Lewis K. Martin II, M.D. and Cheryl Rose Martin Scholarship

Dr. Lewis Martin of Winchester, Virginia likes to say that "Florence Smith saved my bacon." It was 1964, and he had just finished his first year at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. The scholarship that helped him had ended and Lewis had no idea how to pay his tuition. Then he won a Florence L. Smith Scholarship from the community foundation that "picked up the cost for my last three years and set the tone for the rest of my life."

Lewis, the first in his family to go to college, went on to a rewarding career as a radiologist. In 2005 he and his wife Cheryl decided to repay his benefactor by setting up their own scholarship fund at the community foundation. It benefits students at his medical school and his and Cheryl's undergraduate alma maters. He later also arranged for a future bequest to add to the scholarship.

"I was not particularly charitable while working, raising a family and paying bills," Lewis says. What impresses him about the Smith Scholarship that started in 1952 is "after all these years and all these hundreds of doctors being educated, the scholarship still had $2 million left. I thought if I give them my money and history repeats itself, my scholarship will be helping people 50 years after I am dead."