The Original Portland Challenger
The Life of William A. Hilliard, Portland’s
Pioneering Black Newspaperman
=Hilliard
at his desk at the Oregonian, 1979. Photo provided by The Oregonian
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In 1938,
11-year-old William A. Hilliard applied for a paper route job at the Oregonian.
A smart, motivated African American boy with an early love for newspapers and
journalism, Hilliard was turned down for the paper route because the truck
driver, who did the hiring, thought subscribers wouldn’t take well to having
their papers delivered by a black paperboy.
Fourteen
years later, in 1952, Bill Hilliard would return to the Oregonian armed with a
BA in journalism from Pacific University, and become the newsroom’s first
African American employee—as a copy boy.
Over the
course of more than 40 years, Bill Hilliard would doggedly work his way up the
ranks, from copy boy to sports clerk; from sports reporter to general
assignment reporter; from assistant city editor to executive editor; and finally,
in 1986, as the first African American editor of Oregon’s largest daily
newspaper.
Hilliard’s
career as a newspaperman reached its zenith in 1993, when he was elected the
first black president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE). He
was subsequently honored with a Distinguished Service Award from the University
of Oregon and inducted into the Oregon Newspaper Hall of Fame.
But before
that—well before the milestones and honors and awards—Bill Hilliard was
founder, publisher, and editor of his own newspaper: the Portland Challenger,
dedicated exclusively to Portland’s underrepresented black community.
=Hilliard
with Gov. Holmes and his assistant Harry Swanson at City Desk, April 18, 1958.
Allan DeLay
I meet
Hilliard at his home next to Forest Park, where he lives with Dian, his wife of
13 years.
Hilliard
is seated near a large window overlooking Swan Island and the Willamette River.
He is 89 years old, and the well-maintained afro he’d worn for much of his
adult life is now just a few tufts of black and gray. Diagnosed with
Parkinson’s, Hilliard’s voice is soft, his speech halted, and each word he
utters comes with palpable strain. But he doesn’t let it quiet him.
For nearly
two hours, Hilliard shares stories about his childhood in Southeast Portland,
his game-changing tenure at the Oregonian, flying all over the world on various
assignments, and more. What I’m most curious about is his time with the
Portland Challenger. After more than half a century since its brief existence,
little documentation or information remains of the newspaper. I want to know
what motivated Hilliard—an African American man and a then-recent college
graduate—to publish his own newspaper in Portland.
=Gabriel
Green
“I never
saw blacks in the regular daily paper, and I figured we needed a paper that
highlighted the good things we did,” Hilliard says. “Because most of what you
saw in the [mainstream] paper was crime.”
Portland
in the 1950s was very much a segregated city. After the flooding of Vanport in
1948, black families were relocated to the Albina district in Northeast
Portland. Owing to discriminatory real estate and lending practices, African
Americans were essentially confined to this narrow area, while white families
moved to whites-only suburbs. Segregation in Portland at that time was
sanctioned and enforced.
“There was
a theater on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. [Blvd.]—used to be Union
Ave—called the Egyptian,” Hilliard says. “Blacks had to go upstairs in the
balcony, they couldn’t sit on the main floor. I never went in the theater.
Never went in there at all. I refused to patronize segregated places.”
Though the
rest of the city discriminated against African Americans, for a brief stint
Albina—especially along North Williams—was home to a thriving black community,
with jazz clubs, record stores, clothing boutiques, pharmacies, and
restaurants. And it was on the corner of North Williams and Cook that the
Portland Challenger printed its first issue on May 6, 1952.
“It is the
hope of the Challenger,” Hilliard wrote in his inaugural editor’s note,
“through its news and editorial columns, to hasten the day of integration and
to foster the principles of true American democracy.”
The first
issue arrived on an election year, and the Challenger examined who was running
for various offices and their opposing positions. African Americans, according
to a national poll published by the Challenger, favored incumbent president
Harry S. Truman, who ultimately lost in the primaries against Adlai Stevenson.
Hilliard
enlisted people he knew to contribute to the paper, many of them childhood
friends and other recent college grads. Hilliard assumed the role of editor and
publisher, with Lonnie Harris as sports editor, Louis Fuller Jr. as staff
artist, Joy Brock as staff writer, and Ted Wesley Burger as managing editor.
