Planned Giving
Jackrabbit Land Is Home After 41 Years
Mylo and Lillian Hellickson
While leading Youth Engineering Adventure Camp a few years ago Dr. Mylo Hellickson says he met a high school student who wasn’t planning to attend SDSU, but changed her mind once she experienced the campus.
“She came to SDSU and just fell in love with it. Lillian and I can relate to that,” he says.
It only took a few weeks for these North Dakota natives to call South Dakota State University home. “I’d been teaching only a few weeks and we looked across the breakfast table and said we thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” says Mylo, who started teaching in the agricultural and biosystems engineering department at SDSU 41 years ago.
“We haven’t changed our minds,” says Lillian, who retired from working many years as workshop coordinator for the South Dakota High School Press Office in the SDSU journalism department.
Like many financial contributors, the Hellicksons give in order to make a good thing even better. They sponsor scholarships for both men’s and women’s basketball. And, working with the SDSU Foundation, they have arranged a major gift of North Dakota ranch land in their estate plans. Athletics and ag engineering will benefit from this in the future.
Growing up on neighboring ranches in North Dakota, the high school sweethearts married after they finished college. SDSU was one of four schools Mylo interviewed with after completing his PhD. He says once he read the job description he knew SDSU was where he belonged.
“If I had written the job description myself it could not have been a more perfect fit,” he says. “It was in my area of interest—agriculture structures and environment—and I was able to do research in that area as well as teach undergraduate and graduate courses. I felt I could contribute.”
Throughout his 41-year career Mylo has served in many roles: professor of agricultural engineering; published author; department head; director of the Extension Service; and in 2009 as acting athletic director—a position that Lillian says was a dream come true for Mylo, who had been faculty athletic representative for many years and ran the clock at basketball games for about as long.
“To have an engineer as the athletic director—talk about crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s for Mylo, she added.”
As much as they both enjoyed their work at SDSU, the Hellicksons say it’s the students and faculty that made the university their home for all these years. “We’ve turned down offers because we just couldn’t leave Jackrabbit Land.”
For additional information on how to factor a favorite charity, such as SDSU, into your own estate plans, contact jeff.nelson@sdsufoundation.org or (888) 747-7378.