In Memoriam

Raymond F. Hunt, 1923-2005

A symphony of service

Last Revised: June 09, 2008

This article was originally posted in the May-June 2005 edition of the Appalachian Trailway News.  Reprinted here with permission from ATC.

The late Raymond F. Hunt undoubtedly is joking about being “the late Raymond F. Hunt.”  That was his way—to blend truth and humor succinctly, humbly, and often a bit mischievously.

The former Appalachian Trail Conference chair from Kingsport, Tennessee, died March 8 after a twenty-year struggle with cancer.  Martha, his wife of fifty-eight years, died less than two months earlier, also from cancer.

Mr. Hunt was active in Trail and Conference affairs right up until his final illness, serving as a chair emeritus on the Board of Managers.  He was just as proud to be an 81-year-old maintainer with the Tennessee Eastman Hiking Club (TEHC) as he was when, at a much younger age, he led the club’s relocation efforts of the Trail on and near the Roan Highlands.  That turned out to be a three-year, sixty-five mile effort that Mr. Hunt once feared “would be the ruination of the club.”

It wasn’t, and Mr. Hunt continued to serve TEHC in a number of positions and, by the mid-1970s, was volunteering for ATC Board assignments.  He was a strong advocate of ATC’s publications program and edited two editions of the Tennessee–North Carolina guide.  In 1977, he created the first Data Book.  He was elected to the Board in 1979 and immediately started working on a publications manual.  As head of the Board’s publications committee, he continued revamping and perfecting the annual Data Book until 1983, when he was elected to the first of three terms as Conference chair.

A year later, in 1984, Mr. Hunt signed the historic document that officially delegated management responsibility for A.T. lands owned by the National Park Service to ATC.  He called the agreement “the most important document that I ever hope to sign.”  Years later, when reminded of the quote, he quipped, “I had overlooked my marriage license.”

Above: Ray Hunt prepares to sign in January 1984 the first agreement delegating A.T. management responsibility to ATC, with Interior Secretary William Clark (behind his right shoulder) and ATC and Park Service officials looking on.  (ATC photo)

Throughout much of his tenure as chair, Mr. Hunt joined other volunteers and staff members in urging Congress to maintain Park Service and Forest Service appropriations each year to purchase the remaining tracts of private lands along the A.T.  After his first such experience, he said, “We appeared as volunteers and amateurs, rather than skilled professionals, and that was probably helpful.”

Mr. Hunt extensively reorganized Board committees and championed the organization’s first steps toward a more comprehensive fund-raising program, including corporate memberships.  Late in his administration, he addressed the need for a resource-management policy to protect natural features along the Trail.  ATC needed to add a land ethic “that goes beyond what is required by laws and regulations but is a direct descendant of the values that inspired the Trail project in the first place,” he said.

Of his many accomplishments as chair, he cradled each, as if its success were yet to be determined.  He worried out loud that managing A.T. lands for the Park Service could get bogged down by “the complications of bureaucracy.”  In 1989, as he completed his third and final term, Mr. Hunt wrote, “We are not agents of government organizations but partners…. Generally, we have achieved our desired results by being nonadversarial and cooperative…[but] agreement should not be the objective in itself.”

“Greater Trail-management responsibilities have resulted in more bureaucratic rules, regulations, and paperwork, mostly originated outside our organization,” he wrote.  “This trend should be resisted, so that they…do not interfere with our doing what is good for the A.T.”

He implored ATC members to keep focused on the target, which he identified as “the welfare of the Trail” and “avoid being diverted by alternative objectives,” such as putting ATC, other causes, or relationships with other organizations ahead of the Trail.  This “mantra” became the “Ray Hunt Rule”—“The business of the Appalachian Trail Conference is the Appalachian Trail.”  That business must include protecting the volunteer role in the project, he often would add.

Mr. Hunt quipped that his parting comments as chair sounded “as if I were expecting to go to another world and never be heard from again.  I hope this is not true, because I have other plans.”

Earlier in that same decade, Mr. Hunt had survived two life-threatening illnesses, one almost on top of the other.

“Either illness could have taken me away in a flash…and that would have disappointed me, not being able to finish [hiking] the Trail,” he said in 1988.

Over the years of his involvement with the Trail, Mr. Hunt began keeping a log of his section hikes.  As they strayed farther from the southern region, he believed that, if he persisted, he might well hike all of the A.T.  The fact that it took him thirty-eight years to become a 2,000-miler made the experience even more bittersweet as he covered the final miles in Shenandoah National Park on April 3, 1988.

Ray Hunt finishes his hike of the A.T. in April 1988 near Thornton Gap in Shenandoah National Park.  (ATC photo)

“I was never obsessed with it at all, although I was pretty determined to finish,” he reflected on the experience, adding, “I think that doing [the Trail] in pieces provides time to reflect on the memories of each particular trip.”

