The Quiet One

As she stood listening to the applause that greeted her in the big auditorium at Southern Methodist University, the plump, kindly lady seemed perilously close to tears. "If I cry," she said, "please forgive me." Then Mrs. Walter William Fondren, 76, accepted the large Steuben vase that ten colleges, hospitals and church organizations had bought for her as a special tribute. "Why I'm chosen," said she, "I'll never know. I've always tried to stay in the background."

To those who know her, there was nothing surprising about the tribute to Ella Cochrum Fondren--or about her reaction to it. The widow of one of the founders of the Humble Oil & Refining Co., she has spent a lifetime giving her time and money to Texas institutions, but in refreshing contrast to the flashier philanthropists of oildom, she has always insisted on staying quietly behind the scenes. Those who honored her last week at first despaired of getting her to the ceremony at all. Says Methodist Episcopal Bishop A. Frank Smith of Houston: "We practically had to drag her into the hall."

Silver for Orphans. Though no one knows exactly how much she has given (best estimate: more than $20 million), her bounty has been spread widely and well. Fondren money built the $500,000 S.M.U. library, furnished half the cost of the $2,000,000 library at Rice Institute. It helped build Houston's Methodist Hospital, and it also helps support Episcopal St. Luke's. It has done everything from building a gymnasium for the students of Houston's Kinkaid School to founding the Methodist Home (for orphans) in Waco and giving Houston's Texas Medical Center an Institute of Religion.

But Ella Fondren has given far more than money to the causes she serves. Every Christmas she takes a load of silver dollars to the orphans of Waco, each week observes a "hospital day" when she tours the Methodist Hospital to find out if anything is needed. She has visited medical centers all over the U.S. to see if her own hospitals have the latest equipment, is always on hand for the annual Fondren Lectures at S.M.U. Says the Rev. Dawson Bryan, former pastor of St. Paul's Methodist Church in Houston: "She attends more committee meetings than anyone I know. Why, it's only been a short time ago that she stopped going down to the church and helping out at functions. She used to roll up her sleeves, cook, wash dishes, do everything the other women did."

Chimes for Seniors. At times Ella Fondren takes her beneficiaries completely by surprise. After a tour of one of her hospitals, she suddenly decided that it needed a radioisotope laboratory, promptly put up $52,000 to install it. Hearing that an S.M.U. graduating class wanted to give the university a set of chimes but could not raise enough money, she told the seniors to go ahead, and picked up the tab herself. In a brief talk before one of the Fondren Lectures, she casually--and unexpectedly--announced that she was going to donate $1,000,000 to give S.M.U. the science building it had long wanted.

In all her years of giving, Ella Fondren has tried to keep her charities as secret as possible. But now and then, as last week, someone decides to honor her. On one such occasion, she dutifully accepted the honor, then summed up her own philanthropist's credo: "No individual is honored as an individual. His life takes on a dignity as the causes to which he attaches himself take on dignity."

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