Early life and education
Ralph Phillip Hughes was born on September 25, 1916, in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was the youngest of three sons of Ralph Bloomfield Hughes, a postman, [1] and Larene ( née Pike), the daughter of an attorney and was raised in a middle-class family. He graduated from Battle Creek Central High School and received training as an electrician. He was not drafted into the army in World War II, but joined out of patriotism, and served as a military electrician. [2]
Career
After his military service, he worked as a foreman at a factory, a position of unusual authority given his age. In the early 1940s, he left this lucrative position for the ministry after receiving a calling. Over the next 60 years, he had ministries in Michigan, Washington and Kentucky at various times. He began pastoring churches in Hastings, Bedford and Battle Creek. [3] [4] During the mid-1940s, he received a home missionary assignment to Kentucky. There, he had difficulty preaching due to his stammer and the hostile culture of the locals toward Christianity. During an interview with The Flint Journal, he recalled:
It was Saturday night. Everybody had a gun and was shooting it off. I was supposed to preach to them. When they introduced me, I was in a panic. Then I opened my mouth to preach and the stammering was gone. It never came back.
Following this, he settled in Clio, Michigan, where he pastored the Clio Assembly of God Church for 29 years. Hughes remained in active ministry into his 90s, hosting a bible study from his home. By the end of his career, he was one of Michigan's longest-active clerics, and was recognized within the Assemblies of God. [5]
Hughes visited South Africa in 1968 and preached through an interpreter. He officiated hundreds of funerals and weddings in the Flint area. [6]
In the 1980s, he moved to Blaine, Washington, known as "sin city" because of its lack of churches and high rates of gambling. There he came out of retirement and assisted his son, the Reverend Jonathan P. Hughes, in founding a church which grew to over 150 members
By the 1940 census, he had acquired his first property [7] and reportedly renovated, flipped and rented houses numerous times throughout his career.
Personal life and family
Hughes married Margaret Lucille Coville (1919 - 2004), the daughter of Percy Adelbert and Ethel ( née Marks) Covill and the great-granddaughter of Wisconsin pioneer agriculturalist Lewis Henry Coville, in LaGrange, Indiana on August 31, 1936. [8] [9] Margaret taught piano and art and painted fine china as a hobby. She and Hughes won several talent shows in Michigan for singing and trick riding. [10]
They had four children:
- Barbara Ann Hughes (b. 1937), who married Edgar Louton in 1958, and serves as a missionary in South Africa.
- Nancy Lucille Hughes (b. 1940), who married the Reverend Ronald E. Thayer.
- Ralph Steven Hughes (b. 1946), an agricultural advisor, and a graduate of the University of Michigan
- Jonathan Phillip Hughes (1947 - 1991), a pastor who graduated from Central Bible College.
Hughes died at the age of 99 at his home in Flint, Michigan in 2016 and was buried at Thetford Township Cemetery
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