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College is, of course, staggeringly expensive and out of reach for many of us. Dale Schroeder of Des Moines, Iowa, knew it, and the selfless way he decided to help made him a legend in Iowa.
When he died, the Iowa carpenter left $3 million to 33 children he had never met.
Schroeder was a humble man who grew up poor, knew the value of a dollar and never forgot it.
His frugality was legendary. He worked as a carpenter for the same company for 67 years and his friend, Steve Nielsen, described him as a “blue-collar, lunchbox type of guy.”
According to Nielsen, Schroeder lived a simple life. Shy and quiet, he was the kind of guy who had “work jeans” and “church jeans” and who “went to work every day. He worked very hard. He was frugal. Like a lot of Iowans,” he said.
So when Schroeder passed away in 2005, people in his community assumed he didn’t have much to leave behind. They quickly discovered that they were very wrong, in the best way possible.
Schroeder had been secretly saving and saving his entire life so he could send his children to college after he passed away.
Schroeder never married and never had children of his own, which helped with his savings. But even Nielsen, who was also Schroeder’s attorney, was amazed by how much he had been able to accomplish in his lifetime.
“He said, ‘I never had the opportunity to go to college. That’s why I would like to help kids go to college,'” Nielsen said.
That lofty goal, of course, gave Nielsen pause, given Schroeder’s humble life.
Nielsen went on to tell Des Moines’ KCCI, “Finally, I got curious and said, ‘How much are we talking about, Dale?’ And he said, ‘Oh, just under $3 million.’ I almost fell off my chair.”
Schroeder friend Walt Tomenga said that it wasn’t just five and ten cents of his carpenter’s salary that he was spending.
He also hadn’t been collecting his years of Social Security checks. Tomenga said that when he passed by, the stack of checks was an inch and a half thick, all waiting to be spent on the education of young people.
Schroeder’s fortune provided 33 students with college funding ranging from $5,000 grants to full scholarships.
Schroeder insisted that he wanted his money to go directly to students, not to an institution or charity, so Nielsen and Tomenga set out to form their own 501(c)3.
They then enlisted the help of an outreach arm of the ACT testing authority, which helped develop a process that included trials and interviews to decide which students would receive aid each year to ensure Schroeder’s money went to the right kind of kids: the that they needed help. the most.
One of those children was Kira Conard. She wanted to be a therapist but she had no means to pay for her education. She told KCCI that the dilemma “almost made me feel helpless. I want to do this. I have this goal, but I can’t achieve it just because of the financial part.”
He said that when he got the call informing him that he had won one of Schroeder’s scholarships — an $80,000 full ride — he “immediately burst into tears.”
Conard was just one of nearly three dozen students whose lives were changed by Schroeder’s generosity between 2007, when the first round of scholarships was launched, and 2019, when his $3 million fortune was finally completely spent.
Now, the scholarship winners call themselves “Dale’s Kids” and occasionally gather as friends to talk about their careers as therapists, doctors and teachers. Nielsen has told them that Schroeder only made one simple request before he died.
“All we ask is that you pay,” Nielsen told them. “You can’t give it back because Dale is gone, but you can remember it and emulate it.”
Good advice for all of us.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer covering pop culture, social justice, and human interest.