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Lewis Rudin, who headed one of New York's oldest real estate dynasties, was one of the city's biggest boosters and became a behind-the-scenes power during the fiscal crises in the 1970's and early 1980's, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.

He died of complications of bladder cancer, his family said.

Mr. Rudin and his brother, Jack, presided over a family empire of 40 buildings valued at $2 billion, including more than 3,500 apartments in 22 buildings in Manhattan. Their holdings also embrace 16 office towers, from the 44-story skyscraper at 345 Park Avenue and 52nd Street to the former AT&T world headquarters at 52 Avenue of the Americas (south of Canal Street). His family almost never let go of a property once it was in their vast portfolio, and rarely ventured outside New York for real estate projects.

"A fisherman always sticks close to his last catch." Mr. Rudin would say in explaining the family's decision to focus on Manhattan.

But if Mr. Rudin was a simple fisherman, it was in a big pond, and he worked tirelessly to ensure its vitality. He played an instrumental role in popularizing the New York Marathon, rallying corporate executives and labor leaders to help the city during its darkest moments, moving the United States Open to Flushing, Queens, and gaining landing rights in New York for the Concorde jet.

Acting out of what he called enlightened self-interest, Mr. Rudin's role in civic life distinguished him from other moguls who rarely stepped away from their businesses. With New York facing possible bankruptcy in 1975, he persuaded other developers and corporate leaders to prepay $600 million in property taxes, enabling the city and his friend, Mayor Abraham D. Beame, to avoid a fiscal disaster.

"We had to do something," Mr. Rudin explained years later. "We couldn't very well pick up our buildings and move them across the George Washington Bridge."

A tall man, he could be blunt or affable. He was sometimes an easy touch, and always an indefatigable booster for New York City. He countered every perceived slight to the city's reputation with a letter to the editor extolling its virtues.

In response to a 1990 newspaper column about a woman who had fled New York's expensive, crime-ridden streets, Mr. Rudin wrote a letter imploring her to return "to the Big Apple and help us solve not only New York's problems, but all of the social problems of this great country."

Mr. Rudin's easygoing manner embraced a wide range of friends; Mayors Beame and David N. Dinkins; Jack Bigel, the labor advisor; Justice Burton B. Roberts, a former chief administrative judge in the Bronx; Percy Sutton, chairman of Inner City Broadcasting; Alan Alda, the actor; and Muriel Siebert, the first woman to gain a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. His annual party at the Regency Hotel to celebrate the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, drew 250 relatives and friends.

His breadth of contacts enabled him to organize a national coalition that defeated a proposal by President Ronald Reagan to abolish deductions of state and local taxes from federal income taxes, which he and others feared would prompt corporations to fell New York in favor of the South and Southwest.

He and his brother were early supporters of the New York Marathon in the 1970's, playing a key role in moving it out of Central Park and onto the streets of the city's five boroughs as its popularity swelled from 127 runners in 1970 to more than 30,000 today. The two brothers sponsored the Samuel Rudin Trophy in honor of their father, a marathon runner.

Mr. Rudin, whose favorite sports, a friend said, were golf and schmoozing, was the public face of a family empire in which his more reclusive brother Jack oversaw construction and development, which he served as a rental agent filling and managing the buildings and serving on civic and charitable boards.

Mr. Rudin often described how his grandfather Louis Rudinsky came to the Lower East Side in 1883 from Poland with nothing more than the change in his pocket. Mr. Rudinsky became a grocer and in the 1920's bought the family's first piece of real estate, an apartment house on 54th Street, because he had heard that John D. Rockefeller owned property on that block. Years later, Mr. Rudin boasted that the family still owned that property, "although now it's a 32-story office building."

Mr. Rudin is survived by his wife, Rachel; brother, Jack; daughter, Beth Rudin DeWoody; son, William; daughter-in-law, Ophelia; and grandchildren Carlton and Kyle DeWoody and Samantha and Michael Rudin.

