June Hileman

June Hileman died early Monday morning.

It's a great loss for this community but then everyone who knew June, knows that already.

Here at The Western News we lost a close friend, a fellow employee, a generous cook of extraordinary talents, and our institutional memory. June had worked here for 45 years, which is just shy of half the time this newspaper has existed.

During that time, she cried with us, laughed with us, consoled us, lectured us, broke a sweat side-by-side with us and treated us and our children as if they were members of her own family. I couldn't begin to count the number of people who worked here and were touched by this lady.

There wasn't much June couldn't do here at the paper. She tried and or had successfully done it all.

Because of her great attention to detail, she was a marvelous proofreader. She also was a terrific speller being a crossword puzzle maven. And she was not afraid to crack open her copy of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, one of the few that looked more used and well-traveled than my own. On the inside of the cover it says "Read, mark, learn but please return to J. Hileman." We had many discussions about grammar, the meanings of words and using just the right word to communicate in a story.

Her page — the Looking Back columns and "old photo" — were done with incredible effort. She would read through the old copies of The Western News from 40, 50 and 60 years ago and find newspaper accounts that related to what was happening here in Libby and Troy today. And she looked for photos containing people who were still involved in the community.

I couldn't get her to take a day off. I imagined she had horrible guilt feelings of leaving us to slave alone but I think she was so dedicated to her profession that she hated for us to put out an issue without her.

I'm going to miss looking over at her while she reads one of the many complicated stories about Libby Dam and asking if she understood what I was writing. My question wasn't really to see if she understood, it was to see if the average reader would be able to follow the gist of the story. She had a great ability to work with me on those complicated issues.

And many a time I would bounce something off her that I was considering for an editorial to see what her reaction would be and query her on what she thought the community's reaction would be.

I think her favorite saying was "Our job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." We all chuckled when she said it because these words were coming from a slight woman with a great manicured coif of white hair on her head. You hardly expected it the first time.

To the community, June's death is the loss of yet another memory of how things were. In the past year, we've lost Inez Herrig and Mick Mills, also great minds who were always available to share information about the past.

And it seemed like June was constantly baking something for some fundraising effort or for some community event. Then there's June's basement children — people who lived in her basement while getting settled in life. There's a bunch of them running around. They probably have great stories to tell about her generosity.

I'll close by saying June was a great human being to know, but to me she was an even better journalist. — Roger Morris