Mayor Jane Byrne’s Secret Transition Report
Because Byrne had run as a reform candidate, after the primary election she quickly sought advice from a panel of knowledgeable experts pulled together for a transition team headed by a Northwestern University professor, Louis Masotti. Masotti had taken [...]
Mayor Byrne’s 90-Day Report Card
In the 1975 Democratic primary election for mayor, the Chicago Tribune had taken a pass on the endorsement of any of the candidates, saying it was a question of, “whether to stay aboard the rudderless galleon with rotting timbers [...]
The Machine Weakens after Daley’s Death
With the anti-Daley vote thus split, Daley was reelected in the Democratic primary election in February 1975 with 58 percent of the vote. Singer came in second with 29 percent, Newhouse with 8 percent, and Hanrahan 5 percent. In [...]
Jane Byrne’s vs. The Chicago Tribune
In June 1980, as Jane Byrne was starting her second year as Chicago’s first woman mayor, a strange media brouhaha briefly transfixed the city. She had become enraged at a Chicago Tribune story and in a fit of anger [...]
Bradford Then and Now
Rod MacArthur had primarily bought Hammacher to expand its mail order catalog business. Founded in 1848, Hammacher remains America’s oldest-running catalog. Before long, he had added to Hammacher’s sole retail operation in New York City stores on Chicago’s “Magnificent [...]
Hammacher Schlemmer
As I began work for Bradford in 1979, Rod MacArthur was directly engaged in the management of the company, but he was increasingly spending his nine-to-five hours doing other things, including working on his growing dispute with his fellow [...]
Copyright and Trademark Mastery
The marketing of collector’s plates involved a good deal of intellectual property law. The plate designs were mostly protected by copyright laws that prevented the artistic work from being copied. Bradford had created a magazine concerned with the hobby. [...]
Hiring Lawyers
I got extensive experience at Bradford in managing litigation outside the United States. Bradford’s collector’s plates were usually made from isolated kaolin clay deposits in China, Japan, and Europe. With artwork on decals applied, they were then fired in [...]
Rod MacArthur and The MacArthur Foundation
When his father had died at the age of 81 in 1978, most of his wealth had been left to the Foundation in the form of his sole ownership of the Bankers Life & Casualty Co. His longtime attorney, [...]
