Hult, Jewel

From Lane Co Oregon

Current revision as of 20:08, 8 January 2008

Eugene philanthropist and tireless community volunteer Jewel Hult died Wednesday in California of natural causes. She was 90 in 2006.

She was the wife of mill owner and real estate developer Nils Hult, and the couple's $3 million arts endowment in 1982 prompted the city to name the performing arts center after them.

"It will be a loss," family friend Hope Pressman said. "She was a wonderfully warm, generous-hearted, engaging woman."

Hult was born in Kamloops, British Columbia, on February 22, 1916, to lumberman Lawrence Bauman and Rose Winifred Bauman. Her family moved to Oregon when she was 2 years old. She met Nils, the son of a lumberman, at a dance in Triangle Lake, said her daughter, Gretchen Pierce.

They married in 1928 and moved to Eugene in 1951.

Pierce said her mother viewed herself as a partner in her husband's work.

"My father was quite powerful whenever he walked into a room and spoke, but she had a presence of her own," Pierce said.

"She remembered everybody's name. She made him join the country club and went to all the lumber conventions with him."

She also instilled ideals of independence and competence in her five daughters, insisting that they all go to college.

"She encouraged us the most. She didn't think there was anything we couldn't do," Pierce said.

Beyond work and family, both her parents felt an obligation to the community, she said.

Her mother served with the Eugene Symphony Guild, on the board of the local United Way and as president of the Assistance League of Eugene.

She was a significant donor to the Oregon Historical Society, and with her sister-in-law, Geraldine Hult Hall, helped found the Pearl Buck Center.

She and her husband also gave money to a variety of programs at the University of Oregon, from athletics and building projects to foreign student scholarships and the museum of art.

But the couple's best known legacy remains their endowment to the Hult Center of the Performing Arts, a building former Eugene Mayor Jim Torrey once called the crown jewel of the city.

The endowment supports a thriving roster of artistic groups that call the Hult Center home.

"We have more resident companies than almost any other performing arts center in North America," Pierce said.

The Hult endowment is part of the reason for that, she said. Annually, about $250,000 funds a variety of local groups, including Eugene's opera, ballet, symphony and concert choir, as well as popular touring shows.

It's hard to imagine Eugene without the iconic downtown structure, but before it was built, the symphony and others were forced to make their magic in high school auditoriums or the UO's McArthur Court.

A group of far-sighted people, including the Hults, wanted something better for Eugene, Pierce said.

"They thought that every community should have a solid foundation in arts and culture," she said.

But Jewel Hult's generosity went beyond large gestures, Pressman said.

She was gifted with an everyday kindness, too, as likely to invite you into her garden and let you pick as many raspberries as you wanted or to share in her supply of Walla Walla sweet onions.

"She was part of an era where your family is the center of everything and it broadens out to the community because of the sense that what has been given to you, you share," Pressman said.

For the last several years, Hult had lived in Bakersfield, Calif. Her husband died in 1985.

She is survived by a brother, Barry Bauman of Eugene; five daughters, Linda Strait of Portland, Jane Ohlemann of Redmond, Gretchen Pierce of Eugene, Carol Lee of Lake Oswego, and Victoria Hollenbeck of Bakersfield, Calif.; 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements - by Musgrove Funeral Home of Eugene - are pending.

They had another daughter, Jane Hult Ohlemann.