Huntington Mayor Hilary Gordon will retire as the Huntington Mayor

Huntington Mayor Hilary Gordon will retire as the Huntington Mayor after 10 and a half years of service as the mayor and six years as a city council member.
Mayor Gordon said she hadn’t really considered getting into politics, but each year a Carbon County employee would come into Gordon’s Floral to get plants for their city. She said it was grant money that came into the city for beautification. Jackie Wilson, Huntington Mayor at the time came into the floral shop and Mayor Gordon was telling her about these grants that were available and Mayor Wilson encouraged Mayor Gordon to get involved in City government.
So she did, she was appointed a city council member and then appointed mayor when Mayor Wilson resigned for health reasons.
Mayor Gordon was in office only a couple of weeks when the Crandall Canyon mine disaster happened and suddenly she was talking to reporters from around the world. She went to the office that morning and phone calls began pouring into the office. She went to speak with the families at that time gathered at the senior citizen center. It was a difficult time, but a time when all the community pulled together. “It really brought out the best in people and the community pulled together. There were so many generous people during that time. Sen. Orrin Hatch visited and donated to the families. I really grew to love Gov. Jon Huntsman he did so much for us and was so loving and kind and compassionate during that time.”
Mayor Gordon was born in England in 1944. She came into the world near the end of World War II. Her sisters had been evacuated out of London because of the air raids on the city and the Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted all children evacuated. One silver lining to this was Mayor Gordon’s father was an air traffic controller and he was stationed near where his daughters were relocated where he could keep an eye on them.
Her father received an award for saving many American pilots as he directed them into the airport and through the dense fog England is famous for. Mayor Gordon describes her father as very level headed and calm in an emergency situation and he was called back to the airport many times to guide in the planes. These were the days without the sophisticated equipment air traffic controllers have in airports now. “My father received the George Medal,” said Mayor Gordon.
“My sisters ended up together in a home in Cornwall, this was near where my father was stationed, one sister was 8 and one 4 at the time and my mom was pregnant with me. My mother and father decided that she would stay at home so they could keep their house. During the war, if you left your house to go to the country, the government would take it over and put someone else in there. In war time, anything and everything is possible. So my mother stayed home, she was about 12 miles from the airport in London, kind of in the suburbs.
“So that’s the situation I was born into, my mom said I cried the first two years of my life. One day my mom was out in the garden digging potatoes when a doodle bob came over, these were launched by the German army. It came down at the end of our street and blew out some windows. It was a terrifying and difficult time. After the war everything was on rations, you were allotted food according to how many children you had to feed. By that time my brother Barry had been born. We were given coupon books. We used to play grocery store, and I’d count coupons out to pay for the food. That’s how we lived. My mother was an amazing cook.
“Back then, if you didn’t cook, you didn’t eat, we didn’t have frozen foods back then. I didn’t taste steak until I was in my late teens. There were markets for each specific thing, a bakery, a fishmonger, a dry good, a green grocer. It was England, I was raised on fish. Fresh fish.
“We didn’t go hungry, my mother was good with making a little go a long way. We had a lot of puddings, rice and fish. People ate a lot healthier back then. Now food is filled with pollutants. This was also the time of the polio scare. I remember walking about two miles to go to Dr. Porters to get my polio shot. We grew up tough. Back then people were intent on just earning a living.
“After the war my father worked for the BEA, British European Airways until he retired. In London they had green belt areas, where nothing was built. There were plots of land that could be leased for farming. My father had a garden on these plots. He was an amazing gardener and he taught me many things.
“I went to the public schools, there was harsh discipline at the time and I had my hands and wrists slapped with a ruler more than once. We had elementary, junior and senior school. The boys and girls were separated when you got to the senior school and we wore school uniforms. There were large classes. I remember being a class monitor where you had to turn in the roll, there were 42 students in a class and one year 32; you could have heard a pin drop in there. The teacher had a large blackboard and taught the lessons, if you didn’t understand something, you would raise your hand and then you were allowed to go to the teachers desk so they could explain it to you,” said Mayor Gordon.
Mayor Gordon said she has learned a lot being mayor of Huntington. It’s the school of hard knocks. “Most people don’t pay a lot of attention. The only time you will hear from them is when you do something they don’t like. You cannot please everyone. You have some people who want to be the exception to the city’s ordinances and regulations. I have really liked doing this job. I had somebody come into my office one time and accuse me of trying to turn Huntington into London. One day I was in line at the bank in Castle Dale when I heard a couple of other lady’s in line and they were talking. One must have been from out of town, because she told the lady, I just drove through the ugliest little town, and she meant Huntington.
