Monday, May 19, 2008

A typical heir?

"Hartford, A. & P. Heir, Dies at 97" reports the New York Times. I was not familiar with this family. In retrospect, it seems that Huntington Hartford was an early ADHD sufferer, given the way he flitted from project to project.

At first, I thought to post a link to this story as a cautionary tale of the perils of sudden wealth, or of unearned wealth. But upon further reflection, I'm not sure that the result here is so bad. Mr. Hartford's inherited wealth permitted him to try out a great many endeavors, some quite offbeat, none very successful. So what? Would he have been better off with a trust officer limiting his access to the family fortune?
Posted by Jim Gust at 4:30 PM

1 comment:

JLM said...

Sounds like Morgan Guaranty Trust did its best to keep Huntington from spending every cent of his trust.

Personally, I didn't think Edward Durrell Stone's Huntington Hartford Museum was that bad. Columbus Circle needed a bit of tame exoticism at the time.

Most memorably, Huntington's financial bleeding seemed to parallel the decline of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Read its history on Wikipedia. When we Depression Babies were young, A&P dominated its field to an extent now unimaginable. In many parts of the country, including mine, people didn't say they were going to the grocery store, They said they were going to the A&P.

Aside from bad management, the A&P stores were done in by bigger and better supermarkets selling name brands at attractive prices. A&P stubbornly stuck to its multitude of house-brand merchandise

6:04 PM

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