The largest philanthropic gift in Saint Anselm’s history began with one alumnus’ love for the humanities, and passion for the Great Books.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
It was lunchtime on the East Coast, morning coffee time on the West. There, and in the other time zones in between, more than a thousand Saint Anselm alumni and friends were looking into their cellphones or laptops, anxious to learn the historic news that was to be announced. Emails and texts had been circulating for days, filled with speculation and anticipation—everything from Division I athletics to a campus monorail system. I stood next to my students in front of the Sonnet Stage behind Alumni Hall amid a large crowd of Anselmians bracing a brisk early November wind.
Two very dear friends of the college were sitting in front of their screen in Naples, Fla. They knew very well what the president would announce. Finally, Dr. Favazza satisfied the curiosity and inspired the joy of everyone assembled in person and virtually. There would be no monorail. But Bob Grappone P ’04, H.D. ’21 and Beverly Grappone P ’04, H.D. ’21 had pledged an unprecedented $40 million to Saint Anselm College!
My phone was soon buzzing with emails and texts from Saint Anselm alums near and far: “WOW! Tears of joy are streaming! TERRIFIC NEWS!”; “‘Thank you’ doesn’t begin to express what this will mean for Saint Anselm students!”; “I am seriously moved to tears by this announcement this afternoon.”; “This is simply remarkable. What an amazing gift and tribute!”; “Extraordinary gift from extraordinary people!”
Extraordinary, indeed! Worthy of the many joyful tears it provoked. To put the size of the gift in perspective, it is not only the largest philanthropic gift in Saint Anselm’s history, it’s the second-largest gift ever made to a college or university in the history of New Hampshire, and more than three times larger than any single gift ever made to Saint Anselm’s peer institutions. And while the dollar amount may astonish, what really matters is how this gift will forever change a place loved by so many, how it will impact the lives of those of us who have served the college for decades, as well as people not yet born.
So, yes, WOW! But beyond the joyful exclamations, people have wondered, just how such a remarkable donation, such unprecedented generosity, came to be. This being Saint Anselm, it is, of course, a love story—and one that begins with the love of books.
PROVIDENTIAL PATHS
Most New Hampshire residents are well acquainted with the locally renowned Grappone name and the successful fourth-generation family automobile dealerships that name represents. Many may also be aware that Bob and Bev’s son, Greg Grappone ’04, who would later work alongside his sister Amanda in the family business, came to Saint Anselm as a student after attending two other schools. An avid reader with unusual intellectual curiosity, Greg chose to major in the Great Books. He was intent on discovering the meaning of things—in authors like Homer, Virgil, Augustine, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky— and in the world around him.
What most people don’t know is that, about five years after graduating, Greg paid a visit to Jim Flanagan, the college’s senior vice president and chief advancement officer. Jim, whose family has owned six Grappone vehicles through the years, had seen Greg on his visits to the dealership to purchase cars and visit with Bob. But in his 38-year career in college advancement, he says, “meetings like this have not happened often. I was struck by how genuine Greg was when he told me, ‘One day, I’m going to do something significant for the humanities.’”
That “one day” would become part of an increasingly tenuous future for Greg when his lifelong pursuit of meaning was sadly interrupted by a rare form of cancer. Five years after that visit with Jim, he was living in Seattle, a husband and a father, receiving special medical treatments for a disease that would rob him of his life at just 35 years old. But not before one more great book. And a conversation that would endure long after he was gone. This time, it was Leo Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom. Greg had purchased a copy of this volume in which the great Russian author collected wisdom for each day of the year from religious and philosophical texts around the world. “I was visiting Greg,” Bob recalls, “and noticed the book on his coffee table. Paging through it, I suggested that the two of us read a page a day and then email our thoughts.” When Bob invited his friend, renowned documentarian Ken Burns, to join in the daily father-son exchange, what Bev christened “the Tolstoy Trio” was born.
For Greg, this final reading pilgrimage lasted only a couple of months. “All too quickly,” Ken recalls, “Greg was gone. But Bob and I decided we would go on, a bereft father and friend sustaining the memory of Greg, and our own flawed souls with our early morning ritual. We’ve missed only one day since then as we struggle to come to terms with the mystery and mechanics of our all-too-short passage here.” This “trio” of two men would slowly grow to include many other early morning pilgrims, and Ken estimates that he has now logged more than 4,000 responses to Tolstoy’s daily wisdom, which, he says, “is ‘yikes!’”
