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Lyda Hill, granddaughter of Dallas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, plans to give away her fortune in her lifetime.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Photos Dallas Morning News archives, Getty Images \/ Illustration Michael Hogue, staff<\/p>\n
About a decade ago, Lyda Hill<\/a> attended a lecture by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, who described his ongoing dig in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system, site of ancient fossils. Afterward, Berger was politely approached by a woman \u2014 modest stature, short brown hair \u2014 who asked what he needed. One can only imagine this scene, the world-renowned scientist smiling and nodding as the nice lady offers to help.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lyda Hill loves to help, particularly when a project strikes her as paradigm-shifting. She gave around $5 million to the National Geographic Society to support Berger\u2019s work, and he discovered an ancient hominin species in those South African caves, Homo naledi, thus expanding our understanding of evolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s fun to do the impossible,\u201d reads an orange neon sign inside\u00a0Pegasus Park<\/a>, the 26-acre campus near UT Southwestern Medical Center Hill created in 2021 to help Dallas attract and retain tech and science innovators.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The granddaughter of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt<\/a>, Hill was born into wealth and scrutiny and has spent 83 years learning to navigate both. She has proved herself a savvy entrepreneur, long before Sheryl Sandberg was leaning in. In the \u201960s,\u00a0Lyda started Hill World Travel, a business-centric travel agency she sold in 1982. Successful by any metric, Hill World Travel became personally meaningful to Lyda. She understood she could create wealth, even if she hadn\u2019t inherited it.<\/p>\n Her legacy, nowhere near finished, is almost too vast to comprehend. She\u2019s donated more than $100 million to cancer research, but that\u2019s a mere slice of her impact. If every building, park, museum, nonprofit or business that Lyda Hill has helped were to suddenly turn orange \u2014 her favorite color \u2014 let\u2019s just say much of Dallas would look like it was rooting for the Longhorns.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Lyda Hill in her Dallas office, photographed in 2012.<\/p>\n DMN archives<\/p>\n These days she runs Lyda Hill Philanthropies, housed on a high floor of the postmodern skyscraper that is the Trammell Crow Center, where her office feels like a chic mini-museum tucked away in the clouds. One wall is lined with exquisite rare minerals displayed behind glass and organized by hue: one row pink and purple, another yellow and orange.\u00a0<\/p>\n Huge windows offer a breathtaking view of downtown, the shiny buildings and highway sprawl and lagoons of green space her family helped build. Atop a bookcase beneath the windowsill are totems of an extraordinary life. The Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, 2022. City of Dallas Distinguished Service Award, 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Perhaps most striking are the four small skulls displayed near a 2015 National Geographic whose cover reads, \u201cAlmost Human: A New Ancestor Shakes Up Our Family Tree,\u201d the magazine story that describes Berger\u2019s groundbreaking South African discovery.<\/p>\n She helped fund the discovery of another species, too, an ancestor of modern hoofed mammals found in 2024 near Colorado Springs and named Militocodon lydae. The last part, “lydae,” was for her.<\/p>\n \u2018Who are you, anyway?\u2019<\/p>\n Lyda Hill was named for her grandmother, a petite and kindhearted woman better known as the wife of oil legend H.L. Hunt<\/a>, once the richest man in America and a figure so complicated he had two secret families.<\/p>\n The second Lyda Hill, born in 1942, never married or had children but has spent much of her adulthood quietly shaping North Texas, from the Fort Worth Stockyards to UT Southwestern. Her legacy is profound, even for the ambitious Hunt clan. It\u2019s not easy to stand out when your uncle Lamar<\/a> started the Super Bowl and your\u00a0half-uncle Ray<\/a> built\u00a0Reunion Tower<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Lyda declined to meet for this story. I sent her eight questions by email; she responded to three, including what brand of chocolate she prefers, as she is a known chocoholic.