For roughly 75 years, Oseola McCarty made her living doing something most people would consider ordinary.
She washed clothes.
She ironed shirts, dresses, sheets and other garments for families in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It was physically demanding work, performed long before modern conveniences made household laundry relatively easy.
There was no glamorous career waiting for her.
There was no enormous salary.
There was no expectation that her name would one day become known across the United States.
McCarty simply worked.
And she saved.
Dollar after dollar, year after year, she quietly accumulated money from a lifetime of labor.
Then, at the age of 87, she made a decision that transformed her from a local washerwoman into one of America's most memorable examples of everyday philanthropy.
In 1995, McCarty gave $150,000 to The University of Southern Mississippi to establish scholarships for students who needed financial help obtaining an education.
It represented the majority of her life savings.
For a woman who had spent decades washing other people's clothes, it was an astonishing amount of money.
But the deeper meaning of the gift was not simply its size.
Oseola McCarty was helping young people obtain something she herself had wanted but never had the opportunity to pursue: an education.
And three decades later, the generosity she set in motion was still growing.
A Childhood Shaped by Work
Oseola McCarty was born on March 7, 1908.
Her story was rooted in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where work became part of her life at an extraordinarily young age.
According to The University of Southern Mississippi, McCarty began working alongside her mother, Lucy, her grandmother, Julia, and her aunt, Evelyn, when she was only eight years old.
Even as a child, she was learning a habit that would define the rest of her life: saving.
The university says she would put away some of the money she earned, keeping it in her doll buggy for safekeeping.
It would have been impossible for that eight-year-old girl to know what those early savings represented.
They were the beginning of a practice she would maintain for decades.
McCarty learned to distinguish between what she needed and what she merely wanted.
When she earned money, she did not automatically spend it.
She saved.
There was another dream in her childhood as well.
She wanted to become a nurse.
Education might have provided a path toward that future.
But life intervened.
McCarty left school in the sixth grade to care for her aunt when she became ill.
She never returned to the classroom.
The girl who once dreamed of becoming a nurse instead entered a lifetime of manual labor.
Yet decades later, that lost educational opportunity would help shape one of the most important decisions of her life.
Seventy-Five Years of Laundry
Laundry in McCarty's working years was nothing like throwing clothes into a modern washing machine and pressing a button.
The work was demanding and repetitive.
Clothes had to be washed, dried, pressed, folded and prepared for customers.
Day after day, year after year, McCarty earned her money through the labor of her hands.
The University of Southern Mississippi says she continued taking in washing and ironing for approximately 75 years.
Eventually, arthritis forced her to stop.
By then, something remarkable had happened.
A woman who had spent her life earning relatively modest amounts had accumulated substantial savings.
The exact figures associated with her finances have sometimes been simplified in retellings of her story, but what is firmly documented is that her $150,000 donation represented the majority of her life savings.
The amount becomes even more extraordinary when considered in context.
McCarty did not build her fortune by selling a company.
She did not inherit millions.
She did not become a celebrity.
Her savings came from decades of ordinary work combined with extraordinary discipline.
Her financial philosophy was simple: spend less than you earn and save what you can.
Those habits accumulated over a lifetime.