South Paris native American’s 7th biggest benefactor

SOUTH PARIS/ WASHINGTON, D.C. — An annual accounting of America’s top philanthropists has placed a Paris native at No. 7 on the list.

Interestingly, that man, Frank C. Doble, has been dead for 40 years.

Since 1996, the online magazine Slate.com had compiled the “Slate 60,” a listing of the country’s top donors.  The purpose of the list, prepared by staffers at The Chronicle of Philanthropy, was to inspire competitiveness among the super-wealthy. 

By publishing a list of gifts and pledges to nonprofit institutions, the magazine says, it hoped the Scrooge McDuck’s of the world would try to outdo each giving in their riches away, instead of seeing who could hoarding the highest pile.

Slate does not say if the strategy worked.  However, its editors did notice something odd about this year’s list.  For the first time, seven of the top 10 gifts came from estates, rather than from living people.

“Some of the country’s richest philanthropists say the bleak economy is causing them to put off making new gifts, and fund raisers already are noticing a dip in eight- and nine-figure donations,” says Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy.  “What’s different about this recession, as compared to the last few, is that it is affecting charitable donations of all kinds, not just those by the poor and middle class.”

Because 25 percent of the biggest gifts in 2008 came from the financial world, Palmer predicts fewer $100 million charitable donations will be seen in 2009.

In 2007, the Slate 60 totaled $7.79 billion in charitable gifts.  Last year, the tally ran to $15.78 billion. However, while the overall total doubled, most of the giving on this year's list came from gifts committed before the start of the current recession, in December, 2007, or else just before the bottom dropped out of the economy last fall.

That’s the case with Doble. 

Born in South Paris in 1886, Doble attended Paris High School and later moved to Massachusetts, where he founded the Doble Engineering Company in 1920.

The company was built around Doble’s first invention, a 7.5 pound portable telephone that allowed utility field engineers in remote areas to communicate with distant colleagues, safely, through high voltage transmission lines. 

Doble followed that up with an electric line insulator tester  to the power industry.  Credited with developing instruments and services that made the delivery of electricity safer and more efficient, worldwide, Doble’s company grew into a global corporation that made testing and diagnostic equipment for the electrical industry.

The company was sold in St. Louis-based ESCO Technologies early 2008 and, in April of that year, a trust Doble created to benefit Lesley and Tufts Universities was dissolved.

Doble earned his bachelors degree from Tufts, but it was his belief in the value of early childhood education that led to his endowment to Lesley, where he was a trustee.

According to Eleanor Eddy, a retired director of Doble Engineering, Doble’s commitment to Lesley stemmed from his belief that quality, early childhood education is necessary to scientific study. 

“He often cited his belief that preparation for college begins in the first grade,” said Eddy.  “Lesley in the 1950s and 1960s could have had no more devoted supporter for its principal mission at that time — teacher preparation.”

The $272 million in the trust was shared equally by Lesley University and Tufts University and the gift put Doble near the top of the Slate 60 list.

While the two largest gifts of 2008, from the estates of hotelier Leona M. Helmsley and medical inventor James LeVoy Sorenson, are estimates because the donors' estates have not been settled, it is worth noting that both, like Doble, are deceased.

Many of the living who frequently haunt the upper echelons of the Slate 60 list dropped off the list this year, including Pierre and Pam Omidyar, T. Boone Pickens, T. Denny Sanford, and Oprah Winfrey.

The following is Slate’s ranking of the top-10 most generous donors and how much each gave to charity in 2008:

• Leona M. Helmsley (bequest), $5.2 billion 

• James LeVoy Sorenson (bequest), $4.5 billion

• Peter G. Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney, $1.02 billion

• Harold Alfond (bequest), $360 million 

• Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler (bequest), $334.2 million

• David G. And Suzanne Booth, $300 million 

• Frank C. Doble (bequest), $272 million

• Robert and Catherine McDevitt (bequest), $250 million

• Michael R. Bloomberg, $235 million

• Dorothy Clarke Patterson (bequest), $225 million