Providentially, in that same spring of 2015 when the Trio was born, the chairs of the seven liberal arts departments at Saint Anselm convened for something of a reality check. A new curriculum had been implemented at the college, and as with colleges and universities across the nation, we were seeing a reduction in the number of liberal arts majors. The meeting was part commiseration, part brainstorming.
Could we somehow rise above the worrisome trend? How could the humanities at Saint Anselm not just survive, but thrive? Someone—it may have been me—suggested we might create a humanities institute.
With support from Academic Dean Mark Cronin, Ph.D., the conversation continued in the coming months. What might such an institute do? How could it serve all students? How could it continue to foster conversations and questions like the ones Greg Grappone and all Saint Anselm students had considered in their time at the college? Over the next two years, a proposal was eventually developed and approved that lifted us away from our initial bunker mentality—“us against STEM”—and instead transcended boundaries by proclaiming an ethos that would eventually become the institute’s trademarked slogan: Humanity: Everyone’s a Member.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, Bob, faithful to his morning spiritual exercise with Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, had been contemplating how he might fulfill the vision Greg had shared with Jim of one day doing something special for the humanities. It was early autumn of 2017, and these seemingly separate paths were about to converge on, of all places, a golf course.
While we were developing our proposal, Jim had been deepening his friendship with Bob and Bev. It had something to do with Bob and Jim’s common love of golf, and much more to do with Greg, and the couple’s desire to do something noble that would honor his memory. Jim had shared our proposal with Bob, and during a round of golf, he informed Jim that he and Bev had decided to commit a million dollars to found and develop the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute at Saint Anselm. Looking back on the decision that would ultimately positively impact thousands of lives, including their own, Bob says, “You never know where a daily exercise that consists of noble thoughts will lead you.”
Over the next six years, Bob and Bev would join with many of us in creating an institute worthy of Greg’s dream, one that would honor his memory, enliven the humanities on campus, and inspire our students to better understand themselves and their place in the world. We persevered through the Covid pandemic, gained the support of a new president, and launched a $3 million capital campaign for which Bob and Bev joined with their friend Ken Burns in taking the lead. With a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the support of hundreds of Saint Anselm alumni and friends, we successfully renovated the old boiler plant behind Alumni Hall, whose balcony had hosted the annual Shakespeare Sonnet Marathon for decades, into a beautiful new home for the humanities.
During those years, Bob would frequently respond to my email updates with the simple rhyming adage: “Inch-by-inch, everything’s a cinch.” I came to regard this as a profession of our mutual faith in the project we had undertaken. Only later would I come to appreciate that inch-by-inch, much more than an institute was being created. With each Anselmian the Grappones came to know, friendships were formed, trust was deepened. Bob and Bev were steadily coming to appreciate and value, and ultimately fall in love with Greg’s alma mater, the special place where, as Bev shared with the crowd at the groundbreaking, “Greg had become a bigger person.”
FINDING A HOME
By 2023, the Grappone Humanities Institute was thriving in its new architecturally award-winning space and Bev had joined the Saint Anselm College Board of Trustees. Bob had begun actively participating in my humanities seminars and attending the institute’s weekly Come Friday forums. He loved listening to the students reflect on challenging texts and express their own ideas as Greg had done two decades before. “You all confirmed my hunch about this place,” he told my humanities students in the wake of the announced gift this fall.
For her part, Bev’s lifelong admiration for nurses, and her personal vocation as one, prompted her interest in the college’s proposed new nursing school. “You could say Bob is interested in healing people’s souls,” Bev has observed, “and I’m interested in healing people’s bodies.” Of the couple’s deepening commitments, Dr. Favazza observes, “While Bob looks inward for truth, Bev looks outward, and is startingly clear-eyed about what she sees. She wants to make the community in which she lives healthier and better.”
In her role as a trustee, Dr. Favazza says, “Bev learned the complexities of running an institution of higher education at a very challenging time. Some people would have been discouraged by all of the weeds of budget, shared governance, and academic culture, but Bev embraced it and has been continually open to knowing more.” Determined to support the commitment Saint Anselm was making to healthcare education, the couple made a $5 million leadership commitment in 2023. Their gift would help fund the construction of Grappone Hall that would house the new nursing school named for Roger Jean ’70 and Francine Jean, Anselmian friends and fellow Naples residents the Grappones had come to know and admire.
