Monday, March 19, 2007

Mary F. Hutchison, 95, a CIA staff officer for 25 years, died March 4 after having a heart attack at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. She was a resident of the District.

Mrs. Hutchison's assignments included posts in the United States, Germany and Japan. She had been in the first class of WAVES officers at the start of World War II. She served in Miami as an intelligence officer, interviewing refugees who arrived at the airport.

Upon leaving active duty, she joined the Navy Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant commander.

Mrs. Hutchison was recruited in 1946 to the Strategic Services Unit, a predecessor to the CIA. She spent 14 years overseas. She retired from the agency in 1971.

A native of Kansas City, Mo., she graduated from the University of Missouri, where she also received a master's degree in 1931 and a doctorate in 1934, both in classical archaeology. She did postdoctoral work at the American School at Athens while participating in the digs at Corinth.

She worked for several years before World War II as an adviser to the chief of curriculum design in the secondary schools of Houston.

In retirement, she and her husband of 64 years traveled extensively, once around the world in three months on a space-available basis aboard Air Force jets.

"It was a lark, despite the fact that we had to wait 10 days in Frankfurt at the end of the trip," said her husband, Gregory L. Hutchison.

The couple also traveled every winter for 20 years, sometimes by freighter through the Panama Canal, the Strait of Magellan or across the Timor Sea.

"She was never still. There was nowhere that Mary went that she didn't have an embroidery hoop in her handbag," said her husband. "She drew her own designs on graph paper and worked on 100-ply cotton cloth."

She was a life member of Veterans of Foreign Wars and a past secretary at the Asiatic Society of Japan in Tokyo. She served on the board of the Washington area Phi Beta Kappa Society and was a member of the American Institute of Archaeology and the Hellenic Study Group. For many years, she assessed and priced books for the annual Goodwill book sale, and she worked for a period as an office assistant at the Society of the Cincinnati.

In addition to her husband, of the District, survivors include a brother and a sister.