BY SHAUNA E. KEELER '09
Wearing a borrowed graduation robe and a pair of darkly rimmed glasses, Sally van Schaick made history on June 15, 1958 by becoming the first woman to receive a Union bachelor’s degree.
A promotional effort launched by then-President Carter Davidson helped land news of her degree from Union, then an all–male college, in newspapers across the United States. One friend read a story and noted an accompanying photo in a San Diego newspaper that showed Sally van Schaick leaving her house and kissing her children prior to a night class.
“I didn’t give much thought to completing a degree. But I decided that I might as well train for teaching because that would fit nicely with being the mother of a lot of kids,” said Sally van Schaick during a recent interview.
So in the mid-1950s, Sally van Schaick, a mother of five living in Schenectady who had nearly 15 years before begun pursing her degree at Duke University, rejoined college life. And after earning her bachelor’s degree, she went on to earn a master’s degree in education from Union in 1961 and later enjoyed a 32-year career as an English teacher at several schools in Schenectady and Saratoga Springs.
Union became a fully co-educational institution in 1970, when about 150 women, including transfer students, were admitted. The first graduates from that group earned degrees in 1972 and two years later about 125 women became the first to earn four-year degrees. Prior to that, in 1925, Florence Fogler Buckland became the first woman to earn a master’s degree, in the field of electrical engineering, from the College.
Sally van Schaick’s long road to Schenectady and Union began in 1941, at the outset of the U.S. involvement in World War II, when she met John van Schaick ’61. John van Schaick was then a young soldier training to fly airplanes for the U.S. Army Air Force at a base in Florida. After just six weeks, the couple married and the former Sally Brown dropped out of college, a year and a half short of a diploma at Stetson University in Deland, Fla., a college to which she had transferred to be closer to home.
“People do that during wars,” Sally van Schaick said of the quick marriage. “They get the feeling that this is the last time they are going to meet people on earth and they’d better make the most of it.”
The couple met at an Elks Club dance in Fort Myers, where John van Schaick was training to fly the B-26B Martin Marauder bomber. John van Schaick later recorded his World War II service and courtship of Sally Brown in a memoir called Surviving Against the Odds: A Bomber Pilot’s Memories from World War II in the Solomons and Elsewhere.
By the mid-1950s, the couple and new family had settled in Schenectady, where John van Schaick was working as a writer in the electronics engineering division at General Electric. At the same time, the College began accepting women in the evening division, although women were unable to enroll in daytime classes.
Sally van Schaick decided it was time to go back to college. Also, it was then that John van Schaick, who was also shy of completing his degree before the war, took advantage of what the evening division offered. The couple frequently took courses together. John van Schaick earned a bachelor’s degree in 1961 and master’s degree in education in 1964.
Despite the almost 20-year gap in her college career, Sally van Schaick felt very comfortable in the classroom.
“One of the hurdles of going back to school when you’re 35 or 40, is you’re scared to death that you’re going to be terrible because you weren’t all that great. Turns out, you’re much better. You’re more focused. It’s a breeze,” she said.
Sally van Schaick particularly enjoyed the courses taught by English and philosophy professor Carl Niemeyer. “He was an extraordinary teacher,” she recalled.
In 1990 Sally van Schaick ran as the Democratic candidate for Schenectady’s New York State Assembly seat against Republican James Tedisco ’72, who narrowly won the race and is now the minority leader in the Assembly. The couple have also been active volunteers in the Schenectady County Historical Association for many years.
Today they live about a mile from campus in a house off Stratford Road in the GE Realty Plot.