Virginia Weiffenbach Kettering, a woman who inherited Dayton's greatest fortune and gave much of her money and herself back to the community, died ______ at Kettering Memorial Hospital.
Since the death of her husband, Eugene, in 1969, Mrs. Kettering had assumed his roles as steward of the legacy of his father, Dayton inventor Charles F. Kettering, and as a major benefactor of the Air Force Museum, Kettering Medical Center, New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases, universities and arts organizations.
She was a person who could be counted upon to lend common-sense advice to Dayton leaders when they were trying to chart the community's future. When some major development was being proposed, business leaders often brought the prinicipals to Mrs. Kettering's 14th-floor office on the east side of the Kettering Tower, so she could meet them and hear out their ideas, like a grandmother whose wisdom the whole family can trust.
Her way of suggesting a community project was often voiced in the collective "we" or "our," and in a question: "Why couldn't we . . . ?" "She rarely exercised her influence as the most powerful woman in Dayton," said one acquaintence. "But when she did, people jumped." In addition to the philanthropy reflecting her late husband's interests, Mrs. Kettering had interests of her own, primarily the fine arts of Japan and other Asian countries, and in the performing arts, including downtown Dayton's Victoria Theatre.
She and her family were honored with an Ohio Arts Council Governor's Award in March 1995, as an outstanding arts patron. The council cited gifts to arts organizations in excess of $28 million. Although she gracefully stayed out of local political squabbles, Mrs. Kettering could be assertive when it came to her personal interests. Longtime curators at the Dayton Art Institute learned to brace themselves when she telephoned to say it was time for one of them to accompany her on a quick shopping trip -- to the Far East.
But she was not just a jet-speed art collector. She also could be seen on the streets or in her bank building lobby downtown at Christmas time, usually in a tailored suit and plain cloth coat. When there were children around, or holiday lights and carols, her blue eyes sparkled and her bony face would be transfixed by a wide smile.
In December 1994, Mrs. Kettering expressed delight at being able to watch the Children's Parade with a group of more than 30 children from a second-floor window of the bank. She was there again for the 1995 parade, unseen by hundreds of people below on Main Street. In one of her last civic gestures, Mrs. Kettering in April 1996 gave $1 million to establish a scholarship fund, at Wright State University School of Medicine, for students who will serve the area's elderly population for at least two years.
In an even larger beneficence, Mrs. Kettering and her family in September 1994 pledged $4 million toward a major expansion of the art institute. Before that, in 1986, she gave $7 million toward renovation and expansion of the Victoria in connection with a proposal for a performing arts center in the block surrounding it.
That Victoria project proved to be controversial, both as to the site and the fait-accompli way a committee of corporate leaders introduced it to the public.
Although Mrs. Kettering told an acquaintance she felt the committee could have handled things more smoothly, she said she was not surprised or disturbed by disagreements over the performing arts center proposal.
"I think it's healthy to get all these feelings and interpretations,",she said in a newspaper interview in July 1986. "I hope people are always free to speak their minds."
Nevertheless, she stuck by the original condition of her gift: that the project be centered around the Victory Theatre or the money be returned. And she predicted the project would take 10 years. When the arts center project still hadn't gotten very far by February 1988, Mrs. Kettering displayed some impatience.
"Some people never like a change and any change is suspicious to them," she said. "Life is one constant change and you cannot keep things as they were. If you did, we would have candlelight, horses and unpaved streets."
As for streets, Mrs. Kettering was not amused in the 1990s when the city and RTA spent some $8 million on new landscaping and furniture for Main Street. Publicly she said nothing; privately she wondered, "Who could imagine trees growing out of concrete?"
There was another fuss in 1972, when Mrs. Kettering decided Dayton needed a downtown Christmas celebration, like the ones she fondly remembered from her childhood here.
It was called "One World of Christmas," but Mrs. Kettering later decided on the more neutral "Dayton Holiday Festival" name. There was a big children's parade and Main Street was closed to become a pedestrian mall. Bus riders, whose routes were moved a block away, could be heard grumbling, "I'll bet she never had to catch a bus." (They were wrong. She rode the street cars all the time as a child and school girl.)
Daytonians, reared on General Motors values, cautiously crossed Main Street at the lights even though they were turned off. The pedestrian mall was a bust.
But the holiday festival itself was a smash hit. Seeing it required more space, Mrs. Kettering the following year personally hired an architect to draw up plans for what became Courthouse Plaza. If they needed more room to party downtown, she suggested mildly, "Why couldn't we . . . ?" and soon,there it was. .
And there it is. There also is the Dayton Art Institute with a new roof, the Air Force Museum with a new building, the University of Dayton with a new research institute and residence hall, Wright State University with its school of medicine, and, in 1965, $250,000 to start the university's library collection; the Dayton Performing Arts Fund with successful campaigns, Kettering Medical Center with a new magnetic resonance laboratory. And the bankrupt Victoria Theatre did not become a parking lot. The list could go on and on.
But Mrs. Kettering, in a 1982 interview at holiday festival time, insisted she got more credit than she deserved.
"I think it probably is a throwback," she said. "My father was a businessman in Dayton all his life, and Mr. Kettering's father was so well known. And, of course, Father died when he was 42, and I think it brushed off enough onto me that I wanted to bring those years back the way they had been when Father was living."
