Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Sergeant attributes success to her mother’s tough love
YOUNGSTOWN
Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Hattie R. Hudson, a Mahoning Valley area Army recruiter, attributes her success in college and her civilian and military careers to her mother’s tough love.
She gave us standards and enforced them, Hudson explained.
“We made ourselves presentable to the community and other members of society,” she said of herself and her five brothers.
“Mother would have nothing less.”
“We shoveled snow, mowed lawns, weeded gardens and did all types of landscaping. We learned that hard work pays off, a life lesson I instill in my children,” Hudson said.
Taking her mother, Ellen Tensley’s, standards to heart, Hudson has found success at most challenges she has faced.
She was a track star at Youngstown East High School, from which she graduated in 1989 and where she is a member of its Hall of Fame for track.
She received an athletic scholarship to Slippery Rock University, where she ran the 200- and 400-yard dash events and majored in computer science. She graduated from Youngstown State University with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts.
After college, Hudson was a substitute teacher for Youngstown City Schools and eventually took a permanent position at Taft Elementary School, where she taught the fourth and fifth grades from 2011 through 2013.
Hudson, 48, joined the Army Reserve in February 1990.
While assigned to active duty in 2014, she taught an Advanced Leadership Course in 2015-16, a Senior Leadership Course, and in 2017-18 became the course manager at the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., teaching and training other instructors as well as managing the ALC and SLC programs.
“Recruiting is kind of a blessing because it allows you to meet a lot of people and generations of families,” Hudson said.
For example, she said, “The first person I recruited was an 18-year-old woman who had graduated from high school in 2017. When I recruited her in 2018, I sat around the table with four generations of her family – her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and father and two uncles. It was her great-grandmother who gave the approval.”
The highly decorated soldier furthered her education while in the military, using the G.I. Bill tuition assistance to earn her bachelor’s degree.
Hudson has been involved in the community in numerous ways, particularly with youths.
She coached the Sons of Thunder youth football team, and taught Money Matters and Entrepreneurship and how to create resumes and job applications at the Boys & Girls Club of Youngstown, where she was also a team leader.
Hudson is assisting in coaching the girls softball team at her alma mater and is a peer mentor in Youngstown Municipal Court’s Veterans Treatment Court.
She coached female track at Hayes Junior High and the former P. Ross Berry Middle School, and is an entrepreneur and owner of the Youngstown New Image Detail Shop.
Hudson, a member of Mount Calvary Pentecostal Church, has been married to Ernest Hudson of Youngstown for 21 years.
The couple have four children: Kaneesha, Toshi, Elisha and Ernest, who is also a graduate of East High and a member of the Army Reserve; and a grandson, Antonio Ford Jr.