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Ralph Hauenstein
A Life of Leadership and Service
Ralph Hauenstein has lived an extraordinary life that exemplifies the service and leadership Grand Valley State University seeks to inspire in its graduates. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1912, Mr. Hauenstein moved to Grand Rapids at the age of 12 and has called Michigan home ever since.
One of his earliest memories -- he was five or six years old -- is of handing out candy to doughboys leaving their midwestern homes for the battlefields of France. As a twelve year old boy scout, he assisted Civil War veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic meeting in Grand Rapids. They arrived in Grand Rapids by car -- and by horse.
His service to our nation began in 1934. That year, at the age of 22, he sensed that war would break out in Europe and inevitably involve the United States. The next year, Mr. Hauenstein was commissioned in the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant and became commander of an all-African-American Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Michigan. Already as a young commander, he demonstrated a far-sighted commitment to civil rights by expanding the opportunities of the African Americans with whom he served.
After two and one-half years on active duty, Mr. Hauenstein returned to civilian life and became city editor of the Grand Rapids Herald. In December 1940, one year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he returned to active duty. During the Second World War, he rose to the rank of colonel and served under General Dwight Eisenhower as chief of the Intelligence Branch in the Army's European theater of operations. In 1945 he was among the first Americans into liberated Paris, war-torn Germany, and Nazi concentration camps. The destruction caused by warring dictators and militant ideologues steeled in him the resolve to work for better international relations and peaceful solutions to conflict.
After the war, Mr. Hauenstein saw opportunities to build bridges between the United States and a Europe devastated by war. He went into international trade and partnered with European enterprises to provide goods and services to consumers in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere where democracies were struggling. A risk-taker, he underwrote a modern bakery in Haiti, providing jobs for hundreds of workers and thousands of individual distributors at a difficult time in that nation's history. He also set up a school in Florida that taught people from developing countries how to run a fully-automated bakery and provide good jobs in their local economy.
During the Eisenhower administration, Mr. Hauenstein served as a consultant on the President's Advisory Commission.
By his own admission, Mr. Hauenstein has never retired. At the age of 97, he works almost every day and is active in numerous causes. He served as an auditor at the Second Vatican Council in Rome, was part of the team that supervised the first free elections in Russia, and contributes to numerous charitable causes. His philanthropy has benefited a variety of organizations devoted to medical research and to education. At Grand Valley, his generosity made possible the founding of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, whose mission is to inspire a new generation of leaders devoted to public service.
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