A couple of weeks ago I attended a very moving event put on by the Los Altos History Museum. It was held in the local high school auditorium, and it was called “Lucile Packard, Woman of Grace.” A panel of 6 people (one of her daughters, and five men who had worked with Lucile on various philanthropic projects) talked about whom she was, what it was like to work with her, and what made her such an extraordinary person. And she was an extraordinary person.

A city girl, she married David Packard, who had grown up in Colorado and followed his lifelong pursuits of hunting, fishing, riding, and raising cattle. Lucile, her daughter informed the crowd, never even learned to ride a bike.

Neither did she particularly like housekeeping, cooking or gardening. What she did like—and believed in—was service. It started in college, when she worked with sick children, and continued throughout her life, ending with the achievement of building the Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.

It was while I was listening to these men talk about her “strategic thinking” and “thinking big” that I began to realize how her values really were the same as her husband’s. They just applied the same values to their different arenas of influence.

Stories abound of Dave walking around and making sure he talked to the workers on the floor, rather than managers. One gentleman told the story of being escorted by the CEO on a site visit to a children’s hospital, only to lose Lucile. She was found sitting at a table talking to an occupational therapist and the child she was working with.

Dave was always concerned with the best product for the customer. Lucile’s touch was noted in the design of the nurse’s stations at the hospital, which had little scooped out areas in them so the children could see the nurses behind the counter.

Lucile made sure that every office at the Packard Foundation had a couch, and employees there were ordered never to sit behind a desk when interviewing potential grantees; they were to join them on the couch to make them feel comfortable. HP was famous for employees calling managers by their first names, including “Dave and Bill.”

Most of all, Lucile felt that her family had been so blessed that they had a duty to give their fortune away. She essentially started the Packard Foundation sitting around the kitchen table with her family, having the children participate in deciding which organizations would be awarded grants. And Hewlett-Packard Company made its first charitable donation in its second year of business.

I was truly inspired by what I heard at this presentation. It sounds silly, but I finally really appreciated that Lucile and Dave Packard were very special people. And as I was walking out, I became very sad, because as I looked around, everyone had white hair. The crowd was obviously the same generation as Lucile and Dave; it was full of their contemporaries. I recognized many of them—because I’m the archivist, and I know them. And I thought, how do I get this message to the next generations, the ones who work for HP now?

One way to get the message would be to attend the current exhibit, “Lucile and David Packard: Valued Partners,” at the Los Altos History Museum. Another way is to attend the next program on April 9. On that night, a group of people who worked closely with Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett will be remembering what it was about the founders that made HP such a special and long-lived company.