John J. McHugh, 89, former state crime lab director
As the first in his family to graduate from college, John J. McHugh believed knowledge was a steppingstone to a better life, and thought there were many lessons to be learned outside a school's walls.
"He very much valued education, but education was more than just a classroom," said his daughter Katherine McHugh Lichliterof Vienna. "Education included traveling and talking with people and understanding their culture and international affairs, and that made a richer life for all of us."
To ensure that his children looked beyond Waltham, where the family lived, Mr. McHugh took his wife, daughters, and son on business trips while he was the director of what became the State Police Crime Lab. By train the family traveled to the West Coast, to Mexico, and Canada.
Mr. McHugh, who spent 41 years with the state's forensic crime laboratories, 22 as director, died of complications from Alzheimer's disease Wednesday in Whitney Place, an assisted living residence in Natick. He was 89 and had lived for most of his life in Waltham.
From 1946, when he was joined the lab as an assistant chemist, to when he retired as director in 1987, Mr. McHugh examined evidence in high-profile cases that included the Boston Strangler and organized crime investigations, his daughter said.
"We learned early on about drug abuse from his stories about work," she said, "and he had no love for the Mafia at all."
One focus of Mr. McHugh's early years as an investigator was fighting attempts to fix horse and dog races.
In a biographical sketch published in January 2004 in "The Nucleus," a publication of the Northeast Section of the American Chemical Society, he wrote about becoming senior chemist for a new lab that developed techniques to detect the presence of performance-altering drugs. The lab's analysis was not limited to animals who finished first, because those rigging races administered depressants to slow down some horses or dogs. "The winners are always checked," he told the Globe in 1972. "We are more interested at the moment in the tail end of the field."
Mr. McHugh also became a leading researcher on drug and alcohol abuse, though it turned out that he was too hopeful when he initially believed that the societal taste for illegal drugs that blossomed in the late 1960s would wane as years passed.
"I thought we were approaching the end of the drug culture we've been in since about 1968," he told the Globe in 1974, "but now I'm not sure."
One of seven children, John Joseph McHugh was born in Cambridge and grew up in Watertown before his family moved to Waltham.
His mother died when he was in his late teens and "things were really hard," his daughter said. "There was no money because of the Depression and they all worked a variety of jobs, and his dad worked on the railroad."
Mr. McHugh graduated from Watertown High School in 1939 and took an accelerated program at Tufts University, graduating in 1941 with a bachelor's in chemical engineering. He joined the Army Air Corps, which trained him in flight meteorology.
Sent to fight in the Pacific, he was part of the attack force during the Battle of Okinawa, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star. Decades later, when two of his grandsons were assigned an oral history project in school, he talked about being trapped on the beach away from the area held by US forces. With other American fighters, he gradually moved closer, foxhole by foxhole, until reaching the US troops.
Japanese kamikaze planes arrived shortly after dawn each day to attack the ships anchored nearby, he told his grandsons, and for many years afterward Mr. McHugh refused to set foot on a plane, traveling instead by train.
Returning home after the war, he married Mildred King in 1946. Mr. McHugh attended Boston College Law School at night on the GI bill and graduated in 1952. After retiring as director of the crime lab, he continued to practice law until 1998, focusing on tax and probate law.
At work, he was an exacting supervisor who enjoyed speaking with his employees each day. "John was a good guy," said Francis Hankard of Weymouth, who worked for Mr. McHugh in the crime lab. "He was a regular fellow and he was well worth knowing for the stories."
Mr. McHugh was a member of the American Chemical Society for more than 50 years and belonged to several other professional organizations. He also traveled extensively with his wife, with whom he went dancing most Saturday evenings.
The couple volunteered with the Waltham Arts Council, reviewing applications for the college scholarship the organization awards annually, and helping out at the refreshment stand during summer concerts. "They were a team. They always did everything together," said Bill Walsh of Waltham, a friend who worked with the McHughs on the arts council.
For Mr. McHugh, friendship was something to be honored and sustained. "He had friends when he went to grammar school, four in particular, and they kept together," said his brother Paul of Weymouth.
In addition to his wife, of Waltham, his daughter Katherine, and his brother, Mr. McHugh leaves two other daughters, Maureen McHugh Dunne of Framingham and Christine McHugh Purington of Rutland, Mass.; a son, John Jr. of Hopkinton; four granddaughters; four grandsons; and two great-granddaughters.
A funeral Mass will be said today at noon in St. Jude Church in Waltham. Burial will be in St. Patrick Cemetery in Watertown. 