The Colonel's Will

The late Chicago Tribune Publisher Robert R. McCormick, unpredictable in many ways, last week left a will with few surprises in it. As expected (TIME, April 11), the Colonel turned over the management of the Trib to his top three executives: Chesser Campbell, 57, who was vice president and now takes the Colonel's title as president; Don Maxwell, 54, managing editor; J. Howard Wood, 54, business manager. They will also be trustees of the McCormick-Patterson Trust, which holds most of the Trib stock, along with Arthur A. Schmon, president of the Trib's Canadian paper companies, and the Colonel's niece, Bazy Miller Tankersley, onetime editor of the Washington Times-Herald. (The Colonel feuded bitterly with her in his last days, but the terms of the McCormick-Patterson Trust automatically made her a trustee at his death.)

To his widow, Maryland McCormick, 57, the Colonel willed a $100,000 yearly income for life. At her own request, he left her no say in the Trib. "I'm not a newspaperwoman." says Maryland McCormick. "Some people thought I would take a bigger hand in things, but I just don't want it." The Colonel did spot an heir way down on the family tree. In his will he asked that seven-year-old Mark McCormick Miller, Bazy Tankersley's son by her first marriage, be "given an opportunity to be employed on the staff of the Chicago Tribune [to] carry on the great newspaper tradition of Joseph Medill."

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