Hepola: Lyda Hill, the dynamic woman quietly shaping modern Dallas

About a decade ago, Lyda Hill attended a lecture by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, who described his ongoing dig in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system, site of ancient fossils. Afterward, Berger was politely approached by a woman — modest stature, short brown hair — who asked what he needed. One can only imagine this scene, the world-renowned scientist smiling and nodding as the nice lady offers to help. 

Lyda Hill loves to help, particularly when a project strikes her as paradigm-shifting. She gave around $5 million to the National Geographic Society to support Berger’s work, and he discovered an ancient hominin species in those South African caves, Homo naledi, thus expanding our understanding of evolution. 

“It’s fun to do the impossible,” reads an orange neon sign inside Pegasus Park, the 26-acre campus near UT Southwestern Medical Center Hill created in 2021 to help Dallas attract and retain tech and science innovators. 

The granddaughter of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, Hill was born into wealth and scrutiny and has spent 83 years learning to navigate both. She has proved herself a savvy entrepreneur, long before Sheryl Sandberg was leaning in. In the ’60s, Lyda started Hill World Travel, a business-centric travel agency she sold in 1982. Successful by any metric, Hill World Travel became personally meaningful to Lyda. She understood she could create wealth, even if she hadn’t inherited it.

Her legacy, nowhere near finished, is almost too vast to comprehend. She’s donated more than $100 million to cancer research, but that’s a mere slice of her impact. If every building, park, museum, nonprofit or business that Lyda Hill has helped were to suddenly turn orange — her favorite color — let’s just say much of Dallas would look like it was rooting for the Longhorns.   

These days she runs Lyda Hill Philanthropies, housed on a high floor of the postmodern skyscraper that is the Trammell Crow Center, where her office feels like a chic mini-museum tucked away in the clouds. One wall is lined with exquisite rare minerals displayed behind glass and organized by hue: one row pink and purple, another yellow and orange. 

Huge windows offer a breathtaking view of downtown, the shiny buildings and highway sprawl and lagoons of green space her family helped build. Atop a bookcase beneath the windowsill are totems of an extraordinary life. The Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, 2022. City of Dallas Distinguished Service Award, 2022. 

Perhaps most striking are the four small skulls displayed near a 2015 National Geographic whose cover reads, “Almost Human: A New Ancestor Shakes Up Our Family Tree,” the magazine story that describes Berger’s groundbreaking South African discovery.

She helped fund the discovery of another species, too, an ancestor of modern hoofed mammals found in 2024 near Colorado Springs and named Militocodon lydae. The last part, “lydae,” was for her.

Lyda Hill was named for her grandmother, a petite and kindhearted woman better known as the wife of oil legend H.L. Hunt, once the richest man in America and a figure so complicated he had two secret families.

The second Lyda Hill, born in 1942, never married or had children but has spent much of her adulthood quietly shaping North Texas, from the Fort Worth Stockyards to UT Southwestern. Her legacy is profound, even for the ambitious Hunt clan. It’s not easy to stand out when your uncle Lamar started the Super Bowl and your half-uncle Ray built Reunion Tower.       

Lyda declined to meet for this story. I sent her eight questions by email; she responded to three, including what brand of chocolate she prefers, as she is a known chocoholic. 

“I don’t have one single brand,” she wrote. “I just like those with maximum dark chocolate.” 

It’s not unusual for a person of her esteem or lineage to decline an interview. As if to underscore her influence, Time magazine recently named her to a list of the top 100 philanthropists shaping the world, a docket that includes Michael and Susan Dell, Lionel Messi and Willie Nelson.

She did give an interview to this paper for a 1992 profile. The story focused on her rarefied childhood and work with Meals on Wheels, her passion project at the time. “By society’s measuring stick of success — wealth — Miss Hill was born not with a silver spoon,” wrote the profile’s author, Diane Jennings, “but with an entire place setting, in her mouth.”

One anecdote describes how Lyda’s fellow campers at Waldemar, a popular sleepaway camp in the Hill Country, clocked her as rich by virtue of her monogrammed towels, a detail she didn’t perceive as unusual and therefore did not hide. “How are you going to make friends at camp if you’re the only person with monogrammed towels?” Lyda told The News, suggesting the strange alienation that can accompany wealth. That story is framed in the hallway outside her office, alongside certificates from the Junior League and Greater Dallas Chamber, and a baseball signed by Nolan Ryan. 

