Remembering Sandy Gutman, wife, mother, lawyer

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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the passing of a remarkable woman. She was my lovely wife, Sandra Gutman. She was remarkable in many ways, no less so than by adopting six children to having stood up as a lawyer in front of the Supreme Court of the United States.

It didn’t just happen.

She came from an otherwise typical Jewish family. Neither of her parents was college educated and, when we married in 1955, neither was she. At that time she was a recently divorced mother of three adopted children. Not long after we married, those three were joined by two more adopted children and a foster child, totaling a family of eight that regularly sat down to a dinner that she prepared and served.

She worked too. Those were the days of downtown department stores and she worked at Hutzler’s and Hochchild’s as a fashion model. She was a trim, 5’9” beauty on those runways.

But not long after family member No. 8 arrived, she transitioned from fashion model to Shakespeare. She enrolled as a part-time student at Baltimore City Community College and discovered the Bard. Not long after, her love of literature led to enrollment as a full-time student at the University of Baltimore and to a cum laude degree.

At that point she had another decision to make that only a few years before could not have been imagined:  She faced the decision whether to accept Johns Hopkins University’s offer to continue her education in a combined master’s/Ph.D. program in English literature or go to law school. With the inspiration of her admired long-time friend Sheila Sachs, this woman who had not even gone to college until she had a house full of children went to law school.

She chose the University of Baltimore law school, where she made law review and earned other honors. Next came the city of Baltimore’s Law Department, where as an assistant city solicitor her job was representing the city’s zoning board in litigation before the Circuit Court of Baltimore City, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and the Court of Appeals and, as noted above, the Supreme Court of the United States — all the while managing her large and diverse family.

In 2016, after a 45-year legal career, she retired, having risen to the position of chief of the land use division of Baltimore’s Law Department.

There is more about Sandy Gutman that could be told, but at this solemn time her family only wants as many people as we can reach to know about Sandy Gutman — wife, mother, scholar, lawyer — and her unparalleled life.

She will forever be missed.