Alcoa heir gives $15 million to Pittsburgh Foundation

Richard Hunt, whose grandfather co-founded the industrial giant Alcoa, grew up in an East End mansion. He left for boarding school in New Hampshire and then opted for a career in academia at Harvard University instead of working for the family’s prosperous Pittsburgh aluminum business.

But he never severed ties with the city where his family built its fortune, coming back for holiday visits and to serve as an active trustee for a Hunt family philanthropic organization based here.

Recently, he and his wife, Priscilla Hunt, sealed their long connection with his hometown by establishing a $15 million fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation that will be used for charitable causes in the Pittsburgh region and elsewhere.

The gift is the largest one-time contribution ever made by living donors to the foundation, officials there said.

“This is where a lot of the money was made through Alcoa and through investments in Pittsburgh-area businesses,” said Mr. Hunt, 89. “We want to make gifts that we think would be good for Pittsburgh, and good for the world.”

Mr. Hunt and his wife, 86, have lived in the Boston area since the mid-1950s when they moved there so that he could pursue a doctorate at Harvard. During a four-decade career at the university, he taught social studies and history, including a core course on Nazi Germany; served as an assistant and associate dean in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and for 20 years was university marshal, a role akin to a chief protocol officer, in which he organized major university events and hosted visiting dignitaries such as Nelson Mandela and former West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

In a telephone interview last week, the couple said some of their money will likely be targeted to The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, where their son, Bill Hunt, chairs the board of trustees.

“That would be one. But there will be others,” said Richard Hunt.

The new fund also will make a series of grants to causes outside of Pittsburgh that the Hunts have supported for years, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, FamilyAid Boston and Oberlin College, where Mrs. Hunt’s father served as president.

Mr. Hunt is the youngest of four sons of Roy A. Hunt, who worked his way up to chairman at Alcoa after starting as a clerk at the company’s New Kensington plant in 1903. Roy Hunt’s father, Capt. Alfred Hunt, helped launch the business as the Pittsburgh Reduction Co. in the 1880s after purchasing a patent for a low-cost way to smelt aluminum. It became the Aluminum Company of America in 1907.

The company built an iconic, aluminum-skinned tower on Sixth Avenue as its headquarters in the 1950s and moved to an aluminum-glass building with open offices on the North Shore in 1998. While it maintains a local presence there and at a technical center in Upper Burrell, Westmoreland County, the company’s headquarters is now in New York City.

Richard Hunt said he was never pressured to work for the family business, even though two of his brothers were Alcoa executives and another worked for Mellon Bank, another Pittsburgh institution.

“My father was very pleased that one son decided to do something else and he thought teaching was a wonderful profession. My mother, Rachel Miller Hunt, was very pleased, too.”

After attending Shady Side Academy for grade school and part of high school, Mr. Hunt went to St. Paul’s, a college prep school in Concord, N.H., and then earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s from Columbia University.

During World War II, he drove ambulances for the American Field Service in India and Burma.

Though he and his wife raised his three children in Cambridge, Mass., one of them ended up in Pittsburgh.

Bill Hunt, 53, is president and CEO of the Elmhurst Group, a real estate and investment firm whose holdings include One Bigelow Square, Downtown, which houses a DoubleTree Hotel; and the Airside Business Park in Moon.

Elmhurst was the name of the manor home (no longer standing) on Ellsworth Avenue in Shadyside where Richard Hunt and his brothers were raised.

“It’s a lot of irony that I came back to the city that my father left,” said Bill Hunt. “And I went into business which is something he eschewed for academia.”

Bill Hunt’s presence in Pittsburgh was a driving force in his parents’ decision to endow a fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation. The younger Mr. Hunt served on the foundation’s board from 2008 until last year.

As a community foundation, he said it provides a model opportunity for donors to participate in the giving process because individuals, families and organizations can create funds there and the foundation staff provides research and guidance on how to direct the money.

“I know my parents are very proactive in their philanthropy. They want to be part of the solution, meet with organizations, understand the needs and feel more engaged in the process. They don’t want just a passive role.”

Their fund will be called the Buttonwood Fund as a tribute to one of Mrs. Hunt’s childhood homes in Connecticut.

The Hunts visit Pittsburgh several times a year to see their son and his family. They also attend meetings of the trustees of the Roy A. Hunt Foundation, a Downtown foundation with assets of $78 million that allocated about $2.85 million in grants in its last fiscal year.

Maxwell King, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Foundation, said the Hunts’ gift reflects an increasing trend among donors to play an active role in how their wealth is directed while they are still alive.

New economy philanthropists such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, for instance, announced earlier this month when their daughter was born that they would donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth about $45 billion, to charity during their lifetimes.

“More and more in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, donors want to have a direct impact on where their grants go,” said Mr. King. “It used to be major donors would make their gifts as bequests in their wills.”

The Hunts’ gift is “a terrific story for Pittsburgh,” he said, because it reflects that continued sense of connection and loyalty.

“I think that’s a very Pittsburgh characteristic. The philanthropic dollars tend to stay here. So many people who made their money in Pittsburgh have kept grantmaking in Pittsburgh: the Mellons, the Heinz family, the Hillmans and others.”

Joyce Gannon: jgannon@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1580.

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