Vogt, Clara Birch Snepp, 1927-
Dates
- Existence: 1927 -
- Usage: 1955
- Usage: 1927 - 1955
Biographical Information
Clara Birch Snepp Vogt is a graduate and previous faculty member of Purdue University. Vogt graduated with a degree in Home Economics, specializing in housing, and became the first female instructor in many years in the Department of Engineering Graphics at Purdue.
Clara Snepp was born in Gary Indiana in 1927 to Virginia Chase Snepp and Karl Milton Snepp. Both her father and her brother, Karl Snepp Jr., were Purdue graduates; her father in Engineering, and her brother in Home Economics/Institutional Management.
Before coming to Purdue, Snepp attended DePauw University, majoring in Merchandising. After two years, she started a full-time position at Carson Pirie Scott, a large department store in Chicago, where she had been working during her summer breaks from DePauw. She was "gently fired" from Carson's and moved back in with her parents in Gary, Indiana where she started working as an engineering record clerk with a local utility company.
Vogt began considering continuing college and, after encouragement from her brother, applied to Purdue University for a degree in Home Economics. She started at Purdue in 1952 and took the standard home economics courses, as well as courses in engineering drawing, architectural drawing and design, heating and air conditioning, electricity, landscape design, and city planning. She graduated in 1954 and became an engineering graphics instructor in the Department of Engineering Graphics where she would teach for four years. She was the first woman in many years to teach in that department and her success helped pave the way for women in the graphics field at Purdue.
During her time at Purdue, Clara Snepp met her husband, Clifford Vogt, and they married in 1955. In 1958, after Cliff received his PhD in chemistry from Purdue, they left Indiana. Clara Vogt continued to work in architectural drawing and residential design as a consultant, and even designed two of her and Cliff's houses, in Connecticut and Georgia.