This article is more than 11 years old

This article is more than 11 years old

Jane M Buri, a school social worker, spent nearly four decades fighting to keep kids in class.

She tracked students to their homes, found them shoes, meals, jackets, and returned the truants to their teachers. She never married, never had children, never missed a day of work.

All the while, she was quietly building a small fortune. Buri died at 84 with $1.4m to her name.

Then in death, as befit her life, she gave it all away.

The last checks from her savings - willed to more than 50 friends, cousins and charities - should be arriving soon in mailboxes.

She gave to African missionaries, Legionaries of Christ and Catholic schools for the Sioux and Cheyenne. She donated to her high school, college and graduate school, to the south St Louis parish she visited thrice weekly, the Alexian Brothers nursing home where she volunteered, and the disabled friend she took to the discount grocery store every Friday.

How did she amass such an estate?

"It beats me," said old friend and co-worker Genevieve O'Hara Brueggemann. "And it beats everybody who knew her."

In retrospect, friends say Buri's savings made sense. They say she drove a 30-year-old car, watched an ancient TV, lived four decades in a house bought with cash in 1969 and just kept stacking charity donation envelopes in her sun room, until, once a year, she sent them all in.

They say she gave of herself and asked little in return.

Nobody's disputing that generosity. But it's not the whole story.

Because this isn't about someone who selflessly saved so others could have.

It's about someone who saved because spending more just didn't occur to her.

Buri grew up in the packed city neighbourhoods of the Great Depression.

Her father ran a cigar shop in downtown St Louis. Her mother was a prim, fancy-dressing woman.

Buri was their lone child. They protected her, family members said.

"Nobody had too much money," said Jack Goettelmann, Buri's cousin and her last relative in the area. "And all they did was try to improve."

Buri went to the all-girls St Joseph's Academy for high school, to Fontbonne and St Louis universities for college and graduate school.

She got her first job as a social worker in 1954, according to St Louis Public School records. She made $3,800 a year. Within 10 years, she was running the department and had doubled her salary.

In 1969, Buri, her mother and father bought a house together on Lindenwood Avenue, blocks from St Mary Magdalen's on South Kingshighway. There is no record in City Hall of any mortgage.

Buri would live in the house until she died.

"She never got married, never had a boyfriend," said Goettelmann's wife, Beverly. "Just had all her lady friends, that she did a lot with. I think she was so into her school work. Just the people in themselves were enough for her."

By the time Buri retired from St Louis Public Schools in 1990, she had managed staff for nearly 30 years. She founded the mid-west's school social work association. And, in her final year, she won Missouri's School Social Worker of the Year, after repeatedly turning down the award late in her career - it should have gone, she said then, to someone still in the field.

Her final evaluation said she would be greatly missed.

"Perfect attendance," it continued, "is noted".

Buri volunteered at a nursing home every Friday, and led seniors in praying the rosary. She bought her friends lunch for their birthdays.

She dressed plainly. She wore costume rings. She dyed and permed her own hair.

She lived, her friends say, nearly as a nun.

The house furniture was her parents'. She resisted replacing the old TV and icebox. And when she went out with friends, they nearly always split the bill.

When she died, coupons waiting to be clipped still covered her dining room table.

"Always, always. She'd reach into her purse, pull out a handful of coupons, and ask me where I wanted to go to lunch," said Brueggemann, her co-worker.

Buri even looked for deals within deals. For instance, she would buy five sandwiches for $5.95 from Arby's. She'd eat one and freeze the four others for later.

"She was very - I don't want to say she was cheap," said neighbour and former public school teacher Lois Zitzmann. "But she was very frugal with herself."

So, yes, Buri was a penny pincher.

But not the kind who refused to share with others or couldn't see the needy around her.

Sure, she froze those sandwiches.

But not before offering a few to her friends.

Buri clipped coupons, her cousin said, because that was how she was raised.

Take, for example, her car. She drove a green 1970 Chevy for 36 years. As it wore down, she repainted it at least twice - in the same avocado green. "Ugly, ugly green," Goettelmann said.

But she didn't keep the car just because she couldn't bring herself to buy another. "She loved that car," Goettelmann said.

Nor did she deny herself small indulgences. Some weeks, she ate out three meals a day, friends said. She traveled to Europe, and to the Rose Parade in California. She bought a baby grand piano.

There was nothing she wanted and didn't buy, said Brueggemann, the co-worker.

"She was frugal because she didn't need anything else," she said. "She wanted that old car. She dressed the way she wanted to dress."

On March 18 2008, Jane Marie Buri died.

Her parish, still decorated for Easter, held a simple ceremony a week later, and buried her on a hill at Calvary Cemetery, next to her mother, father and relatives.

The site is hard to find. Monuments etched with old St Louis names rise 10 to 20 feet into the trees.

The Buri family plot has no marker. The dozen gravestones are just grouped together, each precisely alike: one-foot-tall, unpolished granite, with small crosses beside the names.

Jane Buri is the last in the line.

Goettelmann says most of us have lost track of what life is all about. He says we think money is the answer to everything.

Buri didn't. Buri lived exactly as she wanted.

And she left for others what she didn't need.