Who Gets It?

If the late Henry Edwin Sever of Chicago had been as vague in the textbooks he published (Riverside Press) as he was in his will, he would never have made a fortune.

Mr. Sever, who died a childless widower in 1941, directed in his will that $1,622,-482 of his fortune be used to establish a "technological school" in his native Missouri. As soon as the will was published, six Missouri colleges put in a claim. The Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. of Chicago, Mr. Sever's trustee, ran for cover, leaving the Cook County Court to appoint a three-man committee to interpret the will. On the premise that Mr. Sever's intention was to set up a new school and not to expand one already existing, the committee decided in favor of St. Louis University, which has no technological school and had made no claim to the bequest.

When they heard the decision, a year ago, the Jesuits who run St. Louis U. happily got busy. In a building formerly used by an undertaker, they set up the Sever Institute of Geophysical Technology, named a dean, planned to install $200,000 worth of equipment, scheduled an $85,000-a-year maintenance budget, and announced themselves ready to accept 180 students of geophysics in the fall. Their curriculum, they declared, would eventually compare favorably with M.I.T.'s. But within a month, St. Louis' Washington University, one of the original claimants, upset this optimistic schedule by a demand for reconsideration.

Washington, which already has an engineering school, had the word of Northwestern University's Engineering Dean Ovid Wallace Eshbach that the money is not enough to finance a new school. Washington was also favored by the trustee bank. Its argument rejected by the Cook County Court, Washington appealed and last month won a decision from the Illinois Appellate Court. Next week St. Louis U. plans to petition the Illinois Supreme Court for another test.

Meanwhile, a lawyer appointed by the court to represent Sever's unborn heirs* figured that, if the fund is not sufficient to establish a new school, the trust has failed. He, therefore, also plans to file a petition next week, asking that the money go to Sever's living heirs.

* No one but a lawyer can understand how a lawyer can represent someone who does not exist. The general idea is to prevent possible future offspring of living heirs from contesting the disposition of a trust fund.

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