I vividly remember the moment when, on the way home from Everest in 1953, Ed Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, learned that he had become Sir Edmund Percival Hillary. What a laugh—that this least pompous of colonial boys, this most unpretentious of mountaineers, should suddenly become a Knight Commander of the British Empire, by command of Her Majesty the Queen of England. He did not, as I remember, laugh himself. He took the command seriously, but not for a moment allowed it to alter him. This was lucky, because during the next 55 years, he was to become one of the most honored men on earth.
He had been knighted because he was, with his Sherpa colleague Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two men ever to stand on top of the world. But he was to be more deeply respected because of the way he used his fame. His strength was not merely physical. It was spiritual, too, which gave him the higher purpose of devoting his later energies to the welfare of the Sherpas—building schools and clinics, bridges, airfields and monastery reconstructions that were sponsored by his Himalayan Trust. He was the opposite of that contemporary mediocrity, the Celebrity.
“Well,” he said when he returned from the summit, “we’ve knocked the bastard off!” His life was saddened by personal tragedy—his wife and daughter died in a plane crash in 1975—but it is for this bold, breezy, let-’em-all-come assurance, innocently masking the more profound, that I shall always remember Ed Hillary—beekeeper, knight and genuinely heroic non-celeb.
