Profile: Sue Hart

Editor's note: This article is an expanded version of "Hart of Gold," by Rachel Schaffer, which appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of The Rimrock, the alumni magazine of Montana State University-Billings, and is used here with the permission of the MSU-Billings Foundation.

On November 9, 2005, the documentary Gravel in her Gut and Spit in her Eye: Dorothy M. Johnson, The Woman and Her Work made its Billings premiere in a 500-seat lecture hall on the Montana State University-Billings campus before being broadcast on Montana PBS later that month. Almost all of those seats were filled, and not all by Johnson fans; rather, the audience consisted primarily of fans of the film's writer and co-producer, Professor of English Sue Hart, a 40+-year faculty member at MSU-Billings and a regionally respected writer (of both fiction and non-fiction), speaker, teacher, and humanitarian. The audience rose in a standing ovation at the end of the film, and in truth, the recognition was as much for Sue's accomplishments in a long and distinguished career and her place in audience members' hearts as it was for the warm, humorous, and insightful profile of Sue's longtime friend that had just been screened.

When Sue Hart first came to Eastern Montana College in 1961, the faculty was so small that everyone knew everyone else. Sue recalls, "We did a lot of things together, and we had a lot of fun." Those days of intimacy are long gone; the college has become much larger, busier, and more fragmented, but Sue continues to feel the support that the faculty offer one another, support that she herself freely provides in a great many ways to her colleagues and students on campus and to the public at large in the Billings community and throughout the state of Montana.

Born in Detroit to parents Truman and Mayetta Smith and educated in a series of Catholic schools, Sue earned a BA in English in 1958 from Good Counsel College in White Plains, New York (now College of White Plains of Pace University), and also received a certificate for English courses taken at the University of London during a summer abroad. After graduation, she followed a friend's advice and moved to Missoula to earn a master's degree in English, completed in 1963, from what is now the University of Montana. After a year on the faculty of the University of Idaho and while still working on her master's thesis, she taught briefly at Billings Central High School. In 1961, she joined the English Department at Eastern Montana College as an instructor, and aside from a leave of absence during the mid-'60s, she has been a continuous and highly valued presence on campus ever since.

Sue's teaching and research interests have grown and developed over the years. When she was first hired, she taught the standard freshman composition and introductory literature courses common to all English faculty, but her marriage to Richard Gilluly, member of a well-known Montana journalism family, had also given her a rich background in journalism, Montana history, and Montana literature, and she had the opportunity to meet such literary greats as Dorothy Johnson and A.B. Guthrie, Jr. As a result of her own experience, she began to teach courses in Montana writers and frontier history seen through literature. Her experience raising four children led to a course in adolescent literature, and her course in writing fiction stems directly from her own interests in writing: she was first published in seventh grade, when a poem she wrote was accepted by her junior-high-school literary magazine (the poem was about wagon wheels--"I haven't grown up at all!" she exclaims about her long-standing interest in western themes. "I'm still the same person I was"). Her background as a journalist also made her especially well qualified to design and teach Magazine Article Writing, a very popular course with a very important final requirement: students write an article on any topic and submit it to an appropriate magazine for consideration. Whether or not the article is accepted is unimportant; it is the experience of going through the process that matters. However, over the years, many students have in fact had their work published in a variety of magazines, including Seventeen and Catholic Digest, as a direct result of taking either this class or her creative-writing class.

Other courses Sue has developed over the years, including Images of Women in Literature and the Arts, Frontier Women, and Plays by and about Women, reflect her long-standing interest in the growth and well-being of her female students. She first became involved in the campus life of women students in 1967, when she was asked to become faculty advisor to the Continuing Education for Women Program. "We actually had the first Women's Center on any Montana campus right here on this campus," she recalls with pride. She later became the Coordinator, then Director, of the Women's Studies and Service Center, spending 25 years leading the program, from 1967 to 1993.

