FRED SEATON and his brother followed in their father’s footsteps, buying news papers. The three eventually formed a media empire. Their descendants now face a myriad of family and business issues.

In our family business, everything tends to run smoothly until someone dies. When my grandfather, Fred, died in January 1974, his will gave half of his stock to his widow and split the rest of his shares evenly among his children. Although he knew that his wife, Gladys, and his brother, R.M., did not like each other, Fred probably had no idea that my grandmother hoped to run his half of the business independent of R.M.

Fred’s shares and money flowed into a temporary trust. While it existed, my grandmother controlled the shares in it. The next annual shareholders’ meeting took place three months after Fred’s death, and Grandmother decided to use her temporary power to name herself chairman of a newspaper, the television station and a radio station. This would give her administrative control over the day-to-day management of these properties and their cash reserves. It would also elevate her to equal status with her brother-in-law. Grandmother would also have assumed control over my father, who ran the Tribune. My father, however, had purchased his own shares in the Tribune prior to Fred’s death; this gave him a bit of power to vote on her proposed chairmanship.

FRED SEATON meets with department heads at the Hastings Tribune, circa early 1940s.

In a meeting that has become infamous in family lore, my father blocked his mother’s ambitions and backed his uncle instead. To say that she never forgave him would be a gross understatement. For the rest of her life, another 25 years, she insulted him, ignored him or threatened to disinherit him at every juncture. As majority shareholder in the newspaper that my father ran, Gladys still had some control over him. She used lavish cash gifts to bind his brother and two sisters to her and pit them against him. This conflict destroyed the relationships he had with his three siblings.

As for the brother-in-law she detested, Gladys used to send him formal letters—dictated to a secretary—threatening legal action against him for imagined slights, telling him he belonged in a loony bin and offering to pay for him to see a psychiatrist. Never one to back down from a fight, R.M. fired back with his own angry letters. The two of them battled until they were in their 80s. When they were dead, the only thing that remained of their battle was an uneasy silence between the two family branches. My grandmother became famous for her angry letters. I received one, too, telling me that I was worthless, that I did not deserve my last name, that I was too ignorant and unmannered to amount to anything. I was 10 years old at the time. My father told my brother and me to ignore the insults and placate her, which we did during countless uncomfortable holidays.

We had always lived next door to Grandmother, which proved to be too close. In the year after Fred’s death, my parents divorced and my brother and I moved away with our mother. Two years later, my father married again. My stepmother, Nancy, decided she could right any family wrongs by taking care of her mother-in-law. Nancy visited my grandmother every day, baked cookies with her, drove her to every doctor’s appointment, every hairdresser’s appointment, picked up her groceries. I tagged along one day for a grocery run and found Grandmother pouting.

TOP VIEW Michelle Seaton, 38, is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Worth. She is preparing to oversee her share of a family media empire, founded by her great-grandfather, which owns newspapers and broadcast stations in the Midwest. She lives in Boston with her husband and their two children.

“Your husband always was weak,” she told Nancy, and then launched into a shrill lecture. When she was finished, Grandmother turned to me with a knowing smile and said, “She doesn’t like it when I say things like that.” What I learned early on about inheriting a stake in the family business was this: Far from offering freedom, it can force you to endure, for decades, someone you would rather not know.

When my grandmother was feeling generous, she promised my father that he would inherit enough of her stock to give him a majority share in the business that he had been running for more than 20 years. When she was feeling mean, she threatened to give all of the stock to his siblings. She died in 1999, and in the end she left my father the stock that he had earned many times over. He was 58 years old. My aunts received her remaining shares. My uncle inherited nothing, which I assume was his wish. More than 18 years ago, my uncle sold all of his stock back to his mother, took the cash—nearly $350,000—and disappeared. The rumor is that he went to Las Vegas and lost it all, then became a barker in a carnival. No one has heard from him since. One of my aunts sent an investigator to find him, with no luck.

The younger of my father’s two sisters has no children and has already announced that she will bequeath her entire estate to an animal shelter in Kansas. It would not be any of our business except that the bylaws of the company forbid this type of outside ownership. Several times my father and I have discussed his sister’s plans and wondered if she could simply liquidate her stock and give the animal shelter a cash gift. There is no delicate way to ask her this, and neither one of us believes that she would change her estate plan if asked because she is so passionate about this charity. As a result, my father must bear the responsibility for purchasing the stock back at book value, unless, of course, my aunt outlives him. In that case, the task will fall to my brother and me. I have asked my father what the book value is likely to be. “I don’t know,” he says, but he hazards a guess. The amount is roughly six times the value of my home, or 20 times my annual income.

Several members of my father’s generation have hired tax attorneys to help minimize inheritance taxes, but no one has broached the idea of bringing in an outside expert to mediate our differences. Perhaps someday we will ask someone to help us wade through the muck, yet when I try to imagine suggesting some kind of retreat, gathering together family members who want nothing to do with each other, I can only laugh.

What would I say, for example, to the cousin who robbed a convenience store a few years ago, armed with a crowbar that he used when the manager resisted? He is one of my other aunt’s three children. He was convicted of multiple counts of robbery and assault and sentenced to 30 years. My aunt rails that too many years in jail will make it difficult for him to be rehabilitated. She has promised that she will not make him a stockholder, that she will settle her stock entirely on her daughter, who is a lawyer working on the East Coast. It is unlikely, but possible, that my aunt will change her mind. Her son is eligible for parole in less than three years.

One of the reasons we have so little in common is that so few of us on either side of the family are involved in the business. None of Fred’s descendants, aside from my father, have taken jobs at any family newspaper. Nor has my brother, nor I. It has not escaped my attention that no woman runs a Seaton Media property or is even a department head in any property. Among my more distant cousins, however, two of R.M.’s sons and one of his grandsons are working in the business, and one of his granddaughters married a man who manages a newspaper. They are actively planning to run this business, while my first cousins and I are not, although together our ownership stake may be equal to theirs because there are so many more grandchildren on that side of the family.

I hear that some of my second cousins want to pool ownership of the businesses in both branches, shut down the flow of dividends and expand to new properties. If this happens, who will run the business? Who will make decisions about what to buy? Who will decide the amount of dividends to be paid to stockholders? I should be preparing myself to take part in these discussions. My father has tutored me on some structural issues, but I do not know enough about the day-to-day business to make management decisions, which leaves me a spectator in my own financial future. Because my brother and I have not prepared to take our father’s job, he has not been able to plan his retirement the way his cousins have. This makes me feel guilty and irresponsible.

Last year, one of my aunts developed a serious infection while hospitalized for a minor surgical procedure. For almost a week the doctors could not say if she would survive. My father went to the hospital nearly every day, even though he and his sister have never liked each other. He was afraid. We all were. When someone dies, that is when the trouble begins.


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