CONNECT . MOTIVATE . INSPIRE .
aware of the cost disparities for HBCUs and asked Wooley about doing a tour for a minimum honorarium. He was able to book Marsalis at the HBCUs he’d been working with like Lincoln University and Cheyney University. By the late ‘90s, Wooley confided in Connors that he was looking for a change. He had been raising his two young daughters, who were three and four, as a single dad with custodial rights. He had started working as an adjunct business professor at Wilmington University so he could be present for his daughters. When he couldn’t find a babysitter, he would often bring them to his class where they gained a business education through osmosis and got acclimated to college life.
“He took us everywhere. We were backstage and met so many people,” remembers his oldest daughter Veda Wooley, Esq. “I give 100 percent to my Dad. We grew up not watching television, and we were homeschooled in addition to going to public school. We had activities almost every day of the week – computer classes, dance. We were always in the back of the classroom when he was a professor. Eventually, we were learning a lot of the business concepts, and we would call out the answers. It gave us a lot of confidence when we went to college.” Veda Wooley would become an attorney, finishing her Juris doctor program in two years; and his youngest daughter Davina Wooley became a
computer engineer and earned two master’s degrees.
As a young man, Wooley wasn’t content with being a musician without understanding all the cogs that make up the music industry and the business of entertainment. And as he got older, he continued to grow in different parts of the entertainment business operating under his production company, Dave Wooley Productions. He moved into one of the most lucrative promoting sectors at the time - professional boxing. Back then, one of the only ways to see a live mega boxing match was to go to an arena and watch it on closed-circuit television on the big screen. Boxing was big in the 1980s and 1990s with
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