Ivy League dreams come true with liquor magnate's gift

Ivy League dreams come true with liquor magnate's gift

By Jason Hanna
CNN


(CNN) -- Sidney Frank made millions marketing Jagermeister and other alcohol brands. Three years after his death, he's a big hit with students at the Ivy League college he briefly attended.
Sidney Frank, shown accepting an honorary degree in 2005, gave $100 million to Brown University.

He's a big hit not because of what he sold but because he's given dozens of them what he couldn't afford as a young man: an education at Rhode Island's Brown University.

On Sunday, 49 students from low-income families became the first four-year Sidney E. Frank Scholars to graduate from Brown, owing virtually nothing except gratitude to the late liquor magnate.

"The world of difference that he made for each and every one of us is unbelievable, incredible," one of the Frank Scholars, 22-year-old Shane Reil, said Sunday.

Frank -- who left Brown after one year in the late 1930s because he couldn't afford to stay -- gave the school a $100 million endowment in 2004. He stipulated that the fund's income go exclusively to covering all tuition and expenses for the neediest of Brown's admitted applicants. Hear graduates say how their dreams came true »

For this year's graduates, tuition and expenses came to a four-year total of about $180,000 each. The median annual income of the recipients' families was $18,984.

The gift was the largest single one ever given to Brown and one of the largest ever given for undergraduate scholarships in the United States, according to the school.

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http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/05/25/brown.graduates.sidney.frank/index.html