Kathy Kayros, retired COO of the Grappone Automotive Group, and someone who had a special relationship with Greg, has been long-time close friends of Bob and Bev, and has enthusiastically joined them in supporting the institute and college. Witnessing their deepening love for and support of Saint Anselm, she says, “Bob and Bev recognize the spiritual impact of the monks. The fact that this is a Benedictine institution gives them comfort that the current values at the college will always continue because the monks foster those values.”
To say that the Grappones found a home at Saint Anselm would turn out to be more than a well-worn metaphor. Back in the summer of 2023, while we were busily working to complete the Humanities Institute in time for a July dedication, Bob made an unusual request. He had a very large stone engraved with the Grappone family tree. It had moved with the family to its various residences over the years. Bob now wanted to have it transported and installed on the grounds of the institute. As we navigated the logistics of this request, I remember thinking that Saint Anselm was really becoming the Grappones’ home. The following summer, that sentiment took on a literalness that even Bob and Bev likely never anticipated, when, with Kathy’s encouragement, they moved into a nearby modest ranch house owned by the college, placing them within walking distance to the myriad of campus activities, from athletic contests to theatre productions, lectures, and liturgies.
STEWARDING SACRED THINGS
So, yes, the largest benefactors to Saint Anselm in its 137-year history are also its happiest seasonal tenants. This amusing irony says much about who they are, about who Saint Anselm is, and about a particular Benedictine hallmark at the core of this relationship.
Good stewardship is, of course, a basic best practice of all philanthropy. But for Saint Anselm, and for Bob and Bev, its meaning has deeper roots than altruism. In Chapter 31 of his Rule, St. Benedict teaches that all the tools and goods of the monastery should be regarded and cared for as if they were consecrated vessels of the altar. Through the centuries, St. Benedict’s instruction has come to be understood as seeing and appreciating the sacredness in all things: the soil and plants, the shovel and rake with which they are cultivated, and, most importantly, the people at the working end of those tools.
Stewardship explains not just the unprecedented financial generosity of Bob and Bev Grappone, but also why these generous campus tenants could be found this past Earth Day on the paths in the woods behind the residence halls filling garbage bags with strewn bottles and cans and other debris. Or why Bev dedicated time this past summer to packing boxes in Gadbois Hall to help facilitate the daunting move of the nursing department to its new home that bears her name. It explains why they are conscientiously attentive to caring for the gardens around the Grappone Humanities Institute.
This stewardship that has led Bob and Bev to care for their Saint Anselm home is, they understand, reciprocal. Back in the summer of 2018, when they returned to Saint Anselm together for the first time since Greg’s passing, they came carrying something sacred in need of care: their love for and memory of their beloved son, and the vision he had of doing something special for the humanities at his alma mater. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
The extraordinary commitment that Bob and Bev ultimately made to Saint Anselm this past fall, together with the significant resources they donated before that, may be seen as the flourishing branches and leaves from the seed they brought to Saint Anselm that day. A seed Saint Anselm has nourished in numerous acts of stewardship, many of which were performed by everyday Anselmians, unaware of the impact of the good works they have done.
AN ENDURING SPIRIT
During his years at Saint Anselm, Greg was a student in Professor Bindu Maliekal’s Shakespeare class. She recalls him seated at the end of the front row where she could barely see his “bemused smile” out of the corner of her eye. She came to admire his “apprehension of literature’s subtle truths and his love of learning for learning’s sake.” They would remain friends and correspondents until Greg’s passing, sharing enthusiasm for books, films, and photography. She fondly recalls the last photograph Greg sent of his daughter, Briar, seated on his lap, sporting a bright pink tutu, “Father and daughter gazing at a sunset, glorious in its colors.” Citing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18—“But thy eternal summer shall not fade, / Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st”—Professor Maliekal says, “Greg’s gentle spirit lingers in the memories of those who knew him.”
Including, I would add, those who knew him only briefly. Like a rather well-known documentarian up in Walpole, N.H., whose short-lived shared reflections with Greg became the spiritual discipline with which—no matter where he is in this wide world—he begins every single day. The pilgrimage that began the day Greg walked into Jim Flanagan’s office goes on for all of us. For on that day, he pressed something into motion that none of the rest of us understood yet. And this past November, Greg didn’t need a smartphone to know what was happening. His day had come.
