Living her best life, leaving a beautiful legacy

Carol Chabot Murphy, from a very early age, learned what it meant to work hard, invest in what you believe in and give back to the community where you live.

So, it is not surprising that she has made plans to leave her estate to Daytona State College for the benefit of students from Volusia County.

From left: Sue Durgy, DSC Foundation, Carol Chabot Murphy and DSC student Alexis Thompson.

With her father as her primary life influence, Carol soaked up the “Midwestern” values instilled by her parents, Arthur and Dorothy Kellogg Chabot and step-mother, Margaret, who her father married following the death of Dorothy when Carol was in high school.

Those values – what Business Insider magazine, in an October 12, 2018 article says – include, ‘People are genuinely nice, The weather is unpredictable and extreme, The people are always finding new ways to have fun, Life might be slower-but it isn’t any smaller, There’s more room to move around and, A dollar goes further in the Midwest.’

Arthur’s Kankakee, Ill. roots, coupled with the fact that he sold a furniture store at the age of 38 and “retired” to Wilton Manors – located in southeast Florida’s Broward County – gave him all the impetus he needed to remake himself.

As he remade himself in the commercial and residential property ownership and management business, Carol watched and learned.

From those up-close-and-personal life lessons, Carol created a thriving foliage business in DeLeon Springs, Fla. that she operated from 1974 to 2000. Her persistence, willingness to live meagerly and reinvestment of almost everything she possessed into the business made possible success where others might have acquiesced to the forces against them.

In 1992, Carol was named Florida Woman of the Year in Agriculture by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Five years ago, 14 years after selling her business and as she battled cancer, Carol began another kind of investment: an investment in the future of DSC students she doesn’t know and will likely never meet.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunities I’ve had in life, and I trust that what I’m leaving Daytona State College Foundation will be put to work to make it so for others.

Quoted in her father’s obituary, which was published by the Sun Sentinel newspaper on March 12, 1990, Carol affirms what her brother-in-law said of her father, “[he] was one of the few people who lived life on his own terms.” This is true of Carol herself.

Part of living her life ‘on her own terms’ is the fierce determination that the possessions she will leave behind someday will be of great benefit to Daytona State students long into the future.

www.DaytonaState.edu/Magazine