For all of those interested, here is the story: My deceased friend Tom worked the last 23 years of his career at UC Berkeley in the Physics Department machine shop making very intricate and detailed devices for research projects conducted by the professors, many of whom are world famous. There is a separate machine shop for student use equipped with machines left from upgrades etc. in the main shop.
Tom had accumulated a very nice machine shop in his very large garage. Some years after retirement, Tom’s lifelong smoking habit caught up with him and he could no longer work on his many projects and he decided to donate his lathe, milling machine, drill presses, surface grinder and many precision instruments to the student machine shop. He also set up a scholarship fund for graduate students in physics at UC Berkeley. His will states that most of Tom’s assets go to the scholarship fund in his name.
It took too long for UC to get Tom’s machinery moved, which didn’t please Tom with his health dwindling but when the machinery mover offered him a pittance for all of his other stuff, Tom was pissed and held back a lot of tooling and other items that he may have given UC under better circumstances. He asked me to get what I could for what was left to add to his legacy scholarship fund.
Tom and I shared the same philosophy that the future of the world is in the hands of the smart kids and they should be encouraged, challenged and appreciated rather than becoming victim of the current trend of bringing everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
If offered the job as executor of someone’s estate, my advice is to avoid it if you can. Dying in the US is expensive and complicated. Too many lawyers that manage to get laws passed just to ensure their livelihood and everybody wants a piece of whatever remains.