About

Jerry Turnauer ’59 endows fund to help students with special financial needs

Due to a generous gift from Jerry Turnauer ’59, the College has established the Dean Frank R. Hunt Emergency Scholarship Fund.

The fund, named in honor of the former dean of students (1946-1958), will help students with certain financial needs, particularly those who find themselves in a situation that would prevent them from completing their Lafayette education.

Turnauer chose to honor Hunt after the dean helped him as a junior at Lafayette in 1958. Turnauer had told Hunt he would have to withdraw from the College due to a further deterioration of his already weak financial situation. Hunt proceeded to pull out his personal checkbook and loaned Turnauer enough to solve his immediate crisis and thus remain at Lafayette and graduate with his class.

“Dean Hunt’s unexpected personal involvement and generosity altered my life dramatically by saving me from dropping out to an uncertain future,” Turnauer recalls.

He repaid the loan after graduation and went on to a very successful career as a private businessman, spending the majority of it as founder and CEO of Bayshore Ford Truck Sales Inc. in New Castle, Del.

Now 50 years later, Turnauer has come full circle by establishing the scholarship fund “in gratitude and admiration for Dean Hunt’s lifetime of personal and professional dedication to helping students overcome obstacles that would have prevented them from graduating.”

Hunt spent 33 years at Lafayette, starting in 1925 as a professor of economics. In 1958, he left to take a position at the Abadan Technical Institute in Iran (now the Petroleum University of Technology). He died in 1968.

“It’s likely that Dean Hunt impacted many more students with his personal concern and guidance,” says Turnauer. “I invite any and all to contribute to the fund to honor this remarkable, quiet, and unassuming dean who exemplified the Lafayette spirit.”