Sue's interest in both journalistic and creative writing has led her to establish far-reaching ties to the Montana writing community and beyond. She was a member of a Billings writers group for many years, frequently hosting its meetings, and has made contacts over the years with a great many authors from all over Montana and the West. She has arranged class visits or phone interviews for her classes with such nationally known writing luminaries as Richard Wheeler, the late Terry Johnston, Tom McGuane, Ivan Doig, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Tony Hillerman, and Harlan Ellison. She has helped spread the word about our state's literary treasures by writing a newspaper column called "Montana Books & Authors," which ran in area newspapers from 1989 to the mid-'90s, and she has also produced and conducted interviews for a companion public access television show by the same name from 1989 to 2004. (The TV program has been on hiatus while she recovers from health problems, but she hopes to resume the show when she feels up to it. "I have a whole list of authors I want to invite," she says.) She further helped to put Montana authors on the map, literally, as chief researcher for the Montana literary map "Montana's Literary Heritage." She is also a long-standing member and former sheriff (president) of the Yellowstone Corral of the Westerners, an international organization whose mission is to promote and protect Western history, literature, and art.

As a writer herself, Sue has produced many different kinds of work over the years: books, monographs, chapters in anthologies, newspaper columns and feature stories, scholarly articles, and a prize-winning work of fiction, the short story "Star Pattern," which won the highly prestigious PEN Syndicated Fiction Award in 1987 and which appeared in a variety of newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. She was a staff writer for the Billings Gazette from 1970 to 1972 and has written dozens of feature stories for newspapers and magazines ranging from Montana Senior News and Montana Catholic to Western Flyer. In her nonfiction, scholarly research, Sue has published articles in a wide variety of journals, conference proceedings, and encyclopedias about such authors as Dorothy M. Johnson (on whom she is a national expert), Willa Cather, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., and Thomas and Elizabeth Savage, about whom she wrote a monograph for the Boise State University Western Writers Series, as well as many other writers, artists, and literary and historical topics. Her talk on "Women in Montana Journalism," first presented at the 1994 Montana Newspaper Association convention and then published in the MNA Bulletin, is the first exploration of its kind on this topic. Her articles in anthologies include studies of food in literature and patriotism in World War II advertising, and she has a recipe and profile included in Eat Our Words: The Montana Writers' Cookbook.

In addition to her monograph on Thomas and Elizabeth Savage, Sue has also written several other books and been involved in the production of two important Montana-related documentaries. The Call to Care is a book-length history of the first hundred years of St. Vincent Hospital and Health Center in Billings. Sue completed Yellow-stone & Blue, The First 75 Years, Montana State University-Billings, a history of the campus, for its 75th anniversary celebration in 2002. During the late '90s, including a sabbatical during Fall Semester 1997, she researched Ernest Hemingway's connection to Billings during a stay at St. Vincent Hospital. As a result of that research, in 1999 she served as an associate producer on the well-received Montana PBS documentary Paradise & Purgatory: Hemingway at the L-T and St. Vincent Hospital, which won a Galusha Award from MSU-Bozeman's Film and Television Program and received second place in the Montana Broadcasters "best documentary" category. And her 2005 Dorothy Johnson documentary was the culmination of five years of work involving writing the screenplay; gathering sources, interviews, and funding; and striving to overcome the inevitable delays and setbacks. The finished film is a highly effective profile of one of Montana's best-known writers and is under consideration for several awards.

