Bernard Daly’s gift to Lake County was very generous and his gift inspired others to also be generous. There are so many examples I’m not sure where to start. An early example is Burt Snyder. Burt came to Lakeview from Plush in the early 1900’s and went to work at Thornton’s Drugstore. Burt wanted to become a pharmacist and Mr. Thornton helped him enroll in a correspondence course. When he completed the course, Burt traveled to Portland in 1910 to take the apprentice pharmacist exam. The journey took him two days by stage to Klamath Falls and then another day and a half to Portland by train. He got his license and returned to Lakeview to work for Vinton Hall and Fred Reynolds. In 1912, Burt bought out Dr. Hall’s interest and the store became known as Snyder and Reynolds.
In the early 1930’s, during the Depression, he hired a young high school kid to work as a soda jerk at the store. That kid was Charles Bogner. His parents had divorced when he was about seven and his Dad, who was a ranch manager at the ZX, arranged for Charles and his sister, Mae, to be raised by George and Hattie Stombaugh. Charles loved working at the pharmacy and Burt encouraged him to apply for the Daly scholarship. He did and, with the support of the scholarship, he went to OSU in the fall of 1935, completed his degree in 1939 and then joined the Army. He served with distinction in Africa, Italy, France, and central Europe earning the Bronze Star and, after retirement, had a successful second career with Teledyne Ryan Aeronautics. When he passed away in 2009 at age 93, he left a generous gift of $250,000 to the Daly Fund to support scholarships for others. Charles’ gift to the Fund was not the first, the last, or the largest from a former scholarship recipient. There have been many.
Back to Burt Snyder. At about the same time that Charles Bogner graduated from OSU, Burt sold his interest in the drugstore to Clifton Howard (much more about the four generations of Howard pharmacists in a later post) and was running for the state legislature. In a campaign statement published by the Bend Bulletin in May of 1938, Burt wrote, “I was born near Lakeview in 1890 and have been here since that time. My education is limited to grade and high school. I studied pharmacy in the back end of a drug store and was licensed as a registered pharmacist upon examination by the state board of pharmacy in 1911.”
Burt won that election, the next one, and the next one, and so on. He served as a member of the Oregon House of Representatives for five terms, from 1939 through 1948. He was a Republican but he was so popular that in 1940, he not only won the Republican nomination but also received enough Democratic write-in votes to win the Democratic primary. After serving in the state legislature, Snyder focused his activities on Lakeview, serving on the Bernard Daly Fund board of trustees for many years. When he died in 1964, his will established the Burt Snyder Educational Foundation which provides scholarships to Lake County youth for professional or graduate studies. It’s administered by the Daly trustees and is part of a growing family of scholarships influenced by the Daly scholarship. Others include the Collins McDonald scholarship, that provides scholarships that can be used at out-of-state and private colleges; the Anna Jones scholarship, specifically for students who graduate from Paisley High School; the Ousley scholarship for students from Lake and Klamath counties; and the most recent one – the Jean Tesche scholarship.
Jean Tesche is a 1973 Lakeview H.S. grad who received the Daly scholarship and went to UO where she studied languages, and then to Columbia for a MBA and PhD in economics and finance. After some university teaching, she worked for the U.S. Treasury, World Bank, and World Health Organization in many countries, including Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Burkina Faso, and is now in Cape Town, South Africa. Though she lives about as far away from Lakeview as you can, she’s attended every one of her class reunions. When I spoke with Jean by Skype recently, she told me that after planning for some time, she has now started a college scholarship for students from Oregon small towns who study languages. The first recipient is a young man who graduated from Klamath Falls’ Mazama High School where he studied Spanish and German. With the help of Jean’s scholarship, he is now attending OSU majoring in history and Russian language.
It’s true, generosity leads to more generosity.
Note: Many thanks to Dorothy Howard for her write up of the history of Howard’s Drugstore, “Footprings of a Small Town Drugstore;” to Karen DelAngelo, Charle’s Bogner’s daughter, who told me about her father; and to Jean Tesche and the Oregon Community Foundation for information about the Jean Tesche Scholarship.
