Goodwill ambassador

Marlene Anne Bumgarner is Gavilan Community College’s unofficial
goodwill ambassador.
Marlene Anne Bumgarner is Gavilan Community College’s unofficial goodwill ambassador.

The high-energy woman “talks up” Gavilan to everyone who will listen. She loves encouraging local residents to take advantage of the educational opportunities and other resources provided at South Valley’s community college.

“I promote Gavilan everywhere I go,” she declared. “I’m really a fan of Gavilan College, but also of all community colleges as well.”

Over the last two decades, Bumgarner, an instructor and a director in the Gavilan’s Child Development Program, has played a major role in promoting Gavilan.

In 1986, she began a student-exchange program where Gavilan students spent a semester at the university in Bumgarner’s hometown of Bradford, England. Few South Valley students took advantage of the opportunity, so the program folded after three years. She has fond memories of local families opening their homes to the visiting students.

But in the last several years, Bumgarner, Morgan Hill resident, has helped develop the innovative – “Teachers for Tomorrow Program” as part of Gavilan’s Child Development Department. She now serves as director of this “get-your-feet-wet” program.

“What we’re trying to do is build and maintain lower-division pathways for students who will eventually transfer and become teachers,” she said. “We can’t actually offer them credentials because that’s part of graduate classes. But we want to be able to offer someone who’ll be a teacher the chance to go into a classroom and work as tutors.”

Susan Alonzo, director of the Child Development Center at Gavilan, said Bumgarner is always willing to share her words of wisdom from years of teaching at the community college. “She’s always been there and supportive,” Alonzo said.

Bumgarner taught Alonzo when she was a student at Gavilan’s Child Development program in the 1980s. “She was always a great instructor I thought. She encouraged you. She supported you. She was there.”

Alonzo said Bumgarner is “caring” but also expects the students to be professional in their study habits. “There are assignments do, and you need to do them,” she said. “I think she’s really outgoing. She’s been involved in so many activities over the years. She’s got a very knowledgeable background.”

And, of course, she’s also active promoting Gavilan College as a South Valley resource. Her voice grows enthusiastic as she describes the financial and practical advantages of taking community college courses. Community colleges are perfect for recent high school graduates who are unsure what they want to do in terms of education, she said. They’re also great for people who want to advance their careers or simply want to take classes for fun.

Bumgarner loves Gavilan’s Morgan Hill and Hollister campuses, too, because they make it easy to take courses in those communities.

“The off-sites have really broadened our ability to serve our community in a very special kind of way,” she said. “I’ve taught at both of them … and the students are so grateful that we’re there.”

It’s been a long and very winding road for Bumgarner to get there. Her story begins in Bradford, which she describes as “out of Charles Dickens.”

“It’s an industrial city, and my parents grew up in it and were quite limited by it,” she said. “And that’s what they wanted me to escape when they took me to America.”

The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the years following World War II, ending up in Belmont.

“They came here with a goal of having me get an education,” she said of her parents. “They always felt that was something they had missed.”

But in high school, Bumgarner wasn’t so sure she wanted to seek higher education. Both her parents encouraged her to pursue a college degree, but she thought she wanted to get married.

But in her sophomore year of high school, she took a summer geometry class. That’s when her life took a major turn.

“The teacher just really made a big push for college all summer long,” she remembered. “He pulled me aside once and asked, ‘Have you ever heard of computers? Computers are the big thing. If you get into computers, you’re going to make money.’ It was one of those two-minute conversations that changed my life.”

So after graduating from high school, Bumgarner enrolled in San Mateo Community College, where she earned a two-year degree in “business data processing” – now called “computer science” – and moved to San Diego where she began earning a good living writing technical manuals.

Bumgarner did get married – to John Bumgarner, who now teaches astronomy at Gavilan. And she also got her bachelor of arts degree in social science, with a minor in anthropology in 1970 from California State University, San Diego.

The couple spent some time in New Mexico and then in Virginia, where they had their first baby. But they returned to California in 1973, taking a home on top of Mt. Hamilton, near Lick Observatory.

Bumgarner also began taking classes at San Jose State University toward a master’s degree in early childhood education, and she even filed her application in Sacramento for her teaching credentials. But a day later, her plans were derailed when she got hit by a runaway car on the mountain. The accident punctured a lung and forced her to use a walker.

Eventually, Bumgarner healed enough to begin working part-time at Heidi’s Learning Center, a private school in Gilroy. That’s when her life took another turn – still one that involved.

Bumgarner had developed an interest in cooking with natural foods – very much in vogue during the 1970s. One day, she drove up to the Whole Earth Catalog warehouse store in Palo Alto to buy whole wheat flour.

“I told one of the employees: ‘I need a book that will teach me how to cook with whole wheat.’ I’ll never forget the look on the guy’s face. He said, ‘If you write that book, I can guarantee that I’ll sell for you a least a hundred copies.'”

Bumgarner sat down and wrote a proposal, sent it off to St. Martin’s Press, and soon received a call from the editor, a gourmet chef. Bumgarner’s first cookbook, “The Book of Whole Grains,” was published in 1976. It became a best-seller.

“It was easy. I never had a book that was so easy,” she said. Wide publicity for her cookbook opened up doors. Bumgarner started teaching natural food cooking classes at the YMCA in San Jose as well as for the Adult Education class in Morgan Hill. Donna Avina, in charge at that time of Gavilan’s Community Education classes, called her up to ask if she’d be willing to teach a bread-making course.

“We filled classes like mad,” Bumgarner recalled.

She wrote a column for The San Jose Mercury News that she parlayed into a second cook book, and she opened a natural food store in downtown Morgan Hill. Teaching classes, running a business, and raising two young children kept Bumgarner very busy, but it also taxed her personal life.

One day Bumgarner received a postcard from a San Jose State professor reminding her that her master’s degree was still unfinished. She’d lose credit for the classes she’d already taken if she didn’t continue.

“My marriage was faltering at that point, and I realized I needed to make a decision about my career,” she said.

She decided to sell her store and put her energy into her degree. At that time, Avina called again.

“Dona said they have an opening in the child development department and asked if I had any interest in teaching in the regular program,” she said.

Bumgarner put in her application and soon was teaching child health and nutrition courses part-time at Gavilan’s Child Development Program. She earned her masters in early child hood education from SJSU in 1982 and her doctorate in education from Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., in 1993.

Bumgarner’s connection with Gavilan continues. She says she intends to teach there “until they kick me out.”

Community colleges show what America can be, she said. “This is where anyone can come whether they have a high school diploma or not, whether they speak good English or not, and we can prepare them for a college degree,” she said. “We can give them the skills they need and put them on the road as a wage earner. I just think that community colleges are the most wonderful thing since sliced bread.”