DEATH AND THE MAVEN

By SHARON E. EPPERSON

NO ONE PAID ANNE SCHEIBER MUCH mind when she was alive. If anyone at all noticed her outside her Manhattan studio apartment, the frugal spinster, a mere five feet tall, was always dressed in the same cheap black coat and hat. She never bought a stick of furniture. She rarely bought a newspaper. But she did read one diligently. Every so often she would venture out to the local library where she could read the Wall Street Journal without paying for it. And on her little noticed journeys outside her apartment, she would also visit her stockbroker. When she died at age 101 last January, Scheiber had converted a $5,000 nest egg into a $22 million fortune. And in death she proved herself extravagantly generous. Last week it was announced that she had bequeathed most of her fortune to Yeshiva University, a New York City school she never attended and where no one ever knew her.

"When I saw the will, it was mind blowing, such an unexpected windfall," says Yeshiva's president, Norman Lamm, who revealed the gift at his school's annual Hanukkah dinner. "This woman has become a legend overnight, and her name will live on for generations."

How Scheiber made her fortune is as fascinating as why she gave it away. By the time she retired from a $3,150-a-year auditor's job at the Internal Revenue Service in 1943, she was already investing her $5,000 savings account in a stock portfolio. During her career reviewing other people's assets, she had noticed that most who left substantial estates had accumulated their money through common stocks. So Scheiber, who had earned a law degree and passed the Washington bar exam before joining the irs, studied the stock markets with the same precision that she had applied to reviewing tax returns.

Fond of movies, she first invested in Hollywood studios, including Universal and Paramount, and kept a tally of their attendance rates. She also bought stock in about 100 blue chips and large franchise corporations, such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, and drug companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Schering-Plough. Her investments grew quickly, says William Fay, her stockbroker for 25 years. "After World War II, stocks really took off. While $5,000 sounds like a nominal amount, it could have increased fivefold in five years," says Fay, who retired from Merrill Lynch two years ago. At Scheiber's death, her portfolio had increased more than 4,000 times. Especially profitable were 1,000 shares in Schering-Plough that she had originally bought in 1950 for $10,000; by 1994 they had grown to 60,000 shares worth $4 million.

Her strategy was simple: don't worry about daily market fluctuations; reinvest dividends; hang tough. She attended annual meetings of companies whose stock she held and asked questions of their officers. "She was an avid reader of one subject and one subject only: where to invest your money," says her lawyer Benjamin Clark. "She was dedicated to studying various companies she thought might result in a sound investment, and she was right 99% of the time, if not 100%."

By 1970 Scheiber was already worth several million dollars, but it was hardly reflected in her life-style. Paint was peeling from her apartment walls. Bookcases were caked with dust. "She was a product of the Depression years," says Fay. Her father suffered substantial losses in the property market. "She felt she had to live on her meager pension and Social Security. She never spent any of it on herself." She kept some money in savings accounts, but Fay encouraged her to invest in money-market funds and tax-exempt bonds. By the early 1980s her cash flow from interest and dividends was more than $200,000 a year, which she used to buy more tax-exempt notes and bonds. These accounted for 30% of her portfolio at the time of her death.

Scheiber had never been promoted at the IRS. In her last seven years there, her salary increased only $150 dollars, from $3,000 in 1936. "She was treated very, very shabbily," says Clark. "She really had to fend for herself in every way. It was really quite a struggle." Hoping to help young women avoid discrimination, Scheiber, raised an Orthodox Jew, decided to donate nearly her entire fortune to two divisions of the Jewish university: Stern College for Women and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Her will specified that the funds be used exclusively for scholarships and loans for women. Stern has 840 of the university's 6,200 students. About half of the medical school's 900 students are women.

"Her world was limited to watching over her investments," says Fay. "She was obviously very intelligent and very unhappy," says Lamm, who received a hand-written letter from Scheiber outlining her life and struggles. Lamm is grateful, but, he says, "It would have been so much happier for her if she had done it in her lifetime so she could see the benefits accrued to others."