November 16, 1999
Contact: John Scarffe, KU Endowment, (785) 832-7336.
LAWRENCE -- A California woman's $50,000 gift will help University of Kansas law students and memorialize her first husband, a prisoner of war who was killed in World War II, Michael H. Hoeflich, dean of the School of Law, announced today.
With the gift of mutual funds, Beatrice S. Siegel of Palm Springs, Calif., has established a gift annuity at the Kansas University Endowment Association. The annuity provides her with a fixed life income and ultimately will create the Major Eugene H. Nirdlinger Memorial Law Scholarship Fund. The fund will provide scholarships for outstanding second- or third-year law students involved in the Jewish Law Student Association.
"It is an honor to be the recipient of this gift in memory of Major Nirdlinger," Hoeflich said. "He was a great lawyer and patriot."
Siegel made the gift in memory of her first husband, Eugene H. Nirdlinger. A Leavenworth native, Nirdlinger earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1931 from KU, where he completed the Army ROTC program and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. When Nirdlinger received his undergraduate degree, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Nirdlinger then attended the KU School of Law and graduated at the top of his class in 1933, where he was selected for Order of the Coif. Nirdlinger passed the bar examinations in Kansas, Missouri and Illinois and practiced law in Chicago until the spring of 1941, when he was called to active military duty.
Nirdlinger was stationed on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines. He served as a judge advocate general on Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff and was captured when the Philippines fell to the Japanese in 1942.
"I was sustained throughout the horrors of that war - praying my husband's mental ability and ingenuity would allow him to survive the atrocities of the prison camps," Siegel said.
Nirdlinger survived captivity in Japanese prison camps, but he was killed when U.S. planes bombed the unidentified ship the Japanese were using to transport POWs from the Philippines to Japan. Nirdlinger was 35 when he died, leaving behind his wife and young daughter, Nancy.
"I was devastated by the irony of the situation," Siegel said. "He lived through years of horrors only to be killed as the war was about to end.
"Major Nirdlinger is truly a war hero who never got the honor he deserved. This gift reflects my love and admiration for him and the admiration I know he had for the KU School of Law. I want to make it possible for those educated in the law to use law to rid our planet of war, and then Eugene Nirdlinger's worthwhile and gifted life will not have been lost in vain.
"My daughter Nancy Nirdlinger Lurie, her husband, Tom Lurie, and their three daughters join me in the joy and pleasure of this gift."
The KU Endowment Association is an independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fund-raising and fund-management foundation for the University of Kansas. Founded in 1891, the KU Endowment Association is the oldest foundation of its type at a public university in the United States and one of the largest.
Story by Melissa Hayes