Barry, Carole Kaye, FAU donors, die of COVID-19 less than a week apart

Barry and Carole Kaye, million-dollar donors to Florida Atlantic University, have died of complications from COVID-19.

An FAU spokesman confirmed the deaths. Barry Kaye, an insurance salesman who was 91, died April 21, while Carole Kaye died five days later at age 87, according to an obituary posted at Legacy.com. The Kayes had moved from Boca Raton to New York 11 years ago when their insurance business crashed.

Barry Kaye was a colorful high school dropout and former disc jockey who had once auditioned to be host of “The Tonight Show.” He became widely known in South Florida in the early 2000s for his life insurance seminars, radio shows and books, including “Die Rich and Tax Free!” and “You Buy, You Die, It Pays!”

His seminars targeted wealthy seniors who could afford to spend $100,000 or more on life insurance policies. He promised the seniors would be able to leave millions to their children and their favorite charities.

He sold these high-commission policies to the rich for more than four decades. Asked in a 2007 Sun-Sentinel interview how much money he had, Barry Kaye said he "would be happy to tell. But Carole ‘would kill me.’ "

“I think a lot of myself, and until you think a lot of yourself, you’re not going to accomplish much,” he said in the interview. “You do the ordinary things that the ordinary man refuses to do, and that’s how you become extraordinary.”

Barry Kaye was born Barry Conrad Katz in New York in 1928. His father, a coal salesman who ended up leaving the family when Kaye was 12, had changed the last name when Kaye, the second of four children, was 3.

After dropping out of high school in Manhattan, he found a job as a disc jockey in Baltimore and later worked in radio in Miami, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York.

His experience in Miami from 1948 to 1950 proved to be a turning point. “I saw everyone coming to Miami Beach in their foxes and their furs, and I thought wouldn’t it be great to live like that,” he told the Sun-Sentinel in the interview.

He failed in his bid to host “The Tonight Show” and began to sell stocks. But in 1962 he was wiped out by a market crash that cost him $250,000.

In October 1962, he started selling insurance for New England Life Insurance Co. in Los Angeles for $750 a month.

Kaye focused on altering consumers’ mindset on life insurance. He tried to take away its association with death and promoted it as a means to wealth creation.

Over the following decades, he launched more than a dozen companies before moving to Boca Raton in 1999.

Carole Kaye was born in Somerville, N.J., and worked with Barry in the insurance business. A collector of more than 300 miniatures that included the Roman Forum, the Versailles Opera House and the Sistine Chapel, she was responsible for hiring sales associates for the couple’s agency, according to the Legacy.com obituary.

In 2007, the Kayes pledged the largest donation in FAU’s history, $16 million to the College of Business. The couple had given $5 million in 2005, and increased the pledge by $11 million.

But the deal fell apart in 2009 when Barry Kaye told the school he was unable to fulfill the pledge after the financial crisis of 2008. The couple’s insurance empire soon collapsed and they began to get sued by former clients.

FAU stripped the Kaye name from its College of Business. To recognize him for the $5 million he did donate, the school created the Barry Kaye Program of Risk Management and Insurance within the business school.

Their names remain on several campus buildings, including the Carole and Barry Kaye Performing Arts Auditorium.

Survivors include four children, 15 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

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