Jack Baskin

Early life Baskin was born in September 1919 in upstate New York and was the son of a watchmaker who immigrated from Russia with his wife to the United States in 1908. For his early education, Baskin attended school in a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade with 30 other students. When it came time for Baskin to seek a college education, it was in the midst of the Great Depression, and so his family worked to save money to pay for his tuition. He would eventually study mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado, the first in his family to have a college education. Afterward, Baskin pursued his Bachelor of Science degree at New York University, earning the degree in 1940.

Following college, Baskin entered his first job in engineering, being paid $28 per week, today being valued at around almost $500, or $70 per day. During this same period, Baskin served as an aeronautical engineer in World War II. Three years after the war in 1948, he moved west and earned his California Professional Engineers License, eventually becoming a general contractor in Southern California, especially in the newly-popular suburbs of Los Angeles. Baskin would go on from there to work in engineering, real estate, and philanthropy, eventually settling in Santa Cruz, California, where he lived until his death. The tower housed the headquarters of Jack Baskin, Inc. until its closing in 1999.

Philanthropy Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz is named in his honor. Baskin's charities include various local Santa Cruz establishments such as the Dominican Hospital of Santa Cruz, Cabrillo College, Seymour Marine Laboratory, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1997, he established a grant of $5 million used to build the Jack Baskin School of Engineering which opened in 1999. Additional grants of $500,000 in 2002 and $1 million in 2003 bring his current total contributions to the Jack Baskin School of Engineering to over $8 million. In 2006, he pledged $1.25 million to the Foundation in order to acquire a site in Aptos where their headquarters would be built. Once the headquarters was completed in 2010, it was named the Jack & Peggy Baskin Center for Philanthropy, in honor of its donors. In January 2008, the Baskins also established the Peggy & Jack Baskin Foundation, initially funded with their gift of $2 million.