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don’t have one single brand,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI just like those with maximum dark chocolate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s not unusual for a person of her esteem or lineage to decline an interview. As if to underscore her influence, Time magazine<\/a> recently named her to a list of the top 100 philanthropists shaping the world, a docket that includes Michael and Susan Dell, Lionel Messi and Willie Nelson.<\/p>\n She did give an interview to this paper for a 1992 profile. The story focused on her rarefied childhood and work with Meals on Wheels, her passion project at the time. \u201cBy society\u2019s measuring stick of success \u2014 wealth \u2014 Miss Hill was born not with a silver spoon,\u201d wrote the profile\u2019s author, Diane Jennings, \u201cbut with an entire place setting, in her mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n One anecdote describes how Lyda\u2019s fellow campers at Waldemar, a popular sleepaway camp in the Hill Country, clocked her as rich by virtue of her monogrammed towels, a detail she didn\u2019t perceive as unusual and therefore did not hide. \u201cHow are you going to make friends at camp if you\u2019re the only person with monogrammed towels?\u201d Lyda told The News, suggesting the strange alienation that can accompany wealth. That story is framed in the hallway outside her office, alongside certificates from the Junior League and Greater Dallas Chamber, and a baseball signed by Nolan Ryan.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Friends and colleagues describe Lyda as curious and energetic. Spry and outdoorsy into her 80s, she wonders whether it\u2019s time to stop skiing. Dr. Daniel Podolsky, president of UT Southwestern, likely speaks for many when he says he likes sitting beside her at galas and black-tie events because she\u2019s such a good conversationalist. Well-read, well-traveled, she is also even-tempered. She \u201cisn’t an emotional woman,\u201d reads a 2008 D magazine story. \u201cOn a scale of one to 10, she’s a zero, she says.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The emotional equanimity seems to be her inheritance as well; her grandmother took the shock of a lifetime (H.L. Hunt\u2019s secret families) like a champ, a story Lyda\u2019s mother, Margaret Hunt Hill, tells in the 1994 memoir H.L. and Lyda.\u00a0<\/p>\n Margaret Hunt Hill, whose name is best known these days for a bridge spanning the Trinity River, was Hunt\u2019s eldest daughter, and she comes across in her memoir as pragmatic, modest and fair. She is understandably furious with her father for his lies; he is also her father, brilliant and surprisingly present in her childhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n H.L. and Lyda recounts Margaret\u2019s love affair with another brilliant man, her husband, Al Hill, whom she met in 1938 at a Dallas event called (you can\u2019t make this up) the Petroleum Ball. In 1942, they had a baby girl named Lyda, \u201ca tiny little thing who weighed six pounds,\u201d as Margaret writes, one of the few mentions of her children in a book focused on her father\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n One story Margaret does tell occurs after the teenage Lyda leaves for Stanford in 1960. Lyda has an appendicitis attack, landing her in the care of a doctor who is 36, an age deemed too young by Lyda\u2019s grandfather. H.L. Hunt had a deep distrust of doctors, for good reason; the country\u2019s best once encouraged him to lobotomize his troubled son Hassie, a decision Hunt came to regret. He called this whippersnapper of a surgeon, and whatever Hunt told him, it made an impression. The next time the doctor saw Lyda, he stared at her and said, \u201cWho are you, anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n An ordinary extraordinary childhood<\/p>\n Although Lyda\u2019s family was extraordinary, it\u2019s not clear she sees her life that way. Her family lived on Vassar, a tony street in University Park, the more modest section of the Park Cities. She attended\u00a0Hockaday<\/a>, and we can assume she liked it, since she later gave them $20 million in what was then the largest donation in the private school\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Her mother brought her along on volunteer work. She was \u201cvolun-told,\u201d she likes to say, but she enjoyed it. The Hunts were forged in the logic of Christian charity and John D. Rockefeller philanthropy: To whom much is given, much is expected. Margaret stayed active in the Junior League and a panoply of nonprofits. Lyda\u2019s business-savvy father, meanwhile, was so taken with a series of cascading waterfalls in Colorado Springs, known as Seven Falls, that he dropped $1 million to purchase the property. It\u2019s hard to get one\u2019s head around this kind of power, historically only known to kings and queens. \u201cI love this waterfall\u201d is almost never followed by, \u201cI think I\u2019ll buy it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Texas oilman\u00a0H.L. Hunt seated near a window in his downtown Dallas office, circa 1970.