Mary Hilton was in junior high school the first time she knocked on doors for a political candidate.
The uncle of her best friend was running for governor, and it sparked something in her, enough so that before long she was running for student government.
She remembers asking questions when candidates came to visit her school, how a passion for the concepts of a representative democracy began to take root.
“I’ve always been interested in politics, as long as I can remember,” said the mom of seven children who landed in Lincoln in the early 2000s.
She grew up in Atwood, Kansas, where the town of McCook was a shopping hub and Denver was the nearest big city.
She lived in town as a young child, then moved to a farm, where her father farmed land that was homesteaded by her mother’s family, who immigrated generations earlier from Czechoslovakia.
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“I grew up on kolaches, canned beef, cinnamon pickles,” she said.
Her passion for politics grew alongside her love of family and gatherings of a large, extended clan growing up. She remembers writing a paper as a senior in high school, declaring that she wanted to have four to seven children.
Before that part of her future came to pass, though, she graduated from high school and earned a degree in business administration from Kansas State University. She met her husband there, an engineering student named Jon Hilton who took a money and banking class to meet women.
“He smiled and I sat by him and the rest is history,” she said.
She graduated in 1995 and landed a job at the Kansas Farm Bureau, the same year the couple married in a church her grandparents had helped build in her hometown.
The following year, the couple moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. Hilton worked for an auditing firm, doing auditing and accounting for municipalities, a job that helped solidify her philosophy about government and the importance of checks and balances by different branches.
“I was able to detect fraud in municipalities,” she said. “I just think we have to have accountability. You have to have someone from the outside looking in.”
A grandmother she never met also influenced her.
She was the mother of Hilton's biological dad, who didn't raise her, and she died when Hilton was very young. But her granddaughter read a packet of letters she'd left — and learned she was a community organizer, fighting against developments she opposed.
"Reading about my grandmother and her involvement in local politics ... I think that connection has really encouraged me over the years."
When she and Jon started a family, Hilton stopped working outside the home, but not studying political philosophy — or campaigning.
She knocked on more doors for more candidates, bringing her kids with her.
“My kids have done that their whole life,” she said.
In 2004, the Hiltons moved to Lincoln, a midpoint between the larger cities where both their families lived. Before long, she got involved in politics again, this time at the Legislature debating home-school issues.
The Hiltons have home-schooled all their children, with help from professionals in the home-school community, and her kids have also taken classes in public high schools.
For years, she’s helped on a variety of issues, many of those championed by the Nebraska Family Alliance, and has campaigned for a number of senators — leading to campaign donations from heavy hitters in the state’s Republican Party.
“There’s really a lot of (legislative) bills probably over the last 10 years that I, when needed, I have ... boots on the ground at the Capitol,” she said.
She worked with supporters of the death penalty during a contentious debate, and decided to take a break for a couple of years after that, she said, coming back into the fray as a volunteer lobbyist for the group opposing medical marijuana legalization.
She hadn’t planned to run for office, she said, until the protests last summer following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Police officers who live in her neighborhood told her they didn’t feel they’d been given the tools or ability to do their job, and so she started attending City Council meetings, thinking about how the council could be more effective in the budgeting process.
She said there’s been government overreach during the pandemic, but the solutions need to come from the Legislature. Her belief in limited government, and the need for checks and balances, convinced her she should run.
“I want to be a part of change at the City Council,” she said.
Watch Now: Voter's Guide for the Lincoln city general election on May 4
51Ƶ posed questions for candidates on the May 4 general election ballot. Read the responses and watch the videos from Lincoln City Council, Lincoln Board of Education and Lincoln Airport Authority candidates.
Learn about the six at-large Lincoln City Council candidates' positions on the issues before voting in the May 4 general election.
Learn about the candidates' positions on the issues before voting in the May 4 general election.
Learn about the candidates' positions on the issues before voting. Two will be elected in the May 4 general election.