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A memorial service will be held at 11 a. m. Saturday in Buffalo Covenant Church, 786 Kenmore Ave., Buffalo, for Karel Hulicka, a retired history faculty member who died Sunday in his Buffalo home. He was 97.
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Hulicka was drafted into the Czech army after graduating from the Czechoslav Academy of Commerce. He completed officers’ school just prior to the Munich Agreement in 1938, but the Czech army was disbanded after Nazi Germany took over the country. He studied and taught in Prague during World War II,
After the war, Hulicka earned the equivalent of a doctoral degree in economics and business administration from the Technical University in Prague and became a professor of commerce in Prague’s Industrial Arts College. He came to the United States in 1947 as a visiting scholar and decided to stay after the Communists took over his homeland in 1948. He earned a second doctorate in political science and history at the University of California-Berkeley.
An expert on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, he taught at Berkeley, the University of Minnesota and the University of Oklahoma before coming to UB in 1959.
A prolific scholar, Hulicka’s “Soviet Institutions, the Individual and Society,” co-authored and published in 1967 with his wife, Irene M. Mackintosh, SUNY Distinguished Professor at Buffalo State College, was used as a textbook in many universities.
He was listed in “American Men of Science,” the “Dictionary of International Biography,” the “International Scholars Directory,” the “International Who’s Who of Intellectuals” and “Who’s Who in the East.”
Fluent in several languages, he easily exchanged ideas and writings with academics from other countries. He frequently traveled to Central Europe and the former U. S. S. R., where he spent a semester at Moscow State University. He also lectured for a semester at the Sorbonne in Paris, and ed a group of Buffalonians on a trip to the Soviet Union.
A music lover, he played first violin in an orchestra in Prague before coming to the U.S. For many years after his retirement, he traveled to Europe twice a year and enjoyed many opera performances.
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