Hutton’s Hero Financial Wizard And Caring Mentor, Robert Revel, Administrator Of Hutton Settlement For 25 Years, Is Retiring

He is quiet and conservative. Suits and ties. Big-money budgets. Real estate holdings. High-powered meetings. These are all part of his everyday life.

All the while, as many as 40 children are on his mind.

As Hutton Settlement administrator, Robert Revel has been the man responsible for overseeing the settlement’s youthful charges for the last 25 years. He will retire at the end of the month.

The nature of the job has been such that there are two sides to Revel - the no-nonsense administrator known to the business community and the loving surrogate father to hundreds of kids who have called Hutton Settlement home.

In his office, Revel the administrator wears a navy blue pinstripe suit and sits legs crossed in a high-backed chair surrounded by the portraits of previous administrators. He fidgets with his glasses and speaks in measured tones, carefully choosing his words.

“He’s very calm and cool,” said Ric Odegard, executive vice president of Seafirst Bank. “But when he needs to be aggressive he is. He gets things done.”

Outside, where the handsome brick cottages and the lush greens of the campus are the backdrop, the conversation switches to children. Revel talks freely and openly. Gone are the reserved, proper answers.

“Hi father,” a young boy in a baseball cap called out.

“Hello there,” Revel replied, the corners of his mouth curling into a boyish grin.

He is at ease now. He is among the children he loves.

“He has a very loving heart,” former Hutton Settlement resident Nancy Houser said. “At first people see him and he looks like he’s mean … but they don’t get a chance to spend extra time with him.”

Revel, who was born in Montana and orphaned as a boy, has left an impression on hundreds of children, including Houser.

“He’s like a father-figure to me,” said Houser, who lived at the Hutton Settlement for 10 years before graduating from West Valley High School earlier this month. “He’s involved with the 4-H program. That’s where you see his true character. He opens his heart up.”

Revel has been active with 4-H because he believes such activities present an important opportunity for success in a child’s life.

“Children sometimes get locked into that corner that they got an unfair break in life,” he said. “They feel they’ve been abandoned, they’re worthless, they have no future. And every success that a child has, whether it’s 4-H, education, athletics - any of those things - turn that feeling around.”

Programs like 4-H, which Revel and his wife, Dorothy, started at the settlement, give him a chance to spend time with children who are a lot like he used to be. Keeping the settlement intimate and homelike has long been the goal of Hutton administrators.

“The children here are our mission, not our business,” assistant administrator Michael Butler said. “Just as Levi Hutton established it, we will continue it.”

Revel, who turned 62 two weeks ago, spent a quarter century seeing to that.

“I’m sure Mr. Hutton would be extremely pleased with him,” Butler said. “I doubt Mr. Hutton would look at (the settlement) today and see it as being any different than what he planned. And Mr. Revel is responsible for that.”

Hutton Settlement holdings have “more than doubled” during his years as administrator, Revel said.

“I just presumed that someone in the social services arena would tend to be … not really business-oriented or free-enterprise minded,” said Larry Stanley, chairman of the Spokane Area Chambers of Commerce, who has know Revel for 21 years through the Rotary Club. “I thought he would fit that stereotype. Not so.”

But if it was Revel’s financial gift that made him successful, it was his ability to relate to the children that made him special.

“The kids used to ask how come he knew what they were going to do before they did it,” Dorothy Revel said.

It was because of the way Revel was raised.

He grew up in a state-operated orphanage in Montana. He graduated from high school in Alberton, a small town about 25 miles northwest of Missoula. He attended Eastern Washington State College, where he earned a degree in psychology in 1954.

“I don’t have fingers or toes enough on my body to count the number of young people that I grew up with in the orphanage that ended up feeling sorry for themselves, thinking that the world owed them and as a result ended up in prison,” Revel said. “I felt that if I was going to succeed, I had to do it on my own.”

That’s an outlook not lost on Houser. As one of her last high school assignments, Houser wrote an essay about the life of the man many call “Pop.” As a final piece of advice, she offered a lesson she learned from Robert Revel.

“Always remember you make your own success from hard work,” Houser wrote.

“He was determined and worked hard. He wanted to do the best job he could. He wanted to give his heart to everyone.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)