Speaking of the success of the Holiday Festival, she added, "It isn't humanly possible (for one person) to do anything of this magnitude. And it isn't worthwhile if you do it yourself. Everyone has to enter into it."
Virginia Weiffenbach was born July 15, 1907 in Bellevue, Ky., a Cincinnati suburb. She came to Dayton as a child when her father, architect Norman C. Weiffenbach, came here with his wife Clara to set up a marble and tile contracting business. The family lived in Dayton View and then Harshmanville, now part of the Village of Riverside. Virginia attended Longfellow School and then the Moraine Park School, an experimental institute set up by Charles F. Kettering and Edward A. Deeds for theirs and friends' children. The site is now the Moraine Country Club.
There she met Eugene Williams Kettering, the son and only child of the already-famous inventor. Her vivacious, outgoing personality seemed to complement Eugene's quiet, serious nature.
Family friends knew there was romance in the air in January 1930 when Eugene dropped out of his senior year at Cornell University and Virginia received an invitation to accompany him, his parents and several prominent industrialists on an ocean cruise in the 170-foot Kettering yacht, the Olive K. Normally Boss Ket's long-distance cruises were all-male affairs.
Virginia and Eugene were married Apr. 5, 1930 in a white-tie-and-tails ceremony at Dayton's Westminster Presbyterian Church.
Although Eugene began his career with the GM-owned Winton Engine Co., of Cleveland, the couple spent most (22 years) of their married life in Hinsdale, Ill., a Chicago suburb.
He worked in research at GM's Electro-Motive division, Virginia was active at the local hospital and they reared three children: Charles F. II, who died in 1971; Susan, and Jane. The Hinsdale household also included three cats and a pet crow named Elmer.
When Charles F. Kettering died in 1958, his son found increasing responsibilities managing what was, at that time, one of America's largest fortunes. (The amount has never been disclosed, but the value of Kettering's General Motors stock alone was estimated at more than $165 million, the most held by any individual then or later, and experts said the total estate exceeded $200 million.)
So the family returned to Dayton, brought the Charles F. Kettering Foundation here from Chicago, and took up residence at Ridgeleigh Terrace, the 90-acre Charles Kettering estate off Southern Boulevard. Almost immediately, their presence made a difference. In January 1959, Eugene Kettering proposed the construction of a 200-bed hospital and research center in memory of his father and donated much of the estate as its site. A few months later, he and his wife announced they would underwrite two-thirds of the facility's cost if the community would raise the rest.
In 1961 the Dayton Art Institute received a valuable collection of 31 ancient Asian art objects, the first of many such gifts over the years. In 1962, Eugene Kettering announced a $1 million gift to help start the Air Force Museum. In 1969, the year Eugene died, the couple had commenced construction of the 30-story Winters Bank (now Kettering) Tower. They could have put the $15 million structure anywhere, but said they hoped it would inspire a downtown economic revival. It did. Discussing their roles, she said: "I suppose Gene took one direction and I another in what we felt we should do. He got the hospital going. Additional medical facilities were needed here. He also was interested in getting a medical school started. So the Wright State medical school (opened in the fall of 1975) is my great interest because it was his when he was living." In June 1973, Mrs. Kettering was married to Warren Kampf, a widower and retired Mead Corp. vice president. They and their families had been friends for years. Mr. Kampf died Aug. 15, 1979 and his widow shortly thereafter resumed the use of her first married name. Just how much money Mrs. Kettering had has been kept a secret. Most of C.F. Kettering's vast fortune went into the foundation he had established in 1927. His son's estate was appraised at only $30.1 million in July 1969, including $22.2 million that had been transferred to trusts during his lifetime. He left 25 percent of the estate to the Kettering Foundation.
Trust funds already established listed no benefactors, but state records show that the principal trust, CFK, Inc. had assets last year os $ million. Mrs. Kettering's financial aide, Richard Beech, Although she moved easily in the society of Detroit, Chicago or New York City, Mrs. Kettering remained a lifelong booster of Dayton. "This is a great place to live. I don't know any people who have left Dayton who haven't said how much they missed it," she remarked. "We have been accused of moving too slowly. But we have saved energy and costs by moving slowly. We know which direction we are going." And in a different interview she said: "I have confidence in Dayton, its people and its industry. We are not alone in our problems."
Mrs. Kettering was so identified with her family's interests and its philanthrophy that she was sometimes described, incorrectly, as the widow or the daughter of Charles F. Kettering.
In a way that was appropriate. While other families such as the Pattersons, Deeds and Coxes died off or took most of their money out of the state, she was still here, doing the things her family had always done for Dayton. And when the Victoria Theatre pledge came, she made it a point to say it was from her and her family.
Her philosophy may be encapsulated in a remark she made when the performing arts center controversy was heating up in 1986. She was talking about the complexity of such a plan, but she could have been speaking of the difficulties incumbent upon being the major philanthropist in town without being accused of stepping on toes or dictating.
"There's so much that enters into it," she said. "And there comes a time, always, when you do the best you can. And that's the way we feel about this."
No one in her adopted hometown could doubt that Virginia Kettering did the best she could, and that it was a great deal.
Mrs. Kettering is survived by her daughters, Mrs. Peter (Susan) Williamson of Greenwich, Conn., and Mrs. Richard (Jane) Lombard of Rye, N.Y., nine grandchildren and great grandchildren.
A memorial service will be conducted at Christ Episcopal Church with the Rev. officiating. Burial will be private and at the convenience of the Kettering family.