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Marvin’s adult life has been dedicated to
this cause, and he has had a very successful
career. As testament to his contributions
to two of the most significant posts of his
career, the president of Sinclair Community
College in Dayton, Ohio, traveled to Arizona
to attend Marvin’s birthday party and
announced that the number of students that
were educated there since Marvin retired is
300,000; and Pueblo Community College in
Colorado also sent a representative to honor
Marvin as their longest standing president –
29 years. Marvin was instrumental in the
formulation, growth and success of both
schools. When Sinclair’s president
remarked to Marvin during his tribute that
he had never attended a 100th birthday party
before, Marvin quipped: “Neither have I!”
But clearly, Marvin was enjoying his
life review. A graduate of St. Olaf College
in Northfield, Minnesota, Marvin had trained
to be a chemist and was promised a job at
the large Anaconda Copper company, but by
his graduation in 1931 the company had gone
bankrupt. Unable to find work, Marvin went
to the University of Minnesota for a
Master's degree, and upon graduation, quite
by chance, was offered a job as a principal
at a small high school.
“I had no idea what a principal’s job was,”
Marvin confides, “but I thought I would try
it.” He then moved on to a larger school
and met an English teacher, Margaret, who
became his wife and with whom he had three
sons. Eventually, he heard of an opening
for a dean at Worthington, Minnesota, junior
college, as two year schools were then
called, and looking for a more lucrative
salary, he applied and was awarded the
position. It was there that Marvin began
putting his mark on education. As WWII was
declared, he wanted to develop programs that
were relevant to the times and that would
provide training for students to obtain
jobs. Marvin developed an aeronautics
program at the college and had an airport
built to train pilots for the Army Air
Corps. He took up flying, too, and it thus
began a lifelong passion that he maintained
into his 80s.
Before continuing on with Marvin’s
career, it’s important, at this juncture, to
look back on his early years in order to
judge just how far this young man had come.
Like many of his peers, he had an
unfortunate, and by today’s standards,
disadvantaged youth. But also like many of
his peers, Marvin refused to let his life be
dictated by his beginnings.
Marvin lost his mother to tuberculosis when
he was three; his younger brother was just
nine months old. Even at this young age,
Marvin felt a sense of responsibility for
his brother, a duty he would carry until
they both graduated from high school. From
his birthplace in Wisconsin, Marvin’s father
moved the family to Montana near the North
Dakota border (The Badlands) in an effort to
improve his wife’s health. The Great
Northern Railroad was just opening passage
through the northern prairies and was
offering land to homesteaders.
Marvin’s father built a small shack outside
the new town of Ismay for himself and his
wife. Marvin and his infant brother slept,
ate their meals and literally lived outdoors
in a tent erected on top of a wagon to
protect them from contracting their mother’s
disease. Marvin has vivid memories of that
time.
“After she died, the house was fumigated
and we moved inside," he recalls. "But my
father was unable to make a living on the
farm and took a job at a mercantile store in
town. His sister came out to care for us,
briefly, but we were too much for her and
she married a cowboy instead. My father
then paid other local families to let us
live with them; we moved around a lot. I
started school at the age of six, but then
dropped out so I didn’t leave my little
brother alone and began the next year when
he could come too. I soon realized the
advantage of the one room schoolhouse – I
could hear all the lessons of the other
grades and so I studied them all at the same
time. We also had an annual trip to the Mayo
Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where my
father would have us checked for TB. That
gave me a sense that there was more to the
world than the isolated area where we
lived. Eventually, my father remarried, but
that didn’t work out for us either. And so
he took us back to Minnesota to live with my
grandparents and that’s where we went to
high school. Life got better after that.
To be continued ....
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