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| Ray and Kay Eckstein's $51 million gift to the Law School moved this building project from wish to reality. The new building will feature a carved transparant facade facing the Interstate. Inside students, faculty and guests will find 12 conference spaces, 52 faculty offices, a chapel and Moot Courtroom. A ground floor forum will connect the teaching, research, conference and social areas. |
There is life and light on a river all day and night, and Ray has always been fascinated by the comings and goings of river traffic. Watching the boats move dock to dock inspired the idea that converted him from onlooker to river entrepreneur.
Wisconsin Power and Light built a big generating plant in Cassville and to run the plant generator they would bring barges loaded with coal up the river. They’d come with a 15-barge tow and tie-off at a spot opposite the plant, take the big 5,000-horsepower boat and deliver two or three barges to the plant at a time. It would take them a total of 10 or 15 hours to unload a big boat. At that time there were just a few switch boats, small tugs of less than 1,000 horsepower, operating on the river. My cousin and I came up with the idea of getting a small tug to take the barges off the tow and cut its delivery time down to two hours — which would save Wisconsin Power and Light a lot of money. They could easily afford to pay us to do the work, and the power plant liked this, too, because we moved the barges in and out of the plant for them.
“Then I graduated into big towing. I formed several companies that would charter boats from big companies then re-crew them and rent them back. On all the boats that we leased, we had buy-backs at a fixed price. My law background enabled me to make up the right kind of contracts. Without my law degree from Marquette, in my opinion, I couldn’t have done what I did.”
In 1961 Ray founded Wisconsin Barge Lines. He sold out to a Chicago conglomerate in 1969 but stayed on with the company until 1978 when he founded Marquette Transportation Co., named for Father Jacques Marquette, S.J. Today the company has a fleet of 38 towboats and 600 barges. Since 1992 it has been led by Ray and Kay’s son, John, and headquartered in Paducah, Ky.
“We wanted to
express our gratitude
to Marquette for
everything we’ve been given. Last year after we sold shares in our company, we were finally in a financial position to make a substantial gift.” |
“We were 100 percent family owned until about six months ago when we took in outside investors,” Ray says, “which was when we started thinking about making a gift to Marquette.”
The Ecksteins have made a point of supporting the causes they believe in most and topping that list are Catholic education and the town of Cassville. They formed the Ray and Kay Eckstein Charitable Trust with 50 percent of distributions committed to Roman Catholic organizations and the other half gifted at the board’s discretion.
They owned the original Marquette Transportation office building and 50 post office buildings Ray had built around the state as part of his real estate business. They sold all but 20 of the buildings and about five years ago began conveying the rest to charity. The Marquette Transportation office building was donated to Cassville for use as a public library with a support trust for its maintenance. The Ecksteins now are building athletic fields and computer capabilities into the local high school. The remaining post office buildings were conveyed into support trusts for St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Grade School in Cassville, the Benedictine Sisters of Chicago and the Sisters of St. Francis in Milwaukee. “It was especially important to us to respond to the needs of retired nuns who gave so much and now depend on the religious orders to support them,” Kay says. They’ve also committed a portion of a trust to the missionary work of the Sisters of St. Francis.
In 2003 a young woman succumbed to the prodding of her persistent grandfather and applied to Marquette Law School. “I really did it just to appease him; I didn’t think I’d go there,” says Kelly Rae Erickson, one of 24 grandchildren who are the pride of Ray and Kay Eckstein. But something drew her to Marquette and as doting grandparents would, Ray and Kay listened when their granddaughter talked about the Law School and about what she liked and what she didn’t. “The professors are excellent and the curriculum tough, but the facilities aren’t good. The Law Library is small and cramped. I told them how I would do as much work as I could fast at the Law Library and then move to Raynor Library to study,” Erickson says.
About two years ago Ray and Kay met Father Wild and had a chance to hear him describe his hopes for Marquette’s future and the role the Law School would play in that. They listened as Law Dean Joseph Kearney talked about raising the stature of the Law School to new heights by building it into an intellectual commons for the study and discussion of important public policy issues; recruiting faculty who are national and even world leaders in emerging law disciplines; and creating a building to match these aspirations. Ray was never more excited for Marquette’s future, and he and Kay decided that when the time was right, they would do what they could to help.
“We wanted to express our gratitude to Marquette for everything we’ve been given,” Ray says. “Last year after we sold shares in our company, we were finally in a financial position to make a substantial gift. We decided on $50 million for the Law School and $1 million to refurnish the Law Library. We didn’t realize at the time that it was going to be the largest donation given to Marquette. And I didn’t realize it was Father’s birthday when I called.”
When Ray called Father Wild on Father's 67th birthday, it sent Marquette’s president over the moon. Father Wild left a message for Dean Kearney to come to his office in O’Hara Hall right away.
“I knew it was either really bad or really good, and I told a faculty member I hoped I’d still be dean when I came back,” Kearney says. “I walked into Father’s office, and he said, ‘You have a lead gift for your building project, $51 million from Ray and Kay Eckstein.’
“With that gift the Law School project went from being a dream to a reality,” says Kearney. “It’s an example of the proposition that the most important thing in these circumstances is a compelling idea — an entirely new building, a prominent location, a facility that enables us to do things programmatically that we couldn’t do before. This is independent corroboration that we are doing important and exciting things within the Law School. This gift is an endorsement in the form that is so precious to people, their hard-earned dollars.”
That’s how it happened. How two young people who fell in love in college and built a wonderful life together decided to give Marquette University the largest gift in its history. Marquette University’s good fortune was featured as the Wall Street Journal’s “Gift of the Week” and heralded with this front-page headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Couple give $51 million to Marquette, record donation will launch construction of law building.”
Wherever he goes, Kearney says, conversation turns to the historic gift to the Law School. His e-mail has been loaded with messages from alumni and friends, notes of congratulations and awe. Kearney has two favorites. The first is a handwritten note from Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, his alma mater, who wrote that Kearney is the envy of his fellow law deans. The other is that a lawyer who will join the law faculty next year learned about the incredible gift when her parents in Texas heard Paul Harvey mention it on his national radio show,“Page Two.”
Law alumni by the dozens began sending e-mails and letters to the Ecksteins after the gift was announced — and they haven’t stopped yet. “We really can’t go to our mailbox without coming back with a handful,” Ray says, “people are so grateful and excited. One person wrote us to say he hopes the Law School will be ready by 2009 so his kids can go to Marquette. It’s going to be a great asset,” he says with unmistakable pride.
To learn more about the campaign for the Law School, contact Dean Joseph Kearney at joseph.kearney@marquette.edu.
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