Smith Scholar Spotlight

Donald E. Sly, M.D.

Donald E. Sly, M.D., who died in 2009, chronicled his early life in Portsmouth in a neat brown scrapbook. Included are photos of friends as well as a green 4-H symbol from when he lived on a dairy farm his father managed. Newspaper articles detail Sly’s football prowess and his acceptance to the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Page one of the scrapbook was reserved for a special letter Sly received in 1957 from the Hampton Roads Community Foundation. At the time Sly was a new University of Richmond graduate and the first person in his family to complete college. He had just been accepted to medical school when the Foundation letter arrived telling him he had been awarded a Florence Smith Medical Scholarship renewable for four years of study.

“If it weren’t for that scholarship I might still be milking cows,” Sly recalled a few years before his death. At the time he was a retired Norfolk otolaryngologist and Eastern Virginia Medical School community professor. “I was very blessed…the scholarship covered everything, and I was able to finish medical school with no debt at all,” Sly said.

Actually Sly finished with one debt – a debt of gratitude to the late Florence Smith, who made his medical education possible. Receiving the Smith scholarship “instilled a sense of philanthropy and gratitude toward the support of education,” said Sly, who arranged through will for a gift to The Norfolk Foundation and also requested that memorial donations come to the Smith Fund that had helped him earlier in life.

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