Gift to the Future : 12 Newporters Aid Scholar-Swimmer at Harvard Medical School

Todd Lincoln remembers, with a chuckle, his early days at Harvard University.

“I guess I was already infamous to the financial aid office,” Lincoln recalled in a recent telephone interview from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass.

“They came to me and said that they’d been notified by people in Newport Beach that part of my costs were being paid by them. ‘What’s this all about?’ they wanted to know.”

What it’s all about is that Lincoln, 24, a former All-America swimmer at both Newport Harbor High and Stanford University, is viewed as a future national asset by various people in Newport Beach. And to back up their belief, 12 city residents are jointly contributing about $10,000 a year to his four-year Harvard Medical School education.

The money is a gift--not a loan.

“We’re sort of syndicating him,” said Lincoln’s former swim coach, Bill Jewell, who is one of the donors to the Todd Lincoln fund.

Jewell attended Newport Harbor High and now works as a builder and developer in Newport Beach. He said Lincoln was such a standout scholar at Stanford that he was readily admitted to every medical school to which he applied.

“He wanted to go to Harvard because it’s so good,” Jewell said. “But he was already paying off a loan for his years at Stanford. He had an academic scholarship there, but it didn’t pay everything.”

Jewell learned of Lincoln’s financial dilemma when the young swimmer-scholar graduated from Stanford with highest honors in 1984. By then, Lincoln’s mother had remarried and moved to Northern California.

“Todd came back to Newport Beach and lived with me and my wife, Carol, last summer while he worked to pay off some of his Stanford tuition loans,” said Jewell.

While Lincoln was paying off some of his undergraduate student loans, he was also applying for entrance to medical schools.

Lincoln graduated second in his class at Stanford, with an overall grade point average of 3.93 after four years as a biology major. He had been valedictorian in his 1980 high school graduating class at Newport Harbor. And he had been All-America at both schools in swimming.

With those kinds of credentials, Lincoln had no trouble getting into medical schools.

“I was accepted at Harvard, UC San Francisco, UC San Diego, UCLA, the University of Michigan, Duke, Columbia and Washington University in St. Louis,” Lincoln recalled.

“Harvard was my first choice, for academic reasons, but the finances of it scared me,” Lincoln said. “I didn’t know if I could make it there because of financial reasons.”

Jewell said he thought that it would be a shame for “a good mind like that” not to go to the best university available. So Jewell began quietly contacting potential donors.

The 12 persons who formed the fund for Lincoln were Jewell and his wife, Brian Mock, Dr. Barry Steele, J.M. Peters, Don Koll, Bill Davis, Don Haskel, Jerry Finster, Ed Warmington Sr. and his sons, Bob and Jim.

“The only thing that we asked was that he do something good in the future,” said Jewell. “And he’s already talking about donating his time, down the line, to causes and charities.”

In the telephone interview from Harvard, Lincoln said he has always been interested in doing some sort of medical charity work. By not being heavily in debt with student loans--thanks to the Newport Beach donors--Lincoln said he can realistically plan now to help others, from time to time, when he becomes a doctor.

Sees Himself in Africa

“I’ve been thinking about going overseas for a year, possibly my third year (in medical school),” Lincoln said. “I have friends here at Harvard who have spent a year working in Africa, pretty much out in the bush, and that’s something I can see myself doing in the future. The Newport Beach financial aid frees me up to do something like that.

“And when I establish myself (as a doctor), I want to help someone else in medical school. I’d like to kind of make this a revolving scholarship--a generation-by-generation scholarship.”

Harvard Medical School is expensive. The $10,000 that Lincoln is getting this year from his Newport Beach donors is less than half of the $22,000 it is costing him for his first year. “I’ve taken out a $10,500 personal loan, and the rest I’m financing from my savings,” Lincoln said.

Lincoln was a star in distance freestyle, breast stroke and individual medley while in high school and at Stanford. He was offered an all-expenses-paid athletic scholarship to Stanford, but he declined that and instead took a lesser-paying academic scholarship. He had to borrow about $6,000 to cover the four-year costs not paid by his academic scholarship.

Lincoln explained that by his rejecting the swim scholarship, Stanford could offer it to another athlete and thus improve the team.

Unselfish Team Spirit

“It was to the team’s benefit,” Lincoln said. “The team was in the process of building a national-caliber competition, and I was given pretty comparable academic aid, really.”

Jewell, however, points to that incident as being one of many indicators of Lincoln’s unselfishness and team spirit.

“He’s an egghead, a very bright kid, the smartest swimmer I’ve ever coached,” Jewell said. “He could have been very selfish, but he’s not. He’s never had much in the way of material things in his life. But he’s an unbelievably happy guy.”

Back in Cambridge, Lincoln said he is grateful to have friends like the Jewells and others in Newport Beach.

“I wouldn’t be here in Harvard if it hadn’t been for those people in Newport Beach,” he said. “There was no realistic way I could have come here otherwise.

“It’s nice to know that people back at home have faith in you. It makes it easier when you lose sight of things here at the university to know that people back home think you can really succeed.”