Niece v. Uncle

A niece of Chicago's mighty America Super-Firster, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, last week told what she thought of her uncle and his Chicago Tribune. At the same time the leftish monthly Common Sense (cir. 12,500) of which she is publisher and mainstay (estimated annual losses: $25,000), published an article by Milton Mayer. Wrote he: "If the people of Chicago hated the Tribune, they would break the [reading] habit with little difficulty. . . . They know [it] distorts . . . news, omits some more."

Common Sense was, in a sense, celebrating the fact that it was no longer being supported in part by the Chicago Tribune's lush dividends. The Colonel's niece had sold her last six shares of Tribune stock to Colonel McCormick (for about $210,000). Says slender, 31-year-old Mrs. Katrina McCormick Barnes: "I've always hated Uncle Bertie."

Trini Barnes is the daughter of the late G.O.P. Senator Medill McCormick and former G.O.P. Congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms.* From her father Mrs. Barnes inherited a block of Tribune stock, packaged in a clause that it could not be sold outside the family. She sold most of it to the Colonel eight years ago for $3 million.

"Cuckoo." Brown-eyed Mrs. Barnes's version of her deal with Uncle Bertie: she offered him the stock at his own price, and he "hit the ceiling." When she told him she was going to give away the money, he said she was "completely cuckoo." He insisted on long, legalistic negotiations to set the stock's value. Finally he was speaking to her only through her lawyer. "I already disliked Uncle," she says, "but after that I really hated him. And that was before I came to understand what the Tribune was spreading."

Over the next 18 months, by working hard at it, Mrs. Barnes managed to give away the whole $3 million--"perfectly anonymously." Some of her benefaction, became known only last week: the founding of Manhattan's Chatham Square Music School; the establishment with Playwright Bella Spewack (wife of OWI's Playwright Sam) of the New York Girls' School Scholarship Fund; the organization of the New York Housing Trust, a war-halted experiment in limited-profits slum-clearance projects.

Tall Trini McCormick's husband is handsome Courtlandt D. Barnes Jr., Manhattan socialite, now in the State Department's Far East division. With their five-year-old son Medill and two cats, they live in a rented ($70 a month) red-brick coach house in an alley off Washington's Massachusetts Avenue. Inside it is comfortably furnished, book-lined.

Of Uncle Bertie's cousin Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher of the huge, America Firstish New York Daily News, Trini Barnes says: "I'm still personally fond of him . . . a nice considerate gentleman. I asked him once why he had turned his paper into what it is and he acted surprised and said he wasn't conscious of any change. I don't believe he is." Of the Captain's sister, Eleanor "Cissie" Patterson, publisher of the Washington Times Herald, end of the McCormick-Patterson party line, Mrs. Barnes says: "We seldom meet. When we do we're civil."

*Mrs. Simms's father was the late "President Maker" Mark A. Hanna.

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