Letting the Defender Go
In retrospect, Milliner shrugs off the dismissal. He’d taken a sabbatical from his company, so he had that to go back to. But the experience gave him more to chew over whenever he tried to figure Sengstacke out. “We were very close but very fiery toward each other,” he says. “He was the kind of person who wouldn’t back down from anything, and if you backed down from him he thought you were sucking up to him….I think he was looking for someone who could mirror his ideology, yet bring something fresh and new to the table. I think he was rather frustrated.”
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Robert Sengstacke, John’s son and Myiti’s father, undertook various assignments his father gave him, always considered himself underused, and speaks today of himself as a photographer. “My mother always used to say, ‘You’re the only one of the children strong enough to get away from your father. I’m so glad you have another way to earn money,’” he says. “I wasn’t the kind of person to sit around being a little rich boy, and when I came back to the Defender it was always because my father asked me to come back. He was a controlling kind of person, and after a year or two I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m doing nothing, and he’s doing everything.’ I used to say, ‘My job is to say to John Sengstacke what the rest of you know but don’t say.’”
Robert counts it among his father’s lapses that he didn’t look beyond the day of his own death. John Sengstacke’s will passed Sengstacke Enterprises to his grandchildren in trust, virtually guaranteeing that the business would have to be sold off to pay staggering estate taxes. “He was somewhat whimsical and somewhat unpredictable,” Milliner offers. “John always felt like he wanted everyone to need him. And people that have those tendencies generally are very difficult to deal with on family matters.”
The case dragged on so long that Hett retired before the end and Judge Bernetta Bush succeeded him. Last week she told Sengstacke Enterprises to accept PublicMediaWorks’s letter of intent and negotiate a sale. Myiti Sengstacke issued a statement calling the order “a tragedy.” She said she and her brothers “remain committed to the promise made to my grandfather to assure the continuity of family ownership,” and she resigned from the board of the company. As the Sengstacke Enterprises board negotiated a deal with one bidder, it would have been unacceptable for an individual board member to simultaneously look for another.
Marshall observes that after three years of trying to balance fiscal obligations and family legacy, Judge Bush finally pushed every other issue aside and told the Sengstacke board to sell to the highest bidder. “They don’t look at the fact I spent 20-plus years in the business,” Marshall says. “Money is not always the determining factor, but they’ve made it the determining factor. They didn’t exercise prudent business judgment in this process. They just said, whoever has the most money wins. We’re still in the audience. We’ll still be there in case things fall apart, which, as we know, has happened before.”
He tells me, “After we redesign the book and departmentalize the various sections, the Defender will be second to none in business, in sports, in entertainment. We’re going to be community driven. We’re going to cover Little League baseball. We’re going to cover Pony League baseball. We’re going to be in the Park District looking at programs that get kids off the street.” Chicago is made up of 77 communities and 50 wards, says Milliner, and the Defender will be a “presence” in all of them–“and don’t forget about the collar counties.”
