Ray Hutchison

Ray L. Hutchison (born September 1932) is a prominent Dallas, Texas, attorney, who served in the Texas House of Representatives in the 1970s and is married to the state's senior Republican senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison. Hutchison graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas with honors in 1957. He obtained his J.D. degree, "cum laude," from the same institution in 1959.

Hutchison is a partner in the firm of Vinson and Elkins, based in the Trammel Crow Building. His principal area of practice is public finance. For more than forty years, he has assisted state and local governments in the use of their constitutional and statutory authority to provide and finance various public activities.

The 1978 gubernatorial primary

In 1978, Hutchison lost the Republican gubernatorial nomination to Bill Clements, by a lopsided vote of 115,345 (72.8 percent) to 38,268 (24.2 percent). (Another 4,790 votes or 3 percent went to Charles Thompson.) Clements went on to win the general election, thus having become the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction.

The Hutchisons met when both were state legislators, he from Dallas and she, as Kay Bailey, from Houston.

The Hutchisons reside in Dallas. They adopted two infant twins in 2001, a son and a daughter. Both Hutchisons have been previously married. Ray Hutchison has grown children by his first marriage.