Cheryl Sue Hutchinson

Cheryl Sue Hutchinson passed away in Cascade, MT on May 6, 2025, at age 80. As per her wishes, there will not be a funeral; a private memorial gathering will occur later at her country home. Her cremains will be placed next to those of her folks at Hillcrest Lawn and at several favorite locations in Montana.

Born the second child of Ben Franklin and Charlotte Morris Wray on September 1, 1944, in Berkeley, CA, where her father was a printer in the wartime shipyards, Cheryl was only a toddler when her parents divorced. Her single-parent mother took up newspapering and moved the children to Lodi. While on a camping trip in Yosemite, they met a single career U.S. Air Force officer, Norman David Hutchinson. He would become Cheryl’s stepfather, and she eventually took on his moniker in court.

Sailing by ship with a captain who allowed Cheryl to produce a chatty newsletter of on- board passengers and events, the new family soon moved to Guam. The next home became Tucson, AZ, for four years and then—traumatically for a high schooler, just before her senior year—they moved to Morocco. She finished high school between Casablanca and Marrakech living in a dorm and commuting by bus on weekends 100 miles to the base where her parents were stationed. The move proved to be a good one in retrospect, however, with family camping on the nomadic Berber sand dunes and in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa as well as throughout Europe, presenting invaluable adventures to a maturing adult.

Cheryl enrolled at San Jose State as a college freshman. Cheryl was fond of saying she “found Montana” when she transferred as a sophomore to Missoula where she finished her undergraduate degree in 1966 and later was awarded a Graduate Assistantship at the University’s outstanding School of Journalism there. She was an Associate Editor of the Kaimin during the restless ‘“Rorvik Reign”. Her first summer, was spent in Apgar Village on Glacier National Park’s west side; she went to the park almost annually until poor health prevented those sentimental sojourns.

To help finance her education, she had jobs on campus and was a reporter for both the Missoulian and Butte’s Montana Standard (first female on night beat). In between studies, she served as the University of Montana’s Publications Editor—earning that campus national recognition for student recruitment literature—before being invited by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to join a start-up research unit.

Although her marching orders when arriving in Helena were to help the jargon-ridden Ed.Ds “speak plain English,” early on she was assigned to prepare a position paper requested by the legislature on educational television. From that experience, she was promoted as Assistant to State Superintendent Dolores Colburg and Director of Information Services.

As her introduction to politics, Cheryl benefitted enormously from monitoring Montana’s Constitutional Convention and coordinating testimony from the Superintendent’s Office on a variety of issues. Many long-term friendships were forged during that time and Cheryl, although affiliated with Democrats, respected everyone’s political persuasion as long as they voted in every election they could. Throughout the United States in the 60s, legal and social issues about civil rights were raging, even in public education. The timing of the 1972 Constitutional Convention let Montana get ahead of the curve. Delegates were primed to embrace concepts like “full potential” and “equality,” priorities among parents and the teaching profession.

One of Cheryl’s most cherished memories was one late night deadline when she was asked, with the Indian Education Specialist sitting beside her at the typewriter, to craft the first draft of what would become the Native American heritage clause; she sensed then it was an historic moment. Among other priorities for the State Superintendent were keeping the office a statewide elected one, separating state governance into two boards (one for K-12 and one for “higher”) and keeping State Land revenues as a steady source of funding for schools. All were successfully implemented, and it was an incredibly invigorating start to what would become Cheryl’s devotion to public policy and citizen participation.

While in the Office of Public Instruction, Cheryl was active on the interstate and national scene, particularly in an evolving field then called “change agentry” or “dissemination.” Long before googling on the internet became popular, she brought Project Exchange to Montana to train school librarians to key-word search into a huge international data base of promising educational practices, programs and policies.

In 1976, she accepted a standing offer from the National Institute of Education (a new R&D arm of the U.S. Department of Education) to work in Washington, D.C. There, she served with a school system administrator from Philadelphia as Advisors on Local and State Relationships to the Director of NIE. Their job was to make sure state, or local representatives were included on every panel with grant-making authority and, in her words, “to remind the Feds that they worked for us, not the other way around.” Frustrated with the bureaucracy and homesick for Hardy Creek, she left that position under a 3-party contract (along with two colleagues from Rhode Island and New York) to provide technical assistance to 34 states from her Montana base.

