Marvel Ebenhahn

Marvel Ebenhahn never sought accolades, awards, or monuments in her honor. She simply wanted to serve her members and her community. Yet in doing so, she not only fulfilled that calling, she helped sustain a rural North Dakota farming town and redefined what leadership looked like at a time when women weren’t CEOs of anything.

 

Marvel’s story begins in New Rockford, North Dakota, a small prairie community along Highway 281 - the “Main Street of North America.” Life there has never been easy. Families have weathered storms, droughts, rising costs, and low commodity prices. Her father was among the original founders of Eddy County Federal Credit Union, which began in 1942, operating from a simple filing cabinet in the corner of a farmer’s cooperative store. From the start, Marvel grew up surrounded by the cooperative spirit.

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In 1952, at just 18 years old, she put aside plans for business school to become the credit union’s first full-time employee. At the time, the institution had 250 members, $18,000 in assets, and a single typewriter. Within a decade, thanks to Marvel’s vision and determination, the tiny credit union moved into its own brick-and-mortar building.
Over the next 64 years, a record of longevity few have matched, Marvel transformed her credit union into Community Credit Union, serving nearly 6,000 members across three branches, with $165 million in assets. Under her leadership, assets grew by more than 9,000 percent, membership by 2,000 percent, and the credit union also expanded from a farmer’s cooperative charter to a full community charter, able to serve anyone within 50 miles of New Rockford. Families who once came to her for their first loan returned with their children, and later their grandchildren.
The work was never just about numbers. In the farm crisis of the 1980s, Marvel sat with members facing auctions and foreclosures, sharing their burdens as neighbors and friends. “Go see Marvel” became a common phrase in the region, especially for those banks had turned away. When two nearby credit unions in Fessenden and Carrington were on the verge of closing in the 1970s, Marvel and her board spearheaded mergers to preserve access to cooperative financial services.

 

Her leadership extended beyond her own institution. She served on the North Dakota Department of Financial Institutions Credit Union Board from 1988 to 1993 and on the Midwest Corporate Federal Credit Union Board for more than a decade. Her credit union also supported countless local projects and fundraisers with both financial contributions and volunteer time.

 

Marvel often kept a quote from credit union pioneer Gene Farley taped to her desk: “To remain viable, a credit union should adhere to credit union philosophy, develop a strategic plan, practice asset-liability management, and control expenses.” She believed that if those principles were followed, credit unions would last forever. She also reminded her peers, “If we can’t be different, then why are we doing this?”

 

In 2013, Marvel was inducted into the Dakota Credit Union Association Hall of Fame. But her true legacy is not found in awards or milestones, it is in the generations of families she helped, the communities she sustained, and the philosophy she embodied every single day: people helping people.

 

Marvel Ebenhahn’s six-and-a-half decades of service represent one of the longest leadership tenures in credit union history.

Truly, she was an institutional marvel.