CONWAY — Willie Hardin, who will retire this week as associate vice president of academic development at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, is well-dressed with a penchant for purple ties, and he’s well-educated, having earned a doctorate in library administration.
He’s come a long way from having to stay out of junior high school for weeks each year to pick cotton and from painting his only pair of shoes with black ink to take to college.
At 69 “and a half,” he said, sounding like a kid who can’t wait to grow up, his successful life has been a testimony to pure hard work and determination.
It so easily could have gone the other way.
Hardin was born in Morrilton to a 15-year-old mother, and his father died at 26 when Hardin was 2 and his brother was 1. His mother remarried and moved to Atkins, then to Kansas, and had eight more children, and he’s close to the surviving seven.
Hardin said he went to live with Zeola Hardin Knox, his paternal grandmother, in Morrilton, and his brother lived across a field at their maternal grandmother’s house. The boys saw their mother in the summers.
“My grandmother was very, very religious,” Hardin said. “She spoke fire and brimstone.”
She taught him to read from the Bible.
“I don’t know how I got through the King James Bible,” he said.
Hardin was a “reserved kid,” he recalled, and didn’t have time to get into trouble if he’d wanted to.
He and his grandmother went to church all day on Sundays, getting home at 6 o’clock in the evening. He wasn’t allowed to do his favorite thing on that day of the week.
“I couldn’t go to the movies on Sunday — it was against her belief,” he said. “I loved to go to the movies.”
When he could, he’d go to the Rialto in downtown Morrilton.
“I was crazy about Westerns. Still am,” he said.
Hardin said the family was so poor that he was forced to leave school each year to pick cotton for $3 per day, $15 a week.
His grandmother would take him to the all-black school and enroll him the first day and then take him wherever they could pick cotton.
“I wouldn’t start school until after Thanksgiving,” he said, “just what you had to do to survive.”
He said the teachers at the segregated school in Morrilton were good — especially in history, English and science — and they gave him extra work so he could catch up.
When he was in 10th grade, circumstances changed. He started getting Social Security checks because his father had died — his grandmother did not know how to fill out the paperwork, but finally got help in doing so when Hardin was a teenager — and the law said he had to be in school. Hardin said he appreciates Social Security even more because of that.
Hardin knew there was a better life, and he knew it was going to be through education.
Winthrop Rockefeller started two scholarships in Conway County — one for a black student and one for a white student, Hardin said.
Knowing he couldn’t afford college, Hardin applied for the scholarship, but it went to one of his classmates.
Hardin said he went to Kansas City to try to find work, but it was a bust.
“I should have stayed and picked cotton,” he said.
When he came back in 1958, the Morrilton High School principal notified Hardin that he’d received a $50 scholarship to Arkansas Baptist College.
His grandmother, an aunt and an uncle took him to the Little Rock school.
When the registrar told them it was going to take more than $50 to enroll, “my grandmother said, ‘I’ll have to take you back home.’”
Charles Johnson, interim college president, overheard and said, “‘No, leave him. I’ll take care of him,’” Hardin remembered. “He became like my foster father.”
For $1 a day, Hardin cleaned Johnson’s apartment. Hardin also got a job in the cafeteria, where his payment was a room and three square meals a day.
He didn’t have the money to catch a bus and come home to Morrilton, though.
The former Baptist Hospital (Arkansas Baptist Medical Center) was four blocks from the college, and an upperclassman who had played basketball with Hardin in high school helped him get a job at the hospital.
“That was the turning point in my life,” Hardin said.
After class each day, he walked the four blocks to work.
“I was making money now — 65 cents an hour. My work ethic really paid off at that time,” he said.
The interim president who took Hardin under his wing was going to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (then Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College.)
Johnson needed someone to look after his grandmother, and he asked Hardin to go with them, so he did.
“I got me a shovel and dug up a garden so the grandmother and I could have vegetables,” he said.
Johnson paid Hardin’s tuition, but Hardin didn’t have any spending money. Because of his reputation as a hard worker, the hospital let him keep his job on weekends, and he rode the bus to Little Rock each Friday and back on Sunday.
His major was biology and general science.
“My dream was to be a medical doctor, but I was afraid of needles and shots and blood,” he said, laughing.
