footsteps as a barkeeper. He attended the Northern Michigan Normal School (now Northern Michigan University) starting in 1922. He graduated with a teaching certificate in 1924, and then transferred to the University of Michigan Law School. While there, he met his future wife, Grace Taylor of Oak Park, Illinois. The faculty at the University of Michigan asked him to withdraw from the school in 1927, but he cited a regulation allowing him to be reexamined. He improved his grades enough to graduate from the school in 1928 and passed the Michigan bar exam later that year. Legal career After law school, Voelker returned home to work for the law firm of Eldredge & Eldredge in Marquette. He also worked as an assistant prosecuting attorney in Marquette County, Michigan. After two years apart from Grace, he moved to Chicago. After their marriage, he practiced law with the firm of Meyer, Austrian & Platt. They lived in Chicago for three years before he returned to Michigan. The few jobs Voelker got in a rural area in the middle of the Great Depression barely kept them solvent. Soon after they moved, he entered the election for Marquette County Prosecuting Attorney in 1934. Voelker was the only local resident to campaign for the office, and when he was elected later that year, he was the first Democrat to hold the office since the American Civil War. He maintained a private law practice while serving as prosecutor and also served in other capacities. He was a member of the Marquette County Bar Association, serving as association president from 1939 to 1941. During the 1940s and 1950s, he served on several committees of the State Bar of Michigan, including the Committee on Judicial Selection and Tenure and the Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. Voelker was a member of the State Board of Law Examiners from 1942 to 1945, and he was the city attorney for Ishpeming in 1943 and 1944. He also assisted the Michigan Attorney General in 1943 with a bribery investigation of the Michigan Legislature. He was defeated for re-election in 1950. During the last ten years of his tenure, he lost only one felony case, judged a "very successful" record according to Judge Thomas Solka, a circuit court judge in Marquette County. Voelker noted of his defeat that it was inevitable. Ultimately, he said that a prosecutor in a small town will build a