Music professor's parents endow scholarship Robert and Frances Green spent their entire lives spending wisely and saving every penny they could. A 1939 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Robert served in the Navy for 26 years. He earned a master's degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins University and worked for several companies in the Washington, D.C., area. Frances, a native of San Diego, graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 1938 and was the head of the household during the many months her husband spent at sea. Now both in their 80s, realizing the scope of their lifelong-accumulated wealth, they decided to make substantial contributions to worthy causes. Within the past month, more than $104,000 of their stock in Fifth Third Bancorp has been contributed to NIU to establish an endowed student scholarship in honor of their son, Music Professor Robert Green. "My parents felt that education was always the road to success, and it was in their lives," said Green, who teaches music history and leads the Early Music Ensemble. "It's been a great pleasure for them because they feel their money is doing something really worthwhile." The Robert R. and Frances A. Green Endowed Scholarship in Music will help attract talented music students and make the NIU School of Music more competitive, said Green, who came here to teach 23 years ago. The school has a "great" faculty, he said, and "it's very stimulating for all of us to have the best students. Scholarships are a very important means to getting that." Green, a musicologist who specializes in music of the baroque, said the scholarship dollars gleaned from his parents' gift will help recruit student performers, music educators, composers, theorists and musicologists. All make important contributions to a well-rounded school, he said. "We already have a first-rate faculty in the School of Music, which will help us realize our full potential," he said. "We'll raise the level of the quality of the music." Frances and her husband, who live in McLean, Va., a suburb of the nation's capitol, also gave a similar gift to a prep school in New York that "changed the lives" of their daughter's children. "We are very interested in promoting education," Frances said. "It provided a great deal to my husband. He has a master's degree in electrical engineering and used that to great advantage, both in his Navy career and his civilian career. As far as I'm concerned, it just provided me with that extra knowledge that I think helps a person mature. I never used it professionally, but I know it improved me as a person." Green followed his father's footsteps into the U.S. Naval Academy, where he earned a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1965. He began laying the foundation for his life in music as a Fulbright scholar in France, where he was exposed to the country's early music and folk tunes. His dreams took shape during a night of cocktails at an officer's club when he served in the Navy when he met a graduate student in musicology at Indiana University. "I always was very interested in music, but I initially did not see a way to make a career of it," he said. "I had managed to teach myself a great deal, and I did well on the entrance exams. To be able to go back to a college classroom and sit back and learn was just heaven." After seven years of service, he left the Navy and enrolled at the School of Music at Indiana University, where he earned at Ph.D. in musicology in 1978. He since has published numerous articles on early music and, in 1995, wrote a book titled "The Hurdy Gurdy in 18th-Century France" and recorded a compact disc of this music. The Greens chose to honor their son and the NIU School of Music based on his devotion to the school and its students. "We're awfully proud of him. He's a hard worker, and he's smart," Frances said. "He did a great job while he was in the Navy, and was a great benefit to his country. He also does a lot for his students and his school. We think he's a fine young man." More news ...