Marce Herz

Athlete • Teacher • Pioneer




Welcome

Marce Herz. Athlete • Teacher • Pioneer. A Biographical Exhibit



“

Never be afraid of dying. Only be afraid of not living.

Marce Herz


Marcelle "Marce" Helen Barkley Herz (Barkley is her maiden name; she went by Marce or Marcelle Herz after her marriage) achieved recognition as a world class athlete in track and field and skiing, taught preschool and elementary-aged children throughout Northern Nevada, served in various social organizations and on boards, and was a pioneer in youth sports education in the state. She also brought her competitive spirit to golf and developed an award-winning design business. Marce was well-known for her magnificent seasonal displays, especially during Christmas. Following her death, the Reno YWCA continued to hold an annual benefit fundraiser in her honor for nearly twenty years. The YWCA Marce Herz fundraiser represented an especially important honor reflecting both her and the organization’s commitment to empowering women and to overcoming racism. She left a legacy that still today continues to flourish.

Born in Madras, Central Oregon, on December 7, 1911, Marce was one of eleven children of Rev. James Hickman Barkley, and the third child of his second wife, Viola Fenn. Marce’s four oldest siblings, Crawford, Maggie, Gordon, and Ruth, were born to her father’s first wife, Minnie (née Martin). James and Minnie began their marriage in Texas — James was originally from Kentucky but had spent many of the early years of his youth in the post-Civil War South — eventually landing in the Pacific Northwest where Minnie passed away in 1903. James remarried in 1904, and together James and Viola would go on to add seven children to their family. Marce spent portions of her childhood in Oregon, then Nevada, and, finally, California. Later, she returned to Northern Nevada where she would spend the rest of her life.

Her life in Nevada began in 1916 when the family moved to Nevada City, NV, a cooperative colony just east of Fallon, and then to the short-lived mining town of Fairview, near Dixie Valley, some 120 miles east of Reno. The Barkley family spent a few years in the Dixie Valley area where they also acquired a homestead within the Valley itself before moving to Rocklin and then Sacramento, California, where Marce would spend the remainder of her childhood. After her graduation from Sacramento High, Marce attended the University of Nevada, Reno where she "double majored" in the sciences and in education.

After earning a bachelor of science in Zoology and a high school teaching credential in 1933, Marce began a teaching career working with young, elementary-aged children in several rural Nevada towns, including Stillwater and Yerington. Later, she took a position at Mt. Rose Elementary School in Reno where she remained for a number of years until the onset of World War II. During the war years, she was briefly in Hawthorne, the site of a major munitions storage facility, and then took on the challenge of running a single room school in South Lake Tahoe where her charges were famed for collecting mountains of recyclable materials on behalf of the war effort. During the waning years of the war, she laid the groundwork for her own private school, the Fennway school (named for her mother, Viola), briefly incarnated as separate girls and boys summer camps at Lake Tahoe, then as a day school just down the street from Mt Rose Elementary in Reno. Marce was an early and effective proponent of the then emerging Outdoor Education movement.

Marce had a zest for life, and she believed that all children should get the chance to learn, regardless of economic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion. She was passionate in her belief that sports and outdoor education were good for everyone, but especially for children, and that sports played an integral role in developing and contributing to a child’s academic performance. A member of the generation of girls in the 1920s United States who experienced the first bloom of women's athletics, Marce pushed boundaries and ensured young women in Reno had athletic opportunities decades before Title IX made such opportunities the law of the land.

In January 1946, Marce married Reno engineer, Walter Herz. Both Marce and Walter would continue to serve the greater Northern Nevada region, Marce as an advocate for accessible physical education and Walter as an active member of the local engineering association, longtime participant in Nevada's Cooperative Snow Survey, eventual Reno Recreation and Parks Commission chair, and vice president at Sierra Pacific Power. Both had a love of skiing and joined many backcountry expeditions under the tutelage of UNR professor, Dr. James Church, who in 1908 pioneered a method of snow survey still employed today to understand spring runoff.

Marce also wrote. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, her Slalom Column appeared as a regular feature in the regional evening newspaper, the Reno Evening Gazette, and she served as a member of the Olympic press corps, covering the 1960 Winter Games near Lake Tahoe. Marce developed great skill in skiing after her introduction to the sport during her undergraduate years. As a talented and competitive skier who had earned the title of state champion in multiple events, she brought extensive knowledge of the sport to her journalism. At the time, a woman sportswriter, whatever the sport, rarely appeared in the nation’s press journalism nor in the nascent television industry.

Marce passed away in 1964 from cancer, a disease she stoically kept hidden from even her loved ones. She was very modest about her accomplishments and would be surprised to learn that a subsequent generation named a school after her, the Marce Herz Middle School in Reno, Nevada. It is no accident. Her work on behalf of children and sports was central to her life as a teacher and involved citizen, and she was a talented and tenacious competitor. She pursued her goals simply because she believed in them. One might wonder why schools end up with the names they do, often of somewhat obscure figures only known to a smattering of scholars and enthusiastic avocational historians. We think you should know why Marce's name graces this school. Those who knew Marce Herz remember her as a force of nature, and her life, legacy, and enduring spirit continue to inspire generations of Northern Nevadan residents.

This exhibit serves as an on-line counterpart of the exhibit about Marce at the Marce Herz Middle School. We invite you to explore Marce's life and contribution below and at the school.




Breaking Trail

An oral history of Marce Herz.

