UNH Today

Lloyd ’48 and Grace Farwell ’45 never forgot their time at UNH. As their sons Wayne and Allan will tell you, their love for the university that brought them together only grew over the years. Before Lloyd and Grace passed away, they included a generous gift to UNH in their wills.

“As they got older, they thought more and more about how UNH impacted them,” Wayne says. “They realized how important their UNH experience was to both of their lives.”

Lloyd and Grace met at UNH in the early 1940s before he left campus to serve as an Army pilot during World War II. Following the war, he was tasked with overseeing operations at a small inn in Austria. He loved that work, and it inspired a change in direction for the former history major. Coming home to UNH in 1946, he decided to pursue a degree in what was then known as hotel administration. It was a hard-to-find concentration at the time, his sons recall, but UNH’s major, which would one day become the Hospitality Management Program at Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, set Lloyd on the path to his future career.

Lloyd also wanted to find Grace again. She had graduated from UNH with a degree in business while he was enlisted, Wayne and Allan explain, but Lloyd tracked her down by calling her parents in New Jersey and learning she was working as a secretary in New York. Despite the distance, the pair began dating again, and a few months after Lloyd’s graduation in 1948, they were married.

“From meeting his future wife to finding his future career, without UNH, none of this would have occurred,” Allan says.

Lloyd remained in the hospitality business and had risen to the level of senior vice president with Hilton Hotels & Resorts by the time he retired, and he and Grace maintained their connection to UNH. Their sons recall how they would recount the years they spent at UNH, describing how much they loved the campus as well as the impact UNH had on them as young adults.

The Farwells chose to make a planned gift to provide scholarships and support for the hospitality program because UNH helped shape the life they would share and the lives of their sons, who both followed their father into the hospitality business.

As Wayne and Allan put it, their family story could not have been told without UNH, and their parents wanted to leave a legacy to help UNH have an impact on future students as well.

In Allan’s words, “We can’t say enough about their UNH experience.”

Learn more about how you can make UNH part of your plan for the future.