Humble Pair Shocks School With $190-Million Bequest

Professor Donald Othmer and his wife, Mildred, lived modestly. They had a townhouse in Brooklyn. They rode the subway. And when they decided to invest, they entrusted their money to an old friend from Nebraska.

The friend happened to be Wall Street whiz Warren E. Buffett.

The result, when the Othmers died, was an estate worth a whopping $800 million--nearly one-quarter of which will go to Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, where Othmer taught for almost 60 years. His bequest of $190 million, about four times the school’s entire endowment, could lift Polytechnic into the most selective ranks.

“We’re looking at this as a transforming gift,” David C. Chang, president of Polytechnic, said Monday.

The school has about 2,000 students, many of them recent immigrants. Chang said he hopes the money will put the school in a league with better-known engineering colleges such as Carnegie-Mellon University.

“Our mission in life is to provide an opportunity for students to fulfill the American dream,” Chang said. “As a small rather than large school, we want to use this opportunity to see how well we can educate our students.”

Othmer held numerous patents from his research in chemical engineering and was co-editor of the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. He died at age 91 in 1995.

Mildred Othmer was an ex-buyer for her mother’s fashion shops in Omaha. She died in April at age 90.

The couple had no children.

The Othmers’ road to riches began in the 1960s, when they each invested $25,000 with Buffett. In the early 1970s they received shares in Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s investment and insurance holding company.

At the time, the shares were worth $42. Thanks in part to Buffett’s acumen, the stock now is worth $77,200 a share.