“I have tried to look at Huntington, the way other people driving through might perceive it. I knew nothing about politics. My first assignment as a council member was beautification and Heritage Days plus planning and zoning. I try to be in the office every day. I take my job as mayor seriously. I have always put what’s best for Huntington City first. I found that you can get grant money, but you have to work for it. I have been to the CIB on many occasions to ask for money for projects. It’s kind of like the bartering system. I always ask for more than I know they will give me.
“The first time I went was to ask for a new watering system for the Huntington Cemetery. So I received part grant and part loan and we put in a new watering system at the cemetery.
“There are some people who don’t want improvements. It’s hard to get people to clean up their properties. People get attached to their stuff. I feel like I’ve made our little town a cleaner and nicer place. The people love the flowers on Main Street. We have people call or stop in all the time and visitors who stop and want to know how to get flowers to stay as beautiful as Huntingtons. It’s not a secret, we always tell them to water and fertilize them. We learned that some of the people we hired to water the flowers didn’t know the proper way to water the baskets. We figured out a diluted fertilizer solution to go directly into the water, so the plants are fed every day.
“One of the most difficult things as mayor has been to balance the budget with decreased interest on our investments. There used to be enough in that fund that we could operate the city from the interest, but then the interest rates went down. We’ve been able to get a lot of projects done by forming partnerships. We partnered with UDOT for the new walking path from Heritage Home to the corner by Headstart. We put in sidewalks around the school with safe routes to schools money with UDOT. We’ve also received grants from the Eccles Foundation and Fastpass grants.
“There’s been times when the CIB turned me down. When we had the Seeley Fire and the river bed filled up with silt. I saw it was going to cause flooding and the CIB offered me a loan, but I turned it down. I didn’t want to go into debt. I called Mike Mower and told him I wanted to meet with the governor because I wanted him to give me some money. I went to the legislature and Sen. David Hinkins assisted us and we got the money to repair the river bank. The NRCS joined in and we did the project. I am like a dog with a bone, I can’t leave it alone when I think something is needed.
“Like with the Huntington fire station. I asked the CIB for 75 percent grant and 25 percent loan, people said there was no way I was going to get that much, but they gave me 65 percent grant for the fire station and 35 percent loan. We’ve had to be careful with the finances and make adjustments. We’ve used CIB funds for the cemetery wall and the new restroom/visitors center on Main Street. I took Mayor elect LaMar Guymon to the last CIB funding where we asked for a grant to finish the cemetery wall to the south. They said they couldn’t give me the entire $74,000 but they could put in $60,000 and we put in $14,000 from the cemetery perpetual care fund.
“I think it’s important that I am always in the office, there’s always things to do and I can answer questions and be here to handle things as they come up. In difficult situations, I really just always have to remember there is a spark of goodness in everyone, even if they’re behaving badly.
Mayor Gordon has plans to help with her son’s restaurant and do some cooking for them. One of her specialities is brownies and rolls. “In my early years of marriage I had a beauty shop and I didn’t work on Monday’s I would bake cookies and bread and made everything from scratch. I thought it would last all week, but the kids would bring all their friends home and eat everything.
“When I was a teenager, I joined the church and my sister and I decided to come to America to see what it was like. I worked along the Wasatch Front and then one of my friends wanted me to go out with a guy from down home that was coming up. That’s how I met Brent. He was sent up to Salt Lake to work for a couple of weeks. He wanted me to come and visit his home, which was Huntington. It’s called Huntington City, but I told Brent, this is a village. There were dirt roads. This is home now. I came to Utah in 1964 and was married in 1965. Our daughter Tammy was born in 1965, we have three sons, Jim, Frank and Josh.
“In the 1970s when we had the boom, there were no ordinances so it was messy. There needed to be a change for future development to organize things for the future. We need ordinances to make things better for everyone. I love this job. I believe in the people of this town,” said Gordon.
Mayor Gordon operates a business called Healing Hands. She believes in prevention and alternative healing. People need to eat correctly. There are so many pollutants in the environment, in foods and medications. She believes everyone should live as naturally as possible and to live abundantly.
She will miss all the friends she’s made on the boards and people she has met but, “Who knows what the future holds, I am ready for new adventures,” said Mayor Gordon.