Couple’s Philanthropy Reflects Their Personal Connections and Practicality

When the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, vice president for university relations at the University of Portland, in Oregon, decided to catch a last-minute Thanksgiving Day flight to Los Angeles to watch the institution’s women’s soccer team in the NCAA tournament last fall, the last thing on his list was where he might eat his turkey dinner.

A Catholic priest with no family or personal contacts in Los Angeles, Father Doyle thought of a San Diego-area couple he was in the process of soliciting for a big gift to upgrade the university’s main engineering building. He thought he might fit in a visit.

As soon as Donald and Darlene Shiley heard Father Doyle’s holiday predicament, they invited him to join them at their house.

“I could smell the turkey as I was walking onto the front porch,” Father Doyle says. “They opened the door, we opened up a great bottle of wine, and we just had a great evening with each other.”

Just a few weeks later, the university had a commitment for a $12-million pledge from Mr. Shiley, an alumnus of the university who made a fortune by founding a medical-equipment company, and his wife. That gift is the largest the university has ever received.

The Shileys have been serious donors for more than two decades, but it is in these past two years that they have stepped up their giving. They committed to $28-million in donations last year and another $16-million so far in 2007.

Most of their support goes to causes they care deeply for, such as health, education, and the arts, and such organizations can count on even bigger gifts because the couple plan to leave all their money to charity when they die.

While the Shileys’ warm invitation to Father Doyle speaks to the personal connections they make with organizations they support, the couple makes giving decisions with equal parts head and heart, say officials of organizations that have benefited from their support.

Mrs. Shiley, who, Father Doyle says, still clips store-discount coupons, says that she and her husband prod the organizations they support to diversify their sources of financing.

Partners in Giving

For Mr. Shiley, 87, it was a love of tinkering that would earn him both a legacy as a lifesaver and millions of dollars for his company.

He tested his handiwork on machines while growing up on his family’s farm in western Washington State, and honed his skills in the Navy during World War II, as Father Doyle tells it. Mr. Shiley earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Portland in 1951.

Mr. Shiley’s wartime experience working to stop the backflow of fluids in machines influenced his work in co-inventing the Bjork-Shiley tilting disk valve, a revolutionary heart valve, according to Father Doyle. (Mr. Shiley typically does not give interviews.)

That part of his life wrapped up in 1979, when he sold his company to Pfizer, in New York, in a $79-million deal that would be worth more than $226-million today, adjusted for inflation.

The decision to do so came soon after meeting Darlene Loran, then an actress. After seeing her perform in a production of The Lion in Winter at the Old Globe, a theater in San Diego, Mr. Shiley waited six months to ask her on a date. When they wed, he was 57 and had been a widower for four years; his new bride was 30.

“Donald’s very quiet, very private, very introverted, unless he’s alone with me, and then he’s just a silly fellow,” says Mrs. Shiley. “We look at life very much the same, being interested in merit and having a work ethic that works for both of us.”

Not long after they married, they began making a habit and hobby out of their philanthropy, with Mrs. Shiley taking the lead in researching their beneficiaries.

After more than 25 years of methodical charitable giving, in 2006 the couple saw their biggest year yet, which included a $20-million gift to the Old Globe. They also mulled how they might help Mr. Shiley’s alma mater.

“I’m not sure we realized how extensively we’d get into this,” Mrs. Shiley said. “When you’re thinking so lovingly about another person in your life, you can’t help but open the circle and let other people, other organizations, into the circle. We’ve had some failures in the giving department, but not that many, and the plusses far exceed that.”

Mrs. Shiley says their learning experiences included a shift from giving unrestricted donations toward supporting specific projects. The couple also now require annual updates from their beneficiaries.

Big Ambitions

Although Mrs. Shiley often leads their philanthropic efforts, Mr. Shiley’s role has been vital. As Mrs. Shiley says, her husband “didn’t invent a pet rock.”

She adds, “Don and I joke that he worked very hard to earn the funds that we have, and I work very hard to hand it out.”

Mr. Shiley has been more than just the source of the money they have donated. One gift they made in the late 1980s, to help start the Shiley Eye Center at the University of California at San Diego, came about because he saw bigger things that the couple’s money could accomplish.

While Mrs. Shiley sought to figure out what equipment the university’s ophthalmology department needed, the pair also learned its researchers were working out of an old Quonset hut, a World War II-era prefabricated building.

Mrs. Shiley recalls the couple’s conversation about what to give.

“I don’t think we should give money for equipment,” her husband told her, sparking what she says was a “wild banshee” response from her, as she interpreted his statement as the final word.

