Robert L. and Carolyn L. Bender Scholarship Fund

When Robert Bender was a child, attending Prairie Street Mennonite Church in Elkhart, Indiana, his Sunday school class helped support a missionary family in India, the family of M. C. and Lydia Lehman. Specifically, Robert’s class’s contributions went toward the support of one of the Lehman children, Carolyn. Robert remembers singing “Hear the Pennies Dropping” as he dropped his pennies into the offering plate. He couldn’t have known that he would end up marrying this Carolyn Lehman, nor could he have predicted the long-standing family joke coming from his children years later, that he married Carolyn because he “already had a lot invested in her.”

Robert was born in Elkhart in 1912, the seventh child of George and Elsie Bender. All seven of the Bender children attended college, five of them graduating from Goshen College, including Robert’s older brother Harold, dean of Goshen College and Goshen Biblical Seminary for many years. While at Goshen College Robert was vice president of his junior and senior classes, president of the men’s glee club, editor of the Maple Leaf and a member of the Aurora Society. He graduated from Goshen in 1932, and from Harvard Medical School in 1937. He began his medical practice in Elkhart and remained there until 1972, when he moved to Long Beach, California, where, at the time of this writing, he still practices medicine at the Obispo Clinic.

Carolyn was born in 1912 in India. She spent her childhood in that country, coming to Goshen College to study philosophy. She graduated in 1934. While at Goshen she was vice-president of the Vesperian Society and she sang in the a cappella choir. She also played on the women’s basketball team. Following graduation she taught for a time in the Goshen school system. She passed away in October 1980. Carolyn’s sister and brother also graduated from Goshen College.

Robert remembers his first encounter with Carolyn at Goshen College. It seems he worked in the library as a book checker. One day he kept Carolyn waiting while he checked out books for everyone else. Carolyn, understandably irritated, began to raise her voice in protest, when he turned around and asked her for a date. Taken aback, she accepted. They were engaged sometime later under unusual, though certainly romantic circumstances. Robert asked Carolyn on a date “to see the sun rise,” and it was on that date that he asked her to marry him, just as the sun rose.

Robert and Carolyn’s daughter, Candy Norum, of Cypress, California, writes about growing up in the Bender household: “My parents always stressed to the four of us children to do our best, no matter what job or profession. We were shown by example in the way our parents expressed kindness and care to all people they encountered.”

Candy and her husband, Thomas, are establishing this scholarship in honor of her mother and father because, she writes, “It is a small way to encourage students in their efforts to reach their goal for higher education, just as my parents have always encouraged us in higher education. We would hope that recipients of these scholarships would embrace these values, as did Robert and Carolyn Bender. In this way, the memory and values of these people will live on.”