Martha Walker Hutson

Martha Sue Walker Hutson passed from this life on October 11, 2023, in Abilene, Texas, at the age of 88.

Martha was born on February 23, 1935 in Knoxville, Tennessee to Mary Frances and James Jackson (“J.J.”) Walker, who was the long-time treasurer of the University of Tennessee. When she was born with an enlarged thyroid, the doctor predicted that she would not live past age 12 and zapped her with radiation. She blamed him for her small breasts and spited him by declaring that she would live to age 125. She missed that goal but outlived that doctor by a long shot. She graduated from Bearden High School (1953) and the University of Tennessee (1956), but later dropped out of her master’s program when she married Roy Lynch Hutson of Flat Creek, Tennessee in 1957.

Martha taught school for two years but threw herself into being a mother and a corporate wife. She held the family together with hot biscuits, home-preserved fruits and vegetables, and gourmet cooking, as Roy’s career moved from Tennessee to Alabama, Texas (which she described in 1965 as “the ends of the earth”), Alabama again, Colorado, Illinois, Colorado again, and back to Illinois.

After she and Roy divorced, Martha sought her own adventures in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Hampshire again, Maryland, North Carolina again, and finally Texas.

Martha was for many years an enthusiastic Sunday School teacher in various Churches of Christ, though in her later years she embraced the more open and inclusive stance of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). She enjoyed international travel. Among trips to numerous countries, the one that made the deepest impact on her was a mission trip to Zimbabwe with her church group in 1997. She was a lifelong art collector, and in different periods her own artistic expressions were china painting and pottery. She authored Sex and the Senile (Indigo Sea Press, 2016) under the pen name Suzie Walker, and left behind an unpublished manuscript, Sam and Agnes, a semi-fictional account of the murder of her grandfather in 1915. She also revived her high school interest in theater, acting in community productions in New Hampshire and North Carolina. She played a nosey neighbor in a stage adaptation of Clyde Edgerton’s novel Walking Across Egypt. And she excelled as Ouiser Boudreaux in two different productions of Steel Magnolias, a role for which she was eminently well suited.

She was predeceased by her older sisters, Mary Ann and Betty, both of Knoxville. She is chagrined to be survived by her ex-husband Roy. She is happy to be survived by four children, Sally, Chris, Ted, and “Jack”; three grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and by her cat Calilu, who is relieved to be free from the constant blare of MSNBC. In lieu of flowers, she requests that you buy something from an artist or artisan, have lunch with a friend of a different ethnicity, hug someone who is gay, and tell a joke in her memory.