Distinguished Alumni Award Winner Profile

William T. Hageboeck, 28BA, and Eleanor Gildner Hageboeck, 29BA, are longtime supporters of the University of Iowa, where they met and got their start in life.

Bill left Lake Park to come to Iowa City in the summer of 1924, traveling gratis in the caboose of a freight train loaded with a friend's herd of cattle. Through he didn't know what he wanted to do in college, his roommate told him of an opening selling advertising for the Daily Iowan. That first campus job proved to be just the beginning of Bill's career in the newspaper business.

Eleanor, a Mason City native who studied at Carleton College for two years before transferring to the University of Iowa in 1927, majored in art at the UI and developed her talent as a watercolor artist. The two met on a blind date and married a year after Eleanor's graduation.

After Bill's brief stint in the advertising department at the Des Moines Register, the couple returned to Iowa City, where Bill became advertising manager of the Iowa City Press-Citizen and Eleanor enrolled in graduate art classes and invested herself in community service. By 1940, Bill was publisher of the local newspaper, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1962, and Eleanor was busy volunteering and raising the couple's three children.

When the Old Gold Development Fund was formed in 1956, Eleanor Hageboeck served as a director of the annual fund that would ultimately develop to become the University of Iowa Foundation. Every year since, without fail, the Hageboecks have quietly contributed to worthy University of Iowa and Iowa City projects that depend on private support. Whether providing scholarship funds for deserving athletes, sconces and chandeliers for Old Capitol, or support for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the College of Business Administration, the Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Art, Hancher Auditorium, Mercy Hospital, the Iowa City Public Library, or Project Green, the Hageboecks have indicated a willingness to give wherever the need is greatest.

Both Bill and Eleanor Hageboeck have been recognized through the years for their civic involvement in organizations such as the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce, United Way, Project Green, Girl Scouts, PTA, and Kiwanis, but their real love has been the University of Iowa. They are members of the Alumni Association's Directors' Club, as well as the UI Foundation's Presidents Club.