The Family
The Bancrofts are a family of publicly reclusive Boston socialites who inherited The Wall Street Journal from Clarence W. Barron, who as a publisher built up the reputation of that newspaper. Upon Barron's death in 1928, control of the company passed to his stepdaughters Jane and Martha, children of his wife Jesse Waldron. Barron's son-in-law and Jane's husband, Harvard-educated lawyer Hugh Bancroft, ran the company and the paper for the next five years. Suffering from depression, Bancroft committed suicide in 1933 at the age of fifty-four. The family members maintained ownership of the company through ensuing generations, though management was placed in the hands of capable professionals, like Journal editor Bernard Kilgore.
A notable family member of the following generation was Mary Bancroft, Hugh Bancroft's daughter by his first marriage. She worked for U.S. intelligence in Switzerland during World War II. She wrote novels and a memoir, Autobiography of a Spy, before dying in 1997 at age ninety-three. She was survived by six grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.
Jane Bancroft's daughter Jessie Bancroft Cox was another prominent member of the second generation. Her husband, son, and grandson — William C. Cox, Bill Cox Jr., and Billy Cox III, respectively — were "the only Bancrofts to have actually worked at Dow Jones since Hugh Bancroft's suicide."
The family members' private pastimes consist mainly of show-horse breeding, sailing, and farming. However, the family has also produced a speedboat champion and an airline pilot.
Read more about this topic: Bancroft Family
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“True spoiling is nothing to do with what a child owns or with amount of attention he gets. he can have the major part of your income, living space and attention and not be spoiled, or he can have very little and be spoiled. It is not what he gets that is at issue. It is how and why he gets it. Spoiling is to do with the family balance of power.”
—Penelope Leach (20th century)
“A poem is like a person. Though it has a family tree, it is important not because of its ancestors but because of its individuality. The poem, like any human being, is something more than its most complete analysis. Like any human being, it gives a sense of unified individuality which no summary of its qualities can reproduce; and at the same time a sense of variety which is beyond satisfactory final analysis.”
—Donald Stauffer (b. 1930)