Bud McGinley had a nickname for each of his six kids.

Mike, the oldest, was Mike the Pike.

Then came Patty Watty, Kelly the Belly, Queen Erin, Kevin the Brain and Dugan Donegal (County Donegal is the McGinley clan’s ancestral home in Ireland).

He passed away 10 years ago.

Find out what the family did for him the other day, in his name.

The president has signed into law The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010 this afternoon. This bill restores the IRA Charitable Rollover for 2010 and permits its use in all of 2011. Because it is so late in the year, the deadline for taking advantage of this option for 2010 has been extended to January 31, 2011.

They lived in a one-room apartment in Lincoln at first. It shared a bathroom with another apartment. Money was tight. Jerry Varner studied hard for his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and became a professor at the university. Carrie Varner worked hard at home, raising their two kids.

Some days, they got upset with each other.

“But no matter what the day brought – and in 50 years together, there’s bound to be difficult days – we never went to bed where we didn’t kiss each other and say, ‘I love you,’” Jerry says.

She didn’t learn much about him other than what she’d read in a short bio - that he’d been a blacksmith in Gresham, Neb., and had left money for scholarships to the University of Nebraska.

But she says she’ll never forget his name: Walter Schmitt.

Thanks to the Walter Schmitt Scholarship, Lindsey Oldaker, who earned a doctorate of physical therapy from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in May, didn’t have to get a second job and had more time to study.

The 25-year-old now works at Valley County Health Systems in Ord, Neb.

“I would just thank him over and over,” she says.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln knows the name T. Mylan Stout well. As a dedicated geologist and professor, he committed his life to both geology and education. Stout began his geology career collecting fossils at an early age, growing up near historic Ash Hollow, Neb. He was professor emeritus of the UNL Department of Geosciences and curator emeritus of the University of Nebraska State Museum. He joined the state museum staff in 1933, earned his bachelor’s degree at UNL in 1936 and his master’s degree from UNL in 1937. He started teaching at UNL in 1938 and retired from teaching in 1980, receiving the UNL Department of Geosciences Distinguished Alumni Award in 1987.

Before Stout passed away on April 21, 2009, he was devoted to continuing geologic education and paleontology at UNL through philanthropy. Stout and his wife Eunice set up seven different funds with the University of Nebraska Foundation beginning in 1951. Their gifts provide support for scholarships, professorships and the state museum.

A passion for lifelong learning not only helped the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln become self-sustaining, it led to an estate gift from a loyal member, the late Marilyn Wilhelm.
 

Robert Blair, associate professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s School of Public Administration, along with his wife, Barbara, set up the Andrew Blair Memorial Fellowship with an outright gift in 2009. They have also included a provision in their estate plan that benefits the fund.

Judith Stewart-Gross worked for 10 years to get her bachelor’s degree – raising two children, working during the day and squeezing in a couple of night classes each semester. After graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1993 she pursued a career in travel consulting, but she soon was required to focus her energy in a new direction.

Stewart-Gross battled breast cancer for nine years before passing away in 2003. Prior to her death, she and her husband, Michael Gross, established the Judith L. Stewart-Gross Scholarship to support nontraditional students.

Jim Crounse remembers standing beside the hospital bed of his longtime friend, Peter Hoagland, as he battled complications from Parkinson’s disease, and vowing that he wouldn’t let people forget him. It would be less than a year later that he would fulfill that promise, with help from the University of Nebraska Foundation.