As a speaker, Sue has delivered a similar range of professional and popular presentations. Her many conference presentations include papers for the National Council of Teachers of English, the Popular Culture Association, the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, the Montana Historical Society, and the Western Literature Association. Her topics cover Montana and Midwestern authors, especially Dorothy Johnson and Willa Cather, Montana literature and history, and many aspects of life affecting women in the West. A personal favorite of ours is "The Original PMS: Prairie Madness Syndrome," which examines exactly what the title suggests: stories of frontier women driven crazy by the isolation and harsh climate of the West. As a member of the Montana Committee for the Humanities Speakers Bureau and a READON! discussion leader for several years, she has traveled the state, bringing her knowledge and research to small communities that would otherwise not have access to them. She has offered programs on "Frontier Women," "Montana Literature," "Montana: High, Wide & Hollywoodized," "Mysterious Montana," "Tall Tales and Literary Treasures," "The People and Places in Hemingway's Montana Stories," and "Montana Memoirs," and presented a first-person dramatization, "Gwendolyn Haste in Person." She is also a One Book Montana discussion facilitator for the state, and locally, she has given myriad presentations to such Billings organizations as the Foster Grandparents Program, the Billings Rotary, St. Vincent Hospital, and Town and Gown, among many others.

Sue's extensive service to the Billings community and to the state of Montana includes many hours spent on a variety of boards and committees, among them the boards of the Foster Grandparents Program, the Museum of Women's History in Billings, the Yellowstone Corral of the Westerners, and the Billings Writer's Voice, for which she has also served as a facilitator, reader, and program presenter. She has also volunteered time on behalf of the Moss Mansion as a tour guide and book editor, has edited many reports and books, has judged countless writing contests, participated for several years in the local Dog Therapy Program in long-term care facilities and hospitals, and since 1991, has been an Associate of the Sisters of Charity and a lay eucharistic minister for the Pastoral Care Department of St. Vincent Hospital, bringing Communion to Catholic patients staying in the hospital. Her role in starting a meal program with AIDSpirit, a volunteer organization whose goal is to provide spiritual support for people with HIV/AIDS and their families, is a similar reflection of her strong faith and desire to help those in need.

On campus, Sue has been, if anything, even more active in service. Over the years, she says, "I think I've served on every committee on this campus with the exception of the Computer Committee." Her longest service has been on the Commencement Committee, which she first joined in 1980 as coordinator of the Ivy Guard (a group of women students selected for their strong academic records who form an honor guard during the graduation ceremony's procession and recession). As committee chair since 1986, she has overseen the arrangements for each year's graduation ceremony and reception, guaranteeing that the graduates and their families will share a memorable closure to their college years. Each year during graduation, Sue can be seen at the back of the Metra checking on details and making sure that every aspect of the ceremony comes off without a hitch. She also chaired MSU-Billings' 75th Anniversary Celebration Committee, an enormous project involving two years' worth of planning and organizing--and culminating in a highly memorable series of events.

Sue's work with the Ivy Guard and the Women's Studies Program illustrates her strong feelings for her students, both female and male, a warmth they return fully. She cherishes their eagerness to learn and the interests they share with her, concluding, "I feel my students have been, next to my own children, the most precious gift I've ever had in this life." Her philosophy of teaching is equally student-centered. When asked to describe it, she says, "I want success for my students in whatever area they enter. I try to give them the tools they need to reach the level of success they're aiming for." She continues, with a customary modesty with which her students would strongly disagree, "I don't always succeed, but I try."

She is still in touch with many former students (a few years ago, she received a postcard from one who was examining refugee camps in Algeria), some of whom lived very inexpensively in her house while they attended school. One of those former tenants, Randall Popelka, now Legislative Director for Montana Senator Conrad Burns in Washington, DC, recalls her with great fondness. He says, "Sue's influence extends beyond the classroom. She is a teacher, mother, mentor, life maestro, and most important, friend to all. Sue has a heart of gold and is willing to extend a helping hand to anybody, regardless of their need." Nancy Widdicomb, a teacher of distinction at Harlowton High School and past president of the Montana Association of Teachers of English Language Arts, was a student of Sue's during the early 1990s and recalls, "Sue Hart carried me with her on a deep and rich pilgrimage into the world of Montana writing...introducing me to an addiction of place and time satisfied only by Montana literature as written by homegrown, but not necessarily native, authors (Maclean, Welch, Doig, Savage, and Johnson). I could go on for hours!" And Monica Lindeen, MSU-Billings graduate in English, businesswoman, State Legislator, and Congressional candidate, eloquently maintains that "Sue Hart is a Montana treasure, and I am honored to have had the opportunity to take her Montana Writers course. Her knowledge of and passion for Montana history and its writers can be compared to no one else's. More importantly, Sue's students leave her classes with a greater knowledge and a friend for life because she is just as passionate about the students' success. Her friendship lasts beyond the classroom and is to be treasured for life."

