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Evelyn Wanke
Legacy honors a Hi-Line dream
by Carol Flahery |
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| Evelyn Wanke, at right with a photo of husband, Harold, working on a tractor and at left, near the homestead. |
Evelyn Wanke tends to describe other people more than she does herself. Even though there are very few "I"s in the story she tells, her presence is unmistakable. She is the barely visible ribbon tying together the stories of her family and, especially, of Harold, her husband of 46 years who died in 1995. And she is the ribbon around a surprise package that arrived at MSU last year -- a $2.7 million donation that will provide opportunities for students studying animal and range sciences.
The gift honors her late husband's wish that he had been able to go to college to become a veterinarian. While neither he nor Evelyn attended MSU, her gift will help build the MSU Animal Bioscience Teaching Building, with state-of-the-art classrooms and labs and a technology transfer center for distance education. In addition, the gift is structured so that Evelyn's heirs won't pay crippling estate tax.
Just how Wanke came to hand this gift to MSU is intimately tied to her life on the windswept land north of Rudyard, where people work hard, think things through and help make their luck.
Evelyn's story begins in 1912 when her father, Eivind Berge, left Norway. He tried to book passage on the Titanic, but his "misfortune" in missing that ship is why there is more to tell. He traveled to Alberta, Canada, and then to the United States, homesteading in Montana, just north of Rudyard.
The view near the homestead is much the same today as when her father arrived. A huge sky arches over open fields for miles in every direction. The Sweetgrass Hills are distant in the southwest, the Bears Paws far southeast. Going north, you have to be almost to the edge of the huge coulee carved by a Milk River tributary to realize that the expanse doesn't continue unbroken to the horizon. The coulee contains a banded cliff of both coal, which Berge mined, and dinosaur bones. (A teen-aged Jack Horner walked the coulee looking for bones long before he became MSU's leading dino-hunter.)
Wanke's mother, Clara Sanda, followed her brothers to Montana in 1912, where she met and married Berge. Evelyn was born in 1929, the youngest of four children. Evelyn met Harold Wanke when she was about 6 years old. On an errand to pick up groceries, her sister gave her an extra dime to buy herself and a girlfriend a treat. Out of the blue, Harold appeared and offered to carry the groceries. When Evelyn bought two Dixie cups of ice cream at the drugstore, the owner offered a third spoon so the girls could share with Harold.
"And that's the first time I remember Harold," Evelyn recalls.
Evelyn and Harold were sweethearts all through Rudyard High School, Harold a year ahead of Evelyn. She graduated valedictorian in 1947 and was offered scholarships to college. Harold couldn't afford college. Rather than leave him, Evelyn took a job at the Marias River Electric Cooperative. They married in 1949. Though they never had children, Evelyn and Harold were close to her sister Lillian's two daughters, Karen Cahill of Bozeman, and Lila Redding of Rudyard. Both are MSU graduates.
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