Sitting in her family’s Bronx home on her 19th birthday in March 1916, future pioneering professional engineer Marie Reith, Class of 1921, made a pledge in the gentle cursive of her daily diary.

“And so we get older year by year and what have we accomplished… what done for the betterment of humanity?” she asked, chiding herself to study harder and earn money for college. “My new resolution is to do something. Really do some good.”

More than a century later from his south Florida home, another accomplished engineer and proud Cornellian said his satisfying and successful life, which he proudly insists he owes to one chance encounter with Reith, is very personal proof that she was every bit as good as her word.

“Marie Reith gave me a very special life,” said Herb Fontecilla ’66, M. Eng. ’67. “She gave me an education, not only at a university, but Cornell. Not in my wildest dreams could I expect to have this sort of life.”

Now, to honor the life-changing moment two Cornell stories intersected, Fontecilla has committed his estate to the creation of the Marie Reith Class of 1921 Scholarship at Cornell Engineering. His gift will endow an ongoing fund to help first-generation students become the engineers of their own wildest dreams.

It all began at the intersection of two Cornell Engineering stories, the first of which was born in determination.

Blazing her own trail

Credit: Cornell University Library

Reith, the oldest daughter of Franz and Anna Reith, was born in Futak in what was then Hungary at the sunset of the 19th century. As a girl she witnessed the rise of the 20th century from her window in the Bronx. As a teen she followed the news of a world swirling with tension during World War I. It was then that she promised herself that she would offer it something more, something constructive. In the broad pages of a diary that included her birthday pledge, she persistently reminded herself to focus on her studies, to find a path to college, and to work hard to overcome any challenges that life presented.

And she did. In 1917 she earned admission into what was then known as the Cornell University Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanic Arts. She was one of only two women among the 155 members of the Class of 1921. Her new diary records how she struggled with physics and math, and even failed gym, but never gave up. She endured sickness and calls from family to return home, and learned to love hiking and hockey and her Cornell life. On her 22nd birthday the sophomore reminded herself to focus, and offered her diary a renewed birthday pledge: “From today on I am going to live an efficient life and do my best in any field that I’ll attempt.”

Once more, she was as good as her word.

Reith enjoyed friends and Ithaca in all seasons. She overcame every personal headwind and all the academic challenges she faced and graduated with her peers in the spring of 1921, sitting alongside Dean Dexter Kimball in the engineering class photo.

Credit: Cornell University Library

Within months of graduating with her degree in mechanical engineering, Reith was back in New York City earning attention from local and international news outlets as the first and then only woman engineer for public utility giant Consolidated Edison, and as a member of the company’s women’s field hockey team. In 1930 she was licensed by the state as a professional engineer, the first woman in New York and only the third woman in the nation to earn that distinction, according to a 2022 article published by the Society of Women Engineers.

From 1921 until 1957 Reith worked all but one year at ConEd. She served as a commercial engineer analyzing reports and studies, as well as refining workplace operations. She was the first director of ConEd’s Home Economics Bureau, conducting outreach to help households learn how to safely use an exploding range of new electrical appliances, and developing new testing protocols to protect consumers from these new wonders.

Still, her good work wasn’t done.

In the long shadow of another world war, Reith volunteered her energies in 1959 to the American Council for Emigres in the Professions, an organization created in 1945 to help accomplished scientists and professionals escape the ruin and political realignment of a post-war, then Cold War world. Soon after her service began at the organization’s headquarter on Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas, Reith rose to assistant director of the refugee Scientist Program, focusing her work on helping fellow engineering professionals find productive paths in their new home.

And that’s where the second determined Cornell story found her.

A chance encounter

As a boy growing up poor in Cuba during the tumultuous Batista era, Fontecilla escaped into visions of physics labs in Europe half a century before. He read all he could about Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie and their contemporaries. His dream was to follow their path, but the storm of politics in his native nation clouded his way. Shortly after the rise of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, Fontecilla’s family fled to Colombia. There they waited for two years while they applied for entry into the United States, finally finding their way to New York City in 1963. Welcomed as refugees and invited by friends to share an apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, the Fontecillas began their American life.

