Juniata College has received its largest bequest ever — worth some $6.5-million — and it came with a cat named Princess.
Princess became a ward of the Pennsylvania college upon the death of Larry Johnson, a 1961 alumnus who lived the San Francisco Bay area, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Dr. Johnson, a radiologist, left everything to the college when he died, apparently of a heart attack, last July. Besides Princess, the college got a $1.3-million condo, a Lexus, artwork, a 1,500-CD music collection, a .38-caliber pistol, the food in Dr. Johnson’s kitchen, and rolls of toilet paper that he had purchased in bulk.
The college’s planned-giving director, Kim Kitchen, flew to California to inventory his belongings and arrange for many of them to be sold or given away (a neighbor took Princess), and she also attended a ceremony in which his ashes were scattered over the water of San Francisco Bay. Dr. Johnson, who attended Juniata on a scholarship, stipulated in his will that the college use $1.5-million to create a scholarship for a student from his high school, in Somerset, Pa., as well as another $1.5-million for a scholarship that will let a Juniata graduate attend medical school at the University of Rochester, as he did.
Some of the money left over is to create a scholarship fund for freshmen that will be named for one of Dr. Johnson’s professors. —Lawrence Biemiller
