Abilene Reporter News 
Abilene, Texas
7 October, 1948 

The ROAD RUNNER
By HAMILTON WRIGHT

Veteran Baird Printer on Comeback Trail
To Health After Siege of Illness, Tragedy

    BAIRD, Oct. 7. -- Veterans whose fingers have been perfumed with printer’s ink in West Texas remember good old Haynie Gilliland, scion of the late Bill Gilliland, founder of the Baird Star and other early-day Callahan County newspapers.

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   But for three years they’ve not seen him. To wander into The Star office and not see the 200-pound khaki-shirted Haynie is to wonder. He was a fixture there ever since he was a boy knee-high to a big duck. Haynie went through World War I, fighting and experiencing hardships and privations that contributed to his later being incapacitated. Three years ago he was taken to Legion, near Kerrville, where he has been ever since.

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   His weight dropped to 158. But now his sister, Eliska Gilliland, assistant postmaster here, says his avoirdupois is back to 190 pounds.
    And Vetern Hospital physicians say he’s rapidy making recovery and might get out in another year.

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    A he-man, Haynie was urged by his attending physicians to make poppys -- anything to take his mind off his malady and life’s tragedies. “That’s for sissies,” he told them. But now Haynie is making poppies, weaving and working in leather and finding those avocations just what he needed all the time.

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    Haynie said the hardest thing he has to bear is to be away from friends at Baird. Miss Eliska says he gets very lonesome. The Road Runner knows what that lonesomeness means to him. Haynie had and still has many fast friends. He was “one of the boys.” After the death of his father he did most of the backshop work of the Star while his sister, the late Miss Eliza, ran the front end -- editor and business manager. He worked night and day to keep the paper’s head above the financial surface.
    The death of his sister after he went to Legion was a shock. Still later another death in the family came. It stunned him. And then a patient in the next room who had interests near Houston “hoped” Haynie up by telling him when he got up -- pretty soon -- he and Haynie could go to his country estate on the bay and “just laze around for a couple of years.” A short time afterward the patient died suddenly. It was another dagger in Haynie’s status. But from all these he has now recovered.

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    Miss Johnnie Gilliland, another sister, is postmaster at Baird.
    “It does Haynie lots of good when we tell him of the great number of people who continually inquire about his condition,” Miss Eliska said.
    “And to all, we now hold out hope of Haynie’s being returned to us in the future. We know it’ll be overwhelming joy for him to see again his native home town and the hundreds who knew and loved him,” the sisters said.

-- transcription by Kate Maynard, 2010