The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Judd Leighton: A Fortune Documented Through Its Foundation
The fortune: Judd Leighton, born in South Bend, a Northwestern law graduate of 1947 who made his career in South Bend business and banking and married Mary Morris Oare — of the Morris banking family of Part Three — in 1961, is the modern fortune this record reaches only through its permanent form. No published total for his personal estate appears in the sources consulted. What he left in public is the Judd Leighton Foundation, established in 2000: its federal filings put its assets at $82,832,180 in 2013 (against $84,605,298 in 2012), a real-estate and banking fortune converted into one of the largest single pools of private charitable wealth seated in the city.
What it left: The foundation's documented signature gift is $4,000,000 to Indiana University South Bend, announced in 2012 as the largest single donor gift in the university's history — including a $1,000,000 challenge grant for the Administration Building — and carrying the Judd Leighton School of Business and Economics name. The pattern is Fort Wayne's pattern a generation later and at South Bend scale: the fortune's second life is institutional, and its size is a matter of tax filings rather than of obituary estimates.
Sources:
- Judd Leighton Foundation / Indiana University honors biography — the South Bend birth, the 1947 law degree, the 1961 marriage, the foundation's establishment in 2000.
- Judd Leighton Foundation Inc., Form 990 figures as aggregated from the public filings — assets of $82,832,180 (2013) and $84,605,298 (2012).
- Indiana University / IU South Bend, 2012 — the $4,000,000 gift, the largest single donor gift in the university's history to that date; the $1,000,000 challenge grant.