Friends and colleagues describe Lyda as curious and energetic. Spry and outdoorsy into her 80s, she wonders whether it’s time to stop skiing. Dr. Daniel Podolsky, president of UT Southwestern, likely speaks for many when he says he likes sitting beside her at galas and black-tie events because she’s such a good conversationalist. Well-read, well-traveled, she is also even-tempered. She “isn’t an emotional woman,” reads a 2008 D magazine story. “On a scale of one to 10, she’s a zero, she says.” 

The emotional equanimity seems to be her inheritance as well; her grandmother took the shock of a lifetime (H.L. Hunt’s secret families) like a champ, a story Lyda’s mother, Margaret Hunt Hill, tells in the 1994 memoir H.L. and Lyda. 

Margaret Hunt Hill, whose name is best known these days for a bridge spanning the Trinity River, was Hunt’s eldest daughter, and she comes across in her memoir as pragmatic, modest and fair. She is understandably furious with her father for his lies; he is also her father, brilliant and surprisingly present in her childhood. 

H.L. and Lyda recounts Margaret’s love affair with another brilliant man, her husband, Al Hill, whom she met in 1938 at a Dallas event called (you can’t make this up) the Petroleum Ball. In 1942, they had a baby girl named Lyda, “a tiny little thing who weighed six pounds,” as Margaret writes, one of the few mentions of her children in a book focused on her father’s legacy.

One story Margaret does tell occurs after the teenage Lyda leaves for Stanford in 1960. Lyda has an appendicitis attack, landing her in the care of a doctor who is 36, an age deemed too young by Lyda’s grandfather. H.L. Hunt had a deep distrust of doctors, for good reason; the country’s best once encouraged him to lobotomize his troubled son Hassie, a decision Hunt came to regret. He called this whippersnapper of a surgeon, and whatever Hunt told him, it made an impression. The next time the doctor saw Lyda, he stared at her and said, “Who are you, anyway?”

Although Lyda’s family was extraordinary, it’s not clear she sees her life that way. Her family lived on Vassar, a tony street in University Park, the more modest section of the Park Cities. She attended Hockaday, and we can assume she liked it, since she later gave them $20 million in what was then the largest donation in the private school’s history.

Her mother brought her along on volunteer work. She was “volun-told,” she likes to say, but she enjoyed it. The Hunts were forged in the logic of Christian charity and John D. Rockefeller philanthropy: To whom much is given, much is expected. Margaret stayed active in the Junior League and a panoply of nonprofits. Lyda’s business-savvy father, meanwhile, was so taken with a series of cascading waterfalls in Colorado Springs, known as Seven Falls, that he dropped $1 million to purchase the property. It’s hard to get one’s head around this kind of power, historically only known to kings and queens. “I love this waterfall” is almost never followed by, “I think I’ll buy it.” 

H.L. Hunt thought the waterfall was a bad investment, for the record. He didn’t like Al either, in the beginning, fearing he was only after Margaret’s money, but he became the man’s biggest fan. “I’ve never been so wrong about anything or anyone as I was about Al,” he said, according to Margaret’s memoir. The waterfall, meanwhile, led to more real-estate ventures in Colorado Springs, including a successful resort built on a mesa overlooking the majestic Garden of the Gods park.

In 1967, Lyda launched Hill World Travel, having spotted opportunity in the number of businessmen coming to and from Dallas during a decade when Braniff Airways was turning the city into a travel hub. She was one of the first women to join the prestigious Young Presidents’ Organization. There is a photo of her standing among middle-aged men and flashing an easy smile in her dark pink blazer.

“When she started Hill World Travel, that was a big deal,” says Mary Jalonick, a friend who is also the former president and CEO of The Dallas Foundation. “In my 20s, I was a community volunteer. I had friends who were full-time professionals, but at that time being a businesswoman and starting your own company was very unusual for a woman.” Lyda was in her mid-20s.

In 1979, Lyda was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was in her mid-30s, and she ultimately triumphed over the bodily invasion. The health crisis seems to have redirected her, though. In 1982, she sold Hill World Travel, and in the mid-’80s, she founded the Oklahoma Breast Care Center in a part of the country low on medical resources at the time. 

