Library of Congress Receives $60-Million Donation; Other Recent Gifts

Numerous nonprofit groups have received large gifts:

• The Library of Congress has received $60-million from John W. Kluge, a telecommunications and media executive, to establish two programs to encourage scholarship in human sciences such as history, sociology, and anthropology, and to find ways to ensure that scholars from those fields interact regularly with members of Congress.

The John W. Kluge Center will provide a group of scholars with office and meeting space within the library, in Washington, allowing the scholars to use the library’s collection and meet with members of Congress to discuss topics of mutual interest. The John W. Kluge Prize for the Human Sciences will award $1-million prizes in recognition of lifetime achievements in the human sciences. Recipients of the prize will spend a period of time at the Kluge Center to meet informally with members of Congress.

Mr. Kluge, of Charlottesville, Va., is the founder of Metromedia Company, a private company that owns telecommunications and media holdings. He chairs the Madison Council, which represents people who make large private gifts to the Library of Congress.

• The University of Oklahoma has received an art collection valued at $50-million in a bequest from Clara Rosenthal Weitzenhoffer, who inherited an oil fortune. The collection consists of 33 French Impressionist paintings and works on paper by Mary Cassatt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh, and other artists, as well as decorative-arts objects from the 17th and 18th centuries.

The university will build an addition to its art museum to house the collection.

Mrs. Weitzenhoffer was the daughter of the late Henry Rosenthal, an oil-company owner, and the wife of the late Aaron Max Weitzenhoffer, co-founder of the Davon Oil Company, in Oklahoma.

• John M. Belk, of Charlotte, N.C., has pledged $28-million to Davidson College (N.C.), to expand the John Montgomery Belk Scholarship, which Mr. Belk established in 1994 with a gift of $1.8-million.

The four-year scholarships provide tuition and living expenses, leadership training, and grants for summer internships or international study.

Mr. Belk is a former mayor of Charlotte and the current chief executive officer of Belk Inc., a chain of department stores across the southeastern United States.

• The family of Robert Wood Johnson IV, of New York, has pledged $12-million over the next three years to support research through the newly established Alliance for Lupus Research, a supporting organization of the Arthritis Foundation that will award grants for research on lupus, an autoimmune disease.

Mr. Johnson, who will serve as chairman of the organization, owns the New York Jets football franchise and is a member of the family that founded Johnson & Johnson, a worldwide manufacturer of health-care products.

• Alberto Vilar, president of the technology investment firm Amerindo Investment Advisors, in New York, has pledged $10-million to the Los Angeles Opera to support the Young Artists Program, which provides training and performance opportunities for young opera singers, and for new productions to be performed at the opera house over the next four years. The billionaire gave the opera company $2.4-million earlier this year for the opera house’s current season.

• Gerald M. Levin, chairman of Time Warner, donated $10-million to the University of Denver’s National Cable Television Center and Museum. The gift will help finance the Jonathan M. Levin Programming Leadership Endowment and the Jonathan M. Levin University Chair in Cable Television Programming, named in honor of Mr. Levin’s son, who was murdered in 1997.

Other recent gifts:

Boys and Girls Club of Park County (Wyo.):

$1,000,000 from Bill and Joanne Price of Cody, Wyo., for its endowment.

Children’s Hospital of Buffalo (N.Y.): $5,000,000 bequest from John A. Johnson of Castile, N.Y., a farmer and postal worker who invested in the Haloid Company, later renamed Xerox Corporation, for unrestricted use at the hospital’s main building.

Drew U. (Madison, N.J.): $1,000,000 from an anonymous donor to endow the Wall Street Semester, a program that teaches undergraduate students about New York’s financial district through trips to Wall Street and meetings with Wall Street professionals.

Duke U. (Durham, N.C.): $1,000,000 from Grant Hill, a player on the Orlando Magic NBA basketball team and former member of the Duke team, and his wife, Tamia, a singer with Elektra Records, to create the Grant & Tamia Hill Scholarship Endowment Fund, which will provide tuition and living expenses for one Duke basketball player each year.

