Curt McCormack, a tireless advocate for the environment whose affable nature won him close friends across the state and during his two-plus decades serving in the Vermont House, died Monday of cancer, his family and former colleagues said. He was 72.
McCormack was well-known for choosing to live without a car since at least the early 2000s. It was that notion — of practicing what he preached — that stuck with so many of the people he knew, recalled his two children, Jamie and Blythe, in an interview.
“He was one of those people who believed that your actions on a day-to-day basis really showed where you put your values — and what you felt was important,” Jamie said.
Jamie and Blythe said they felt their father’s commitment to the environment early in their childhood in Rutland. The family would regularly trek through cold winter weather, instead of driving, to get around. At home, their shower was heated with solar power.
Even in the final years of his life, McCormack would avoid taking a car — preferring to bike to his chemotherapy treatments, Jamie and Blythe said. When he could no longer bike to his appointments, he would insist on taking the bus instead.
“Jamie would say, I’ll drive you,” Blythe recalled, but their father would say, “no, no.”
McCormack represented Rutland City in the House from 1983 to 1996. He moved to Burlington in 2008 and, four years later, won election to the chamber again. He’d go on to serve the city’s downtown and Old North End, a deeply progressive district, until 2022.
At other points an electrician, a state employee and a consultant, McCormack also played a key role in the creation of Amtrak’s Ethan Allen Express service in Vermont. In the 1980s and ‘90s, he pushed to bring train service on that line to Rutland; more recently, he helped extend the line all the way to its current terminus in downtown Burlington.
McCormack was also known for sponsoring a first-in-the-nation law regulating ozone-damaging chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
He served for years in the Legislature with his older brother, Windsor Democratic Sen. Dick McCormack — who himself is now retiring after 30 years in that chamber.
In 2019, then-House Speaker Mitzi Johnson appointed Curt McCormack to chair the body’s transportation committee — a move she said ruffled feathers at the time because he did not drive a car. But Johnson said his reliance on other modes of transit helped him think, more so than many others, about the state’s entire transportation network.
“He could see whole systems, and try to figure out how to put that whole system together — not just focus on a little element,” Johnson said in an interview, adding that McCormack always came to the Statehouse “with a wonderful smile.”
Other friends and former colleagues also recalled McCormack’s warm personality.
McCormack “was one of the friendliest people ever to serve in Vermont,” said David Glidden, chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, in a statement Tuesday. “Curt was a kind, passionate man who never stopped looking for ways to help his neighbors.”
Jamie and Blythe recalled feeling that spirit at home, too. McCormack and their mother sponsored numerous foster children, they said, and regularly opened the house up to other young people who were in the area for an international volunteer program.
“We’d have this constant flow of people running through our house,” Jamie said. “And that was just how we grew up — like, that was perfectly normal to us.”
Their father also took trips abroad to volunteer his time. In 2005, he joined the Peace Corps and moved to Senegal, where he helped create a trash-sorting and compost system in a small city that had no such infrastructure in place previously.
“He developed this whole program from the ground up. He was a doer,” Jamie said. “Things didn’t seem too daunting for him. He would just think — OK, we’ll figure it out. We’ll do this.”
McCormack’s family plans to hold a memorial service for him at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington at 2 p.m. on Oct. 19.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Former Rutland, Burlington Rep. Curt McCormack dies at 72.