by Darryl Gossett

lthough Nell and Robert Woodruff never had children of their own, they managed to produce a pair of remarkable surrogates--"daughter" Edith Honeycutt and "son" Joseph Jones--both of whom have gone on to establish their own unique legacies at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.

As secretary and personal aide for Mr. Woodruff for 40 years, Jones was on call 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in every part of the world, and became Woodruff's most trusted and dependable confidante. Over the years, "the boss" added to his duties, making Jones his chief of staff. Ultimately, Jones became chairman of the charitable Trebor ("Robert" spelled backward) Foundation, which was renamed the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation after Woodruff's death in 1985.

Jones also was serving as a trustee of the Woodruff Fund in 1979 when Robert and George Woodruff made philanthropic history with their unrestricted gift to Emory of Coca-Cola stock worth $105 million. Under the leadership of President James T. Laney, the university was transformed from a well-respected regional school into an internationally admired center of higher education and research.

Significantly, the first major initiative after the gift was the establishment of the Woodruff Scholarships. These highly competitive, full-tuition awards were designed to attract the superior student to Emory, thereby creating an environment of academic excellence that would lift the school to the next tier. The first 12 scholars enrolled in the nursing school in the fall of 1980. (Profiles of two former Woodruff Scholars, Marjorie Frazier, 91MN, and Nancy Rabin, 93MN, appear in the Class Notes section of this magazine.)

Woodruff's style of giving was largely anonymous, a graceful approach that Jones himself has emulated. In 1990, for example, he was the force behind the $1-million gift that endowed the Edith Honeycutt Chair in Nursing, but he stayed well in the background, leaving the spotlight to Edith. "Mrs. Honeycutt is a remarkable nurse and most deserving of such an honor," he says. "And the school, too, is deserving of, and was in need of, an endowed chair of this sort, to enable it to continue to recruit the highest caliber of faculty and students."

The nursing school is gratefully aware of the role the Woodruff philanthropies and Joseph Jones have played, over the decades, in strengthening the school. To say so explicitly, Dean Dyanne Affonso has funded a new two-year scholarship, awarded in the junior and senior years, and named it the Joseph Jones Scholarship. The first class of Jones Scholars will graduate in 1999, to enter hospitals, academia, government, and elsewhere. It is the hope of the nursing school that they will take with them a part of the charitable wisdom exemplified by their scholarship's namesake. That would be the best gift of all.