Well-nurtured gift enriches two campuses

Tufts, Lesley universities will split a $272m trust

Frank Doble, Tufts 1911, was a longtime Lesley trustee. (Tufts University photo)

While an electrical engineering student at Tufts University in the early 1900s, Frank Currier Doble wired the campus for telephones to help pay his way through college. A century later, like a bolt from the past, Doble's work ethic and pioneering technical expertise have produced a stunning windfall for his alma mater and another local university that will help an untold number of students afford school.

Tufts University and Lesley University, where Doble was a trustee for two decades, will evenly share $272 million, easily the largest donation either school has ever received, officials at both universities will announce today. The unrestricted gift appears to rank among the largest private donations to US colleges and universities, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Almost 40 years after Doble's death, the gift, established through a charitable trust, has now delivered a boon that may be beyond what Doble or the colleges ever imagined.

For Lesley, the gift, which surpasses its current yearly budget of about $110 million, holds vast potential to transform the Cambridge uni versity, best known for its education and teacher-preparation programs.

"It's a beautiful spring day," quipped Lesley's president, Joseph B. Moore.

The money comes from the $319 million sale last fall of Doble Engineering Co., which Doble founded in 1920 and ran from the Tufts campus from 1925 to 1947.

Before his death in 1969, Doble placed ownership of his company in a trust, and with no heirs named both colleges as the primary beneficiaries. When he died, the trust's value was about $2 million. Over the years, much to the delight of both colleges, the value of the small, regionally based company soared.

The company had rapidly expanded over the past decade, opening offices in six countries. But after the sale of the company last year to ESCO Technologies, the executors of the estate decided the timing was right to dissolve the trust, which in recent years has distributed several million dollars a year to both universities.

Now fully realized, the gift will dramatically swell both schools' coffers and triples Lesley's $65 million endowment in one fell swoop.

"Lesley has just received a stunning boost to its capacity to be able to serve its students well," Moore said. "This gives us much more financial flexibility, and really moves us up a notch."

The university, which has 7,500 students after steady growth in recent years, plans to invest the proceeds in scholarships, academic programs, and facilities.

Doble's long relationship with Lesley may have begun when he met Edith Lesley Wolfard, a fellow Cambridge resident who founded the school, Moore said. Doble went on to become a key figure in the history of the college. A dormitory bears his name, as does a gavel that trustees use at meetings. Future Doble scholarships and grants are likely, Moore said.

At Tufts, officials plan to use the $136 million donation to expand financial aid and build a new interdisciplinary science laboratory as a way of honoring Doble's legacy. The lab, which will be named for him, will encourage collaborative research between engineers and biologists. Tufts has an endowment of $1.4 billion.

"It's absolutely in keeping with his legacy and the priorities of the university," said Tufts president Lawrence Bacow, who said university records revealed Doble as an "ingenious and inventive student" who wrote his senior thesis on power and lighting in mill engineering.

In his professional life, Bacow said, Doble was an innovator who "foresaw the potential of the electric power industry when it was still in its infancy."

Born in 1886 in South Paris, Maine, at the dawn of the electric age, Doble moved to Methuen after high school and worked as an electrical apprentice before entering Tufts in 1907. He worked as an unofficial on-call electrician and installed, wired, and rewired the Medford campus for telephone service.

Doble founded his company on the back of his first invention, a 7 1/2-pound portable telephone that enabled utility field engineers to communicate over long distances and avoid the danger and static caused by high-voltage power lines.

He followed that up with an electric-line insulator tester that created a profitable service niche to the power industry.

As the head of the company, he often hired Tufts engineering students and maintained close relationships with Tufts professors. He helped Doble become a worldwide leader in providing diagnostic systems for electric utilities to test safety and reliability. At one point, Doble products tested about 95 percent of all the electricity generated in North America, according to a corporate history published in 1995.

Doble was also an amateur Shakespeare scholar, and in 1962 Tufts awarded him an honorary doctoral degree with the citation: "Humanist and engineer, you have demonstrated in your career that it is possible to bridge the gap between two cultures; beyond this you have shown that the inevitable result of this bridging is responsible citizenship."

Doble had one son, who died as a teenager in 1931, said Tufts officials, citing the corporate history.

Eleanor Eddy, a former Lesley trustee and retired director at Doble, said Doble's commitment to Lesley stemmed from his belief in early childhood education.

"He often cited his belief that preparation for college begins in the first grade," Eddy, who is 98, said in a statement.

Liisa Colby, director of corporate communications for Doble Engineering, said Doble was ahead of his time.

"The business model he came up with, developing and leasing diagnostic equipment for utilities and manufacturers, that's the same model we're using today," she said.