Peter Ortale Honored With Scholarship

Aug. 19, 2002

Former Blue Devil lacrosse standout Peter Ortale was last seen trying to help colleagues to the stairway during the attack on the World Trade Center last September. Now, friends and teammates from Duke have tried to keep the memory of their vibrant classmate alive by initiating a scholarship in his name.

The Peter Ortale Memorial Scholarship will go to a Duke lacrosse player beginning this season. Nearly $100,000 was pledged in barely four months last spring to launch the scholarship endowment fund.

"We were thrilled to hear about it, and I know Peter would be very honored," said Cathy Grimes, one of Ortale's three sisters. "This is exactly the kind of charitable thing he would love, helping someone like himself who would not under normal circumstances have been able to afford to go to Duke, but was able to because of some of the financial assistance he received."

The idea for the scholarship began to take root last November when dozens of Duke lacrosse players from the 1980s returned to campus for a reunion and tribute in honor of their former coach, Tony Cullen, who was battling cancer. Cullen suggested an endowment drive to a few of Ortale's teammates and even made a personal financial commitment to the project despite his failing health.

Former All-ACC players Jim Cabrera and Maurice Glavin, fellow members of the class of 1987 with Ortale, took charge of the fund-raising effort. After a December meeting between Cabrera and Susan Ross, Duke's chief athletics development officer, the drive got underway. Cabrera, Glavin and another former player, Dan Treinish, began contacting Duke lacrosse grads, while Cabrera's wife Ginge called on friends outside the lacrosse circle. By April, the phone campaign had netted the $100,000 Duke requires to start an endowment, and Cabrera made the announcement and presentation to president Nan Keohane during the university's reunion weekend. A total of 26 donors with gifts ranging from $50 to $25,000 got the endowment fund started.

"Everyone wanted to do something, it was just a question of how much and how to do it," said Cabrera, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., and runs his own company, Antares Investment Partners. "Pete got to go to Duke as the result of a scholarship, both athletic and financial aid. The idea was to give someone else who couldn't afford it the opportunity to go to Duke to be successful like he was."

"We raised the $100,000 with a fairly short number of phone calls, which speaks highly of both Peter and how people feel about the use of the funds for the lacrosse program," added Glavin, who also runs his own business, Total Scope Inc., which services high-end medical instrumentation. Ortale, a native of Philadelphia, was 37 years old when he died, one of five Duke alums to perish in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He had been working at Euro Brokers on the 84th floor of the WTC south tower for almost two years, after spending 10 years as a bond broker for Tullet & Tokyo a couple of blocks away. He had been living in the SoHo section of New York City with his wife Mary Duff, whom he met in 1996 and married in May of 2000.

At Duke, Ortale lettered from 1984-87, earned All-ACC recognition in 1986, co-captained the team in 1987 and played in the North-South game after graduating with his degree in political science. He was an integral part of the Blue Devils' back-to-back 11-win seasons of 1986-87. He continued playing lacrosse for various U.S. and Australian teams after Duke and spent a year traveling around the world before going to work in New York in 1989.

Friends and teammates remember him as one of the most intense competitors they ever knew. "If you asked 50 people about him, in the course of five minutes the word competitive would come out in all those conversations," said Glavin, who roomed with Ortale for three years at Duke after playing against him in the same league during high school. "He was a competitor first and everything else second. Some people might find that abrupt, but he competed at everything. That was one personality strength that stuck out."

Grimes, one of Ortale's four surviving siblings, said the Duke experience was life-changing for her brother.

"He definitely met some of his closest friends there," she said. "From an athletic perspective, it took his skill and his endurance, his concentration and focus and his leadership to a whole different level. From an academic perspective, he was completely blown away by the level of teaching and the variety of the courses at Duke. I know he took a breadth of different courses from a language perspective and a philosophy perspective, all the kinds of things he really loved, which ultimately wound up being a strong foundation for his world travels as well as his love of literature."

"I believe strongly that Duke afforded him some opportunities that guys like us don't really get in many cases," said Glavin. "We got a chance to experience a great university that might otherwise have been a challenge for us to get to. That's something he understood, and he fought aggressively to make sure he could stay there and do the things necessary to graduate. He thought a lot of Duke and the opportunities it gave him." Before coming to Duke, Ortale attended the Penn Charter School in

Philadelphia, where he played football and lacrosse and was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame. Mary Malitas, another of his sisters, said a drive to establish a scholarship in Ortale's name at Penn Charter also was underway and a memorial game was played there this past spring.

At Duke, the $100,000 committed so far will fund a partial scholarship worth about $5,000 per year to the recipient. Based on the trustee-approved spending rate of five percent on endowment funds, Ross said it takes $750,000 to fully endow an athletics scholarship, currently valued at $37,917 per year.

Contributions to the Peter Ortale Memorial Scholarship fund at Duke can be arranged through the Iron Dukes office by calling (919) 613-7575. Contributions to the high school scholarship in Ortale's name can be directed to the William Penn Charter School, 3000 West Schoolhouse Road, Philadelphia, PA 19144.

Peter Ortale Honored With Scholarship

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