Giveaway

In eleven years, old Crapo Cornell Smith* became a well-known sight on the University of Michigan campus. A prim, courtly and reserved man, he seldom spoke to anyone. No one knew much about him except that he had graduated from the law school in 1896, that he had now retired from a Detroit law firm, had come back to the university and asked permission to live there. President Ruthven saw no reason not to grant the old grad's wish. A bachelor in his 70s, Crapo lived in one room at the Student Union, and spent most of the day in a leather chair in the lobby, buried behind his New York Times.

Occasionally he would get up, shuffle to the registration desk, ask the name and salary of some student he had seen scrubbing floors or waiting on tables. Then, with a curt "thank you," he would go back to his chair, or set off for his daily stroll. Old Smith was never known to buy any clothes and he always ate at the union cafeteria (the cheapest place on campus).

Two months ago Crapo Smith died. He was 79. And last week Michigan got the surprise. The old man had left $1,000,000 to the university. The money would go into scholarships, gifts, loans and rewards of merit to worthy, needy students, like the ones Crapo Smith had been silently watching for the last eleven years.

Unlike Crapo Smith, leathery Daniel G. Arnstein is still young at 58, very much alive, and dapper rather than dignified. He quit school at 13 to help support his family, worked as a $2-a-week office boy, and later as a cab starter. For a while, he went to night school, carried a dictionary around with him to look up the words he didn't know. But he never got to college: "I majored in work."

Dan Arnstein got his degree from the college of hard knocks ; he acquired a fleet of New York City taxis and a tidy fortune. During the war, President Roosevelt sent him to China as a transportation expert on the Burma Road. After the war, as Arnstein sat in his paneled Manhattan office under his certificate from the International Game Fish Association (he holds the world's record for catching the heaviest bone fish on a three-thread line), he began to worry about his 1,800 employees. Would any of their kids get to college? Arnstein decided to ask three friends (including Journalist Quentin Reynolds) which children of Arnstein employees best deserved a college education each year.

Last week, the committee picked the first two, and Arnstein awarded each a $6,000 scholarship. "I want them to have the same chance," says Arnstein, "as the kids of wealthy parents." He wishes he'd thought of it sooner.

* Grandson of Michigan Governor Henry H. Crapo (1864-68) and cousin of Automaker William Crapo Durant.

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