A Philanthropist Of the Old School

摘要

Billionaire Ruth E. Lilly has a small frame, small hands, and a small, whispery voice when she talks. But she talks to almost no one. On the rare occasions when Lilly, 88, and the lone heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, leaves her home in Indianapolis' plush North Side, friends say if s often for a drive around town with her nurses. She likes to pass by the dozens of projects she supports. Before she was confined to a wheelchair, she once stopped in at the Ruth Lilly Health Education Center. Receptionist Louise David recalls that the organization's president "was so flustered" to see Lilly there. Flustered, but lucky. Most of Lilly's beneficiaries have never laid eyes on her. In November, 2002, Lilly established herself as the first lady of verse―and thrust herself unintentionally into the media spotlight―when she pledged Eli Lilly & Co. stock, estimated then to be worth $100 million, to Poetry, a small Chicago-based magazine that previously had an endowment of only $200,000 and through which she has given an annual poetry prize since 1986. She followed that with a second gift, valued then at $120 million, to Washington (D.C.)-based advocacy group Americans for the Arts, and a $150 million gift to her family's legacy, the Lilly Endowment Inc., which owns 13% of Eli Lilly, according to Bloomberg Financial Markets. This came on top of the $175 million that Lilly's lawyer, Thomas Ewbank, says she has given to Indiana social and cultural institutions over the past two decades. And when she dies, Lilly will leave hundreds of millions of dollars to the Ruth Lilly Philanthropic Foundation.