Octogenarian completes master’s degree at Northwest after career in technology field

As Northwest Missouri State University’s newest graduates crossed the commencement stage at Bearcat Stadium in May, it was Gordon Hill who drew the loudest applause and a standing ovation from people in the crowd that day.

Gordon, at age 85, was Northwest’s eldest graduate this spring, earning a Master of Arts degree in English – just 60 years after completing a bachelor’s degree at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“I’ve got transcripts from so many universities,” Hill marveled, listing Northwest, the University of Missouri-Columbia, New Mexico State University, the University of Mississippi and the University of South Florida as places where he has enrolled in coursework.

After graduating from Maryville High School in 1956, Gordon tried taking a couple summer courses at Northwest. He concedes he did not do well, however, and instead joined the Air Force. He served for four years and then returned to Northwest for one semester in the fall of 1960 before opting to pursue a degree in engineering at the University of Missouri.

Through all of it, Gordon’s wife, Frances, had been at his side. They were married 63 years, exchanging their vows in 1957 – two years after they “got together” as juniors at Maryville High School.

The couple raised two children and had been inseparable as they traversed the country and Gordon worked a variety of jobs. In 2020, they returned to northwest Missouri to be closer to their daughter and other family members. Unfortunately, Frances’s Parkinson's disease accelerated and she died that May, just three months after their move.

“But we had a good time in that three months,” Gordon said. “We got to see people and do things.”

Afterward, Gordon felt a hole in his life and needed something to occupy his time.

“My life without her was just nothing,” he said. “I needed to fill that hole in my life. I’ve always taken classes at universities where we’ve lived every now and then, but I decided to make it more formal, and seeking a master’s was a way of really filling up my life.”

As he reflected on his graduate coursework at Northwest as well as the joy he experienced in sharing his writing with faculty and classmates, Gordon said, “It’s phenomenal. I don’t know how many professors I had. I took the 10 classes and probably had six or seven different professors, but every class was different. What I got was a broad spectrum of literature – and not only the reading but the discussing and then also the writing.”

Gordon says he’s been a writer throughout his life and career. He notes with pride that he studied journalism at Maryville High School under the tutelage of local icon Opal Eckert. Today he authors a weekly column that appears in the Nodaway News Leader, and he is a frequent contributor to the Maryville Forum.

A self-described “computer technical geek,” Gordon graduated from the University of Missouri in 1963 with his bachelor’s degree in engineering. For years after that, he worked stints at several small companies – some multiple times – and often wrote instructions in a computing field that was just beginning to take off. 

“Jobs were always looking for me – because I was in the computer field in the early ’60s,” Gordon said. “It was all vacuum tubes and paper tape and punch cards. I started as a technician and then became an engineer and then became a salesman of scientific computers.”

In 1974, he ended up as a project manager at a company in Florida and stayed there for 11 years. But when one of that company’s products failed, Gordon was out of a job and – with a nudge from a friend – launched a consulting firm. About six months later, he joined a seminar company for which he developed and led technical seminars for 15 years. Gordon figures he trained more than 5,000 people on how to design and develop computer networks before he retired in 2001 at age 63.

In retirement, Gordon took to volunteering, first offering encouragement to inmates at a juvenile detention center and then as a docent with Frances at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in New Mexico. There, Gordon led guided tours and saw himself evolving into more of a storyteller than a technical writer.

The Hills were docents at the Gila Cliff Dwellings for four seasons until Frances’s health began deteriorating and she could no longer walk the trails, prompting their move back to Maryville.

On the day he graduated from Northwest, his daughter as well as siblings and extended family who came from St. Louis, Florida and Oklahoma were in the crowd watching from the Bearcat Stadium grandstand and cheering him on.

He noticed a lot of people calling his achievement “a big deal,” but he shrugged off that notion.

“It’s not a big deal for me because it’s what I wanted to do next, and I think that successful people do what they want to do next,” he said.