Beryl Buck left oil stock for Marin County, Shell's purchase made it worth $253 million, and a court kept it in Marin

Leonard Buck, a pathologist whose father Frank Buck co-founded Belridge Oil, died in 1953. His widow Beryl Buck died in 1975 and left the bulk of the estate to the San Francisco Foundation, about $7.6 million for "charitable purposes in Marin County," including "extending help to the problems of aging." In 1979 Shell Oil bought Belridge, paying $253 million for the stock in the trust. Marin was one of the richest counties in the United States^†. The San Francisco Foundation asked the court to apply cy pres, the doctrine that lets a court change a charity's purpose when it becomes impossible or impractical, so it could spend the money across the Bay Area. It lost^†. A 1986 settlement created the Marin Community Foundation to run the trust. It required 80% of annual earnings to go to Marin causes and 20% to three named Marin organizations, one of which became the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, opened in 1999. The trust was worth about $1 billion in 2013^†.