When you ask people why they chose to live here, most often they reply that it is the “quaintness” and the “small town” atmosphere that drew them here. If you dig deeper, what you will find is that the qualities we all love about living here are fostered and nurtured by some of the most amazing people, all who are our neighbors, if not in the exact sense of the word, in spirit.
This series is intended to introduce you, the reader, to some of our amazing neighbors you should know if you don’t already. They are the souls who give of themselves so that our community and the lives of those around them are better for it. They are truly, Unsung Heroes.
Her name is Audrey Hauth and I used to see her often in the years after we moved to Seal Beach running over the 2nd Street Bridge to Long Beach. I did not know her name then, but I would always see her and always wondered what type of determination kept her going. You’ve seen her out and about Seal Beach too. Now you are going to meet the woman who I have come to know as a most remarkable “Neighbor to Know.”
Technically Audrey is not a California native, but she feels like one. She came to Long Beach during her third-grade year, leaving a mid-west life behind, but not the values. As a young girl, she had a horse in Los Alamitos that she rode daily. She was the “bossy older sister” of two other sisters, both who remain nearby.
When college presented itself to her, she chose to go to the University of Redlands. Her love was journalism, but she chose the school for its “pretty campus and cute boys” and they did not offer journalism, so she settled for English as a major. It was here that she met the love of her life of 62 years, Luster, who was working on a master’s in communications at the time. But the Korean War in 1954 changed the course of both of their lives. Lus was sent to Naval Officer Candidate’s school and promptly upon his graduation, Audrey left school to marry and join him on a more than two year station assignment in the Philippines where he helped to win the war code decryption. To remain productive, Audrey taught nursery school children on the base, acquiring her love for teaching. During their time in the Philippines they welcomed their first daughter, Sheree.
After returning from the war, they went to Iowa where Lus worked to finish his master’s and started on his PhD. Daughter Linda was born there before they moved again, this time to Phoenix. There, Lus worked and completed his PhD. Audrey recalls the hours and hours of effort that it took her to type his master’s and PhD thesis work into five carbon copy format. From Phoenix, they made one last short stop in San Diego before Lus was offered a position teaching at Cal State University at Long Beach in 1964.
As a result of his new position, they moved to their home in Seal Beach, where they still reside 52 years later. The home at that time cost less than $35,000. They have a remarkable view straight down Taper Drive that looks out at the Ocean. By now, with both daughters in school, Hauth decided it was time to finish her own school dreams, and she enlisted at CSULB to complete her B.A. in English as well as obtaining her teaching credential in secondary education.
It was during her tenure as a teacher of 20 years at Fountain Valley High School that the teacher became the student and found her love of running. She loved the feeling of running from the start. She found it was something she could excel at. She was only running and training for 10K events when during a class assignment discussion, her class got her to reveal that her dream was to run a marathon. So they threw her a challenge.
“I am not one to back down from a challenge, so I took it,” she says. The challenge was a full marathon less than three days later in Los Alamitos—a full 26.2 in our own back yard with zero long distance training. Her students turned out to cheer her along a route that took her, as unprepared as she was, only four hours 46 minutes to complete. She lost toenails and had to crawl up the stairs backward for a week, she says, but it set off a love of long distance running that continues in her heart today.
Since that first marathon in March of 1979, Audrey has gone on to compete in 41 more. She was an original member of the Long Beach 26.2 club, a group of returning marathon runners who have competed or been involved every year the race has been run. Her personal best time ever was run at the 1984 Long Beach race with a 3:54:58 finish.
She has also run over 150 half-marathons as well and has won six total Senior Olympics Gold Medals in 1992 (3) and 1993 (3), competing in multiple short distance events. Audrey was also an original runner in the early years of what is now our local 5/10K run, running with “mostly men” she recalls.
In 1993 she was selected by the Long Beach Marathon Board of Governors to represent them in Sakado, Japan where she competed in the Sakado Mainich Half Marathon. But Audrey was forced to hang up her running shoes when in 2002 painful arthritis attacked her hip. She ran one last marathon that year, surrounded and supported by her friends who met her along the route to keep her going. She won her division for her last effort, as sad a day as it was.
Not to be left behind, however, the next year Hauth began volunteering for the race, assisting at registration in the days prior and taking to her bike on race day to provide medical support to the 26.2 club members along the route and giving hundreds of hours in the years since. Her devotion to the race earned her the “Volunteer of the Year” award in 2013 and a permanent bench bearing her name installed near the waterfront in Long Beach.
Audrey has also devoted a big portion of her life to education and specifically to CSULB where in 2010 she established the Audrey Nichol Hauth Scholarship that provides women re-entry scholarships and research grants every year who are in Communications, where she is still actively guiding the program. This program is a subset, however, of the work done through The Luster E. and Audrey Nichol Hauth Center for Communication Skills at the school, established in 1998, which provides a resources and skills training for all CSULB students, interested faculty and members of the larger social and business community in Southern California. In 2000, she received the Distinguished Alumna Award from CSULB’s College of Liberal Arts for her continued work.
Audrey does not slow down even now. She served as a volunteer for Run Seal Beach for the past five years. She and Lus have traveled all over the world. You can still see Audrey out walking at least several days a week, even after just having had a second hip replacement in October. Once a week she sets out with her posse of friends, who walk all the way to the Queen Mary, stop for lunch and then come back.
Ask what keeps her going and she quickly replies, “Because every day is a new adventure. I just know something exciting is going to happen every day and I cannot wait to find out what it will be.”
Summarizing all that she has done she tells me, “I believe there is so much good in people, I know it because I received so much more in return than I have ever given. Love lives on; you have to pass it on.”
I know personally I will work harder to live by her example. I encourage the readers to as well.
