The Donald C. & Marjorie Finch Wilson Scholarship

Marjorie Finch was born in a farmhouse on Halloween,1925, near Oketa, Kansas.  After growing up poor, she moved to Omaha during World War II where she worked in the registrar’s office at Omaha University, which became the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO).  She met Donald C. Wilson at the First Christian Church and was married in 1949.  Together in north Omaha, they raised and educated three sons, all Eagle Scouts. Marjorie was always a friend to the less fortunate and instilled strong values in her family.  Although she never completed college, Marjorie was a voracious reader, with an intuitive personality.  Throughout her life she was keenly interested in education. For a generation she was the librarian at the First Christian Church, across the street from the UNO campus.  Despite a long malignancy and chronic heart disease, she remained a lifelong learner who treasured genealogy and maintained a strong independence.  She died the day before September 11, 2001.

Donald Claud Wilson was born in 1923 in North Platte, Nebraska to parents who were the children of Nebraska homesteaders.  He was raised in Omaha where he lost sight in one eye due to a childhood accident.  After ‘squeezing four years of college into six’, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska.  Like many of his depression generation, he understood the importance of work and spent his forty year plus career at the Omaha Public Power District.  As a father, he was a PTA president, a Boy Scout leader, and a champion of his sons’ education, always stressing education as the highest priority.  Don is a lifetime ‘pillar’ at First Christian Church where he has served as a deacon, elder, board chairman, and trustee.  He was instrumental in starting the church foundation.  He remains a fit octogenarian who loves to dance.

In honor of their parents’ love of learning and their devotion to First Christian Church, the sons of Don & Marjorie have established this scholarship.