Behrend

Unexpected gift creates Trustee Scholarship at Erie

Engineering students at Penn State Erie will benefit from the unexpected generosity of the late Shirley L. Roth. The campus has received a scholarship bequest of a little more than $417,000 from the estate of the longtime Erie resident, who died in December 2003. Edinboro University received an equal amount of money for nursing scholarships; neither institution had a previous relationship with Roth.

"Shirley Roth created scholarships for two very important occupations, nursing and engineering. The entire region will benefit from her philanthropy to our universities," Jack Burke, chancellor, said of the unanticipated inheritance.

Erie has created The Shirley L. Roth Trustee Matching Scholarship, which gives preference to engineering students. Penn State provides an additional 5 percent of every Trustee Matching Scholarship's principal amount to the scholarship's spending account every year in perpetuity.

"By creating a Trustee Matching Scholarship, Miss Roth's gift will produce approximately $40,000 in permanent scholarship funding every year for academically talented engineering students who demonstrate financial need," Burke said. With nearly 1,000 engineering students on campus, Erie has significant demand for scholarship aid.

Roth graduated from Academy High School in 1946, started working at the former Pennsylvania Telephone Co. shortly thereafter and stayed until her retirement in 1981. "She was a methods analyst, which meant that she wrote procedures for the rest of the company to follow," Joan Nathal, a former co-worker, said of her longtime friend. "She met with salesmen and did buying of materials. Shirley was very meticulous, very methodical and very smart."

Roth never married and had no children. She and her brother, Herman, a technician at Bliley Electric Co. who also remained single throughout his life, lived together in a home on Melrose Avenue until his death in 1994.

Roth's friends surmise that she made the gifts to the universities as a way to honor her brother. As an electrical technician and amateur radio enthusiast, Herman would have supported the idea of educating future engineers, said Peggy Tarr, who, along with Roth and Nathal, was a member of an informal "girls' club" of women who had worked for the telephone company in downtown Erie during the 1950s and '60s. The idea for nursing scholarships "probably came about when her brother was very sick and needed hospice care," Tarr said. "Those caring occupations interested her."

Both Nathal and Tarr remember Roth as a woman of wit and grace. "She was always very modern, preppy dresser. She ... had a nice sense of style," Nathal said. Tarr described her friend as "perfectly coordinated" at all times. "We'd sometimes kid her that she was too perfect," Nathal added.

"Spunky" is another adjective her friends used to describe Roth. "She was in her 60s when she decided she wanted to learn to drive," Nathal remembered. "It took her a couple of tries to pass the test, but she was undaunted." After getting her driver's license, Roth purchased her first car. "I thought she'd buy a conservative car, but she got some kind of sporty Pontiac instead," Tarr said. "I was very surprised."

Roth took great pleasure in her garden, her yard, her cooking and her investments. Her friends say that they knew she enjoyed following the stock market and analyzing her portfolio, but had no idea that she'd managed to amass an estate of $1.2 million. "She never talked about her finances. We just knew that she was doing OK," Nathal said.

Roth died at Sarah A. Reed Retirement Center in December 2003. Her will also included gifts to the Visiting Nurse Association's Hospice of Erie County, the American Cancer Society, the International Institute and the Shriners Hospital for Children in Erie.

"Shirley and Herman were not people who made a lot of money" in their careers, Tarr noted. "But what money they had, they took very good care of. When you can save your money like they did and use it the way they are to help others, that's really something."

Shirley L. Roth Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

Last Updated November 18, 2010

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