Mother, Wife, and Small Business Owner During the Pandemic

WVIK, Quad Cities NPR | By Jonathan Turner

Published May 6, 2020 at 11:52 AM CDT

Annette Hutto grew up on the south side of Chicago, and majored in geology at Augustana College. During her junior year she came up with the idea to open a coffeehouse on the corner of 30th Street and 14th Avenue, near the campus in Rock Island. And in August 2009, she opened Cool Beanz, fell in love with the College Hill District, and has been a key to its revitalization.

She married her husband, Ian, an ICU nurse at Unity Point Trinity in Rock Island, and welcomed their first child, Lydia, born on February 3rd. Then came the pandemic.

She spoke with Jonathan Turner about her journey.

Annette Hutto, mother, wife, and small business owner, on her life during the pandemic. Cool Beanz continues curbside pickup for now and you can get information at the Cool Beanz website.

While not asking for donations, Hutto does encourage customers to donate $10 so Cool Beanz can provide free bags of coffee to first responders and hospitals in the area.

And we thank Jonathan Turner for helping us tell the stories of Quad Citizens affected by the pandemic.

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Jonathan Turner

Jonathan Turner has three decades of varied Quad Cities journalism experience, and currently does freelance writing for not only WVIK, but QuadCities.com, River Cities Reader and Visit Quad Cities. He loves writing about music and the arts, as well as a multitude of other topics including features on interesting people, places, and organizations. A longtime piano player (who has been accompanist at Davenport's Zion Lutheran Church since 1999) with degrees in music from Oberlin College and Indiana University, he has a passion for accompanying musicals, singers, choirs, and instrumentalists. He even wrote his own musical ("Hard to Believe") based on The Book of Job, which premiered at Playcrafters in 2010. He wrote a 175-page book about downtown Davenport ("A Brief History of Bucktown"), which was published by The History Press in 2016, and a QC travel guide in 2022 ("100 Things To Do in the Quad Cities Before You Die"), published by Reedy Press. Turner was honored in 2009 to be among 24 arts journalists nationwide to take part in a 10-day fellowship offered by the National Endowment for the Arts in New York City on classical music and opera, based at Columbia University’s journalism school.

See stories by Jonathan Turner