Join us after dinner for desert and our second “Know Your Neighbor”, an informal, interview of member Connie McHugh.
March 26, 2017
7:00 PM
Ke ‘Olu Living Room
Connie McHugh
Consuelo Hall McHugh was born into a prominent Spanish/British/Filipino family in Manila, Philippines. She arrived in the United States when she was 16, completed high school and graduated from the University of California. She currently resides in Mill Valley, California.She is the mother of 2 sons and a daughter and the grandmother of 6. Connie and her late husband Bob McHugh joined the Hualalai Ohana in 2001.
For the past 25 years, Connie has researched and studied about World War II in the Philippines. She co-founded Memorare Manila 1945 an organization in the Philippines that yearly commemorates the over 100,000 civilians killed in the Battle of Manila.
Connie has written her own private memoir, A Child of War, and has spoken to groups in the Bay Area about her experiences. She has collaborated with her brother in establishing his Roderick Hall Collection at the Ayala Museum’s Filipinas Heritage Library in Manila. The collection, a center for the study & research of the war, consists of over 1,000 books & memoirs, interviews, archival information, films & photographs.
Connie is also a member of Bataan Legacy Historical Society based in Berkeley which, after 3 years, was successful in obtaining approval from the California Department of Education and the California Legislature to include WWII in the Philippines in the 11th grade history texts books. She has co-chaired three Bataan Legacy conferences on different topics about the war. The fourth conference will be held at the University of San Francisco on September 9, 2017, highlighting the Filipino Guerillas, the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Manila War Crimes Trials.
Connie’s talk “A Child of War” is a unique perspective from the eyes of a very young child of what it was like to live under the Japanese occupation, culminating in the Battle of Manila and finally, liberation.
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