We suggest that you start with the following oral history recorded by the Shared History Program at the Mathewson IGT Knowledge Center of the University of Nevada, Reno on April 6, 2019. Nancy O'Connell interviews Howard Herz, Marce's son, and Alicia Herz, Marce's granddaughter.




Growing Up

Madras, Oregon, located in the central, "high" part of the state and where Marce was born, developed into a small agricultural community dependent on dry land wheat farming during the initial decades of the twentieth century. Marce’s year of birth, 1911, was the same that Madras first incorporated as a town, and for a few short years, the economy of Madras boomed. The construction of the Oregon Central Railroad supercharged the local economy, and the Barkley family prospered. Business, ranching, and politics, all part of the Oregon mix, were the backdrop of Marce’s upbringing.

Marce’s father, James Hickman Barkley, had moved the family to Wasco, Oregon in 1908 and then to Madras in 1910 from Washington state where he had enjoyed a varied career as a farmer, rancher, road commissioner (a local official in charge of road construction and maintenance), irrigation canal developer, businessman, Evangelical Christian preacher, hotelier, solicitor, politician, IWW official, and radical, rabble rousing lecturer in the years just prior to the major labor "Wobblies" free speech struggle in 1909 Spokane. In Oregon, Barkley continued this mosaic of occupations, often simultaneously, even briefly publishing a newspaper. He served as pastor of the First Christian Church community in Wasco before turning to business and ranching in Madras and Bend. Throughout his life, James Barkley was an almost perennial candidate to local and national office. He ran for United States Congress three — perhaps four— times, though never gaining sufficient votes to win a seat.

Over the immediate years prior to Marce's birth, the Barkley family had lived in and near Spokane, Washington, including periods in the suburban northeast of the city, the downtown Hotel Clement which the family managed, and south of the city in the tiny town of Plaza, Washington, where at a nearby ranch Marce’s father had married her mother. During one of James’s Congressional campaigns, the family briefly moved to Seattle, a convenient hub for a circuit of political lectures and rallies. Marce’s older siblings remember Seattle as a period of financial distress, but it was the kind of distress associated with an under-financed political campaign. It was not the only period of hardship the family experienced. The trust-fueled financial meltdown of 1907, a dress rehearsal for the calamity of 1929, was particularly hard. But the family survived and grew.

The Barkleys seem to have generally preferred a more rural life with earlier periods in Marienfeld, Martin county, Texas, Temple near Austin, a ranch outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico where one of Marce’s older sisters, Maggie Francis, lived for a week and was buried, Twist in mountainous Okanogan county, Washington, followed by Brewster and Plaza, then Wasco, Madras, and Bend in Oregon. Farms, ranches, homes, and businesses, were bought, sold, and traded in a dizzying succession often keeping the family at the leading edge of the “Frontier.” Household membership was often equally fluid over the decades with aunts, cousins, grandparents, teachers, and roomers forming part. The "Barkley Irrigation Canal" in Okanogan County, Washington situated along the Methow river is a reminder of the family’s travels and testament to James Barkley’s commitment to cooperative, community-based development. One of Marce's older half-brothers, Gordon, was born in 1894 in Winthrop, a small mining and ranching center in Okanogan county. A sister, Ruth, who would later serve as the first curator of historic Bower's Mansion south of Reno and interim curator of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, was born in nearby Twisp in 1901. In 1902, during a period near Brewster along the Columbia river, Marce’s father started a post office, the Gordon Post office, named after his second son. The Gordon Post Office would remain open for the mail until 1918.

Marce's father, James, was active in Progressive, then Socialist politics. He is representative of the farmer-rancher wing of the reform politics of the 1890s and early decades of the twentieth century rather than the harder, industrial wing. In 1896 he ran for county treasurer of Okanogan County on the People's Party ticket which swept the state that year winning the governorship and numerous Okanogan county offices against a panoply of other parties — Republican, Democratic, Nationalist, Prohibitionist, and Union Silver. Barkley lost, but the 1896 election was not his last electoral contest. Later, he would run for office again in Washington, and then in Oregon, Nevada, and California.

James was a recognized lecturer on behalf of the rights of working people, farmers, and ranchers, the eight hour work day, and many other labor and civic rights Americans now take for granted. He was no friend of the industrial cartels and trusts of the period but was committed to the kind of communitarian development that often characterized the American frontier. He was recognized as something of a firebrand who called out economic abuses when he saw them: profiteering, price gouging, wage theft. He was not above delivering an impromptu soap box, street corner speech like those of the later “hobo" free-speech protests of the long, hot summer, fall, and winter of 1909–1910 Spokane. Indeed, he pushed labor free speech issues years before the Wobblies’s Spokane battles and, like the Wobblies, was arrested for it. (Hobo is the term then used for itinerant, seasonal laborers often caught up in what was a highly abusive temporary employment broker system). Though Barkley served as an IWW officer and made a regular appearance in Spokane's more staid newspapers — as well as newspapers across the Northwest and as far south as San Francisco — he does not feature in The Industrial Worker, Spokane's most radical newspaper and organ of the IWW union that organized the Spokane protests. He seems to have been among the more moderate lecturers later wobblies decried in their drive to organize.

