WEST PLAINS, Mo. – It’s been nearly 50 years since Thayer residents Virginia (Jenny) Underwood and Winnie Marie (Dills) Russell joined over 100 other area residents to take the first classes offered by Missouri State University-West Plains in fall 1963, but their memories of that experience remain as fresh as if they had happened yesterday.
“We graduated from Thayer High School in spring 1963, and Marie moved to Kansas City and went to work, and I went to Arkansas State that summer,” Underwood recalled. “Then my dad heard about the West Plains Residence Center from G.V. Kissinger, who worked with him, and he told me I should come back home to take classes here to avoid out-of-state tuition.”
So she did, and she convinced Russell to return to this area and do the same. They moved into an apartment on Curry Street with two other friends and began their quest for a college education.
“We didn’t know if the classes here would transfer, so it was a leap of faith, not just for the faculty and administrators who ran the center, but for the students, too,” Underwood said.
Since the residence center was housed at West Plains High School at the time, classes were taught in the evenings, and sometimes students went to class every night. “If it was a five-hour class, you went all five nights; if it was three, you went three,” Underwood explained.
Classes usually started about 5 p.m. and continued until 10 p.m. “We were usually dragging by 9,” Russell said.
During the day, Underwood worked a part-time job at a local propane gas company; Russell, however, didn’t have a job. “Every weekend we’d go back to Thayer and charge food on my dad’s grocery account and take meat from the freezer at Marie’s house,” Underwood recalled. “That food would feed the four of us for a week,” Russell added.
After a semester, Russell decided to return to Kansas City and her job as a typist at Montgomery Ward entering customers’ orders. Underwood decided to stay on for two more semesters, but she had to find another place to live.
“My dad felt I didn’t need to be driving back and forth from Thayer all the time, so he mentioned my situation to G.V., and he offered to put me up at his house,” Underwood said.
Kissinger and his wife, Peggy, who also was a student at the residence center, moved out of the master bedroom in their house, relocated to a small bedroom next to the kitchen, and gave the master bedroom to Underwood. “I tried to talk them out of it, but they wouldn’t have it,” Underwood said.
After completing her three semesters, Underwood successfully transferred to the University of Missouri in Columbia and completed a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 1967. She began working with computers and eventually found a job as a junior programmer at McGraw-Hill’s California Test Bureau in Monterrey.
She spent 40 years working in the computer departments of various companies and eventually completed a Master’s in Business Administration in 1977 from Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. “It was a specialized program for working people which combined all of the classes into one weekend every three weeks,” Underwood said. “I was working for an airline company and living in Phoenix at the time, so I flew to L.A. every three weeks to take the classes.”
Meanwhile, Russell had married, had a family and moved back to Thayer “because my husband didn’t like city life.” In 1971, she decided to return to the residence center, which was still holding classes at the high school, to pursue an education degree.
“I was able to take all of the classes needed for my degree at the local campus, except for one summer, which I had to take in Springfield,” she said. “We were required to take a minimum number of classes at the main campus at that time.”
Russell completed her degree in 1975 and spent the next 31 years teaching elementary and Title I math classes in the Thayer school district. “I wouldn’t have been able to pursue my degree had the center not been here,” she said. “I had a family, and I couldn’t have gone anywhere else.”
Two of Russell’s children also took classes at Missouri State-West Plains. “Jolynn graduated with her Associate of Science in Nursing in 2005, and Pam began taking classes here but completed her speech pathology degree at the Springfield campus,” Russell said.
Underwood, too, also returned to Missouri State-West Plains as a student in 2002. “My son’s illness led me to a second career as a nurse,” she explained. After taking anatomy, physiology and microbiology at a college in Mobile, Ala., where she was living at the time, she applied to several nursing schools, including those at the University of Alabama, Arkansas State University and Missouri State-West Plains.
“I was accepted here, so we decided as a family to return to Thayer,” she said. She enrolled in the nursing program in 2002 and completed her ASN in 2004. She then completed her bachelor’s degree in nursing online through the University of Missouri in Columbia in 2005. She worked at Baxter Regional Medical Center in Mtn. Home, Ark., the University of Missouri Medical Center, and Riverways Home Health in West Plains. Currently, she works as a private duty nurse for area residents.
Not only have Underwood and Russell benefitted personally from Missouri State-West Plains, they’ve also seen how the campus has impacted other lives and area communities.
“It’s amazing! Seems like every time you go by, there’s another building,” Underwood said. “The campus has done wonderful things for the community. They’ve extended opportunities for area residents, not just those who have attended there. I think the campus influenced us and our friends to pursue an education. It really changes lives. It did me. I had wonderful opportunities because of the start I had here.”