Carol Bernstein Ferry

Carol Bernstein Ferry was a social change philanthropist and board member of DJB Foundation.

Carol Bernstein was born Carol Underwood on July 29, 1924 in upstate New York, but, from the time she was four, she grew up in Portland, Maine, where her mother’s family was located. Ms. Bernstein graduated from Wells College, and then she moved to Manhattan, where she worked as a writer, editor, and secretary for various publishing companies, including McGraw-Hill.

In 1953, she married Daniel Bernstein, a stockbroker who had inherited a large sum of money upon his father's death. Although she grew up in a rather apolitical family, Ms. Bernstein became increasingly radical by adopting many of her husband’s views about left-wing politics.

In an interview conducted in the 1990s, Ferry speaks of her first marriage, presenting a picture of a lovely New York housewife who was largely uneducated in the ways of the world. In one interview, she laughingly recounts how Mr. Bernstein tried to teach her to record their personal finances, saying, “ . . . [He] started teaching me double entry bookkeeping . . . This huge book spread out on the floor and it had lines going in every direction and little tiny numbers, that I started to cry and he closed the book and that was the last time we ever discussed my being the bookkeeper for the family.”

Until Daniel Bernstein’s death in 1970, in fact, Ms. Bernstein ran her household simply knowing that there was plenty of money for everything. It wasn’t until she read his will that she discovered she had six million dollars in a foundation and another sixteen million in personal funds.

This, then, was the beginning of Ferry’s legacy of philanthropy. Rather than wanting to accrue more riches, she says that “. . . with a little hasty arithmetic, which took me only an hour and a half, I realized that in order to stay even and not have an increase or decrease, I had to give away two thousand dollars a day for ever . . .” Throughout the rest of her life, Ms. Bernstein and her second husband, W.H. “Ping” Ferry gave away vast sums of money, and they are still remembered by many of the organizations they helped to get started.

Ferry died on June 9, 2001. Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ms. Bernstein Ferry prepared her own obituary, a call to the world to allow physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, wrote a longer letter explaining her choices, and swallowed a handful of sleeping pills in the presence of her family members.

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