Greetings from the Northern campus! One of the perks of working in the Alumni Office is that you get to visit with some very interesting alums. Not long ago, I received a phone call from Dr. Janet Trethewey (Education Faculty) asking if I would be interested in visiting with her aunt, Eileen Muller Buchholz, who had been a secretary for Dr. Vande Bogart in the early days of NMC. Of course, I took her up on the opportunity. This is what I found out.
In July of 1942, Eileen Muller had been a young graduate of the Business and Secretarial Science program at NMC when she was hired as a stenographer to assist Dr. G.H. Vande Bogart's secretary. When his first secretary resigned to take care of her mother and the next secretary resigned soon after, during the war, for a higher paying job, Eileen was "conscripted" to the head secretary job at $80 a month (yes, you read it right). When Eileen was offered a job in Dodson, Montana for double her salary, she felt she had to notify Dr. Vande Bogart. When she first started to work for him, she had been "scared to death" of him so this was a character building event. He gave her a hard time because there was no one else to do the job, so she accepted a raise to $110 a month. Their offices were located in the old Havre High School building during her stint as his secretary from July 1942 to December of 1944.
S. Kendrick Clark was the Registrar at that time. His desk was a box and he sat on another box to type out all the requisitions for everything to start the college.
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President Vande Bogart took care of all the faculty applications and she remembers that he had a "Filbert File" for the job applicants who were not highly qualified or were completely unacceptable. She remembers how hard Dr. Vande Bogart worked getting the school going. "He lost his job over funding in the 1940's."
As a student at Northern, she says they had no cars but it wouldn't have mattered much as gas was rationed anyway. They had to hike to Pershing for typing class and when it was cold, their instructors let them warm up before they started typing. She had enough money to go to college with a scholarship and the money her father got from selling a cow. She worked besides. Babysitting netted $.25 for the whole night and her folks would send food when they could. Students saved and rented books from past students. Things were really bad when the instructors changed textbooks. When asked about what surprised her most about Northern this trip, she said, "it looks like a real college." Thank you Eileen, for sharing your memories with us!
In my 15 years of experience in working with alums and the Alumni Association, Dr. Vande Bogart's dedication and commitment to Northern has been mentioned more than once by alums who have also been very dedicated to helping Northern. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that he has been the inspiration for many who followed in his footsteps and probably the reason the school still serves Montana's students. Thanks for reading!
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