His politics left a deep imprint within his family. In an oral history interview, James’s grandson Howard, Marce's son, recalled how he had stressed the values of fairness and equality. His interest in seeking elected office left an imprint, too. Marce’s brother, Gordon, who later became a well-regarded Fallon rancher, would run for Nevada State Assembly and for Churchill County sheriff, both on the Republican ticket. Sister Llewelyn and her husband Harvey Gross, co-founders and co-muses of the Lake Tahoe casino, Harvey’s, were active for a time in Nevada state politics. Marce’s brother-in-law Harvey even traveled with Grant Sawyer, Nevada’s Civil Rights era Democratic governor, on a business recruitment trip to Europe.

“

The Selfish Goat is Punished
Billy Whiskers lived in a field. Jack lived in the same field.
Billy lived on one side of a stream. And Jack lived on the other side.
On Billy’s side the grass was tall. But on Jack’s side the grass was short for Jack was selfish and had eaten it.
Jack thought to himself, I’ll just go cross the bridge and eat that grass to. Old Billy can’t hurt me. Just as he was on the bridge, Billy saw him and said here comes that old selfish Jack. I’ll bet he is trying to eat my nice grass. I’ll bet he’ll be surprised when he finds hisself drinking water out of the middle of that stream with one of my buts. And selfish jack was surprised when he found himself flying in the air.

Marcelle Barkley, Rocklin, CA
Sacramento Star April 1, 1921



The 1910 national census places the family firmly in Oregon, away from the political caldron of Spokane, but just a few years after moving the family to Madras, then Bend, Marce's father moved the family further still, to Nevada City, Nevada, following that Fairview, and finally, Dixie Valley, Nevada, a once promising desert steppe agricultural settlement. The allure of cooperative life at the short-lived Nevada Colony Corporation, a radical experiment in collective living, drew the family to Nevada. While in Nevada, James Barkely ran for Churchill County sheriff on a progressive platform for the political party that had firmly supported and helped deliver the right to vote to Nevada women several years earlier. The family remained in Fairview and Dixie Valley for a couple of years before moving to Rocklin then Sacramento, California in 1919. The Barkley family remained connected to Fallon with various sons and sisters continuing to live in Northern Nevada. James Barkley ran an outfit during Fallon’s very brief petroleum exploration boom, but no oil was found. In Sacramento, he returned to newspapering, working in sales for the Sacramento Star, in social work on behalf of itinerant workers, “hobos,” and eventually running a boarding house that sheltered a mix of family, working men, and even a Danish photographer.

Shortly after moving to California, the family was forced into bankruptcy, and, a year later in 1921, Marce lost her mother. The family was well-known in Sacramento, her mother’s passing recorded in the Sacramento Star. From the newspaper account, we know she passed reciting a favorite poem, which the paper published in part, as she lay dying following a surgery. Just before her mother’s death, Marce published the first of two childhood stories, The Selfish Goat, in the Sacramento Star newspaper in 1921 followed by another in 1922. Her father ran a final congressional political campaign in 1924 on the La Follette ticket, surprising political observers and his opponents with the strength of support he received. The newspapers record dirty tricks aimed at the Barkley campaign, including a warrantless invasion of their home and an arrest warrant conveniently timed to interfere with political campaigning and dropped as meritless following the election. The family remained active in the Evangelical Christian church, once earning a prize for the greatest number of family members at a service. Marce’s father ran inter-denominational religious meetings in the mid 1920s, a tradition that harkened back to his participation in annual Evangelical “camps” in Oregon. In 1926, middle schooler Marce and her father both participated in the Western Hobo Convention where he was named delegate to the California Social Workers Convention in Pasadena that year and Marce performed a recitation as part of the convention’s musical program which was filmed by the Oakland Tribune for matinee news offerings in regional movie theaters. A few years later, Marce would lose her father while an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Marce spent her earliest years with ample space to roam. Her father had kept horses, and perhaps she had learned to ride while still little. By the time she arrived in Sacramento, she was a budding athlete, manifesting talent as early as her elementary years. It was as a high school student at Sacramento High, however, that Marce would compete as a star track and field athlete, setting national and world records in the process. Her skill in skiing developed later while at UNR where she rapidly showed herself to be as formidable a competitor on skis as she was in track and field during her high school years.



Dixie Valley and the Nevada Colony Corporation

Dixie Valley lies to the east of Fallon in the eponymous valley. Once a thriving, though small agricultural and ranching community, Dixie Valley was in many ways similar to Winthrop, Plaza, and Madras, other stops on the Barkley family journey. While a Federal irrigation project allowed Madras to switch from dry land farming, thus ensuring the survival of the town, Dixie Valley eventually declined. The extreme 1954 Rainbow Mountain-Fairview Peak-Dixie Valley earthquakes altered water flow to the artesian wells that fed Dixie Valley farms and ranches bringing the brief experiment of irrigated agriculture to an end. Today, the valley and the remains of its main town serve a training function for pilots at nearby Fallon Naval Air Station as an imaginary "enemy" town. Marce's small town school house became a Cold War mock Soviet one.

Becoming an Olympic Calibre Athlete

Marce was part of a generation transforming women's opportunities in athletics. Marce ran track just a year before the International Olympic Committee opened the Summer Games in 1928 to women allowing them to compete in gymnastics and in five track and field events. During the late 1920s, high level athletic competition opportunities for women slowly expanded. Women were only allowed to compete in one event, figure skating, at the winter events in Chamonix, France as part of the Paris Olympic Games, just several years earlier in 1924.