The now-divorced Hardin got married after he graduated from AM&N and was looking for a teaching job when the Army drafted him. He spent two years at Fort Hood, Texas, and the military paid for him to take education courses at a nearby college.
The couple didn’t have children until he got out of the military and was working in Little Rock at the Pulaski Federal Savings and Loan Association.
He has twin daughters, Valencia Maxfield of McKinney, Texas, and Dalencia Hervey of Conway; and a son, William K. Hardin, who lives in Tallahassee, Fla. All three are UCA graduates.
Hardin was happy at the bank, but his former elementary school principal called and told him about an opening for a science teacher at Morrilton Junior High School.
“The funny thing is, J.C. Penney had a sale — three suits for $100, so I went and bought me three suits,” Hardin said.
Teaching was stressful, he said, especially when parents thought he should give their children higher grades than they earned.
Hardin told his principal he didn’t want to teach and was asked to become the librarian — although Hardin balked when the principal first suggested it. “I said, ‘I’m a male. I’m a macho man,’” Hardin said. He told the administrator that he’d take the job on one condition — if he could meet with Gladys Sachse at the University of Central Arkansas.
“She was the ultimate librarian in the state of Arkansas,” Hardin explained.
He sat in Torreyson Library at UCA, and she talked to him for two hours.
“She convinced me. The head librarians at UCA were males,” he said. “Males dominated the field in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, I found out.”
He spent six years as librarian at Morrilton Junior High School.
“That’s when I fell in love with it,” he said.
He was active in the Arkansas Education Association and was running for a board position when he caught the eye of then-UCA President Silas Snow.
Snow hired Hardin, and he left the public school and went to work in the UCA Department of Library Science in 1973.
After he took the UCA job, Hardin finished his first master’s degree — in library science — at the University of Oklahoma, then earned his second in business administration. He took a leave of absence in 1975-76 without pay to get his doctorate in library administration from Simmons College in Boston.
Hardin was named interim director of the library, then director of the library in 1985. During his tenure, UCA became the first automated library in Arkansas.
“We had a funeral for the card catalog,” Hardin said, chuckling. It was his idea, he admitted.
He and development librarian Gay Moore carried out the card catalog and put it in a hearse.
“I will always cherish Gay Moore,” he said.
In 1991, then-UCA President Dr. Winfred L. Thompson changed the position to dean of the library.
“UCA had the first dean [of a library] in Arkansas — that was me,” Hardin said.
It was also in the ’90s that Hardin bought a liquor store in Little Rock.
“I nearly quit my job here to work there,” he said.
It was all about greed, he admitted without hesitation.
“Even my pastor told me not to do it — he begged me.”
Hardin said it was a mistake, and he prayed to get out of it.
“One of the local winos came in and fell dead in the store,” Hardin recalled with a laugh. “That was a sign this was not the business I should be in,” and he sold it.
In 2003, shortly after Lu Hardin became president of UCA, Willie Hardin was named associate vice president of academic development.
“I couldn’t do anything else in the library,” Hardin said. “We had the second-largest library in the state,” although now it’s the fourth largest, he said.
Hardin, who grew up without two nickels to rub together, found he enjoyed fundraising because of the people he met.
He’s most proud of the scholarships he started, which include the Fred and Lilac Petrucelli Scholarship and 12 scholarships for African-American students.
Provost Lance Grahn said Hardin is “someone with a big heart, a love for UCA.
“In terms of fundraising, he was someone who was our direct contact into the African-American community, especially in African-American churches. He was very active in raising scholarship money for African-American students.”
Hardin spent most of his career in the library, and the changes are obvious, with new technology such as e-readers.
“You can use the library without ever going to the library,” he said. “You can even check out books without going to the library.”
Hardin said libraries are still needed.
“You still have those who like to cuddle up with a book and read it, but I think that will change because of the expense of publishing a book,” he said.
Hardin’s last day — after 38 years of service to the university — will be Wednesday, and he’s ready.
“It’s time to move on,” he said.
He was working tirelessly when his children grew up, so he wants to do all the things with his grandchildren that he didn’t do with his children, including taking them to see national monuments.
“I don’t feel poor anymore,” he said. “I’ve been blessed.”