The Fifth Generation

Last week the young men of the Harvard Crimson made another bow to the inevitable encroachment of womankind, and for the first time elected a girl writer to their editorial board. Their choice came with well-established credentials. She is Alice Patterson Albright, 18, redheaded Radcliffe freshman and a fifth-generation heir apparent to the famed Patterson-McCormick newspaper publishing dynasty of New York and Chicago.

Vibrant, unassuming Alice is the daughter of Chicago Painter Ivan Albright and Josephine Medill Patterson, youngest daughter of the late Captain Joe Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News. Alice's Aunt Alicia Patterson, 52 (TIME Cover, Sept. 13, 1954), is 'the editor and publisher of Long Island's moneymaking, fast-growing tabloid Newsday (circ. 288,483). It is to Alice and her brother Joe, 21, a reporter on the Chicago Sun-Times, that Aunt Alicia may hand down important interests in Newsday, the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune.

Alice began her journalistic career at twelve while a student at the Girls Latin School of Chicago. As co-editor of the weekly four-page mimeographed Neighborhood News (circ. 225), she waged her first crusade against Chicago's dirty streets and the sanitation department's lethargic collection schedules. By selling ads to local merchants, Alice and a friend raised $25, bought the city six new trash cans, and so shamefaced the aldermen that they appropriated $9,000 more for new cans, asked Alice for a list of street corners where she wanted them placed.

Unlike her Republican parents, Alice, who traveled to Russia last year in the party with Adlai Stevenson, an old family friend, considers herself "a Stevensonian Democrat," but adds: "My political views are probably pretty immature." Certain that she wants to go into the newspaper business but uncertain whether she will settle in Newsday territory ("It's hard to pick out a man that lives on Long Island"), Alice knows what kind of paper she would like to run: "The New York Times with guts."

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