Photo illustration: Hal and Inge Marcus depicted against the backdrop of 1960s Copenhagen, where they first met. Image Credit: Gemini.
Inge was in trouble.
So, she turned to the Little Mermaid for help.
At age 17, she was on her way to her grandmother’s house when she realized she was being followed by a man in a green sports shirt. She sought to lose him in the busy streets of 1960 Copenhagen.
But the man in the green shirt persisted.
Getting nervous, she headed to the iconic Little Mermaid statue in Churchill Park, overlooking Copenhagen’s harbor. The hope: she would lose her pursuer amidst this busy tourist attraction. But other than a few Japanese tourists, no one was there.
Meanwhile, it was getting dark.
Suddenly, her stalker appeared, lounging against a nearby tree. In desperation, she noticed another man, Harold “Hal” Marcus (M.S. ’59), a 32-year-old American, recently graduated with his USC master’s degree in industrial systems management, sitting on a bench.
“Will you walk with me to the train station?” Inge asked.
Later, her mother, shocked by the sight of this American stranger, asked her: “How did you know this guy was any better than the man who was following you?”
Inge’s response: “he had kind eyes.”
Two years later, on her birthday, Inge and Hal Marcus were married. Glaucoma eventually robbed those “kind eyes” of sight. But for 55 years, they only had eyes for each other.
Like the Little Mermaid, Inge’s adventure would take her across an ocean to a new world. Ariel traded her voice for legs. Inge traded Danish for English. And eventually, she and Hal became among the most quietly consequential philanthropists in the Pacific Northwest.
Inge and Hal Marcus in the year 2000. Image courtesy: Inge Marcus.
Education = Choices
Like her late husband, Hal, Inge is a believer in higher education.
The Marcus’ philanthropy spans the globe — from Penn State to Technion University in Israel. It supports USC Viterbi scholarships, as well as the school’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, which moves into its new home in late 2026 or early 2027.
For Inge, though, born in Denmark in 1942 during the German occupation, that belief came by hard necessity.
Her earliest memories are not of toys or schoolyards, but of air raid sirens and running to shelters.
“I remember the sirens and running down into bunkers,” she recalls. “And then waiting until the alert was over.”
At some point, Inge’s parents vanished. Between the ages of two and ten, she lived in a private orphanage in Copenhagen. There were perhaps a dozen girls, cared for by staff in a large house near a school. It was orderly and structured, but it was not family.
What she remembers most vividly are the former residents who returned to visit.
“I noticed that there were two types of grown-up women that came back. Some that were prostitutes or had very low-end jobs. And then, there were some that were principals of schools, dentists, lawyers.”
Even at four or five years old, she began asking herself a question that would shape the rest of her life: What made the difference?
The answer became clear as she grew older. In Denmark at the time, if a child did not perform well academically by age 14, they could be pulled from school and sent into domestic service. Educational performance was destiny.
“I realized education was the difference,” she says. “So, I made sure I had good grades.”
When she was 10, she stood before a judge who asked whether she wanted to remain at the orphanage or be adopted by a couple who had taken an interest in her.
“I said I wanted to go with them because they could give me a good education,” she recalls.
She was adopted that day.
What Happens When You Give the Little Mermaid A Stopwatch?
Similarly, across the Atlantic, Hal Marcus was a Brooklyn kid who had served in the Philippines at the end of World War II, then earned his undergraduate degree at Penn State.
His hero was Benjamin Franklin: a self-made man who started from nothing, educated himself, and became a diplomat and inventor.
Hal arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1950s with little more than a packed car and a hunch that the West was where the future was being built.
He drove across the country knowing no one and having no job. He found one quickly — Cannon Electric hired him, and they paid for his master’s degree at the future USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He ate lunch at the old Pantry Café in downtown Los Angeles and studied on the USC campus, graduating in 1959.
As his hero, Ben Franklin, once said: “Do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made out of.”
