‘McLovin’ the Billings Community
Justin Hutchinson gives back over and over
When the Big J Show airs on weekday mornings in Billings — at 101.9 on your FM dial — Justin “McLovin” Hutchinson plays second fiddle to show host Jason “Big J” Harris. But when it comes to charitable activities under the umbrella of the show’s nonprofit fundraising arm, Big J is the sidekick and Justin is the Big Cheese.
“Every year, he is getting more and more people and businesses to jump on board with his missions,” Jason says. “His passion to help, and how genuine his efforts are, make it hard not to want to be a part of it.”
And the number of “missions” just keeps on growing. The longest-running program is Santa Claus for a Cause, which has served 1,113 families since its inception in 2005. Books for Kids, which puts one book a month throughout the school year into the hands of an ever-growing number of Billings-area elementary-age children, has distributed more than 115,000 books just since 2021.
Under Justin’s leadership, their nonprofit, The Big J Show Cares, has also given steady support to Relay for Life of Yellowstone, Billings Family Service, the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter and ZooMontana. An important one-off effort was the drive to raise money for flood relief in Carbon and Stillwater counties in the soggy summer of 2022.
In fact, it was the flood-relief drive that prompted Justin and his wife, Taylor Machler, who was heavily involved in the charitable work, to form the nonprofit organization. After the heavy flooding in June 2022, Justin would ask for donations on air and on the show’s Facebook page, and after a few hours he might go to Sam’s Club, buy cases and cases of bottled water and then drive them up to Red Lodge.
At one point, he says, Taylor said to him, “Maybe if we’re going to do this, we shouldn’t have it running through our own personal finances. Maybe we should make things a little more official, so Uncle Sam doesn’t come knocking on our door and demanding their share of all the money that was gifted.”
So now it’s official, with Justin leading the fund drives, doing all the financials and maintaining the spreadsheets. Taylor helps out where she can. Her biggest lift comes during the week when they’re narrowing down hundreds of applications for the Santa Claus for a Cause campaign. When they’ve picked the families — 70 last Christmas — Taylor types up a “story” for each one, so people making donations know what presents to buy for family members.
During that busy week, Justin says, Taylor will dedicate up to 40 hours to Santa Claus for a Cause, on top of her full-time job. During the year, they both put in hundreds of hours on charitable activities.
“And that’s just because we believe in the programs,” Justin says. “We’re just passionate about it.”
Where did that passion develop?
“The critical part — not to get too religious — but the critical part of Christianity was Jesus commanded people to love your neighbors,” Justin says. “To me that just kind of stuck. To me, that’s always been in my head that you’ve got to take care of the people around you.”
Justin’s father was in the Navy, and Justin was born in Washington state. The family spent a couple of years in Hawaii before his father retired and the family moved to Billings. In the middle of second grade, they moved to Lockwood, where Justin remained until graduating from Senior High School.
During his junior and senior years, he attended the Career Center, where he took a class in broadcasting. In the fall of 2005, his class toured the 101.9 station, where Jason had started his Big J Show just a few months earlier. During the tour, the station manager invited the students to apply for a job as a board operator “to push buttons on the weekend,” mostly during broadcasts of college football games.
Justin applied, got an interview and was hired on the spot, in early October 2005. “It was the first real, paying-taxes job that I ever had,” he says.
Two years later he was still working weekends but also coming in to produce a morning show out of Nashville. It was another job involving mostly button-pushing, and it wasn’t terribly fun or challenging, so he’d walk down the hall to watch Jason do his thing. Eventually, Jason started asking Justin to chime in on various subjects, and the two developed a rapport.
He was hired to be a full-time part of the show in the spring of 2008, and he was known from the start as “McLovin,” the name of a character in the teen comedy “Superbad,” which came out in the spring of 2007. Justin saw it with some friends, and they were as amazed as he was how closely he resembled McLovin, not just in looks but mannerisms, but even in the use of similar catch phrases.
So, McLovin it was, and McLovin it remains on the Big J Show. After all these years, Justin’s job title is still “producer,” even though there is minimal production on a talk show that’s all about spontaneity and improvisation.
Santa Claus for a Cause was the only regular charity program associated with the Big J Show when Justin started, and he soon took the lead on it, going from a dozen families or so to 50 or 60, and this past Christmas to 70, which seems to be a good level, Justin says.
It differs from similar charities by providing gifts for the whole family, not just the kids, and now also involves providing grocery gift cards, gas cards and gift cards to places like Wendy’s and Walmart.
Books for Kids began in 2020, when Joseph Kamps, a friend of Justin’s who was teaching at Bench Elementary, made a Facebook appeal for donations to buy books for his students. Justin and Taylor made a donation, but then Justin started thinking: what if they could raise enough money to buy a book a month for every child at Bench, kindergarten through fifth grade?
In 44 hours, he raised over $6,000, more than enough to expand it to the whole school. He expanded to McKinley Elementary after Kamps moved there, then added Ponderosa School too, because of a flood of support.
This spring, through a partnership with United Way of Yellowstone County and the Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools, all 21 elementary schools in Billings will give a book a month to every student in March, April and May, plus the Rimrock Learning Center and elementary schools in the Elder Grove District, Lockwood, Columbus and Absarokee — nearly 10,000 children in all.
Books for Kids means a lot to Justin because he always loved to read, but his family couldn’t always buy him the books he wanted. Now, he occasionally goes into classrooms and reads to schoolchildren, many of whom know him as “the book guy.”
“They just get so excited,” he says. “I get thank-you cards from these kids, and it’s just the coolest thing. It’s like, yeah, it makes everything worth it.”
He and Jason started supporting ZooMontana by having its director, Jeff “The Nature Guy” Ewelt on the show every Friday. Then they started buying family zoo passes to be included with the other gifts in the Santa Claus for a Cause program. And when the zoo drew heat for hosting a Drag Queen Story Hour, Justin says, the Big J Show “chose to rise above the hate” and drum up donations for the zoo. In a matter of days, they raised enough money to buy annual memberships for 25 families.
And after eight years of serving on the marketing and public-relations team for Relay for Life, Justin was looking for something new to do and joined the board of the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter. Last year he was elected board chairman, and he serves on the capital campaign that is raising money to build a new shelter. One fun event he coordinates is the Hot Dog Drive, because the shelter uses wieners to administer medication to their animals.
“They’ll send me a message once or twice a year,” he says. “They call me President Wiener. They say, ‘President Wiener, we need more hot dogs.’ We fill up their freezers with hot dogs.”
Justin says they’re proud that roughly 98 percent of donations to the nonprofit — minus a few small expenses like postage, web site maintenance and state registration fees — are “immediately put back into the programs that they are donated to.”
And for the record, Justin says he likes to “work behind the scenes — even just this article is hard for me,” because he’d much rather shine a light on other people and organizations.
“The charity truly wouldn’t exist without our donors,” he says. “I often feel like I get an inappropriate amount of credit for what we’re doing, simply because I’m the one organizing it. I don’t have a lot of money to donate, but I know how to get in touch with the people that do, and to highlight those people and make those people known.”
Justin’s dedication to charitable work still amazes Jason, his friend and co-host.
“He wasn’t rich,” Jason says. “He didn’t have all the answers. It didn’t start out where it is today, but he did the work. If you look at the numbers of cumulative giving over the years, and realize that it all goes back to that kid from Lockwood, that’s pretty dang inspiring.”
