Albion K. ‘Ken’ Hutcherson

Former chief of graphics for International Monetary Fund was decorated aviator in 95th Bomb Group in World War II

Albion K. “Ken” Hutcherson, former chief of graphics for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., and a decorated World War II Army aviator, died in his sleep Feb. 2 at the Blakehurst Retirement Community in Towson. The former Lutherville resident was 99.

Albion Kenneth Hutcherson, son of tobacco farmers Jesse Martin Hutcherson and Evelyn Starkey Hutcherson, was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. After graduating in 1941 from high school in Halifax, Virginia, he moved to Baltimore and went to work for 50 cents an hour, family members said, at Glenn L. Martin Co., the old aviation factory in Middle River.

As a teenager, Mr. Hutcherson fell under the spell of airplanes, watching them while laboring in the family tobacco field, and vowing to learn to fly.

Mr. Hutcherson was driving back to Baltimore from a visit to Virginia on Dec. 7, 1941, when he heard over the radio that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The day after the attack, the United States declared war on Japan and formally entered World War II.

The next month, Mr. Hutcherson enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was sent to Keesler Field, near Biloxi, Mississippi, for basic training. From there he went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for radio school and finally, in 1943, to gunnery school in Las Vegas.

The flight training that followed at Moses Lake, Washington, however, was not without peril.

On a night mission as a gunner flying at 8,500 feet, the door to the turret suddenly opened, which blew off Mr. Hutcherson’s headphones, rendering him unable to communicate with the plane’s crew.

“He was scared to death. When he got back in the plane, he said he quit and would not get back in the ball turret,” according to an oral account published by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. “The first radio operator offered to switch places with him, and they did.”

After completing training, he joined the Eighth Air Force, 95th Bomb Group, in Horham, England, flying 22 combat missions as a radio/operator gunner and four as a bombardier aboard Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses.

Planes, which left the field every 30 seconds in all kinds of weather, made Mr. Hutcherson uneasy.

He once watched a plane suddenly ditch into the North Sea after taking off while another crashed with a full bomb load, killing the entire crew. He had known them all.

Mr. Hutcherson explained in the interview that on one terrifying mission over Germany, out of 24 enlisted men in the raid, only six survived.

During debriefings, crews were given shots of scotch. “Losing men they had played cards with the night before had an effect on them,” the museum interview noted.

“Being in combat, you constantly think you could be next,” Mr. Hutcherson said in the footage. “We were more afraid of the flak, anti-aircraft shelling, than the fighters. You cannot image how terrorizing it is to be surrounded by fighters from every direction.”

The 95th Bomb Group was the only Eighth Air Force group to be awarded three Presidential Distinguished Unit Flying Citations.

The first was for the bombing of an aircraft manufacturing plant in Regensburg, Germany; the second was for bombing railroad yards in Munster, Germany; and the third was for bombing a Berlin suburb, the first time the German capital had been bombed by an Army Air Force group.

Mustered out at war’s end in the fall of 1945 with the rank of technical sergeant, Mr. Hutcherson departed with additional decorations that included the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three clusters.

In 2014, Mr. Hutcherson was inducted into the Chevalier of Honor, the highest French order of merit, established by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Mr. Hutcherson was the last surviving member of the 95th Bomb Group.

He attended the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Baltimore, and began his graphic arts career in 1946 at Lord Baltimore Press, and in 1957 went to work for Dulany-Vernay Co. and Vari-Typer Corp., a printer and typewriter company, respectively.

In 1960, he joined Modern Linotypers Inc., where he rose to vice president and was a member of its board. He spent the last 14 years of his career until retiring in 1988 as chief of graphics for the International Monetary Fund in Washington.

Until COVID-19 arrived in 2020, Mr. Hutcherson worked one day a week for Hill Management in Hunt Valley.

He was a longtime member of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Jamestown Society. Active in Masonic affairs, he was a 71-year member of the Tuscan Lodge and Mount Moriah Lodge, where he was a past master, family members said.

He also had been a member of the Boumi Temple Shrine, where in 1974 he had been potentate, and a member of the Royal Order of Jesters.

Mr. Hutcherson enjoyed visiting schools to speak to students about World War II.

“He’d bring pictures of his crew, plane and medals, and had lots of fascinating stories to tell,” said his daughter, Kimberly Anne Hutcherson, of Rockville. “He’d talk about the difficult situations he had been in during the war and honoring our country.”

Mr. Hutcherson made a sentimental pilgrimage in 1972 to his old base in Horham, now overgrown with briers and underbrush, and surrounded by rolling farm fields.

One building remained standing and the barracks where he had lived was now a crumbled mass of rusty steel. The control tower had collapsed, but the runway was still in use by crop dusting planes.

“You would find it hard to believe but there were still pinup pictures pasted on the wall from Yank Magazine and also a Sad Sack cartoon stenciled on one wall,” he explained in “Wild Blue and Beyond: The 95th Bomb Group in War and Peace,” a history of the unit.

“Over the doorway was stenciled ‘Through These Doors Pass the Best Damn Flyers in the World,’ ” he said. “What an experience.”

His wife of 67 years, the former Virginia “Ginny” Kirsch, a part-time travel agent and homemaker, died in 2015.

Mr. Hutcherson was a member of Ashland Presbyterian Church in Hunt Valley.

He was a supporter of the Shriners Children’s Philadelphia, and because he was a Jack Russell terrier fancier, Russell Rescue Inc.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Feb. 19 at the Masonic Grand Lodge of Maryland at 304 International Circle in Hunt Valley.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Hutcherson is survived by a son, Stephen Kent Hutcherson of Boca Raton, Florida, and a brother, Robert Douglas Hutcherson of Laurens, South Carolina.

Albion K. “Ken” Hutcherson was inducted into the Chevalier of Honor.