Did Somebody Say McDonalds?

[Monte Smith]

So quit it with the annoying pledge drives already!

NPR Given Record Donation
McDonald's Heiress Leaves $200 Million

By Paul Farhi and Reilly Capps
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 6, 2003; Page A01

National Public Radio will announce today the largest donation in its history, a cash bequest from the will of the late philanthropist Joan Kroc of about $200 million.

The bequest from the widow of the founder of the McDonald's fast-food chain both shocked and delighted people at NPR's headquarters in Washington yesterday. It amounts to almost twice NPR's annual operating budget. "No one saw this coming," said one person.

The nonprofit organization, which will disclose details of the bequest at a news conference this afternoon, called the donation the "largest monetary gift ever received by an American cultural institution" in a brief announcement to its staff yesterday.

The gift was such a surprise to NPR officials that they were uncertain what the money would be used for. The organization's board is expected to meet in the next few weeks to decide what to do with the windfall. An NPR spokesperson declined to comment yesterday.

NPR, best known for its daily news programs "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," cut back on some of its music and cultural programs earlier this year, and there was speculation yesterday that Kroc's money could be used to restore those offerings. It could also be used to expand NPR's news programs, which are heard by about 22 million people weekly.

Speaking generally, Michele Norris, a co-host of "All Things Considered," said any cash infusion is welcome at an organization that is perpetually on tight budgets. "What we do every day is a miracle on the order of loaves and fishes with such a small and dedicated staff," Norris said.

Kroc, 75, died of brain cancer on Oct. 12 in San Diego. She had been a longtime listener of NPR's local affiliate, KPBS, but had no formal association with NPR or history of funding it. People at NPR said yesterday that she had expressed admiration for NPR's coverage of the events leading up to the war in Iraq and its reporting of the war itself.

Her gift to NPR is one of several that flowed from her estate. Last week the University of San Diego and the University of Notre Dame announced they each had been given $50 million by Kroc's estate. The donations are the largest either university has ever received.

In 1998 she gave $25 million to USD for the establishment of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice. Notre Dame hosts a similar institution, the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, which was established in 1986.

With a long history of philanthropy, Kroc has donated to individual public radio stations in the past. In 2001 she gave $3 million to KPBS to help the station build a new studio. KPBS spokeswoman Nancy Worlie said that her station also would announce a gift today. She would not confirm that the gift came from Kroc, who lived much of her life in Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego.

Forbes magazine estimated Kroc's worth at $1.7 billion and ranked her No. 121 on its list of the nation's wealthiest people.

Joan Beverly Mansfield was born in 1928, the daughter of a railroad man who was often out of work during the Depression. Still, he made sure his daughter received piano lessons, and eventually she became a piano player in a St. Paul restaurant. She met Ray Kroc in 1957 when he was dining, on business, and caught her eye. In his autobiography he called her a "blonde beauty." Though she was 25 years younger, the two fell in love and eventually married. The couple had a daughter, Linda Kliber, who could not be reached for comment yesterday.

When Ray Kroc died in 1984, she took control of the San Diego Padres, which her husband had purchased 10 years earlier. And though Ray Kroc had been committed to philanthropy, opening the Kroc Foundation in Chicago to support medical research, his wife took giving even more seriously.

She gave more than $90 million to the Salvation Army, the largest donation that organization had ever received, to build a 12-acre community center that opened in June 2002. She also helped build the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center for the homeless, a palliative care center, and the Kroc-Copley Animal Shelter, all in or near San Diego. She was also a major benefactor of the Carter Center of Emory University in Atlanta, and in 1987 she gave $1 million to the Democratic National Committee, at the time believed to be the largest single contribution to a political party in U.S. history.

During its most recent fiscal year, which ended in September, NPR had an operating budget of $103 million and broke even despite the cost of covering the war in Iraq. Despite gains in listeners, its income has grown slowly over the past three years. In fiscal 2001, NPR lost about $4 million.

About half of NPR's revenue comes from public radio stations that pay annual dues based on the size of their audience. The balance comes primarily from private donations and corporate contributions. The organization receives less than 1 percent of its funding directly from federal tax dollars. The federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting supplies about 15 percent of the budgets of NPR's member stations, however, which then pay some of that money to NPR.

Staff writer Roxanne Roberts contributed to this report.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[clinthopson]

I think I'll go out and get a Big Mac in Joan's honor.

A very classy lady.

[Tom Storer]

No serious person can dispute that the entire sum should be spent on increased jazz programming.

[al j]

More Flintoff!

[jesus marion joseph]

Originally posted by Tom Storer
No serious person can dispute that the entire sum should be spent on increased jazz programming.

Damn straight!

[Uli]

Originally posted by Tom Storer
No serious person can dispute that the entire sum should be spent on increased jazz programming.

I think some of the "more serious" people would take issue with this.

[Monte Smith]

Tom: surely some of the money should be put aside as bounty on the head of Jose Bove, no?

[jesus marion joseph]

Originally posted by Uli
I think some of the "more serious" people would take issue with this.

Screw those tightass serious people!

[Chris D]

Let's hope they start an endowment and don't just blow through it for operating expenses.

[al j]

Are you saying they should only blow the well-endowed? Talk about biased...

[Monte Smith]

Originally posted by Joe Christmas
Are you saying they should only blow the well-endowed? Talk about biased...

I can hear it now: "Morning edition is brought to you by the Pew Charitable Trusts, by Raymond James (serving investors since 1962), by IDI (innovative developers of warehouse and distribution facilities), by TIAA Cref, by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, by the Annenburg Foundation, and by the John Holmes/Joan Kroc Memorial Special Sauce Throbbing Boner Suckoff."

