John E. Moore, Jr. ’64, ’65 MAT can’t help but laugh when he remembers his arrival in New Haven in 1960. He and a high school classmate, both beginning their undergraduate years in Yale College, landed at Tweed Airport after a long day of traveling from Minnesota. The dorms on Old Campus wouldn’t be open for another day, so they checked into the Hotel Duncan on Chapel Street. “In the morning, I went down to the hotel lobby and asked the man at the front desk where Yale is,” John recalls. “The attendant looked at me and said, ‘Son, it’s all around you.’ Talk about being seventeen years old and as green as grass.”
By the time he left New Haven five years later, with a bachelor’s in history, the arts, and letters (a divisional major at the time) and a master’s in teaching, John had studied hard and learned a great deal. At Yale, he was in ROTC and later served in Korea before embarking on a career in education. “Yale showed me what a good liberal arts education ought to be. I left knowing how to read critically, think critically, and share my ideas clearly.” These abilities proved invaluable to him while serving as president of Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, a position he held for twenty-two years. “For all the time that I was president of Drury, the experience that I had at Yale was my model,” he says.
Now retired, John manages a small farm in Missouri, where he keeps bees and raises Angus cattle. Recently, he established a charitable gift annuity (CGA) at Yale. “I set up this gift for two reasons: because Yale means a lot to me and because the CGA gives me an income stream for my lifetime, which I can use and enjoy,” he notes.
John has designated the residual of the annuity for the Robert W. Carle Scholarship Fund—the very same scholarship fund that supported his own Yale education. “I would not have been able to attend Yale if it hadn’t been for that scholarship,” says John. “Now I hope to be able to help other bright young men and women go to Yale who might come from a family without means. Yale needs a lot of support to make that possible, and I am more than happy to play a part.”