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Spencer F. Eccles, with his children Spencer P. Eccles and Lisa Eccles, in front of portraits of his uncles George and Marriner and his grandfather David.
Courtesy of the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation
The Eccles name is already ubiquitous on the University of Utah’s campus, from its David Eccles School of Business to its football team’s Rice-Eccles Stadium. With its biggest single gift yet, the family is now adding the Spencer F. Eccles School of Medicine to its collection.
Two of the family’s foundations announced on Wednesday that they’re partnering to give $110 million to the university’s medical school to support the construction of a new 248,000-square foot building and bolster its endowment and research funding. The school will be named for Spencer Fox Eccles, the 86-year-old third-generation patriarch and former chairman and CEO of banking company First Security Corporation, which Wells Fargo acquired for $2.9 billion in 2000.
“I have a love affair with the state of Utah, and it extends right over to the University of Utah,” Spencer Eccles says. “I said years ago, ‘No state or region can become truly great without a world-class medical center at its nucleus,’ and that’s the bottom line of what we hope we’re building.”
The donation is a joint gift from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, which has given more than $750 million to benefit numerous causes in Utah over the last half-century, and the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation, which focuses on medical research. The $110 million total is a nod to First Security’s old slogan to give 110% effort for its customers. Construction is expected to start in the next year on the new facility, which will replace the medical school’s aging 60-year-old home, and it will allow the school to increase its class size from 125 to 160.
“We can be a good university with our state funds, but it’s those private funds that let us become great and achieve excellence,” says Michael Good, interim president of the University of Utah and executive dean of its school of medicine. “We want to create an endowment that gives us funds to innovate in medical education, and form follows function—we want a facility where we can accomplish those innovative things.”
The Eccles’ roots in Utah date back to the 1860s, when the family of Spencer’s grandfather, David Eccles, converted to Mormonism and received a $375 loan from the church to immigrate from Scotland. Spencer Eccles says the family was penniless in Scotland and took the train from New York to St. Louis on the day of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, walking the rest of the way to Utah.
David was 19 years old when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869 and became a successful industrialist in Ogden, Utah, making money in railroads, lumber, banking and an assortment of other industries. He and his wife Ellen had nine children, and when he died at age 63 in 1912, he left his $7 million fortune (about $190 million in today’s dollars) for his 22-year-old son Marriner to manage in the Eccles Investment Company. The family kept its wealth in the firm until the 1970s, when seven of the aging children ramped up giving from their own foundations. The George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation is the largest of the seven, with $432 million in net assets at the end of 2019, and the foundations have given a total of about $1.25 billion over the past 50 years.
Marriner and his brother George Eccles — both Spencer’s uncles — consolidated their father’s fragmented banking ventures into First Security Corp. in 1928 and eventually grew it into a large regional bank based in Salt Lake City. Marriner Eccles served as chair of the Federal Reserve from 1934-48, managing the central bank through the end of the Great Depression and World War II after being appointed by Franklin Roosevelt.
Spencer F. Eccles received his undergraduate degree from the University of Utah, where he was an All-American ski racer, and earned an M.B.A. at Columbia Business School. He worked at Citibank briefly before returning to the family business and took over First Security in 1982 after George’s death. He’s now the chairman and CEO of George’s foundation and serves as chairman or a board member of four other family foundations.
The family’s influence on the University of Utah began with the dedication of the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library 50 years ago, named for Eccles’ father. In addition to its regular donations to the school, George Eccles’ foundation has also given millions to organizations like the Utah Food Bank, the Nature Conservancy in Utah and the organizing committee for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. A $15 million gift helped the Eccles Theater open in 2016 to bring touring Broadway shows to Salt Lake City.
“I made a solemn promise, which is binding, after Marriner and George selected me, so I’m stuck and I’m happy as can be,” Spencer Eccles says of his responsibility to sustain the family’s legacy. “We’re bringing my four children along and now starting to ease the understanding of who we are and what we do to the 10 grandchildren and hope that this can continue to be a resource for the state.”