Found this tribute to Cathy… Today is her birthday
From a high school dropout and single teenaged mother to the first woman owner of a number one radio station and the first African-American woman to lead a publicly traded company, Catherine Hughes has had quite a ride.
Catherine Hughes’ Early Days Catherine Elizabeth Woods was born in Omaha, Neb., on April 22, 1947. She was the oldest of four children and grew up in a public housing project. When she was nine years old, her parents””William, an accountant, and Helen, a nurse””gave her a transistor radio. “Her incessant listening was a portent of things to come,” Jean Sand ers writes for Nebraska State Education Association.
Catherine was an intelligent and hard working student. She was the first African-American to attend Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart, a respected Catholic girls’ school in Omaha. But at 16, she discovered she was pregnant, married the baby’s father and dropped out of school. Just two years later, the couple divorced.
Wanting to set a good example for her son, Catherine returned to Duchesne Academy and graduated in 1964. After a variety of jobs, she was made general sales manager of Howard University’s radio station, WHUR-FM in 1973. She left the station in 1978 to be general manager at Washington, D.C.’s WYCB-AM.
“rustrated at being stifled creatively,” according to Sand ers, Catherine wanted to buy her own station. With help from her husband , television producer Dewey Hughes, the couple secured investors and a bank loan to purchase WOL-AM in Washington, D.C.
Though it was the beginning of what would become Radio One, keeping the station afloat in the beginning was a struggle. Financial and marital stresses mounted, and Catherine and Dewey divorced. Catherine bought his share of the station, while she and her son, Alfred Liggins, lost their home and car. According to The Black Perspective magazine, mother and son lived at the station. Catherine “slept nights in a sleeping bag on the station’s floor and played her own LPs brought from home to fill air time.”
