George Roeper was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1910 to a long line of energetic entrepreneurs. He spent the first years of his life in Japan. In 1923 he began attending Max and Gertrud Bondy’s progressive boarding school, where he met Annemarie Bondy, who would become his life’s partner.  His astute intelligence and moral courage helped him lead the Bondy family out of danger from the Nazis and establish a new life for them all in the United States. As an educator, his early interest in gifted children led him to establish Roeper as the second school exclusively for gifted children in the country.  All his life, he lived by the mission statement on his resume: “Nothing is more worthy of research, understanding, and improvement than the means to encourage children to achieve full development as creative, intellectual beings for the satisfaction of their own and mankind’s aspirations.” George passed away in Oakland, California, in 1992.

Annemarie Martha Bondy was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1918, while her father was serving in the German Army and her medical-student mother was attending to wounded soldiers and studying psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. After escaping the Nazi threat in Europe in 1939, she and her husband, George Roeper, went on to co-found The Roeper School in Michigan. After retiring from the school, Annemarie established a flourishing consulting practice for gifted children and wrote extensively about the emotional lives of gifted children. She passed away in Oakland, California, in 2012.

Mariann Hoag was an indispensable member of The Roeper School, from the day she joined the staff as George Roeper’s secretary in 1948 when she was fresh out of Albion College, until she passed away more than 60 years later in July 2009.  Nominally retired, Mariann still ran the school’s financial aid program from her bed till the very end. While George and Annemarie brought their dreams and ideas to the school, Mariann made everything happen. The school holds the Mariann Hoag Scholarship Dinner every other year to raise funds for financial aid, Mariann’s particular passion.