Wellesley gift to generate years of buzz

WELLESLEY -- You won't see a Leonie Faroll performing arts center at Wellesley College, or a sparkling new Leonie Faroll wing of the campus art museum, a Leonie Faroll endowed professorship, or a Leonie Faroll scholarship fund.

No, Leonie Faroll, class of 1949, had other ideas when she left $27 million to her alma mater: to keep the power flowing through campus, the boilers pumping, and the nuts and bolts of certain college facilities properly greased and tightened.

A lover of infrastructure, Faroll, who died in September 2003 at 75, left Wellesley what is believed to be the largest bequest ever given to a women's college. The catch: Most of the money will go to the campus power plant; the rest for renovations and maintenance at the college science center.

''Most people who give a gift want to build a park or a building that people see and appreciate," said George Hagg, assistant director of utilities for the college. ''Leonie didn't care about that. She understood that this is what keeps all of [the campus] going."

Faroll's beloved power plant, a cavernous cinderblock building that thrums with a constant purr of huge electric generators, generates all of the college's electricity. It's not exactly a popular campus hangout or a target of donations from wealthy alumni.

Faroll bequeathed more than half the money for maintenance and capital improvements at the plant. (Day-to-day operating costs will still come from the college's operating budget.) She requested that the plant be named after her parents, Berenice and Joseph Faroll, which the college plans to do. At the science center, Faroll's bequest will go to upgrades such as new windows and improving old lecture halls, and, of course, to upgrading and maintaining heating and cooling systems.

Nobody knows exactly when Faroll, a longtime resident of Park Avenue in New York, became fascinated with energy and engineering, but it seems she was hooked early. As an undergraduate volunteer at the college radio station in the late 1940s, she could frequently be spotted hanging wires around campus in an attempt to boost the station's modest signal.

Most summers since she graduated more than a half a century ago, Faroll drove a rental car from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Wellesley for a weekend visit. She always dropped by the power plant, often hanging around a while to talk to the employees, whom she called her ''power house buddies."

Over the years, it was Hagg who led her on many tours of the plant. Afterward, she would pepper him with questions about chlorofluorocarbons, efficiency operations, and federal energy regulations.

''She knew the ins and outs of everything," he said.

Those who knew Faroll say the bequest, made public this month after her estate was settled, reflects the personality of a frugal and eccentric woman who treasured the memory of her time at Wellesley studying economics.

Her donations to the power plant, which also houses equipment that heats and cools buildings on campus, date back at least two decades. When the college upgraded the plant in the early 1990s, which allowed it to produce all campus electricity, Faroll was a major donor to the project. Her contributions totaled $750,000.

College president Diana Chapman Walsh remembers that she had to resist the urge to smile at Faroll, who insisted on remaining anonymous, during the ribbon-cutting.

''Only I knew and she knew," Walsh said this week. ''She had a whimsical sense of humor, so I think she enjoyed having that secret."

But the $27 million bequest shows that Faroll was keeping a much bigger secret.

''We had no idea," Walsh said. ''We were just stunned by the size of the gift."

The amount of the final bequest was a shock because Faroll was an unrepentant penny-pincher, said Jeanne Theodore, a 1936 alumna of Wellesley.

''She was so penurious and miserly; she believed that people should spend very little money," Theodore said. ''But she believed that education was the most important thing in the world. Wellesley and education were truly the loves of her life."

Raised at 1120 Park Avenue by well-to-do parents, Faroll was given shares of stock for her 10th birthday by her father, a Wall Street investor. From a young age, she invested her own money, later independently investing her parents' estates.

After leaving Wellesley, she worked for several years as a research analyst for the New York investment firm Scudder, Stevens & Clark. Her father died in 1958, and she quit to take care of her ailing mother, who died in 1962. Faroll's only sibling, her older sister Miriam, died a few years later.

Faroll never married, and, friends said, made no improvements to her family's nine-room apartment, where she lived the rest of her life. But she served as treasurer for the building association for more than 25 years. She had a fascination for the building's heating system and an obsession with energy conservation.

''She found leaks that even the handyman couldn't find and saved everyone a lot of money," said Theodore, 89, a resident of the building.

A dedicated reader with a stunning memory for detail, Faroll loved classical music and held season tickets to the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. She rarely cooked, instead eating meals at neighborhood restaurants or at neighbors' homes.

She refused to pay for extravagances such as taxicabs, insisting on taking the subway to Wellesley alumni events, even during snowstorms. She rarely socialized and disliked being photographed or fussed over. College officials said they didn't even have a recent photo of her.

The New York-based Council for Aid to Education, which tracks annual bequest payments reported by colleges and universities, believes Faroll's gift to be the largest ever made to a college for women. (The tally does not include gifts made by living donors.)

In her final years, Faroll developed Parkinson's disease, and she collapsed at home about six months before she died, said Linda Bermas, an executor of her estate and a family friend who met her in a youth golf league at the North Shore Country Club on Long Island.

That more than half of the gift would go to the power plant was clear.

Bermas visited Wellesley last year to help decide how to fulfill Faroll's wishes for the rest of the bequest.

College officials made their own suggestions: Add to the popular campus greenhouses? Improve the campus observatory? But Bermas took a pass. ''Those are things other people would get involved in," she said, ''and therefore not something Leonie would be interested in."

Then she saw the dark, outdated classrooms in the science center.

''I said, 'That's the kind of thing she would have wanted to do,' " Bermas said.

Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com.