Hilliard
also brought on board Richard “Dick” Bogle, who grew up on the same street as
him and attended the same grade school: Southeast Portland’s Hosford
Elementary. Bogle would go on to become an officer with the Portland Police
Bureau from 1959 to 1968, and then became the first black television news
anchor on the west coast, at KATU, where he stayed for 15 years. In 1984, Bogle
was elected to Portland City Council.
In his
final years before passing away in 2010, Bogle was a contributor to Down Beat
magazine and hosted a weekly jazz show on KMHD. But the 22-year-old Bogle
hadn’t yet received his journalism degree from Portland State when Hilliard
tapped him to become associate editor of the Challenger.
=The
inaugural Portland Challenger inside Hilliard’s personal scrapbook. Gabriel
Green
Though
several of the newspaper’s contributors would go on to become formidable
leaders in their own right, many of the bylines were at the time unknown
names—just folks from down the way. Dr. DeNorval Unthank—the only black
physician in Portland in the 1930s, and the first black member of the City Club
of Portland—lived with his family in the same Southeast neighborhood as
Hilliard. Dr. Clarence Pruitt—the first African American to graduate from and
teach at the University of Oregon Dental School, now OHSU School of
Dentistry—was Hilliard’s dentist. Each of them lent a hand in supporting
Hilliard’s fledgling newspaper.
At
Hilliard’s house, original copies of the Challenger are preserved in a large,
black folder, which Dian retrieves from their basement. As I flip slowly
through the pages, she points out an article in the sports section, accompanied
by a black-and-white photo of a smiling, handsome, young black man in a
football jersey.
“Oh,
there’s Emery,” she says to Hilliard, with a laugh. “Oh, you just wrote about
all your friends!”
Emery
Barnes was Hilliard’s roommate at the University of Oregon. After a brief stint
with the NFL, Barnes moved to Canada to escape racial discrimination in the US.
He entered Canadian politics, focusing on social welfare and human rights, and
became the first African American elected to a legislative office in British
Columbia. Barnes then went on to become the first African American elected to
Speaker of the Legislature in 1994. The city of Vancouver, BC, named a park
after him.
Dian notes
how all of these old friends became the “first” African Americans in their
fields. Hilliard attributes it to the fact that his grade school, unlike many
other schools in Portland, had been integrated. He believes that attending an
integrated school gave him and his friends opportunities other kids missed out
on. But even with opportunities, support, and intelligence, Hilliard, as a
black man, had to have twice as much drive as his white peers, and put in three
or four times as much work.
His life
as a newspaperman was determined almost from the beginning.
=Allan
DeLay
After
being turned away by the Oregonian for a paper route, 11-year-old Hilliard went
door-to-door, selling the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. He worked
on his school newspaper at Benson Polytechnic High School, and at 18 was
drafted into the US Navy, where he served one year before being discharged
Seaman First Class.
He went on
to study journalism at Vanport Extension Center college (now Portland State
University), then transferred to the University of Oregon. When a white
professor took Hilliard aside to let him know that a black could never hope to
find work at a major newspaper, Hilliard left U of O and transferred to Forest
Grove’s Pacific University, where he became managing editor of the campus
newspaper, The Pacific Index, and was elected editor for the 1951–52 school
year. After graduating from Pacific, he was offered an internship at the
Hillsboro Argus—and shortly after, he launched the Portland Challenger.
The
Challenger covered the NAACP and Urban League meetings when other newspapers
wouldn’t. They offered political candidates’ positions on civil rights. They
published stories on local sports, dances, and other social gatherings within
Portland’s black community. When Charles Gragg and his wife Joyce moved to
Parkrose Heights, then an all-white neighborhood, the couple awoke one morning
to find a burning cross on their lawn. Hilliard put this story on the front
page of the May 20, 1953 edition. “I am determined to stay,” Gragg was quoted
as saying. “This is a challenge.”
Oregon
passed its civil rights bill on April 13, 1953—the 21st state in the union to
pass such legislation—and the Challenger marked this historic occasion with a
celebratory front page story, printing the three sections of the new law
word-for-word.
