Big Three Windfall

To a dark old countinghouse at Church and Chambers Streets in Downtown Manhattan, with old-fashioned desks, high-backed chairs, an ancient parlor stove, some 60 years ago went a Vermonter named Henry William Putnam to merchandise and distribute his invention--a bottle stopper. Mr. Putnam and his bottle stopper began to make money. Mr. Putnam also invented a glass fruit jar, made more money. In 1898 when, grown old and tired, Mr. Putnam called his son into his office and turned the business over to him, it was worth $5,000,000.

Henry William Putnam Jr. grubbed away in the same office, without changing the furniture, for another 40 years. Tall, blond and solitary, he had only two hobbies besides making money--yachts and Shakespeare. One of his few friends was another student of Shakespeare, Gene Tunney.

Henry Putnam Jr. tripled his father's fortune, came at last to old age and the problem of how to dispose of the gains from 60 years of grubbing by one of the cagiest father-son money-making teams in U. S. history. A bachelor, Henry Putnam Jr. consulted no one, cocked his feet on his old desk, wrote a will. Last year he died. Last week it became known that after specific bequests to hospitals and other charities, he left the bulk of his estate, $8,000,000, to four female cousins, all over 70; that, although he was no college man, he had provided that after his cousins' deaths the $8,000,000 should be divided equally among Yale, Harvard and Princeton, which had never heard of him. Once more an unknown financial breeze had brought U. S. education one of its always-to-be-expected, unexpected windfalls.

Last week University of Chicago also received a big gift, from no unknown but an ardent alumnus who still lives in a fraternity house (Psi Upsilon) on Chicago's campus. The donor: broad-shouldered Daniel Hedges Brown, '16, onetime Hearst circulation manager, now president of Morris Mills, Inc., inventors and manufacturers of "Germ" flour (TIMEX Aug. 15). The gift: 20% of the annual royalties on Morris Mills' flour making process. If, as Mr. Brown is confident, all U. S. mills adopt his process, Chicago's income from it will be $1,-000,000 a year. Of the gift, 40% is unrestricted, the rest is to provide $1,000 annual scholarships, preference to be given to: 1) American Legionnaires and their descendants, 2) members of 4-H Clubs.

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