Sophie Davis

Sophie Davis, a successful businesswoman whose backing helped create the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education at the City College of New York, died in September 2000 at her home in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 74. The cause was breast cancer, her son Alan said. Mrs. Davis helped her husband. Leonard, found the Colonial Penn Group of insurance companies, and they gave millions of dollars to art, dance, music and Jewish philanthropic causes, including the Holocaust Museum in Washington. But one project in which she took the most pride was the medical program at City College, which helps place economically disadvantaged students into medicine with the understanding that they will practice for at least two years in low-income communities. Students in the seven-year accelerated medical degree program take three years of undergraduate work at City College, two years of medical training at Sophie Davis and their final two years at one of six cooperating medical schools, including New York University and SUNY/Downstate. The graduates are known as ''Sophies.'' The Davises' first gift, $1.2 million, to the school, which began as an experimental program, was given anonymously in 1972. Five years later, Mrs. Davis agreed to have her name attached to the school. Continue reading the main story When the school gave her an honorary degree at that time, she brought a phalanx of friends and relatives to the ceremony to see her in her academic cap and gown; she had dropped out of City College to get married. Mrs. Davis was born in 1926 in the Bronx to Isadore and Esther Kesten, immigrants from Minsk, Russia. After skipping a grade in high school, she attended City College at night; there she studied accounting and met Leonard Davis, whom she married in 1945. He survives her. In addition to her husband and her son Alan, of San Francisco, Mrs. Davis is survived by another son, Michael, of Belvedere, Calif., and four grandchildren. While Mr. Davis worked as an accountant and later in the insurance business, Mrs. Davis worked at his side, organizing the office, handling the bookkeeping and serving as his sounding board. She was also a director of the Colonial Penn Group, which they founded in 1963, until they sold it in 1984. ''I always discussed everything with her,'' Mr. Davis said. ''We made the decisions jointly, based on which one of us felt the strongest. Sometimes we had to figure out which of us that was.'' He said that the company avoided borrowing money, for example, because Mrs. Davis violently opposed it. But he prevailed on the issue of buying a magazine that later merged with Modern Maturity, the magazine of the AARP, which he helped found. ''She was opposed, and she got the other senior members of my staff to oppose it, too,'' Mr. Davis recalled. ''But I felt very strongly about it, so we bought it.'' The Sophie Davis medical school was one of many projects the couple supported at City College. They also provided funds for a performing arts center, Aaron Davis Hall, named after Mr. Davis's father. Mrs. Davis helped choose some of the resident performers, and she and her husband often entertained them after performances. As the Davises began to spend more and more time in Palm Beach (although they kept their Fifth Avenue apartment), they played a similar role as impresarios, establishing the Regional Arts Foundation, with Mrs. Davis as president, in the early 1970's. The foundation brought performers like Isaac Stern, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Ballet to southern Florida, then considered by some a cultural wasteland. ''She felt a responsibility to bring music and dance to this area,'' said Judith Mitchell, chief executive of the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, which took over the performance series in 1994. The Davises also became involved with the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Mrs. Davis served as a trustee and spearheaded the drive to build a new wing. But even from Florida, she kept in touch with the medical school named after her. She and her husband gave the school another $2 million for an endowed scholarship fund in their names. And last year, when she attended the graduation ceremony, the students stood up and started chanting her name: ''Sophie! Sophie! Sophie!''