PATTERSON, ELEANOR MEDILL

born Nov. 7, 1884, Chicago, Ill., U.S. died July 24, 1948, Marlboro, Md. original name Elinor Josephine Patterson, byname Cissy Patterson, married name Eleanor M. Gizycka the flamboyant editor and publisher of the Washington Times-Herald. Elinor Patterson came from one of the great American newspaper families: her grandfather, Joseph Medill, had been editor in chief of the Chicago Tribune; her father, Robert W. Patterson, and her cousin, Robert R. McCormick, were in turn editors and publishers of the Tribune; and her brother, Joseph Medill Patterson, was publisher of the New York Daily News. After a private education at Miss Hersey's in Boston and Miss Porter's in Farmington, Connecticut, she became a most eligible debutante. In 1904 she married an impecunious Polish nobleman, Count Joseph Gizycki; the count had other interests besides his wife, and she left him after less than four years. He followed Patterson, abducted their baby daughter, and initiated an international episode of great interest on both sides of the Atlantic. It took a year to get the baby back and another eight years for Patterson to obtain a divorce. As Eleanor M. Gizycka she later published two novels, Glass Houses (1926) and Fall Flight (1928). Another marriage left her a widow in 1929, and her social standing was a disaster. She decided to try the newspaper business, and in 1930 she was engaged by her old friend William Randolph Hearst to edit the Washington Herald. (The same year, she legally changed her name to Eleanor Medill Patterson.) She was an eccentric editor in chief, often arriving at the office in riding costume or in evening clothes. She feuded with a series of city editors in the course of proving her seriousness and determination to shape her own paper. Patterson's involvement in the Herald extended to going out on many important stories herself, usually in disguise. Her editorial style tended strongly to the personal, even idiosyncratic, and included sharp wit and venom among its weapons. She was an archconservative politically, a cast reflected by the paper, and she violently opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Patterson was an early crusader for home rule for the District of Columbia and for a hot lunch program for District schoolchildren (a program she underwrote herself for a time). She also had the family genius for circulation-building publicity. Within a few years her paper's circulation had more than doubled. In 1937 she leased the Herald from Hearst, together with his evening paper, the Washington Times, and in 1939 she bought them outright. Against her brother's advice she combined them into a single all-day paper with six editions, the Washington Times-Herald. By 1943 the paper had the highest circulation in Washington and was out of the red. It thrived during World War II but declined afterward. The Times-Herald was sold to the Chicago Tribune in 1949 and to the Washington Post in 1954.