Photograph reprinted courtesy of Lorenzo N. Hoopes. All rights reserved.
B e n e f a c t or s 5 9
Ray L. and Eloise Hoopes Lillywhite
by over $400,000 in gifts from the Lillywhites. In April 2001, the building was dedicated as the Ray L. and Eloise H. Lillywhite Building. xvii The Lillywhites’ interest in the COMD Department stemmed from the experience of their daughter, Joanne Lillywhite Christensen, who was inspired to become a speech pathologist by an introductory speech and hearing course she took at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1950s—taught by doctoral student Jay Jensen, later to be head of USU’s Department of Communicative Disorders. Joanne taught children with speech impairments for several years until her untimely death from cancer at age 40. Although Joanne obtained her degree in speech and hearing elsewhere, the Lillywhites felt a strong connection to USU, as the Wisconsin contact with Jay Jensen continued after he joined the USU faculty and their son obtained a degree in Communicative Disorders at USU..21 In 1994, they began a series of donations to establish and support the Joanne Lillywhite Christensen Scholarship Endowment for speech-language pathology students in the newly renamed Department of Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education (COMDDE). In 2005, as part of a larger gift to the university from the Lillywhites’ estate, $200,000 was added to the scholarship endowment. And with an additional gift from the estate and one from the Lillywhite Trust the next year, the total endowment reached over $523,000. The gift to USU from the Lillywhites’ estate in 2005 totaled $4.5 million, at that time the second largest gift from an individual in USU’s history. At the university level, $2.2 million of the gift added to a Lillywhite endowment for USU’s University Scholars program. Within the college, $2 million was designated for establishment of the Ray L. and Eloise Hoopes Lillywhite Endowed Chair in Speech-Language Pathology in the 21
Dr. Jay Jensen, now retired for over 19 years, provided this information in an e-mail on 8/26/10.
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