For Sallie Hume '70, Union College and Memorial Chapel have long had special meaning. So it was natural that she make a $100,000 gift of stock for the restoration of Memorial Chapel.
“As a child, I used to roller-skate with my friend, Jessica Waldron, in front of the chapel steps,” she says. “It was the smoothest place around.”
A few years after childhood, she was one of the few people who looked forward to mandatory Sunday night chapel.
“It was a nice place to meet young gentlemen,” she recalls.
And a few years after that, her son, Bill, was married there.
Hume, one of the College's first women graduates, served on the Board of Trustees during the 1970s. Her parents met on campus during a performance at the Mohawk Drama Festival. Her mother was playing a lead role. Her father was in the audience.
Her gift for the Memorial Chapel restoration was made possible by stock she'd received from her late father, H. Loring Wirt, an engineer with General Electric for forty years.
For Edward Cammarota '37, the decision to apply his giving toward scholarships was easy. “When I was a student at Union, tuition and fees were $350 for a full year,” he recalls. 'Today, students still have to go to College, but it's so expensive.”
Cammarota, who earned a degree in civil engineering, has two brothers, Armand '38 and Alexander '41. During his career, he has been involved with a number of business, financial, and real estate concerns.
He recently made a $130,000 addition to the scholarship that bears his name.
“I like the idea of helping the College, and I like the idea of helping
the students,” he says, recalling meeting a number of “very good kids” who have benefited from his scholarship. “It never hurts to help someone.”
Michael S. Rapaport '59 likes the idea of supporting Schaffer library. So he made a gift of $50,000 toward the renovation and expansion of the building.
Though he says he felt the Nott Memorial may have “served its purpose as a library” while he was a student at Union, he acknowledges that “times have changed” and today's library has become more of a central fixture in the learning process.
Rapaport earned a bachelor's degree from Union in Social Studies and a law degree and M.B.A. from Columbia University. A partner in his family's New York City law firm, he specializes in probate, real property, and estate taxation law.
Rapaport says he has directed his gifts to the College to be used in projects for which other funds are unavailable. His gift to the library also will be used to secure other matching funds.