In the spring of 1959, things got a little out of hand for then-freshman Paul Kelly.
It was during the Rowbottoms -- an annual series of riots -- when he ran into trouble with the police. Trouble that landed him on University probation.
At the time, though, the University officials who handed down Kelly's punishment had no way of knowing one day there would be a building named for him on campus.
•
Most students who have ever had a late-night cram session in the quiet of the Fine Arts Library, attended an author's workshop or worked out at the gym probably paid little attention to the buildings' namesakes -- and never stopped to think about the stories attached to them.
But behind the names are faces of numerous alumni who, for different reasons, have chosen to leave their mark.
The gift amount necessary to rename a building depends on the size and scale of the project, though it generally needs to be about 50 percent of the total cost, according to Executive Director of Principal Gifts Linda Kronfeld.
Those who have signed such hefty checks include Kelly, who graduated from the College in 1962 and received an MBA from Wharton in 1964, Jerome Fisher, a 1953 Wharton graduate and David Pottruck, who graduated from the College in 1970 and received a Wharton MBA in 1972.
Their legacies include the Fisher Fine Arts Library, Fisher-Hassenfeld College House, Kelly Writers House and the David Pottruck Health and Fitness Center.
•
It may seem surprising that a president and CEO of an investment banking firm spent over half of his undergraduate career on University probation -- and didn't even take business-related classes.
But that is exactly what Kelly did.
"I've never really felt that I was a finance-type guy," Kelly says in his frank, friendly manner -- which is unruffled even as he is preparing for a trip to New Zealand the next day, where he runs a resort and winery.
As he neared graduation from the College in the early '60s, Kelly says he planned to go to law school after he received his degree in English. Instead, he went into business.
Despite receiving his MBA from Wharton, Kelly -- who now works for Knox & Co. -- insists that he does not fit the mold most financiers do, since those people usually "have a proclivity for math."
"I spent most of my undergraduate career ducking math, taking things like 'Math for Poets,'" Kelly laughs.
But though he succeeded in avoiding math, Kelly was not always so lucky when it came to ducking trouble -- which is how he ended up on University probation for nearly three years.
The story begins at the end of Kelly's freshman year. In those days, spring at Penn heralded Rowbottoms -- which would originate in the Quadrangle and sometimes spill out onto what was then known as Locust Street.
"Somewhere back in the dim, dark past of Penn there was a student who used to wander in late at night who was all drunked up," Kelly says, explaining the Rowbottom legend. "He could never figure out where his room was, so he'd start yelling for his roommate, whose name was Rowbottom. At a given point in time, people would start throwing things at him down there."
The Rowbottoms became a tradition and would start up on a warm spring night with a Quadrangle student yelling out "Rowbottom!"
The year Kelly got into trouble, the rioting had spread all over campus.
"People were running around and throwing stuff," he recalls. "The police... were grabbing people and putting them in paddywagons, and I got a little too cute."
"There was a guy selling ice cream bars and I kind of sauntered over to get [one], kind of looking at the cop as I was doing it," he says. "I was within grabbing distance, so even though I wasn't doing anything, he grabbed me and stuck me in the paddywagon.... They took us down and booked us, and then they turned us over to the University."
Kelly, who served as freshman class secretary and had been actively involved in lacrosse, track and sprint football, was put on mass probation along with many other students, which meant that he could no longer participate in extracurricular activities.
The whole experience, Kelly says jokingly, "taught me that you shouldn't get too close to the action, otherwise you're apt to be grabbed -- as it were. That kind of cut down on my activities for a while."
But, Kelly is quick to add, being put on probation did give him the time he needed to get serious about his schoolwork.
And he still had his fraternity, Sigma Chi, which boasts other famous Penn alumni such as Jon Huntsman Sr. and Jr.
In fact, Kelly says it was his ties with his fraternity brothers that drew him back to campus.
"They seemed to have developed a philanthropic bent, and I guess it was fairly inspirational for a number of us," Kelly says of his Penn comrades. "Despite the fact that it's not a huge fraternity, we've always had people who have been involved with the University."
Kelly adds that he had also reached a time in his career in which he came to an important realization.
"At some given point in time, you just have to make time [to give back], because you can always continue to be immersed in your business interests," he says.
Founded in 1995, the Writers House, located at 3805 Locust Walk, was in need of financial support when the Development Office contacted Kelly and arranged for him to visit Penn. Kelly says he knew immediately that he'd found a diamond in the rough.
"Being an investor, it was sort of like looking at Microsoft for 10 cents," he says. "You look at it and say, 'This thing's got everything going for it.'"
The former English major gave $1.1 million, which went toward the renovation of the Writers House and to support its programs.
"I liked the whole idea of the thing which involves the informality of having a kitchen and coffee always available, Kelly says of the house. "It's sort of like a Greenwich Village coffee shop, but at the same time, it has this sort of salon-like atmosphere where people are dealing in the various arts, whether they're the written arts, the spoken arts or music."