It is not only students who think highly of Sue. Her colleagues also value her warm collegiality and the many contributions she has made to Eastern Montana College/MSU-Billings. Dr. Gary Acton, long-time chair of the Department of English & Philosophy, says, "Sue Hart has contributed so much in so many ways to the excellence of Montana State University-Billings. I have known Sue for some 35 years, and the thing that has always impressed me is her dedication and willingness to serve. I remember when, to reach out to prospective students, we had information booths staffed with students, administrators, and faculty to present the wonders of studying at EMC, as MSU-Billings was known then. Every time I saw one of the booths at Rimrock Mall or West Park Plaza of a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I saw Sue Hart talking to interested students and their parents. Among all of her academic and teaching accomplishments, which are numerous and varied, I find her commitment to the university and willingness to serve in often mundane ways the touchstone of her exemplary career." Dr. Ron Sexton, a faculty member at MSU-Billings for many years and currently its Chancellor, adds, "Generally stated, Professor Hart has spent her entire career teaching, writing, and doing research. In every case she has, from the very beginning, taken seriously her responsibility to expose others to the wealth of Montana talent amongst writers. Her own publications and writing efforts are very much treated the same way she raised her children, with great passion, love, and dedication. She has avoided the spotlight for herself but is diligent and professional in shedding the spotlight on others. Her passion for sharing the written word is second to none. She has managed in a very quiet and subtle fashion to create a rich heritage, a passion and love for the written word that will preserve the best for future generations." When asked what she is proudest of in her life and career, Sue responds in a characteristically self-deprecating fashion. Of course, she is justifiably proud of the prestigious awards she has won and the high professional regard in which she is held by her colleagues. But more important to her, typically, are the people in her life: "I would say for a lot of years, when we were first getting the Women's Program going, probably the biggest thrill I had every year was watching one of those women who had come up here terrified at the prospect of even trying to start back go across [the stage] and receive a degree." Most important of all to her is that all four of her children have earned degrees from Eastern Montana College/MSU-Billings. "I'm very proud of that," she says.

Family has always been important to Sue. She cared for her aging parents for many years until their deaths, sharing a house after they moved to Billings to be with her. She is justly proud of the achievements of her three daughters and one son. Eldest daughter Kathleen worked for several years for Job Placement Services and is now Volunteer Coordinator for Senior Helping Hands; Mary is the Executive Director of the Family Tree Center, currently on leave while she manages State Senator Monica Lindeen's Congressional campaign; son Michael is an officer with the Billings Police Department; and Margaret teaches theater arts at an elementary school in Texas. Her four grandchildren and one great-grandchild also bring her much joy and pride, as does her husband of five years, award-winning Western writer Richard Wheeler.

During the past year or so, Sue has had to limit her activities because of health problems (a fall one icy day injured her shoulder, which later required surgery, and Sue believes that the stress of that experience brought on a rather severe case of shingles, from which she is still recuperating). She may not be as busy as she has been in the past, but she is still involved in many activities, including helping to organize the High Plains Book Festival, held each summer in Billings and featuring panels of Montana authors and other presentations at several locations around town. She has just completed the manuscript for another book, this one a history of MSU-Billings' Montana Center on Disabilities, and she has begun work on a third documentary, a profile of retired Eastern Montana College faculty member and Art Department Chair Ben Steele, a well-known artist and Bataan Death March survivor. And she continues, as she always has, to entertain family, friends, colleagues, writers, students, and probably strangers, as well, with some of the most entertaining dinner parties, buffets, and potlucks ever experienced. She is truly the Elsa Maxwell ("the Hostess with the Mostest") of Billings, a formidable cook who loves to try new recipes and share her companionship, and her generosity in opening her home to guests is legendary statewide. We have been lucky enough to have participated in a number of these occasions, the highlight being 23 years' worth of traditional Thanksgiving dinners, complete with a dozen or more of the best-tasting dishes hungry guests could wish for.

