Nancy McHugh, influential member of Cedar Rapids community, dies at 88

CEDAR RAPIDS - Nancy McHugh, who held key positions on the boards of the Cedar Rapids Public Library, Brucemore, and the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, has died at age 88.

McHugh's daughter, Kathy Bauer of Fort Collins, Colo., said Wednesday that her mother died Monday morning of natural causes. Funeral services are pending.

As she talked, Bauer was looking at a plaque given her mother as a member of the Cedar Rapids library board in the mid-1980s when the city finally built a new library after years of failed public bond issues.

'If you're going to do something, do it right,” McHugh's daughter read from the plaque. 'That's a motto my mother lived by.”

Good friend Elinor Day, on Wednesday called McHugh 'a quiet force” in the community whose only interest was results, not recognition.

'She was just so persistent in taking on all these things, when others just didn't seem to be as interested,” said Day, a former director of public relations at Mount Mercy University. 'She would just infect them with her passion and enthusiasm and enlist them to help.”

Day said McHugh was the daughter of Howard Green, the founder of today's HR Green Co. engineering firm, and grew up next to the Brucemore mansion back in the day when it was serving as the residence for Howard and Margaret Hall.

David Janssen, executive director of Brucemore, on Wednesday said McHugh served on the first Brucemore board of trustees as the property made the transition from private residence to a non-profit organization and a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

'It was absolutely a pivotal moment in the evolution of the estate, and the initial board of trustees really laid the foundation for what this organization has become,” Janssen said. 'And Nancy was critical to that.

'I spoke with Nancy a few weeks ago, and she was still very much interested in Brucemore's landscape and in plans we had going forward. She continued to be engaged in Brucemore for the rest of her life as a neighbor, a supporter, and an advocate.”

Scott Olson, a commercial Realtor and City Council member, sat on the first Brucemore board with McHugh and on Wednesday called her an 'activist for many good things and a lot of organizations in the community.”

'In my involvement with her on the Brucemore board, she was so pleasant and knowledgeable and, of course, very intense about how things developed in those early stages at Brucemore,” Olson said. 'She was just a pleasant individual to be around, and a very positive person who tried to work through many organizations to make Cedar Rapids a better place. It's just sad to hear she's passed away.”

Les Garner, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, on Wednesday said McHugh was 'a wonderful woman and a real leader in community philanthropy.”

He said McHugh served on the foundation's board of directors from 1983 through 1998 and was board president at a time when the entity moved from a private foundation to a public charity and foundation with an expanded vision to serve the community.

'Nancy was a key part of the leadership of that effort,” Garner said.

He said the foundation had an endowment of $1.3 million before the transition, and today, has assets of $150 million, from which the Community Foundation last year awarded $7.4 million in grants.

'She set the stage for that growth,” Garner said. 'That kind of growth and reach into the community would not be possible without the transition that she led.”

McHugh headed up the Cedar Rapids library board's building committee back in the mid-1980s when private and public funds finally got a new library built at 500 First St. SE. Five bond issues to use public funds to build the library had failed until then.

'We had a wonderful time getting that going,” Curran Rosser, a colleague of McHugh's on the library board at the time, said on Wednesday. 'Nancy was a very impressive person, and she had wonderful ideas and knew the right people to help her do what she wanted to see happen.”