DATELINE – Clayton, New Mexico.
NAME: Mary Julaine Hurt or “Judy” – to those of us who knew her best – passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends on July 26, 2023, in Oklahoma City – her home for the past 44 years.
SERVICES: Funeral services will be held at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, August 1, 2023, at the First United Methodist Church in Clayton, New Mexico with Rev. Billy Rammage officiating. Burial will follow in the Clayton Memorial Cemetery in Clayton, New Mexico by Hass Funeral Directors of Clayton. Please visit www.hassfuneralhome.com to view the online obituary and sign the guestbook.
BACKGROUND: Mary Julaine “Judy” Hamilton Hurt was born in Clayton, NM on December 20 1946 to Hal and Juanita Hamilton and later joined by her baby brother Sid (all three of whom she will be joining) she was a rambunctious and precocious cowgirl who learned to do cowgirl things before she could walk; if even a quarter of the stories are true. Throughout the next 76 years, she never forgot this heritage and shared the life lessons and work ethic embodied with everyone she came in contact with. After somehow surviving the shenanigans she cooked up with those who would become lifelong friends, she graduated from Clayton High School in 1964 and went on to receive a degree in business administration from Pepperdine University (Go Waves!). She worked for women in Job Corps, using her strange and amazing talents with the English language to create opportunities in the face of oppression, then went on to run… I mean “work with” some of the best and brightest minds in aerospace optics at SBRC – traveling across the country with millions of dollars of classified equipment and national secrets, and a variety of other notable roles in a time when women were generally told to sit down and shut up (while on occasion she did the former, the latter was never going to be an option.) It was at SBRC in Santa Barbara, California where she met her husband of 45 years (Ron Hurt) – a partnership that was unarguably filled with more love and compassion than most will ever know, and changed both for the better. After moving to Oklahoma she had two children (Nicholas and Christopher) to whom she was far more than just a woman who gave birth, but a mother in every sense of the word – creating a home of opportunity, love, and joy.
SURVIVORS:
She is survived by one loving husband, two not-as-clueless-as-they-could-be children, a talented nephew (Alan), a gormless cat, an army of friends and colleagues (some of whom call her “mama Hurt”), and the ripple effects of more than 50 years worth of good work that often never came with a title, much less a large paycheck. Her life was one full of love, service, humor, compassion, and grace under fire – she left the parts of the world she touched better than she found them – and nobody could do better than that. She will be missed by all who truly knew her.
