The IBM Fortune and the Funeral Home Director

Kevin Maney writes: This has to be one of the more amazing stories of a hidden tech fortune -- and I happen to be close to it in a bunch of ways I never knew.

A couple of months ago, Robert McDevitt died at 90 in Binghamton, N.Y., my hometown. He ran a nice-enough but unremarkable funeral home near the center of town, about two blocks from where my parents now live. Over the past week, his will has become public, revealing that while McDevitt spent his time embalming local bodies and soothing mourners -- he was worth $250 million.

It turns out that his mother in the early 1900s had been the secretary of A. Ward Ford, one of the original board members of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which would eventually become IBM. I know a lot about Ford. He helped C-T-R decide to hire Thomas Watson Sr. as its president, and Watson would go on to turn C-T-R into the powerhouse data processing company we all know, running IBM until the 1950s. And I wrote a biography of Watson, titled The Maverick and His Machine.

Anyway, McDevitt's mother, Mary Graiff McDevitt, while serving as Ward's secretary, got what basically were IBM IPO shares -- and apparently held onto most of them, passing them to her son, who ran the funeral home and died childless. His wife had died not long before him. It's kind of like imagining what will happen to the son of some admin for Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

My friend Jeff Platsky, a long-time business editor and writer for the Binghamton Press, sent me this additional info:

Evidently he was the single largest individual holder of IBM stock. Lived a very frugal life. Few knew of his fortune, though I had heard a continual rumor about some guy (a funeral home director, I was told) who had some whopping amount of IBM stock. Was never able to confirm. The couple lived on Leroy St.
 
He left $50 million to LeMoyne, $75 million to Georgetown Univ., $7.5 million apiece to St. Pats, St. Thomas and St. James, $20 million to some home for retired priests and an equal amount to some home for retired nuns and a sizeable sum to the Syracuse diocese. He also left millions to Seton Catholic Central, the Lourdes Hospital Foundation.
 
The money will be held in trust, and these benefactors will receive interest income from the pot of money.