Atlantans Pay Tribute to Philanthropic Pair

For years, George and Jean Brumley threw themselves into charitable works around this city as determinedly as they shunned public acclaim for their deeds.

The community’s gratitude poured forth Saturday as an estimated 3,000 mourners gathered in memory of the retired pediatrics chief and his philanthropist wife, who died July 19 in Kenya in a plane crash that also took the lives of 10 other family members and the two pilots.

The mourners overflowed the main sanctuary of Trinity Presbyterian Church in the upscale Buckhead neighborhood to commemorate a family that only in death became known to much of the city, despite the broad range of its beneficiaries, from poor children to the city’s symphony.

“They were such extraordinary people. They’re regular people who didn’t care about [others] knowing what wonderful things they did. So many people in this world want everyone to know what they do,” said Jack Guynn, who is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and served with Jean Brumley on the board of the nonprofit Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta.

George W. Brumley Jr., 68, was the retired head of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine. A native Georgian, he was respected by his medical colleagues in part for his research aimed at reducing deaths and disability among premature babies caused by lung malfunction. He retired in 1995.

Jean Stanback Brumley, 67, traced her roots to a North Carolina family that amassed a fortune by producing headache remedies.

Much of the couple’s philanthropic work was carried out by a family charity called the Zeist Foundation, named for a city in the Netherlands where they once lived. The couple established a nonprofit community development program in impoverished southeastern Atlanta called the Whitefoord Community Program. The project provides a health clinic for a nearby school and sponsors a preschool.

George Brumley also played a leading role in the Atlanta branch of a program, called Project GRAD, to keep low-income students from dropping out of school and to spur them on to college. He was a firm believer that promise resides in everyone, but that success is “all a matter of circumstance,” said Ellen Harrison, associate director of the Houston-based program.

Jean Brumley, who grew up in North Carolina, was a childhood friend of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Hanford Dole (R-N.C.). She even passed along her wedding dress for the couple’s nuptials.

In the years after moving to Atlanta with her husband in 1981, Jean Brumley served on the boards of a number of arts and community-oriented groups, including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. As part of those efforts, she helped raise money for a new music hall and was co-chair of a committee that raised more than $18 million for a recent expansion of Trinity Presbyterian.

“Whenever there was a need for money for Trinity, somehow it mysteriously appeared,” said George Goodwin, a retired public-relations executive who served as a church elder with each of the Brumleys.

A family spokesman, Jim Tsokanos said the cause of the plane crash was still under investigation.

The crash claimed family members across three generations, including three of the Brumleys’ grown children and their spouses, along with four grandchildren, ages 11 to 14. The group was aboard a chartered airplane, headed from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to a nature reserve. George Brumley had become captivated by the region after to climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro two years ago.

The family spokesman said the victims’ remains and their belongings had been recovered following an arduous effort to get to the crash site on 17,058-foot Mt. Kenya. The remains are to undergo DNA analysis to hasten identification, Tsokanos said.

Those who knew the couple described them as unassuming and private. The memorial service attracted a wide array of Atlantans, from nurses to former Mayor Andrew Young.

The broad shock around the city also was apparent in the number of mourners who barely knew the Brumleys. “They meant a lot to this community. It’s a great loss,” said Helena Stokes, who attended the service despite having only briefly met the couple through their role in the Zeist Foundation.

Kim Bugg, a nurse practitioner with the Whitefoord program who met George Brumley shortly after he arrived as pediatrics chief at Emory in 1981, said staffers have been told that the charity would be well provided-for through the Brumley estate. That, she said, spoke volumes about the depth of the family’s commitment.