Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/99748
Fred Schwengel (back row, second from right) in a family photograph with his brothers Carl, Harrold, Herbert, Forrest, sister Helene, and his mother Margaret and father Gerhardt. ance at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. His own teams at the high school also outperformed expectations, and his coaching success made it possible for him to move on after two years to a bigger job with the school district back in his college town of Kirksville, Missouri. There, in addition to getting married to his college sweetheart Ethel Cassidy and beginning a family, Schwengel kept busy with a neverending whirl of civic, religious, fraternal, and political activities. He was active in his church, and launched a breakfast Sunday school program in 1933 for local newsboys that attracted Kansas City and St. Louis newspapermen to town to write about it. He served as "Dad" for the local Masonic DeMolay youth chapter and as an officer in their statewide athletic association. As a charter member of a new business and professional men's club in Kirksville he sponsored a recreational playground program. He served his college fraternity as its national president for four years in the WINTER 2013 early 1930s and continued on after that as national secretary for many more years. When the Young Republicans organized in the county in 1936, Schwengel became a township president. He attended that year's Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and then went to presidential nominee Alf Landon's acceptance speech in Topeka, Kansas, where he tracked down the chairman of the congressional campaign committee and persuaded him to make a financial contribution to the campaign of a candidate back in Missouri that party leaders in Washington considered a lost cause. With that money to work with, the race became a competitive one and Schwengel only narrowly missed an opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. as his candidate's congressional aide. His summers were filled with temporary jobs while school was out, graduate courses at the University of Iowa, and Missouri National Guard duty. In addition to all this, by 1937 he was serving as the district president of the state high school coaches association and had been promoted to supervisor for physical instruction for the entire school district. That same year, as director of the annual May festival, an event involving 1,300 school children, he integrated the festival for the first time by having children from the segregated black schools participate alongside the white children. It was a busy life he met with boundless enthusiasm and a seemingly endless supply of energy. But with a growing family to support in hard times, when a smalltown teacher's salary could only stretch so far, Schwengel eventually decided it was time to leave the teaching profession and look for better opportunities elsewhere. In 1937 he moved to Davenport, Iowa to begin a new career in the insurance business. There he worked hard to establish himself in his new profession, eventually becoming his company's general agent for the region, and once again plunged into a wide variety of activities, just as he had in Kirksville. He remained active in his THE CAPITOL DOME 3