“Are you done?” he asked. “I was thinking maybe we should help them along with the facility and give them a leadership gift and help them get started with a building.”

“Oh,” she replied. “That’s better than the equipment.”

Soon, the Shileys’ million-dollar gift helped break ground on the eye center, to which they have given nearly $9-million more to date.

Since that first gift, the eye center’s staff has increased twentyfold, to about 200 employees today, and the center’s doctors conduct about 100,000 appointments each year, says Karen Anisko, director of development and communications at the center. Ms. Anisko describes the Shileys as donors who know that their gifts can inspire other donors, and are highly loyal to organizations they support.

“They’re thoughtful in what they give to,” Ms. Anisko says. But, she adds, “They’re not going to come and pick out furniture — they don’t get to that detail.”

Ms. Anisko chats with Mrs. Shiley roughly once a week, during which Mrs. Shiley asks about the state of the organization overall. (The Shileys visit the center and other university facilities for their health care.)

Ms. Anisko says that Mrs. Shiley’s relationship with the center and its staff is usually less formal than that of other donors.

“She usually gets hugs as soon as she walks in the door,” Ms. Anisko says.

The Shileys are an integral part of the philanthropic scene in San Diego and want to be seen as leaders, says Todd Schultz, director of development at the Old Globe. “It’s clear that they care about the programs they give to, and that resonates with other donors,” Mr. Schultz says.

Their ties to the Old Globe are among those that tug most firmly on their emotions.

To court the actress, Mr. Shiley drove more than 400 miles from Orange County to her place in the Bay Area where she was doing another show, and greeted her with champagne and roses from a perch on her landing when she arrived home. His message was a simple one: “I just wanted to see you,” she says he told her.

“It was the start of a beautiful relationship,” Mrs. Shiley says.

Through the years, the Shileys have given about $22-million to the Old Globe, not including the 2001 donation of a building to house performing artists.

That property, known as Shiley Terrace, was recently valued at $2.8-million, according to Mr. Schultz.

“They are really good people, they’re fun people to be around, and their hearts are really in the right place,” Mr. Schultz says.

A Pledge Over Dinner

A few weeks after Father Doyle shared Thanksgiving dinner with the Shileys last November, he and the University of Portland’s president, the Rev. E. William Beauchamp, traveled to the San Diego area again, to dine with the Shileys and discuss in further detail a gift the couple were considering for the engineering building.

At the time, Mr. Shiley had some health problems that had tired him, causing him to take a pass on going out to a restaurant with the college officials.

Discussion among the two university officials and Mrs. Shiley at that dinner hovered around a donation of $10-million, an amount that would be about half the cost of the renovations and remodeling and give the school the opportunity to name it after the Shileys.

Father Doyle felt that the Shileys’ giving could inspire other donors, so he asked Mrs. Shiley to consider giving an amount that would top the largest gift in the institution’s history, which was $11.7-million at that time.

By the end of the dinner, the two university administrators had an oral commitment on the $12-million Shiley gift that they would announce publicly the following spring.

“That was a hard thing for Darlene, because she was there for the both of them” at the dinner, Father Doyle recalled.

The trio returned to the Shileys’ home, and greeted Mr. Shiley, who was sitting at the table. Not a lot of words were exchanged, as Father Doyle recalls it, but they all felt the glow of his excitement.

“If you’ve ever seen his eyes and his smile, they speak in ways that words cannot,” Father Doyle says. “There was sort of this deep sense of satisfaction that he was going to have an impact on the University of Portland, and that the love of his life had done well.”

Their landmark gift to Portland will not be the last time the Shileys are able to help an institution with their charitable support.

Already this year, the couple have given $1-million to the cardiology department at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, Calif., and two other gifts that have not yet been publicly announced: $1-million to the University of San Diego and $1.2-million to San Diego State University. Mrs. Shiley declined to provide specifics on those two gifts until their formal announcements.

Other miscellaneous gifts in 2007 total about $1.2-million more, Mrs. Shiley says.

She says the couple’s entire estate ultimately will go to charity after their deaths, though she did not want to discuss estate matters in any detail.

Mr. Shiley’s four adult children, whom he and his first wife adopted, are not involved in the couple’s philanthropy, and are still, Mrs. Shiley says, “focused on getting themselves down life’s highways and byways.”

They all attended the announcement of the Shileys’ donation to the University of Portland.

For now, though, the pair keep an eye on the gifts they have already made, enjoying their decision to make some major gifts within their lifetimes.

“It’s just kind of fun to make the commitment now,” she says, “and see it start to work.”