[Chris D]

Man, Monte, you've got the underwriting credits down pat.

[Monte Smith]

Originally posted by Chris D
Man, Monte, you've got the underwriting credits down pat.

It's scary how listening to that schpiel for going on fifteen years, it just gets subliminable.

[Ron Thorne]

Originally posted by Chris D
Let's hope they start an endowment and don't just blow through it for operating expenses.

Those were exactly my thoughts while reading the article, Chris. Even a small piece of that gift could continue to provide support in perpetuity if wisely used.

[Pete C]

Interesting. A similar windfall bequest happened to Poetry magazine recently, and it amounted to MANY times the journal's annual budget.

[Pete C]

I found this at the Village Voice:

Modest $100 Million Proposals, for Better or Verse
Poetry Nation
by Joshua Clover
November 27 - December 3, 2002



On November 15, Poetry Magazine received a $100 million bequest from Ruth Lilly, heir to Eli Lilly and his like-named pharmaceutical behemoth. This isn't the first time the arts have been promised better living through chemistry: Carl Djerassi, "father of the birth control pill," provides residence grants to artists through the Djerassi Foundation. But as lump sums and poetry go, they've never gone together like this.

One well-noted irony is that the journal in question rejected Ms. Lilly's poetry a few dec-ades back—the lesson being that it pays to have standards. Suddenly, those standards are golden with highlights of green, and likely to be read all over. The grande dame of verse journals, Poetry (founded 1912) is of the same generation as Ms. Lilly herself, and no one can gainsay its historical importance: Back when Modernism was young and high, the magazine forwarded the earliest works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., and William Carlos Williams. But of late it's become a placid backwater where middlebrow elegies go to die, outcirculated by American Poetry Review and outmoded in comparison to the more contemporary aesthetics of numerous journal-come-latelies. These days, far from the front lines of increasingly chaotic aesthetic struggles, Poetry is a sort of palliative for the anxiety and depression of life on the edge.

Eli Lilly and Company, an early purveyor of synthetic insulin, has done a better job of keeping current. In the same week as the bequest's announcement, the senate passed the Homeland Security Bill over objections to some rather arbitrary amendments. One of these provides protection against class-action suits for the makers of thimerosal—a mercury-based vaccine additive, developed by Lilly, that some people believe is linked to autism in children. But when one thinks about the wealth of Lilly, one imagines fluoxetine money, under its more recognizable brand name.

That is to say: henceforth, all words published in Poetry Magazine will be underwritten by Prozac. And that expense will be mere pocket change for the new Poetry, now "one of the world's richest publications," per the Times. Editor Joseph Parisi suggests (after expanding his staff of four and finding new digs in the journal's hometown of Chicago) he'd like to publish some first books, and educate middle and high school teachers in poetic goodness. It's a category he's comfortable with: "We get to see everything," he told the Times, "and we get a pretty good idea of who will be the new important poets."

The vision of an 800-pound tastemaking gorilla, no matter how august, is not a rosy one for all concerned. The poet Juliana Spahr, co-editor of the influential journal Chain, tells the Voice that she hopes Poetry will "support and encourage the unusual wealth of poetries that have developed in the U.S. since the 1960s, especially those outside of their fairly narrow interest and scope." She's representatively leery of concentrations of power, and interested in fostering local autonomy. "Wouldn't it be amazing if instead of one poetry magazine getting 100 million, 400 magazines got a quarter-million?" she asks. "Which would mean almost every magazine in the U.S. would receive more than enough support."

That's a suggestion Parisi is unlikely to heed; he'll surely use the capital as an endowment, and pursue his own designs with the income of, say, $7 million per annum in perpetuity. What could said stash do to fundamentally advance the state of poetry? Let's think big:

1. If you really believe in education, use the income to lobby for pro-education candidates in elections at a national level. A few more congressmen, a senator, and we could have fewer tax cuts for corporations—wouldn't it be swell to see Lilly money do that?—and more teachers, more texts, more classrooms.

2. Buy a million poetry books every year and give them away. Let every poet published the previous year nominate one

unpublished manuscript. From these, choose 100 titles utterly at random—previously selected poets ineligible—then publish and distribute 10,000 copies of each.

Publishers will start releasing more poetry, 100 poets a year get a "royalty grant," and the number of contemporary poetry books in circulation will increase by orders of magnitude.

3. Poetry Magazine could offer free medical coverage to every poet accepted for publication, provided he or she did not already have a medical plan. This would be a boon for the many institutionally unsupported poets, the very sort often found working outside codified tastes. In return, their submissions would revivify Poetry as a forum for contemporary, ambitious work.

Such a scheme would burn a tiny fraction of the bequest; instead of investing the remainder, Poetry could secede from the Union, purchase the Republic of the Marshall Islands (GDP: $99 million), and appoint their very own poet laureate, who would then meet the U.S. laureate in a battle to the death, wreaking unfathomable destruction across the landscape. The eventual winner could then sink beneath the seas for a thousand years, during which poems would somehow still get written, some of them in languages not yet invented.

[Chris D]

Well, they will use it t beef up the endowment, according to The AP.

"Most of the gift will become part of an endowment fund created in 1993 to offset periodic drops in revenue. With the bequest, the fund's total will leap past $225 million, NPR officials said."

[Gordon B]

Originally posted by clinthopson
I think I'll go out and get a Big Mac in Joan's honor.

A very classy lady.

Are you saying that she didn't approve of her late husband's choice to sing the National Anthem before the start of the 1998 World Series game three against the Yankees?