They were philanthropists who founded a scholarship program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County to ensure that more blacks, particularly males, graduated with degrees in math and science.
He was typical of many students who had earned one of their free rides to college -- bright, determined and short on high school friends who shared his passion for biology class.
Yet during his stint at UMBC, Meyerhoff Scholarship recipient Andrew Atiemo of Oxon Hill could never find the right time to fully convey his gratitude to Robert and Jane Meyerhoff -- even though the couple made a point to get to know the scholarship recipients.
For four years, at functions and parties the Meyerhoffs held, Atiemo was just one of dozens of scholarship recipients, although in the customary scholarship class photo taken during his senior year in 1996, he stood right behind the couple, towering over the diminutive Jane.
The next time the three would be in the same room together was eight years later, in October last year, at Johns Hopkins Hospital: Jane Meyerhoff lay unconscious, heavily sedated after having undergone major heart surgery. Robert Meyerhoff stood by her side, overcome with sorrow, not knowing whether his wife of nearly 50 years would pull through.
Yet for a brief moment his attention shifted to a tall black doctor in the group of cardiologists tending to his wife. It was good to see him, Meyerhoff thought, in a line of work where black men are so few, and he wondered about the man's background.
The black doctor approached, asking Meyerhoff for written permission to perform a complex cardiac assessment procedure on his wife. Meyerhoff signed the form and thanked him, and then was stunned when the doctor offered his own words of thanks:
"He said, `Mr. Meyerhoff, you probably don't remember me, but I'm a Meyerhoff Scholar, and you paid my tuition to college,'" said Meyerhoff, 81, reflecting upon the moment recently in the wake of UMBC renaming its chemistry and biochemistry building after the couple last month.
The doctor was Atiemo who, having gone on from UMBC to Harvard Medical School, was now a postdoctoral cardiology fellow at Hopkins.
"I'm honored," he told Meyerhoff, "to participate in your wife's care in any way I can, because you've done so much for me and many others."
"It was just wonderful," Meyerhoff said, "the idea that it came home, that it would come back to us like that."
