Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by e-mail at mstrand@salina.com.
Salina Journal
A former Abilene couple's estate has donated $8.5 million to Wichita State University to benefit the university's speech, language and hearing clinic, and its Regional Institute on Aging.
The gift from the estate of Paul and Evelyn Cassat is the second largest in the university's history, Elizabeth King, WSU Foundation president and CEO, said in a Tuesday news release announcing the gift.
The release said the gift would go toward renovation of the speech, language and hearing clinic, which will be renamed the Evelyn Hendren Cassat Clinic, and to purchase new equipment for the clinic. Other parts of the gift will be used to support endowed professorships for research in audiology and related subjects, and for clinical services and faculty development.
The funds going to the Regional Institute on Aging will support aging research, as well as the Carl and Rozina Cassat Professorship in Aging, named for Paul Cassat's parents.
The Cassats lived in Abilene for many years. According to the news release from WSU, Evelyn received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1933, and a bachelor's degree in education from Kansas State Teachers College of Emporia in 1938. She taught high school in Florence, Chapman and Abilene.
Paul attended Kansas Wesleyan University but quit school to work for the United Telephone Company in Abilene and later for Southwestern Bell. He retired in the mid-1970s.
James Rhatigan, a consultant to the WSU Foundation, first met the Cassats in 1998, when they called then-WSU President Eugene Hughes. Rhatigan developed a close relationship with the couple, describing them as highly intelligent and creative.
An inventor's mind
Rhatigan described Paul as having "a scientific mind, and inventor's mind" and described how he designed improvements to the internal combustion engine when he was 17, getting a patent in 1929 when he was just 20. Later, in the 1940s, he invented a hydraulic clutch, which he tried to sell to various automakers.
The couple also lived "very frugally, and you can put 'very' in capital letters," Rhatigan said. Especially after Paul died, he said, Evelyn could have been mistaken for a "bag lady," who was good with investing.
"She was the one with the financial acumen, with stocks, bonds, treasury bills, even overnight loans to banks," Rhatigan said,
Neither made more than $6 an hour during their careers, but through saving and investing developed their substantial estate.
"Spending money was not her thing, but she was very capable as an investor," Rhatigan said; One $1,000 investment she made in 1953 -- and never sold -- was recently valued at over $1 million.
Both suffered from severe hearing loss in their later years, and that, along with vision loss, led to the interest in helping the aging that was the focus of the gift to WSU.
Paul died Nov. 21, 2002, and Evelyn died Sept. 9.
n Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by e-mail at mstrand@salina.com.
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