locals Ninety-two-year-old Bill Hamilton has seen many things over the years, from experiences spending his childhood overseas, his military service and the role painting has had on shaping his career and life. He continues to live his best life, enjoying the lessons learned from...
Art & History
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by Joseph Zyble ife is good, really good, according to newlywed William Hamilton. Well, he may not qualify as a newlywed since recently celebrating his one-year anniversary to his wife, Diana, but he is happy, and there’s no place he’d rather be than in Marquette County. Sure, a lot of people feel that way about this area, but Hamilton isn’t like a lot of other people. To begin with, his parents were Presbyterian missionaries serving in China when he was born there in 1929. He was eight years old the first time he remembers coming to America. His family returned to Atlanta for a year in 1937 to get reacquainted with relatives and friends, and his parents gave presentations to raise monies for the missions. “In China there was very little motorized transportation,” he said. “It was all rickshaw and oxen powered. When we got to San Francisco, it was like being transported to a different world.” Returning to China in 1938 was also memorable. While they were away, the Japanese military captured the region of China where his family lived. “When we entered Shanghai, it was a completely different China than the one we left a year earlier,” Hamilton said. “I remember seeing the devastation of parts of Shanghai due to the shelling of the city from the gunboats on the river. The main destruction was to the main railway station. There were two or three thousand Chinese killed in that attack who were trying to leave the city.” He remembers hearing bombshells soaring overhead and witnessing aerial dogfights in the skies. They also discovered that the Chinese pastors in the area had been imprisoned as well. Fortunately, Hamilton’s mother had been raised in a missionary family that served in Japan, and her knowledge of Japanese language and culture helped her advo-
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Marquette Monthly
cate on behalf of the jailed missionaries. “My mother was perfect for this role—she knew how to speak to the sensibilities of the local commander,” he said. “Her efforts, along with the efforts of others, they got the Chinese pastors released.” It wasn’t all bad under Japanese rule. The local commander took a liking to Bill and his sister because they reminded him of his own children. The kids got to ride on the commander’s Australian thoroughbred and took trips into town with him for ice cream. “We had a good counter-balance to the popular belief that all Japanese were evil,” he said. The family stayed in China until early in 1941 when the state department ordered all missionary families to leave due to the growing threat of war. Hamilton’s family returned to America, with the exception of his father who opted to stay and run the mission by himself. However, he too ended up leaving later that year. “We found out afterward that he caught the last ship leaving Shanghai to make it to the states,” Hamilton said. “Three weeks after he was in Honolulu on the stopover, the Japanese got there and attacked Pearl Harbor.”
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n China, Hamilton was home schooled, but in America he was enrolled in junior high. “As a missionary kid, you were kind of an oddity in school,” he said. “Kids would cluster around you and tell you to say something in Chinese.” In school he was very happy to go to art class. While living in China, he liked to draw and had created a comic strip to entertain his siblings, but he never had any formal training in art. His teacher must have noticed his artistic knack because one day he received a special assignment. “There was a day I went to school and there was snow on the ground,” he recalled. “That’s rare in Atlanta. My art teacher took me to the top floor of the school and set me in front of a
December 2021
Bill Hamilton enjoys time in his home studio, located in Marquette, which he describes as the perfect community. (Photo by Joe Zyble)
large window to paint the view of the snow-covered rooftops. It was a nice painting. I won a scholarship with that painting.” Unfortunately, he had to pass on
it. At age 12, he wasn’t interested in studying with 16-year-olds, the typical age at the special school where the scholarship was awarded. He continued to enjoy painting