Although the Title IX surge in women's athletics remained two generations away, at Marce's high school as at others, new and highly contested athletic opportunities were already emerging for young women. The recently formed Girl's Athletic Association provided new sports opportunities at Sacramento High, initially in tennis an "approved" sport for girls. In 1927, the high school created its first "athletic" opportunity for young women, the girls track team. Eighty girls, Marce included, signed on. Unfortunately, by 1929 the experiment had seemingly come to an end. Editors relegated any mention of girl's “sports” to the club pages of the school's yearbook, The Review, seemingly excluding girls from the rough and tumble of school "athletics."

Young women, like Marce, who wished to compete did so as members of regional athletic associations outside of their schools. Historians have noted that in the twenties racism and not so subtle social pressures often prevented young white women from participating in track, leaving the sport open primarily to young women of color. Like many young women athletes of her generation, Marce faced numerous societal prejudices concerning women and athletics. Her experiences as an adolescent growing up in 1920s America undoubtedly proved formative to her later sports education advocacy.

Marce was fortunate. The support of her family and political climate in the Northern California region provided the support she needed to strive to reach the Olympics. The Barkley family publicly pushed for new opportunities for girls in Sacramento as early as 1923. Cousin Marguerite Barkley, who lived in the family’s extended 48th St. household, triumphed over boys in Sacramento’s competitive marble games — a serious affair then with finals to be held in Atlantic City, New Jersey — advancing to the semi-finals along with two Barkley boys. The family took sports seriously. Two of Marce’s brothers would go on to play semi-pro baseball in Sacramento and in Fallon, Nevada.

At the time of Marce's record-setting runs, she was fifteen and in the second semester of her sophomore year, her first of three in high school. Unlike the boys who could compete in teams against other high schools — Sacramento High fielded strong competitors in track and field and would go on to win the state championship in 1930 — the girls could not. Male track team members who excelled received mentions in the school yearbook. Despite setting a world record, and unlike the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times that wrote her praises, her school yearbook is silent on Marce's accomplishment.

Marce's 800 meter record set the standard for Olympic caliber performance. Reporting her performance, the Sacramento Bee masthead read: Time Betters Listed Record by One-fifth Of A Second. Shows Speed of Deer in Grueling Event on Track. The following year, 1928, on the Fourth of July at the United States women's national track and field competition in Newark, New Jersey, the first ever women's national track and field team emerged from the day's top performing women. They would go on to compete in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

While Marce's record was bested that day and she did not qualify for the Amsterdam Summer Olympics, her name appeared in national newspapers recognizing her athletic accomplishment. The Los Angeles Times (July 5, 1928) wrote, “Although track conditions were perfect, only one American record fell in the running events, and another was equaled. Miss Ravina B. Wilson, announcing as she toed the mark for the 800-meter run—'Boys, here’s the winner'—dashed twice around the track in 2m. 32 3/5s. to clip four seconds from the recognized standard of Marcelle Barkley of Northern California.”

On the rostra

Marce was also a member of the Rostra Society, a school club dedicated to fostering oratorical excellence and debate prowess and to participation in league debates in the region. Marce’s participation in debate and rhetorical speech must certainly have been influenced by her father’s long political career with his multiple runs for United States Congress and other offices, his long presence at the pulpit as a Christian Socialist, and her own earlier public recitation performances and childhood writing. The practice gained first in high school served her well as an adult actively engaged in working to better the lives of Northern Nevadan children.

“

American women in the first quarter of the twentieth century won two rights, that of suffrage and that of participating in sports. The second of these seems at least as important as the first.

Glenna Collett.

Cited in Boughner, Genevieve Jackson. Women in Journalism: A Guide to the Opportunities and a Manual of the Technique of Women’s Work for Newspapers and Magazines. New York: D. Appleton, 1926.




Teaching and mentoring

Fallon, Yerrington, Reno

Marcelle Barkley Herz, trained in Zoology and Education at the University of Nevada, Reno, initially planning a medical career. Reno of the early 1930s was a small city of 20,000 with a growing university. At the time, UNR was a small, close knit community with numerous traditions that included inter-class competitions, a university-wide parade, celebratory beard growing, the coronation of a Mackay Day queen, and other annual traditions such as heading into town in pajamas. Marce was very active in campus life, participating in multiple organizations. She was a member of the pre-medical society, Omega Mu Iota, serving as treasurer for the organization of young women planning careers in medicine and nursing.

In 1931, she joined the Alpha Gamma Chapter of Gamma Phi Beta, a philanthropy-oriented sorority and the oldest in the United States. After university, Marce would remain active taking the role of president of the sorority alumni for a term in 1938. Marce’s participation in Alpha Gamma certainly further shaped her views on the value of Outdoor Education. The national sorority voted in 1929, just before her arrival at the University of Nevada, to make camping for girls its official philanthropic activity. Two camps for older, elementary-age girls were established with sorority members serving as counselors and in leadership, one in Colorado and one in Vancouver, Canada. Gamma Phi Beta’s official magazine, The Crescent, reveals through extensive coverage the importance of the camping program to the organization and to their vision of a new, post-Nineteenth Amendment role for women in American society.

