Alicia Patterson

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Alicia Patterson (1907 - 1963) was the founder and editor of Newsday, one of the most successful post-war newspapers in the 1940s.

The daughter of Joseph Medill Patterson, the founder of the New York Daily News and the great-granddaughter of Joseph Medill, owner of the Chicago Tribune and mayor of Chicago, Patterson found her calling late in life when her third husband, Harry Guggenheim, wanted to keep her busy and out of trouble. She found her own niche in a family full of successful publishers.

Harry Guggenheim, son of Dan Guggenheim, had inherited a multi-million dollar trust fund at the age of 21, while his father lived; and another $2 million at the age of 39, when his father died. When he was 49-years-old, Harry Guggenheim--who was also U.S. ambassador to Cuba during the late 1920s and early 1930s--married for the third time in 1939. His new wife was the then-32-year-old Alicia Patterson.

Shortly after the Guggenheim-Patterson marriage, Harry Guggenheim used $750,000 of the Guggenheim fortune to buy Alicia Patterson a suburban newspaper, the "Nassau Daily Journal," for her to operate under the name of "Newsday." "Newsday" was intended to be little more than a suburban version of the Patterson family's "Daily News." Guggenheim gave 49 percent of "Newsday"'s stock to his wife, but made sure that he, not Patterson, retained 51 percent of `Newsday"'s stock--so that he could always make the final decision in any major business disagreement with his new wife.

Between 1940 and 1963, "Newsday" was essentially a Nassau County and Suffolk County-oriented Long Island tabloid, run according to the editorial whims of its editor-in-chief and publisher, Alicia Patterson-Guggenheim. Harry Guggenheim, its owner, was more concerned with the business departments of "Newsday."

Although Harry Guggenheim was a Republican, when the Guggenheim-Patterson alliance began to sour on a personal level in the late 1940s, Alicia Patterson became involved romantically with the man who became the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson. The Alicia Patterson love relationship with Stevenson was not mentioned in either "Newsday" or other U.S. newspapers until 1976--11 years after Adlai Stevenson's death and 13 years after Alicia Patterson's death at the age of 55 in 1963 (following an unsuccessful operation on her stomach).

The Alicia Patterson Foundation now presents an annual prize to mid-career journalists such as herself.

Patterson's nephew, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, married former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Patterson also had a career in comics, creating the character Deathless Deer with Neysa McMein[1].

She died in New York in 1963, at age 55.