CHARLOTTE, Vt. (InvestigateTV) — From the canvas to the dance floor, 87-year-old Judy Tuttle doesn’t shy away from a creative or personal challenge.
Following the death of her husband, Tuttle realized she could build something positive for her community.
She has an eye for detail, whether she’s hanging art for a show at the Charlotte Senior Center or creating her own paintings.
“Right now, I’m trying to match that group and this group,” Tuttle explained, as she curated artwork for an upcoming show. “And then they have to be all level.”
Tuttle finds the artists and hangs the paintings with her friend Katie Franko. But she doesn’t just install art, she also creates her own.
“Almost everything I do is of water of some sort,” she said about her paintings. She gives away many of them.
Tuttle likes to keep busy, telling us that when you’re old, “it’s good not to sit around.”
At 87, Tuttle also dances through life. Once a week, she gets up bright and early and travels to Montreal for ballroom dancing lessons.
“Love ballroom dancing!” she said. “117 miles, one way.”
Tuttle has been contentedly twirling and moving in her two-inch high heels with Sylvain Trottier, a Canadian national champion.
“You just can’t dance with anybody and have them be able to do that,” Tuttle said. “I think that my dancing is keeping me healthy.”
She learned to paint and dance as a student at Middlebury College. That’s where she met her future husband, Fred.
After graduation, Fred started teaching and eventually became the superintendent of schools in South Burlington. Their world, though, would change in an instant.
“He learned that he had cancer around Christmas, and he died around June,” Tuttle said.
Fred was so respected that in 1992, they announced they would rename the South Burlington Middle School in his honor.
“He cried,” Tuttle said.
He died five days later following the announcement.
After that, Tuttle would also question her own mortality. “I wanted to do something for the world like he did, to make it a better place.”
Trained as a special educator, Tuttle decided to start a school for troubled boys. Hull Crest School in Burlington was an independent school funded by the state.
“These kids who come in have been asked to leave public school,” Tuttle said. “They followed my rules because, if they didn’t, I said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to go back to public school.’”
Their classroom was the world, opening their eyes to new ways of learning and thinking.
“So, in Italy, they could actually see a volcano,” Tuttle said.
At 59, she even learned to snowboard with her students.
“I fell, and fell and fell and fell,” she recalled. “But on the other hand, I needed to do that with all the kids, for all the years I had the school.”
She has since retired from the school — and the slopes — but the dance floor is still music to her ears, along with her passion for painting just a brush stroke away.
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