William “Bill” Hughes Jr was born in Hudson in 1965, at Columbia Memorial Hospital. He has lived in Hudson all his life and still resides in town with his wife of twenty-two years. 

Bill is the oldest of four siblings, including two sisters and a half-sister. His father was the fourth child of fourteen children, and growing up, Bill had “hundreds,” of cousins, the majority of whom also resided in Hudson. His family lived at 12 Warren Street until Bill was six, when they moved to a new single-family home on State Street. Bill recounts the wide variety of restaurants and stores on Warren Street when he was a child and remembers that when they moved to State Street, he felt like they had moved to an entirely different town. He was raised in the Shiloh Baptist Church and is still devout today, considering the church to be the center of many of his fond childhood memories. 

Bill remembers that Hudson had a thriving working-class population and many factories in the area, but also recalls that around the time he was fifteen or sixteen, the quality of life in town began to degrade. Drugs became a problem in town; there were many police raids; and Warren Street was considered a dangerous place. Many of the shops on Warren Street closed their doors. Around 1995, the antique boom began to take place in Hudson, which brought with it the movement of Hudson’s gay community. Bill recalls that this was a shocking development for a town which, up until then, had been very conservative. 

Bill is legally blind and has progressively lost vision since the age of five, when he underwent surgery to remove cataracts. This led to glaucoma, which went undiagnosed for many years and left him unable to join the army as he had planned to in his teen years. After high school, he worked at Burger King for five years, and then took on another job at Walmart before a family friend, the Grandinetti's, recommended he look into employment with the county. In 2003, he decided to run for city politics, becoming Hudson’s first black Alderman. He held this position for four years before becoming County Supervisor in 2007, which he held until 2017. 

Bill discusses his experience in politics at length, including the programs that he developed and advocated for during his time as Supervisor, such as the Greater Promise Neighborhood program, the Re-Entry program, and the mentoring program at CGMHA. He recalls the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests as a key point in his concern for police reform and his efforts to start the LEDI (Law Enforcement Diversity Initiative), and how the Hudson Police responded to the program. He thinks that the political divide in Hudson (and throughout the country) has become much worse in the last few decades, and highlights housing as the most important issue impacting Hudson currently. 

Though Bill is not involved in county politics at the moment, he wants to create a think tank to focus on the solutions he thinks could benefit Hudson, including pilot programs for housing, the closing of Hudson Correctional so the land can be used for property development, and the merging of Hudson and Greenport. Bill closes the interview by relating a story from his county government days when he sued the County for racial and disability discrimination, which ended in his election to County government and the installation of a new ethics code.