The section hikes, accomplished mostly in the company of friends, brought him recognition as the first Conference chair to hike the entire Trail since it initially was completed in 1937.  Mr. Hunt recalled last year that what made the event “truly historic” was that he was joined by Brian King, ATC director of public affairs, for the last leg of the trip. (King is not noted for hiking.)

Mr. Hunt said he never got used to hiking the Trail and called it hard work: “When you’re hiking by yourself, it’s easy to give up.  When you’re with a group, and the car is waiting 80 miles away, it’s a disgrace not to get there.”

His frequent hiking companion was V. Collins Chew, a close friend, member of TEHC, and former ATC board member, who Mr. Hunt often ribbed for his discourses on Trail geology.

“Whenever we were going uphill, Collins would do all the talking; I’d save my breath and answer his questions when we started coming down a hill,” Mr. Hunt recalled.

After serving him for a thousand miles, Mr. Hunt was forced to retire his worn-out hiking boots, but not without a fitting eulogy.  “I felt like an old man who had lost his pet dog.  I knew I could get new boots, but it would never be the same,” he said.  He launched the “Society of Those Whose Favorite Boots Wore Out,” a short-lived, tongue-in-cheek organization of one.

Above: Hunt had no takers for the first meeting of his Society of Those Whose Favorite Boots Wore Out.  (ATC photo)

Mr. Hunt’s love of the outdoors was honed as a child.  Although raised in Pittsburgh, he once said he always felt at home in the woods.  He was a boy when he met architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the Fallingwater masterpiece southeast of Pittsburgh for Edgar J. Kaufmann, Ray’s uncle.  Many of his childhood memories were of staying at the house (now operated as a museum) and playing with his brothers and cousins in the woods amid the river and falls, all of which are integrated parts of the house.  There were also family ties and visits to remote areas of Georgian Bay, north of Toronto, that remained throughout his life.

Soon after graduating with a degree in chemical engineering from Yale University in 1944, Ray Hunt began a 40-year career with Eastman companies, first in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, moving later to what is now Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport.  He joined the hiking club in the 1950s.

It was at Eastman he met Martha Helen Morrow, a native of Ware Shoals, South Carolina.  The couple married in 1946 and had two children: a son, Thomas Edward Hunt, who died at age 16 from cancer, and a daughter, Judy Ann, who has two children, Mary Beth Morris and Ben Hunt.

Both Ray and Martha Hunt served their community in many ways.  Both were volunteers for the Exchange Place, a living-history farm in Kingsport.  Mr. Hunt was also active in Boy Scouts, the Bays Mountain Park Association, and the local Civitan Club.

Judy Ann Hunt credited her father for instilling in her “his love of the outdoors and for family.  Both were very important to him.  He was very honest and loyal with his family and with the causes he thought were important.  He always tried to secure more land to protect areas” for public use, whether they be along the A.T. or adjacent to a Tennessee park, she added.

Her father told her often that “he had no regrets, that he never looked to yesterday, but instead to what could happen in the future.”  She compared this philosophy to that which he used to hike the A.T.: “Just keep putting one step in front of the other.”

Ms. Hunt, who lives in a log cabin on a 50-acre tract of land near Kingsport, recalled hiking and backpacking trips with her father and hasn’t forgotten his insistence that she wear hiking boots “at a time when no young person wanted to be seen in hiking boots!”

Of course, she learned to respect his wisdom on the matter, and, because of his own affection for his favorite footwear, she made sure her father was buried with his hiking boots on.

Ray Hunt was known for being meticulous in his recordkeeping, and his daughter said she recently enjoyed discovering, among his personal possessions, a journal in which he listed every book he had read since sometime in the mid-1950s.  “It was sort of hidden away, as if he didn’t want anyone to find it and think that he was obsessed,” she laughed.

Mr. Hunt’s penchant for making “to-do” lists carried over from his involvement as a club maintainer to Board member and chair to his duties as a father.

“He always showed up with a list of projects and jars of nails,” his daughter recalled.

ATC Executive Director Dave Startzell also recalled Ray’s penchant for lists.  “When he served as chair, it was our routine to have a telephone meeting once a week.  And, each time we did, Ray would have his list—usually with 15 or 20 items on it.  He would methodically cross through each action or issue that had been addressed, but he also would add new items each time,” he said, citing the “never-ending list.”

On his eightieth birthday, Mr. Hunt helped to patch some holes in the loft of the Roan High Knob Shelter.  He told his club colleagues, eager to celebrate his birthday, they could hold off until the renovation list was completed.

In 1979, Startzell, then director of education for ATC, wrote about Mr. Hunt for the Trailway News.  He touched on Mr. Hunt’s unique giggle—“a flute-like laugh”—that could lighten the heaviest of occasions or debates.

In retrospect, maybe it really was a flute—befitting the symphony of a life of service, lived by one remarkable man.

Judy Jenner was editor of the Appalachian Trailway News from May 1979 through 1999.