The Buck Trust

The Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the I. M. Pei complex on the hill above US 101 at the north end of Novato, exists because of an oil deal and a lawsuit over whether Marin County was too rich to deserve its own fortune. Beryl Buck of Ross died in 1975 and left the San Francisco Foundation a trust built on her late husband Leonard's seven percent share of Belridge Oil, worth about 7.6 million dollars and restricted by her will to the needs of Marin County. In December 1979 Shell bought Belridge for 3.65 billion dollars, and the Marin trust was suddenly worth about 260 million. The foundation spent five years giving away more than 134 million dollars in Marin, some of it on grants like 20,000 dollars to a homeowners' association for a swimming coach, and in 1984 it went to court asking to spend the money across the whole Bay Area, arguing that Marin's affluence made the restriction impracticable. The trial ran six months before a judge brought in from Santa Clara County, Homer Thompson, and ended in a settlement in 1986. The San Francisco Foundation gave up the trust, and a new Marin Community Foundation took it over in January 1987 with about 450 million dollars. The settlement required at least a fifth of the income to go permanently to major projects in Marin that would benefit all humankind, and in August 1987 the court chose three, one of them a research centre on aging. Pei was brought in to design it in 1989, and the institute opened on its 488-acre site on Mount Burdell in 1999. The Marin Community Foundation has since given away more than 2.7 billion dollars, over a billion of it from the Buck Trust.