•
The year is 1968 and it's Penn's homecoming game. The Quakers haven't defeated Princeton's football team in nearly 10 years, so the stakes are high. After taking an early 19-0 lead, the Quakers are slipping -- there is no room for injuries, especially in the defensive line. But then, the unthinkable occurs.
"This one play happens, and I manage to tackle the quarterback, [but] in the process of tackling the quarterback, I knock myself out," David Pottruck recalls. "Even though I was wearing a helmet, I sort of saw stars. The trainer of the football team was also the wrestling coach, and he saw his star wrestler go down and not get up."
When Pottruck finally came to, his trainer wanted him to come out of the game, but Pottruck had other plans in mind.
"I wanted to keep playing. A photographer from The Philadelphia Inquirer took the picture of this battle that was going on between [trainer] John Fry trying to drag me off the field, and I'm trying to get back in the game," Pottruck says.
"It was pretty funny. In fact, it hung on the wall in the training room and the football locker room for about the next 10 years."
Penn ended up winning, 19-14.
Every detail of the game is still vivid for Pottruck as he recalls it today, even as he is in the car, headed for the airport.
"It sort of demonstrates the passion and energy that I had about what I was doing," Pottruck adds.
And even 35 years after the game, the athlete does not seem to have relinquished any of that drive.
As president and CEO of the Charles Schwab Corporation, Pottruck has added such titles as "CEO of the Year" by Information Week and "Executive of the Year" by the San Francisco Business Times to the MVP awards in varsity football and wrestling he received at Penn.
Despite his recent recognition in business, the lessons he learned in athletics, Pottruck says, are what shaped his character and contributed most to his current success.
Athletics is "where I learned to bounce back from defeat and disappointment," he says. "It's where I learned about teamwork and self-sacrifice and those lessons... have been there in my life."
But Pottruck adds that he would never have had the opportunity to participate in athletics at Penn in the first place had it not been for a man named James Skinner.
"I come from a very, very modest economic background," Pottruck explains. "When I was admitted to Penn, I got an all-expense paid scholarship called the James Skinner Scholarship."
"I never really gave a lot of thought to who James Skinner was, or why he had given money to fund this scholarship, but as I got older and more successful, it occurred to me one day that James Skinner had made it possible for me to go to Penn."
Thoughts about Skinner led to thoughts about making donations himself.
"I knew it was my responsibility to make sure that I made it possible for other young people to go to Penn," he says. "My wife and I started funding scholarships at Penn... and at my wife's college."
Pottruck's passion for sports and sense of duty are what prompted him -- with advice from University President Judith Rodin -- to give $10 million to the new David Pottruck Health and Fitness Center, located on 3701 Walnut Street.
"I told her I'd like to make a large gift to the University," Pottruck recalls of his discussion with Rodin. "I said I'd like that gift to be something tied to athletics, but I really wanted most of it to benefit all the student body."
Pottruck says his wish is for the fitness center to "become the new campus hangout."
"My hope is that people would go to the gym to work out and meet people," he says. "To hang out and make friends... just that it would be the center of a very healthy social interaction among students."
•
Though he became the founder of the billion-dollar Nine West shoe company, Jerome Fisher, like Pottruck, comes from humble beginnings.
"I was poor, and I had to work my way through college," says Fisher, who is now successful enough to afford spending his days in a private boat off the coast of France. "I was so busy working my way through college, I didn't really get the full experience of being there. I didn't have the opportunity to have that real campus life."
But while Fisher may have missed out on some aspects of his own college experience, he doesn't want to let the same thing happen to others.
"It's very important to me to try to enhance the school experience at the University," says Fisher, who -- along with his wife Anne -- is financially responsible for revamping the Fisher Fine Arts Library at 220 S. 34th St.
"My wife and I fell in love with the project," he recalls of renovating the Victorian building in 1991. "My wife and I are very, very major collectors in... art... and we really love the beauty of a masterpiece."
Fisher and his wife have also donated $5.5 million to the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, and most recently, $5.75 million toward the restoration of Fisher-Hassenfeld College House in the Quad -- formerly known as Woodland.
"We participated in the college house so that we could... give some of the students the ability to unite and enjoy meeting other students in their classes under different conditions than they were many years ago," Fisher says.
And what were those conditions?
"Most of us were living off campus in boarding houses in deplorable conditions," Fisher recalls. "We had very few amenities or enhancements of our student life.... Today, I think students feel a much bigger sense of pride and much bigger sense of a student community."
But Fisher still had plenty of pride in Penn.
"I was very proud of being a graduate of the Wharton School," he says. "Indirectly, that self-esteem helped me achieve my goals. I think it's changed my life socially.... The result of my achievement at Wharton helped my self-esteem."
•
As a private university, Penn relies on alumni such as these. With every renovation and new building announced come opportunities for more naming gifts. It's often a careful process -- finding alumni whose interests match the purpose of the project. Behind the bricks and mortar lie stories that reveal the true motivation for the gifts.
