Moyna Hudgens

The memorial for Moyna Hudgens has been set for Saturday, January 21, 2023 at 2:00 PM. The service will be held at the University Park United Methodist Church, 2180 South University Blvd, Denver, CO. However, the main entrance is actually from E Warren Ave (east of University Blvd.) And the wheelchair/walker accessible entrance is accessed from S Josephine St. from a parking lot on the north side of the church, where there is an elevator. Moyna will be interred in the University Park Sanctuary Transept Columbarium.


Moyna June (Nicholson) Hudgens passed away in her sleep on November 3, 2022 at Monarch Greens Assisted Living. She was adored for her stories and her unconditional love for family, adopted family and friends from around the world.

Moyna was born March 30, 1924 to loving parents, Lester and Mildred, in El Reno, a small railroad town, 30 miles west of Oklahoma City. She would have been the second daughter, but their first daughter, Marcine Antoinette, had died the night that she was born, 5 years before. They were religious, hardworking people. Her dad was a Special Agent for the Rock Island Railroad. He was a quiet, industrious man and the last person in the world you would guess to be a detective. However, when he single handedly captured a 6' 4" cowboy robber, the front page of the local newspaper reported on the amazing story with gusto. It seems that while Dad was investigating the Round House robbery, he noticed a pair of cowboy boots beside a haystack in a nearby field and wondered if they might have something to do with the robbery. Approaching the haystack, he called out "Police. Come out or I'll shoot." The thief crawled out and as he began to straighten up, his 6' 4" frame towered over Dad, but Dad had the gun! The thief was handcuffed and taken to jail. Unbelievably, the thief broke out of jail while the sheriff was asleep upstairs. So, a posse had to be formed the next day which hunted him down with the help of her dad. Lester was treated with great respect that day and thereafter.

Her mom was the best homemaker in town. She cooked 3 meals a day, washed their clothes, ironed them, and cleaned her spotless small house daily. She even washed the windows weekly. She was a volunteer Pink Lady at the hospital in her spare time, earning more volunteer hours than any other Pink Lady her first year.

One unusual thing happened in her earlier years, when one day one of Moyna's good friends, Billy Jane Stansel, found her fathers pistol and brought it out to show her parents. While waving the pistol about, she said; "Look what I found!" This caused quite a commotion, as Lester retrieved the pistol, and nobody was harmed. But he never again left that pistol where a child might pick it up. Later, her father did teach her how to shoot the pistol. She remembers going down to a river and tossing in empty cans. She would then practice shooting at the cans until they sunk.

Per her mother, Moyna had to practice the piano an hour a day. One summer the piano teacher was not teaching and Moyna got to participate in a program for how to speak in public. (Perhaps this was just a foreshadowing of her later performances and love of telling stories.) This she loved, but when the fall started, rather than getting (what she wanted) to continue with this new passion, her mother said that she had to start her piano lessons again. She was sufficiently talented on the piano that she was asked to perform Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor for her high school graduation. She felt that she had played that as well as she ever could, and after that, she never touched the piano again.

One fond memory was when the brand new El Reno Junior/High School was to be dedicated, they had Eleanor Roosevelt as the guest speaker.

After graduating high school, she took classes at the junior college and worked in the clothing store. One day, a friend who had moved home after attending the university, told her that she should apply out at the army air corps airfield where they could make over a dollar an hour. Since she was making 18 cents/hour, she immediately applied and was hired to work in the supply office. She had a wonderful time working on the airfield and dating all the cadets. It was not unusual for her to have three dates a week, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, often seeing the same movie all three times. Moyna was having a wonderful time

Enter Tom A Hudgens.

He was the Chief Pilot at Mustang Field Army Air Corps training base outside El Reno where Moyna was working. He sat in the second row of the Methodist Church and she in the first row of the choir, facing the congregation. After some time, she told her mother that "That Tommy Hudgens finally asked her for a date." Shortly thereafter, on their 6th date, Tom proposed marriage. Moyna was shocked since she "barely knew him." Moyna followed her mother's advice to accept but she still had doubts. With the war winding down the training base closed, whereupon Tom headed off to get a job and landed a position with United Airlines. Moyna went off to college at the University of Oklahoma for a semester. Tom wrote her everyday and called every week. Finally, one day in prayer in a church, she felt that she received a message, that everything would be okay. They married in June of 1945. They were one of the happiest couples in all the world. One of Tom's best friends once said that he did not know any other man that loved his wife more than Tom Hudgens did.

Tom had asked to be domiciled in Denver with United, but since he was at the bottom of the seniority, they were sent to Chicago. This was a big change for a small-town Oklahoma girl. However, this is where she found her lifelong community of friends. Tom & Moyna lived in several apartments and houses in the Chicago Suburban area from 1945 until 1962. They attended the LaGrange Methodist church where they were one of the founding members of the Kee Class, a bible study and social class that became their main group of friends for their entire lives. They were asked by the minister to help start a young married couples' group and they dutifully called all of the known young couples. After a very slow start, sometimes when nobody else would show up, they were transferred to San Francisco for 6 months, where Tom was flying cargo across the Pacific to support the army in Japan. When they returned the "Kee Class" had started to have a weekly attendance and would grow to have over 250 couples, who then started families. The community grew and grew. Her lifelong best friend, Melba Pollard, was one of those members. The Pollards and the Hudgens each asked the other couple to be the Godparents of their first child. Although Melba passed away 20 years ago, Moyna's goddaughter, Linda Pollard is still a beloved and devoted part of Moyna's family. When the Hudgens moved to Denver in 1962, they continued to attend Kee Class functions because they had free passes. Sometimes they would fly out in the afternoon and get back to Denver on the red eye special early the next morning.

