In 2003, McDonald’s heiress Joan B. Kroc bequeathed more than $200 million to NPR. This is the impact of the record-breaking gift over the past 20 years.
Joan Kroc in 1987. The philanthropist often settled on surprising causes. “It had to be a great organization,” said an adviser, “... headed by a person she could connect with.” On a fall day 20 years ago, Kevin Klose got a phone call from a man named Dick Starmann. Klose, then president of NPR, knew Starmann as a top adviser to the widow of Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s into a global fast-food juggernaut. But he had no idea what was afoot.
He started counting out loud by the millions, beginning around $200 million. When Starmann dramatically landed on the total amount, Klose was “flabbergasted,” he recalled last month. Kroc had left NPR $222 million.In a stroke, the late philanthropist transformed the fortunes of NPR, a nonprofit that had struggled since its founding to keep its transmitters humming.
There were a number of things the money didn’t, and couldn’t, do. The organization has endured multiple lean periods since 2003 as its expenses have grown and its annual revenue — fees from its member stations, corporate ads, other philanthropic contributions — have waxed and waned, triggering layoffs, programming cuts and furloughs. In February, it announced it wasgood fortune enviously
Joan Mansfield grew up poor in Minnesota. She married her first husband at 17 and had her only child at 18. In 1957, at age 28, she was playing the organ in a St. Paul restaurant when a brash businessman named Ray Kroc stopped by. Was she an NPR fan? Starmann maintains that Kroc was an avid listener, but others are less certain. When Klose first met Kroc a year before she made her bequest, “it was clear that Kroc did not listen to NPR,” Ken Stern, a veteran public radio executive who once served as NPR’s chief executive,. Joan Kroc, he wrote, “frequently confused NPR with other public media organizations ranging from PBS to BBC to other public radio producers.
The next summer, only a few months before her death, she invited Bergsma and Klose to a small party at her home for her 75th birthday. At one point, she took Klose aside and cryptically told him that they were going to do “great things” together.
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