Third largest donation in philanthropy’s 88-year history
Gift gives a glimpse into 1930s-40s Rhode Island

One of the largest charitable gifts in The Rhode Island Foundation’s – and the state’s – history traces back to a period when ‘gutta percha’, the Berkshire-Hathaway miracle, and the 3-cent Rhode Island tercentenary stamp were major topics in Rhode Island.

Ruth Kilton of Warwick passed away this year at age 96, leaving $17 million to the Foundation, according to her lawyer, Robert H. Breslin, Jr., an estate planner with a law office in Warwick.

“She was a wonderful woman, as exemplified by the generosity of this gift. I feel honored to have assisted in carrying out her wishes,” the Warwick lawyer reported.

Mr. Breslin said Mrs. Kilton finalized her plans several years ago after having set up a $50,000 endowment at the Foundation to benefit children, the elderly, and Rhode Island’s animals. "That should cover about all of it," she smilingly said at the time. The new gift is flowing into the original endowment established in 1997: the John B. and Ruth L. Kilton Fund.

“Rhode Islanders with a high net worth, as was Mrs. Kilton, should always consider charitable giving as an essential part of their estate planning,” continued Mr. Breslin. “More specifically, I often suggest to clients that they consider including The Rhode Island Foundation as part of the process.”

“The Foundation is deeply involved in all of the issues Mrs. Kilton specified,” reported Ronald V. Gallo, Ed.D., the Foundation’s president and CEO. “Her gift will mean that we can fund more of the hundreds of projects we would otherwise have to turn down.

“And the Foundation is also grateful to Mr. Breslin, who continues to serve his client by ensuring that her wishes are quickly and competently executed.”

“Ruth Kilton was a lovely woman who epitomized manners and grace,” said Carol Golden, the Foundation’s Senior Vice President for Philanthropic Services.

“Every time I met with her in her immaculate home, she dressed as if I were important company. She was reserved, but always very gracious and friendly.

“She was also very unassuming. I had no reason to believe that she was planning to leave the Foundation such a remarkable and generous gift. We didn’t talk about money, just about the things she cared about,” said Ms. Golden.

Third largest gift in the Foundation’s 88-year history

The gift is the third largest ever received by the Foundation, which is nearing $400 million in permanent assets. The largest gift was the Royal Little Charitable Trust to benefit the United Way of Rhode Island, which was valued at $34.2 million when it was donated in 1991. The renamed Rhode Island Charities Trust is now worth $60.7 million and has already made $28.2 million in grants to the United Way.

The second largest was the Rose Grinnell Matteson Fund into which Mrs. Matteson contributed $28.3 million between 1966 until she passed away in 1990. The unrestricted fund is now worth $41.4 million. It has added roughly $22 million over the past 15 years into the roughly $25 million The Rhode Island Foundation grants each year.

The Foundation is one of 650 ‘community foundations’ in the United States. Unlike most private, family, and corporate foundations, community foundations are comprised of individual endowments established by individuals, families, and organizations, and serve a particular geographic area. The Rhode Island Foundation has 825 permanent endowments.

Donor’s history reveals a Rhode Island largely forgotten

Ruth Leighton Kilton, the daughter of Mr. & Mrs. Lewis C. Leighton, grew up in the Washington Park section of Providence, just north of the Roger Williams Park Zoo. In a 1997 interview with the Foundation, she fondly remembered taking trolley rides into the "city" with her sister Florence. During her professional years with Amica Insurance and the U.S. Gutta Percha Paint Co., she spent her two-week vacations in the Caribbean and Central America.

She met John Balch Kilton at U.S. Gutta Percha Paint Co. “As best we can tell, Mr. Kilton was a salesman for the company, where his father George J. Kilton was one of the officers and possibly owners,” Ms. Golden related.

Not exactly a household word today, gutta percha was considered a wonder material for a hundred years between 1850 and 1950, after which the U.S. Gutta Percha Paint Co. disappears from the Rhode Island phone directories.

Like natural rubber, gutta percha was extracted from trees in equatorial countries. A very moldable substance that can harden to the consistency of a billiard ball at room temperature, it replaced wood and leather for golf balls, insulated undersea telegraph cables, produced a nearly perfect white paint that wouldn’t yellow, and apparently was considered for filling dental cavities. Today, the only references to gutta percha seem to be on e-Bay for antique golf balls.

From gutta percha to the 3 cent stamp

“But in 1936, something happened – we don’t know what -- that made a major change for Mr. Kilton, who turned 33,” continued Ms. Golden. In the same year, he left the company, married Ruth Leighton, and followed what Mrs. Kilton had told the Foundation was his lifelong passion: stamp collecting. He opened a stamp dealership within Grant’s Hobby Shop on Empire Street in Providence, near the present day Trinity Repertory Company.

Stamp collecting was a major hobby then, and 1936 boasted a particularly special event: Rhode Island’s tercentennial, i.e. its 300th birthday. The United States issued a special 3-cent stamp on May 4 in commemoration of the anniversary. And John Kilton added one more wrinkle to that banner year of his life: he collected more “covers” that day than any other stamp collector in Rhode Island.

‘Covers’, explained Jack Malbandian, a member of the Rhode Island Philatelic Society who knew Mr. Kilton, were envelopes with a stamp that is cancelled on the first day of its issue. “At the time, there were 115 post office branches in Rhode Island. You tried to mail a letter with the stamp at each one. Remember, this was 1936, and the roads weren’t that great. To get from one post office to another was no easy matter. And you could only buy the stamps at the central post office. We asked the postmaster to open the post office at 12:01 a.m. to give us more time, but he said, ‘No, we’re opening at 9 a.m., just like always.’”

Mr. Kilton’s feat is still a matter of some honor among the older stamp collectors, and is still honored on the Rhode Island Philatelic Society’s website. He became president of the Society five years later.

The last mystery: 175 shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock

Mrs. Kilton’s gift to the Foundation included Berkshire Hathaway stock, which has sold this year for as much as $94,000 each.

But the stock was purchased before Mr. Kilton’s premature death at age 56 in 1959, and thus at least six years before Warren Buffett purchased the company in 1965 at $18 a share, and transformed the company into the international conglomerate it is today.

Mr. Kilton would have almost certainly purchased the stock in the 1950s. In that decade, Berkshire merged with Hathaway to become a major manufacturer with its headquarters in New Bedford. It would likely have caught Brown University business graduate Kilton’s eye as a good investment. He probably purchased it for less than Warren Buffett paid in 1965.

But about the time of Mr. Kilton’s death, the company had had a reversal, and reportedly dropped steadily in value until Buffett bought in. Had he lived, Mr. Kilton might have sold it in those few down years.

“We’re pretty sure that Mrs. Kilton didn’t sell any of the stock in the four decades following her husband’s death. Whether it was savvy investing or sentimental attachment, we’ll never know,” admitted Ms. Golden. “But it was the right decision for her charitable plans.”

The Kiltons were part of other changes in Rhode Island, too.  Just seven years before he died, for example, the couple had been among the early urban transplants and "settlers" in Warwick's then-rural Governor Francis Farms. "It was like moving into the country," Mrs. Kilton had recalled.

“One of the joys of helping people with their philanthropy is learning where they came from, what fuels their generosity, and what they care about,” said Ms. Golden. “Mrs. Kilton and her husband have really given us two gifts: the endowment which will do so much for Rhode Islanders, and their legacy, which we will always treasure.”