Santa Cruz Sentinel Article — Sunday, December 16, 2001
By Michael Lacuessa
SANTA CRUZ — Victor Bogard was born to Dutch immigrants on a farm outside Sheldon, Iowa, where he and his seven brothers and sisters were raised.
He farmed one year after high school, but knew farming wasn’t in his future. He enlisted in the Navy after selling six chickens he took from his father. He got $6 and left town, keeping in touch with the family with a letter each week.
After four years in the Navy, Bogard had saved $2,000, a sum almost unheard of at that time, his superiors said. He made just $56 a month as seaman first class, but took on other jobs on the ship to earn more money.
In 1938 while home for a visit, he met a young woman named Nelina. She walked into the cafe where he and his friends were, and Bogard said to himself, “This is the girl I’m going to marry.”
And he did and he opened Bogard Cleaners in Sheldon.
In 1941, Bogard re-enlisted and boarded the USS Duane. It would be 1946 before he returned to the dry cleaning business in Sheldon, and then for just a short time.
In 1947, he and Nelina moved to Santa Cruz, then population 14,000. Nelina’s parents moved with them and bought a house across the street from the two-bedroom house on Opal Cliff Drive. Bogard paid $8,500 for that first house.
Bogard and his friend, Bud Daniels, who moved to Santa Cruz from Sheldon too, bought their first lot on Opal Cliff Drive for $1,260. They built a house with the help of Bill Burr, who went on to build hundreds of houses with Bogard and Daniels. The two men split the $3,200 profit from the house and took $50 a week for living expenses.
A neighbor who watched them build the first house asked them to build a house for him, and that’s when Bogard Construction began.
Bogard’s parents eventually moved to Santa Cruz. Victor built them a house in Pleasure Point area. Victor and Nelina bought a property on the cliff three blocks from his parents and stayed there for 32 years. Nelina’s parents eventually moved across the street from she and Victor into a house Victor built.
The Bogards are members of Twin Lakes Baptist Church and credit their success to their faith in God.
His parents spelled their last name, Bogaard. Victor said, “I dropped the second a in my name upon graduation from high school as a mild form of rebellion. I figured one a was enough.
“I cared little in those days about our rich Dutch heritage that included some of the world’s greatest, explorers and military statesmen: Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Jon Stien.”
Changing the name seemed a small matter at the time, but today, some of the family has added an a to become Bogaard, which means flowering orchard.
“Later on in my life I was sorry I had robbed my grandchildren of the same name as their ancestors,” he said. “Our three grandsons have corrected my youthful indiscretion.”
The Bogards credit an arrangement with Louis Rittenhouse, a Santa Cruz lawyer, for jump-starting their construction business. Rittenhouse allowed Bogard to build on land he owned and sell the homes on spec.
Victor Bogard Sr. recalls that the first day he visited Santa Cruz, the newspaper had an article about Rittenhouse’s father being killed at his law firm by a mentally unstable man. He had no idea at the time his success would be connected with the Rittenhouse family.
Bogard built many of the homes around the 3-acre Westlake Pond, where the company was able to secure 80 lots from the original owner in Los Angeles. The plan was to build a home for the Bogard family over the lake, on piles and piers with a drawbridge. Eventually, it was decided to donate the land to the city to become a park.
After developing around Westlake Pond, Bogard purchased six lots for $3,000 each. The company passed on six lots overlooking Monterey Bay at $5,000 apiece determining they were overpriced. Twenty years later, a member of the Bogard family bought the last remaining lot for $140,000.
Bogards Construction has built nine subdivisions on Westside Santa Cruz in the last five decades.
Victor recently wrote a book about his life and his success. While it was written mainly for the family, it’s an interesting read and can be found on the company’s Web site.
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