With 354 undergraduate credits and a college career at the University of Montana that spanned eight years before he got his teaching degree, Jack Eggensperger has a simple explantion: “I loved going to school.”

Eggensperger, 64, spent his entire career in education, teaching, coaching and being an administrator in several Montana schools. His broad spectrum of experience with rural schools prompted him to run for Flathead County Superintendent of Schools.

He’s unopposed in the Nov. 4 general election and will assume the position now held by Marcia Sheffels. Eggensperger’s good buddy, retired Evergreen School Superintendent Joel Voytoski, told him about the opening and he pursued it because he’s not ready to retire.

“I feel I still have a lot to offer,” he said.

Eggensperger grew up in Thompson Falls after his father completed his military service in the Air Force.

“Dad’s dream was to buy a small-town newspaper,” he said, and so in 1953, his father, Kermit Eggensperger, took over the Sanders County Ledger.

“It was very much a family business. Mom was the bookkeeper. All of us brothers had duties every week,” he recalled.

He remembers having to put away the wooden spacers and deal with the molten metal used in the linotype, a line-casting machine used in printing, and was well-acquainted with the hand-fed “monster”-sized press. He and his brothers would come in after sports practice and help get the weekly newspaper out every week.

His brother, Tom, still runs the Sanders County Ledger.

Eggensperger played high school football, basketball and was in track. He played in the band and was a member of the All-State chorus. His vocal talent is confined to the shower these days, he said with a smile.

Eggensperger’s parents stressed education, and it ran deep in his family. His mother, Gladys Gaines Eggensperger, graduated from Montana State University and by age 19 was teaching math and physics. Her father and Eggensperger’s grandfather, P.C. Gaines, is the namesake for Gaines Hall at MSU. P.C. Gaines worked for 43 years in the university’s chemistry department and served four times as acting president of MSU.

After Eggensperger earned a triple major at UM in broad field science; health and physical education; and business education, he set out for the Willow Creek school district near Three Forks, where the high school enrollment was 22 students. He was there a year before heading to Centerville, another small district near Great Falls.

After three years in Centerville he taught in Drummond for a year, then went back to UM to get his master’s degree in school administration.

Eggensperger was teaching and coaching at Reed Point, near Columbus, when he got the opportunity to move into the superintendent position there. That began his career as a school administrator.

He served as superintendent of Lambert School in Eastern Montana from 1987 to 1991, then spent 19 years as superintendent of schools in Darby, resigning in 2004 after the school board there was embroiled in a contentious public debate about a proposed policy that would have required the Darby Schools’ science teachers to question the theory of evolution.

“That just split the town,” Eggensperger said in an earlier interview, explaining how Darby residents voted down the proposed policy in the biggest election turnout in the town’s history. “I was completely burned out.”

He then spent eight and a half years working as a contractor for the federal government, running the GED program for the Trapper Creek Job Corps Center south of Darby. When the recession hit, though, he lost his contract job.

Most recently he’s been an education consultant.

Eggensperger said he loves rural Montana, and his experience with smaller schools makes him a perfect fit for the job of superintendent of schools.

He told about a challenging situation during his time in Darby when two families moved into the district from Ohio. One family had 26 children with a variety of special needs, then another family from Ohio — friends of the other large family — moved there with 12 disabled children. Providing the necessary accommodations and special education classes was a challenge, he said.

“OPI (Office of Public Instruction) used to have a reserve fund for unexpected special education costs,” he said. “The Darby district took every penny of that.

“You dealt with it as well as you could within the parameters of the budget.”

Eggensperger and his wife of 31 years, Joanne, raised a son, Curtis, who attends Flathead Valley Community College, and a daughter, Christina, a UM graduate who is a restaurant manager at the high-end Resort at Paws Up near Missoula.

Eggensperger’s down time is filled with sports, among other things. He’s a season ticket-holder for UM Griz games, and is an ardent Cardinals fan — that would be the Arizona Cardinals football team and the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.

He hikes, fishes, golfs and loves animals, namely their two miniature schnauzers, Monte and Griz.

“They consume us,” he said with a laugh.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.