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Southern Exposure
Arlington man saw Antarctica with Adm. Byrd
Ryan Sanders
Star-Telegram Writer

ARLINGTON -It's difficult to follow Guy Hutcheson's stories about his expedition, especially if you've never been to Antarctica.

Hutcheson talks about furs and pressure ice and "the winter night."

After a few minutes, though, you realize that Hutcheson has been to a place where winter and night are synonymous, where temperatures reached 72 degrees below zero, a place where few people have ever been.

Hutcheson was one of 56 men who spent 13 months in Antarctica on Adm. Richard Byrd's second expedition to the ice cap in the early 1930s. He's one of four who are still alive.

"There were several times when we thought we wouldn't come back," Hutcheson said, remembering the trip from the warm confines of the living room at his home on West Abram Street where National Geographic magazines are bundled in a corner and the TV is tuned to a film crew exploring Incan ruins. "But we all came home. Byrd never lost a man in the field."

Sixty-four years after his trip, Hutcheson doesn't call it to mind often. He said his five grandchildren like to hear his expedition stories, "when they can get me to talk."

When he is spurred to recall the trip, he does so with little braggadocio. "I don't think about it much anymore," he said. "It was a long time ago."

Byrd, Hutcheson remembers, was a stalwart leader.

"He was very smart and very fair," Hutcheson said. "He knew his job and knew how to handle men."

But Byrd was absent several months during that second expedition, spending the winter alone in a hut more than 100 miles inland from the main camp he named Little America.

"The base camp was still there from the first expedition, but all the buildings were under the snow," Hutcheson said. "You could enter them through tunnels."

Hutcheson said the first expedition, four years before, had left in a hurry - so much so that they left a pot of beans on a stove.

"We ate it," he said with a chuckle. "It was still good."

Hutcheson was 22 and fresh out of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University) when he went to Antarctica. The trip lasted from 1933 to 1935. He remembers the reaction from his family when he told them he was going to the bottom of the world.

"They thought I was crazy," he said. "I was the first one out of my company at A&M to get a job. I had a good job in Houston with the Texas Company and at that time, jobs were hard to get. But I went off and did this and it didn't pay anything."

Hutcheson was one of four radio operators on the expedition. He said competition for the chance to go to the world's coldest place wasn't too difficult.

"I had followed the first [expedition] and when I found out he was organizing a second, I wrote a letter to the admiral in Boston," Hutcheson said. "I gave him my qualifications. He needed a radio operator and so I got on a bus to go up there."

After the expedition, Hutcheson went to work for CBS in New York.

He worked there for 10 years before moving to Arlington to start a radio engineering consulting business in 1946. Arlington's population was 6,000 then, he said.

Hutcheson served on the Arlington school board for 19 years and when he retired, the school district named Hutcheson Junior High for him.

Hutcheson's wife, Ruth, died three years ago.

Though he speaks little of his once-in-a-lifetime trip, the spirit of exploration is still alive in him as evidenced by his interest in present-day expeditions in South America and undersea.

If he had it all to do over again, Hutcheson said he would, under the same conditions.

"I guess I would," he said with a smirk. "If I were young again.

And crazy."

Ryan Sanders, (817) 548-5566 rsanders@star-telegram.com

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