Indeed, a dedication to democratic and equalitarian ideals is also reflected in articles in The Crescent such as that celebrating the participation of a young University of Nevada, Reno graduate in economics and UC Berkely teaching fellow, Robert Merriman, in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and as commander of the Patrick Henry Battalion of the XVth International Brigade on behalf of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. UNR Gamma Phi Beta graduate, Marion Merriman, his wife and Marce’s contemporary and fellow Alpha Gamma sister, served the war in Valencia, Spain and wrote of their struggles in an issue of The Crescent. A member of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the University of Nevada, Robert Merriman, who would be killed at the front in Aragón in 1938, was put in charge of training newly arriving American volunteers in the effort to defend Spanish democracy. Later he led the Lincoln Battalion at the battles of Jarama and Belchite. Marion was the only American woman to serve as a full member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.

Economic and other issues prevented University of Nevada members from directly participating at the camping program sites in Colorado and British Columbia during the early 1930's, but sorority members typically contributed materially by making things for the campers. Quilts, nightgowns, and other effects required at the camps were common items manufactured in the sorority houses. The early 1930s were a particularly challenging time period, especially in Nevada. In 1933, the closure and reorganization of Nevada banks as a consequence of the Depression put the local chapter in dire financial straits, enough to note that they were "embarrassed" in a letter published in Gamma Phi Beta’s The Crescent that year. Marce and her colleagues made the best of a difficult time. Later, as president of the sorority alumni association, Marce organized a system of fund raising that, a year later, resulted in the complete renovation of the organization's house, a former governor’s residence.

Despite the rigor of classes and participation in university social organizations, Marce still found the time to engage in athletics. While at UNR she discovered skiing, a sport that remained a lifelong passion. Marce was a quick study and would continue to compete athletically in her new sport through the 1930s and 1940s. She won the Nevada State Ski Championship in 1949 with signature grace in the Combined event, which is scored by times in both slalom and downhill. In the late 1930s, a society page note in the Reno Evening Gazette also makes clear that she enjoyed competing in golf too.

Perhaps out of economic necessity, in particular following the 1931 death of her father, Marce also "helped out" with the creation of window displays in the local Reno Penny's store. She would go on to have a successful design business later in life, winning awards for float designs, gaining a contract for the 1960 Winter Olympics to collaborate with the Disney organization on olympic decor, and gaining local fame for her carefully crafted and creatively lit Christmas trees of a wild range of materials, including ice, feathers, even oil lamps. Just before her death, at least one Reno casino, Harolds Club, featured several of her trees. She regularly helped with decoration, including the annual Christmas decor, at Harvey's Wagon Wheel Saloon and Gambling Hall, later Harvey's Casino Resort, co-founded by Marce's sister Llewellyn and her husband Harvey Gross. In later years, Marce's South Arlington house became the place to see Christmas decorations in Reno. During some years, city police guided the traffic. Her son, Howard, in a 1995 oral history interview at the University of Nevada, Reno recalled many mid August trips to San Francisco florist warehouses for the December Christmas decor.

A fire destroyed records of her design business, and much of her design work would have been ephemeral by nature. A description of her work in The Crescent does survive from the 1930s capturing some of the playfulness she brought to design: “Reno alumnae, headed by Marcelle Barkley and Alpha Gamma chapter represented by Eunice Beckley sponsored the dinner Sunday evening when the officers' table was converted into a desert garden with sand and tiny pots of cacti and a miniature dude ranch with cowboys and horses made of brilliant orange pipestem cleaners.The small tables, too, were centered with a dude ranch while each guest received a box of sage brush incense.

Beloved Teacher

Marce’s first career out of college was as a beloved teacher. Following her graduation on December 23, 1933 with a Bachelor of Science degree and a Teacher's Diploma of High School Grade, Marce taught through the 1930s across Northern Nevada, eventually settling at Mt. Rose Elementary in Reno where she quickly assumed a major role in establishing the school’s physical education program while also serving the needs of remedial readers. At the time, the school stood near the very edge of the city.

The year Marce graduated from the University of Nevada, 1933, proved to be particularly difficult for the Nevada economy. Jobs were scarce and budgets were thin. Rural teaching positions, like Marce's earliest educational experience in the Dixie Valley school house, were a particular challenge due to poverty, then lower rates of literacy, family needs in a largely agrarian and ranching economy, the boom and bust of the mining economy, and the sharp drop in Depression Era state taxation revenue. Following graduation, Marce accepted a series of rural assignments at the start of her career teaching in schools located in St Claire (now part of Fallon), Stillwater, Fallon, and Yerrington. Newspaper reports on education show that she was active beyond the classroom, participating on multiple occasions in county and regional education forums, at one point serving on a panel on the problems of rural schools. Marce also participated in Federal Emergency Relief Administration summer programs for children, the Depression Era predecessor to Outdoor Education.

Soon Marce obtained a teaching position in Reno at Mt. Rose Elementary. While at Mt. Rose, she developed the physical education program for the upper grades, supervising outdoor games. Each year the district also held out of door athletics competitions, “Play Days,” for elementary and junior high school-aged children. Marce chaired the organizational committees for both. She quickly became active in P.T.A. activities and also contributed to the fundraising activities of Reno’s YWCA, an association that continued past her death in 1964.

Social Life

While newspaper accounts suggest that Marce was a beloved and talented teacher, she also had a busy social life during the 1930s and held leadership roles in various local societies and endeavors. Continuing a family tradition begun with her father’s first newspaper appearance in the March 18, 1895 Seattle Post Intelligencer, Marce’s name frequently appeared in the social columns of the Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal. She organized parties and social teas, collaborated in community drama, helped fundraise, and began to practice set and other design. The first published reference to a Christmas-themed event associated with Marce was the 1936 play, Mutiny in Toyland, written by a fellow Renoite and performed at the Century Club, an important local institution for Reno women. She was soon in charge of decor for other plays, monthly dinners, and the annual fashion show.

