Fr. Augustine Darold Hartman, O. P.

March 5, 1929 - December 20, 2020

In the former logging town of Vernonia, Oregon, on the day Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as president of the United States, the fifth son of Frank and Freida ( Chamberlain) Hartman was born. A suggestion of naming the child Herbert Hoover Hartman was mercifully vetoed by his mother, who named him Darold Herbert. Ravages of the Great Depression moved the Hartmans to Spanaway, Washington, the poorest of Tacoma’s suburbs, where his earliest memories were of hunger and the excitement generated by deliveries of canned bully beef, spam, corn meal, powdered eggs and powdered milk that turned chalky when mixed with water. When Darold was eight, the family relocated three miles east to Clover Creek, and, two years later, to Kapowsin near the foot of Mt. Rainier, where he completed elementary and high school. The family grew until there were seven boys and two girls – the first eight born within eleven years of one another. During WWII the four oldest boys joined the Navy in the cause of freedom, leaving Darold to help tend the farm. The memory of hardship in the midst of inspiring physical beauty and days bursting with manual labor, became the grist of innumerable stories that Fr. Gus enjoyed telling, and were the foundation of his love for American folk music and spirituals that capture the travails and hopes of the poor.

After high school, Darold worked as a nursing attendant at the V. A. Hospital in American Lake, WA, where he helped care for the war’s emotionally traumatized veterans. In 1948 he followed his elder brothers into the Navy, where for nine years he served as a hospital corpsman, specializing as an operating room technician, then a clinical lab and blood bank technician. There, his desire to bring healing to the wounded in body and spirit was born.

After two years of college at St. Mary’s, Moraga, CA, he entered the Dominican novitiate, where he completed his Bachelor of Philosophy and Master of

Divinity degrees. Blessed Sacrament Parish in Seattle, WA, was his first assignment, close to his childhood home. He served as an associate pastor there, then at Holy Family Cathedral in Anchorage, AK. In both places, his attentiveness to and empathy for the down and out was noticed by his brothers. The dining room table in Anchorage was replaced by a larger one to accommodate the poor that Gus invited to share the friars’ meals.

In 1979 he began ministry as a priest chaplain in Catholic hospitals in Nevada, California, Idaho and Alaska, and, finally, in Seattle. He trained in group dynamics and earned certification as a chaplain. The energy and dedication he gave to patients is summed up in a letter he wrote forty years ago. “A chaplain, representing Christ and His Church, has to be generous, if necessary, in the extreme… in time of great need I believe there should be no impediments to our availability and willingness to be of service.”

Fr. Gus returned to Oakland in 2013 as his mobility deteriorated. He passed away quietly in hospice care on Sunday morning, December 20, 2020. After a funeral Mass at St. Albert Priory, he was buried at St. Dominic’s cemetery in Benicia, CA, on December 23. He is survived by Jerry his brother and his sisters- inlaw Gail Hartman and Doris Hartman, nieces, nephews, as well as his brothers in the province of the Holy Name of Jesus. To honor the memory of Fr. Augustine, gifts may be made securely online in support of the education of Dominican brothers and priests at https:// www. opwest. org/ brdanielfraugustinememorial/.