Catherine Yannone

Kitty was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 11,1954. Her family later moved to Victorville, a small desert town in the Mojave Desert, in 1966 where she and her siblings were raised by their parents, Mike and Lorraine Yannone.

She spent a semester at the University of Riverside for a high school program when she was 16 and was accepted to the school following the summer. She met her first husband, who was from Hawaiʻi, and they moved to the Islands in 1976, where she attended the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She fell in love with the Islands and passionately called Hawaiʻi home until her death.

Kitty planned on attending law school, but her youngest son’s illness took her on a different path. In 1980, her son Kalin, who was 11 months old, was hospitalized with spinal meningitis at Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women & Children. Kitty met other parents from the neighbor islands whose children were also hospitalized. Many could not afford to stay at a hotel during their children’s lengthy hospitalization. Witnessing their plight set Kitty on a course that would lead to her helping to coordinate a community effort to establish Hawaiʻi’s first Ronald McDonald House, and in the process would launch a 37-year career as one of Hawaiʻi’s leading communications professionals and community leaders.

In the years to follow, Kitty continued to do whatever it took, often with no experience, to get the Ronald McDonald House up and running, from helping to find a suitable house in the Judd Hillside area in Mānoa to fundraising to community relations. Her work on the Ronald McDonald House as a founding board member and its first executive director led to her being offered a job by Communications-Pacific, which had been hired to help with public relations while the Mānoa home was being developed. The Ronald McDonald House welcomed its first families in 1987.

Kitty’s first client with Communications-Pacific was Dr. Richard Kelley of Outrigger Hotels, who had coordinated the Hawaii Convention Park Council to lobby and raise money for a convention center. Kitty continued to provide communications counsel to Dr. Kelley until his death in 2022.

She briefly left the company in 1994 to pursue her own entrepreneurial interests, including becoming a principal founder of Hawaii Online, the state’s largest Internet provider at the time. During this time, she also served as vice president of the Kapiʻolani Health Foundation.

The public relations sector lured Kitty back, and she returned to the agency which was then known as Hill and Knowlton Hawaii, part of the worldwide Hill and Knowlton public relations firm. In 1998 she purchased the firm and reinstated the original name of the company – Communications-Pacific – and built a team of first-class public relations and marketing professionals by providing outstanding counsel and service to a “who’s who” of Hawaiʻi’s top companies and organizations. Over the next 25 years, she became involved in some of the state’s most challenging and controversial issues.