Bangor Daily News, April 6, 2001

Augusta benefactor honored

Gifts to technical school students earn New England award

By Gordon Bonin Of the NEWS Staff

At 92, Thelma C. Swain is a busy woman.

She tries to volunteer at the Maine State Museum once a week. She goes to the gym, on doctor's orders, thrice a week. She also serves on the membership committee of the Norlands Living History Center in Livermore.

And Swain, who lives in Augusta, drives herself everywhere in her 1996 Mercury Mystique, which was being services at a garage where she was finally met for an interview.

The woman named New England benefactor of the year in 2000 by the Council for Resource Development, an arm of the American Association of Community Colleges, has give more than $370,000 in cash or stocks to the Maine Technical College System during the past five years.

"People don't understand what these [Technical College students] go through to get an education," Swain said. "How can you have a 3.9 grade point average when you have two kids, a full-time job, and a family to take care of? You'd think you'd kill yourself."

The average age of students in the Technical College system is 28. At least 30 percent of the degree students at Kennebec Valley Technical College in Fairfield, for instance are self-supporting with incomes less than $20,000 a year.

"So many people try awfully hard to get an education, but there's no one around to give them a helping hand," she said. "You don't get very far without [an education]."

She chose the Technical Colleges, in part, she said because many Technical College students feel that they are "considered second-class citizens."

"And I thought, 'Dadgum, they shouldn't feel that way...we need them," Swain said. "That's when I decided to give to the Technical Colleges. Nobody asked me."

Swain said that she go to thinking about her plumber and how dependent she is on him. "I have had lots of experience with plumbers over the years," she said. "Life would have been very difficult if I didn't have a plumber I could depend on."

After her husband, Vernon, an electrical expert, died in 1993, "I needed an electrician," she added.

Then there's her car mechanic, she said.

And finally, "you need a carpenter," Swain said pausing, "for when a car runs into your house."

That's exactly what she needed a few years ago. At 5:30 one morning, a "weird sound" awoke her. Swain thought a limb had fallen in her back yard. She was just going back to sleep when "the phone began to ring violently."

She answered it. It was one of her neighbors telling Swain that there were police cars in her driveway.

Swain said she Swain said so I got up, went downstairs to the dining room, opened the venetian blinds and "looked right into the front window of an automobile."

A driver had gone off the road, crossed two lawns, drove down over a 3-foot wall, went through a vacant lot and across her lawn, and would've kept going but "my house was in the way," she said.

Inspired by her periodic need for skilled labor, she began donating to the technical colleges

Swain has given three blocks of gifts, according to Alice Kirkpatrick, spokeswoman for the system. Over a four-year period, she gave $20,000 in cash to each of the seven colleges.

Then in 1999, Swain gave each school an additional $2,000.

This year, Kirkpatrick said, Swain is in the process of giving 1,000 shares of Gillette stock to each of the schools. At the close of the stock market Thursday, Gillette was trading at $31.10 a share, making the gift worth $217,700.

In all, Swain has given cash and stock worth $371,700 to the technical colleges.

The money must be used for scholarships, preferably for students in a program unique to that technical college or one that directly benefits the region, Kirkpatrick explained.

"I have visited each campus and talked to the people there about how they should award the money" Swain said. "It's used for a different thing in each college, but it must be used for scholar ships for students from Maine."

At Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor, the money is used for welding scholarships. At Washington County Technical College in Calais, the money is split between heavy-equipment operation and boat-building scholarships. At Northern Maine Technical College in Presque Isle, the money funds scholarships in instrumentation and controls, a program that produces graduates who are able to work in vegetable processing plants.

The technical colleges are not the only beneficiaries of Swain's generosity

In 1990, she set up a scholarship fund under her parents' name at Tufts University her alma mater.

As with the technical college scholarships, to be eligible, the Tufts students must be from Maine. "They have to come from Maine to get money from me," she declared.

She and her husband also established the Swain Family Scholarship Fund at Middlebury College in Vermont, which their daughter attended.

Swain was born Thelma Cowhey in Chelsea, in Kennebec County. Her family moved around and she ended up growing up in New Hampshire, Virginia and Maine. She graduated from York High School in 1927.

After graduating from Tufts in 1931 with an English major, Swain worked for four years for Public Service of New Hampshire.

"My job was to show people how to defrost their electric refrigerator and make ice cream and operate the electric ranges and if necessary to cook them a meal," she recounted. "I could barely boil water and I didn't even have an electric fridge at home."

While working in New Hampshire, she met Vernon. They married there and subsequently moved to Waterville. He worked for Central Maine Power selling electric equipment, such as commercial cooking equipment and milk coolers.

In 1949, they moved to Augusta, and he went into business for himself as a consulting engineer. He designed the lighting for the dormitory at Eastern Maine Technical College, as well as for the boatbuilding facility at Washington County Technical College.

Swain started out keeping her gifts anonymous. But last year the technical college presidents and her lawyer, who helped arrange her giving, prevailed on her to submit her name to the Council for Resource Development.

"So, I said 'OK, if it will please you,'" she said.

She didn't figure she would win, given the big givers in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

"I went through the ceremony [in December in Washington, D.C.], and, to this day I see it as someone else standing off in the distance," she said. "I can't believe I took part in it. I have never had any publicity of any kind," she continued. "I'm very much overwhelmed by the whole thing."