Publishing
a newspaper wasn’t easy, however, and it wasn’t cheap. Like most periodicals,
the Challenger depended on advertisements, mostly from other Albina businesses,
like Benny’s, Wilson’s shirt shop, Hooson’s Hardware, and Phil Jones Food
Market. Hilliard had to hustle for every one of these small ads, and even then
the paper—which Hilliard estimates to have had a circulation of 4,000 to 5,000,
at 10 cents a copy, or $2.50 for a yearly subscription—struggled for revenue.
To help support himself and the paper, Hilliard worked at Union Station as a
railroad porter, known back in the day as a “redcap.” There were about 50
redcaps at Union Station, almost exclusively African American men. Each redcap
was assigned a number, which would identify him and connect the passenger to
his or her luggage. Hilliard was number 28.
“You had a
great big cart full of bags, and you’d go out front to deliver them,” Hilliard
explains. “People would pick them up, and that’s when they’d tip you. But you
didn’t get much in tips. If you had two bags, they’d give you a quarter.”
Hilliard
faced resentment from his white bosses at Union Station. They couldn’t figure
out why a young black man with a college education would want to work part-time
as a redcap. But to Hilliard, it was a necessity to keep the Challenger afloat.
“Being a
redcap gave me the opportunity to work on this sort of paper, which was very
independent of the big papers,” Hilliard says. ..“And the white guys, they
didn’t understand that.”
To further
supplement his income, Hilliard also worked as a copy boy at the Oregonian. He
didn’t harbor any resentment against the paper for their snub 14 years
prior—or, if he did, he didn’t let it deter him. Even so, he didn’t get the job
on his first attempt.
“They said
they wouldn’t hire college graduates to do copy boy work,” Hilliard says. “They
wanted someone with experience. I said I can’t get the experience unless you
give me the opportunity.”
Hilliard
was hired by the Oregonian on his second try. He was 25 years old, the first
black employee in the newsroom. He didn’t remain a copy boy for long, however,
and within a year he was given his first writing assignment. Hilliard smiles as
he remembers his debut as an Oregonian reporter.
“The first
story I had was about an old black man who was a hundred-and-something years
old,” he says. “I thought everybody around Portland would see my name and pay
attention.”
Meanwhile,
the difficulties in maintaining the Challenger proved too great to continue.
Hilliard had been publishing the paper, writing most of the copy, and drumming
up advertisers, and even with his supplementary work at the Oregonian and Union
Station, the paper’s funds soon dried up.
The
Portland Challenger printed its final issue in the spring of 1953, only a year
and a half after its debut. Though Portland’s black community lost a promising
new voice, Hilliard was now free to commit himself fully to the Oregonian.
=Gabriel
Green
He worked
myriad beats, earning promotions to sports reporter, religion reporter, and
general assignment reporter. In 1965, he became assistant city editor, and in
1971 he was named city editor—an event that was noteworthy enough to be covered
by Time magazine. Under his management, the Oregonian became the west coast’s
first newspaper to cover the national meetings of the NAACP and the National
Urban League. Hilliard prohibited writers from the use of racial identification
unless it was critical to the story, because it reinforced negative
stereotypes.
“After the
Watts riots, a lot of white-owned papers began to look for black writers,”
Hilliard says. “And I was a prize for most of them, because I’d been working at
the Oregonian for years as a reporter, covering all kinds of stories, all
around the country. And when they began to see me, they thought that I’d be a
good one to start with, but I never left the Oregonian. I wouldn’t leave. The
Oregonian was good to me, gave me an opportunity, so I decided I owed it to
them to stay. So I did stay, and it’s a good thing I did.”
Hilliard
was named executive editor in 1982, and one of his first responsibilities was
the impending merger of the Oregon Journal with the Oregonian, which gave the
paper even greater leverage and boosted circulation. Five years later, in 1987,
Hilliard was offered the paper’s top job, becoming the first black editor of
the Oregonian. As head boss of the newspaper, Hilliard increased the hiring of
non-whites, broadened coverage of minority and LGBT issues, and delivered
lectures throughout the country on the importance of diversity in the newsroom.
In 1992,
following protests by Native American communities across the nation, the
Oregonian became the first major newspaper to bar sports teams with names that
were derogatory to Native Americans. Not everyone at the paper was on board.