In 1988, her beloved father Al died of complications from hip surgery, a few months shy of his 50th wedding anniversary. That was the same year a developer named Holt Hickman began a project to bring back the Fort Worth Stockyards, one-time home of the cattle drive that had devolved into a cluster of meat-packing plants and former sheep and hog pens. 

Lyda became the co-investor in that project, giving North Texas one of its great tourist locales and paving the way for thousands of European soccer fans to buy Stetsons and drink Lone Star during the 2026 World Cup. 

“This is real Texas, not Southfork,” she said of the Stockyards in 1993.

Not long after that, she turned her attention toward the Garden of the Gods, the Colorado park where her father had bought a nearby mesa. The park was struggling financially. It was Lyda’s idea to open a visitor and nature center to generate income. She had an eye for leveraging capital: money that could lead to more money, more opportunity, the greater good. 

In 1997, she founded the Lyda Hill Foundation, which became Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

Lyda Hill Philanthropies has funded many well-known local enterprises like the Perot Museum and KERA. She’s invested more than $45 million in parks across the city, including Klyde Warren, one of Dallas’ crown jewels and a civic project imitated across the country. 

And she has funded endeavors many people have never heard of. More than $60 million to Houston’s MD Anderson; more than $60 million to UT Southwestern; more than $35 million to Dallas’ Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. 

“Science is the answer” is one of her mission statements.

“The biggest way she supported us was a gift to endow the department of bioinformatics,” says Podolsky, president of UT Southwestern. “It’s not warm and fuzzy,” admits Podolsky, “but the science is driving impact that will lead to treatment and cures.” 

Her mother, Margaret Hunt Hill, died of natural causes in 2007, at 91. Margaret had a good long life, and her name lives on, not only in the Santiago Calatrava bridge that has become a Dallas icon but also in places like the Margaret and Al Hill Performance Hall in Richardson’s Eisemann Center.

The loss of the Hunt family’s second-gen matriarch seems to have unstitched whatever bound them together. A fight over money broke out, with Lyda’s brother Al Hill Jr. sued by his son, Al Hill III, over mismanagement of about $3 billion in assets. 

“I am crushed for my brother,” Lyda told D magazine in 2008. “Can you imagine having your son sue you?”

The battle dragged on, even after Lyda’s brother Al died in his sleep in his Lakeside Drive mansion in 2017. A 2026 story from The Texas Lawbook about at least $15 million that may have been looted from the family trust points to more than 2,060 docket entries in what one judge called a “seemingly interminable family dispute.”

Lyda appeared to stay above the fray on that drama. In 2010, she signed “The Giving Pledge,” organized by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to inspire the world’s richest to donate much of their fortunes. Lyda plans to donate all of hers. 

It’s dramatic and profound to distribute one’s wealth like this, but if there was a movie moment, à la Scrooge or It’s a Wonderful Life, Lyda isn’t telling. When I asked what prompted her decision in my list of questions, she emailed back, “I wasn’t inspired by one specific person or event as much as by my belief that if you’re in a position to make a meaningful difference, you should.”

In December 2018, representatives from 20 Dallas nonprofits attended a breakfast with Lyda Hill Philanthropies. They thought it was “pitch day,” and a few might walk out lucky winners. Instead, taped under each chair was a check for $110,000. 

The surprise announcement had a showman’s flair, a sprinkle of Oprah Winfrey. Imagine Lyda on stage with her microphone, pointing to each person in the audience: YOU get infrastructure and discretionary funds, and YOU get infrastructure and discretionary funds.

Her largesse has helped build a $1.7 million Dream Lab for the Girl Scouts of South Dallas. She helped fund a project to ensure 48,000 kids in the Dallas Independent School District got to go on STEM-related field trips. 

And her reach extends beyond Dallas. She is one of the great philanthropists of Colorado, where she has spent summers since childhood. 

In 2020, the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience opened at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, to focus on trauma recovery. The program emerged from Lyda’s concern about post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly in military veterans and first responders, and it has pioneered treatment modalities used in 32 countries.

