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New Endowed Scholarship Supports International Studies at USCB

Establishing an endowed scholarship at the University of South Carolina Beaufort is personal for Colonel Wallace Hollinger. The US Air Force veteran and longtime Sun City resident is honoring the memory of his late wife, Gerda, by supporting students pursuing international studies.

“It is a natural fit for us,” he said.

Wallace is Canadian by birth, and Gerda, who passed away in 2022, was German.

When Wallace met Gerda

When Wallace met Gerda it was 1952. He was working at a small engineering company and attending night school at New York University. One very special morning, he says, Gerda came in to interview for a secretarial position with the company’s treasurer. She quickly got Wallace’s attention.

“She was wearing a white sweater and a straight-line grey skirt,” Wallace recalls.

At the time, he happened to have two tickets to a Broadway show so Wallace asked Gerda if she would like to go to the theater with him. He says the chemistry between them was so great that two weeks later, on their second date, they decided they should go through life together. That was the beginning of their 70-year shared journey.

In 1952, the United States was engaged in the Korean police action, and Wallace had already received a letter from his local draft board when he met Gerda. He joined the United States Air Force and launched a 24-year career spent mostly flying transport aircraft around the world.

That is why the Hollinger scholarship at USCB is specifically for students who share the family’s desire to promote mutual respect between people of different countries, origins and ethnicity.

“We live in an integrated world,” Hollinger said. “And there’s nothing more important than people learning to get along with each other.”

Wallace saw a lot of the world from the cockpit of a C-124 transport plane. He clocked 5,000 hours in that aircraft, and 10,000 total hours, flying for the Military Air Transport Service. During his military career, Wallace went to Vietnam, Thailand, Kenya, the Congo, Brazil, Greece, Turkey, and many other countries in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South America.

“We flew for the Air Force, the State Department, for any governmental agency that needed cargo quickly delivered to any place in the world,” he said. “I have been in almost every country in the world.”

Gerda's War Story

One of the many countries Wallace visited as a pilot was Gerda’s native Germany. Born before World War Two, Gerda lived with her aunt and uncle while her mother was learning English and looking for work in the United States. The plan was for Gerda to join her mother, but world affairs intervened. By 1937, when Gerda was still an infant, Germany had closed its borders and she could not leave the country.

Gerda spent most of the war in Augsburg, the home of a major ball-bearing manufacturing company repeatedly bombed by the Allies. To protect the children, the citizens of Augsburg relocated them to families who lived in rural areas and away from the city. Gerda went to live with a cousin in the eastern part of Germany.

Unfortunately, that area eventually became part of Russian-occupied East Germany. The first action taken by the Russians was to evict German families from their homes and move in Russian soldiers. Homeless, Gerda and her cousin started walking westward. After a few days, Russians rounded up the Germans, placed them in train box cars and told them they were going to Siberia.

Thrown into a slow-moving box car, Gerda endured grueling, cramped and unsanitary conditions for days. Night after night, guards lined up Gerda and the other refugees and pretended to execute them. Instead of firing directly at their prisoners, the Russian soldiers would fire bullets over their heads.

At the end of this grueling trip, the Russians released their prisoners into Germany’s Western Zone, not Siberia. Away from her captors, Gerda was able to contact her family and her favorite cousin brought her back to her family in Augsburg.

Gerda was now 11 years old and had no recollection of her mother living in the United States. She was with the only family she knew, so when her mother sent for her, Gerda resisted. Her aunt and uncle had to convince her to go to the United States with the promise that if she did not like it there, they would bring her back to Germany.

Luckily for Wallace, young Gerda did like life in the U.S., but she never forgot her roots.

“Gerda’s painful childhood war story had a profound effect on her adult life and her family,” Wallace said.

As her daughter Cyndy, who also lives in Sun City, tells it:

“Mom was so skinny; she and her little friend would crawl under fences and deliver notes back and forth to the priest to let everybody know they were OK.”

Cyndy also remembers her mom telling her how as a young child, she saw a playmate blown up during an Allied bombing attack.

“Mom lived through the Second World War, I mean hands-on, and that is why international studies was so important to her,” explained her son Don, who lives in Pooler, Georgia.

In this close-knit family, Cyndy and Don are also inspired and influenced by their dad’s story.

Wallace's Story

Wallace’s childhood was quite different from Gerda’s. His family moved to Atlanta from Toronto, Canada, in 1945 when his father was transferred for work. Wallace zipped through middle school in one year and started ninth grade at age 12. By 16, he was enrolled in the aeronautical engineering program at New York University’s night school. At 18, he received that draft board letter to serve in the Korean police action.

“Uncle Sam tapped me on the shoulder,” Wallace recalls. “I said I don’t do trenches.”

While waiting for a spot in the Air Force’s pilot training program, Wallace took the opportunity to earn ratings as an observer, navigator and aircraft performance engineer. He went from being a reserve officer to regular officer. In 1976, after flying around the world in service to his country, Wallace retired as a full Colonel.

“I figured that I had a pretty successful military career, and could have stayed in for the star,” he recalls, “but I wanted to try my luck at having a civilian career.”

That second career, spanning 23 years, was working in risk management for an insurance agency in Savannah, Georgia. Wallace also taught risk management and insurance to business and community leaders, including his daughter Cyndy.

In 1999, Wallace retired for a second time, three years after moving to a new community being built near Bluffton, South Carolina.

In Sun City, Gerda and Wallace started the next chapter of their life that included a family environment filled with two adult children, several grandchildren, service to their new community, and a commitment to higher education.

According to Wallace, he and Gerda have educated all their grandchildren through master’s degrees and are waiting to educate their 10 great-grandchildren. Their generous support of higher education now also includes USCB students.

Wallace and Gerda witnessed firsthand the precarious state of world affairs in the mid-20th century. Now, their legacy includes helping future generations of students at USCB study and experience other countries in the hope of making the world a better place to live and raise a family.
 
For more information on establishing an endowed scholarship at USCB, or making a charitable donation, contact Tim Daniels, assistant vice chancellor, at 843-208-8258 or tdaniels@uscb.edu.

  -USCB-