=Bill
Hilliard at his desk, July 22, 1959. Many Oregonian reporters grew beards in
honor of the Oregon Centennial. Allan DeLay
“The
sports editors were nasty about it,” Hilliard says. “And I threatened to remove
them if they didn’t go along with the policy. They said, ‘You can’t say
Washington unless you say Redskins.’ I said, ‘The hell you can’t. I’ll sit down
at the typewriter and show you what to do.’ And all I did was just use
‘Washington’ or ‘Atlanta,’ and that was it.”
The
Oregonian has since rescinded this policy. [CORRECTION: The Oregonian's
director of news, Therese Bottomly, has told the Mercury that this policy, in
fact, still stands. Former sports editor Jeff Wohler also takes issue with this
description, saying that neither he, or his editorial assistants, were
"nasty about it" and they implemented the new policy when asked to do
so.]
Also in
1992, the Oregonian endorsed a Democratic candidate for president for the first
time in its history.
“Clinton
called one day, and wanted to come in to meet the editorial board,” Hilliard
says. The publisher, Fred Stickel, wasn’t a fan of Clinton, so Hilliard invited
Stickel to sit in on the meeting. Stickel walked away impressed with what he’d
heard from Clinton, and gave Hilliard the go-ahead for the endorsement. Bill
Clinton won Oregon with 42.5 percent of the vote (over George H.W. Bush’s 32.5
percent and Ross Perot’s 24 percent).
The
following year, the 65-year-old Hilliard was named the first black president of
the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In an interview with the New York
Times marking the occasion, Hilliard said, “The thing that bothers me more than
anything else, is what I see as more and more racial divisions in the country
today. And I think newspapers are the ideal educational tool to correct it.”
At the end
of his one-year term as president of the ASNE, and after 42 years at the paper,
Hilliard retired as editor of the Oregonian.
“When I
retired, Bill Clinton gave us a party inside the White House,” Hilliard says.
“We had a ball.”
=Hilliard
in recent times, with wife Dian. Gabriel Green
As
Hilliard tells me these stories, it’s November 7, one day before the 2016
presidential election. I want to know, after everything he’s seen, what he
makes of the Republican candidate.
“Trump was
telling people that he’s going to arrest the liars at newspapers when he gets
to be president,” Hilliard says. “It’s a bunch of crap he’s giving people. But
eventually, if we’re not careful, we could be like [Nazi Germany]. It scares
the hell out of me that one of these days we’ll end up with a dictator.”
For one
who has spent his entire adult life in the newspaper business, and as a
lifelong advocate for diversity in the newsroom, a Trump presidency is a
serious concern—not only to Hilliard, but to journalists across the nation.
Journalism has been under threat for years, but it faces an even greater menace
under a Trump administration. What opportunities Hilliard had been given were
not available to everyone—nor are they guaranteed to anyone today.
His
success didn’t only come about through hard work and perseverance, but from
hard-won civil rights, desegregation, and the commitment to diversity in
schools and the workplace. For any American committed to freedom and equality,
a free and open press is an indispensable tool in ensuring equal opportunity
and fairness. As Hilliard wrote 64 years ago, in the first edition of the
Portland Challenger, a newspaper’s main objective is to “foster the principles
of true American democracy.”
Like the
country itself, Portland has seen numerous changes since Hilliard was a young,
ambitious, black reporter working the beat. Though we’ve still got a long way
to go, Portland has become a more welcome and diverse city, thanks in large
part to Bill Hilliard’s long and dedicated life as a newspaperman.
“I want to
believe,” Hilliard said at an ASNE meeting in 1994, “that over the years,
scores of young people of color have looked at me and said, ‘It can happen.’”
=Hilliard
and Johnny Cash. Photo Provided by the Oregonian
......................
William A. Hilliard, former editor of The Oregonian, has died
......................
William A. Hilliard, former editor of The Oregonian, has died
By Tom Hallman Jr., Oregonian 1/16/2017
William A. Hilliard - a former editor of The Oregonian
and a national pioneer who paved the way for a generation of minorities who
wanted to become journalists - has died. He was 89.
Hilliard, who once was denied a paper route at The Oregonian
because managers said whites did not want blacks delivering their paper,
retired in 1994 after a 42-year career. In 1993 he had served as president of
the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the first African American to hold
the post.
In 1998 Hilliard was voted into the Oregon Newspaper Hall of
Fame, which recognizes journalists who have made outstanding contributions to
Oregon journalism.
