All night dance turns into longtime gift for UNL students
The summer sun already was rising when Bill March finally drove his date home.
And he already was falling for her, an adorable sorority girl from UNL.
They’d been dancing in Omaha and Council Bluffs. They’d lost track of time – and she had to go back to her hometown of Tecumseh, where she was living for the summer with her folks. It was their first date, a blind date. Bill feared it would be their last.
Her mom stood on the front porch in her nightgown.
“It wasn’t the warmest greeting I’ve ever had,” Bill says, chuckling at the memory all these years later. “But from there, it just got better and better. And we were married a year later.”
His Margie was quite a gal, he says. She liked everybody until she found a good reason not to. She had many friends. And she loved her sorority sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma.
When they married in July of 1950, Margie had just completed her junior year.
Some of her best memories of UNL took place in the Kappa Kappa Gamma house. After she died in 2000, Bill created a scholarship in her name for those Kappas – in particular, for young women in the sorority who are working their own way through school.
Over the years, he’s created five other scholarships for those Kappas in honor of other Kappas who’ve meant a lot to him and Margie, including one of their daughters and Margie’s dear mother.
Dozens of Kappas have thanked Bill over the years for that help.
Says scholarship recipient Jordan Seaman: “The stress of having to pay for something like this is definitely big when you’re going through school. You’re just grateful for those who are donating money like this.”
And those grateful Kappas have heard Bill talk about his Margie.
Says scholarship recipient Caitlyn Guenther: “I remember sitting there last year at the scholarship dinner, when I first met Bill, and he talked about his wife and literally right after we left we all said we hope somebody talks about us like that one day.
“He just glowed and he could tell so many stories about his wife, and he just loved her so much.”
Bill, a graduate of the University of Nebraska Omaha, also supports UNO’s College of Arts and Sciences and UNMC’s College of Medicine. He had to work from the time he was 10, he says, and many people helped him along the way.
“So you pass those things along,” he says. “I think the education area is one place where you really can help people, because they can build on that.”
Student support is one of the top priorities of the Campaign for Nebraska. If you, like Bill March, would like to help students achieve their dreams, please consider giving online or contact the University of Nebraska Foundation at 800-432-3216.
