A legal secretary bought the same stocks as her bosses for decades and left more than $8 million to scholarships, and her husband may not have known

Sylvia Bloom grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression and earned a Hunter College degree at night. In 1947 she joined the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton as a secretary. When her boss bought a stock, she bought the same stock in a smaller amount, her niece Jane Lockshin said. She rode the subway, lived for years in a rent-controlled apartment and had no children. Her husband, Raymond Margolies, was a firefighter who became a schoolteacher; he died in 2002. Lockshin said it was "very possible" that he did not know the size of her fortune. A colleague recalled her walking from the subway to the office in a snowstorm when she was still working at 96. She then retired to a senior residence and died in 2016. Her estate was more than $9 million. Her will named Lockshin executor and let her choose where most of the money went. In 2018 the Henry Street Settlement in New York received $6.24 million, the largest single estate gift in its history, for the Bloom-Margolies Scholarship Fund for low-income students. Another $2 million was split between Hunter College and a scholarship fund still to be named. Henry Street's executive director, David Garza, said he was "speechless."