Katherine Roueché, 96

    Katherine Eisenhower Roueché, a 50-year resident of Stony Hill Road in Amagansett and the niece of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, died on Feb. 25 at the Hampton Care Center in Southampton of a heart attack. She was 96.

    Mrs. Roueché, whom friends called Kay, was born and raised in Kansas City, Mo. Her parents were Arthur B. Eisenhower and the former Louise Grieb. She went to college at the University of Missouri.

    In 1936, she married Berton Roueché, who originated the “Annals of Medicine” series in The New Yorker magazine and was the author of 20 books. They came to the East End in 1950, living first in East Hampton Village and then in Springs, where they remodeled an old Parsons family house. In the mid-1950s, they built a house on a wooded lot on Stony Hill Road. Mrs. Roueché went to live at the care center after Mr. Roueché died, in 1994.

    Mrs. Roueché was a regular at the Springs Presbyterian Church and the Devon Yacht Club, and she was active in the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society and the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons. She and her husband had bred Springer spaniels for a number of years.

     She also loved gardening, collecting antiques, and going to the theater, especially at Guild Hall in East Hampton. In later life, she took an interest in perfecting her French and achieved fluency in her late 70s.

    She is survived by a son, Arthur Roueché of Spencer, Mass., and a granddaughter. Burial, in Massachusetts this spring, will be private.