Grace Ford Salvatori; Raised Funds to Build Music Center

Grace Ford Salvatori, wife of Republican contributor and presidential confidant Henry Salvatori and a major philanthropist and fund-raiser in her own right, has died at her home in Bel-Air at the age of 80.

Death came Saturday and was attributed by family members to the effects of age. Private services were held Tuesday at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Glendale.

Although she made major gifts to USC, the Marlborough School and other educational institutions as well as to Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, St. John’s Hospital, the Hospital of the Good Samaritan and the Los Angeles Mission, perhaps Mrs. Salvatori’s proudest accomplishment, according to her daughter, was her work in raising money for the construction of the Los Angeles Music Center. As vice chairman of the executive board that directed that fund-raising effort, Mrs. Salvatori was the chief associate to its chairman, Mrs. Norman Chandler.

It was Mrs. Salvatori who secured a Cadillac Eldorado from General Motors as the raffle prize for the celebrated “Eldorado Party” of March 17, 1955, that kicked off the Music Center fund-raising campaign. The raffle netted $369,200 through the sale of $1 tickets. Soon after, Mrs. Salvatori was named a Times Woman of the Year by Mrs. Chandler, wife of the late Times publisher Norman Chandler.

On March 17 of this year, the 35th anniversary of that seminal event, the Eldorado Room of the Music Center was renamed the Grace Salvatori Room at a small ceremony with city and county officials in attendance.

In 1977, the Salvatoris gave $2 million to USC for construction of Grace Ford Salvatori Hall, a three-story classroom building for the school’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Born in Oklahoma, Mrs. Salvatori came to Los Angeles to try out for a movie part and was briefly under contract to MGM Studios. She met Salvatori, who was in the oil business, in Los Angeles and they were married in 1937.

Mrs. Salvatori is survived by her husband; a son, Henry Ford Salvatori; a daughter, Laurie Ann O’Connell, and a grandson.