Bio: Kutsche, Ray (History - 1978)

Contact: Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon
E-mail: dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org 

Surnames: Kutsche, Dobes

----Source: Clark County Press (Neillsville, Clark Co., WI) 3/16/1978

Kutsche, Ray (History - 1978)

By Brent Bernau, Assistant Editor:

For twelve years, a kindly gentleman faithfully escorted children across Hewett Street on their way to and from school. Now he’s gone.

Nothing drastic or traumatic occurred—he simply decided to slow things down. For years, he was the smiling face which greeted pedestrians on many a cold and blustery morning at that intersection. Many of those pedestrians perhaps never knew that there was more to the man.

Ray Kutsche is the man’s name. He’ll be 82 on March 22, and right now, his main concern seems to be to live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet. That’s something most people want.

He places great value on getting along with people. He wants no enemies or hard feelings. He seems to want to go out on good feelings. No one can begrudge him for that.

But Ray Kutsche probably has more reason for wanting those things than others might. He hasn’t been a crossing guard all his life. That, in fact, was just one small, small part of it.

For 22 years, Kutsche served Clark County at alternating times as sheriff and undersheriff. He left his town of Lynn farm where he was raised and married and where he began to farm, to become the undersheriff in 1943.

In 1945, he was elected to his first-term as sheriff. Because a sheriff could not hold office for two consecutive terms, he and Frank Dobes traded the sheriff’s and undersheriff’s jobs back and forth, time and time again.

About all Kutsche remembers is that he and his wife Hattie had to move either in or out of the sheriff’s quarters in the jail every four years. When they were in residence there, she did the cooking for the inmates.

As far as occurrences which stand out in his mind, Kutsche says he does not remember any particularly. All have apparently faded and blended together over the years.

The robbers, thieves, outlaws—even murderers—have all receded with time. They are no longer real, existing only in the memories of others.

Even the time when this area was covered with national and state lawmen and the metropolitan media all switching a murder-kidnap case unfold—this has slipped away.

Perhaps these things aren’t really important after all. Perhaps their memory would only served to remind nice people of the blacker side of man’s soul, a side which nice people are tired of grappling with for an explanation or reason.

Perhaps-one should be allowed the right to forget.

Yes, the kindly gentleman has left the corner.