KINGSTON – Tenth-generation farmer H. Winfield Tucker and his wife, Phyllis Tucker, have donated $160,000 to the University of Rhode Island for the H. Winfield Tucker Jr. Engineering Scholarship Endowment.
Their gift – part of the university’s $100 million Making a Difference campaign – nearly doubles the scholarship endowment the Tuckers established in 1992 and expanded in 2000 to aid engineering students from the South County area.
“We wanted to make this contribution while we could,” Phyllis Tucker said in a statement. “If I hadn’t had the education at URI,” her husband added, “we wouldn’t be in a position to give these scholarships.”
Win Tucker, a 1943 mechanical engineering graduate of URI, credits his engineering and mathematics education with enabling him to succeed as a farmer and a businessman.
After graduating, Tucker recalled, he was offered a job as a draftsman, but the pay was too low, so instead he worked on the family farm. In the 1950s, he not only grew potatoes there, but also bought them from farms in a dozen states to sell to potato-chip makers. He also acquired several other potato farms in Slocum, bringing his total farmland to more than 500 acres.
In the 1970s, on the advice of URI Prof. Richard Skogley, he began converting those farms from potatoes to turf. Skogley “kept telling us, ‘You should be planting grass, you should be planting grass,’ ” Tucker recalled. “So we finally took his advice, starting with just a few acres, and then kept adding more and more until we had no potatoes.”
The family turf business, Sodco, is now run by the couple’s daughter, Linda Tucker, who received her MBA from URI in 1972.
“The Tuckers are a legendary family here in South County,” said Robert Clough, senior development officer for the URI College of Engineering.
“Their recent contribution to grow their scholarship endowment is a wonderful sign of their continued commitment to their alma mater,” Clough said. “We appreciate their tremendous loyalty and generosity.”
Additional information is available at www.uri.edu/news.