"It was a great career," he said in a 2010
interview. "Every day was exciting. It was a heck of a job."
Hilliard prided himself on his talent, hard work and
perseverance, traits that he believed allowed him to make his way from a
newsroom clerk to a position where he ran the entire news and editorial
departments.
And yet as was the case during his long career, Hilliard's
race - not any one overriding journalistic strength or accomplishment
- defined the man, his legacy and journey.
He was The Oregonian's first black reporter. When promoted
through the paper's ranks, he received national attention because he was always
the first black to hold a particular job. He was the first black to be city
editor of a major, mainstream newspaper and later the first black to be editor
of such a paper.
In the 2010 interview, Hilliard said he was always aware
that he was being judged twice: Once as a journalist and again as a black man
in a white world.
"The adults around me, my parents and neighbors,
encouraged me to succeed," he said. "It never dawned on me that I
couldn't."
In 1993 the National Association of Black Journalists gave
its Presidential Award to Hilliard for his leadership as a mentor to reporters
and editors. The association president praised Hilliard as a role model and as
a "quiet, persistent journalist" who worked behind the scenes to
integrate the mainstream media.
"This is the most outstanding award presented to
me," Hilliard told the 1,500 delegates representing the nation's largest
black media organization. "It's important to me because you are my
family."
Throughout his career, Hilliard refused to be described as
an African-American. He wasn't born in Africa, he'd say, but in Portland. He
always insisted on identifying himself as black.
Hilliard's parents divorced when he was a baby, and for the
first eight years of his life, he and his three sisters lived with his
grandparents in Arkansas. His mother, who worked as a maid, moved west with a
family and sent for her children when Hilliard was 8. By then she had remarried
and the family rented a house in inner Southeast Portland.
"My stepfather was not a father figure," Hilliard
said in a 1994 profile. "He was my mother's husband, that's all. He drank
and he'd disappear for days at a time, or come home drunk. He had no interest
in our lives."
Although other black families lived in the neighborhood,
most of Hilliard's friends were white. When he ventured out of the
neighborhood, however, he heard racial slurs and taunts. Blacks were allowed to
eat in only a handful of Portland restaurants, and Hilliard remembers going
downtown with his family and being stopped at businesses by signs that read:
"Whites Only."
Hilliard found guidance from a neighbor. His name was
Stephen Wright. He was a black businessman who owned the Melody Hotel, the only
hotel in Portland that welcomed blacks.
"I cut Mr. Wright's grass and he took a liking to
me," Hilliard recalled in the profile. "It dawned on me that there
were no blacks that I could see as role models. But here was Mr. Wright, a
black man who was not a waiter or a Pullman porter."
When Hilliard was 13, his mother and stepfather moved to
Northeast Portland. Hilliard didn't want to go. Wright's family took him in.
"My mother may have been hurt from time to time, but I
think she saw it as a good influence," Hilliard said. "Mr. Wright
took me on business trips. He taught me how to drive. At his hotel I met black
entertainers and businessmen. Mr. Wright told me, showed me, that there were
blacks doing things with their lives. He told me to do what I wanted to do. Get
good grades in school, go to college and don't pay attention to what anyone
else says.'"
Hilliard attended Benson High School and worked on the
school paper but was not named editor. He believed it was because he was black.
After graduation, he was drafted by the U.S. Navy and served for a little more
than a year. While in the service, Wright sent him small, comic book-sized
copies of The Oregonian that the paper produced for servicemen.
Hilliard returned to Portland and studied journalism at
Vanport College, which was organized to accommodate the returning servicemen.
Two years later, he transferred to the University of Oregon, where a professor
told him that he was wasting his time. Hilliard transferred to Pacific
University, graduated, but could not find a job. He worked as a redcap at Union
Station and started the Portland Challenger, a weekly paper that covered
Portland's black community.
After a family friend heard that The Oregonian was looking
for a copy boy to run errands, Hilliard applied for the job and was hired. He
was 25. His boss was a high school student. After he was hired, white editors
and reporters openly wondered whether he would bring what was then called the
"Williams Avenue look" to the paper.
He ended up as a reporter in the sports department - the
only full-time sports reporter who was never sent outside of the office to cover
a story. His first outside assignment was to cover the Harlem Globetrotters,
the black basketball team, which was putting on an exhibition at Lincoln High
School.
