July 15, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Curious George is always getting into trouble.
Except this time it’s the Curious George Foundation immersed in monkey business, according to Worth magazine (July-August). And the mess has been far harder to clean up than those created by the perky primate of storybook fame.
The magazine relates the tale of how a group of prominent Boston-area charities found themselves enmeshed in a bitter legal battle over the estate of Margret Rey, who wrote the popular Curious George stories with her husband H. A. Rey.
Ms. Rey long planned to leave her fortune to 16 Boston-area charities. But on her deathbed, she told Lay Lee Ong, a close friend, that she wanted to make a major gift to a Jewish charity, to honor her Jewish heritage, as well as smaller donations to five additional charities.
Unfortunately, Ms. Rey never wrote her instructions down, and the result wasn’t pretty, the magazine says.
“Rey’s last act created an imbroglio that pitted charity against charity, burned up several hundred thousand dollars in legal expenses, blackened the good name of many of the organizations involved, raised charges of anti-Semitism, gave co-executor Ong ulcers, and took two and a half years to resolve,” according to the magazine.
When Ms. Ong moved to include the additional groups as beneficiaries, the 16 original charities protested. Splitting the $8-million estate with the new charities meant their piece of the pie would be smaller — and they weren’t going to stand for it. Enter the lawyers, and the squabbling began.
“Anybody who thinks that charities are going to behave well just because they’re non-profits, well, that’s a bunch of crap,” John Spooner, one of the foundation’s trustees, told the magazine. “They’re often no better than the grasping cousins from Milwaukee.”
The moral of the story, Mr. Spooner told Worth: “You better write things down.”
“Clearly the lesson is also not to leave decisions such as these so close to the bitter end, but instead to resolve them in the formal-estate planning process,” the magazine says.
The article is available on the magazine’s World-Wide Web site at http://www.worth.com.
