When the Lodi Community Foundation received an email that it would be gifted $30 million, officials thought it was a typo.
Sheila Wishek, a Lodi native whose family was one of the largest stockholders of Farmers & Merchants Bank, had arranged for the bequeathed amount to be donated after her death. The 87-year-old died in January 2024 in San Francisco after a brief illness, according to her obituary.
The gift from the “stealthy philanthropist” is the largest the foundation has ever received, said John Ledbetter, chairman of the foundation’s board of directors.
Though Wishek left her hometown some 70 years ago — she graduated from Lodi High in 1954 and attended St. Anne’s Catholic School before that — she visited frequently and sought out ways to support the community, Ledbetter said.
Her cousin Robert Litts said Wishek lived a modest, humble life. She would always be the one to reach for the restaurant bill, he said, but she would avoid seeking credit for her kindness.
“She took the city bus for most of her life,” said Litts, who also grew up in Lodi and knew Wishek when he was a child — although she was 10 years his senior. “You’d never know her last name was on buildings for her philanthropy.”
Wishek graduated from UC Berkeley and worked for several years at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid during the 1960s before settling in San Francisco. She owned and operated an antiques shop there from 1985 to 2007, the year she retired.
Her retirement years brought her in contact with Ledbetter, who met Wishek about 15 years ago through her philanthropy efforts with the Lodi Community Foundation, which Ledbetter co-founded.
The group was created in 2007 to support projects that enhance resources for residents, support local nonprofits and strengthen the spirit of collaboration across the community.
Describing her as kind and humorous, Ledbetter said Wishek was often mistaken for an introvert because she avoided the spotlight. In fact, she wanted no funeral service when she died.
But friends and family refused to let her death go unmarked and arranged for a celebration of life. Exactly one year after she died, family and friends from high school, college and her sorority gathered on Jan. 12 at the Wine & Roses Hotel ballroom in Lodi to honor a life well-lived.
“It would be the last thing in the world she would have wanted,” Litts said of last month’s soiree in Wishek’s hometown.
“But there were so many of us that wanted to celebrate her,” he added, noting that he and his husband, Bill Mault, developed a closer friendship with Wishek in the last 30 years after the couple returned to California from the East Coast.
Because of her past generosity — Wishek had previously donated to local groups such as the Woman’s Club of Lodi, the San Joaquin Historical Society and the Children’s Home of Stockton — Ledbetter said he expected her to make final arrangements to support the foundation in a broader scale. In fact, the group had worked with her to put plans in place for her estate, per her request, ultimately creating the Sheila Wishek Legacy Fund.
“She had enough trust in us to know that if she left the money to the Lodi Community Foundation … that we would support the community in the way she would have,” Ledbetter said. “Maybe in some new ways.”
But the amount Wishek gifted left Ledbetter speechless. When he told the board of directors, its members were also at a loss for words.
“I’m telling you that our board is still in awe,” he said.
The $30 million donation is structured so that a portion is set up as an endowment, and the foundation will be able to grant funding from the endowment’s earnings.
“She had always told us … everything that she had was because of Lodi, And so she felt very akin to a town that she only visited once in a while,” Litts said.
The foundation is finalizing the process for organizations to apply for grant funding, Ledbetter said, noting there are plenty of underserved areas in the community. Wishek’s gift more than quadrupled the nonprofit’s total assets, and it now plans to hire a CEO and small staff to take the group to the next level.
“(Wishek) was a person that had a huge heart that was committed to this community that she was raised in and loved,” Ledbetter said. “Her gift will live on in perpetuity, forever.”