Davidson College Lands $25 Million From a California Couple, and University of Arizona Receives a Bequest of $8.8 Million (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Davidson College

Richard (Rick) Halton and his husband, Jean-Marc Frailong, pledged $25 million for scholarships and campus programs to be determined later.

Among the programs the couple is considering for support are Lula Bell’s Resource Center, which provides students with food, professional clothing, textbooks, and other things; and the Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Halton is a retired attorney and a private investor in Rancho Mirage, Calif., who graduated from Davidson in 1977. Frailong is a computer scientist who co-founded FreeGate, a software company, and worked for Xerox at its Palo Alto, Calif., research center.

University of Arizona College of Medicine

Ronald Baker left $8.8 million for scholarships and a professorship. Of the total, $5.9 million will be used to establish the Ronald K. Baker, M.D., Scholarship Endowment, and the remaining $2.9 million will create the Ronald K. Baker Endowed Chair in Anesthesiology.

Baker was an anesthesiologist in Denver. He earned two degrees at the university: a Ph.D. in chemistry and a medical degree. He died in 2017 at 70.

Walsh University

Bill and Trina Rambo gave $8.3 million to back scholarships, research, and other programs of the Byers School of Nursing.

Specifically, the money will create the Rambo Family Endowed Scholarship to provide financial aid for students pursuing nursing and other career fields in the health sciences; establish the Trina Rambo, R.N., Dean’s Chair; back the Rambo Global Health Scholars Program; and establish and maintain the Bill Rambo Admissions Center and the Rambo Family Advanced Nursing Lab.

Bill Rambo served as vice president with Brown & Brown, a property and casualty insurance company, and as president of its subsidiary MacDuff Underwriters, before retiring in 2000. He was Walsh’s first applicant in Walsh’s history, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the university in 1964. Trina Rambo retired from a nursing career in 2004.

University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and KUSC

Edward Judd Zobelein left a total of $8 million, of which $6 million will go to the Thornton School and $2 million to KUSC, the university’s classical music radio station.

The donor was a classical-music lover who played the flute and piccolo and listened to the radio station throughout his lifetime. He did not attend USC but was a longtime supporter of the radio station and the music school.

Zobelein, who died in 2017, was an heir to a brewing company fortune. His great-grandfather George Zobelein co-founded the Maier-Zobelein Brewery in 1882 and in 1907 purchased what would become the Eastside Brewing Company, in Los Angeles.

University of Denver

John Madden Jr. donated $5 million to support the Center for Innovation in the Liberal and Creative Arts at the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences. The center will be named for the donor.

Madden founded the John Madden Company, a commercial real-estate developer in Denver who donated his personal art collection to the university in 2015.

Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

Jane Fortune left approximately $4 million to establish the Dr. Jane Fortune Endowment for Women Artists and the Dr. Jane Fortune Fund for Virtual Advancement of Women Artists. She also bequeathed 61 works of art to the museum.

Fortune, who died in 2018, founded Advancing Women Artists, a nonprofit dedicated to researching, restoring, and exhibiting artwork of women artists, particularly in Florence, Italy. Her organization located and restored many Renaissance-era works that were either unknown or thought to be lost, and as a result, the Italian press nicknamed her “Indiana Jane.”

The bulk of her wealth came from a family fortune started by her great-grandfather William Fortune, who founded Indianapolis’s first phone company and served on the board of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.