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THE PASSING OF BILL HUDSON, FOUNDER OF THE PROEXPORTER NETWORK Dec. 19, 2024
Source: The Amos Family Funeral Home
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Bill Hudson | William J. (Bill) Hudson was born in Kansas City, MO, on December 8, 1938. Bill was the only child of Arvia E. Hudson II of Kansas City and Maribel W. (King) Hudson of Raytown. Bill's father was an aircraft company executive, and the family moved several times after WWII -- including to Hartford, Dallas, and Wichita, and again to Warsaw, Indiana when Bill was a senior at Wichita North.
Bill's first job in 1961 after KU was with the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, where he became Head of the AEC's first Office of Industrial Cooperation in 1964. Ten years later, Bill switched careers from advanced technology to the grain business, when he worked for a grain-trading company in Toledo, OH, becoming Senior Vice President of Research.
Bill published a number of books, including Vision 2020: World Food Abundance and the Natural Advantage of America, Business Without Economists, and Intellectual Capital.
In 1988, Bill started his own company, The ProExporter Network (PRX), serving the US grain industry with a satellite-based GIS system that Bill developed with NASA. The software was used to locate most of the country's ethanol plants.
Bill's business career required extensive flying, but there was a problem -- Bill was 6 foot 10 inches tall, and had constant problems with airplane seats. Except once! On a flight from Washington to Ohio, Bill found himself in the middle bulkhead seat, next to a tall woman his age, then employed by the US Foreign Service. When Bill asked her how tall she was, she answered, "Four foot, twenty-three and three-quarters inches." Their sense of humor, and everything else, matched perfectly, and Betty L. Kane (Cleveland) and Bill were married on November 27, 1975.
Betty became a devoted step-mother to Bill's two daughters, then in high school in Toledo, and Betty later plunged into the new PRX business, taking over the accounting and all other administrative affairs. Bill and Betty moved from Toledo to Olathe in 1995, to be near to their daughters and grand kids, and have been married for 49 years.
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