Obituary of Charlotte Day Hudson

          Charlotte Day Hudson passed away peacefully in Belmont, Massachusetts, on April 12, 2020, due to Covid-19. She was 95.

          Born Charlotte Maclean Day in Worcester, Massachusetts, on July 13, 1924, she grew up in Webster and later in Brimfield. Her father, Floyd MacLean Day, was a mill supervisor in the woolen textile industry, and her mother, Marjorie Ellen Packard Day, was a homemaker. She had a brother, Charles Packard Day, six years younger than she was.

             In 1937, her family moved from Webster to Brimfield where she attended grades 9 through 11 at Hitchcock Free Academy. For her senior year, in order to complete college entrance requirements, she attended boarding school at Chapel Hill in Waltham. In 1941, following her mother who was a 1922 Wellesley graduate, she entered Wellesley’s freshman class. A talented choral singer with a strong alto voice, she intended to major in music. However, after taking a geology course to fulfill the breadth requirements, she fell in love with earth sciences. She augmented her newfound interest with a minor in geography, and upon graduation in 1945 worked in Texas, Oklahoma, and Vermont as a geologist for oil and aluminum companies. Returning from a vacation with her mother in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, she stopped in Alexandria, Virginia, to visit an aunt. While there, she applied for a job as a cartographer with the Army Map Service in Washington, D.C. On the strength of her Wellesley education, she was hired on the spot. 

            At the Map Service, she met Paul Hudson, an army officer and topographical engineer. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple married on December 13, 1948, before he left for a new assignment in Tokyo, Japan.  In 1949, joining her husband in Tokyo, she worked as a cartographer for Air Force Intelligence, making maps from aerial photographs.  In 1950 she gave birth to her first child, Anne. A year and a half later, pregnant with her second child, she returned to the United States with her family to the Presidio of San Francisco. Shortly after giving birth to son Russell, the family moved to their first home in Mill Valley, California. Her daughter Ellen was born in 1955. In 1957 her husband’s military orders changed, and the family moved to Fort Hood, Texas, and in 1959 to Fort Carson, Colorado. Upon her husband’s retirement from the army in 1961, the family returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, settling in the East Bay city of Pinole.

            From 1961 to 1962, she worked at UC Berkeley’s seismology lab, leaving after a year to work fulltime in the home. In 1970, she and her husband divorced. The day the divorce was granted she left the courtroom and drove from Pinole to Brimfield in eight days. Upon relocating in Massachusetts, she worked as a guide at Old Sturbridge Village and then for thirteen years as a librarian at the Springfield Public Library. She worked another ten years as the weekend librarian at Becker College, retiring in 2001.

            After her parents passed away and she sold their house in Brimfield, she built a three-bedroom house on the land adjacent to her parents’ former home. She lived there from 1981 until 2014 when she moved to be closer to her daughter in Newton. She loved the house she built and hosted many family gatherings there.

            Her family has deep roots in New England, and she was fiercely proud of her heritage. Despite wide travel and decades living in the western United States, she never softened her Yankee accent. She was a staunch Episcopalian and belonged to St. Mary’s Church in Palmer and at the end of her life to St. John’s Church in Newton. She was also a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who changed her party affiliation in 2008 to independent to vote in the primary for sister Wellesley graduate, Hillary Clinton. She also voted for Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

            If she heard about a place she didn’t know, she had to look it up in one of her many atlases. She had an uncanny sense of direction and gift for charting a route in an unfamiliar location. “I wonder where this road leads,” she often said before driving down a road she’d never been on. Despite her attachment to her home, she was an adventurous traveler and explored the New England states, New York, and Canada, sometimes on her own, often with friends or family. She loved Maine, especially the white sands and tidal pools at Moody Beach where she vacationed every summer. She traveled often to see her children and grandchildren in Massachusetts, New York, and California. She visited friends and family in Florida, driving the length and width of the state many times.

            In 1997, fulfilling a long-held dream, she joined a guided tour of England. Leaving the tour, she drove to Scotland to visit Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the Isle of Mull. On the Isle of Mull she found Duart Castle, the seat of the MacLean clan, and introduced herself to the clan chief as a MacLean descendant.

            In 2004, she fulfilled another long-held dream, to see the Grand Canyon, when her children and grandchildren converged in Arizona with her to celebrate her eightieth birthday.

            In 2013, she and her cousin Laura traveled by train and car to Colorado Springs. She wanted to see the house in Fort Carson at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain where she and her family lived from 1959 to 1961. Despite the passage of 52 years and her diminishing eyesight, she recognized it immediately. “That’s it, that’s it!” she exclaimed, telling the MP escorting her and her cousin to stop. This trip remained a treasured memory for the rest of her life.

            Books mattered to her, and she was a lifelong reader, usually working her way through a mystery novel or a nonfiction work of biography or history. She liked to say that an educated person is not someone who knows everything about a subject but someone who knows how to look things up. That meant she was passionate about libraries. In Pinole, she belonged to the library building committee and used her background in geography to scout potential sites. Even though she left the area before the Pinole Public Library opened in the late 1970s, her time, energy, and enthusiasm contributed to its establishment. In her hometown of Brimfield, she supported the Brimfield Public Library and served on the Board of Trustees, devoting herself to the library’s maintenance and modernization.  

            Love is important, she insisted, and needs to be honored wherever you find it—whether between human beings or between a human being and an animal. She always had cats, including kittens left to her care by her daughters, and she was a doting mother to them all. Two stray cats, Minty and Cruiser, who ventured into her yard hoping to get fed, worked their way into the house and ultimately adopted her.  Her last cat, Libby, was a long-time shelter rescue that no one seemed to want until Charlotte adopted her.

            Wherever she lived, she joined the church choir, sometimes as the choir director. She also joined, and sometimes started, community choral groups. In Pinole, she belonged to the Richmond Chorus and also started a group with neighborhood women called Mother Singers. In Brimfield, she enthusiastically sang with The Villagers for many years, and at her independent living community in Newton she belonged to the Cabot Chorus. Her repertoire encompassed Wellesley songs, patriotic music, American folk tunes, selections from the great American songbook, Christmas carols, and Christian hymns. In the last years of her life, despite a failing memory, she could still sing the alto part and all the lyrics of many of these songs--with gusto.

            She is survived by her daughter Anne Hudson of Newton, Massachusetts; son and daughter-in law Russell and Paula Sunn of Chico, California; daughter Ellen Hudson of Staten Island, New York; grandson Evan Sunn and his wife Katherine of Quincy, California; grandson Julian Sunn and his wife Emmy of Santa Cruz, California; grandson Dylan Sunn of Monterey, California; sister-in-law Jean Baker Day of Hartland, Vermont; niece Sarah Day Brimlow of Florida, nephew Michael Day of Florida; and numerous cousins throughout the country with whom she had warm relationships.

Funeral services are pending due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, donations in her memory may be made to the Brimfield Public Library, 25 Main Street, Brimfield, Massachusetts 01010 (www.brimfieldpubliclibrary.com).