Hilliard received his first byline and learned that never
before had the paper covered the Globetrotters. When friends suggested he
contact the newspaper union to complain about his assignments, the sports
editor warned Hilliard to get the union off his back, or he would run him out
of the paper. Hilliard never complained.
"Bill was always breaking barriers," said Judson
Randall, one of Hilliard's friends and an assistant city editor when Hilliard
ran the operation. "He came of age during a time when people of color were
marginalized in the mainstream media. He had tenacity in seeking what he wanted.
He did it in a way that was never pushy, but it was always firm."
In 1965, after covering sports, religion and general
reporting assignments, Hilliard was named as an assistant city editor. Six
years later, he was named as city editor. In 1982, Hilliard became executive
editor of the paper. He flourished, showing himself to be a strong and decisive
leader with plans on how to improve all areas of the paper.
"Bill started having weekly meetings," recalled
Randall, who retired as assistant to Hilliard. "We had good, focused
discussions on where the paper should go. Then bam, it was over. He really
didn't get to make his mark. Events overtook the paper and him."
Four months after Hilliard was promoted, publisher Fred A.
Stickel closed the Oregon Journal and merged the staff into The Oregonian.
Stickel said no staff members would lose their jobs, but Hilliard had to absorb
managers from the Journal and place them in key posts at The Oregonian.
"He did a good job under a very difficult
situation," Stickel recalled in a 2010 interview. "What he did was
not easy. He treated people fairly. He had a little bit of a temper, but that's
OK. We all do."
The ensuing years turned out to be tumultuous, Hilliard
recalled.
"The last 12 years of my career was mostly dealing with
the staff and their personalities," he said. "I would have loved to
have done more community work and become more involved as a journalist in the
paper's operations, but I was more a manager of people. We had a serious morale
problem."
In hindsight, Hilliard said he wished he had exerted more
control over the paper instead of letting subordinates carve out feuding
fiefdoms.
"I wish I had been stronger," he said. "I
wish I had embarked on more of a crusade in the community."
Even so, John Harvey, the paper's news editor who retired
after 43 years, said Hilliard's major accomplishment was building "the
modern Oregonian."
"Don't underestimate what Bill did in putting that
staff together after the merger," Harvey said. "Before the merger the
paper made a lot of money, but the owners ran it as if we were in the
Depression. We couldn't spend money. Overnight, the news hole grew by 80
percent. He was the editor during what I would call the paper's fat years when
the paper devoted whatever resources were needed to cover a story."
But the paper did miss a national story in its own backyard.
In 1992, the paper was scooped when the Washington Post
reported that 10 women had accused Sen. Bob Packwood of sexual harassment. The
Oregonian came in for even more criticism when it was revealed that one its own
reporters had been kissed on the lips by Packwood.
"I was in the dark about all of that," Hilliard
said. "Some lower level editors in the news operation knew about it, and
knew the Washington Post was out here looking into allegations. But the editors
did nothing about it. They didn't pass the word on to me or the
publisher."
Within the paper, Hilliard pushed to change the way minority
communities were covered and described. Reporters had routinely written that
police were looking for a suspect described as "a 6-foot black man."
Hilliard said the description was so generic that it was useless, and only
served to perpetuate stereotypes.
Hilliard also had the newspaper quit calling sports teams by
what he called "offensive" nicknames: Indians and Redskins.
"Bill dedicated his life to The Oregonian and to
serving our community," said Director of News Therese Bottomly, hired in
1983. "More than anyone, he worked to ensure our newsroom, and newsrooms
everywhere, reflected the diversity of the communities we cover.
"His legacy endures in the young journalists he hired
and mentored over his long career."
In retirement, Hilliard continued to be involved with
journalism. He was one of three former newspaper editors asked to conduct an
investigation after USA Today found a former star foreign correspondent made up
substantial portions of at least eight stories and plagiarized numerous quotes
and other material from competing publications.
The team of editors called the conduct "a sad and
shameful betrayal of public trust."
Hilliard is survived by his spouse, Dian Hilliard. Survivors
also include his son, Abdur-Razzaque, and daughters, Linda and Sandra, from
previous marriages; sisters, Juliet and Dorothy; and two granddaughters. No
funeral is planned, but the family plans a celebration of life in the future.
