William J. Hudson 2nd Accession collection

William J. Hudson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1922. After graduating from high school, Hudson studied languages at Princeton University. In 1942, before completing his degree program, he was selected to enter the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School (JLS) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Upon graduating from the fourteen-month language program in March of 1944, he was sent to the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York City for a course in Naval Intelligence. Afterwards, he was assigned to the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area (JICPOA) at CINCPAC in Pearl Harbor and traveled to Hawaii via the carrier, USS Franklin. There, he was one of eight editors creating two Japanese military and technical dictionaries. He also interrogated Japanese prisoners of war on Peliliu Island, where he received a battle star. During the occupation of Japan, Hudson was assigned as an interpreter for three months. In June of 1946 he was discharged, having reached the rank of Lieutenant. He returned to Princeton and graduated in 1947 with a BA degree in Linguistics. Subsequently, he served as an officer in the Naval Reserve until 1958.

After finishing his degree, Hudson entered in to the securities business with his father as a salesman, later switching to financial analysis, a field in which he remained for most of his life. In 1952 he began working for Robert Young, chairman of the Board of the NY Central Railroad. Hudson later became a private investor, specializing in water utilities. In 1970, he married Florence L. MacFarland and moved to Palm Beach, Florida. Florence died in 1995 after 24 years of marriage. He subsequently remarried to Claudia Wampole. In his free time, he continued studying rare languages, such as Basque and Sanskrit, and remained fluent in spoken Japanese.

Following WWII, Hudson stayed in contact with his JLS classmates and fellow Navy and Marine Japanese Language Officers. In 1976, Hudson helped Captain Roger Pineau USNR, a fellow graduate of Boulder’s JLS, to organize a reunion of the school in Washington DC. He then became a partner in Pineau’s efforts to research and write a history of the school and its graduates, maintaining copies of Pineau’s records, corresponding with graduates, and searching for “missing” alumni. Pineau and Hudson assisted the Alumni Association with the 1992 JLS reunion at the University of Colorado. Following Pineau’s death in 1993, Hudson became the unofficial “secretary” for the “Boulder boys”, or those who graduated from the JLS during its stay at the University of Colorado. He donated his JLS/OLS papers to the USN JLS/OLS Archival Project at the Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. In 2000, the archival project took over where Pineau and Hudson had left off. Hudson died on August 27, 2008 at his home in West Palm Beach at the age of 85. After his death, the lawyer in charge of his estate, Thomas H. Courtney, sent the remainder of his papers to the USN JLS/OLS Archival Project at the Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.