Olin used the foundation for personal giving, including gifts for a chemical engineering building in the Engineering Quadrangle at Cornell University and a vocational high school in Alton, Illinois. In creating the foundation, Olin passed control of what would become the Olin Corporation to his sons, Spencer and John, while donating controlling shares to the foundation. "The old man then took his marbles out of the game," as "Fortune" described the transaction. "He plunked his stock into a charitable foundation. . . . If the boys did not want control of the company to pass to the foundation on his death, they’d jolly well have to hustle up the money to buy back the shares." The Olin sons did that, which left $50 million in the foundation's corpus, making it one of the largest foundations in the country.