In 1938, Marce served as president of the Junior League of the Twentieth Century Club. Her presidency was marked by a focus on camping opportunities for young girls paralleling her university period and later work on behalf of girl camping in Gamma Phi Beta. Simultaneously, Marce was elected alumni president of her sorority. She was also highly active in the ski community, collaborating with her future husband, Walter Herz, then treasurer of the Hardway Ski Club, to raise the $300.00 necessary for then Nevadan Olympic ski hopeful Marty Arrouge to finance a trip to the Pan-American Championships and Chilean Ski Tournament in South America. Marce’s work with the Century Club, Gamma Phi Beta, and other social groups was always a bit playful. One memorable newspaper description described a farm-themed, Barn dance in 1938 where, as president, she greeted her future husband, Walter. Both Marce and Walter won awards for their costumes.

War Years

Following the onset of World War II, Marce took a position as the only teacher of a one room schoolhouse at the southern end of Lake Tahoe, the Tahoe Valley school, and then gradually started her own school, Fennway School, at first introducing children to the outdoors through multi-week boys and girls summer camps at Lake Tahoe under the name, Play Chalet or Play Hamlet camp. Girls attended camp in July and boys in August. In a 1995 oral history interview, Marce’s son Howard, recounts how her students, then in their 70s, recalled their time with Marce fondly. At the time (1943-1944), South Lake Tahoe virtually completely shut down in winter and could become practically inaccessible following a winter storm. It would take a talented teacher to tamp down the cabin fever.

Despite winter challenges, or perhaps because of them, several members of her family had made the southern end of the lake their home, including her brother Fenn Barkley, who owned the Tahoe Sierra Market, and her sister Llewelyn and brother-in-law Harvey, who acquired an old church property to open up the Wagon Wheel Saloon and Gambling Hall.

The war brought significant change to Northern Nevada. Military infrastructure and personnel to serve the needs of the Army and Army Air Corps, the precursor of the US Air Force, transformed the region. In the later war years, Marce became a ski instructor, along with Wayne Poulsen and Dodie Post, to serve the recreational needs of soldiers from Tonapah, Reno, and Stead and sailors from Hawthorne and Fallon at what was then known as Grass Lake. The Reno army base alone had 150 sets of skis for wartime Winter recreation. Skiing elsewhere was not possible during the war as ski resorts near Donner Summit were shut down for reasons of national security.

Following an extensive snow survey of Mount Rose by Wayne Poulsen during the winter of 1937-38, the area then known as Grass Lake was identified as the ideal location for a ski resort on Mt. Rose. Poulsen had worked with Dr. James Church who taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, and others involved in the Cooperative Nevada Snow Survey throughout high school and college and had become quite knowledgeable in the field of Snow Science. The following year, Wayne Poulsen and Ed Heath founded Mt. Rose Upski at Grass Lake. Two years later, Robinson Neeman would purchase the land and hire Keston Ramsey to build a lodge and a T-bar-style lift. He renamed the resort Sky Tavern. Four years later, in 1945, Ramsey purchased the fledgling ski area.

In 1945, Marce relocated the Fennway school to Reno. She did so in a house that she appears to have purchased as a single woman, highly unusual at the time. Marce would marry her husband Walter Herz, a Reno engineer, on New Year’s Day, 1946. Fennway school ads placed in Reno papers mention athletics as much as academics. She encouraged excellence in both. Sports were an integral part of the curriculum, and during the summer students from her school and other schools such as Mt Rose Elementary located just down the street participated in camps featuring horseback riding and other sports. There are significant gaps in the historical record pertaining to Marce’s early professional life; however, one might wonder if some of her rural school charges benefited from her belief that camping for kids was good.

Marce believed that children were not meant to hibernate in winter. By 1947, she was taking preschool-aged kids for ski lessons to Sky Tavern in an old "woody" station wagon, one well-suited for the less well-developed roads of the era. Marce’s son Howard was a constant companion on these trips. Sky Tavern was one of the first ski areas in the region, and would go on to compete for the 1960 Winter Olympics as the center of Reno's bid to host the event. Marce was well-acquainted with Keston Ramsey, Sky Tavern's co-owner, a well-known local Reno developer. Those expeditions to snow must have been uproariously fun for the children and a welcome escape from the classroom. The station wagon of kids, including her own son, rapidly evolved into something bigger, the Reno Junior Ski Program. In time, the program would grow to one of the largest of its kind in the country. As of 2020, it remains the only such program on the West Coast of the United States.

The Junior Ski Program

Marce was well-known as a strong community leader, active in many civic organizations, and as a successful entrepreneur. She first approached Keston Ramsey, the owner of Sky Tavern, with her idea for a junior ski program. He said yes and is credited with co-founding the program. She then approached Hal Codding, a well-known, respected, and accomplished ski instructor and convinced him to be the program’s lead instructor. Codding said yes, and is also considered to be a co-founder of the Junior Ski Program. In order to keep the program costs as low as possible, Marce opted for an all-volunteer ski school staff.

