From the Head Fellow: Finishing the U.S. Endowment
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
Charles Eisendrath ’75
In the fall of 1928, a University of Michigan journalism major named Bert Askwith was stranded in Ann Arbor by a strike on the New York Central Railroad, along with numerous classmates who relied on the train for transport home. Askwith, an editor at the Michigan Daily, had a brainstorm. He would rent a bus and sell tickets for the ride. It worked well and he had started a company which covered his UM costs during those tough depression times.
That’s how journalism lost Askwith. Immediately after graduating in 1931, he went home and transferred Campus Coach Lines (named for UM), a charter bus company, to the New York metro area. It became a substantial enterprise, which he now runs with his daughter, Patti Kenner. Once I asked her whether she thought her father might be free for lunch. “He’s hardly ever free for lunch,” she said, “because he thinks it’s a waste of time.”
He’s serious about his philanthropy, too, including how it’s described. Building KWF has made me a sort of connoisseur of donor sensitivities and Bert is at the extreme end of the extreme end of modesty. No numbers to be known, please, and seldom his name. He is also an original thinker. As Charlie Gibson ’74 and I found out several years ago, Bert’s ideas may not be easy to implement, but they’re fresh, interesting... and they work.
Neither of us had met Bert when he introduced himself at one of UM’s “tailgate” parties, which are held inside for hundreds more than that quaint term implies. Bert started talking about the sad state of politics. We agreed. Then he mused whether Michigan could set up a sort of civilian equivalent of scholarships to West Point, which members of Congress award to students from their districts. Great idea, we thought. The honoree would then come to Ann Arbor to speak in the Political Science Department. Wonderful, I agreed. Then Bert asked whether it shouldn’t be journalists who judge the merits of legislators to make such an award. By then we noticed the twinkle in his eye and realized there was no escape. The man had seduced us on idea power alone.
Gibson introduced the first University of Michigan Distinguished Service Award at the National Press Club in 1996. The award went to Senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, who wondered aloud—to an audience of 150, including Katharine Graham, much of the Michigan Congressional delegation and a number of national journalists—why no university in her state had such a program. The answer was that only Michigan had Askwith.
Administering the program was not simple. The award winner would select a student in her state to receive a four-year scholarship. The University admissions office reorganized the way it did business to identify excellent prospective freshmen from specific legislative districts. Wallace House assembled a panel of judges with unquestioned expertise and unassailable balance. Bert stipulated that the scholarships should be generous but not a free ride; the need to work had given him some of his best ideas and would do the same for others.
Despite its considerable success—it was given twice more, to Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar and West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd—plans to make the contest permanent lapsed. That won’t happen to Bert’s new programs with us because they are endowed. Once again, they began at a tailgate.
There was Bert and he had that twinkle. This time he was talking about some kid I’d never heard of who “perfected the forward pass” on the 1925 UM football team. Benny Friedman praised by none other than Knute Rockne as “the greatest football player ever,” was the first Jew elected captain of a major college squad. Bert said Friedman never got his due because of the prevailing anti-Semitism of the time and thought he and a few friends could raise an endowment in his name. The first Benny Friedman Fellow in Sports Journalism arrived with the class of ’06.
But one last increment of the Knight Foundation’s matching grant still needed to be found and, frankly, I was out of ideas. I asked the Office of Development and Mike Wallace, honorary co-chair of the University’s capital campaign, to throw themselves into the project. In the end, to our amazement, the donor was again the man that journalism lost to the bus-chartering business in 1928.
Major generosity always excites me. But from individuals, “moved” is how I feel. In this case the sensation is sharpened by the knowledge that Bert’s gift essentially completes permanent funding for our 12 positions for Americans.
Now it’s on to the internationals. We’re after six positions and I’m confident we’ll get them. That’s what we will be celebrating at the reunion next September.
