New Giant Giver

Arthur Vining Davis, who died last month at 95, is about to join, posthumously, the most distinguished club in U.S. capitalism--the founders of vast philanthropic foundations that are unparalleled throughout the world.

By his own account, Aluminum Pioneer Davis was the fifth richest man in the U.S. A penniless New England preacher's son, he spent 60 years building the Aluminum Co. of America into one of the world's industrial giants. At 80, he retired to Florida, seemingly ripe for a pipe, cabana and canasta. Instead, he began a second career of buying Florida real estate. Soon he owned an airline, a shipping company, an ice cream plant, one-eighth of Dade County (Miami), 20,000 acres in the Bahamas, 200,000 acres on Cuba's Isle of Pines.

Last week the Davis will was filed for probate. One-fourth of the estate, or about $100 million, goes to taxes and individual bequests, including $1,000,000 for Secretary Evelyn Mitchell, who served and nursed Widower Davis for 13 years.

The remaining $300 million is left to trusts held by two banks in Miami and Pittsburgh. Earmarked for two Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the net in come will be used "exclusively for such religious, charitable, scientific, literary and educational purposes within the United States and its possessions as the trustees shall see fit." Since only 154 of the 15,000 existing U.S. foundations have assets of more than $10 million, the Davis kitty is among the biggest on record, and it will grow. John D. Rockefeller, for example, put up a mere $182.6 million to launch the Rockefeller Foundation, which is now worth $615 million. Other big foundations: Hartford ($414 million), Duke ($400 million), Carnegie ($286.6 million)--all of them topped, of course, by the Ford Foundation's $2.5 billion.

Neither the Davis foundations' income nor the trustees' targets are yet known.

But if the money (mostly in real estate and Alcoa stock) were simply banked, it would yield about $13.5 million a year-compared with the Carnegie Corporation's $10.9 million in 1961. Clearly, a new-philanthropic giant has been born.

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