Once Marce had talked Keston Ramsey and Hall Codding into supporting the program, she contacted Jim Woods, who ran a local bus company, to provide transportation at an affordable cost. At Marce’s urging, Hal Codding and Jerry Wetzel, at Codding and Wetzel, along with Chet and Link Piazzo at The Sportsman, provided new and used ski equipment to program participants at an affordable rate. Such community support was crucial and ensured that the program would be open to all children in the region. In 1948, the first group of kids got on the bus and headed for Sky Tavern to learn to ski. The Junior Ski Program grew rapidly through the fifties and sixties, and by the mid-1970s more than 30 buses brought students up to Sky Tavern from across the Truckee Meadows.

To date, more than 100,000 kids have learned to ski and snowboard at Sky Tavern. Marce reached out to various communities across Reno from the beginning, visiting churches and other schools to encourage parents to enroll their children, regardless of economic status, race, or gender, in the program. She also worked hard to recruit volunteers to teach in the program and keep costs rock bottom. The program remains all volunteer to this day. Hal Codding, head of the ski school at Sky Tavern, ensured that the volunteers were trained to teach the children to ski. Many of the current instructors are Sky Tavern Junior Ski Program alumni.




Athlete and Writer

Ski Champion, Scientist, and Sports Writer

Marce’s passion about the benefits of sports for everyone would translate to another career as a sports writer and editor at the Reno Evening Gazette. As skiing grew in popularity, Marce was a natural to take on the position of ski editor in the newspaper. She published her first Slalom Column on December 1, 1945. That first day her byline was absent, replaced with a brief introduction from the sports editor. In subsequent editions, Marcelle Barkley, and from January 1946, Marcelle Herz, would become a familiar and trusted byline for the greater Northern Nevada skiing community. The skiing community in Reno during the 1940s and 1950s was a close knit group. As a competitor and later, as an instructor, Marce knew who the key players were. She also knew the kids as they were coming up through the ranks. Marce intimately knew the courses. She described the challenges competitors faced on the slope with precision and knowledge gained from having skied the same courses herself, often as competitor. The Slalom Column would run until 1951 and then continue without the Slalom Column masthead. She wrote most of the Reno Evening Gazette's 1960 Winter Olympics coverage. The first Slalom Column coincided with the first post-World War II ski season and marked the beginning of a massive post-war expansion in tourism that would, shortly, remake Reno, Tahoe, and the surrounding region.

“

Written by one of Western Nevada's most enthusiastic winter sports supporters, "Slalom Column," as its title and the description of its author indicate, will deal exclusively with skiing and other snow activities in the area. From now on look for it every Wednesday on the Gazette Sports Page.

— Sports Editor

Oral histories recorded in 2019 by the Shared History program of the University of Nevada, Reno with Marce's son, Howard Herz, capture a bit of Marce's working methods:

One thing she used to do to supplement what I'd call her skiing money, is she would write for the local newspaper. I remember her having a rather memorable argument with Alex Cushing (the owner) in Squaw [Olympic] Valley, because lift tickets had gone up to $5.50, which she thought was outrageous at the time. And so she argued with Cushing for a while, and finally convinced him that she could write stories about skiing that would be beneficial to Squaw Valley. ‘Oh, and by the way, you can give me a ticket, and one for my son, Howdy.’ So, we used to wrangle a few tickets, based on how the news stories would come out.

I remember once, she was in a race at Squaw [Olympic] Valley, up on Squaw Peak. We were riding up the chair, my mother and Ann Walbridge, who was a lady that came along to look after me. I wasn't very old, I think it was around 1952, so I would have been five or six years old. I was sitting in the chair between them, and as we were coming up the hill, we got right by the start, and they were announcing her name, that she was up. And all of her friends said, ‘She's on the chairlift!’ And the starter says, ‘She's not here. She's a scratch.’ And she threw up the bar on the chair, threw down her poles, and jumped out of the chair! And the guy was just mortified. The only choice he had was to let her run, because, first of all he wasn't going to take on a lady that would jump out of a chairlift, and he sure as heck wasn't gonna take on all the ladies that were telling him she was gonna run. So she ran the race!

Backcountry Skiing

Marce's husband Walter's brothers, Fred and Wilton Herz, were noted Reno jewelers. Fred learned the trade in 1920s Dresden, Germany, then a center of Art Deco Jazz Age jewelry making. Many longtime Reno locals remember R. Herz & Bro. Jewelers, which closed in 2007 after 122 years in business. R Herz & Bro. reset many a former wedding ring during the heyday of the Reno divorce industry. Richard (Andares Frederick) Herz, the founder of the company, emigrated from Germany to Virginia City in 1883, and gained a reputation as a talented jeweler. He opened his own business in Reno in 1885 after taking over from William Goeggel, another well-known jeweler in town. The jewelry business was an anchor for the family. So, too, skiing.

Marce’s brother-in-law, Fred, learned to ski in Germany while studying the jeweler's arts, bringing his Weimar Period German skis with him back to Reno. It was on those skis that his younger brother, Walter, learned the sport. Both brothers were avid outdoorsmen. Fred joined backcountry university snow survey expeditions supervised by Dr. James Church early on, participating in many snow survey seasons from the mid-1920s onward. Walter began participating a few years later, and while on those expeditions the Herz brothers got to know Dr. Church’s assistant, Wayne Poulsen. When Marce joined her future husband on these expeditions during the war years, they all became lifelong friends.