Lewis Rudin was born in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx on April 4, 1927. The son of Samuel and May Rudin, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and the New York University School of Commerce after serving as a sergeant in the Army during World War II.

It was Mr. Rudin's father, Samuel, who founded Rudin Management in 1924, when he built his first apartment house, a six-story tenement in the Bronx that still stands. After World War II, Lewis and Jack joined the family firm and the Rudins became known for their modern apartment towers on the Upper East Side, with insulated plumbing, air-conditioning and storefronts.

In 1955, the Rudins built their first office building, at 415 Madison Avenue (48th Street), followed by 1 Battery Park Plaza and 345 Park Avenue, which became the headquarters of Bristol-Myers.

Like other landlords, Mr. Rudin often railed against the city's rent regulations, saying low rents were a brake on new housing construction. The family built its last residential building, 211 East 70th Street, in 1976. But they continued building office towers in the 80's and 90's at a slow, determined pace. Mr. Rudin said he preferred to follow his instincts rather than market studies.

"We don't need marketing studies," he once said. "When the time is right we build."

Mr. Rudin became a major force in the civic arena in 1971, when he formed the Association for a Better New York with Howard J. Rubenstein as well as Preston Robert Tisch, Alan V. Tishman and other Midtown property owners.

Mr. Rudin and the others felt that New York's power brokers had never tried to help the city by lobbying or promoting its attractions. The group held breakfast forums on the issues of the day, treating, at Mr. Rudin's insistence, Democrats and Republicans with equal deference. The group also handed out Polished Apple Awards to the worthy and Rotten Apple Awards to the laggards, like shop owners who failed to pick up debris outside their storefronts.

In 1974, Mayor Beame confided to Mr. Rudin that the city was in dire straits because the federal government had just turned down the city's request for a loan. In the next months, Mr. Rudin rounded up other property owners and executives from Con Edison, New York Telephone and Rockefeller Center, who pledged to pay their real estate taxes early to keep the city afloat.

"Everybody pulled together in '76," Mr. Tisch said. "Other people went on to do other things, but Lew continued with it single-handedly, making it one of the most important organizations in the city."

As the fiscal crisis persisted, Mr. Rudin helped organize informal, private meetings with Felix G. Royatyn, the financier; Mr. Bigel, the union adviser; and Barry Feinstein, a powerful Teamster official, to discuss problems.

In what seemed to be yet another blow to the city's civic pride in the late 1970's, the United States Tennis Association was close to abandoning Forest Hills and moving the United States Open to another city. Working with Mayor Beame, Mr. Rudin intervened in 1977, persuading the association to move instead to its current home in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Mr. Rudin played a similar role in the early 1990's when the city seemed overwhelmed by the crack epidemic, a sagging economy and a rising crime rate. Although the Rudin company often benefited from his easy access to City Hall and the state's most powerful government officials, he said he never asked for special favors. On more than one occasion, however, he did send one transgressor or another a small pillow with an embroidered message: "No good deed goes unpunished."

"The secret of my relationship with the political world is, I never ask them for anything," he said. "So I owe them nothing. Most of the time, they owe me something."

And in explaining his support for city Meals on Wheels, New York University or North General Hospital in Harlem, he said "My father loved New York and wanted to reward New York for what it did for our family. It was as simple as that."

The family was caught short during the recession in the early 1990's, which left its 30-story office building at 55 Broad Street empty for several years. Still, the Rudins gambled. After reading an article about a technology company that was considering a move to Manhattan, Mr. Rudin spent up to $40 million transforming the asbestos-ridden building in the financial district into what he called the Information Technology Center. The project, which received generous tax incentives from the city and state, was a success, attracting tenants like Sun Microsystems.

In 1993, Mr. Rudin's son, William, became president of Rudin Management Company and spearheaded the family's latest project, the Reuters tower in Times Square.

