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Firm Foundations: Charles Lee Powell’s Generous Legacy Charles Lee Powell was a pioneering, self-taught engineer who invented and patented new methods for building concrete structures underground. He is credited with building much of Los Angeles’ early infrastructure, including the Second and Third Street Tunnels and the Angels Flight funicular railway in the historic downtown Bunker Hill district. Following a successful career as a contractor, Powell made provisions in his will for a charitable foundation that would carry forward his legacy of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. For nearly 40 years, the La Jolla-based Charles Lee Powell Foundation has supported groundbreaking engineering programs at USC, Caltech, Stanford, and U.C. San Diego. “The foundation’s directors identified a select group of universities in California that had quality engineering programs,” says Joel Holliday, president and chief executive officer of the foundation. “Given the relatively modest size of the foundation’s endowment, they felt it would be best to limit the number of schools they fund, in order to provide sustained support for leading-edge research and teaching in areas where it would make a difference.” Since 1970, the foundation has provided more than $13 million in grants to the USC School of Engineering, funding the Charles Lee Powell Hall of Information Sciences and Systems Engineering, the Charles Lee Powell Chair in Computer Engineering, the Charles Lee Powell Chair in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Charles Lee Powell Foundation Photonics Industrial Laboratory. “Thanks to the Charles Lee Powell Foundation’s generous support, the School of Engineering is pushing the boundaries of research and teaching in fields that are of enormous importance to this nation and the world as a whole,” says Dean C. L. Max Nikias. “The core of our giving centers on ‘bundle grants,” says Holliday. “We fund exciting research, along with the equipment and graduate fellowships that are required to sustain this work.” Holliday has been president and CEO of the foundation since 1999. He succeeded the late Herbert Kunzel (LAS ‘33, LLB ’34), a San Diego trial and corporate attorney who served as the foundation’s chairman and
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executive director since the mid-1980s. Although Powell laid the foundation for his professional career in Southern California, he hailed from storied Southern stock. He was born on the campus of the Virginia Military Institute in 1863, during the Civil War, and his mother was a second cousin of General Robert E. Lee. Powell was the youngest son in a family of 11 children – a family that lost all its land and assets during the war, Charles Lee Powell before young Powell’s second birthday. just as each of his brothers had done. Powell’s entrepreneurial spirit and Perhaps it is true that good deeds do ingenuity were evident from the start. not go unnoticed, for later that year Powell When he was six, he paid for a sow by was offered work supervising a street shucking corn for his grandfather’s hogs, paving job in Neosha Falls, Kansas — the and made money raising and selling the first of several construction projects he resulting piglets. He worked steadily at a managed in that state. By 1893, he had variety of odd jobs throughout his youth, saved the princely sum of $10,000, and by the time he was 18, he had saved which he carefully carried with him on a westward-bound train to Los Angeles, to launch what soon became one of the most successful construction businesses in By 1893, he had saved the Southern California. princely sum of $10,000, which In addition to landmark structures, he carefully carried with him on Powell’s firm built one of the first modern sewerage systems in downtown a westward-bound train to Los Angeles, replacing the open redwood Los Angeles, to launch what soon sewer trenches that had served city residents. As a contractor, he was admired became one of the most for implementing numerous worker safety successful construction businessmeasures in what were often dangerous es in Southern California. underground construction projects. Powell died in 1959, at the age of 96, leaving the Charles Lee Powell Foundation $158 (equivalent to $2,764 today). to continue his legacy. “Mr. Powell clearly When he was 21, Powell received his was a man of great vision, compassion and share of a small inheritance from his entrepreneurial drive,” says Christopher father’s estate. Jobless, he was living in Stoy, the School’s CEO of External Kansas City at the time and wore folded Relations. “We are grateful to him, and to newspaper in his shoes because they had the foundation he created, for supporting so many holes. Nonetheless, he signed his exciting new frontiers of engineering entire inheritance over to his mother — research and teaching at USC.”