Reed College, Napa Valley Center Get Big Gifts; Other Donations

A college and a future culinary and cultural center have received big gifts.

* Reed College, in Portland, Ore., has received $21.1-million from a former student’s trust to endow financial-need scholarships.

Phillip Wertheimer attended Reed in the 1940s and worked as a mechanical engineer and supervisor at Longview Fibre, a paper and cardboard manufacturer in Longview, Wash.

He died in 1990. Mr. Wertheimer’s widow, Jeanne, dedicated the trust — a mixture of stocks, bonds, and securities — to Reed this month. Both she and college officials agreed to its purpose. The college will receive the trust upon her death.

* The wine maker Robert G. Mondavi has given $20-million to help create an educational center in Napa, Cal., to celebrate American contributions to fine culinary fare and to the humanities.

The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts has received a total of $37-million, including Mr. Mondavi’s gift, toward its $70-million “Raising the Dough” campaign. The project’s backers expect to break ground in June and open the institution in fall 2001.

The center’s blueprint includes galleries, gardens, and an outdoor amphitheater for live entertainment. The tax-exempt organization will offer wine tastings and cooking seminars, as well as encourage study on such topics as sustainable agriculture and American literature.

Other recent gifts:

The Johns Hopkins U. (Md.): $1,000,000 from Jeong H. Kim of Potomac, Md., founder of Yurie Systems and president of carrier networks at Lucent Technologies, to endow undergraduate engineering scholarships and for research at the Wilmer Eye Institute.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art: $3,000,000 from George N. Boone of Los Angeles, a dentist, his wife, Mary Lou, and their children to endow the children’s gallery.

Michigan Technological U.: $3,600,000 from John Opie of Fairfield, Conn., vice-chairman of General Electric, and his wife, Ruanne, for the capital campaign.

Shenandoah U. (Va.): $1,000,000 real-estate gift from Eugene Grove of Winchester, Va., and his wife, Barbara, owners of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership, for athletic fields. The amount is the difference between the appraised value of a piece of land and the reduced price at which the Groves sold it to the university.

Texas A&M U.: $1,000,000 from Carlos H. Cantu of Downers Grove, Ill., president and chief executive officer of ServiceMaster Company, to establish a center that will work to reduce the drop-out rate of Hispanic students at middle and high schools nationwide.

U. of Massachusetts at Amherst: $1,500,000 from Frederick (Jack) Francis, a retired professor of food science at the university, to endow a professorship in the food-sciences department.

U. of North Texas: $1,000,000 from Ken Murphy of Dallas and his wife, Shirley, founders of The Mail Box Inc., to create an entrepreneurial center at the College of Business Administration.

U. of Notre Dame (Ind.): $2,000,000 from Joseph E. Morahan of Denver, chairman of AON Financial Services Group, to endow the directorship of the Core Course at the College of Arts and Letters.