While in the Chicago area, the entrepreneurial Tom and another United pilot started a chain of laundromats that was quite successful. And since there was no place in the suburban area where women could buy stylish maternity wear, Moyna and a friend, Ruth Dunning, started The LaGrange Maternity Store. She enjoyed the business (and the trips to New York) providing dresses and outfits that made women feel good about their clothes while pregnant.

Also in Chicago, Moyna and Tom had 4 boys born over 12 years, Bill, Jim, Bob and John. As their friends in the Kee Class had children, there was great sharing of joys of family life and sometimes sorrows. In time, each of the boys would have children of their own and currently, Moyna has 8 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.

One time in Chicago, a woman was going to come from out of town to perform a one-woman performance of a Lenten piece called "A Letter from Pontius Pilate's Wife." At the last minute due to a snowstorm, the woman was unable to attend, so Moyna's friend, Melba read the script to the group. Moyna became enchanted with the story and decided to learn and perform this dramatic rendition the next Lenten season. She would memorize the hour-long script every year and perform it in costume. For the next 50 years, Moyna performed this throughout the United States and even in Canada and Puerto Rico. And since she could fly for free on United, she would go wherever asked and only in the later years did she begin to ask for a small honorarium. She only once performed it on a public television, but it was nicely produced with an introduction and concluded with the song "Were you there when they crucified My Lord"

Moyna's one-hour performances in character included;

A Letter from Pontias Pilate's Wife
Grandma Wore Bluejeans
First Lady of the World
Mary Queen of Scots

When in 1962, they moved to Colorado, first to 250 Fair Place in Boulder, they entertained over 100 friends and children in the first summer.Then in 1963 they had their dream home built and moved to 43 Sunset Drive, Cherry Hills Village, Colorado where Moyna lived until 2014. She loved having enough room that she could invite all of her friends to come visit. And they came to visit along with new people that they met from around the world. One chance meeting on an airplane, led to a lifelong friendship with an Israeli musician, Gideon Efrati and then his son, Amir. She invited Gidi to visit while in the US and she was surprised a few weeks later when he called from the Denver bus station asking if he could come visit. He then came back almost every year.

Upon moving to Cherry Hills Village, Moyna and Tom joined the University Park Methodist Church. Tom often helped with the financial committee while Moyna went on to hold almost every lay leadership role in the church including being the first female lay leader and then chair of the church council. They were the church's delegates to the national United Methodist Conference for 17 years.

Tom was an ardent world government advocate which Moyna supported. She also took on the regional chair of the United Nations Associations. They often travelled nationally and internationally to speak for world government or attending conferences and to find others around the world seeking and working towards world peace.

Moyna also joined a local P.E.O. chapter, that currently has many of her good friends. It was in P.E.O. that she met Betty Hudgens who also lived on Sunset drive in Bel Mar. They became good friends, and the two families even bought a condo together in Vail. Later, two of her PEO sisters, Berta Trine and Mary Neptune often took Moyna on monthly adventures. One that is fondly remembered is when they took both Betty and Moyna to have lunch at a "biker bar" called the Piper Inn.

Another way that Moyna shared her love of stories is that for about 7 or 8 years, Moyna was a volunteer storyteller with the non-profit called Spellbinders. This is a group that started in the Denver area and is now national. The volunteer storytellers go out into the elementary schools and churches to tell stories to the children with the intention of giving the children a fun and entertaining oral story that would then encourage them in storytelling as well as reading. With great regret, Moyna gave up Spellbinders because she could no longer hear the high-pitched children's voices when they wanted to ask questions or make comments after she told her story.

One day years later, in the lobby of the University Park United Methodist Church in Denver, Moyna saw a tall young man smiling at her and the following dialogue ensued.

M I think I'm supposed to know you?
E Yes
M Which one of the boys are you
E Evan (church organist's son)
M Well I am so glad to see you
E I was hoping to see you as well.

You see, Evan was the church organist's son and as a young child, had free range in the church when his mother was working. One day when Moyna was telling a story, she saw Evan across from her in the circle making hushing signs. She didn't know what he was doing until she noticed the two boys sitting next to her elbowing each other and not being attentive. Sure enough, the one who was always getting into this and that at church was trying to control the other boys to help her out. And he was now a 6-foot-tall young man going to college who obviously remembered her fondly from her story telling.

After Tom passed, Moyna stayed in her home for another 8 years. She then moved into independent living at the Meridian Senior Living until 2022. She loved that several of her University Park Methodist friends also lived at the Meridian, and they continued to attend church together with a van that took them all to church each week. She also loved the variety of interesting people that she met at the Meridian where she would meet them in the dining room or in other activities.

Then in April 2022, after a hospital and rehab stay, she moved to Northern Colorado with her son Robert for 5 months, then into the lovely and loving care at Monarch Greens Assisted Living. There she passed in her sleep about noon on November 3, 2022, exactly 16 years to the day since Tom had died. Together again, they are off on their final flight into the wild blue yonder. She had said that she was ready and that she was looking forward to the great adventure.

She is survived by Cheryl Ann (widow of William), Jim (Jeanette) Robert (Anne) and John (Angela) along with grandchildren, Marina (Rick Sullivan,) Ian, Cody, Sean, Chris, Fiona, Austin and Grace along with great-grandchildren Atlas and Charlie.

Moyna will be interred in the University Park Sanctuary Transept Columbarium.