Mr. Rudin often mulled over the past and the future for his family at his office at 345 Park Avenue, which was filled with photographs of children, grandchildren, presidents and mayors. He pointed out that the headquarters was build on the site of the grade school attended by his father at the turn of the last century.

"Owning the land here is going to be very good for my children," he once told a reporter. "I would say we got a very good deal."

Victor Posner, a corporate raider whose exploits over three decades earned him a place in the rogue's gallery of American business, died on Monday at the Miami Heart Institute.  He was 83 and lived in Miami Beach.

The cause was pneumonia, according to Milton Farrell, his friend and lawyer.

A master of the hostile takeover from the mid-1960's until the early 1990's, Mr. Posner at one time or another controlled public companies as diverse as the Arby's restaurant chain, Royal Crown Cola and Sharon Steel.   He mismanaged many of these companies into bankruptcy but enriched himself as they foundered.  He was forced to sell others at a discount.

Even as shareholders suffered, Mr. Posner was one of America's highest paid executives for years, drawing millions of dollars in annual salaries from the corporations he ran.  But by the late 1980's, Mr. Posner was facing mounting legal problems.

In 1987, he pleaded no contest to a charge of tax evasion and was ordered to give $3 million to the homeless and serve meals in a Miami shelter as part of 5,000 hours of community service.

A year later, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Mr. Posner and his son Steven of conspiring with Ivan F. Boesky and Michael R. Milken to gain control of the Fischbach Corporation, an electrical company in New York, in 1984.   In its civil complaint, the S.E.C. contended that with Mr. Milken's help, Mr. Posner and his son secretly arranged to "park" Fischbach stock, or place it with Mr. Boesky, to conceal their intention to seize control of the company.

Mr. Boesky and Mr. Milken pleaded guilty to felony charges stemming from the transaction.

In 1990, shareholders in the DWG Corporation, a Detroit cigar company that Mr. Posner used as a vehicle to acquire other companies, sued Mr. Posner and his son, contending they had plundered DWG.

A federal judge installed three directors to serve as watchdogs.   Two years later, they reported that Mr. Posner drew $31 million in compensation from DWG over five years, even as the company had difficulty finding the case to pay its creditors and employees.

Mr. Posner settled the lawsuit by selling half his shares in DWG to a partnership run by the financiers Nelson Peltz and Peter May.  He agreed to sell the balance of his stake in 1999.

In December 1993, all of this history led Judge Milton Pollack of Federal District Court in New York, in ruling on the Fischbach case, to ban Mr. Posner and his son from any further involvement with public companies.   The judge also ordered them to give up control of their remaining public companies and to repay about $4 million they had received from Fischbach.

In his ruling, Judge Pollack said Mr. Posner was "contemptuous of the interests of public shareholders."

James W. Michaels, the former editor of Forbes magazine, said of Mr. Posner, "He was a low-quality, cynical, greedy man who didn't care about his own reputation."

Still, Mr. Posner was an active and generous philanthropist for causes and institutions in the Miami area.

The Victor Posner Center for Communicative Disorders at the University of Miami Ear Institute and Posner Hall at Barry University are named in his honor.   A founder of the Mount Sinai Medical Center, he also supported the Jackson Memorial Foundation and Miami Children's Hospital.

In large measure, Mr. Posner was able to continue his philanthropy even during his legal troubles because of big real estate holdings he had amassed in Maryland and Florida.

The son of immigrants from Russia, Victor Posner was born in Baltimore.   He dropped out of school at 13 to work in a grocery store owned by his parents.

In Depression-era Baltimore, Mr. Posner used his grocery store earnings to build low-cost housing, selling the homes for less than the prevailing market prices but retaining the land beneath the houses.

"He assembled a real estate empire at an early age," said Mr. Farrell, his lawyer.   "He built large numbers of housing units at a time, something no one else had done at the time.   His understanding of financial matters was unequaled."

Mr. Posner said he was a millionaire by age 25.   In the 1994 article, The Wall Street Journal said he continued to collect rent on more than 20,000 ground leases.

