Lessie Smithgall, 96, and family attorney Harvey Hill listen to a tribute to Charles Smithgall, GS 33.

The secret was made public when Lessie Smithgall, 96 on April 1, took the stage to accept the 2007 Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service on March 15, the birthday of the late Atlanta mayor.

Her late husband, Charles Smithgall, GS 33, was named a co-recipient of the prize, which unveiled the couple's anonymous gift of $3 million in 1988 to name Tech's liberal arts college for their friend.

The Ivan Allen College also recognized a Tech student, graduate and faculty member with Legacy Awards. Chris Van Acker, graduating this spring with a science, technology and culture degree, received the student prize. Douglas Noonan, a professor in the School of Public Policy, won the faculty honor. Carol Couch, director of the Environmental Protection Division within the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, won the alumna award.

Couch, HSE 78, also was the keynote speaker during the Founder's Day program. She called the gift of the Smithgall Woods Conservation Center to the state "a donation that is rooted in the heart ... and a sense of connection to a place."

Couch said the sense of conservation ethic rooted inside the Smithgalls is being increasingly lost in Georgia, which is losing 54 acres of trees per day and another 108 acres of tillable land each day to sprawling growth.

She noted the Smithgalls' investments in Tech's students, who will be needed "to help develop and move forward the new policies, the new ideas and the new research that are going to help us grapple the changes of growth, of growth management, growth strategy and economics."