Throwback Thursday: NMC Using Recurring Trivia Contests To Tell Its 75-Year History

Who was the first president of Northwestern Michigan College (NMC)? How many students were enrolled at the college on September 17, 1951, its first-ever day of classes? Where did that first batch of classes take place?

The answers are, respectively: Preston Tanis, 65 students, and the old city-owned airport terminal building. If you got all three correct, you might consider tuning into WNMC next week to try your hand at official NMC trivia.

This year, as part of NMC’s 75th anniversary, the college’s radio station is hosting monthly trivia segments as a means of celebrating the institution’s surprising and sometimes quirky history. Those segments will air at 8am on the last Thursday of each month throughout 2026, with next week’s March 26 show marking the third of 12 trivia games.

Leading the project is Ann Swaney, a longtime NMC librarian and archivist. Swaney started working at the college almost by chance in 1983, and has been fascinated by the college’s history ever since.

“One day, I had picked up my two boys from preschool, they were with me, and I had to run into the library to make copies,” Swaney says. While there, she struck up a conversation with Bernie Rink, the college’s first-ever library director (and, speaking of local history, also the founder of Leelanau County’s Boskydel Vineyard, the first commercial vineyard in northern Michigan).

“I told Bernie I had just moved up here from Texas, and had been a librarian at the public library there, and had also done some other cataloging for another library in New York,” Swaney recalls. “I was talking to him about libraries and how much I love them, and he said, ‘Would you consider being the Saturday librarian at NMC? Somebody just left to get a job in the school system, and now we need somebody to start working in two weeks.’”

Swaney took the job. Fast-forward 43 years and she’s still involved with NMC, even though she formally retired in 2021. At that time, the college even dubbed her “the custodian and guardian of NMC’s institutional memories for more than half its history.”

Working with WNMC Station Manager Eric Hines on the trivia series, Swaney tells The Ticker she’s loved the challenge of telling NMC’s history in a new way. Each month’s trivia game consists of six or so questions, and covers about eight years of NMC history. The three questions posed at the start of this article all came from January’s trivia quiz, which focused on the college’s earliest days. By December, Swaney and Hines will be touching upon near-present-day NMC factoids.

For her part, Swaney is most nervous about writing compelling trivia for the more recent eras of the college. The origins and early decades, she says, are well-documented, thanks in large part to a trio of history books NMC published in 1973, 1994, and 2013 that cover the first 60 years in 20-year chunks. No such book exists covering NMC’s post-2011 growth and evolution, which makes those years harder to capture, even though they happened more recently.

Not that every trivia question will be sourced from NMC's official historical records. Swaney is also leaning on other resources for the games, from local news coverage to NMC’s own White Pine Press. Of course, deciding which facts merit trivia questions is posing some, shall we say, unexpected challenges.

“I don't know if I dare ask about the condoms,” Swaney laughs. “There was a whole five-year period or so where every single issue of the student newspaper had an article about condoms, because they had a little vending machine that Pat Salathiel put in the dorm. It was a big scandal, and she almost got fired over it. I don’t think I’m going to ask about that, but that’s what the students cared about in the moment! They were writing all these articles and columns about it.”

Hines is hopeful students, alumni, and community members alike will tune in for the trivia shows – and not just for a chance to win prizes like gift cards or NMC swag.

“Having these little elements of knowledge about the history of this place gets people feeling connected and engaged in a different way,” Hines says, citing his own tenure at WNMC as evidence. “I’ve been here for a third of the history of the radio station, and people will come up to me all the time and say things like, ‘Oh, I was a DJ down there in the ‘80s!’ Knowing something about what the radio station looked like then, and who worked here, that helps me do my work better. Because there are alumni of the station who have become pretty major supporters, and I’m not sure that would have happened if I’d always had to say, ‘Oh, sorry, I actually have no idea what happened here back in 1980.’”

Pictured: Eric Hines (left) and Ann Swaney (right)