Ira Elegant, a Miami lawyer who once worked for Mr. Posner, told The Journal that the favorite motto of his former boss was "I buy by the mile and sell by the inch."

By the mid-1950's Mr. Posner had begun buying up property in Florida.   The Security Management Corporation in Miami, the centerpiece of his private real estate empire, owns large stretches of oceanfront property in the Miami area.

Although he had been in ill health for some time, Mr. Posner "was very strong willed" up until his death, Mr. Farrell said.  "He was unconcerned with how he was viewed by others," he added.

Victor Posner is survived by a brother, Morton Posner, and a sister, Beatrice Cohen, both of Baltimore; four children, Steven and Gail Posner of Miami Beach; Tracy Posner Ward of Norco, Calif.; Lance T. Posner of Henderson, Nev.; and seven grandchildren.

A celebratory air filled the room as Joe Temeczko, an 86 year old scavenger and handyman, signed his last will and testament.   He ran around his lawyer's office, hugged everyone and said, "We should call Mayor Giuliani and tell him."

Mr. Temeczko, a Minnesota resident, was eager to share the news that he was leaving his savings and all his earthly possessions - including the lawn mowers, small appliances and VCR's that jammed his house, his garage and a neighbor's garage - to the City of New York.

Remembering that late September day, Mr. Temeczko's lawyer, William K. Wangensteen, said that he gently dissuaded his client from making the phone call to Rudolph W. Giuliani. "I thought, 'Well, it's a little premature,'" Mr. Wangensteen said.

For at least 15 years, maybe 20, Mr. Wangensteen had known Mr. Temeczko, a Polish immigrant who prowled alleys looking for discarded items he might repair and sell.   Mr. Wangensteen hired him every fall and spring to climb an extension ladder and change the storm windows and screens on his house.   And over the last 10 years, the lawyer had prepared several wills fro Mr. Temeczko as he struggled to choose his heirs.

A week after the World Trade Center disaster, Mr. Temeczko knew exactly what he wanted.   He made the hour-long bus trip to Mr. Wangensteen's office to rewrite his will yet again, and the returned on Sept. 29 to sign it, bequeathing everything "to the City of New York, New York, to honor those who perished in the disaster of September 1, 2001."

Two weeks later, on Oct. 14, Mr. Temeczko died, apparently after a heart attack as he worked in the backyard of his modest two-story stucco house.

Now it was time. So Mr. Wangensteen sent a letter notifying Mayor Giuliani of the date of the probate hearing.   "For your information," the Oct. 24 letter said, "I estimate the size of Mr. Temeczko's estate to be somewhat in excess of $1 million."

At the Nov. 19 hearing in Minneapolis, no one contested the terms of Mr. Temeczko's will, which stipulated that the city use the money" for the interests of the people of New York City, as its mayor and City Council shall best determine in their discretion."

"For the record, he's never seen New York City politics, has he?" said the probate judge, Richard M. Wolfson, who grew up in Brooklyn and was reading "The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York," when the case came before him.

Mr. Wangensteen proceeded to sell Mr. Temeczko's home and possessions, but by mid-March he was disappointed and puzzled that there had been much in the way of a response from New York, although The Minneapolis Star Tribune had written an article.   He said he had received one phone call from James W. Rayhill, a lawyer at Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, a Wall Street law firm that is providing free legal work for the Twin Towers Fund.

"Giuliani was so on the spot and so personally involved with the disaster that I thought that for sure this was a story that he would relish and jump on as a kind of rehabilitation factor for the city and a spiritual renewal-type thing," Mr. Wangensteen said in a telephone interview on Monday.   "And the fact that nobody responded - nobody other than this one very brief phone call from this one lawyer - was, I thought, disappointing."

Mr. Wangensteen said he understood that city officials had been extremely busy over the last six months, but "we're not talking about 500 bucks here."

