Richard L. and Kathleen A. Hauke Papers (Mss. Gr. 68)

Biographical note

Richard Louis Hauke was a Professor of Botany at the University of Rhode Island from 1959-1989. Born on April 28, 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, and educated in the Catholic schools there, he earned a B.S. in Biological Sciences at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1952, received his M.A. in Botany from the University of California at Berkeley in 1954, and his Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1960.

Dr. Richard Hauke began teaching Botany at the University of Rhode Island in September, 1959. His principal area of research was the morphology, taxonomy and anatomy of the genus Equisetum (often called horsetails or scouring rushes). He took several sabbaticals to further his studies: Costa Rica, 1966-1967; University of Jordan, Fulbright Lecturer, 1973-1974; University of California at Berkeley, 1980; and Kenyatta University, Kenya, 1987-1988. Also of research interest to Dr. Hauke were botanists Agnes Arber, Edith Saunders, and Edmund Sinnott. The result of which was an article entitled "Vignettes from the History of Plant Morphology" available in the collection (see box 15B, folder 100) and on the web at http://members.aol.com/cefield/hauke/, accessed in May, 2001.

Professor Hauke served on various University committees including a term as vice-president of the Faculty Senate (1969-70). He was a founding member of the URI Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and served as president twice, remaining active until he retired in 1989, becoming Emeritus Professor of Botany, and moved to Atlanta to be with Kathleen. There he taught for an additional 10 years at Georgia State University. Professor Hauke belonged to many scientific societies including: The American Institute of Biological Sciences, Phi Sigma, The American Fern Society, Sigma Xi, The Botanical Society of America, The American Society of Plant Taxonomists, and The International Society of Plant Taxonomists. He was also elected to the honor society Phi Kappa Phi. He was particularly involved with the American Fern Society and held the offices of Treasurer, 1962-1965; Secretary, 1971-1973; Vice-President, 1976-1977; and President, 1978-1979.

Richard Hauke met Kathleen Armstrong at the Newman Catholic Center at the University of Michigan in February 1958. They were married on September 20, 1958. Together, they raised four children: Katherine (1960), Nellie (1962), Andrew (1967), and Henry (1968).

Kathleen Armstrong was born the middle of three daughters of a nurse and a pediatrician on August 27, 1935 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. As a girl she exhibited a talent for writing and was encouraged by her mother. As war brewed in 1940, changing the world, Kathleen's life changed when her father left the family and changed his medical specialty from pediatrics to anesthesiology in 1946. Kathleen's older sister had died of rheumatic fever in 1943. In 1949, her mother took a position as nurse/teacher at the Children's Hospital School in Eugene, Oregon, so Kathleen, her mother, and sister Nellie Ann moved West. In 1949 Kathleen began a family newsletter, The Jargonian, which continued until 1975. When she was 14, she persuaded the editor of the local newspaper, the Eugene Register-Guard to launch a weekly teen-age column, which she would write. It was called "Teeners Topics." The following year she was asked to add a second column "Teen of the Week." During the summer of 1951, her mother, while working on her Ph.D. at the University of Oregon, was killed in an automobile accident. Kathleen and her sister returned to Kalamazoo to live with their father and stepmother on her father's tree farm. She continued writing a teen-age column, "Teen Talk," in Kalamazoo, this time for the Kalamazoo Gazette. In 1953 she financed a trip to Europe with a series of 10 subscription newsletters which described her adventures. She postponed college for a year in order to work for Henry Holt publishers in New York. She saved her money and made her first trip to Africa, by freighter, in the fall of 1954. Kathleen earned her undergraduate degree in Journalism in 1958. While at the University of Michigan, she edited the Catholic students' newspaper. After earning her degree she married Richard Hauke and moved to Rhode Island where he began a position as an Assistant Professor of Botany. During Richard's 1967-1968 sabbatical in Costa Rica, Kathleen taught fifth grade at the Country Day School in San Jose, Costa Rica.

While Richard pursued interests in the academic community, Kathleen pursued her interests in promoting racial equality in education. In the1970's she was active in CANE (Citizens to Advance Negro Education), an organization founded to encourage and promote black students to pursue higher education. To that end, CANE established a day care center aimed at providing a preschool learning environment to encourage educational advancement in the black community. The CANE Day Care Center continues to thrive today. She edited the CANE Newsletter and, a tennis enthusiast, Kathleen founded the CANE tennis tournament in Kingston in 1969. She worked as a research assistant at Harvard University's Graduate School of Business (1971- 1972) for Professor Stuart A. Taylor, a URI graduate who, with Registrar Edmund Farrell, and communications director Polly Matzinger, had founded CANE in 1962.

Kathleen A. Hauke earned both her Master's Degree (1962) and Ph.D.(1981) in English from the University of Rhode Island. Her dissertation is entitled A Self-portrait of Langston Hughes. Kathleen was also a basketball enthusiast and in 1972 she wrote a privately-published chronicle of the first season of URI basketball coach, Claude English. (English was coincidentally one of Richard's former botany students.) Kathleen Hauke was asked to write an essay on Hughes' friend, Ted Poston, the first black to "make it" in mainstream journalism, for The Dictionary of Literary Biography. That project led to the work which consumed the rest of her trime: writing the biography, Ted Poston: Pioneer American Journalist, Athens: University of Georgia Press,1998. She also edited Poston's childhood short stories, The Dark Side of Hopkinsville (1991), and a collection of his best journalistic articles, First Draft of History (1999). She published essays on Charles S. Johnson and Frank London Brown for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (volumes 51 and 76); and on poet Julia Fields for The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997). She moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1984, to teach a course at Emory University, then became an Assistant Professor of English at one of Atlanta's historically-black institutions, Morris Brown College, in 1985. She taught part-time courses while at Morris Brown at Georgia State University and at Spelman College. In 1987-88, she joined her husband on his sabbatical in Kenya. She taught that year at the University of Nairobi and at Kenyatta University, and during the spring break making her first trip to South Africa, before the fall of apartheid. In 1990, she left teaching in order to complete the research on and writing of her books. Kathleen's journals are at the Schlesinger Library, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

During their time at URI, Richard and Kathleen Hauke saw a need within the University community for a place on campus in which Catholic students could gather as they had at the University of Michigan. To fill that need Professor Hauke, a devout Catholic, helped found the Catholic Center at URI. Although they were both active at Christ the King Church in Kingston, the Haukes were also good friends with Mary B. and John Hall, Rector of the Episcopal Chapel of Saint Augustine's located on Lower College Road. They and the Halls were active in CANE. Both couples adopted mixed-race children in 1968 and were founding members of the Rhode Island Families for Inter-Racial Adoption. He and Kathleen delivered sermons for the congregation of Saint Augustine's (see Manuscripts, box 15, folder 75 and Kathleen Hauke, Subject file, box folder 6).

The Haukes moved to Arlington, Virginia, in 1999 to be closer to their grandchildren. Richard runs the food pantry at St. Charles Borromeo Church, which serves needs of the poor. The papers of Richard L. and Kathleen A. Hauke offer a rich and interesting look into the life of an academic couple who devoted their lives to the pursuit of knowledge in their respective fields and in their dedication to equity in higher education.