Standing Pat With a Few Blue Chips Reaps a Bonanza : Philanthropy: Retirement home reaps $4.5 million from $12,000 trust created with 100 shares of fledgling IBM stock in 1928.

Folks at the Scripps Home retirement facility in Altadena will be the first to tell you that some things get better with age--particularly IBM stock.

The nonprofit home for the low-income elderly announced Wednesday that it had inherited $4.5 million from a trust created in 1928 with 100 shares of IBM stock, when the fledgling International Business Machines Corp. was hardly a household name.

The Scripps Home became a beneficiary of the trust after the death of Anne Smith Bundy of Pasadena, whose grandfather-in-law founded one of the companies that became IBM.

Executive Director James Graunke said the money will help ensure the home’s ability to provide care for its 150 residents, all of them older than 70.

“We’ve made a promise to care for them for their lifetime,” said Graunke, 46, who has been with the Scripps Home since 1977. “This will give us a stronger financial base to secure that commitment.”

The trust was established by Julia Bundy for her son, Bruce, in 1928. A provision stated that if Bruce Bundy and his wife, Anne Smith Bundy, had no children, trust money would go to several charities--including the Scripps Home, which was founded in 1911.

After Anne Smith Bundy died without children in October, the home was in line to receive the portfolio that blossomed from the shares of vintage IBM stock.

Talk about maturing gracefully. The stock, worth $12,300 in 1928, split several times and the money was reinvested in several other holdings--so that Scripps’ share of the trust was valued at $4.5 million, a 36,600% increase.

The appreciation shouldn’t be a surprise considering the stock--and it’s owners’--blue bloodlines.

Julia Bundy’s husband, Harlow, founded the Bundy Time Machine Co. in Binghamton, N.Y., with his brother, Willard, in 1890. Willard had invented the world’s first time clock, which, for better or for worse, enabled employers to record employees’ work hours and identification numbers.

The company grew and merged with several competitors and related businesses to become IBM in 1924. Although Harlow Bundy had retired and moved to Pasadena in 1915, he is credited with planting the seeds that blossomed into Big Blue.

The money comes at a good time for the Scripps Home. According to Graunke, the home has spent more than $6 million over the last 15 years to modernize its apartments, improve its medical facility and bolster its earthquake readiness. He said the new money will help keep the facility on firm financial footing after those expenditures.

“It’s a beautiful facility and the residents here are proud of the facility,” he said, “and the fact that we’ve been supported so well by the community.”