'The millionaires next door:' GBH CEO Susan Goldberg on Malden brothers' $6 million 'transformative' gift

There’s a lot to learn from the story of Anthony and Louis Maglione, the Malden brothers who lived modestly, invested wisely and upon their passing left $6 million to their favorite station, GBH.

“I can't remember a story that I've been more touched by in a really long time,” GBH CEO Susan Goldberg told Morning Edition co-host Jeremy Siegel Thursday. “I think it speaks to our value, and the value of public media in the community, and how we really touch people's lives in a way, obviously, that sometimes we don't even know.”

Louis Maglione died on November 19, 2019, when he was 67. Anthony Maglione died on March 12, 2021, at 70. It wasn’t until more recently when GBH found out the brothers, who had donated regularly to GBH’s TV and radio operations since 1987, had bequeathed a fortune to the organization.

GBH is a nonprofit operation, with most of its funds coming from donors. Another portion comes from corporate sponsorships, and a small sliver from government funding.

Anthony and Louis Maglione lived in the Malden house they grew up in, Goldberg said. They loved Boston, local politics and the Red Sox. Louis Maglione worked at the Jamaica Plain VA, and Anthony Maglione worked at the Gillette Company for 25 years.

Both brothers made modest salaries.

“But Anthony Maglione turned out to be an amazing investor in the stock market,” Goldberg said. “He made blue-chip investments and they paid off. And I learned yesterday from some people who came to an event that we had to honor their contribution that he would give stock advice to everybody that that he knew. He was very free with his advice. And he was a heck of a stock picker.”

Anthony Maglione would walk up and down Stop and Shop aisles to get an idea of which grocery products were flying off the shelves, then research investments in the companies that made them, Goldberg said.

He also learned a lot from a show he watched on GBH — Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, carried by PBS from 1970 to 2002.

“They were sort of like the millionaires next door that nobody really knew about,” Goldberg said.

The brothers' is the largest unrestricted gift GBH has ever received.

Goldberg said she thought it was a typo when she first saw it.

“I thought, $6 million? No, no, I must be reading this wrong,” she said. “I thought I might have the wrong number of zeros, or I had the decimal point misplaced.”

The money is “really a transformative gift,” she said. The fact that it’s unrestricted means the brothers left it to GBH to use it in whatever way the organization sees fit, without specific instructions.

“Because they were community people, they loved Boston, they loved the community, we're going to put it really to our community outreach efforts, investing it in places like the Boston Public Library, where we have our studio, where we have events practically every day,” Goldberg said. “We will put it into the digital transformation of the newsroom that is going on right now at GBH News, and also how we innovate, how we distribute information.”

For Goldberg, the Maglione brothers’ gift has upended the idea of who large donors are.

“I think sometimes we think about big donors as being unbelievably wealthy people living on some other planet,” she said. “This really speaks to, though, the impact that GBH had in their lives: That we did stories and news and brought them information that mattered to them and they cared about, and that they trusted us to be right with the facts, and clearly in the end trusted us to take care and to steward their investment.”

It's also a touching moment of gratitude, she said.

“It is one of these very human stories,” Goldberg said. “These best friend brothers, living seemingly very uncomplicated lives. And they really wanted to give back. And I can't think of anything more meaningful.”