The Shineman Legacy: The Founder Speaks: The family and the story behind the Richard S. Shineman Foundation

By Jeff Rea

Dick and Barb. Two middle-aged teachers at an Upstate New York college, one a bachelor, the other a widow. Two lives lived generously, despite vastly different backgrounds. A meeting in a church parking lot. A romance. A marriage. From this intersection, their lives grew together, forming a combination that, ultimately, worked much as two elements in a chemical formula to create a potent Catalyst For Change in Oswego County.

This is the story of Barbara Ann Irvine, who grew up as a child of the Great Depression, and Richard Shubert Shineman, whose own privileged upbringing was further enriched by the community- mindedness and generosity shown by his parents.

While Dick Shineman inherited and further grew a fortune beyond most people's imaginations, the self-effacing chemistry professor had no earthly interest in the trappings of wealth. He worked with his wife, now known as Barbara Palmer Shineman, to make substantial gifts during his lifetime. Dick's last will and testament set aside $25 million for a foundation to benefit Oswego County and Central New York. His widow, then in her 80s, followed through. So was born the Richard S. Shineman Foundation.

Barbara, now nearing 93 and always resolute, wanted a book to keep alive Dick's story and capture the evolution and growing significance of the foundation and its benefit to the county and region in economic development and environment, parks and the arts, human services and historic preservation, and so much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098369552

Book preview

Title

© 2021 by Jeff Rea, Syracuse, NY, and the Richard S. Shineman Foundation, Oswego, NY

ISBN: 978-1-0983695-5-2

Independently published

Net proceeds from the sale of this book, including any author royalties, go to the Richard S. Shineman Foundation in its mission to serve as a Catalyst For Change in Oswego County.

Cover photo: Richard S. and Barbara P. Shineman (Used with permission, © Shutterfly, LLC; courtesy of Kathy Barker)

Cover and interior design: Peter Allen Music & Art, Syracuse, NY

"May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit.

Though the world knows me not,

may my thoughts and actions be such as will

keep me friendly with myself."

– From A Prayer by Max Ehrmann, found among Barbara P. Shineman’s papers

Contents

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Acknowledgments

About the author

Board of directors

Bibliography

Preface

This is a love story. Romantic love, for sure; a beautiful tale. But also love of family, friends, community, and a love for humanity so great that a fortune beyond most folks’ dreams lives on as a gift to caring organizations around Oswego County and Central New York.

Dr. Barbara P. Shineman (SHIN-eh-mun) could not have imagined how her life – now nearly 93 years long and counting – has played out, thanks to these loves. Raised in a Depression-era household in Western New York, she married her high school sweetheart at 19, was widowed young, remarried to SUNY Oswego’s chemistry chair, then was widowed again at age 82.

With the resilience and sheer will of a woman who started higher education in her 30s, completed a Ph.D. at age 52 and a certificate of advanced studies at 60, Barbara set to work in her 80s, following the 2010 death of her husband, Dr. Richard S. Shineman, to carry out the task laid out in his last will and testament. Teaming with advisors, friends, and family, she has turned her husband’s $25 million legacy gift into a much greater one, Oswego County’s largest charitable foundation.

As the Richard S. Shineman Foundation ends its eighth year, it has granted more than $1 million a year – without touching a dime of the principal – to non-profit organizations. They number in the scores, if not hundreds, and are as disparate as the American Red Cross and the Children’s Museum of Oswego, the Oswego Renaissance Association and Pulaski’s LaVeck Concerts. The largest of the foundation’s gifts has been its first: $4 million over 10 years to the Oswego College Foundation toward science and engineering programs in the state-of-the-art SUNY Oswego building that bears Richard’s name. The smallest – dozens of mini-grants and discretionary grants of $5,000 or less – have assisted a vast array of charitable projects.

The story cannot be well told without tracing the personal histories of its co-founders: Barbara, who emerged from a one-room schoolhouse and a relatively poor family, and Richard, who attended an exclusive prep school, inherited a considerable portion of his father’s Beech-Nut Packing Co. fortune, grew it substantially, and yet lived humbly and unselfishly as he gave the fortune away during his lifetime and beyond.

With the same clarity of thought and determination that led the tiny dynamo that is Barbara to found a charitable organization as an octogenarian, she has been equally resolute in her 90s to have a book written about the foundation. She wants to pass on her story of its ancestry, birth, growing pains, and burgeoning maturity.

