Oseola McCarty, 87, did one thing all her life: laundry.

Now she's famous for it--or at least for what she did with $150,000 of the $250,000 she saved by washing the dirty clothes of wealthy bankers and merchants in her hometown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. For decades she earned 50 cents per load (a week's worth of one family's laundry). But when she finally laid down her old-fashioned washboard--which she always preferred over new-fangled electric washing machines--McCarty decided to ask her banker how much money she had stowed away.

The figure astounded her. Then it set her to thinking. "I had more than what I could use in the bank," she explained to Christian Reader, "and I can't carry anything away from here with me, so I thought it was best to give it to some child to get an education."

To the astonishment of school officials, the soft-spoken, never-married laundry woman from a not-so-posh part of town gave $150,000 to the nearby University of Southern Mississippi to help African-American young people attend college. The first recipient is 18-year-old Stephanie Bullock, a freshman at USM, who has already invited Miss McCarty to her 1999 graduation ceremony.

To date, McCarty has been interviewed by Barbara Walters, each of the major network news programs, CNN, People magazine ... and the list goes on. Though she had never traveled out of the South before, McCarty visited the White House, where President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizenship Award.

McCarty attends Friendship Baptist Church and reads her Bible every morning and prays on her knees every evening. Discounting the publicity, she says she is simply grateful for the chance to help others gain what she lost: in the sixth grade she was pulled out of school to care for an ailing family member and to help her mother with the laundry.

"It's more blessed to give than to receive," she tells reporters when they ask why she didn't use the money on herself. "I've tried it."