Ford honored with Hauenstein Fellowship award

It is Grand Valley State University’s most prestigious award — the Col. Ralph W. Hauenstein Fellowship. This fellowship was created in recognition of Hauenstein’s extraordinary life, which exemplifies the service and leadership that Grand Valley State University seeks to inspire in its graduates.

The first fellowship will be awarded posthumously to President Gerald R. Ford, Hauenstein’s good friend. Ford’s son, Steven Ford, will accept the award on his father’s behalf during a special ceremony at Grand Valley State University. The fellowship will be awarded each year to leaders who have led our nation at the highest levels.

Col. Hauenstein Fellowship award presentation
March 15, 2011
1 p.m.
Loosemore Auditorium
DeVos Center, Pew Grand Rapids Campus
Free and open to the public

“I am so proud of Grand Valley’s close association with Ralph Hauenstein,” said Thomas J. Haas, president of Grand Valley State University. “Nearing 99 years of age, he is an extraordinarily youthful individual who has been a leader in so many fields — journalism, the military, international business, the church, and philanthropy. All of our lives are enriched by his continuing impact on our world.

“I thought it appropriate to establish Grand Valley’s most prestigious fellowship in his name. We could not be more pleased than to confer the first Col. Ralph W. Hauenstein Fellowship on his good friend, President Gerald R. Ford, whose leadership and public service have shaped the policies that have profoundly influenced the course of our nation and world.”

Hauenstein said: “It is highly appropriate that this first award be given to President Ford, an individual whose contribution to his country and fellow man is of the highest degree. I was honored to know him.”

About Col. Ralph Hauenstein
Ralph Hauenstein will celebrate his 99th birthday on March 20. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1912, he moved to Grand Rapids at the age of 12 and has called Michigan home ever since. One of his earliest memories, at the age of 5 or 6, is of handing out candy to doughboys leaving their homes for the battlefields of France. As a boy scout, he assisted Civil War veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic meeting in Grand Rapids. They arrived by car and by horse.

His service to our nation began in 1934. 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. After two and-a-half years, 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.  

After the war, Hauenstein went into international trade and partnered with European enterprises to provide goods and services to consumers in Europe and the Middle East.  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 residents from developing countries how to run a fully automated bakery and provide good jobs in their local economy.

During the Eisenhower administration, Hauenstein served as a consultant on the President’s Advisory Commission. He was awarded an honorary doctorate at Grand Valley State University in 2004 and was awarded the 2006 Slykhouse Lifetime Achievement Award by the Economic Club of Grand Rapids. Hauenstein also wrote a book about his military service called, “Intelligence Was My Line.”

By his own admission, Hauenstein has never retired. He works almost every day and is active in numerous causes. 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.

For more information, contact the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at (616) 331-2770, or visit www.allpresidents.org.