Three months later came the bomb-
shell: Leonard Gigowski had passed
away—and he’d left behind a $13 mil-
lion scholarship fund for St. Thomas
More. “I nearly fell off my chair,” Mary
McIntosh, the school’s president, told
the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Gigowski may have been humble,
but he led a very full life. He was
an avid ballroom dancer—he had a
dance floor in the basement of his
modest suburban home. He also
loved pigeon racing. He had a coop in
his yard and kept meticulous records
on each of his birds. “He
told me he loved being
around God’s creatures
and caring for them,”
says his friend Jeff
Korpal.
But the school was his
passion. Larry Haskin,
Gigowski’s friend and
the lawyer who helped
him set up the Leonard
Gigowski Catholic Edu-
cation Foundation, says
there was no doubt that
Gigowski had saved his
money with the intent
of donating as much as
he could to the students
of St. Thomas More.
“He wanted to have the
greatest impact pos-
sible on future genera-
tions,” Haskin says. “He
felt he owed his long
life to God, his Catholic
education, and his deep faith, and he
wanted to pass it on,” Korpal adds.
Gigowski had a lot in common
with Margaret Southern, a special-
needs teacher from Greenville, South
Carolina, who died in 2012 at age 94.
Southern loved children and animals.
Before she allowed Mike Shain, vice
president of wealth management at
UBS, to handle her investments, she
made him promise to take in her
dachshund, Molly, if anything hap-
pened to her. “I know you’ll take care
of her,” she told him.The Grocer
Milwaukee’s Leonard Gigowski left a $13 million
scholarship fund to his high school alma mater.rd.com 75Good Deeds