By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 7, 2008
When a house fire last year killed 88-year-old Helene Whitlock Alley and her husband, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, she was remembered primarily as an unassuming retiree and a devoted wife.
Now, Alley is being remembered because of something else: a $7.3 million posthumous donation to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the largest bequest in the nonprofit organization's history.
The bequest's size stunned the foundation, which had known Alley as a dedicated "hundred-dollar donor," said Alan Berkowitz, the group's national director of planned giving. Instead, he said, she turned out to be the "millionaire next door," a term taken from the title of a best-selling book about people who quietly accumulate large sums of money without attracting notice.
"I was shocked, shocked," Berkowitz said. "We had no idea what her wealth was."
The source of Alley's wealth is something of a mystery. Her late father was a successful businessman, Berkowitz said, and her assets included Merck stock that she might have purchased when she worked at the pharmaceutical company as a secretary before she married in 1949.
The reason for the bequest, however, is quite clear: Her late brother, Theodore Whitlock Jr., had Type 1 diabetes, and the gift was made in his memory and that of her father.
Alley included with her will a note to help her son, Robert, her only immediate survivor, understand why she left the bulk of her fortune to the foundation.
"My will may not be what you had anticipated," she wrote to her son, an illustrator of children's books. "However, I believe that once you have read my will you will embrace its purpose wholeheartedly."
Alley described her brother's battle with diabetes as "heart rending, frightening and inspiring."
"He was happily married, mentally sharp, independent and traveled alone by car or plane without hesitation," she wrote. "He injected insulin 3 or 4 times a day and checked his blood sugar multiple times a day until, one morning in his 73rd year, while fixing breakfast, he dropped dead."
Alley went on to say that her "knowledge of the difficulties" faced by her brother and other diabetics "motivated me to use my inherited funds and Merck stock to further the research to help find a cure for diabetes that at no time requires a diabetic patient to take an organ rejection agent" after receiving transplanted pancreatic cells.
She left her son $1 million. Through a family member, he declined to comment.
Type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes, is a disorder in which the immune system attacks and destroys cells in the pancreas. Type 1 diabetes, which is the less prevalent form of the disease, affects about 2 million people and is usually diagnosed in childhood or adolescence.
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation's records, which date back to 1989, show that the Alleys had made 38 gifts totaling $27,488 to the foundation. The first donation was $100 in 1989, and the largest gift through the years was $5,000.
Getting a large bequest from a hidden millionaire such as Alley is a welcome surprise for nonprofit groups that solicit donations from a broad spectrum of contributors. About $22.91 billion in bequests were made in the United States in 2006, the most recent year for which information was available. That number is part of a record $295.02 billion in charitable donations made that year, according to the Giving USA Foundation.
Those donations include mega gifts from the very wealthy, but 65 percent of U.S. households with less than $100,000 annual income gave to charity, too, the foundation says. The millionaire-next-door benefactor comes from those households.
"The ingredients are they are accumulators," Berkowitz said. "They have a passionate interest in the cause. They don't have a need to provide for big families. They're generally not big philanthropists."
In 1998, Alley contacted the foundation about her plans to leave a bequest, probably for about $200,000. It wasn't until after she and her husband, who was also 88, died in March that Berkowitz learned in an e-mail from the couple's attorney that it would be "a significant bequest."
The foundation announced the bequest last week. About $300,000 of Alley's donation came indirectly from her husband's estate, estimated at $725,000. Alley's estate is believed to be valued at $8.5 million.
Alley was circumspect about the extent of her wealth even with her estate attorney, John Newell, who said that her stock holdings from Merck and other companies were documented by security certificates that "were very old."
"Mrs. Alley," he said, "when she met with me, she told me what she wanted me to know."
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