By HARRIET PROTHRO PENROD
In 2008, Hilary Wooley had graduated from the University of Texas School of Law and was practicing at a firm in Austin when she was faced with a decision – stay in Austin and raise a family or move to her husband’s hometown of Shreveport. When Wooley talked to her parents about what she should do, they said, “Well, you can live in Austin – it’s this great beautiful city – but it’s kind of isolating. Or you could have Shreveport, where there’s a real opportunity to make a difference and be really involved in a lot of things in the city.”
Hilary Wooley did exactly what her parents predicted. She made the move to Shreveport, where she is “really involved in a lot of things in the city.”
And she is making a difference.
I sat down with her for lunch at Glow Alchemy Kitchen and discovered all that has happened since she made that fateful decision.
When Shreveport Mayor-Elect Tom Arceneaux recently announced his transition team, he made good on his promise to “include voices from across the community.”
One of those voices belongs to Hilary Aldama Wooley, corporate counsel at the Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana, who will serve on the Blight Abatement Transition Committee – along with chair LeVette Fuller, Lydia Jackson, Mike Moore, and Tim Magner. Her insight will likely be sought by the Economic Development Committee also.
Wooley, who calls Arceneaux a “friend and mentor,” has known the Mayor-Elect since she moved to Shreveport in 2008. In addition to attending the same church, the two have worked together in the legal field and developed a strong working relationship.
When Arceneaux decided to run for mayor, Wooley was torn.
“I told Tom, ‘I don’t know what to do,’” she recalls. “LeVette (Fuller) and Mario (Chavez) were also running and I had a lot of respect for them. Tom said, ‘I understand that.’ And we left it at that.”
When Arceneaux and Greg Tarver emerged victorious in the primary and went up against each other in the runoff, Wooley knew what to do. She posted a message on Facebook explaining why she supported the former Shreveport Councilman.
“I wanted to tell people what I know about Tom and maybe convince them if they weren’t sure about who to vote for,” she says. “I just wanted to say, ‘Here is someone good for Shreveport.’”
(Chavez was also named to the transition team and will serve on the Community Building Committee.)
Wooley, who was appointed Board Chair for the March of Dimes in 2013 and has also served on the board of the Junior League, has served as corporate counsel for BRF since 2015. That same year, the newly divorced mother of two was asked by her friend Judy Williams about going on a blind date with a friend of hers.
Actually, it didn’t really have to be a blind date. Williams just thought she would enjoy meeting her friend, Bill Joyce, whose wife had passed away recently.
Sure, said Wooley. The three of them would go out to dinner, but both Wooley and Joyce told Williams beforehand that they would give her the “signal” if it wasn’t going well.
Williams never got the signal. It went well.
So well that Wooley and Joyce have now been married for two-and-a-half years.
I first met Wooley in 2019, when she and Joyce were sitting in a packed classroom on “Back-to-School Night” at University Elementary School, where her adorable twins Maximus and Isabel would be two of my third-grade students that year.
The twins are now sixth-graders at Southfield School, where Isabel is a cheerleader and plays basketball and soccer and runs cross country. While Max also plays sports, he is very involved in the theater arts and was a member of the cast of The Crying Bull, a short film that was a 2022 Louisiana Film Prize finalist.
When asked how she can balance everything – motherhood, a career, so much involvement in the community – Wooley smiles and says, “When you love what you do, it’s not difficult.”
Wooley has done a lot since making that decision to move to Shreveport.
“And one of the crazy things,” Wooley says as she recalls those early days, “happened when I was a baby lawyer in Shreveport in 2008.”
That’s when Kay Medlin, an attorney at Bradley Murchison (where Wooley started practicing in Shreveport), was drawing up the papers for Moonbot Studios and asked Wooley to notarize them.
“It’s my first week there, and I walk into this room where there’s all men – except for Kay and me,” says Wooley. “Nobody acknowledged me when I walked in the room. I was really nervous. One man — across all these tables — in dark, black glasses stood up, walked all the way to the door, reached out and grabbed my hand and said, ‘Thank you so much for being here today.’”
That man was Bill Joyce.
“We both go through so much in our own personal lives and don’t see each other again until Judy gets us together in 2015,” she says. “You look at those papers now and there’s my signature, there’s my stamp. And there’s William Joyce’s signature.”
Some things are meant to be.
Contact Harriet at sbjharriet@gmail.com
