"It seemed like the perfect blind date.”

That’s how Mary Laraine Young Hines (AB ’68) describes her reaction to the Red Cross “Donut Dollies” program during the Vietnam War. Graduation was nearing, and “Larry,” as she has always been called, was considering going back to her home state of North Carolina to work, when a Red Cross recruiter showed her a brochure describing the Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas program.

Hines was very aware of Vietnam. She was a senior at The University of Georgia, majoring in English. It was hard to be on any college campus during the late 1960s without being influenced in some way by the country’s presence in Southeast Asia. As a fraternity sweetheart for Sigma Nu, she heard the guys talking about the draft. Some wanted to avoid it, while others volunteered to serve.

Hines grew up in the small town of Lexington, NC. She heard about the university from her summer-camp roommate as well as her favorite counselor, who attended UGA. She visited the Athens campus during her junior year in high school and felt an immediate connection that she says lasts to this day.

She loved her classes and won the Spanish Medal for academic achievement. She was also a member of Alpha Lambda Delta honorary scholastic sorority for freshmen women and Kappa Kappa Gamma social sorority.

“The best weekends were going home with friends to small Georgia towns,” she said. “I learned so much about the people and the state this way, and that kindled my life-long interest in how people function in society.”

The size alone of the student body impressed her. “I’d never seen 14,000 people in one place except when our family went to New York or Atlanta,” she said.

She grew up in a family that stressed volunteer service.
“I wanted to help people,” Hines says. Becoming a Donut Dolly and bolstering the soldiers’ morale seemed to be a way to do just that. But getting into the program was not simple.

“I had to compete hard to go to Vietnam,” she remembers. After a series of interviews and undergoing an extensive background check, she was accepted into the program.

Hines’s tour of duty from 1968 to 1969 took place during some of the most grueling fighting. During the day, she and the other Donut Dollies visited Americal Division infantry or wounded soldiers in base hospitals. She spent many nights huddled in bunkers during rocket and mortar attacks.

She recalls being in a Huey helicopter that was hit by .51-caliber machine gun ground fire. She narrowly escaped injury as the roof of the helicopter filled with holes from the attack. Amazingly, of the 627 female Red Cross volunteers who served in Vietnam over a seven-year period, there were only three casualties.

In addition to the Americal Division, Hines also served with the Army Engineers at Dong Ba Thin and the Air Force at Cam Ranh Bay.
Emotionally and physically drained, Hines returned to the States at the end of her tour to face the life she had known a year earlier when she was fresh out of UGA. But living through the hell of war changes your life and relationships. Settling back into the innocence of freedom becomes difficult if not impossible. She searched for a direction.
Hines’s deep-seated desire to help people after she returned from service with the Red Cross led her to enroll at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and pursue a master’s degree in special education. She later earned a master’s degree in liberal studies from Duke University, where her great-great-grandfather, Braxton Craven, had served as the first president when it was still Trinity College.
In 1971, her life was changed by another blind date—this one with her future husband, Tom Hines. He had served in Vietnam as a Navy carrier fighter pilot. He became her soul mate, since they both understood the experience of war, and they were married in 1972.

Two years later, Thomas Blair Hines, Jr. was born, followed by another son, Robert Craven Hines, and later a daughter, Mary Craven Hines.
Now that her children are grown with careers of their own, Larry Hines looks back at parenting with a sense of fulfillment.
“I wanted to raise our family with a focus on children,” she says. “That was very important to me. All I’m leaving behind when I die is my family, my children.”

Passing along the family tradition of volunteering, Hines filled the children’s summers with opportunities to volunteer.

“I don’t understand children spending their summers sitting beside a pool,” she says. She also exposed them to life in other cultures. “I wanted my children to experience the wonders of the world.”

When Mary Craven graduated from high school, Hines took her daughter to Haiti instead of the traditional tour of Europe, wanting her to see how the rest of the world lives—especially its pervasive poverty.
Hines’s concern for the needs and welfare of those who are hurting has filled her life with service groups. She works with Habitat for Humanity or the emotionally difficult, but the most rewarding support is that she gives to abused children.

“The least, the last, the lost—that’s where I’m directed,” she says.
Hines’s life took another direction when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She says she didn’t need a wake-up call when she got breast cancer, since she thought she had done all the right things to prevent it.

“The only thing I did wrong was turn 50, and I didn’t have a choice about that!” she laughs.

Being a person who likes to fix problems, she suddenly felt out of control. Those days were incredibly scary and lonely, but Tom, her family, and friends were supportive as she battled through cancer treatments. In the end, Hines said, “You are all alone with it.”
In addition to a long list of service organizations Hines serves on six different university and college advisory boards, including Duke University, the University of North Carolina, Wake Forest University and the Franklin College.

“I’ve always wanted to make my days count,” she says. As her father once told her, “Don’t look in the mirror at age 50 and wonder what happened.”