Top Philanthropic Donors: John and Julie Mork

John Mork, 63, is chief executive of Denver-based Energy Corporation of America. He and his wife own 71% of the privately held company, focused mostly on developing natural gas reserves in the Appalachian basin, especially West Virginia. Mr. Mork, in a phone interview made no bones about his desire to keep well off the radar. “Submerged whales don’t get harpooned,” he said.

ECA is a pretty big player in the fast-growing Marcellus shale gas field that stretches from New York down through Pennsylvania and West Virginia. According to registration documents filed with the Securities Exchange Commission for the recent IPO of a royalty trust tied to ECA’s West Virginia gas fields, ECA operates some 5,100 wells in Appalachia and holds leases on 1 million acres. It also owns and operates 5,000 miles of pipelines across the region. ECA’s production in 2009 was 62 million cubic feet of gas per day; annual revenues are on the order of $200 million, with net income of $20 million.

Mr. and Mrs. Mork, pledged $110 million to the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, to support merit scholarships. A payment schedule was not available. Mr. Mork, who has served on the university’s Board of Trustees since 2006, earned a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from the university in 1970. The couple’s daughter, Alison, and son, Kyle, are also university alumni. In 2006, the Morks gave the university $15 million.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Mork drilled more wells and acquired a handful of companies like West Virginia gas utility Mountaineer Gas and Westech International, which has oil and gas prospects in New Zealand.

The focus of Mork’s philanthropy, like the $110 million earmarked for USC scholarships, is education. He also donates to early childhood education and to programs seeking novel ways to prevent recidivism among drug felons and to help cure attention-deficit disorder in youngsters.

Mork is a classic American rags-to-riches story, and an exemplar of the fading American ethos that the best place to find success is in hard work and humility.

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