\u00a0<\/p>\n Andy Hanson\/courtesy Andy Hanson Collection\/The DeGolyer Library, SMU<\/p>\n H.L. Hunt thought the waterfall was a bad investment, for the record. He didn\u2019t like Al either, in the beginning, fearing he was only after Margaret\u2019s money, but he became the man\u2019s biggest fan. \u201cI\u2019ve never been so wrong about anything or anyone as I was about Al,\u201d he said, according to Margaret\u2019s memoir. The waterfall, meanwhile, led to more real-estate ventures in Colorado Springs, including a successful resort built on a mesa overlooking the majestic Garden of the Gods park.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n In 1967, Lyda launched Hill World Travel, having spotted opportunity in the number of businessmen coming to and from Dallas during a decade when\u00a0Braniff Airways<\/a> was turning the city into a travel hub. She was one of the first women to join the prestigious Young Presidents\u2019 Organization. There is a photo of her standing among middle-aged men and flashing an easy smile in her dark pink blazer.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen she started Hill World Travel, that was a big deal,\u201d says Mary Jalonick, a friend who is also the former president and CEO of The Dallas Foundation. \u201cIn my 20s, I was a community volunteer. I had friends who were full-time professionals, but at that time being a businesswoman and starting your own company was very unusual for a woman.\u201d Lyda was in her mid-20s.<\/p>\n In 1979, Lyda was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was in her mid-30s, and she ultimately triumphed over the bodily invasion. The health crisis seems to have redirected her, though. In 1982, she sold Hill World Travel, and in the mid-\u201980s, she founded the Oklahoma Breast Care Center in a part of the country low on medical resources at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lyda Hill (right) at the 1997 Junior League of Dallas Ball with her niece Heather Hill Washburne (daughter of Al Hill Jr.) and Heather’s husband, Dallas developer Ray\u00a0Washburne.<\/p>\n Joe Laird\/DMN archives<\/p>\n In 1988, her beloved father Al died of complications from hip surgery, a few months shy of his 50th wedding anniversary. That was the same year a developer named Holt Hickman began a project to bring back the Fort Worth Stockyards, one-time home of the cattle drive that had devolved into a cluster of meat-packing plants and former sheep and hog pens.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lyda became the co-investor in that project, giving North Texas one of its great tourist locales and paving the way for thousands of European soccer fans to buy Stetsons and drink Lone Star during the 2026 World Cup.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is real Texas, not Southfork,\u201d she said of the Stockyards in 1993.<\/p>\n Not long after that, she turned her attention toward the Garden of the Gods, the Colorado park where her father had bought a nearby mesa. The park was struggling financially. It was Lyda\u2019s idea to open a visitor and nature center to generate income. She had an eye for leveraging capital: money that could lead to more money, more opportunity, the greater good.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 1997, she founded the Lyda Hill Foundation, which became Lyda Hill Philanthropies.<\/p>\n Lyda Hill at Garden of the Gods in Colorado.<\/p>\n Courtesy Lyda Hill<\/p>\n The gift of science, the curse of wealth<\/p>\n Lyda Hill Philanthropies has funded many well-known local enterprises like the Perot Museum and KERA. She’s invested more than $45 million in parks across the city, including\u00a0Klyde Warren<\/a>, one of Dallas\u2019 crown jewels and a civic project imitated across the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n And she has funded endeavors many people have never heard of. More than $60 million to Houston’s MD Anderson; more than $60 million to UT Southwestern; more than $35 million to Dallas\u2019 Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cScience is the answer\u201d is one of her mission statements.