The Press: Lucky Seven

As a publisher, Eleanor Medill Patterson knew how to employ the carrot as well as the stick. In benign moments she used to tell top hands on her Washington Times-Herald that when she died, the paper would go to them. Last week, in her will, she made good on her promise. The Times-Herald, valued at around $7,000,000, was left to seven faithful executives. Overnight each of the seven became a millionaire. Her estate will even pay the inheritance taxes. The lucky seven: ¶ Editor-in-Chief Frank C. Waldrop, 42, who never crossed the boss, became an executor and trustee of her estate. Presiding at the press conference where the will was read, Waldrop told Washington newsmen with elaborate offhandedness: “After this meeting I invite anyone who cares to join me in the bar for a drink. For once the drinks are on the Times-Herald” ¶ General Manager William C. Shelton, 55, also named an executor, began at ten as a newsboy, has been with the paper since 1922. “This might show the Russians,” he exulted, “that capitalists in this country treat the workers right fine.” ¶ Supervising Managing Editor Michael W. (“Mike”) Flynn, 59, an owl-faced, Washington-born news veteran. ¶Circulation Director Harry A. Robinson, 59, a Russian-born, Hearst-trained veteran who came from Boston on temporary assignment to the Times-Herald in 1931, and stayed on. ¶ Advertising Director Edmund F. Jewell, 52, a former publisher of the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader. ¶Mechanical Superintendent (and onetime literary editor) J. Irving Belt, 64, who joined the old Washington Times 48 years ago as a hand typesetter. When he heard of his inheritance, his ailing heart began fluttering and he took to his bed. ¶Night Managing Editor Mason Peters, 33, a Navy veteran, was hauled up from the police beat by Mrs. Patterson. When asked how it felt to be a millionaire, he brushed it off: “Oh, I’m not interested in the money. It’s my pencil—my career in the newspaper—that interests me . . .”

The inheritors will remain in their present jobs, with Shelton likely to be elected the boss. How well they will get along without Cissie Patterson to drive them was debatable. But rival Washington newsmen thought the syndicate would make good if its members could keep from quarreling among themselves.

Columnist Drew Pearson last week paid his last respects. Wrote he: “A great lady died the other day—a lady who had caused me much happiness—and much pain. She was my ex-mother-in-law, Eleanor Patterson, who used to write about me in such scathing terms that even the very frank TIME Magazine had to interpret them with dots and dashes … Sometimes Page I featured headlines about ‘the headache boy’—Cissie’s description of her ex-son-in-law . . . Today, Senator Brewster of Maine has his offices stacked high with 75,000 reprints of a speech largely taken from Cissie’s diatribes against me, which he is mailing to constituents at the taxpayers’ expense. People used to ask me why I didn’t answer Cissie or sue her for libel. Well, she and I had been through a lot together and I concluded the public is the best judge of such things . . .”