Music student awarded Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship

Elizabeth Golden, a Penn State University Park sophomore studying music won the coveted Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Scholarship competition. Scholars will receive up to $30,000 per year for the final one to three years of undergraduate study.

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is a private, independent foundation, established by the late Jack Kent Cooke to help young people of exceptional promise reach their full potential through education.

Cooke was a businessman, sportsman, and philanthropist. His business interests included ownership of professional sports teams, such as the Toronto Maple Leaf baseball club, the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, and the Washington Redskins football team. Cooke also owned a thoroughbred racing farm in Lexington, Kentucky. Numbered among his other businesses were newspapers, magazines, radio stations, cable television, and real estate holdings, including the Chrysler Building in New York City. He was also a musician and a member of ASCAP. Cooke died April 6, 1997, and left most of his fortune to establish the Foundation.

In seeking to fulfill its mission, the Foundation intends to identify young people who have shown unique overall excellence, both in academic endeavors and in extracurricular activities. The purpose of the Foundation is to reward young men and women for unusual intelligence, application, deportment, and character.

Elizabeth is the first of five children; her parents are Vincent and Loretta Golden of Portage, Pa.