Gazette Chief Librarian Donna MacHutchin
April 12, 2000

By: ALAN HUSTAK, The Gazette

Gazette chief librarian Donna MacHutchin died of a massive heart attack in the emergency room of the Montreal General Hospital on Monday. She was 62.

Readers who called The Gazette with a question about stories that appeared in the paper are likely to have spoken with her and encountered her wry sense of humour. She was not only an encyclopedic resource for reporters but
was emerging as a fine journalist in her own right. She reviewed books, wrote travel articles and last year contributed the Alphabet Soup series to the paper's Sunday Magazine. 

She was highly regarded as a professional and was to have been recognized as one of the unsung heroes of Canadian journalism by being a presenter at next month's National Newspaper Award ceremonies in Montreal.

Ms. MacHutchin died 20 years to the day after she started working at the newspaper. Just before her death she was talking about taking early retirement and embarking on a new career as a travel writer.

''Her passing represents the loss of one of The Gazette's most important 'institutional memories,' '' said managing editor Ray Brassard. ''She was more than our librarian. She was a repository of our anecdotal history.''

Former Gazette staffer and longtime friend John Fitzgerald, who now freelances for the Financial Times in London, remarked on her enviable loyalty to her friends.

''She was witty, inquisitive and full of life,'' he said. ''Aside from her sharp brain, there was a subversive streak to her humour that I always found enormously appealing. She was a rarity in today's newspaper culture: a person of spirit and spark.''

Donna Margaret Leitch was born in Winnipeg on Sept. 5, 1937, and grew up in Regina. In 1953 she moved to Montreal, where she joined the work force as a stenographer at Canadian Industries Ltd. In 1958 she married Westmount engineer Graham MacHutchin and they had three children: Cathy and James, who live in California, and Michael, who lives in Israel.

After they split up Ms. MacHutchin went back to work, supporting herself selling books at Classics Bookstore. She also went back to school in 1972 and obtained bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees from Sir George Williams University. In 1979 she received a degree in library science from McGill University.

Loved Chamber Music

Ms. MacHutchin was a renaissance woman who read voraciously and built an impressive home library of history books and biographies. She enjoyed painting, holding dinner parties and loved chamber music.

She died just after returning from a weekend in the New York area, where she had gone to hear a recital of medieval music at Princeton University.

One of her friends, author Ted Phillips, described her as ''a perceptive woman whose opinions both as a friend and as a critic generated heat and light on any and every level. She will be missed.''

Ms. MacHutchin began working the night shift at the Gazette library part-time in 1980 and four years ago was appointed the library's chief administrator. She split her duties at The Gazette with library systems administrator Michael Porritt, who considered Ms. MacHutchin his ''second mum.''

''After my own mum died, Donna was the first person I turned to,'' Porritt said. ''She was like a walking encyclopedia. You could ask her anything and she knew the answer off the top of her head or exactly where to find it.''

After Ms. MacHutchin and her husband separated, she shared her life with Gazette copy editor Nick Powell, who died in 1987 and then with Roy Jones, an advertising executive and former Montreal Star writer , who died in 1991.

Funeral arrangements were not known at press time.

GRAPHIC: P Photo: Donna MacHutchin had a wide variety of interests.