NORWICH — On a mid-August morning in 1991, Kathy Hoyt was leaving her house to go back-to-school shopping with her two teenage sons when a call came from Lt. Gov. Howard Dean’s office.
In the brief conversation, Hoyt learned the stunning news that Republican Gov. Richard Snelling, 64, had been found dead earlier that morning of an apparent heart attack at his home in Shelburne, Vt. Dean, a Democrat, was now the state’s chief executive.
Ten minutes into the job, and before he’d been sworn in, Dean asked his administrative assistant to call Hoyt.
Dean needed her in Montpelier, preferably within the next hour. In Vermont, the lieutenant governor’s position is part time, which allowed Dean, a physician, to continue teaching medicine at the University of Vermont.
Suddenly thrown into the role of governor, Dean felt a bit overwhelmed. “I had no idea what I was supposed to do,” he said in a recent Valley News interview.
Hoyt, on the other hand, did.
She had already served as chief of staff for Madeleine Kunin, who preceded Snelling as governor. Dean came to know Hoyt — and her familiarity with the inner workings of state government — during his time in the state legislature and more than four years as lieutenant governor.
“The entire state was in shock. I needed some very experienced people to help me,” Dean said in a 1997 Valley News interview. “I had worked with Kathy before. I knew she had a good grasp of state government, and I trusted her.”
Dean and Kunin, a Democrat, were among the state dignitaries who attended a celebration of life for Hoyt that her family held last month at the Hanover Inn. Hoyt died on March 7 at her home in Norwich, after battling dementia for several years. She was 82.
Hoyt was a “force in Vermont politics for years,” Dean said at the event.
Which was remarkable in the sense that she was never elected to any office. She was Dean’s chief of staff for seven years, before he appointed her secretary of administration in 1998. She was the first woman to hold the position, which Dean described as the “second most powerful position in state government.”
The job gave Hoyt a large say over how the annual state budget (roughly $1 billion in the 1990s) was divided up, who got hired for high-level state jobs, along with being the go-to person for anyone seeking the governor’s support in legislative matters.
Hoyt, whose slight Southern drawl hinted at her family roots, had an easygoing style that she used to her advantage. “People were always underestimating her,” said Rich Smith, a policy analyst in the Dean administration in the 1990s. “She was so warm and friendly, but she was as tough as nails when she had to be.”
During tense budget negotiations with legislative leaders, Dean relied on Hoyt to do much of the heavy lifting. “She had the ability to tell people to go to hell and they’d look forward to the journey,” Dean said. “We were great partners.”
Hoyt grew up in Rich Square, N.C., a small town in the northeastern corner of the state, that she was fond of describing as “neither rich nor square.” Her memories of the town, however, weren’t as fond. Rich Square suffered from a deep racial divide.
Hoyt’s mother was a home economics teacher. Her father, who held a variety of jobs, including driving an oil truck, died when Hoyt was 5 and her younger sister just 3. To make ends meet, Hoyt’s mother moved the family to a hardscrabble neighborhood of Rich Square, where many of the residents were Black.
It gave Hoyt a close-up view of how Black people were treated as second-class citizens. Jim Crow laws dictated, among many other things, where Black people could live, shop and even which public restrooms they could use.
The injustices of racial segregation in the South stuck with Hoyt. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in 1964, she took a job with the North Carolina Fund, a nonprofit that worked to lessen poverty and expand civil rights in a part of the country where the Ku Klux Klan threatened progress — and worse.
Hoyt held a vivid memory of driving home one night from a Civil Rights rally when a police officer pulled her over for no apparent reason — except that a Black friend was in the passenger’s seat.
“Her friend was scared for his life,” said Michael Hoyt, the older of her two sons. His mother remained calm, however, making small talk with the cop. After the officer learned that a relative of Hoyt’s was a friend of his family, she and her passenger were allowed to drive away.
“If you look at what she valued and fought for throughout her life, it was growing up in the Jim Crow South that shaped her,” said Michael, who serves on the Hartford Selectboard. “It led her to wanting to help people who were disadvantaged the most.”
At the memorial event in Hanover, he told a packed room that his mother was “born with nothing, but she escaped that world and helped to change it.”
By pure happenstance, Vermont became the place where Hoyt made her mark. Driving through on her way to “Expo 67,” the world’s fair held that year in Montreal, she later described Vermont as the “most magical place” she had seen.
