New Scholarship at Pitt-Bradford to
Benefit Criminal Justice Students
Assistant Director of Communications and Marketing
University of Pittsburgh at Bradford
A new scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford will benefit students pursuing careers in criminal justice.
The Jack and Grace Knapp Fund for Forensic Education was endowed with a $5,000 gift from the Knapps’ daughter, Kathleen Knapp Holt of Victor, N.Y. The gift will be matched by funds from the Agnes L. and Lewis Lyle Scholarship Challenge as well as the Xerox Corp.
Although she now lives in Victor, Holt grew up on Pleasant Street in Bradford, playing war with a little boy who would grow up to be the president of Pitt-Bradford – Dr. Richard McDowell, president emeritus – and hanging out with her brother’s best friend, Dennis Lowery, who would enroll in Pitt-Bradford’s first class and become an ardent supporter of the university.
In the intervening years, she left Bradford and eventually married Charles P. “Chip” Holt, architect and implementer of Xerox’s DocuTech product that created today’s multibillion dollar print-on-demand industry. She had never planned to marry, but “we had a very interesting life, and he was a fascinating, totally wonderful man.”
Kathleen Holt described her husband as “layered – so very complex; you worked down a layer at a time. But at the end of the day, engineering anything and everything was his passion.”
In 2006, she designed a plaque that in part read -- “I saw him at his best; I saw him at his worst and I idolized him all the time.” Chip died Sept. 24, 2005 “with grace and dignity,” she said, “and always a gentleman.” He left his wife in charge of distributing his wealth, a job she has taken on with gusto.
Kathleen Holt likes to be personally connected in the philanthropies she supports, most of which involve children or police K-9s.
She provided the funding to build the Chip Holt Nature Center at Conesus Lake as well as a Habitat House. Holt works extensively with the Boys and Girls Club, the Rochester Science Museum and her struggling urban church and bought a K-9, named Chip, for the Monroe County (N.Y.) Sheriff’s Department. She regularly goes out to watch K-9 Chip and his handler, Sheriff John Messura, train in the field.
“In another life, I would be a cop,” she said. “But when I was young, I didn’t know that.”
It was K-9 Chip and Dennis Lowery who brought her back to Bradford. Lowery and his wife, Debbie, convinced Holt that, given her new interest in law enforcement, she needed to come meet Dr. Tony Gaskew, coordinator of criminal forensic studies and assistant professor of criminal justice, and visit Pitt-Bradford’s Crime Scene Investigation House.
She did and was impressed.
“It’s pretty darn interesting for a school that size to have someone with such impressive credentials and a facility like that,” Holt said of Gaskew and the CSI House.
She was also inspired to make her gift to Pitt-Bradford by a nephew who worked in the Central Intelligence Agency.
The first recipient of the Knapp scholarship is Kaylee Goldsmith, a junior criminal justice major from Conneaut Lake.
For more information on the Knapp scholarship, which is awarded to a criminal justice student, preferably, but not exclusively, from the Bradford area, contact the Pitt-Bradford financial aid office at (814)362-7550.
For more information on the Thomas Scholarship Challenge, contact Joelle Warner, manager of donor services, at jaw104@pitt.edu or (814)362-5104.
Pictured, Kathleen Knapp Holt of Victor, N.Y., at the annual Donor Scholarship Luncheon held this spring at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford with two Pitt-Bradford scholarship recipients. They are Doreen M. Carl, a psychology major from Eldred, left, and Yvon Woappi, a biology major from Hanover.
Pitt-Bradford photo by Alan Hancock
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