Above, Virginia Visser and Dave Eldridge enjoy the Class of 1963 Reunion luncheon during Homecoming 2013 at Emporia State University.
Emporia State lost one of its most-loyal and best-loved supporters on Feb. 8, when Virginia Visser, a former First Lady of the university, died in Mankato, Minnesota, at the age of 94.
As recently as 2013, Visser — accompanied by her daughter Mary — had returned to the campus to attend Homecoming 150.
She and her husband, John, and their four daughters had lived in Emporia from 1967 to 1985 during his tenure as university president.
“I’m so caught up in what goes on in the university, I don’t feel I’ve ever lost touch with ESU,” Visser was quoted in a news article at the time. “... I like coming back here.”
The feeling was mutual. Colleagues and friends remembered Virginia Visser with affection and admiration as news of her passing spread.
Her role as First Lady had given her a high profile within the community; however, she had carved out a strong identity of her own. She completed her master’s degree in home economics at Emporia State, taught marriage and family classes at the university, was involved in opening the Bargain Box thrift store near the campus, and was well known for her quick wit and for opening the invisible social door between administration and faculty.
Gary Bleeker, former Emporia State professor of English and dean of graduate studies, of Hamilton, New Jersey, remembered Visser as a “gracious, classy and hospitable First Lady” who at the start of each fall semester invited all classified and unclassified personnel and spouses to an ice cream social on the lawn of the president’s home.
“She and John would welcome everyone by name at the front door and later mix with everyone in the backyard,” Bleeker said. “She made us all feel like family.”
Sandy Dorrel, former Emporia State faculty member, became friends with Visser when the two shared an office.
“She was very giving to everyone and always took time to really listen to her students and others,” Dorrel said. “I learned so much from her.”
For many, the friendships rooted in Emporia flourished even after the Vissers moved on to Wisconsin, Alaska and Vassar, Kansas, where the couple retired.
Dave Eldridge and his wife, Ann, were among those who stayed in touch through letters, phone calls and visits to Vassar when the Vissers retired and built their dream home on Lake Pomona. After John died in 1997, the visits continued when Virginia moved to Lawrence and, later, to Mankato.
“She was very genuine, very down-to-earth, very intelligent,” said Eldridge, former director of ESU’s admissions office, university relations, alumni association, and the National Teachers Hall of Fame. “She could relate with anyone. ... She wasn’t intimidating at all. I can’t say enough good things about her. She was awesome, one of a kind.”
Realtor Jim Pickert and Virginia Visser began a lasting friendship in the late 1960s, when both were trustees of Emporia’s St. Mary’s Hospital board of directors. He described her as a dynamic woman who got things done.
Pickert recalled Visser’s rapid response when he choked on a piece of meat during a trustees dinner.
Unable to speak and wondering whether he would see his life flash before him, Pickert hoped someone would call an ambulance. But Visser handled the emergency single-handedly.
“She, being the old Army nurse, everybody panicked but her,” he recalled. “She did the Heimlich maneuver and I coughed it up.”
Visser then asked Pickert if he was familiar with an old Chinese custom that, because she’d saved his life, would mandate Visser’s responsibility for Pickert forever. Pickert told her he’d heard that.
“She said, ‘Forget it!’” he said, laughing. “She had a quick tongue with one-liners. We enjoyed a long, long time friendship.”
Pickert’s wife, Helen, also admired Visser’s quick wit and other talents that might not have been so widely known.
Visser not only relished cooking food for her guests, she could taste foods made by others and identify what had gone into them, Helen Pickert said. Visser also hand-crafted special gifts for her friends.
“I’ve still got a cloth flag that says ‘Joy’ that she made. I put it up every year at Christmas,” Helen Pickert said. “She just did a lot of things like that.”
Visser often hosted breakfasts or lunches for a group of friends who got together to play tennis every six weeks or so. The games had evolved because President Visser was an avid tennis player, according to former Emporia State tennis coach George Milton.
“We had a trophy of some sort, and Mrs. Visser was the facilitator on all that,” said Milton, who had been part of the group.
The Miltons, too, were among the groups of friends who traveled together to Lake Pomona for dinner and conversation with the Vissers.
Milton, however, had first met Virginia Visser in her role as educator, not as First Lady. She had heard that he and his wife, Gail, didn’t have a television set in their home, so she invited him to speak to a class of about 75 students, to talk about family life with five children and no TV.
The Miltons also hosted parties that primarily drew younger faculty members and the Vissers as well.
“They fit right in,” Milton said. “They felt comfortable with any crowd. From our standpoint, it was a magnificent feeling. She was the kind of person who encouraged a mixture of people in her setting. ... She loved people herself and — as a mother — being around other mothers, other concerned parents, I think that was kind of uplifting for her.”
Before Emporia
Virginia Schuyler Visser may have been spurred to treasure life because she’d been exposed to so much death in her youth.
She was born June 26, 1922, to William and Edna Frear Schuyler in Danbury, Iowa. Virginia Schuyler had been only 11 when, during the midst of the Great Depression, her mother died of cancer.
In a family that included a grandfather and uncle who were doctors and a father who was a pharmacist, she perhaps had gravitated naturally to becoming a registered nurse. Her childhood dreams, however, could not have foreseen the travel and trials she would endure as a surgical nurse caring for wounded GIs and prisoners of war during World War II.