Snow Science was a nascent field in 1900 when Church conducted his first surveys up on Mt. Rose, just south of Reno. Primarily a Classics professor, he began making regular forays up the mountain to conduct scientific research, collect data, and compile statistics. By 1906, Dr. Church had co-founded the Mount Rose Meteorological Observatory and would continue to make regular ascents up Mt. Rose, observing and recording snow and weather conditions for the United States Weather Bureau and the University of Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station. By 1926 the annual measurement of snow on Mt Rose was well-established.

That year, Fred and Walter were responsible for the construction of a snow survey equipment hut on the flank of Mt. Rose below its summit. In subsequent years when the Cooperative Nevada Snow Survey had evolved to include multiple routes around the Tahoe Basin, Fred and Walter were often assigned the route at the southern end of Lake Tahoe. Each snow excursion could take several days of backcountry skiing, avalanche avoidance, snow coring, and measurements. The goal was to calculate the amount of melt water from each sampling point along a particular track and extrapolate the amount of water expected to flow into the lakes and rivers at spring melt. The small sampling teams often experienced inclement weather and dangerous storms and would depend on food stocks stored up in survey huts along the routes.

Skiing in winter in the rugged backcountry of the Sierra Nevada presented challenges even to the most experienced and capable. The surveys were not for the faint of heart. They required each participant to be in exceptional physical condition to endure the rigors of ascending and descending slopes while carrying equipment over extended, unmarked distances. To lose one’s direction or misjudge the state of snow on the slopes could invite death by avalanche or exposure. Nonetheless, these trips were necessary. Spring flooding was a significant problem along the eastern Sierra front, and what became the Nevada Cooperative Snow Survey following James Church's early work, proved instrumental in preventing catastrophe. Marce was one of the few women to participate on these snow survey expeditions, and her education as a scientist made her a natural, if unconventional, fit for the survey team.

Marce pushed the envelope as a teenage athlete in California, then became an accomplished amateur Alpine ski racer in Nevada. One of her closest friends and fellow ski instructor, Dodie Post, coached the US Women’s Ski Team, and Marce took lessons from the legendary Otto Lang in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1942. Marce won 16 championship titles, including the 1949 Nevada State Ski Championship Combined, which was awarded to the skier with the best combined times in both slalom and downhill. The State Championship Downhill started at the top of Slide Mountain and ran almost two miles long, ending near Davis Creek State Park. This downhill was known for being harrowing and demanding, requiring skill, determination, and courage of those who competed. Marce once commented on the grit required to run this race and said, “You’ve got to be cruel to run (race) downhill.”

She again pushed the envelope as a woman participating in science expeditions long before this was commonplace. She gained invaluable experience in the backcountry which informed her writing, and her expertise earned her a position as Ski Editor at the Reno Evening Gazette that culminated with her reporting of the 1960 Olympics from Olympic Village.

The 1960 Winter Olympics

Many of Marce’s stories about skiing often ran without a byline. While she had several bylines during the Olympics, many stories were simply credited to the Olympic News Bureau. The Herz family, Marce, Walter and Howard, were up before dawn to make their way to Olympic Valley each morning and came home late each night. Marce covered every aspect of the Games, from issues and concerns with parking for the massive influx of spectators, to the technical issues faced by skiers competing on demanding courses. In addition to covering the Games for the Evening Gazette, Marce collaborated with the Disney organization as a designer for Olympic Village spaces and events. Walter shot photographs and film, helped score events as a “computer,” and teenage Howard provided coffee and tea to the gatekeepers. For the Herz clan, skiing, and by extension, the Olympics, was a family affair.




Marce’s Legacy

Marce Herz passed away on January 9, 1964. Untreatable cancer cut her life short. Shortly later, she was honored by the Sierra Nevada Sportswriters and Broadcasters Association as sportwoman of the year. She was held in very high esteem by her professional colleagues in journalism, in teaching, and by many, many others. The Reno Evening Gazette published the posthumous news later on January 24th. At the time Mare was active in fundraising for the YWCA. The YWCA held a fundraising event in her honor, the Marce Herz Christmas Festival, for decades following her death. The Festival celebrated winter holiday crafts with workshops held at the YWCA preceding the festival where volunteer participants made wreaths, table and door decor, and ornaments to sell to benefit the youth programs and building fund of the organization. Marce’s intertwined legacies as pioneering woman athlete, founding spirt of the Junior Ski Program, strong advocate for Outdoor Education, and fundraiser for the YWCA and other causes all manifest her intense commitment to equality of opportunity, to children, and, above all else, to the central importance of the Northern Nevada community to her life.





About the Authors


The Shared History Program, University of Nevada, Reno

The Shared History program at the University of Nevada, Reno, empowers humanities students to engage in applied and collaborative public history projects with community and faculty partners focusing the lens of history on the contemporary world.

Research: Nancy O'Connell, Christopher von Nagy
Exhibit text: Nancy O'Connell, Christopher von Nagy
On-line exhibit text, audio description: Christopher von Nagy, Nancy O'Connell
Video: Nancy O'Connell
GIS: Christopher von Nagy
Exhibit design: Christopher von Nagy, Nancy O'Connell
Web design: Christopher von Nagy, Nancy O'Connell
Additional contributions: Ivy Anderson, Sara Garey-Sage, Daniel "DT" Burns, and Mariah Mena

This exhibit developed in collaboration with the Marce Herz Foundation.

Marce Herz Foundation Logo

Corrections and queries: sharedhistory@unr.edu

Shared History
Department of History, Mail Stop 0308
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV, 89557

Image of Lake Tahoe in winter courtesy of UNR Special Collections. Used with permission.


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