Robert Larry Hauptman

Bob Hauptman, whose prodigious skills with numbers and data analysis helped unions and social justice organizations win major gains over the years, died August 16 in Washington, DC of mantle cell lymphoma. He was 69.

He played an important role in the Miners for Democracy victory over the corrupt leadership of the United Mine Workers union in 1972. Later, he served the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in multiple high-level roles, mainly involving financial and administrative matters. He also assisted a long list of groups on financial issues, including the youth-led immigrant rights group, United We Dream; the Navajo Nation; National Security Archive, Sasha Bruce House for homeless youth, and countless others.

Hauptman was close to many in DC and throughout the country who loved him deeply and proclaimed him more a family member than a friend. Bob attended softball, soccer, and basketball games of friends’ children and didn’t miss a birthday, bar mitzvah, wedding, or graduation, despite a heavy work schedule.

If you had an Ikea bookcase to build or a frozen yogurt maker to assemble, Bob was your guy.

And if your car broke down on the Beltway, you didn’t call AAA—you called Hauptman, who would rescue you at 3 in the morning from harm’s way and offer up a cold beer in the process.

On group vacations, he’d be the first one up cooking the bacon and getting the coffee ready; he’d go off to the lake with the kids so parents could have a few peaceful moments. To those kids, who loved him dearly, he was known affectionately as “Uncle Bob.”

He regularly would help friends put on amazing parties at which his grilled lamb always was a hit. Bob never left until cleanup was done and time had been spent laughing with hosts about gaffes and misdeeds committed by those who may have been over-served during the festivities.

Robert Larry Hauptman was born on July 4, 1954, in Philadelphia to Herbert and Adele Hauptman. His father was a clothes’ contractor and his mother worked as a bookkeeper.

As a high school senior, Hauptman travelled to Charleston, West Virginia in a minivan with other classmates studying poverty in Appalachia.

His teacher at the experimental Parkway School in Philadelphia had arranged for the students to hear from Don Stillman, a leader of the Miners for Democracy (MFD) campaign, about the coal miners’ struggle for union democracy and safer coal mining practices. Discussions continued the next day---Thanksgiving---at Stillman’s house where the students were joined by Ed James, the MFD campaign manager, and a group of young miners and activists working to reform the miners’ union.

Before leaving Charleston, Hauptman called to say he planned to drop out of high school and join the campaign. Stillman and James discouraged the idea and said it couldn’t happen unless permission came from Bob’s parents and his school. “We had doubts about hiring a teenager, but realized Hauptman possessed math and data skills that Miners for Democracy really needed,” James said.

Bob walked into the MFD office with both a slide rule and a shiny, new “Bowmar Brain”—one of the very first pocket electronic calculators. He went on to make major contributions to the miners’ campaign.

In late 1972, coal miners won a huge victory when they voted to oust the corrupt regime of Tony Boyle, the United Mine Workers president. Boyle later was convicted of ordering the murders of his previous opponent, Jock Yablonski, and Yablonski’s wife and daughter.

The union’s new leadership named Hauptman a special assistant to Harry Patrick, the incoming Secretary-Treasurer. In that role, he helped rebuild the tattered accounting and financial management functions of the union, which had a net worth of more than $100 million.

The UMW then owned the National Bank of Washington, a mainline DC bank with its own corruption problems. Hauptman was a key member of the UMW team coping with the bank’s mismanagement.

“I’ll always remember Bob Hauptman, age 18, walking out of the UMW headquarters and into a stretch Cadillac sent by the bank so that he could sit at the head of their boardroom table and begin cleaning house there,” Don Stillman later recalled.

Hauptman’s skills proved key in the new reform union leadership’s bargaining with the Bituminous Coal Operators’ Association (BCOA) in 1974. The union won huge gains for coal miners, including pension increases, sick pay, higher wages, and health and safety protections.

Bob left the coal miners’ union in 1975 to study at Stanford University in economics and computer science.

His brilliant academic performance resulted in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business accepting him in its MBA program, despite his lack of an undergraduate degree. He became an Arjay Miller Scholar in the Public Management Program and graduated with his MBA in 1979.

He served as a project manager for ICF Incorporated that year and directed analysis of the U.S. natural gas market. His work was used by the Department of Energy to develop regulatory and legislative proposals on energy policy.

Bob worked on behalf of Walter Mondale’s campaign for U.S. President in 1984. He served as assistant controller of the Democratic Victory Fund, a joint project of the Mondale campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

In the mid-1980s, Hauptman helped organize large events to raise funds and awareness for the Free South Africa movement in the broader fight against apartheid rule. He also organized fundraisers in support of efforts to stop U.S. military intervention in Central America.

In 1988, Hauptman was named Vice President of ICF Kaiser, a large public policy consulting firm in Fairfax, Virginia, with expertise on financial management and planning. During his tenure, the firm’s annual revenue grew from $80 million to $700 million.

“Bob was smart and loved analysis,” recalled William Stitt, who worked with Hauptman for years at ICF Kaiser. “He was skilled at finding meaning in messy data. His reasoning demonstrated ‘hard thinking.’ If Bob said it, you could rely on it. Bob’s second act in the labor movement came in 1992 when he became special assistant to the recently elected reform president of the Teamsters union.

During his six years there, he worked on financial, accounting, and pension fund issues, including developing a national multi-employer 401(k) plan and new group benefit programs for prescriptions and Medigap insurance.

Hauptman helped organize a pair of baseball games in 1999 between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban National All-Stars. No Major League Baseball team had played in Cuba since Fidel Castro took power there in 1959.

Hopes of normalizing U.S.-Cuba ties through sports diplomacy led Hauptman to work with Orioles owner Peter Angelos. With writer Scott Armstrong, they lobbied the U.S. government to hold the exhibition in Havana under an unprecedented humanitarian license during the American embargo of Cuba.

Bob also helped recruit youth sports groups from the DC area and advanced the money for a private charter for their flight to Cuba where their games against young Cuban athletes were a big success.

In 2004, Hauptman was recruited by the two-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to handle a wide range of financial and administrative matters.

“Bob was a good person to have on your side in a fight,” one SEIU colleague remembered. “The light in his office was the last to go out; his head was usually bent over a computer screen looking for solutions others did not have the skill or patience to find.”

More recently, Hauptman served as a strategic consultant to SEIU. He helped with the union’s fair elections program to reduce barriers to an accessible and fair voting process.

As Trump’s assault on democracy worsened, Bob became even more committed to working for election justice.

He is survived by his beloved brother, Arthur M. Hauptman, and sister-in-law, Maureen McLaughlin, as well as two nieces, Megan and Hannah Hauptman.

Looking back on his years of activism, Bob recently told a podcast interviewer: “In many ways, the crowd from the miners’ campaign became my family…once you get on the bus, you’re on the bus. That was my whole life.”

Services for Bob will be private.