Paul E. Tausche of West Hartford was active and engaged at 93 and was planning a fall cruise in Portugal with his wife of 66 years, Frances, when COVID-19 claimed him April 24.
Tausche, who grew up in Wisconsin, was trained as an engineer, and worked much of his career for General Electric. Fresh out of grad school, he worked in nuclear science at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Oak Ridge was involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II and enriched the uranium that was used in the atomic bomb Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima.
Tausche first worked at Oak Ridge while working toward a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT had a facility at Oak Ridge.
He earned his master’s in 1949, a year after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in electrical engineering. Tausche then earned a master’s in business administration from the Harvard Business School in 1951.
After Harvard, with the Cold War underway, Tausche went back to Oak Ridge to work full time for the Y-12 National Security Complex, which at the time was developing the hydrogen bomb. Tausche worked on teams that produced the fuel and processes integral to the hydrogen bomb, the first of which was detonated in 1952 at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Soviets detonated an H bomb in 1953, launching the arms race.
While at Oak Ridge, Tausche met his wife in a choir in which both sang. She was a biologist at the national lab. They married in Oak Ridge in 1953. Three years later Tausche took a job with General Electric and they moved to Connecticut. They lived first in Trumbull while Tausche worked at a GE appliance plant in Bridgeport. They moved to West Hartford in 1960 when Tausche was transferred to GE’s electrical distribution and control division in Plainville.
Frances Tausche said she and her husband picked West Hartford because they had been told it had good schools. Both of their children attended West Hartford schools and then college and, like their parents, obtained advanced degrees. Their daughter, Paula Babiss, is a physician in North Carolina and son, James, runs a biotech firm near Atlanta that he helped found.
Jim Tausche said his father was always interested in math and science and that it was a big step for him and his family when he headed off to MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
“He wanted to know how things worked,” Jim Tausche said.
At GE, Tausche held a variety of high level positions that required him to travel extensively. During his 35 years with the company, he visited 140 countries, his wife and son said.
Some of those trips lasted weeks and Tausche would dictate into a cassette recorder descriptions of the places he visited, the things he saw and what he was doing, Jim Tausche said. He would then mail the tapes home and his family would listen to them during dinner.
“I would call him an incredibly adventurous person,” his son said. He would eagerly volunteer for trips to interesting places and then seek out interesting places to visit, Jim Tausche said.
Tausche also kept on top of world affairs so that he could understand what was happening in the places he visited or where the company had facilities. He experienced a handful of coups and the start of one war, his family said.
His love of traveling continued into retirement, and Tausche and his wife visited Europe, Asia and even Antarctica. He loved the foods, cultures and history of foreign countries and was always interested in trying new things, Jim Tausche said.
“I couldn’t keep him home,” Frances Tausche said.
Tausche also loved music, played the clarinet in the Oak Ridge symphony, and made regular trips to the Hartford Symphony and Tanglewood.
The Courant is working to highlight the lives of those lost to COVID-19. If you have lost a loved one, please contact David Owens at dowens@courant.com.