"When you think about it, he gave everything he had," Mr. Wangensteen said.   "He gave everything he had to the city."

Sunny Mindel, the former mayor's spokeswoman, said that she first heard about the bequest this week when a reporter called, and that Mr. Giuliani did not remember it.   "he said it was an incredible story and it speaks to how New York became another town in America," Ms. Mindel said.

Jonathan D. Greenspun, commissioner of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's Community Assistance Unit, said he also learned of it after a reporter's inquiry.   "This is just one of probably thousands of stories of charity and emotional affiliation felt by people throughout this country," Mr. Greenspun said, nothing that on almost a daily basis the city received donations and other gestures of sympathy in response to Sept. 11.

Mr. Rayhill said he had been waiting to contact the Bloomberg administration to make sure there was no legal challenge to the will.

"We're obviously very, very happy in some small way to use the gift to help others," Mr. Greenspun said.

He said that he had called Mr. Wangensteen on Tuesday and that the mayor's office would work with the City Council to determine how best to use the money, estimated at $1.3 million.   Mr. Greenspun said he was also looking into Mr. Wangensteen's request that his client's ashes be sent to New York.

It was only last spring that a startling telephone call from a Minneapolis banker gave Mr. Wangensteen any idea of Mr. Temeczko's holdings.

The banker explained that Mr. Temeczko had about $1 million in his savings account.

How the handyman amassed such a sum remains a mystery to his friends, neighbors and customers.   They pointed to his enterprising work ethic and his abhorrence of waste.

Mr. Temeczko, a survivor of Nazi and Soviet prison camps in World War II, was just a little over 5 feet tall and said his small stature had save his life.   Because he was able to fit into small spaces and make repairs, he came valuable in the camps.

He then lived in Vienna and worked at an American air base before entering the United States through Ellis Island in 1950.   In New York, he worked on a construction project on Bedloes Island, now known as Liberty Island, and he told friends that he had been treated very well.

When he moved to Minneapolis, he took a job as a painter at a 30-bed private psychiatric hospital.   "He could fix anything," said Veronica Davidson, who managed the hospital with her husband.   Mr. Temeczko kept pointing out things that needed to be done, she said, making himself indispensable.

He perfected the technique when he went out on his own, sometimes to the surprise of people who had not yet become customers.   Rod Carlson, a neighbor, remembered his introduction to Mr. Temeczko.   After a thunderstorm, Mr. Carlson was surprised to come home and find his neighbor nailing shingles on his damaged roof.   He was even more surprised when Mr. Temeczko presented him with a bill for $150.

That began an unusual friendship in which Mr. Temeczko would insist that Mr. Carlson help him carry home large items he salvaged from the trash.   Other times, Mr. Temeczko would bring a box of items to Mr. Carlson and urge him to buy it.   Or he might bring a toy he had found and repaired for Mr. Carlson's daughter.

Although he was still agile and energetic, Mr. Temeczko, who lived alone and said he had no family, may have known he was near the end of his life.   He gave Mr. Carlson a key to his house so he could get in if he became concerned.   And last fall, he gave Mr. Carlson his snow blower, saying, "I won't be needing it anymore."

(AP) -

A woman who was so frugal that she slept in the hallway of her boardinghouse so that each room had a tenant has left $3.5 million to her alma matter.

Shrewd stock investments allowed the woman, Mary Hutto, to amass the money she donated to Western Kentucky University for scholarships, said Ron Beck, the university's former director of planned giving.

"She saved money because she never thought she'd have enough to line on," Mr. Beck told The Courier-Journal in Louisville.   "She lived in a little cubicle in the hallway with a little sheet around her so she wouldn't take up one of the bedrooms."

Ms. Hutto, a former teacher, died in April at age 95, but the university did not identify her as its benefactor until Wednesday.   She had contributed $250,000 for scholarships before her death, but Mr. Beck said she had insisted on remaining anonymous while alive.

