I was honored to attend Dick Rathgeber's 90th birthday on May 10.

I've written many articles about Dick and his wife Sara's philanthropic efforts over the past two decades at the Statesman. In the opinion of many in the community, the couple rank at or near the top of Austin's most beloved and well-known charitable donors, having given away as much as $200 million of their annual income over the last 40-plus years.

At his 90th, I was reminded of an article I wrote 10 years ago, when Dick turned 80.

While our professional tie was well established, the article recounted a personal connection that I have recalled fondly and shared often since then. Here's what I wrote in 2013:

For years, Rathgeber and I were unaware we shared a connection of our own.

A few years ago, as I drove with my mom to our farm in Yoakum, a small town 90 miles southeast of Austin where she grew up, Rathgeber phoned. As I sometimes would, I put Mom on speaker phone to say a few words with him in German.

He asked her maiden name: “Lange,” she said. He said he remembered two people from Yoakum, when passing through in 1952 selling cookware to work his way through college at UT. One was a Leona Lange, “a really good-looking gal” who played piano in a country-Western band. He remembers she was all decked out for a gig.

“That was me!” Mom said.

Rathgeber was 19 at the time. Mom was 22. He told us he thought about asking her out, but only fleetingly. “I knew I’d be fighting out of my weight class,” he said.

My Mom passed Feb. 5, 2013, with Feb. 5 being the very day in 1978 she always considered to be her spiritual birthday, when she became a born-again Christian. She had Alzheimer's.

This article I wrote about another of Dick and Sara's countless causes just four months after my Mom's death — a fundraiser that was sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Association and the American Contract Bridge League (Dick and Sara are expert bridge players) — will always have special meaning.

I hope you'll enjoy my article that published Monday about Dick's 90th birthday. It's one of several real-estate related news stories that my colleagues and I wrote in the past week. You can check out our work below.

More: You might not know his name, but this Austin icon just turned 90

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: After giving away $200 million, Austin man recently celebrated a major birthday