Kroc's $200 million gift stunned NPR, but not her friends

By Reilly Capps and Paul Farhi
The Washington Post

	Joan Kroc
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"She was a bit of a news nut," said Dick Starmann, Kroc's longtime friend and spokesman. "She loved NPR and its unfiltered presentation of the news. ... It wasn't liberal, and it wasn't conservative. It was as objective as you're going to find."

The depth of Kroc's appreciation of public broadcasting became clear Thursday. NPR officials formally announced that Kroc had bequeathed the Washington-based organization about $200 million, by far the largest single contribution in NPR's 33-year history. Kroc also left KPBS $5 million.

Before her death Oct. 12 at 75, Kroc, widow of McDonald's mastermind Ray Kroc, had committed her attention and some of her $1.7 billion fortune to charity, such as creating the San Diego Hospice, a 12-acre Salvation Army community center and a shelter for the homeless. Kroc also helped establish two institutes dedicated to the study of peace, at the University of San Diego and at Notre Dame. In her will, she left an additional $50 million to each of those universities.

Stephanie Bergsma, who knew Kroc for 20 years, said she and Kroc would talk often about current events over lunch. Kroc was especially horrified by the war in Iraq. "She understood the human damage that this war was doing," Bergsma said. "She really had hope that by communicating with each other we could avoid these conflicts."

It was Bergsma, the associate general manager of KPBS, who introduced Kroc to Kevin Klose, NPR's president. One afternoon in mid-2002, Bergsma called Klose in Washington and suggested he meet her "extraordinary friend."

After a series of polite but maddeningly unspecific meetings with Kroc, Klose heard from Kroc again around Christmas last year. In her holiday card, she included a check for NPR — for $500,000. But Kroc was just warming up. A week after Kroc's death, Starmann called Klose with a piece of news: Kroc had remembered NPR in her will, to the tune of $200 million.

"I was stunned," Klose said Thursday.

NPR employees celebrated the news by eating takeout McDonald's for lunch Thursday.

"When I heard about the scope of it, I was almost speechless — a dangerous state in my line of work," longtime NPR host Susan Stamberg said. "This was totally unexpected." She joked that she was changing her name to "McStamberg."

Klose said Thursday that NPR was more likely to invest Kroc's donation than spend it. When Kroc's estate settles in the next few months, the gift — a combination of cash and marketable securities — will be deposited primarily in a trust fund operated by the NPR Foundation. NPR will receive income from the trust fund, which currently has assets of about $35 million. Based on a 5 percent return, the donation will spin off roughly $10 million a year in cash, said John Hermann Jr., chairman of the NPR Foundation.

Joan Beverly Mansfield of St. Paul, Minn., was 28 when she met Ray Kroc in 1957. He was 53 and still married to his first wife. By the time they married 12 years later, McDonald's had grown into an international giant with more than 1,000 outlets. After Ray Kroc died in 1984, Joan Kroc took control of her husband's fortune, estimated at $525 million at the time.

The NPR donation was in keeping with Kroc's penchant for showering money on surprised and grateful recipients. Joe Carroll, the priest who is president at the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center for the homeless in San Diego, recalled the time Kroc told him she had an article she wanted him to read. When Carroll opened the envelope he thought contained the article, he found a $1 million check.

Another night, Kroc came to Carroll's house for dinner and saw an empty spot in his living room.

"Father, you don't have a piano," said Kroc, who met her husband while playing piano in a St. Paul restaurant. "Why not?"

The next day, a baby grand was delivered to his house.

She also gave money to those she never met, often anonymously. When the Red River flooded Grand Forks, N.D., in 1997, Kroc toured the damaged area incognito, then wrote a $15 million check for relief efforts. In the late '80s, she anonymously gave $7 million to build an AIDS wing at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

"There were so many you didn't know about," Carroll said. "When you hear she did one gift there were probably 30 others."

Bergsma remembered a "warm, funny, genuine person" who loved her little King Charles spaniels. Even on her last birthday in August, with the brain cancer that was to kill her progressing rapidly, Bergsma said, "she was still able to enjoy it, she still got great joy being around her daughter and granddaughters."

Carroll recalled taking a trip with Kroc to London in 1988 (after a stop in Newfoundland for a lobster breakfast). On their way to separate events in the city, Kroc rode in one limousine while Carroll was in another. Carroll soon heard the car phone ring. It was Kroc.

"Pardon me, Father," she said. "Do you have any Grey Poupon?"

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