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Thwing Conservatory Merit Scholarship Endowed
As much as Oberlin’s devoted alumni and friends love the College, it isn’t every day that someone decides to pick up the phone and make a six-figure donation out of the blue. But that’s exactly what happened one day last fall when Mary Claire Phipps made the decision to donate a portion of her inheritance from her aunt to Oberlin College.
“I don’t think the development office has quite recovered from my phone call,” jokes Phipps, who decided to endow the Consuelo Lay Thwing ’17 Endowed Conservatory Merit Scholarship in memory of her aunt.
Mrs. Phipps, who handled her aunt’s affairs from the late 1980’s until her death in 1990, and her husband Charles decided to support Oberlin because they both believe strongly in education and providing scholarship support to those in need.
Designating the fund to Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music was an easy choice. “Even as she got older,” Mrs. Phipps recalls, “music stayed as her one interest, joy and passion in life.”
 Born in 1896 to Eldred L. and Claire Pauline Thwing, Consuelo Lay Thwing attended Oberlin as a math and music major for three years until the influenza epidemic of 1917 forced her to return home. She completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin before pursuing graduate coursework at New York University. Thwing also attended school in Argentina for a short time.
It is her years living in New York City, while working as an accountant for Hermann Loewenstein, Inc., for which she is most vividly remembered by her niece. “My mother and I would visit my aunt in New York,” she notes. “And as a girl I always marveled at how they got her Steinway grand piano into her apartment.”
Once she retired to Florida, Thwing had to replace the piano with an organ, but she played at church and at home until the very end of her life.
Beyond its musical influence, Thwing once commented in correspondence to the College that Oberlin broadened her horizons culturally, as well. She wrote that she held “a soft spot” in her heart for Oberlin: “[It] gave me my ‘start’ and inspiration to seek further.” *
For Mary Claire Phipps, providing that inspiration to others – through the form of merit scholarships – will be a fitting legacy for the aunt she will always treasure.
* quote courtesy Oberlin College Archives
To learn more about Conservatory scholarships, please contact the Office of Conservatory Giving at conservatory.giving@oberlin.edu or 440 775-8545.
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