A $128 million gift of gratitude

The news reached a few students at the George School last week in an e-mail carrying the subject line "You are kidding!?"

But no one was. The e-mail went on to say that Barbara Dodd Anderson, a 75-year-old graduate living modestly in Fresno, Calif., had given the small Quaker school $128 million, believed to be the largest single gift ever made to a US secondary school.

Few even knew of her wealth before the former kindergarten teacher made philanthropic history.

Mrs. Dodd Anderson says she was simply paying a debt of gratitude to the school she attended from 1946 to 1950.

"I went there under a situation in which my mother was ill," she said in a telephone interview. "I'm paying back the way I was treated by them. Everybody was very kind and helpful."

Mrs. Dodd Anderson, a Presbyterian, says she was pleased to be giving to "very honest, straightforward, decent, friendly people" who had looked after her in a time of need.

The huge sum stunned this coeducational boarding and day school, whose normally tranquil campus 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia has been awash in television cameras, balloons, and ice-cream parties since the word got out.

"Pride, that's my instant reaction," says Nancy Starmer, the school's head. "It just makes me very proud." Ms. Starmer insists that the windfall, to be paid from a trust in installments over 20 years, will not divert the school from its Quaker-based values.

The gift, almost double the school's existing $77 million endowment, will initially be used to bolster student financial aid, raise faculty salaries, and pay for initiatives to make the campus more "environmentally sustainable."

Jovial memories of her school days also appear to have influenced the alumna, who has made several contributions to the school over the years, including a $5 million donation last year for a new library.

She easily recalls such pranks as placing alarm clocks beneath the stage ahead of school meetings and flicking lumps of butter at the cafeteria ceiling with her napkin.

"Oh, I wish I was back in biology with John Carson. I had a crush on him," she adds with a hearty laugh.

Ultimately, it was her belief that "the country needs intelligent young people" that persuaded Dodd Anderson to part with such a large sum – a decision, she says, that she thought long and hard about:

"There was a time when I wasn't absolutely sure this was something I should do."

Dodd Anderson owes her wealth to another well-known philanthropist: legendary financier Warren Buffett, who in the 1950s became a student of her economist father, David Dodd.

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