Blue-Collar Benefactor

Matel Dawson has worked and sweated as a forklift driver in Dearborn, Mich., for nearly 60 years, often clocking 84 hours a week. He has spent scarcely anything on himself, preferring to invest heavily in the stock of his employer, Ford Motor Co. He could have been one of those millionaires next door you read so much about, living frugally while piling up money for a lavish retirement.

Instead Dawson has given most of it to strangers. Since 1995, he has donated more than $1 million for college scholarships. And at age 78, he just keeps working and giving: “I wouldn’t know what to do if I retired,” he says. “It keeps me going, knowing I’m helping somebody.”

Three years ago, Dawson phoned the Shreveport branch of Louisiana State University, a tiny campus with about 4,000 students in the town where he grew up. He wanted to know how to make a donation. Chancellor Vincent Marsala remembers taking the call and assuming that because Dawson was an autoworker, the most he could give was a couple of hundred dollars. Marsala says he “nearly flipped” when Dawson wrote checks for $200,000–enough to fund 18 four-year scholarships.

To date, Dawson has also given $431,500 to Wayne State University in Detroit, $230,000 to the United Negro College Fund and a few hundred thousand dollars more to various community colleges and churches. All he asks of the schools is that they use his money to give scholarships to the most deserving students, regardless of race. “If I was to do anything with my money other than help some of these kids begging to go to school,” he says, “I’d be throwing it away.”

What drives this blue-collar philanthropist? One spur is his own thwarted desire for higher education. Growing up the fifth of seven children in Shreveport, he had to drop out of school after seventh grade to help support his family. “I always wanted to better myself,” says Dawson, “but I came up in the Depression. I had to work.”

Dawson says he’s trying to live up to the example set by his late mother Bessie, a laundress. He watched as she helped others who were less fortunate, even when she could barely feed her family. She made Dawson and his siblings promise always to “give something back,” no matter how little. It’s a lesson he took with him back in 1940 when he headed for Detroit.

Dawson insists that “anybody could do what I’m doing if they put their mind to it.” His advice: work hard, spend sparingly and invest in solid stocks. Dawson once bought a three-bedroom house with a 30-year mortgage–and paid it off in six years. He also once owned a pair of shiny Lincoln Continentals. But he gave up those things 23 years ago when he and his wife were divorced. Today he lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Highland Park, a gritty Detroit suburb. He drives a red 1985 Ford Escort that runs just fine, thank you–though neighborhood thieves have forced him to do without hubcaps.

Dawson rises at 4 most mornings, brews coffee and goes to work at Ford’s Rouge Assembly Complex, which builds fuel tanks, engines and other auto parts. He relishes overtime pay and often works 12-hour shifts right through Saturday and Sunday. He has dinner at a modest local restaurant. While neighbors spend evenings tending lawns and cars, Dawson watches Hard Copy and is in bed by 8:30. His only vacations are occasional jaunts to Shreveport to meet recipients of the scholarships named in honor of his parents. His only real luxuries are the Burberry’s suits he wears on college visits and sometimes to church.

Fully half of Dawson’s pay–about $24 an hour plus overtime–goes directly, by payroll deduction, into Ford’s employee stock-purchase program. Since he began buying Ford stock in 1956, it has returned 13.7% a year on average, outpacing the S&P 500.

Dawson has received an honorary degree from Wayne State, plus a Trumpet award for philanthropy from Turner Broadcasting System (owned by the same parent company as TIME). He shrugs at such honors. “I just want to be remembered,” he says, “as an individual who tried to do some good.” His mother would be proud.