Robert H. Rucker, FASLA

by Kay Tiller, Associate Editor

Bob Rucker is celebrating his “golden anniversary” as a Landscape Architect this year! In these 50 years, he has contributed greatly to the profession in many ways, not the least of which is teaching his profession to thousands of garden club members across the country and doing a public relations job for the profession that has seldom been equalled.

Bob Rucker has been asked to be the chairman of the 75th Anniversary Celebration of Texas A&M’s Landscape Architecture Department next year. It is, of course, also the 50th Anniversary of the graduate program in Landscape Architecture.

Working in a garden he planted in his grandmother’s hotel in Franklin, Texas, Bob first became interested in flowers at a young age. When he went to Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Texas A&M University), he decided to major in Landscape Architecture. He graduated in 1938 and the next year was one of the first two graduate school students to receive an MLA at A&M. In the summer of 1947, he continued his study of his chosen profession at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

His attendance at Texas A&M meant he was a member of “the corps.” Every student – at the time it was an all male college – had to participate in military training along with their college education and that led to his being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army upon his graduation from college. In January 1942, he was called to active duty during World War II and served in North Africa until he was wounded in combat, an injury that brought him his friend “Oscar”, a man-made leg to replace the one that was severed by a landmine in the Maknessey area of central Tunisia. At the time, he received a promotion to captain and was the commanding officer of Company K, 60th Division.

He was honorably discharged with a combat disability on January 4, 1944, and returned to his chosen profession. “Oscar” is well known to many members of the ASLA who know and love Bob and many have asked him to write a book about “Life with Oscar,” a chore he’s finally getting around to doing.

His first job was with the Texas Highway Department as a “roadside developer” under Jac Gubbels, the man who was brought to Texas from Holland to initiate Texas’ roadside development program, a program that is recognized today as the finest in the nation and is emulated throughout the world.

After his Army service was halted by his injuries, Rucker went back to Waco, where he had worked with the Highway Department. He became Landscape Architect and campus planner for Baylor University. That was the beginning of his university tenures. He was at Baylor for a year-and-a-half, then spent eleven years at The University of Oklahoma. Following that, he spent three years at Texas Tech University and then back to Oklahoma for another nine-year span.

It was during this time that Bob Rucker was requested by the Governor of Oklahoma to set up the Oklahoma display at the World’s Fair in New York. It was also during this time that Rucker, working with Hubert Owens of Georgia, first began the Landscape Design Program for the National Council of Garden Clubs.

The program and Rucker’s involvement in it earned him Honary Lifetime Membership in the National Council of State Garden Clubs. “Bob Rucker served as head of Landscape Design for the Council for many years,” Mrs. Robert Dooley of Dallas, said in a recent interview. “His contributions to all of us were spectacular and we all learned so very much from his lectures and slides. One of the most impressive things, I believe, is the fact that his talks were always illustrated by slides and that brought everything home to us in such graphic detail.”

As the numbers of people who wanted to go on the tours grew, he would enlist the aid of other Landscape Architects and knowledgable garden club members to accompany the tours. (This writer was privledged to be one of those hostesses, along with a registered Landscape Archtiect, in 1986 and the planning and care that went into the itinerary was fabulous – the work of Bob Rucker – and I’d like to thank him again for the invitation to be hostess on the trip,)

Last year, he hosted a number of people on a trip to South America where they visited Roberto Burle Marx at his home in Brazil and saw many of the gardens the South American landscape architectural genius had designed. This trip was made in conjuction with the Landscape Architectural Foundation, of which Rucker was a member of the board.

The public relations work that Bob Rucker has done for the profession is exhibited by the fact that, through his work with the National Council of Garden Clubs, most publicly funded park and urban design projects in many cities throughout the country must have the services of a Landscape Architect to be okayed. The garden club members make sure of that and that has, during the past few decades, made additional work for Rucker’s contemporaries and has also brought the work of Landscape Architects into the fore. Everyone who knows Bob Rucker, admires and respects him. If you didn’t see him with his cane, you would never know he had any disability at all. In his early 70’s, Bob still is extremely active, and even though he is getting around on crutches these days, he is continuing to make plans for another trip to South America later this year, as well as work on his book.

Landscape Architecture has a great advocate in Bob Rucker. Although he is now retired from active service in both the garden clubs and at Texas A&M, he is still an avid member of the Rotary International (27 years without missing a meeting, even though some of the meetings were attended in European cities). His list of projects read like a list of every possible field in which the profession is involved and in 1983, the Council of Fellows of the ASLA invested him into their group.

Robert H. (Bob) Rucker, FASLA, is truly a ?EUR??,,????'??Master of Landscape Architecture” now and he will be remembered as such long after he is no longer on the scene. We salute and thank him for all he has done for humanity, for the landscape architectural profession and for all of us who have the honor of knowing him.