Schindler family helps Phoenix students

Leonie Schindler wasn’t able to receive the education she sought, so she wanted to encourage others to continue their schooling. Her husband Fred said that’s why the family set up a scholarship for students at Phoenix High School in Dalton in her honor.

Leonie died last year, but Fred and her nephew Bernard Blattel, a top executive at BMW, and his family stopped by Phoenix on Wednesday to see the plaque erected in her honor.

“Leonie was smart as could be. She was a brilliant woman, really. But she never had the opportunity to get a great deal of education. She had the learning that you get from the school of hard knocks,” Fred said.

Leonie was born in the mid-1930s in what was then the German state of Prussia. She was just a small girl when the Soviet Union repulsed a German invasion and began battling its way into Germany.

“They had a farm, and when the Russians came, her parents loaded her, her sister and her brother up on a wagon and said, ‘We are going for a ride.’ They left everything they had behind,” Fred said. “They lived in the forest off mushrooms and stuff for almost two years while the war was going on around them.”

After the war, the family ended up in East Germany.

“They lived there for about four or five years. Then one day, Leonie’s mother told her to put two dresses on and if anybody asked where she was going to tell them she was going to a wedding,” Fred recalled. “They crossed the border and once again left behind everything they had started to build.”

Leonie made her way to the United Kingdom and eventually to the United States.

“She came to work for a farmer in Missouri. She had a one-year contract, but she didn’t get along with the man. At the time, Claude Kirk was the governor of Florida, and his wife was German. She had read about her and knew they had children, so she wrote to the governor’s wife and got a job as their nanny,” Fred said.

Her work with the Kirks brought her to Palm Beach, where she met Fred, a native of West Palm Beach, Fla.

The two moved to Dalton in the mid-1980s.

“I was partners with a man who had a Teflon-coating business in West Palm Beach. At the time, we were doing parts for Tappan, which had a plant here in Dalton. We were looking at moving to South Carolina. But Tappan asked us to come up and look at Dalton,” Fred recalled. “So we came up and looked around and bought a building on Callahan Road.”

They became friends with Jackie Edwards, a teacher at Phoenix, and her husband Terry.

Phoenix is a special purpose high school designed for nontraditional students.

“Many of the students here are from deprived backgrounds, and Leonie understood that and wanted to help out in any way she could,” he said.

In addition to seeing the plaque for the first time, Blattel and his wife Elke both spoke to a group of Phoenix students about the importance of education.

Bernard has a doctorate in physics and math from the University of Chicago, and Elke has a bachelor’s in business administration and a master’s in marketing from the University of Illinois. Both had stopped in Dalton on their way from their home in Germany to California.

Bernard told students that an education would help them attain their goals in life and it is important to maintain a sense of curiosity about the world.

The scholarship will be awarded to one student each year through a fund established with the Community Foundation of Northwest Georgia. Edwards said the details of the scholarship are still being worked out by Fred and the Community Foundation.

“We’ve done sort of a pilot program over the last two years, with each of the students awarded $500,” said Edwards. “But that’s not what it will be eventually. When Fred passes, his assets will pass to the fund, and the scholarship will escalate each year. When we met with (Community Foundation President) David Aft, Fred indicated he wanted to begin escalating it now.”

Edwards said the scholarship is directed to the school’s top students by grade point average.

“We said they must have a 3.0 and be interested in obtaining higher education, whether that is college or technical college. But they really have to want to go, and they have to be dedicated, hardworking students. Those are the only qualifications Fred put on it,” Edwards said. “But the first two students who were chosen were really high-achieving math students. I think that was because of Bernard’s input.”

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Schindler family helps Phoenix students

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