Charles Cook Sutton

Charles C. Sutton, New England journalist and publisher, died at Rutland Regional Medical Center, Rutland, VT, on January 13th, 2025, He was 93 years old.

Sutton and his wife, Catherine O'Kane were publishers of the Vermont Country Sampler, a monthly feature newspaper she founded in 1984. They ceased publication in April, 2022. For several years the couple also published a sister publication, The Vermont Weathervane.

In his 90s Sutton turned to writing children’s stories about how different species of wildlife responded to global warming.

Sutton was born in New York City on April 3rd, 1931, the son of Frederick Totten and Elizabeth Cook Sutton. He attended the public schools of New York City and Fairfield, CT, including Timothy Dwight School and Roger Ludlow High School. He was graduated from Berkshire School, Sheffield, MA, where during his junior year he was awarded the Harvard Book Prize. Sutton received a BA in Russian studies from Cornell University. During his senior year he was president of The Kappa Alpha Society.

A U.S. Navy reservist, he attended Officers Candidate School in Newport, RI where he was commissioned an ensign in the USNR. He was assigned to the National Security Agency where he was a Russian translator during the Korean War.

He began his newspaper career as a copyboy at The New York Times, and worked in the Times' UN and Washington bureaus as a new assistant. While at the UN he wrote the daily column "Proceedings at the UN".

He then joined the Guy Gannet newspapers in Maine, working first as a reporter-photographer for the Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, ME, and then as a general assignment and police reporter for the Portland Press Herald.

He became that newspaper's first full-time education writer. This was a time when education was making the news following the Soviet's launch of Sputnik into space, student protests over the Vietnam War, and teachers demanding better pay and conditions through sanctions and other forms of protest. 

He wrote a series of columns and articles stressing the need for a university to serve the southern area of the state. The University of Southern Maine became a reality in 1970, through a merger of a teachers college in nearby Gotham, the Portland Law School, and the University of Maine—Portland, known as UMP and offering a few adult courses, mostly in accounting. Sutton also taught a business writing course there. USM today serves 10,000 students.

While a Maine resident of the Saco River village of Bar Mills and later Hollis Center, he was active in the Saco River Corridor Association, an environmental organization that helped clean up the river and got the legislature to upgrade the river's classification from “D" suitable to carry off wastes, to "B" for recreational uses.

Sutton took a year off from journalism and headed up the U.S. Dept. of Labor's New Careers program in Maine, providing education and public service job opportunities for persons on welfare.

He returned to daily newspapering as Kennebunk Bureau chief and later City and Managing Editor of the Biddeford-Saco Journal. The newspaper was a consistent winner of awards for its writing and photography.

Sutton also free-lanced articles published in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times (Travel), Chronicle of Higher Education, Rural New Yorker, Maine Times, and the Associated Press. He wrote a monthly column on commercial fishing for the Fishing Gazette magazine. He was also a stringer for the McGraw-Hill publications and contributed to Business Week, Purchasing Week, Oilgram, and other magazines.

Sutton returned to Connecticut as a copy editor for the Bridgeport Post (now the Connecticut Post), and for several years was its front page and news editor. Also, as adventure travel editor for its Sunday edition, he took his annual vacations on trips to countries all over the world.

While in Bridgeport, Sutton joined The Washington Park Association, a group of people moving back into the inner city to restore homes. With help from Habitat for Humanity, this area of the city made famous by P.T. Barnum was revived. 

Retiring from the Bridgeport Post, and after traveling across the country in a camper for six months, Sutton ended up in Vermont in 1986 and began first writing for, and then co-publishing the Vermont Country Sampler.

Sutton was preceded in death by his wife Catherine O'Kane. He is survived by five stepchildren: Andrew Donovan of North Clarendon, VT; Jesse O'Kane of Falls Church, VA; David Sutton of Portland, ME; Susan Saunders of Pownal, ME; and Timothy Noyes of Hollywood, CA; a sister, Lisa Robinson of Cambridge, England; and several nieces and nephews.

There was no public service but he was memorialized by family.