Sue's academic and service achievements have earned her a host of well-deserved awards and honors, including her promotion to full professor in 1986, the only woman faculty member in the history of MSU-Billings to achieve that honor without a Ph.D. In addition, her many contributions to the community through her volunteer activities have been recognized twice on campus through the EMC Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for Community Service, which she received in both 1984 and 1990; by the Billings branch of the American Association of University Women through a 1989 Named Gift Award; and by the Billings YWCA through its 1997 Salute to Women award. She received the Governor's HIV/AIDS Recognition Award in 2000 for her efforts to provide AIDS patients with meals and social opportunities and to raise her students' awareness of AIDS issues. In October 2002, she also received the Montana Historical Society Educator's Award for Educational Excellence "for her commitment, expertise, and inspiration in the fields of Montana literature and history" (Montana Post, on the Discovering Montana website, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter 2002-03). Her most recent honor came in 2003, when she was one of five recipients of the Montana Committee for the Humanities' Governor's Humanities Award (in the illustrious company of Harry Fritz, subject of The Montana Professor's Fall 2005 faculty profile; Diana Eck; Cindy Kittredge; and James Welch), an award which "recognize[s] achievement in humanities scholarship and service, and in the enhancement of public understanding and appreciation of the humanities." Former Rocky Mountain College professor Ken Egan's nominating letter called her "a model of the engaged humanist" and "one of the most knowledgeable scholars of Montana literature." The bio accompanying publicity for her 2003 award adds, "She has volunteered her services and served as a speaker and humanist for dozens of organizations across the state."

Perhaps Sue's greatest contribution to Montana academe and to the state as a whole is her role as a popularizer and disseminator of Montana history, literature, and writers, no matter how well or little known. Egan, in his Governor's Humanities Award letter, supports that claim: "She has made it her special mission to highlight underappreciated writers in the region, especially those from east of the divide and those working in popular genres (such as mystery and historical fiction)." Because of her varied experiences in journalism and teaching, and her personal acquaintance with many well-known Montana authors and community leaders, she has acquired a vast and unique knowledge about Montana literature, writers, and history, and over a long and distinguished career, she has done her best to share that knowledge with a wide variety of audiences--as Egan put it, "A true humanist combines scholarly skill with care for the wider community. Sue Hart embodies this kind of humanism." The Governor's Humanities Award thus makes a fitting capstone for Sue's long and illustrious career, for she has indeed spent many years making Montana literature and history accessible to everyone who lives in the Big Sky State, both on the MSU-Billings campus and beyond, and the end result is that her countless contributions have benefited MSU-Billings, Billings, and Montana as a whole.

As Sue did her research for Yellow-stone & Blue, the history of MSU-Billings, she related it to her own years on campus. She recalls that "starting way back at the very beginning, there was that sense of togetherness that was part of the vision of the founding president, Dr. McMullen. He was so intent on having that sense of everyone belonging to one institution. I'd like to see us have more of that." Her strong feelings for her colleagues remain undiminished: "One of the things that's been really important to me in the 40-some years that I've spent on this campus has been the faculty. I think that this community has been so blessed by having such a good faculty here, a faculty that gets involved in off-campus and community events." That high regard is enthusiastically reciprocated by a campus, community, and state that fully recognize her selfless dedication to helping others and the lasting impact she has had during her career as an educator. Sue says she wants to be remembered "as someone who made a contribution, not just to this campus but to our state." That is one wish that is certain to be fulfilled.

Sue Hart, Montana Writer, Teacher, And Humanitarian