Hospital surprised The Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children in Honolulu has received its largest-ever gift: more than $5 million from the estate of a former Honolulu couple who also left surprise bequests to two other organizations.
with gift
Shriners receives more than
$5 million from a California willAssociated Press
Hospital board member Jack Webb said Thursday it was a total surprise when he was notified this week of the bequest from the estate of Marjorie Hobbis, who died in December 1999, leaving no surviving family. Her husband, Charlie, died in 1995.
Also sharing in an estate that grew to $17 million are the Braille Institute in San Diego and the Unity School of Christianity in Kansas City, Mo.
None knew they were in line for the gifts until after Marjorie Hobbis' death, said her accountant, Emidio DelConte.
The couple, who lived in Rancho Santa Fe near San Diego, had received help from the Braille Institute after Charlie Hobbis lost much of his vision late in life. Earlier, he had been a Shriner in Hawaii.
The only known tie to the Unity School was Marjorie Hobbis' subscription to its prayer booklet.
Webb said Charlie Hobbis, once one of Hawaii's biggest magazine and newspaper distributors, joined the Honolulu Shriners in 1955. It was not known when the couple left the islands to live in California.
Charlie Hobbis was a champion for the First Amendment.
In 1956 he threatened Hawaii County with a lawsuit if it adopted an ordinance banning "horror" comic books.
In 1962, he was arrested by Honolulu police for distributing Henry Miller's novel "Tropic of Cancer." A year earlier, the novel had catalyzed a landmark freedom-of-speech decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which lifted the book's decades-old obscenity ban.
The case was thrown out on the grounds that Hawaii's "obscene publications" law was unconstitutional. Among those rallying to his defense were U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink (D, suburban Oahu-neighbor islands) and then-U.S. Rep. Thomas Gill.
Webb said the estate has already distributed $4.5 million to the hospital. The total gift is expected to be $5.6 million.
It will go into the endowment fund to support the hospital's annual $13 million operating cost.
"I wanted to know, who was Marjorie Hobbis?" said the Rev. Sandy Diamond, a Unity officer who went to San Diego two weeks ago to accept a ceremonial check. "What prompted her to remember us in such a big way?"
What Diamond would hear was the story of a Depression-era survivor, a rich but frugal woman, private but adventurous enough to try skydiving at the age of 85.
The couple had no close friends that anyone knew of to summon to the check ceremony other than DelConte, their accountant since 1985.
Marjorie and Charlie Hobbis, as far as anyone can tell, were not members of a Unity church.
The only connection anyone can find, said J.D. Bloom, a Unity development director, was that Marjorie Hobbis was one of the 1.3 million subscribers to "Daily Word," Unity's monthly booklet of inspirational readings.
DelConte described Marjorie Hobbis as a woman who threw out surprises late in her life, finally shaking loose from the grip of her Depression upbringing. She had cared for her husband in his declining health. After his death, she went at the world as if collecting a debt.
She sipped champagne with DelConte as they rode in a hot-air balloon. She had him take her up in his single-engine airplane, and celebrated her 85th birthday by skydiving and making him come along.
She had married into some wealth in a previous marriage and was an astute investor, DelConte said. Charlie Hobbis had made his fortune with a publishing business.
But they never made a show of their wealth, occupying a home that was modest compared with some of the villas around Rancho Santa Fe.