Perhaps most of all, she wants the book to serve as a guide for those who come after, those who will carry on providing the love that’s at the root of an organization growing in importance to Oswego County’s present and future – especially as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the region, nation, and the world and drains charities of other fundraising sources.

In short, she wants this book to help answer the inevitable future questions of foundation leaders and the community: What would Barbara have done? What would Dick have thought?

As the product of a dozen interviews in Barbara’s Fayetteville, NY, home, many follow-up conversations, and review of hundreds of resources, this book, commissioned by the Richard S. Shineman Foundation, comes with Barbara’s fond wish to provide you, the reader, with guideposts to the answers.

Jeff Rea

Syracuse, NY

December 2020

One

Barbara Ann Irvine was born April 21, 1928, in a small community in Western New York, the daughter of George H. and Hazel Irvine. Her childhood gave no hint she would spend decades later in life as a noted Central New York philanthropist.

I started in life in Albion, which is in Orleans County, Barbara recalled. There were three children. My brother George was two years older than I. Then myself. And then my younger brother, Donnie – eight years between us.

Young Barbara knew tragedy early. A fifth-grade classmate died during an appendicitis emergency, leaving an empty chair in nearby Medina’s elementary school. A second-cousin drowned. She had to learn to navigate grief.

I remember my dad and mother taking me with them to the funeral home. I did not know how it was going to affect me. When I looked at (her second-cousin) in a coffin, that was traumatic for me. For a long time, I sat in the waiting room for them to pay their respects. I just couldn’t deal with it. Of course, I eventually learned to deal with it.

Then, in 1940, her mother died. Barbara was 12.

When my mother was taken sick with grave kidney problems – and she was – she was bedridden for about two years before she died, Barbara said.

The day her mother passed away, said Barbara, an aunt came to the house while Barbara was at another aunt’s house overnight. When Barbara returned, she had become the senior – and only – female in the house.

My brother Donnie was about 4. I became like a mother figure for him, she said.

The elder George Irvine, a 1911 graduate of what was then School District No. 8, worked as a car salesman in Albion, about 60 miles northeast of Buffalo. He was a good salesman, Barbara said. While not impoverished, the family had little money to spare.

My dad had his hands full with three kids and not much of an income, she said.

Her dad met Berenice Potter in 1942. Again, advance notice of developments in the adult world was scarce. ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ quoted Barbara.

One sunny day, my father and Berenice appeared with big smiles on their faces. ‘Guess what?’ he said. ‘We just got married!’

You what?! Barbara recalled exclaiming.

Yet the woman her father married was wonderful to then-teenage Barbara. Berenice was a widow with no children of her own. She became Barbara’s confidant and a bulwark against a controlling father – over-controlling, Barbara thought.

I didn’t get along with him, and it was my stepmother who interceded a lot, said Barbara. He was just determined I was not going to become one of these wild teenagers. He was very strict; he was extremely strict with me. If I meet up with him someday, I’m going to remind him of it.

Barbara Ann Irvine (at right, fourth from front) joins classmates and teacher Florence Sanford (in back, obscured) in Eagle Harbor, NY. (Courtesy of Barbara Palmer Shineman)

Yet young Barbara seemed to have had free enough rein to pursue education and numerous after-school interests.

When her mother was alive, the family lived in Eagle Harbor, a hamlet near the Erie Canal about three miles west of Albion. The one-room schoolhouse was manned by this great lady, Miss Sanford – Florence Sanford, said Barbara. My best recollection of her is in this fairly large classroom with Row 6 students here, Row 5 students there and so on. No kindergarten; it was strictly from first grade on. I used to like the way she taught everyone. Miss Sanford would move from row to row, teaching that particular age group, whatever it was. I could just sit there and take it all in, thinking, ‘Wow, isn’t that great? I want to be a teacher someday!’

***

The family moved to Medina, 10 miles west of Albion, and Barbara entered another school. "I was allowed to skip a grade. I wasn’t there very long when the principal said, ‘We think you’d do better with Mrs. Gray, and she’s in the next grade level.’ … So I was kind of a grade ahead of myself through school. I was a tiny, skinny little kid. I was thinking that moving ahead could be good, but it puts a