Biography
Fred Leroy Hillis was born June 8, 1918 near Brosely, MO. He was the first of three boys born to 15 year old Hattie Franklin Hillis and Sam Leroy Hillis, a manual laborer for the railroad. His parents were poor by anyone's standards and barely educated. Fred's father Sam died of tuberculosis when he was 8 years old. His mother soon found herself in desperate circumstances. Her family could offer no help. Hattie was one of 10 children and her in-laws boasted an even larger family (21 children). There was no hope of employment in rural Missouri for this uneducated widow with three small sons.
Hattie eventually found her way to St. Louis where she finally found a job as a waitress. It was soon obvious that her pathetic salary was not going to be enough to feed herself and her boys. She temporarily found a place for her sons at an orphan's home sponsored by the Feefee Baptist Church in Hazelwood, Missouri, near St. Louis. It was the time of the Great Depression, and homes for orphans across the nation were swelling with the children of the destitute. The grinding poverty of Fred's childhood proved to be a formative seed. He developed an unquenchable appetite for knowledge that never died. He realized early in life that education was the only way to a better life. He decided that he would do whatever it took to achieve that goal.
Fred and his brother Randy gradually started to earn a bit from various odd jobs. The family's slowly improving financial situation finally allowed them to live together again in 1932. By the time Fred was 14 he was as tall as most men, and managed to pass himself off as 18 for a job after school and weekends with the Anheuser Bush brewery in St. Louis. He was assigned to an area populated by a tight knit bunch of tough old German brewers. Many still communicated only in their native tongue. Fred soon developed a new muscle bound body from the heavy physical demands of his job. Simultaneously, as the months wore on, he also began to understand more of the second language of the brewery, German; an accomplishment ten years hence that proved fortuitous.
As a young man, Fred worked and saved what he could, finally making it to the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, a Freshman at age 20. His chosen course of study, Electrical Engineering, was far from an easy one. He found a multitude of various jobs between and after classes to pay his way, but his rigid schedule left little time for socializing or dates. Study was done in bits and spurts whenever he could work it in. In 1941 two things happened that were to alter this regimented lifestyle forever. Fred met a beautiful hazel-eyed brunette from a farm near Napton, Missouri. Though Mary Frances Abney was a year younger than Fred, she was already a Senior and an honor student at the University. The attraction was immediate and mutual. Neither dated anyone else thereafter. Close on the heels of their budding new relationship, the events of the morning of December 7, 1941 changed the lives of millions including that of Fred and Mary. The two oldest Hillis brother enlisted with the multitudes that volunteered following Pearl Harbor, Fred with the Army Air Corps and Randy with the Navy. They joined their younger brother John, already serving in the Pacific on Midway Island as a Marine.