Martin N. Kelley, an Oregon State University alumnus and one of the school’s most prominent donors, died June 18 of cancer at his Lake Oswego home. He was 80.

Kelley always was generous where his alma mater was concerned, but never more so than in 2000, when the philanthropist gave $20 million for The Kelley Engineering Center, which bears his name on the OSU campus.

The gift was a catalyst in OSU’s drive to become one of the top 25 engineering schools in the nation.

“He launched the transformation of the College of Engineering. ... It created confidence in a bunch of people, faculty and staff and other donors,” said Ron Adams, dean of the College of Engineering.

OSU has improved from being ranked in the 60s to the top 40.

Kelley initially made his donations anonymously. However, Adams said, “We convinced him that knowledge of his gift would inspire others to step up and help.”

The 146,000-square-foot “green” building, a showcase for engineering innovation, opened in 2005.

Kelley graduated from OSU — then Oregon State College — in 1950.

“I always felt that the Oregon State education did a good job of preparing me for my career in civil engineering construction,” he said at the opening of the Kelley Engineering Center. He called the building he helped make possible “fantastic.” “It’s hard for me to imagine anything that could look any better.”

Kelley spent 42 years as an engineer, winning various honors and rising to become the vice president and chief engineer at Kiewit Engineering in Omaha, Neb, one of the nation’s largest construction firms. He worked on major projects throughout the world, including engineering large dams such as Oregon’s Detroit Lake Dam, powerhouses, bridge projects and tunnels, including those in the San Francisco BART system.

When Kelley retired in 1990, he and his wife returned to Oregon and founded a philanthropy foundation. In 1990, he made a $5 million gift to OSU, at that time the largest single gift to the university ever made by an individual alumnus.   

In the spring of 2008, Martin Kelley was honored by the Oregon State Foundation with its Lifetime Trustee Award at an awards banquet in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Kelley was inducted into the OSU Engineering Hall of Fame in 1998 and also was honored with the E.B. Lemon Distinguished Alumni Award in 2002.

His wife, Lora Laslett Kelley, died in 1993. They had five sons and one daughter.

Kelley married Judith Carlson in 1994.

His personality, as well as his generosity, prompted affectionate regard.

In March, Darald W. Callahan, chair of the OSU Foundation Board of Trustees, said, “OSU has had an outstanding friend in Martin Kelley ... When I think of him, five things stand out: his dedicated leadership, incredible generosity, humility, great stories and sense of humor and, of course, that trademark bow tie.”

“We’re all going to miss him,” Adams said

See http://campaignforosu.org/news/featurednews/current/kelley/

For the 2005 article on the opening of the Kelley Engineering Center, see http://gazettetimes.com/articles/2005/10/30/news/top_story/news01.txt

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