Contract work allowed the flexibility in Cheryl’s schedule to pursue some volunteer interests. In 1979, she was a founding member of the Montana Arts Advocacy, the first statewide membership organization registered to lobby on behalf of cultural causes. The Advocacy hired veteran statehouse AP reporter J.D. Holmes as its lobbyist; board members hit the 1979 Legislative Session running and came away with many large-scale victories: among them, coal-tax funds to support the state’s system of library federations and to provide for a “cultural and aesthetics” grant program, both of which still exist today. The Montana Historical Society, Montana Arts Council and State Library witnessed their best budget hearings ever. In 1979, Cheryl was elected to chair the Advocacy, lending her talents toward a periodic newsletter, fundraising and sponsorship of awareness events for a vibrant cultural coalition. She also went on to be a founding member and chair of the Alliance for Arts Education in 1981.

As well as the arts, Cheryl believed keenly in the role of libraries in a thriving democracy. “Even if I never used one, I simply relished the idea that they exist,” she often said. As early as 1978, she was a gubernatorial appointee to the pre-White House Conference on Libraries and Information Sciences and was asked to chair the ‘“The Library as Community Center” Committee. She represented Montana at an annual national WHCLIS meeting in the nation’s capital in 1985, when she also was serving as Chair of the State Library Advisory Council. She and Dr. McClernan, then Chair of the State Library Commission, helped conduct an extensive Program Review of the State Library’s operations, setting the course for improvements over the following decades.

In 1981, she joined the newly elected Schwinden-Turman administration, assigned initially to local government relations, a strength of Lieutenant Governor and former Missoula mayor George Turman. Cheryl served as a liaison to the state’s 56 counties and 127 municipalities by tracking their statewide organizations’ legislative agendas, reviewing relevant passed bills awaiting the Governor’s signature, and preparing for the 10-year local government review mandated by the new state constitution.

In the mid-1980s, she was named Statehood Centennial Coordinator and proceeded to establish a framework for the official commemoration in 1989. Key was the creation of a statewide network of volunteers called “The Eighty-Niners” and legislation to allow for a citizen commission chaired by the Lieutenant Governor with fundraising mechanisms such as a special license plate and selling of square inches to “The Last Best Place” through a series of Centennial Acres. She oversaw the creation of a Centennial Sampler containing more than a thousand suggestions for individuals or groups to adopt. She then developed sanctioning procedures for the licensing of sponsored projects and products.

Cheryl chaired an interagency task force to enable joint planning by various state entities and also a 6-state Centennial Caucus endorsed by the governors of MT, WY, ID, ND, SD and WA to take advantage of regional celebrations and anticipate the national Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Trail. Overwhelmed by growing citizen expectations and yet bewildered by lack of state financial commitment, she resigned in 1987 leaving mainly a calendar of official events to be completed, which she believed to be primarily a local prerogative.

With the Lieutenant Governor’s Office as a platform, also in the 1980s Cheryl was asked to chair on the State Data (Census) Council and to represent Montana on the National Governors Association’s Council of State Planning Agencies. Governor Schwinden designated her to organize state and local involvement the International Year of the Disabled. Regarding the latter, she called a statewide meeting in the state Capitol only to realize a week ahead there were no handicapped-accessible restrooms in the building; the situation was temporarily corrected, and one newspaper dubbed her the Capitol’s “head can opener.” Disabilities and other health issues were dear to her heart, as she was deep into a 15-year stint caregiving for her aging parents.

ln 1989, serendipity smiled when the widow of Norman Jefferis “Jeff” Holter, who died in 1983, commissioned Cheryl to work on his biography. Cheryl had gone to journalism school with Jeff’s first son and knew something of his father’s internationally known reputation. Having more time to spend with her parents who had retired in Great Falls also was appealing.

Jeff, a wealthy scientist, started the Holter Research Foundation in his pioneering family’s hometown of Helena after WWII and was credited with inventing the Holter Heart Monitor, the first such device for ambulatory tracking of bodily functions. He was not only instrumental in the development of telemetry but was active in the field of nuclear physics. Paging through nearly 160 linear feet of State Historical Society archival material and having regular meetings with Joan Holter in Montana or Southern California, Cheryl spent part of the next four years pursuing that project and produced a 300-page manuscript.

Wilford “Bill” Glasscock, a research associate and co-inventor of the monitor at the Holter Research Foundation—and a former education co-worker of Cheryl’s—had confided to her that it was “too early” to publish owing to Jeff’s later, somewhat controversial, years. Both the Montana Historical Society and a medical publisher in England expressed interest, but Mrs.

Holter balked at any idea of immediate release. That suited Cheryl, too, eager to “crawl out from under Jeff’s skin” after such a prolonged period of interviewing, transcribing, writing and then editing; nor did she want to upset Mrs. Holter. So, she locked up the draft in a safe delivered from Butte by Dr. McClernan—also a scientist (geology)—even though it was legally her property as the author.

