Alumni Profile Traveling woman
Hardin has traveled around the globe and back
By BINKY STRICKLAND
W
hen Frances Lanning Hardin traveled the 100 miles south of what she calls the “cornbread and black-eyed peas provinces of Georgia” to attend Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, it was the first time she had ever been that far away from home. It was also her introduction to the world outside Canton, Ga., where she was born and reared. And it was the beginning of a lifelong lust for learning that would take her to the far corners of the earth. At GSCW, Hardin listened to her humanities professor talk about the plains of Troy and the columns of Greece, and she pictured herself in faraway places, taking in all that history she was learning about. “I feel that my inspiration for learning came from the college,” she said. “It gave me a lot of avenues to explore. I was keenly interested in being able to stand there, where the action took place.” Since that time, she has traveled across the globe and back more than once – to most places in Europe and some of the more exotic locales – three times to Antarctica, and to the North Pole, Alaska, the Himalayas, Egypt, South Africa, Rhodesia, Uganda and other “wild and wooly places.” She has traveled with the first woman who wintered in Antarctica; Peter Hillery, son of Sir Edmond Hillery; and Mark Shuttlesworth, the first civilian in space. In addition to her business degree from GSCW, Hardin earned a juris doc-
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tor degree in 1979 and a master’s degree in law in 1980 from Atlanta Law School just so she could be knowledgeable about some of the business transactions necessary in the family business. She and her husband J.T. Hardin were married for 50 years before his death in 1997. She and her husband traveled to Alaska three times, to California for the Rose Bowl game and parade twice; to Maine, to Jackson Hole, Wyo., and abroad “only once,” she said. But her husband traveled for a different reason than she did, Hardin said. He wanted to see the places he’d seen in the slick brochures. She wanted to be where events she had read or heard about took place. She wanted to soak it all up and imagine what it was like back then. And she didn’t mind roughing it one bit. “I could travel with a bandana on a broom handle and that wouldn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s just the desire for learning that outweighs the care. I have found it pretty wonderful. I have never had a bad experience. I don’t know why.” Hardin did persuade her husband to go to Brooks Fishing Camp in Alaska, after hearing his hunting and fishing buddies tell stories about their exploits there. While her husband opted to stay put, she went fishing with a young guide. She later found out that she was one of the first women to fly fish at the popular camp. “We put on the waders, and had a little lunch packed,” she said. “We started up on the banks of the river. It was grown up and I would fall in every hole,
Georgia College & State University Connection • Winter 2005
but wouldn’t let him know. About a mile up the river, he looked at me and said ‘Get in.’ I did, and we fished for trout.” When lunchtime came around, they ate on a little sandbar. Then her guide told her, “I smell bears. We have to go back in the water.” That’s when she saw the waterfall where the salmon go upstream to spawn. “When I came back and told everybody I’d made it, we didn’t hear many fishing stories after that,” she said. Once, when she stayed a month in India and Nepal, Kashmir, Hardin came