Beth Curry, a former homemaker who co-founded Eagle Capital Management, a New York-based investment firm with $25 billion in assets, after returning to school for an MBA, has died. She was 74.
Ms. Curry died Monday at her home in Manhattan, her husband, Ravenel Boykin Curry III, said in a telephone interview. The cause was a recurrence of breast cancer that was first diagnosed 23 years ago.
Ms. Curry and her husband, a former partner at H.C. Wainwright and portfolio manager at the Duke Endowment, formed Eagle Capital in 1988. The firm manages money for pension funds, universities, foundations and families.
“We look for companies that have great management and good businesses but for some reason are undervalued or overlooked by the investment community,” Ms. Curry said in a 2010 article in Queens, the magazine of Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. “The kind of companies we are looking for are ones with everything in place to become greater than they are today.”
Ms. Curry enrolled in Queens College where she was a student government president and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1963. The school changed its name to Queens University of Charlotte in 2002.
In 1979, Ms. Curry re-enrolled in Queens College, earning a degree from the school's then-new Master of Business Administration program.
In 1983, Ms. Curry and her husband moved back to Summit, N.J., and she began working as a securities and equities trader at Summit Bancorp. Five years later, she and her husband started Eagle Capital.
Through the Ravenel and Elizabeth Curry Foundation, she and her husband gave $3 million to Queens University and $5 million to New York's Weill Cornell Medical College, where Ms. Curry served on the board of overseers. She also was on the board at Rockefeller University in Manhattan. The foundation has $180 million in assets.
In addition to her husband of 52 years, survivors include two sons, Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, an analyst at Eagle Capital, and Marshall Andersen Curry; a daughter, Caroline Rivers Curry, a consultant at Eagle Capital; seven grandchildren; and three siblings, Jay Rivers, Rebecca Sullivan and Melinda Ford.