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest way she supported us was a gift to endow the department of bioinformatics,\u201d says Podolsky, president of UT Southwestern. \u201cIt\u2019s not warm and fuzzy,\u201d admits Podolsky, \u201cbut the science is driving impact that will lead to treatment and cures.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Her mother, Margaret Hunt Hill, died of natural causes in 2007, at 91. Margaret had a good long life, and her name lives on, not only in the Santiago\u00a0Calatrava bridge that has become a Dallas icon but also in places like the Margaret and Al Hill Performance Hall in Richardson\u2019s Eisemann Center.<\/p>\n Margaret Hunt Hill (center) with her son, Al Hill Jr. (left) at a Crystal Charity Ball event in 1995.<\/p>\n DMN archives<\/p>\n The loss of the Hunt family\u2019s second-gen matriarch seems to have unstitched whatever bound them together. A fight over money broke out, with Lyda\u2019s brother Al Hill Jr.<\/a> sued by his son, Al Hill III, over mismanagement of about $3 billion in assets.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI am crushed for my brother,\u201d Lyda told D magazine in 2008. \u201cCan you imagine having your son sue you?\u201d<\/p>\n The battle dragged on, even after Lyda\u2019s brother Al died in his sleep in his Lakeside Drive mansion in 2017. A\u00a02026 story<\/a> from The Texas Lawbook about at least $15 million that may have been looted from the family trust points to more than 2,060 docket entries in what one judge called a \u201cseemingly interminable family dispute.\u201d<\/p>\n Lyda appeared to stay above the fray on that drama. In 2010, she signed \u201cThe Giving Pledge,\u201d organized by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to inspire the world’s richest to donate much of their fortunes. Lyda plans to donate all of hers.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s dramatic and profound to distribute one\u2019s wealth like this, but if there was a movie moment, \u00e0 la Scrooge or It\u2019s a Wonderful Life, Lyda isn\u2019t telling. When I asked what prompted her decision in my list of questions, she emailed back, \u201cI wasn\u2019t inspired by one specific person or event as much as by my belief that if you\u2019re in a position to make a meaningful difference, you should.\u201d<\/p>\n Reach beyond Dallas<\/p>\n In December 2018<\/a>, representatives from 20 Dallas nonprofits attended a breakfast with Lyda Hill Philanthropies. They thought it was \u201cpitch day,\u201d and a few might walk out lucky winners. Instead, taped under each chair was a check for $110,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n The surprise announcement had a showman\u2019s flair, a sprinkle of Oprah Winfrey. Imagine Lyda on stage with her microphone, pointing to each person in the audience: YOU get infrastructure and discretionary funds, and YOU get infrastructure and discretionary funds.<\/p>\n Her largesse has helped build a $1.7 million Dream Lab for the Girl Scouts of South Dallas<\/a>. She helped fund a project to ensure 48,000 kids in the Dallas Independent School District got to go on\u00a0STEM-related field trips<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n And her reach extends beyond Dallas. She is one of the great philanthropists of Colorado, where she has spent summers since childhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lyda Hill, photographed in 2012, operates by the motto, \u201cScience is the answer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 2012 File Photo – David Woo<\/p>\n In 2020, the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience opened at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, to focus on trauma recovery. The program emerged from Lyda\u2019s concern about post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly in military veterans and first responders, and it has pioneered treatment modalities used in 32 countries.<\/p>\n \u201cLyda has a fusion of creative and pragmatic energy, that\u2019s what I love about her,\u201d says Pam Shockley-Zalabak, chancellor emerita of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. \u201cI\u2019ve been around a lot of people who are creative but cannot make an idea work.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Shockley-Zalabak attributes this to Lyda\u2019s lifelong quest to understand the world. \u201cI\u2019m having dinner with her in a couple nights,\u201d says Shockley-Zalabak, \u201cand she will always say to me, now what do I need to know?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Pegasus Park and making Dallas competitive\u00a0\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Courtesy Lyda Hill<\/p>\n
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