Hadassah Medical Organization (Jerusalem): $1,000,000 from Morton Mower, former chief of cardiology at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital and co-inventor of the implantable defibrillator, a device that applies an electric shock to restore the rhythm of a failing heart, and his wife, Toby, a retired nurse. The Mowers designated their gift to support two medical institutions in Jerusalem: the Henrietta Szold-Hebrew University School of Nursing and the Dr. Morton and Toby Mower Cardiac Catheterization Unit.

Marquette U. (Milwaukee): $1,000,000 from John H. Beaumier, former director of the Orthopedic Evaluation Unit at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and his wife, Mary Jane McKenna Beaumier, for the construction of a new library that will house electronic information resources.

Miss Porter’s School (Farmington, Conn.): $6,160,000 unrestricted bequest to the school’s endowment from William D. Hacker of Los Angeles, a former business executive and stock-market investor, in honor of his late wife, Barbara Lang Hacker, who graduated from the girls’ preparatory school in 1929.

Salt Lake Organizing Committee (Utah) : $1,000,000 from John Price, chief executive officer of JP Realty, in Salt Lake City, and his wife, Marcia, for support of the 2002 Cultural Olympiad, the Olympic Arts Festival connected to the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

U. of California at San Diego: $5,000,000 pledge from Irwin M. Jacobs, founder of the Qualcomm telecommunications company, in San Diego, and his wife, Joan, for the creation of a retinal research center at the Donald P. and Darlene V. Shiley Eye Center; $2,000,000 pledge from Donald P. Shiley, founder of Shiley Inc., a company that manufactures heart valves and other medical products, and his wife, Darlene, of San Diego, for the expansion of clinical and educational programs at the center; $1,500,000 pledge from an anonymous donor for the creation of a glaucoma research center, also at the Shiley Eye Center.

U. of Iowa: $1,500,000 from Lawrence Dorr, of La Canada-Flintridge, Calif., senior surgeon at the Bone and Joint Institute in Los Angeles, and his wife, Marilyn, to create the Lawrence and Marilyn Dorr Chair in Hip Reconstruction and Research.

U. of New Hampshire: $7,000,000 from Dana A. and Kathryn P. Hamel, part-time residents of New Hampshire, to create the Hamel Center for the Management of Technology and Innovation at the university’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics.

U. of New Mexico: $1,000,000 from an anonymous donor to its Harwood Museum for endowment.

U. of Notre Dame (Ind.): $2,500,000 from Joseph T. Mendelson of Santa Barbara, Calif., a private investor and former track and cross-country coach, to endow the university’s Center for Sport, Character & Culture, which conducts research on the role of sports in society.

U. of Pennsylvania: $2,000,000 from David Goodhand, a retired designer of Internet products at Microsoft Corporation and Vincent J. Griski, former vice president at Goldman Sachs, to renovate a historic campus building that will house the university’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center.

U. of Rochester (N.Y.): $1,000,000 from Andrew H. Neilly, retired chief executive officer of the John Wiley & Sons publishing company, in New York, and his wife, Janet Dayton Neilly, residents of Weston, Conn., to create an endowed deanship for the university’s libraries.

U. of Texas Southwestern: $1,000,000 from Charles E. Seay, founder of Charles E. Seay Investments, and his wife, Sarah, of Dallas, to create the Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Center for Pediatric Urology, which will conduct research and provide clinical care for childhood urological problems.

U.S. Naval Academy Foundation (Annapolis, Md.): $2,000,000 from Kevin W. Sharer, chief executive officer of the biotechnology company Amgen, in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and a 1970 graduate of the Naval Academy, to endow a chair in aerospace engineering in honor of David F. Rogers, founder of the academy’s aerospace-engineering department.