MARSHA SIMON ~
Marsha Simon followed her boyfriend to Flagstaff for college in 1973. She’s been there, working in hotels, owning restaurants and operating catering companies, ever since.
Now, 52 years later, Simon is retired, but she said she is much busier now than she ever was when in the workforce — she spends her days attending Bible studies and enjoying time with her grandchildren. She is consistently booking social engagements with lifelong and new friends, from casual lunches downtown to sharing symphony tickets for shows in Phoenix.
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Her first attempt at a post-graduate job in the hotel industry was at the Holiday Inn where she already had a part-time job. She applied to be the food and beverage director. The position had a job description that already overlapped with her day-to-day duties, due to the unexpected departure of the current food and beverage director.
Unfortunately, she was not met with open arms.
“The general manager, who I thought was a really sweet guy, said my new husband wouldn’t want me out of the house working 60 to 70 hours a week,” Simon said. “So I left, and became the food and beverage director at another hotel in town.”
In addition to using her degree to find jobs in Flagstaff hotels after graduating in 1978, Simon used her company — Simon Enterprises LLC — to own and operate a restaurant, Kachina Kitchen located in the Flagstaff Mall, and catering companies The Pickle Peddler and Mac’s Snacks.
However, she said she was still a woman in a man’s world. Even with her successful companies, hotels were hesitant to hire a young woman. Simon said the only reason she was able to get jobs was because of her degree in hotel management.
The effect that Simon’s degree had on her future opportunities cannot be overstated. It even led her back to NAU as an adjunct professor for the Hotel and Restaurant Management school and sales manager for The Lumberjack, KJACK radio and NAZ Today — NAU’s student-run media outlets.
Now, as an alum of the university and a half-century-running member of the Flagstaff community, Simon said she sees the way NAU is affecting the entire city as it expands. There is a symbiotic relationship between university nomads and Flagstaff residents.
For example, Simon noted that a large part of Flagstaff’s service industry workforce is made of NAU students. The traffic on the roads get better with fewer people driving around, but cashiers, baristas, servers and retail workers are in short supply when school is not in session.
“You can’t get a Starbucks without standing in a line,” Simon said. “When all the students leave, there’s no one working until the high schools let out a few weeks later.”
As opposed to speaking to any impact the NAU’s students and staff have had on her life, Simon was more intent on asserting how important she believes college is to the development of young people.
In Simon’s opinion, college is an important time in the foundation of a young person’s life, and she strongly feels that the experiences one can have when attending a university can last them a lifetime.
“It’s a really good stepping stone between being an adolescent and becoming an adult,” Simon said. “You sometimes have to live with a roommate. You have to get yourself up and get to class. You have responsibilities that you need to attend to. Those life lessons are really important.”
Despite the value that Simon sees in the higher education system, she said that there are certain aspects that have gotten out of hand. Most evidently, she found herself comparing her own experiences with financing her education to the funding of her children’s degrees and even to the cost of a college education now.
Though Simon worked her way through college, she said she can see that now it is almost impossible to pay for a college degree with a part-time job while also keeping up in classes. Her NAU tuition cost a mere $200 per semester, while today, an Arizona resident student pursuing the same degree would spend $5,844 for one semester.
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“This cost has gotten out of hand,” Simon said. “It’s ridiculous. Tuition goes way up and they keep building buildings, and you’re like, why don’t you quit building more and drop your tuition? And they just say, ‘It’s not categorized that way.’”
Nevertheless, Simon said that she is grateful for the opportunities she had because of her degree from NAU. She said it has made her a more holistically involved member of society. She thinks people should want to go to college to learn how to make a difference and help their communities.
“I want people to want to make the world better,” Simon said. “I want to be that United States that we always had, where we were the leader of growth, learning, teaching and giving.”
To Simon, going to college was not what her family had in mind for her — she said her decision was largely based on her boyfriend, Gene, moving to Flagstaff, and her family did not approve of her going to college.
“I wanted to follow my boyfriend, so I wanted to go to college, but my dad said, ‘girls don’t need to be going to college,’ but I did,” Simon said. “I paid my own way. I graduated high school early and worked from that summer until December, saving up money, and then I was here.”
Simon said she continued to pay for college by working at restaurants during every break, earning 90 cents an hour. Her tuition during her time at NAU was $200 per semester. She was in the first graduating class from the hotel management bachelor’s degree program, which later turned into the Hotel and Restaurant Management school. She then married Gene.
Retired Flagstaff Resident, NAU Alum, Class of 1978
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