In Memory of Anthony La Hogue

Anthony La Hogue

Spouse: Maria La Hogue
Children: Michael, Alisha
Birthdate: March 20, 1953
Blessing: January 12, 1989
Ascension: January 4, 2024
Seonghwa Ceremony: February 10, 2024

Anthony Roy La Hogue was born on March 20, 1953, in Wanganui New Zealand to Raphael Roy and Annie Margaret La Hogue. He was one of five children - Rae, Elizabeth (died in early adulthood), Peter (died in infancy), Tony, and David. After graduating high school, he worked in a bank in NZ for one year and a bank in London for three, then worked in Australia cleaning huge trucks used in mines, and in a meat-processing plant back in NZ. Tony’s M.O. was working to save enough to travel, and then traveling until he needed to work again.

Tony met the Unification Church in April 1979 in Berkeley, California, when he was approached at a bus station by Laurence Baer and a brother named Tony, also from NZ (Dr. and Mrs. Durst encouraged brothers and sisters to “find your second self” while witnessing, and that seems to have worked perfectly in this case). After hearing the Divine Principle, Tony La Hogue quickly joined and began working in a carpet cleaning company owned and run by church members, “Champion Services.” Within two months of joining the church, he moved to Houston to help the Champion branch there and in 1981 moved with Champion again, this time to New York City. The coworkers at Champion were very close-knit and many lived together or close by one another.

Through the 1980s, Champion expanded their scope of the work to include interior contracting, woodworking, and refinishing. In addition to working as a crew boss and doing sales, Tony also took on responsibility for accounting, given his previous experience working in banks. In 1989, along with seven other members of the Champion family, Tony travelled to Korea for the Blessing.

On January 12, 1989, Tony was Blessed to Maria Mikl from Klagenfurt, Austria. After their Blessing in 1989, Tony and Ria found a small apartment in Queens near the Champion community there. Soon thereafter, Tony assumed management of Champion, into which he invested his heart and effort for another two decades.

In 1990, Tony and Ria received Romania as a mission country, and Tony went there three times to conduct missionary work. The first time, he had to race back to America as Ria was giving birth to their first child weeks early, but unfortunately missed the birth due to a snowstorm over New York. Michael Seung Bok Peter was born on February 16, 1991. Parenting was tough but evidently not that bad, and Tony and Ria welcomed their second child, Alisha Sun Ae Gertrude, into the world on August 15, 1992.

Tony’s love for traveling continued and grew with his family, and together they traveled to many parts of the world. Somehow, Tony’s love of the exotic didn’t extend to food, and he always seemed to want to eat a hamburger, whether in Germany, Greece, France, or Korea. Tony loved spending time with his family – going skiing with family friends, reading books together at bedtime, or enjoying a (big) bowl of ice cream while watching a movie or the latest episode of Survivor or the Amazing Race.

Tony was an active member in both his faith community and with a nonprofit called “The Mankind Project,” which helps men heal, grow, and understand themselves. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, as a result of the Great Recession, Tony gave up Champion and eventually began working as a financial planner, life insurance salesman, and tax preparer. He was passionate about helping people, especially his brothers and sisters in the Church, do whatever possible to be financially healthy and often worked late into the night to accomplish this. He was also always generous to friends in need as well as relative strangers, donating regularly to Native American schools and church members in developing countries.

Mickey and Alisha had left New York by the mid to late-2010s, which gave Tony plenty of reasons to feed his love of travel. He and Ria attended Mickey’s Marriage Blessing ceremony in Korea in 2017 as well as his civil wedding to Nicole (née Thurner), which Alisha officiated in Hawaii in 2018. Tony often visited Alisha in Hawaii and in South Carolina, where she married Carter Collins, a Marine Corps officer, in 2023. (Tony had flunked out of a student military training program as a teenager in NZ, but somehow both of his children became connected to the US military!) Tony became a grandfather in 2020, with the birth of Mickey’s son, Elijah, and then again in 2022, when Colette was born—he loved playing with and doting on his grandkids, and they cherished “Pop pop.”

Tony spent the last few years of his life working hard during tax season, then spending at least 3 months a year with Ria in her mother’s home in Austria; and getting started on his dream of traveling around the world, with trips to Germany, Greece, the Dominican Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, and Egypt. In December 2023, Tony and Ria traveled to Barbados to spend a few weeks house sitting and enjoying the tropical beach life; however, just after Christmas, Tony contracted Dengue Fever and was hospitalized. A few days after being released, he was readmitted and passed away on January 4, 2024, at 8:20 pm, from a secondary infection that he had caught during his first hospitalization.

Tony is survived by his sister, Rae; his brother, David; David’s children, Daniel and Annie; his wife, Ria; his son, Michael, daughter-in-law, Nicole, and their two children, Elijah and Colette; his daughter, Alisha, and son-in-law, Carter; and many dear friends.

Seonghwa Ceremony

Date: Saturday, February 10, 2024 at 2:00 PM EST
Location: Manhattan Family Church (4 W 43rd Street New York, NY 10036)

To join the livestream of the ceremony click here.

The family has created a memorial fund for any donations and requests that fund be used in lieu of sending flowers. Please share any memories or stories of Tony at his memorial page.