In 1968, Hoyt applied for — and landed — her first job in Vermont state government with the Office of Economic Opportunity. After a couple of years, she moved over to what was then known as the state Human Services Agency, where she met an attorney with the Vermont Department of Taxes.
Norrie Hoyt was charged with looking into how a potential federal tax overhaul proposed by the Nixon administration could impact Vermonters. The assignment required him to meet with the Human Services Agency’s planning director. The two became friends and then some.
On Jan. 26, 1974, the couple married in the Vermont Statehouse — two stalwart Democrats “brought together by Richard Nixon,” said their son Michael , repeating a slice of humor that family and friends noted over the years.
While her husband entered elected state politics, rising to chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Vermont House, Kathy Hoyt devoted her career to government’s administrative side.
In the late 1970s, she left state government to devote more time to caring for — and enjoying — the couple’s sons, Michael and Chris, who now lives in Middletown Springs, Vt. When the boys took up collecting baseball cards, she did as well. She drove them to card shows. She became a serious baseball fan, following the Red Sox on TV and radio.
A fabulous cook, Hoyt was a hit with her sons’ friends. After sampling her dishes (Southern fried chicken was a specialty), one boy asked his own mom why she couldn’t cook like Mrs. Hoyt.
A favorite from Hoyt’s childhood was a sandwich consisting of bananas, peanut butter and mayonnaise. “You have to get past your initial reservations, but it’s really good,” Michael said. (During their evening visits after his mother had retired, Michael came to appreciate another of her Southern tastes — Jack Daniels mixed with Diet Coke.)
In the late 1980s, Hoyt returned to public life. Kunin, the state’s first female governor, hired Hoyt to run the Department of Employment and Training before naming her chief of staff in 1989.
“I had the good sense to bring her into my administration,” Kunin said in an interview at the Hanover event last month. “I saw her talent and her ability to get things done. She understood state government and had a devotion to public life.”
Dean recognized that as well, hence the phone call during his first minutes as governor. For the next dozen years, Hoyt played instrumental roles in his administration. During that time, Vermont implemented universal health care for children and pregnant women. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples.
While Kathy and Norrie, who died in 2013, both worked in state government with offices in Montpelier during the 1990s, they made the 60-mile daily trip from Norwich in separate Subarus.
“Kathy never worked a 9-to-5 schedule,” said Kate O’Connor, a special assistant to Dean.
As he was apt to do, the governor called her one night when she was driving home from Montpelier on Interstate 89. “Suddenly, there was this crashing sound,” Dean said. “She’d hit a deer.”
Hoyt assured the governor that she was fine. The deer was another matter.
Hoyt remained a trusted adviser to Dean throughout his five terms as governor. In early September 2001, Dean called his leadership team together for an announcement.
“I’m not running again,” he told the group.
“Yahoo,” Hoyt responded.
The governor looked a bit surprised, O’Connor recalled. “It was very clear that Kathy enjoyed working with Howard, but she was ready to move on,” O’Connor said.
After retiring in 2002, Hoyt was named to the University of Vermont’s board of trustees and also spent the 2014 legislative session in the House, taking over for Rep. Margaret Cheney who had been appointed to the Vermont Public Service Board.
Hoyt opted not to run for the open seat in the November 2014 election — she’d spent enough time over the years in the Statehouse.
The first paragraph of Hoyt’s obituary makes mention of her serving as an “inspiration and mentor to generations of women in Vermont state government.”
In no small part because she led by example.
“A lot of people say the Legislature is personality driven, but it is also information driven. Kathy was very good at reminding people in government of that,” said Tasha Wallis, who started out as a policy analyst in the Dean administration and later became deputy secretary of administration for Republican Gov. Jim Douglas. “She always made a point of emphasizing the need to really understand an issue, if you wanted to get people to listen to you.”
From her own experience before moving to Vermont, Hoyt was also aware of what women were often up against. In the mid-1960s, she earned a scholarship to work on a graduate degree in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship school. But before she could finish her thesis, the scholarship was yanked. A dean at the college told her the scholarship money had been turned over to a “worthy male candidate” and that she was going to “become a housewife anyway.”
She told the story, her sons said, to encourage both young women and men not to let others have the final say about the direction their futures take.
“She was a very positive and resilient person,” said Chris Hoyt, who served as his mother’s primary caregiver in her final years. “She faced a lot of obstacles early in life, but she knew what she wanted and kept going.”
And Vermont is better for it.
CORRECTION: Vermont’s civil unions law was enacted in 2000. A previous version of this story gave an incorrect date for the law’s enactment.