Henry P Buller, Scholar

Buller Time has alluded to Henry Buller’s academic pursuits from time to time. In what may have been the first mention of Henry, for example, a 2014 post (here) contained his and his wife Bea’s obituaries. Henry’s obituary reported, among other things:

He received a bachelor’s degree from Bethel College, North Newton, Kan., in 1941. After completing his alternative service, the Bullers moved to Newton, Kan., in 1947, where Henry taught in area public schools. He later received his graduate degree in psychology and counseling from the University of Kansas in Lawrence. In 1961 he joined the faculty of the Lamar University psychology department, where he remained until his retirement in 1982. 

A 1 June 1936 York Daily News-Times story allows us to trace Henry’s scholarly trajectory even earlier. According to this account, Henry placed third among 1,400 seniors from 406 Nebraska high schools in a University of Nebraska scholarship contest.

Although 250 of the 1,400 seniors who entered the competition won some sort of regents’ scholarship to attend the University of Nebraska, presumably the top finishers received the highest awards. The dollar amount of the awards is unknown, as is the type of competition (test?) that the seniors underwent and when it took place.

All we really know is the identify and future plans of the top three finishers. This is where it becomes curious. According to the newspaper account, Henry planned “to enter the college of arts and sciences this fall,” that is, the fall of 1936 (recall that the winners were announced in the 1 June 1936 issue). 

However, 1936 was a momentous year for the Peter P Buller family for another reason: this was the year that Peter P, Margaretha, and their unmarried children (Sara, Maria, and Henry) moved from the farm north of Lushton to California. There is a clear disconnect between the August 1936 move west and Henry’s stated plans to enter the University of Nebraska at roughly the same time. It raises the question, When did Peter P and Margaretha decide to move west? 

If they decided before the competition took place, then Henry’s plan to attend the University of Nebraska may have been more a wish than an expectation. That is, perhaps Henry hoped to convince his parents to allow him to remain in Nebraska so he could start school in the fall. If the decision took place sometime after the competition, then it seems likely that Henry’s original plans fell apart with that decision.

It does not help that we do not know when the competition took place, but presumably it was sometime during the spring term, perhaps in April or May. One thing we do know is that Peter, Margaretha, Sara, and Maria visited Peter P’s brother J. P Buller in Hawaii from early December 1935 to late March 1936 (see here). Henry stayed behind, since he was still attending high school. Is it possible that the decision was made after the four returned from their ocean cruise? One could draw this impression from Henry’s reminiscences about his early life:

Well in 1936, after having a vacation in Hawaii with Maria and Sarah, they moved to southern California, where there was a gentleman—Pete Janzen—who Dad had helped to come from Russia in the early 1920s. He convinced Dad that southern California was the place to retire, and they came home and talked about buying some orange groves and sitting under the trees, picking them and eating them. Well, they had the sale of the farm in the summer of 1936, and we took off. (see here)

Although we cannot say for certain, it seems plausible that Peter P visited with Pete Janzen, who appears to have lived in California in 1936, either prior to or after the voyage from San Francisco to Honolulu, at which time Pete Janzen encouraged Peter P to retire in southern California. Not long after, Peter P decided to do just that. In Henry’s words, “they came home and talked about buying some orange groves.”

If this proposed reconstruction of events is accurate, then it is entirely possible that Henry did plan to attend the University of Nebraska when he entered the competition. However, by the time he learned of his third-place finish, those plans had been superseded by his parents’ decision to move the entire family to California. So it was that Henry’s academic career was placed on hold—at least for a time.

But what of the report that Peter P had helped Pete Janzen to relocate from Russia to the US? Well, that intriguing detail deserves its own future post.