BEQUEST OF $309,262

John George Beranek '20, son of a poor immigrant family who rose to be personal secretary and assistant to the president of Boeing Aircraft Company, has bequeathed $309,262 to the College.

Mr. Beranek, also a graduate of Tuck School of Business Administration, went to work immediately after high school in his home city of LaCrosse, Wis. Sometime during the next four years he took a job with the LaCrosse Board of Education where the late Louis P. Benezet '99 was Superintendent of Schools. Mr. Benezet became interested in Beranek, talked to him about a Dartmouth education, obtained financial aid for him, and saw the young man off to Hanover.

Perhaps the relationship between Mr. Beranek and Mr. Benezet can best be described by this passage from a letter written by Mr. Benezet's son, Louis T. Benezet '36: "Father's fondness for John Beranek was repeated many times toward other poor but alert and ambitious boys during Father's sixty years in education. Nothing in his whole career gave him more joy than to see young men - and women - rise from humble backgrounds, through the medium of a good education, plus the priceless ingredient of someone who believed in them."

Mr. Beranek never married. After working eight years with a paper company and then with a bank, in 1929 he began his association with Boeing Aircraft. As an active Dartmouth alumnus, he served as President of the State of Washington Alumni Association, as an assistant class agent, and as a member of his class bequest and estate planning committee.