Gift of Appreciated Stock

Jerald and Grace Liebhart
Generating a return for your community
            When my brother Jerry and I established the Liebhart travel fund in honor of our parents a few years ago, it was an obvious choice for a memorial. First of all, my mother had wanted to do something for the First Baptist Church of Morganton in my father’s name since his death in 1984, but as ideas came and went, mom never found anything that seemed quite right. When she died in 1998, the money she had intended to use was still there, along with the opportunity to do something in the name of both our parents together. My friend Rachel Frew has claimed credit for the idea of a travel fund, and even if I am still not sure that I remember it that way, I knew that we finally had the right plan. But while we had the “what”, we now needed to figure out the “how”. The money could have been given directly to the church, but then there would have been the issue of administering the fund and keeping it separate from general church funds. Adding another layer to church bookkeeping did not sound like much of a gift. I mentioned this one day to my friend and lawyer John Ervin, and his eyes widened as he started telling me about the brand new Burke County Foundation that was being created to administer just the kind of fund we had in mind. When I checked with Tom Bland at the church to make sure that there might be a need or desire for such a fund, his enthusiastic response confirmed that we were on the right track. While not limited to church members, the fund was established with the main goal of helping young people from the Morganton area to travel outside the county, the state, and, preferably, the country. I am delighted to report that the idea has been working perfectly since its inception.
            So much for the “what” and the “how”. I thought I might also say a little something about the “why”.
            My parents loved to travel, and while my mother’s first report on returning was often to talk about the food they ate, they were both acutely aware of the value of seeing new places, experiencing new cultures, and meeting new people with completely different backgrounds. They came to their love of travel via different roads. My father’s family moved from southern Illinois to Miami, Florida when he was 4 years old. That was a long way from their roots, but every year, my grandfather packed everybody up on the day after school let out in the summer, and they took off in the car (and even in a home-made RV for a while) and headed north, back to Illinois, and sometimes out West. They would get back to Florida just in time for school to start at the end of the summer. Suffice it to say that traveling was in my father’s blood all his life. My mother, on the other hand, grew up in a small town in southern Alabama with her extended family close at hand, so traveling long distances was not part of her life as a child. Their backgrounds made them a perfect pair in many ways: my father’s love of travel complimented my mother’s excitement at seeing new places and people. My parents met at the University of Alabama, where my father got to realize one of his other dreams…to learn to fly airplanes. All these bits of their lives would finally coalesce into a life made richer through travel. They traveled by car or small plane all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. A commercial jet was needed for Hawaii, Europe, and even Egypt in Africa. They ultimately traveled so much that I could not keep track of their trips even when they were alive. I occasionally still run across a photo of some foreign locale that I never knew they had visited.
            My mother and father instilled in me that same love of travel and gave me the means to see wonderful places and people. It was the hope of my brother and me that the fund could provide opportunities to the youth of our home town for travel to places they might not ever see otherwise. It is not the photographs and souvenirs that recipients of these funds bring back with them that will be important, but the memories, visions, and experiences of those other places and people that they will keep and share. Understanding and appreciating other cultures from firsthand contact is one of the keys to compassion and peaceful coexistence. If the Jerry and Grace Liebhart Travel Fund can accomplish this in any way, large or small, the spirits of my parents will always be smiling.