San Diego Fund Receives $80-Million; Other Gifts

Several organizations have received big gifts.

• A Point Loma, Calif., woman has bequeathed $80-million to the San Diego Foundation.

  Jean Jessop Hervey, who died last year, attached no stipulations to the gift. Her late husband, James Edgar Hervey, a lawyer, had established a trust with the money he made as one of the original investors in Price Club. Shortly after he died in 1996, Costco Wholesale bought the grocery chain and the value of the investment surged.

  The foundation has made its first grant from the donation: $5-million for a new library in Point Loma to replace the one where Mrs. Hervey used to spend every Tuesday night reading with her children.

• A trust established in 1996 by Lambert J. Gross, former chief financial officer at both General Dynamics Corporation and Combustion Engineering Company, will provide a total of $22.6-million to four organizations.

  Mercersburg Academy, in Pennsylvania, a college preparatory school, will receive half of the proceeds from the trust, or $11.3-million. The American Heart Association of Florida, in St. Petersburg, the American Lung Association of Southeast Florida, in West Palm Beach, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, are each to receive approximately $3.8-million.

  Mr. Gross died in 1998. Proceeds from his trust were released after the death last month of his wife, Rheta Dellay Gross.

• Eleanor Nicols Jernigan, a zoologist, physical therapist, and investor, has bequeathed $10-million to the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, in Great Neck, N.Y., for endowment. The alliance is in the second year of a $100-million capital campaign.

  Ms. Nicols Jernigan, who died in March, assisted the geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan during the 1930´s in his Nobel Prizewinning work on the fruit fly.

Other recent gifts:

Fairfield U. (Conn.):

$6,000,000 from William P. Egan of Boston, managing general partner at the venture-capital firm Burr, Egan, Delage & Co./Alta Communications, and his wife, Jacalyn, for undergraduate scholarships.

North Carolina State U.: $1,200,000 from Ruby Vann Crumpler McSwain of Sanford, N.C., to construct an education center at the J.C. Raulston Arboretum.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (N.Y.): $5,000,000 from Jeffrey L. Kodosky of Austin, Tex., co-founder of National Instruments, and his wife, Gail, to finance a “constellation” program that pairs senior and junior faculty members to conduct research in physics, information technology, and entrepreneurship.

U. of Colorado at Boulder: $2,250,000 from Jim Roser of Boulder, Colo., a venture capitalist, and his wife, Becky, to help construct the building for the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society.

U. of Vermont: $9,000,000 bequest from the estate of Genevieve Patrick of Burlington, Vt., whose late husband, Robert, was chairman of Rock of Ages Corporation, to endow scholarships and research in health and the environment.

U. of Washington: $5,000,000 from Richard W. Fade of Seattle, a vice president at Microsoft, and his wife, Susan, to establish a center for autism treatment.

Union College (N.Y.): $2,000,000 from William R. Grant of New York, chairman of the venture-capital firm Galen Associates, to renovate a facility for the admissions and financial aid offices.

Webster U. (Mo.): $2,400,000 from Beatrice Kornblum of St. Louis, a retired schoolteacher, to establish the Institute for Teaching Excellence, at the School of Education.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Mass.): $5,000,000 from Gratia Rinehart Montgomery of South Dartmouth, Mass., to build a Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull research vessel.