Author Tony Hillerman stepped on a land mine in WWII and recuperated in a hospital in France, and he received a Purple Heart for it.
"While he was up in the air, he was thinking, 'This is really going to hurt when I hit the ground,'" said Luther Wilson, UNM Press president and Hillerman's friend.
Hillerman died Sunday at 83 from pulmonary failure.
He also received a Silver Star and a Bronze Star before returning to Oklahoma in 1945. A reporter encouraged Hillerman to pursue writing and journalism after reading the letters he'd written home to his mother during the war.
"He had country-boy smarts about him," Wilson said. "He had a sixth sense about people and human nature. He was just very observant. It made him a very good writer."
Sharon Warner, a UNM creative writing professor, said Hillerman once signed books for four hours at an event she arranged to help raise money to feed the homeless.
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"We've lost one of our literary lights," Warner said. "People had registered for the (Taos Summer Writers Conference) in order to meet him, and they stood in line to talk to him. One particular participant told him about her novel and how influential his work had been for her, and he responded by giving her the name of his agent.ˇHe was just so warm and authentic.ˇHe wrote for all the right reasons: out of a love of place, a love of people and a sense of genuine and generous curiosity."
Hillerman was a professor and chairman of UNM's journalism department, as well as a mystery novel writer, drawing on Southwest and American Indian cultures. He donated $500,000 to renovate UNM's journalism building and has given money for Navajo scholarships. He wrote more than 20 books, a handful of which were turned into films.
Before turning to fiction, he was executive editor at the Santa Fe New Mexican, a political reporter in Oklahoma City and a crime reporter in Texas.
"In 1996, Tony and I went to the Super Bowl in Phoenix, and we were waiting for this bus to take us to the hotel," friend and Albuquerque Journal columnist Jim Belshaw said. "People were carrying signs and blowing whistles, creating a racket, and Tony said, 'Watch my luggage a minute.' I thought he was going to the restroom. He walks across the street, and about three minutes later he comes back, and he knows who's on strike, why they're on strike, what their demands are and the names of a couple of the strikers. He was just one of those human beings that you meet for 10 seconds and, for some reason, you felt like you've known him all your life, so you talk to him. People always felt comfortable around him."
Belshaw said Hillerman wasn't so self-absorbed that he couldn't take criticism.
"We were talking one night, and he was telling me this story about the greatest chapter he ever wrote," Belshaw said. "Without a doubt - most complicated and best chapter he'd ever written in his life. He sends the manuscript to New York, the editor sends it back and says, 'Tony, this is the best book you've ever written. There's only one chapter that needs a lot of work.'"
Hillerman rewrote his favorite chapter because that was his job, Belshaw said.
"People who don't write think there's a secret to it," he said. "Tony said the secret was the grind. You had to write every day . I cannot think of a time when I walked in his house that he didn't say, 'OK, just a second. Let me turn the computer off,' and on the screen would be the next manuscript. He wrote every day."
