Clare Ritchie Hudspeth

Born on February 16, 1942, in Fairfax County, Virginia, Clare was the second of five children of Louis Cloud Ritchie and Frances Hutchison Ritchie, a devoutly Catholic family of deep roots, good humor, and high expectations. She grew up in McLean, Virginia, and began school at three, as she was precocious. She excelled there. At Marymount Catholic High School, the nuns encouraged her to develop her gift for debate and public speaking. A natural leader, she served as a Girls Nation delegate, editor of her yearbook, and president of the Sodality of Mary.

Clare earned a scholarship to Smith College and graduated in 1963. One week later, she married William (Bill) J. Hudspeth Jr, whom she had met on a blind date while he was at Amherst and she at Smith, and the two moved to Austin, Texas. She would later observe that graduating, marrying, and moving across the country all within a fortnight was perhaps more transition than any one person needed!

Clare adored President Kennedy long before most of the country caught up. She kept a scrapbook of clippings about him and received a personal letter from his Senate office in reply to a fan note. Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter and confidant, had been among her babysitting clients in McLean. On November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas, she and Bill had tickets to see him that evening at Palmer Auditorium in Austin. She kept them in her scrapbook.

Clare and Bill raised two daughters in Austin, whom she described as the best thing about her life. Ann Marie, an artist and designer, shared her mother's passion for politics, culture, and Molly Ivins. Jenny inherited Clare's gifts for creating a beautiful home, gathering family around her, and producing the kind of event that people talk about for years. She adored her grandchildren and was a loving, involved, and devoted grandmother who never missed a birthday, ballet recital, soccer game, or school play. She truly knew and loved Will and Katherine. Life, Clare said, was complete.

Clare came into her own first through the Junior League of Austin, rising to president during its 50th anniversary year in 1983-84. It was, she said, fun and hard work and a big learning experience. Under her leadership, the League sold its Thrift Shop on East 6th Street and acquired the Square at Parkcrest, a rather unheard-of venture for a Junior League, and one that required informing a loan officer who suggested the board "go home and play tennis" that they had other plans.

After her League career ended in 1984, Clare moved into paid professional life with characteristic purpose. She worked first at St. Michael's Academy, then at the Chamber of Commerce as Adopt-a-School and Education Director, visiting every public school in the district and building meaningful partnerships between schools and the broader community. From there, she led the Mental Health Association of Austin, where her focus on healthy families and child welfare deepened into a federal grant that funded a pioneering resource center for teen parents at Crockett High School. It was the first program in the school's memory to see teen parents graduating. She moved to Dallas for several years to lead the Mental Health Association of Greater Dallas, but missed Austin greatly. Her career in nonprofit fundraising and development then took her to the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts and the Environmental Defense Fund, where she built major donor programs and lasting institutional relationships. She finished her career at the Center for Child Protection, the cause closest to her heart.

Clare was a lifelong, proudly liberal Catholic, a rebel who loved the ritual, stayed for the argument, and prayed for a more progressive Pope. For most of her adult life, she served as a lector at St. Theresa's Catholic Church and later at St. John Neumann, proclaiming Scripture at Sunday Mass with the same conviction she brought to everything else. Her faith was shaped by a beloved Belgian missionary priest, Father Paul Cauwe, whose years imprisoned in a Chinese prison camp had stripped religion down to what really mattered. His maxims stayed with her: God does not have a stopwatch.

She was a woman of keen intellectual appetite, devoted to crossword puzzles, Sudoku, and jigsaw puzzles, to deep political conversations over a good dinner, and to showing up where history was being made. She wrote thoughtful, persuasive letters to politicians, church leaders, and newspaper editors over the years, some of which were published. In retirement, she was the seminar chair for the University of Texas Osher Lifetime Learning Institute (OLLI) and enjoyed time with family and friends. She loved Christmas deeply, taking great pride in decorating a towering tree with decades of cherished ornaments, and baking homemade cookies for family and friends.

Clare loved reading and instilled a deep love of books in her children and grandchildren.

She founded a book club featuring University of Texas professors as monthly speakers, a tradition that has been going strong for more than 40 years. She jogged three miles regularly into her later years, saying the rosary as she went, which she had always found too boring to say sitting still. She loved a good bridge game, a thought-provoking sermon, and any evidence that the world was moving, however slowly, in the right direction.

In her final years at Belmont Senior Village, Clare repaid the staff's kindness in the way she knew best. She straightened and tidied, greeted everyone with warmth and affection, and made the place a little more beautiful simply by being in it. She was, by all accounts, a staff favorite.

Clare was preceded in death by her parents, Louis Cloud Ritchie and Frances Hutchison Ritchie, and by her former husband and forever friend, William J. Hudspeth, Jr. She is survived by her daughters, Ann Marie Hudspeth and Jenny Hudspeth Stone; by Jenny's children, William (Will) Morgan Stone Jr. and Katherine Layne Stone; and by her siblings, Louis Ritchie, Barbara Ritchie Zimmer, David Ritchie, and Ann Marie Ritchie.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at St. John Neumann Catholic Church, Austin, Texas, on June 19th at 10 am with a reception afterwards. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Center for Child Protection, in honor of Clare's lifelong dedication to the welfare of children, or the Alzheimer’s Association’s work towards a world without Alzheimer's and dementia.

A small memorial gathering will also be held at a later date in McLean, Virginia, where Clare was always proud to call home.