Cheryl’s ties to former employers and professional affiliates stayed strong long after she first left them. The State Board of Public Education hired her in 1988 to prepare a grant proposal to support Montana’ s elementary guidance counseling and Native American teacher

preparation programs. She later was contracted to do the layout and editing of a Rural School Guidance Handbook. The U.S. Department of Education invited her twice to be a panelist, in 1989 for the National Secondary School Recognition Program and the next year the same for elementary schools. In 1990, she also was selected as a reviewer for the lucrative U. S. Regional Educational Laboratory contracts.

The Montana Arts Council chose her to launch the first legislatively mandated “Outstanding Montanans’” display in the Capitol and later to serve as a management consultant to fill in while its director was on sabbatical. It was her honor to be asked to assist in planning, promoting and conducting a public forum for the ConCon Society’s 20th anniversary in 1992. The Montana Association of Counties contracted with her to update the book Montana Counties on the Move. Former Superintendent Colburg, then Commissioner of Political Practices, engaged Cheryl’s skills occasionally from 1988-1992, finally to prepare six annual reports required by the legislature.

A freelancer at times to augment or in between full-time positions, Cheryl was under contract by the Montana Department of Labor and Industry for an experimental technology “case management” training project, the Holter Museum of Art, the Archie Bray Foundation and the Montana Community Foundation for publications and grant writing, and a few private businesses.

As her final act in the state capital, Cheryl and former First Lady Betty Babcock agreed to work together, as they had earlier to create a display in the kiosk in Constitution Park on Last Chance Gulch. Cheryl was hired as part-time Executive Director of the Montana Capitol Restoration Foundation, incorporated by the current and former living governors of the state.

Mrs. Babcock was president of that non-profit foundation to mend the historical features of the building, which the legislature had shown reluctance to do. Over three legislative sessions and closure of the building, Cheryl organized several large-scale events and fundraising mechanisms, assisted the board in its planning, and managed media coverage. In 1999, Governor Marc Racicot handed her a State Historic Preservation Office Special Award for the Foundation’s role.

Cheryl retired from a rewarding public service career in 2000 after her mother, Charlotte Hutchinson of Great Falls, and her significant other, Dr. Henry McClernan of Butte, both died within months of each other. She took up full-time residence on her family's beloved Hardy Creek property between Cascade and Craig.

Throughout her career, Cheryl seldom succeeded someone in a specific position; almost always it was circumstances and timely needs that were addressed. She also chose never to marry or bear children, liking her lifestyle just the way it was. Still mourning the death of her mother and Henry, she left her most lasting legacy; she rescued what would become a site on the National Register of Historic Places from public auction as state surplus property.

A mile-long spectacularly angular natural rock “sculpture” had been a spiritual symbol within view of her family’s Hardy Creek property every season since they acquired it in 1972. Unbeknownst to the Hutchinson’s was that Meriwether Lewis named it Tower Rock and also Pine Island Rapids in the Missouri River below it in July of 1805. It took five years wrangling with the Montana Department of Transportation—first convicting one director not to sell it inadvertently and then the next not to do so on purpose—before Tower Rock was supposedly safe for public access as a state park. It was “the point where the Missouri River first enters

the Rocky Mountains,” according to Capt. Lewis. From the Hutchinson residence, in fact, It is only 30 miles “as the crow flies” to the Continental Divide.

In retirement on Hardy Creek, Cheryl served for three years as a Co-President of the Dearborn Garden Club and as Vice President of Joe’s Trail Board of Directors. She helped initiate the updating of Mountains and Meadows, covering local history in the Cascade vicinity. She was a charter member and elected president of the Reaching The Rockies Chapter of the Lewis and Clark National Heritage Trail Foundation.

A 43-year running streak of revisiting Glacier was interrupted only in 2015 when she suffered from hydrocephalus which caused a broken hip and brain surgery for a shunt, then in 2016 she had an unrelated stroke that caused her left limbs to go lame. Cheryl considered herself blessed, thankful that her mental faculties were not affected; she feared she would simply succumb from a severe case of Trumpitis.

Cheryl loved camping and cooking, big band and jazz music, piano bars and dancing, gardening and floating the Missouri on the USS MOM, ethnic foods and the mere idea of belonging to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Cheryl will be greatly missed by her friends and the State of Montana that she served so well. Cheryl suggested any donations in her memory be directed to the Montana Free Press.