The School of Business Administration has received the first part of a $5-million bequest from the estate of Ruth McCabe Bertauche in memory of her father, Evert McCabe, a co-founder of United Parcel Service (UPS).
The bequest establishes the first endowed chair in the business school—the Evert McCabe Distinguished Chair in Marketing and Transportation ($1.5 million)—and also will fund the Evert McCabe Endowed Fellowship Program in Private Enterprise ($3.5 million).
Evert McCabe came to Seattle as a young man in the early part of the twentieth century, during a time of tremendous economic growth and development. He attended the University of Washington for two years, then started a small delivery company in 1907—the first in the Northwest to use motorcycles to deliver messages and parcels. Through growth and mergers, that company evolved into United Parcel Service, which Evert McCabe headed until his death in 1933 at the age of 46.
The Evert McCabe Chair will enable the University to attract nationally acclaimed experts in the related fields of marketing and transportation, and will encourage researchers to seek more efficient ways to deliver products and services. The Endowed Fellowship Program, honoring Evert McCabe’s belief in individual initiative and entrepreneurship, will enable Ph.D. students to prepare for careers as business faculty and foster a better understanding of the private enterprise system.
Ruth McCabe Bertauche, who died in 1992, left her estate in trust to the UPS Foundation; the bequest will be distributed to the University over the next several years.