“Lyda has a fusion of creative and pragmatic energy, that’s what I love about her,” says Pam Shockley-Zalabak, chancellor emerita of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “I’ve been around a lot of people who are creative but cannot make an idea work.” 

Shockley-Zalabak attributes this to Lyda’s lifelong quest to understand the world. “I’m having dinner with her in a couple nights,” says Shockley-Zalabak, “and she will always say to me, now what do I need to know?” 

In 2014, Nicole Small, a Hockaday grad with an MBA from Northwestern, left her dream gig at the Perot Museum to become the CEO of Lyda Hill Philanthropies and its investing arm, LH Capital.

“If you’ve ever known Lyda or worked with Lyda, then you know why someone would want to work with Lyda,” says Small, as we sit in an office with a bowl of dark chocolate at the center of the table.

Over the past decade-plus, Nicole and Lyda have become a Dallas power duo: two modest-statured, sharply dressed, pleasant women with the combined power of a rocket ship. 

In 2021, they opened Pegasus Park, a hub for science, technology and social impact in an old Zales building near the Medical District. It came to Lyda’s attention that Dallas, despite its reputation as a medical center, was losing talent to innovation corridors like Boston and San Francisco. Pegasus Park changed that.

More than 70 companies reside on the 26-acre campus with 37,000 square feet of startup lab space. The place looks distinctly Silicon Valley, with its trendy neon signs and cold brew on tap in well-appointed common spaces that encourage chitchat and collaboration between companies. 

“It’s something people did not think would ever happen in Dallas,” says Small. Since the launch of Pegasus Park, its tenants have raised more than $2.2 billion in capital.

Five floors are reserved for nonprofits, unusual for this kind of go-go environment. This part of the building is called the Water Cooler, where companies that might otherwise be languishing in whatever cheap space they could afford enjoy the natural light of giant windows and the top-tier conference rooms of a for-profit enterprise. There is, unsurprisingly, a waiting list.

Small tours me through Bridge Labs, adjacent to the main building and designed for research and development. Then we head over to BioLabs, the area for startups. “At any given time, there could be 20 companies in here, everything from one lab bench to a private lab trying to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s.”

The sidewalk leading to the building is lined with life-size orange statues of women in science, part of Lyda’s If/Then Initiative to encourage young women in STEM. More recently, Lyda funded another version of this with life-size green statues of women in sports on display at FIFA FanFest during the World Cup. 

If you can see it, you can be it. In a city that claims to think big but has not always had a creative vision of itself — sports, shopping, finance — Lyda has expanded possibility.

“We had our annual meeting yesterday,” Small says, “and we had a big slide of impact. Just watching Lyda absorb it made me teary. We’ve got a lot of numbers, right? We did 600 grants last year, and so on. And she said, it doesn’t matter what the number is. Look at what we did.”

Lyda’s impact on the national parks is one of the more moving parts of her legacy. It’s also beguiling, given the origin story of her family fortune. There is a passage in her mother’s memoir where H.L. Hunt is given a gag gift, a book titled What H.L. Hunt Thinks About Geologists. The pages are blank.

I can only speculate whether Lyda’s devotion to the natural world has some relation to the shadow side of her grandfather’s impact. It would be just as reasonable to conclude it’s the logical extension of her true-blue devotion to the outdoors, a woman leaning in to her passion and curiosity to make the most of her complicated inheritance.

“She came to us because she was distressed about the state of national parks,” says Sue Urahn, president and chief executive officer of The Pew Charitable Trusts. This was 2014. “There was $11 billion of deferred maintenance, and it needed an infusion of money from the government.” 

Lyda persuaded Pew Charitable Trusts to take on the issue, raising public awareness to convince the government to address the problem. “I don’t think it’s a topic we would have taken on but for Lyda,” says Urahn.

In 2020, the Great American Outdoors Act was passed. The landmark bill tackled the maintenance backlog and became a significant act of conservation and recreation legislation. 

“She made it her mission to visit nearly every national park,” says Urahn, “and she was so delighted to think she had helped make those improvements.”

There is a dangling question underneath this giving and building: When will the money run out? Not anytime soon. She is a savvy investor. As much money as she has given away, she has made plenty. 

Lyda is committed to shaping North Texas for as long as she can. As she has joked, “I want the last check to bounce.”