Birth Date: 03/21/1950
Deceased Date: 09/29/2022
Cindy Huntsberry spent much of her time in her own little world. She could be found wandering the aisles of the grocery store, muttering to herself, either laughing or frustrated at some conversation going on inside her head. And often that is how she was found – by clients who she had helped over a 40-year legal career.
They startled her from her revery and almost always it took her a minute to remember who they were – if she did at all. They were always grateful for some help she provided in what was a dire and unforgettable moment in their own lives: making a legal claim for disability payments, facing serious criminal charges or going through an ugly divorce.
She couldn’t leave the house without running into thankful people. They always hugged her and, occasionally, said ‘I love you.’ She always said, ‘I love you’ back. That was what made her unique, another Smithfield attorney remembered recently: her ability to make her clients feel seen and understood.
Cindy died peacefully at SECU Hospice House in Smithfield on Friday, with her two sons and two of her siblings by her side.
In 1979 when she started practicing law, she was Smithfield’s only female attorney – though courthouse portraits show there was at least one before her. Like all interesting people, she was a mess of contradictions. She was a strident conservative, who opposed the death penalty. She thought people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but spent her entire career helping those who couldn’t.
She scoffed at feminism, but set a course for other women to be lawyers in this small Southern town – and argue big cases, just like the good ‘ol boys. She loved being a mother more than anything, even though she was, to put it mildly… not good at cooking, cleaning and almost every other domestic activity. What she did well was reading and thinking.
She was born in 1950 to Gene and Doris Clayton and she was obsessed with books from the start. She begged her mother to teach her to read and practiced on her three younger siblings, who listened intently when they were small. When they got big enough to play outside, she stayed in, preferring to find a quiet spot to hole up with a book.
She was a military brat and spent her childhood moving every few years. Of all the places she lived, she loved England most. She was a teenager and it was the era of the Beatles. She started speaking with a British accent that her brother Clint loved to tease her about. Throughout her life she loved the great British authors of the Victorian era. “Anthony Trollope is very underrated. You should really give him a try,” she told her oldest son Will on more than one occasion.
Her most underrated quality was resilience. Her first husband, Alan Huntsberry, died suddenly when their son Will was only four years old. Less than a year later, her house on 4th Street burned to the ground. Crawling across the floor, she led her son to a window. They jumped into the arms of their neighbors, David Stubbs and Frank Creech.
She later married Tommy McNeill and to her great joy had another son Thomas when she was 44 years old.
She tried three capital murder cases and ran for district court judge four times. Smithfield, it turns out, wasn’t quite ready for its first female judge. But several ended up on the bench after her first run in 1988. “You go into your job with big ideas about making changes,” she said once , “but your profession shapes you more than you shape it.”
In her case, it gave her 40 years of using a sharp and creative mind that would have been wasted on many of the jobs that were supposed to be reserved for women in Smithfield in 1979. And it gave her the opportunity to bring her social worker’s heart (her first job after college) to a profession known for being cold and calculating.
She leaves behind her siblings, Clint, Sue and Paul Clayton and her two sons, Will Huntsberry and Thomas McNeill.
A visitation will be held at Parrish Funeral Home on Sunday, Oct. 2 from 6 to 8 pm. A funeral service will be held at Centenary United Methodist Church at 2 pm on Monday, Oct. 3, with graveside service to follow.
In lieu of flowers please send donations to Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church: https://umcmission.org/advance-project/01138a/
RIP Cindy. You were a trailblazer…