A “Self-Made Couple” Remembers Their Roots with Support for Scholarships

Bill and Gail Robinson are the very definition of a “self-made couple.” Married for more than 40 years, the Southern California natives grew up in middle-class families who instilled in them a strong work ethic that has brought them great success.

From 1970 to 1977 Bill was an academic part-time employee at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), first working as a technician and later in engineering design. He enrolled at UCLA in 1970 and received his BS in electrical engineering in 1974. Bill, using his JPL earnings to finance his graduate studies, received an MS in electrical engineering from UCLA in 1975 and a JD from Loyola Law School in 1978. Combining technology and law, he went on to a 45-year career as a technology trial lawyer specializing in patent and trade secret litigation.

Gail began her career at JPL in 1970 while on summer break from the University of San Diego and rose through the ranks while earning an MBA. She oversaw business operations for various interplanetary flight projects and served as the business manager for Dr. Charles Elachi, who became director of JPL. Elachi later appointed Gail chief of staff. After more than 50 years of service at JPL—where Gail and Bill first met in 1975—Gail retired in 2023, the same year that Bill did.

At the age of 53, Bill was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “It’s a genetic issue in my family,” he explains. “My first cousin, who was ten years older, was also diagnosed at 53 and didn’t make it to 63. I didn’t want that to happen to me.”

Bill wanted his cancer vigorously and quickly treated and spoke first with a Stanford urologist, who recommended robotic surgery for prostate removal. Bill declined, citing concerns that it was still a relatively new and risky procedure with the potential for long-term negative side effects. Fortunately, Gail had a childhood friend—a Keck School of Medicine of USC-educated doctor—who referred them to the Keck Medical Center of USC, where they met with urologist Dr. David Penson.

“I wanted someone who knew their way around,” Bill says. “Penson was performing two to three of these surgeries a week and had the expertise I was seeking.” Four weeks after he was diagnosed, Bill had the surgery. The surgery was successful, without any need for chemotherapy or radiation later. When Penson left USC to head the urology department at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, his Keck Medical Center colleague, Dr. Matt Dunn, did the follow-up testing of Bill for a couple of years.

The expertise of these doctors, combined with the overall quality of care he received at the Keck Medical Center, made a lasting impression on Bill. When he later tore a previously repaired hernia while securing a mooring line on his boat in Catalina, he returned to the medical center for corrective surgery by Dr. Howard Silberman. And when Bill’s 97-year-old mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, he describes how “we returned to Keck, where Dr. Annie Yessaian performed a successful hysterectomy. Mom was up the next morning, talking to her friends on her cellphone. Everyone at Keck treated her so well, and she lived another two years. Her original health care provider didn’t want to do anything given her age, but Keck did.”

Today the Robinsons are happily retired and enjoying the fruits of their high-profile careers. Still, neither Bill nor Gail have forgotten the challenges they faced decades ago paying for college or how college graduates today often struggle to pay off student loans.

“I got out of law school with no money but also no debt. You can’t do that today,” Bill says, adding that “at the law firms I worked at, we hired kids out of law school with thousands of dollars of debt. We even had partners still paying off their school loans!”

Likewise, Gail describes how “at JPL we would hire engineers who couldn’t start families because of crushing debt or couldn’t afford to live nearby in Pasadena and would have to commute an hour to work.”

The Robinsons reached the point in their lives where they needed to make decisions about their estate, which had grown over the years. With no children of their own, they decided that the best use of their money was to provide scholarships for middle-class students. As Gail explains, “Bill and I came from very middle-class families. Middle-class students and their families receive minimal need-based assistance but cannot cover the total cost of tuition. They are the lost economic strata for scholarships.”

As Bill says, “We wanted to help future generations of scientists, doctors, engineers, and lawyers.” And Gail wanted to “keep it local, where we grew up,” so the couple made four $5-million estate gifts to create scholarship funds at four SoCal universities: Caltech, Loyola Law School, UCLA, and USC. All of these bequests are specifically designated for scholarships for students from middle-class backgrounds. The USC bequest is in gratitude for the care Bill and his late mother received at the Keck Medical Center.

“The Keck School of Medicine is one of the foremost medical institutions in the country,” says Bill, “not only in teaching but in terms of helping real-life patients. We are delighted to be able to support USC.”