Sometimes a good story doesn’t have to have any hidden gimmick. What you see is what you get. And in the case of an Iowa man, that really was reality. For some, life is simple. You live, you work and then you die. But despite thinking it’s simple, it’s often full of twists and turns you only learn once someone is gone.
For Dale Schroeder, his life was always simple. He only owned two pairs of jeans. He was never married, had no children and held the same job for 67 years: a carpenter. He also saved everything he ever earned. “He was that kind of a blue-collar, lunch-pail kind of a guy,” Steve Nielsen, a friend, said. “[He] went to work every day, worked really hard, was frugal like a lot of Iowans.”
Dale Schroeder is pictured when he was a young man, just beginning his career as a carpenter.
When Schroeder finally told Nielson about his savings and his plan to help others, he was shocked.
He said, ‘I never got the opportunity to go to college. So, I’d like to help kids go to college. Finally, I was curious and I said, ‘How much are we talking about, Dale?’ And he said, ‘Oh, just shy of $3 million.’ I nearly fell out of my chair.”
The elderly man spoke with a lawyer, setting up his plan to help ‘small-town kids from Iowa.’ After speaking to a lawyer, the carpenter expressed his wish for his wealth to help ‘small-town kids from Iowa’.
“He wanted to help kids that were like him, that probably would have an opportunity to go to college but for his gift,” Nielsen said. Since his death in 2005, Schroeder has managed to help send 33 students, dubbed ‘Dale’s Kids’, to college. Their degrees range from doctors to therapists to teachers.
Recently, ‘Dale’s Kids’ gathered to celebrate the man’s life, as well as his legacy. They displayed Schroeder’s old lunch pail, ‘as a symbol of his hard work’. Earlier this month, they were said to have got together to honor the man that changed their lives.
They gathered around his old lunch pail ‘as a symbol of his hard work’. One of the recipients, Kira Conrad, is now a therapist. She recalled the moment she learned about the donation from Schroeder.
I broke down into tears immediately.”
She had expected to be left behind as all of her highschool friends headed off to college. Instead, she is now beginning her career with no student loan debt. “For a man that would never meet me to give me basically a full ride to college,” says Conrad, “that’s incredible. That doesn’t happen.”
In fact, none of the 33 students will have to repay any of the loans back. But there was one thing that the frugal carpenter wanted from them. “All we ask is that you pay it forward,” Nielson said. “You can’t pay it back, because Dale is gone, but you can remember him and you can emulate him.”