"She was a multimillionaire.   It's a phenomenon of some of these people who grow up in the Depression," Mr. Beck said.   "Some of these older folks don't realize the true value of their savings."

Ms. Hutto graduated from the university in 1927 with a degree in education and moved to Florida to teach English.

In Florida, Ms. Hutto met her future husband, an appliance salesman.   He was killed in an automobile crash in 1953, and she never remarried.   They had no children.

Ms. Hutto returned to her hometown after her father died in 1957 and ran the family's boardinghouse near the university, renting out bedrooms mainly to students.   It was there that she set up a makeshift bedroom in the hallway.

In the late 1980's, she returned to Florida, but her heart remained in Kentucky.

"It's what she talked about all the time," said Marian McGrath, the lawyer who handled Ms. Hutto's estate.

She had become legally blind and listened to books on tape and the radio.

"Her mind was active until close to the end," Ms. Beck said.

Ms. Hutto's gift will establish an endowment allowing about 70 students to receive $2,500 annual scholarships, the university's president, Gary Ransdell, said.

She intended the aid to go to students who showed strong academic and leadership skills but who would not qualify for top scholarships.

Leonard S. Shoen, who created the multibillion-dollar do-it-yourself moving industry in 1945 when he welded together a trailer, painted it an attention-grabbing orange and called his little company U-Haul, died on Monday morning after he drove his car into a utility pole near Las Vegas, Nev., his hometown for the last 20 years.   He was 83.

His death was a suicide, said a spokeswoman for the Clark County, Nev., coroner's office.

Mr. Shoen was known for stunts like tossing $1,000 out of an office window in Phoenix, creating a traffic jam on the street below, to show how easy it was to waste money.

In his later years, a vicious family feud erupted over control of his company.   He successfully sued several of his 13 children after some of them took over U-Haul International Inc. in 1987.

Known as Sam or L.S., Mr. Shoen was born on Feb. 29, 1916, in McGrath, Minn. He earned a bachelor's degree and a law degree from Oregon State University, and after World War II naval service, he and his wife, Anna Mary Shoen, moved to her family ranch in rural Washington State.   At the age of 29, he created the first U-Haul trailers on the ranch.   He rented them for $2 a day.

Later, dealerships were established, and by 1949, it was possible to rent a trailer for a one-way trip from city to city in most of the country.   Today, U-Haul rents trucks and trailers through independent dealers and company-owned centers.

In the mid-1980's, Mr. Shoen gave most of his stock to his children.   Several of them, principally Joseph Shoen and Mark Shoen, then ousted him as president and chairman in 1986 and stripped him of his retirement benefits after differing on corporate strategy.   Mr. Shoen and other family members then sued and won a $1.5 billion settlement that was later reduced to $461 million.

Joseph Shoen and Mark Shoen now head the company.   Efforts to reach them directly were not successful; they did not return messages left yesterday with their public relations officials and at U-Haul's headquarters in Phoenix.

Mr. Shoen was married five times; he was widowed once and divorced three times.   He is survived by his wife, Carol, and her daughter, Shana Coupland of La Mesa, Calif., whom he adopted.   He is also survived by six children from his marriage to his first wife, Anna Mary, who died in 1957.   They are Dr. Samuel Shoen of Port Townsend, Wash., Michael Shoen of Vancouver, Wash., Edward Joseph Shoen of Phoenix, Mark Shoen of Phoenix, Mary Anna Eaton of Boynton Beach, Fla., and Paul Shoen of Phoenix.

He is also survived by five children from his second marriage, Sophia Shoen of Phoenix, Cecilia Hanlon of Southampton, N.Y., Theresa Romero of Phoenix, Katrina Carlson of Los Angeles, and James Shoen of Reno; a son, Scott Shoen of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, from his third marriage; a brother, Ramon Shoen of Las Vegas; three sisters, Paula Martinson of Portland, Ore., Audrey Shaner of Los Angeles, and Bernice Doyle of Denver, and numerous grandchildren.

