Hazel Zachar Scholarship a local mainstay, but who is she?

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com

It’s just like a doctor to think he should have been named class valedictorian over a nurse.

Dr. Bob Jongewaard finally just came right out and said it to Hazel Zachar back in 1989 at the 50-year reunion of the Jefferson High School Class of ’39.

Jongewaard had gone on to practice medicine, while the former Hazel Brown — the actual valedictorian — enjoyed a career in the Army as a pediatric nurse and a public health nurse.

“He really thought he should be valedictorian,” Zachar, now 99, said, conceding that she hadn’t given it much thought in the 50 years since graduation.

Zachar ended up replying to Jongewaard like the nurse she was.

“I don’t think I was the smartest,” she replied. “I worked the hardest.”

For nearly 30 years, high-achieving girls graduating from Greene County High School have been honored with scholarships in Hazel Brown Zachar’s name from a fund she established for just that purpose.

When the high school holds its annual Senior Awards Night on May 18, three girls will again receive the Hazel Brown Zachar P.E.O. Scholarship, each award worth more than $2,000.

But 82 years after she graduated empty-handed at the top of her class, it’s well past time that Zachar is recognized at home as a true, trailblazing woman.

The resident of a San Antonio retirement community, Zachar will likely be among just a few remaining members of the JHS Class of 1939 who will cross the century mark. (Dr. Jongewaard died in 1997.) Admittedly, though, Zachar has more pressing things to think about than turning 100 next January.

“My version of long-range planning is what I’m having for dinner tonight,” Zachar quipped.

For her part, back in 1989, Zachar probably could have pulled rank on Jongewaard, himself a veteran who served in the Army Medical Corps in Korea.

After all, there was only one full-bird colonel at that reunion.

And it wasn’t him.

Zachar — who didn’t join the Army Nurse Corps until the ripe age of 31 — became one of the first women in the nation to be promoted beyond the rank of major after the signing of Public Law 90-130 by President Lyndon B. Johnson in late 1967, which removed promotion restrictions on women officers.

Before the change in law, only one woman in each service could hold the rank of colonel. And for that one woman, the rank of general was strictly off limits.

With the old restrictions removed, Zachar was swiftly promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and would retire from the Army in 1974 as a full colonel.

“I just feel blessed I’ve been able to do all these things,” she said.

Kay Finneseth, a member since 1955 of P.E.O. Chapter CZ in Jefferson who heads the organization’s scholarship committee, said they have awarded well over $100,000 since the first scholarship in 1994. Zachar’s fund — managed by the P.E.O. Foundation — will undoubtedly outlive us all.

“I feel very, very fortunate that she has done this for the girls in Jefferson,” Finneseth said.

The girls chosen to receive a scholarship all have high grades, but they must have high goals as well, Finneseth said.

Finneseth believes Zachar to be such an inspiration that she told her granddaughter about her. Finneseth’s granddaughter is in the Navy and now happens to be living in San Antonio as well, studying physical therapy on a full scholarship through Baylor University.

“My granddaughter can hardly wait to meet her,” Finneseth said.

Zachar’s story begins where so many in Greene County do: on a farm. Specifically, on Arthur Brown’s farm in Jackson Twp.

“It was in the days we could joke about things,” Zachar said. “I was Farmer Brown’s daughter.”

Actually, Farmer Brown had three daughters in all. Middle sister Marjorie would go on to find notoriety locally during World War II as Greene County’s first WAAC. The first local woman to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Marjorie eventually achieved the rank of captain, but didn’t make it a career like her sister would.

Until high school, though, Hazel Brown was the only person in her class at the one-room country school she attended.

“I was an insecure, shy, isolated country girl,” she recalled. “I was aware I was probably a few notches down from town people.”

Once in the halls of Jefferson High School, Zachar admittedly felt she had something to prove.

“I worked so hard,” she explained, “I graduated valedictorian.”

Despite Dr. Jongewaard’s long-held belief that he, not her, should have been valedictorian, it didn’t mean much in 1939.

Zachar recalls receiving a free year’s subscription to Reader’s Digest.

“I don’t even think the family baked a cake,” she said.

That lack of recognition would later factor into Zachar’s decision in 1993 to establish a scholarship in Jefferson for girls.

It also wouldn’t be the last time that recognition passed her by.

It would happen again in 1968, when, as an Army nurse since ’54, she started working toward a master’s degree in nursing at UCLA in Southern California.

Zachar recalls receiving a personal letter addressing her as a lieutenant colonel — surely a mistake, as there was only room for one female colonel in the whole of the United States Army.

Out of curiosity, she called an Army recruiter in nearby Santa Monica and inquired if he had the latest issue of the Army Times on hand. From there, she asked him to flip to the promotion list, if there was one.

There it was in black and white.

She was indeed a lieutenant colonel. The law had changed. The Army never bothered to tell her.

By her own admission, Zachar didn’t think much about her lack of recognition through the years until her involvement in P.E.O., the philanthropic women’s organization established in 1869 to further the education of women.

Suddenly, it hit her.

Her outrage was merely delayed.

“What do you mean I didn’t get a scholarship?” she said, thinking back about graduating at the top of her class in 1939 and receiving nothing to aid in her studies at Iowa State and the University of Colorado.

She set out to right a wrong.

With $20,000 in 1993, Zachar established her scholarship fund. Jefferson’s two P.E.O. chapters — CZ and MY — jointly award the local scholarships.

Today, Zachar is still active in her local P.E.O. chapter in Texas. At the age of 99, she has been attending meetings over Zoom.

“I feel rewarded that the girls are recognized,” said Zachar, who is twice widowed and without children. “It gives me a little happy feel. I feel blessed I was able to do it. The fact that I even had the idea was the gift.”