Her wartime memories are part of the Flint Hills Oral History Project at the Kansas State Historical Society. George Walters, professor emeritus of business at Emporia State, and Ashley Isbell in 2006 interviewed her for the project, which was edited by Loren Pennington, Emporia State professor emeritus of history. A digital copy and transcript are housed at ESU Special Collections and Archives.
With some financial help from her father and a loan from her Sunday school teacher, Virginia Schuyler had graduated in three years from Briarcliff College in Sioux City, Iowa, and enlisted in the U.S. Army nurses’ corps, which she entered with the rank of second lieutenant. Schuyler had worked in a Cherokee, Iowa, hospital while waiting notification that she had passed the State Board test to become a registered nurse.
By December 1943, she was on her way to Fort Carson, Colorado, riding with railroad workers in the caboose of a cattle train.
“They were wonderful to me,” Visser recalled, “because at that time everyone was committed to the war. ... So they shared their food with me that was on the old pot-bellied stove” in the caboose.
The oral history recorded her feelings waiting in the station in Omaha to catch the train for the final leg of the trip to Colorado. There, she watched GIs celebrating with “a little too much to drink,” soldiers leaving to report for duty, and people weeping as watched trainloads of soldiers pull away from the station.
Visser said she suddenly became strikingly aware of the separation and the seriousness of her situation.
“It was a very lonely time for me, because I realized that I was entering into a whole new world that was going to be entirely different,” she said. “... (We) had no idea what we would be doing, where we were going, or where we would serve. So there was a good deal of ... concern about what was going to happen.”
Within six weeks, she was sent overseas to serve in hospitals in several war-ravaged countries in Europe.
In England, she endured the blackouts and ducked under steel-reinforced tables to take cover during air raids and hitched a ride in a laundry truck that could take her to northern England, where her brother Fred Schuyler, a B-24 pilot, was hospitalized with serious injuries after being hit; for a time, doctors did not expect him to live. She stayed with him until he was able to be transferred to a U.S. hospital for surgery.
She and the other nurses worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, treating wounded GIs. Their courage was incredible, Visser said in the oral history.
“When the guys came back, one of the first questions they asked was, ‘Do you know where my outfit is? Have you heard about my outfit?’
Later, in France, which had been liberated, she found delight that white bread was available, after doing without for more than a year in England.
The hastily erected hospital in Dijon saw surgical nurse Schuyler assigned to the prisoner-of-war unit. Many seemed relieved to be away from battlefields, despite their injuries, she said in the oral history.
In the spring of 1945, she and other nurses were ordered to report to the 2nd Evacuation Hospital in Naumburg, Germany.
En route, at Weimar, Germany, she and a small group were taken to view the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where a few prisoners remained.
“They didn’t at all prepare us in any way for what we saw,” Visser said. “... (The) ovens were still warm and there were bodies that were ... stacked up like cordwood in huge piles.”
Her experiences during the war are recounted in a book she wrote, “Through the Years 1940-45.”
Visser also was active as a speaker at many schools and university groups, including the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
In 2006, she was a featured speaker at the International Conference on World War II at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Among the other speakers were former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Sen. George McGovern and CBS newsman Andy Rooney.
Her wartime service brought lifelong memories and a lifelong partner, too.
Virginia Schuyler had met Army Capt. John Visser at a dance in Weimar, Germany as the war was winding down. He invited her to dinner and the courtship began, despite the miles that often came between them.
Visser managed to visit the young nurse occasionally, but when she and several nurses received orders to leave Fulda, Germany, immediately and travel to Marseilles, France, about 900 miles away, she tried to reach Visser by phone at every stop along the route.
“I never did get through,” she said in the oral history. “When I got back (to the States) I had no idea where John was or where he was going to be.”
On the way back to Iowa, she stopped in Chicago to spend a few days with an aunt and called home. Her sister answered the phone and quickly asked, “Who is this Visser or Viser?”
Virginia learned that 10 or 15 letters from John Visser were waiting for her.
“He wrote and said, ‘Please don’t make any plans until I get home,’” she reminisced in the oral history.
The couple arranged to meet in Chicago, then went to Grand Rapids to meet with his family and on to Iowa to meet hers.
They were married May 29, 1946. Both attended the University of Iowa on the GI bill, living in GI trailers on campus along with hundreds of other veterans and their families.
John Visser continued his education and moved up the administration ladder until the couple settled in Emporia for a 17-year stint as president and First Lady of Emporia State.
In honor of the couple’s dedication to the university, memorial donations may be made to The John and Virginia Visser Student Athlete Scholarship or the Bargain Box Scholarship Fund, 1500 Highland St., Emporia KS 66801, or to the Mayo Clinic Health System SWMN Regional Hospice (http://mayoclinichealthsystem.org/locations/mankato/donate).
A private ceremony to celebrate Virginia Visser’s life will be held later.
Virginia Visser is survived by daughters Mary Visser of Mankato and Nancy Visser of New York, New York, and one brother, George F. Schuyler and family of La Crosse, Wisconsin. In addition to her husband, she was preceded in death by two daughters, Betty Visser and Martha Visser, and siblings Martha Clark, Fred Schuyler and Edwin Schuyler.