Hal took that seriously, indeed.
When he met Inge in Denmark, he reminded her of the dad in the novel “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Armed only with a stopwatch, Hal would observe factory workers all over Scandinavia, timing each task, figuring out how to make the operation more efficient. It was the classic industrial engineering practice of time-motion studies.
Hal was getting pressure from both ends — management demanding their money’s worth (his firm, Parson and Williams, charged $50 an hour for his services in the early 1960s) and workers who were decidedly unhappy about a guy with a stopwatch watching their every move.
Inge was not trained as an industrial engineer, but she quickly learned efficiency.
Shortly after their wedding in Denmark, Hal casually asked Inge whether she knew how to iron. She assured him she did. When they arrived at his apartment, she discovered what he meant: 14 white dress shirts, freshly washed and waiting.
“I didn’t even have an ironing board,” she recalls. The neighbor’s board had a hole in the middle. By the time she pressed and folded the shirts, they looked wrinkled again.
So, she engineered her own solution.
She loaded the clean shirts into the basket on her bicycle, rode to a small laundry and asked them to press and fold them — no hangers, just neat stacks. She paid for the service using the weekly household money Hal had given her for groceries.
“He never said a word,” she says. “He just saw the beautiful pile of shirts.”
There was one consequence:
“We had hamburger that whole week because I used the household money,” she laughs. “That’s why we lived on hamburgers.”
She didn’t confess until years later.
The Marcus family: (from left to right) Hal, Matthew and Inge (with their dog, Savannah) in 2017 on her birthday and their 54th wedding anniversary. Image courtesy: Inge Marcus.
Lessons in Resilience
Trained as a laboratory technician in Denmark, Inge arrived in America ready to work. But at 30 — surrounded by 18-year-olds — she started over, enrolling at Cal State Northridge to earn a degree in biology.
In 1980, the family — now including their son, Matthew — moved to Olympia, Washington, partly because of Los Angeles smog and partly because of a skin cancer scare that prompted Hal to quip they should find “someplace where the sun doesn’t shine.” Inge finished her undergraduate biology degree at Saint Martin’s University, then earned a master’s in health science from Chapman University in 1985.
What began as reinvention became vocation: she went on to teach microbiology and botany for nearly two decades as a professor at Saint Martin’s University, building labs, mentoring students and quietly shaping futures.
That personal connection to the university eventually grew into something lasting — Saint Martin’s named its School of Engineering after Hal and Inge.
Hal, meanwhile, transitioned from industrial engineering into real estate, where he built the financial foundation that would eventually allow the couple to give generously.
He was a man of systems and logic — he once told Inge that the most efficient kitchen layout was a galley kitchen because you never had to move — but also a man of deep warmth. Frank Minton, a longtime friend who spoke at Hal’s memorial service, perhaps captured him best:
“I have never known anyone who worked harder than Hal to give money away.”
The Marcus’ philanthropy has focused primarily on scholarships — especially for engineering and nursing students. At USC Viterbi, they support students through the Hal and Inge Marcus Scholarship Endowment, as well as annual support to the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering — now ranked among the top 10 such programs in the U.S.
When asked what message she would give those students, Inge’s answer is immediate.
“Don’t give up,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how old you are. If that’s what you want, go ahead and do it.”
She began college at 30. She built a scientific career in a second country. She endured loss and reinvention. She has outlived her husband of 55 years. Sadly, she has also outlived her only child, Matthew, who died from a sudden aneurysm in 2018, a year after Hal’s passing.
But unlike the 1837 Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, Inge’s transformation was not one of loss. It was one of resilience.
From wartime sirens in Copenhagen to a house overlooking Puget Sound, Inge Marcus’s life has been defined by resilience — and by a conviction formed in childhood: education is the great divider, and the great equalizer.
In short, as Ben Franklin advised, she hasn’t squandered her time.
Published on March 17th, 2026
Last updated on March 18th, 2026