Theodore R. Johnson was a 90-year-old Florida retiree when he set aside $36 million for college scholarships in 1991. The former United Parcel Service (UPS) vice president never earned more than $14,000 a year at the company, according to Education Week.
Johnson retired from UPS in 1952. He credited his fortune, estimated at $70 million, to investing in company stock every year, Education Week reported.
The money went into the Theodore R. and Vivian M. Johnson Foundation, administered by U.S. Trust Corporation in New York. Education was “the most important thing a child can have in life,” Johnson said. He hoped to help middle-income families who struggle to pay for college.
Interest from the fund was divided among six recipients. Palm Beach Atlantic College in West Palm Beach, Florida, got 40%, and Johnson chose it for its community service requirement and its coursework on the “free-enterprise system.” The rest went to scholarships for the children of Florida UPS employees, the American Indian College Fund, Gallaudet University, the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, and a fund for disabled Florida children.
Eventually, 500 to 1,000 students a year could each receive $500 to $5,000, the publication said.
The foundation grew after UPS went public in 1993. The offering tripled its corpus between 1993 and 1999, and it held about $140 million by the time of a profile from the National Center for Family Philanthropy.
More than 6,300 Palm Beach Atlantic students have received Johnson Scholarships, the university said in 2021, per a university news release.
Johnson is not the only person whose gift outstripped a modest lifestyle. There’s Grace Groner, an Abbott Laboratories secretary, who lived in a one-bedroom cottage and left more than $7 million to Lake Forest College students when she died at 100. There’s also Geoffrey Holt, who had no car and little furniture in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, who left his town $3.8 million when he died in 2023.
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