Credit: Provided

For 18-year-old Fontecilla, that mission meant two things: find work to help his family, and somehow find a path to college to fulfill his dream. He tempered his academic ambitions to attending college part time at night, and redirecting his theoretical physics ambitions into the more employable path of engineering. Through the late winter and early spring of 1963, Fontecilla walked up and down the main avenues in Manhattan, “free and full of dreams,” and chasing every help-wanted ad and cold-calling at every business he thought offered promise.

Eventually, someone suggested he go talk to the folks a few blocks away at the American Council for Emigres in the Professions. He wasn’t a good fit. He was a teenager with just a high school transcript, not a professional looking for a productive place to land. He went anyway, and he talked himself past the people who politely suggested they couldn’t help by explaining his determination to be an engineer. Then, someone suggested he go talk with a woman who worked with all the engineers – Marie Reith.

“She was a small lady, pleasant, very friendly, just very nice. She made me feel comfortable,” Fontecilla said. “It wasn’t a long conversation, but we interacted and I told her the same story, that I wanted to go to school.”

As he recalls, even though there was no immediate support she could offer through her organization, she asked to see Fontecilla’s academic records. She made a copy and took his phone number, promising only to see if there was anything she could do.

“I said thank you very much and goodbye, and that was it.”

Shortly after that meeting, Fontecilla got a job working in the mailroom of a photographic agency, eavesdropping on the office staff on the phone to hone his English. A few weeks later Reith called and left a message for him to contact her. He stopped by at lunch, but she was busy. Her colleagues said she left a letter for him. 

“I had to go back to work so I left, and the moment I left I opened the letter to see what it said,” Fontecilla recalled. “It was a letter from Cornell giving me a full scholarship.”

“I remember I couldn't wait to get home. I got a scholarship. I’m going to Cornell!”

Credit: Provided

In June the university confirmed his scholarship through the International Student Office. After he passed several courses during summer session on campus, Fontecilla became an incoming sophomore at Cornell Engineering. He remembers faculty members and their spouses picking him up at the bus stop, helping him find housing and inviting him to dinner. Sometime during that first summer, Fontecilla recalled, he was walking up East Hill toward campus, and it all hit him.

“I thought, God what a glorious view with the clock tower, and everything was so green,” he said, stressing that the moment hasn’t faded across more than six decades. “My God here I'm at a university. Not just a university, a big research university.”

Through talent and hard work Fontecilla made everything he could of the opportunity that Reith extended. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics and then a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from Cornell. Along the way he became an American citizen and took advantage of every academic opportunity he could seize – even attending lectures by Nobel physicists Han Bethe and Richard Feynman, two of the heirs to the earlier generation of great minds in physics who inspired Fontecilla’s youth.

“He was a fine man. I liked a lot of what he said,” Fontecilla remembered of Feynman with a laugh. “It was just over my head.”

Fontecilla worked in the private sector after Cornell, doing mathematics and computer modeling for the nuclear power industry. He worked on NASA’s Apollo program, and later for the federal Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he was active in the effort to learn from the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. He finished his professional career back in the private sector, helping industry understand and manage federal energy regulations.

Through all of that, Fontecilla never stopped being grateful for Reith’s gift. The two kept in touch through his academic career, exchanging letters and updates. As he moved into his professional career those connections naturally faded. He remembers reading about Reith’s death in 1976 in an alumni newsletter.

The gift of opportunity

Credit: Cornell University Library

Across decades, Fontecilla always remembered his time at Cornell with deep fondness, even returning as a young retiree to audit a full semester of classes in 2007-08. He thought much had changed – no 8 a.m. classes and more professorial flexibility when it came to student workloads. Still, his time on campus refreshed his impression that Cornell was a special place that promises a transformative experience to all those with the talent and the good fortune to be there.

Now, Fontecilla has committed his estate to fund a newly created scholarship for first-generation students – named in honor of the woman who opened the door to Cornell for him. As a man who turned the opportunity to study at Cornell into a rich and rewarding life, a man who never forgot the extraordinary gift another Cornell Engineering graduate shared, Fontecilla said his primary motivation is as powerful as it is simple.

“Since she did what she did for me, that's why,” he said. “So Cornell can keep doing it in her name, and keep her name from fading into history.”

His secondary motivation is more personal.

“I'm not sure she realized what she had done or what it's really meant to me. I'm not sure I could ever express it. I went to Cornell – and Cornell, that’s what I am,” he said.

“And this is for the next me. I hope a young Herb will benefit from it.”