For retired Clinton Public Schools teacher Wilma McElmurry, frugality was a way of life. She preferred not to spend money on herself, going so far as to collect promotional items such as hats and T-shirts to avoid having to purchase those items.
Yet there was one area where the rural Custer County resident spent freely: charity. And nowhere was that generosity more evident than at a recent luncheon at Southwestern Oklahoma State University.
At the event, the $5 million charitable trust that McElmurry created made its first payout to three nonprofit beneficiaries: the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, SWOSU and Clinton Public Schools. Each organization will receive perpetual payments from the trust.
McElmurry, who died in July 2005, earmarked half of the trust’s payments to fund research on cancer and heart disease at OMRF. As a result, OMRF will receive annual payments of at least $60,000 to study the diseases that claimed the lives of both of McElmurry’s parents.
“From firsthand experience, Wilma McElmurry understood the terrible toll that cancer and heart disease can take on a family,” said Tia Jones-Bibbs, OMRF’s director of planned giving. “This selfless gift will help OMRF’s scientists transform Mrs. McElmurry’s personal loss into a legacy of hope.”
Born in 1916, Wilma (Davis) McElmurry was an only child. She graduated from SWOSU in 1940 and spent 33 years as a schoolteacher, first in Arapaho, then in Clinton. While teaching at Arapaho, she and married fellow teacher Bonnie McElmurry, who would later become Arapaho’s principal and superintendent.
After retirement, the couple, who had no children, lived on the family farm north of Custer County. They were quite active in farming until Mr. McElmurry’s death in 1996.
Mrs. McElmurry made her first donation to OMRF that year in memory of her husband, and she continued to give for the final nine years of her life. “She felt like OMRF was charitable organization that that would do the most with her funds,” said C.B. Graft, McElmurry’s attorney for 36 years.
According to Graft, his client listened to advice from close friends, but she always made her own decisions. “She was the type of person who was fiercely independent,” said Graft.
McElmurry’s estate was a product of oil and gas holdings and an inheritance in the 1980s. Despite McElmurry’s considerable holdings, said Graft, she remained extremely careful with her savings, spending little and collecting promotional items given out at rural electrical cooperative meetings. “She was kind of like a legend that way,” said Graft.
