$111-Million Bequest to Finance 29 Nonprofit Groups; Other Recent Gifts

Numerous nonprofit organizations have received multimillion-dollar gifts recently:

• A San Francisco woman has left a bequest worth $111-million to benefit 29 nonprofit organizations. Dora Donner Ide, who died in 1998 at age 82, specified that the money be used to build the organizations’ endowments.

  Mrs. Ide gave the largest single gift, $11-million, to the San Francisco Foundation, and nearly $8-million to the public-broadcasting station KQED, in San Francisco. The other publicly announced beneficiaries are the California Academy of Sciences, the California Institute of Technology, the Chinese Hospital Association, Guide Dogs for the Blind, the Nature Conservancy, On Lok Senior Health Services, the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco Boys and Girls Club, the San Francisco Public Library, the San Francisco Zoo, St. Anthony Foundation, and the University of California at San Francisco.

  Mrs. Ide inherited money from her father, William H. Donner, who founded the Donner Steel Company in Buffalo, N.Y.

• Halsey M. Minor, founder of CNET Networks, in San Francisco, has pledged to give $25-million to the University of Virginia for a center to integrate digital technology with instructional and research efforts, create multidisciplinary programs that focus on new forms of technology and media, and build a facility to house these and other technology programs at the College of Arts and Sciences.

  Mr. Minor, who graduated from the university in 1987 with a degree in anthropology, said he would match dollar for dollar up to $25-million raised from other sources.

• James P. Hynes, founder of Hynes Investments, in Riverside, Conn., and his wife, Anne Marie, have pledged $10-million to Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. About $1.5-million will be dedicated to the Hynes Natural Science Center, $7-million to build the Hynes Athletics Center, and the remaining $1.5-million is earmarked for the expansion and renovation of the Ryan Library.
• Wilson College, in Chambersburg, Pa., has received $10-million from Marguerite Brooks Lenfest, a 1955 graduate, and her husband, H. F. (Gerry) Lenfest. The couple sold Lenfest Communications and its subsidiary, Suburban Cable, to Comcast Cable Corporation in January. Their gift is unrestricted, and will be used for endowment.

Other recent gifts:

Anne Arundel Medical Center Foundation (Md.):

$1,000,000 from Pat Sajak, host of the game show “Wheel of Fortune,” and his wife, Lesly, part-time residents of Annapolis, Md., for capital needs, programs, and research at a new center for women with breast cancer.

Center for Women and Families (Louisville, Ky.): $1,000,000 pledge from Gus Goldsmith, owner of the Action Loan Company in Louisville, to enlarge the center’s shelter for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, and to support a program that encourages working poor people to save money.

Duke U. (Durham, N.C.): $4,000,000 from Karl M. von der Heyden, vice chairman of PepsiCo and a university trustee, and his wife, Mary Ellen, to renovate and expand the Perkins Library; and $1,000,000 from Michael J. Fitzpatrick of Hillsborough, Calif., a former Duke football player and chairman of E-tek Dynamics, a manufacturer of fiber-optic products in San Jose, Calif., and his wife, Patricia Wyngaarden Fitzpatrick, also a Duke graduate, to build a new football training facility.

Florida State U.: $6,500,000 from Howard Tibbals, former owner of Tibbals Flooring Company in Oneida, Tenn., to build and endow a learning center at the Ringling Center for the Cultural Arts in Sarasota, Fla.

Hadassah Medical Organization (Jerusalem): $1,000,000 from Sigmund Nathan, of Boca Raton, Fla., a real-estate developer, and his wife, Millicent, for a bone-marrowtransplant unit at the Sharett Institute of Oncology.

Hiram College (Ohio): $1,000,000 in a deferred trust from Daniel M. Slane of Westerville, Ohio, a university trustee and founder of the Slane Company, a commercial real-estate developer, for unrestricted use.

James Madison U. (Harrisonburg, Va.): : $1,500,000 pledge from Alvin V. Baird Jr., a Harrisonburg man who struggled in school because of a learning disability and acquired his wealth by investing a small inheritance in stocks and bonds, to support the university’s Attention and Learning Disabilities Center, which assists the university’s students as well as local children with attention or learning disabilities.

Marquette U. (Milwaukee): $2,000,000 from James H. and Virginia Wheeler, co-founders of the industrial soap and detergent manufacturer Essential Industries, in Merton, Wis., to help build a new athletics facility that will be named for the university’s former basketball coach Al McGuire; the couple pledged to match up to $2,000,000 in private donations raised by the university for the building.

Nature Conservancy (Arlington, Va.): $5,000,000 from Glen Boyd and Eli Shapira, founders of the software company WebTrends, in Portland, Ore., to help purchase 26,879 acres of Oregon land to create the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve.

Ohio State U.: $1,000,000 in a deferred trust from Daniel M. Slane of Westerville, Ohio, a university trustee and founder of the Slane Company, a commercial real-estate developer, for unrestricted use by the College of Law, the James Cancer Hospital, and the Tzagournis Medical Research Endowment Trust.

Ohio U.: $5,000,000 pledge from Vernon R. Alden of Brookline, Mass., a former president of the university, to create the Marion Parson Alden Permanent Endowment for University Libraries, named in honor of his late wife.

U. of Chicago: $2,500,000 from the family of LeRoy T. Carlson, founder of Telephone and Data Systems, a Chicago telecommunications company, and his wife, Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson, for a professorship to be named for the couple.

Weber State U. (Ogden, Utah): $1,000,000 from Alan Hall of Ogden, Utah, founder of the marketing and sales company MarketStar, and his wife, Jeanne, for community-service programs at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.