His mom converted to the LDS religion after missionaries came to the door when Hughes was a baby. "Growing up I had a bad attitude toward the Church," and he thought his mom a bit flaky. "I thought the reason we were Mormons is because the Jehovah's Witnesses didn't find her first."

Things settled down some when his mother married a steel mill union man when Hughes was five, and the couple had two daughters together. But that marriage ended in divorce when Hughes was 10. And Hughes' high school years didn't produce a scholar.

"There were a lot of things in life, where I grew up (in Pittsburgh) that I had to fight for," he recalls. "I went to a school where when you fought someone, you gained each other's respect. If you and a guy bumped shoulders in the hallway, and he didn't like the way you were lookin' at him, you went into the boys room and work it out. Whoever won, you came out friends. You knew your boundaries."

And still fighting in the boxing ring helped the bathroom brawls, too.

One day when Hughes was 16 he and a friend skipped school, a decision that would profoundly impact his life.

"He wrapped his VW around a telephone pole, me in the passenger seat. I was airlifted to the hospital, had 13 pins in one leg, nine in the other. My pelvis was wired together," he said. He spent a year in a wheelchair. The accident and aftermath "led me to a religious experience, you could say," and Hughes got serious about the LDS faith.

After he got out of the chair, Hughes worked as a bellman in an upscale Pittsburgh hotel where he learned "how to get good tips from people — make them feel like they were the king of the world."

Then came "the LDS girl."

"Her parents made it clear, she wasn't marrying anyone who didn't go on a mission. I thought I was in love, so I knew I was going" on a two-year assignment before college.

But his life took another turn before the black suit-wearing days in Australia/Papua New Guinea.

Hughes got involved in politics. Through friends he started working for then-Vice President George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign in Pittsburgh. He rose quickly through the campaign ranks, that summer after graduation, taking on more and more important assignments. And he met Joe Waldholtz, a fellow Pittsburgh Republican also working on the race.

"I loved the policy part. I would sit up after people left campaign headquarters, reading (Bush's) policy papers. And I found that I was a conservative."

Bush won and Hughes says he was offered an entry-level administrative job on the White House legislative team — a lowly position, but still good stuff for a 19-year-old. But he'd already accepted his Church calling.