"I Will Keep My Promise"

By Ezra Bowen

How far is it from a scruffy Harlem elementary school to the top of the heap? Not all that far, in the benign perception of Entrepreneur Eugene Lang, 66, if you can stick with your books and show a little hustle. Before he was nine years old, Lang was doing plenty of both. Each school day he walked the two miles back and forth between his home in Manhattan and P.S. 121 in Harlem to save the nickel carfare. Along the way, he picked up extra nickels from other boys by selling checkers that he had carefully lead weighted to become lethal shooters in a then popular game called street checkers.

Lang has long since moved on from checkers to American technology, which he hustles lucratively in some 45 foreign countries. But he retains his devotion to education, no longer as a recipient but as a formidable giver. "It's what I do for fun," he chuckles. Three weeks ago, the philanthropist clearly was having fun at a ceremony at New York City's eclectic New School for Social Research. The school's tiny (195 students) Seminar College, which offers a program of reading in the classics steered by seminars, was being renamed Eugene Lang College. And why not? Lang had made a gift to the institution of a cool $5 million because he had spotted something that he liked. "I see a college whose focus is clearly directed to individual student development," said Lang as he bathed in the cheerful homage of some 500 educators and well-wishers, while a brass quintet serenaded them with strains of Bach and Gabrieli.

There are bigger spenders in educational philanthropy. California Industrialist Arnold Beckman, for example, recently gave $20 million to the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering for a new West Coast study center, raising his total gifts for 1985 to $72.5 million. But what makes Lang special is his passion for the personal growth of students. Five years ago, he handed over $6 million to his alma mater, Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia. It was the largest single gift ever received by that quintessential liberal arts college, where the 1,300 or so students are deeply imbued with the school's Quaker tradition of individual responsibility. Lang had already given $1 million to Swarthmore, principally for a music building. "Nothing brings people together like music," he says.

His most unusual gift, if not his largest, was a guarantee of college tuition for 61 pupils at P.S. 121. Lang was making a sentimental visit to his old school, and in the middle of what he recalls as a paralyzingly dull, rehearsed speech to the graduating sixth grade, the inspiration came to him. Suddenly he broke off and told the astounded youngsters that he would give them each $2,000 toward college tuition, with more where that came from, if they stuck with their books and finished school. Later he followed with a letter to every pupil, declaring "I will keep my promise."

There were no such guarantees when Lang was enrolled at P.S. 121. His immigrant parents scraped for a living, the father as a sometime machinist, the mother teaching school. During high school, Lang worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant. One evening he was pressed into waiter service to attend a regular patron. "I was terrified," Lang recalls. "The man asked me why I wasn't in school. I was 14 years old, but I looked ten." Lang explained that he had, in fact, just graduated precociously from Townsend Harris High and hoped to enter tuition-free City College of New York. Thereupon the diner, who was a Swarthmore trustee, suggested the boy apply to that college, where a scholarship just might be waiting.

Lang sailed through Swarthmore, then earned a master's in business at Columbia. By that time he had also managed to start up a dry-cleaning business, manufacture college pennants, publish a trade journal called Monthly Stock Digest and work in a settlement house. "I had always intended to become a social worker," he says, "but my principal at Townsend Harris told me I seemed to have the capacity for making money. He said maybe I could do more about all the misery around if I concentrated on that."

Soon after leaving Columbia, Lang became a partner in a Long Island machine shop and married his secretary Theresa, to whom he is still wed after 39 years. In 1952 he formed Refac Technology Development Corp., from which he has made "an improbably large amount of money" by developing equity in small manufacturing businesses whose products he sells abroad. With fine disdain for the trappings of wealth and position, however, he still walks to work and flies coach class to overseas meetings.

Nearly five years have passed since he made his Harlem tuition offer. With 18 months to go till high school graduation, not one of the 52 students still in the New York area has abandoned school. The four-year dropout rate for high schools in New York City, by contrast, is nearly 40%. Lang sets aside his Saturdays to meet with his youngsters (an assistant, John Rivera, keeps in touch with them the rest of the week). One girl confided to Lang that her father beat her and tried to keep her from going out. "Stick with it," Lang urged her. "School is all you've got going for you now."

She is one of several members of the group who may not go on to college. For them, Lang is offering help in finding jobs after graduation. For the rest, Lang promised to up the ante through bonuses at graduation, when some students may win scholarships while others will need extra help from Lang, so that his cumulative gifts may far exceed the original offer. Leonard Quinones, 16, is one of the majority who are hitting the books with every intention of taking him up on the offer. "My parents say they'll kill me if I mess up," says Quinones. Windskey Santiago, 16, a budding singer with gold records spinning in her head, is determined to make it into the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. Says she: "I'm going for my dream." The nice part is, so is Lang. --By Ezra Bowen. Reported by Sidney Urquhart/New York

With reporting by Reported by Sidney Urquhart/New York