Hattiesburg, Miss., Sept. 27 - She had not even known exactly what the word "philanthropy" meant, but the elderly washerwoman who gave away practically every dollar she ever made to endow a scholarship fund for poor students in Mississippi would become a symbol of selfless giving.

Oseola McCarty, who gave away a life savings of $150,000 to help complete strangers get a college education at the University of Southern Mississippi here in her hometown, died late Sunday afternoon in the frame house where she took in laundry and ironing and made her small fortune a dollar or two at a time.

Miss McCarty was told that she had liver cancer three weeks ago, about a year after she underwent surgery for colon cancer.   She wanted her last days to be spent in the little house where she spent most of her life.   She was 91.

"I don't want to close my eyes because I don't know if I'll open them again," the tiny, frail woman told a visitor recently.   "But I am not afraid."

In anticipation of her death, she decided in the summer of 1995 to give away most of her life savings, saying there was nothing in particular she wanted to buy and no place in particular she wanted to go.   An only child who had outlived her relatives, she lived a solitary existence, surrounded by rows of clothes she made pretty for people who knew her only as the washerwoman.

"I'm giving it away so that children won't have to work so hard, like I did," she said in July 1995.

She did not want any monuments, any proclamations, said people who knew her.   But the selflessness of her gift would bring her worldwide attention.   The woman who had gone out only for some preaching at the Friendship Baptist Church in Hattiesburg and to buy groceries would be honored by the United Nations, would shake hands with President Clinton and would receive more than 300 awards.   People all over the world knew who she was and what she did.

The woman who acted in anticipation of death found a life she could have never imagined.   She flew on a plane for the first time in her life and laughed out loud when the food did not fall off the tray as the plane rumbled through the sky.   She stayed in a hotel for the first time in her life, and before she checked out, she made the bed.

"People treated her like a monument," said Jewel Tucker, the secretary to the president of the university and Miss McCarty's traveling companion in those almost giddy years after the gift.   "But she was really a movement.   It will keep moving."  

Contributions from more than 600 donors have added some $330,000 to the original scholarship fund of $150,000.   After hearing of Miss McCarty's gift, Ted Turner, a multi-billionaire, gave away a billion dollars.

"He said, 'If that little woman can give away everything she has, then I can give a billion,'" Ms. Tucker said.

If anyone can say they felt adoration in their life, Ms. Tucker said, Miss McCarty could.   People would see her in airports and flock to her.   Some people just wanted to touch her, as though she was good luck.

Along with all the plaques and trophies or other honors - she received the Presidential Citizen's Medal, the nation's second-highest civilian award, and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University - she was awarded other things that were pure fun.

In 1996, she carried the Olympic torch through part of Mississippi.   Later that year, hers was the hand on the switch that dropped the ball in Times Square in New York's New Year's Eve celebration.   In fact, she said at the time, it was the first time she had stayed up past midnight.

Miss McCarty will lie in state in the rotunda of the university's main building on Saturday.

Friends like Aubrey K. Lucas, president emeritus of the University of Southern Mississippi, said it warmed him and others that came into contact with her to know that a lifetime of loneliness had been pushed aside by all the positive attention that her gift brought.

Horace Fleming, the university's president, said he sometimes wondered if all the attention that came her way was really welcome.   But he believes now that it was.

Her traveling companion, Ms. Tucker, knows that Miss McCarty did enjoy it.

Although she never asked for it, "She loved every minute of it," Ms. Tucker said.

In time, people came to see her almost like an oracle and listened closely for pearls of wisdom at the little woman's knee.

But her friends know that Miss McCarty's wisdom was really a mix of common decency and common sense.

"There's a lot of talk about self-esteem these days," she once said.   "It seems pretty basic to me.   If you want to feel proud of yourself, you've got to do things you can be proud of.   Feelings follow actions."

The university's president said that a New York reporter once asked him out of earshot of Miss McCarty to tell him the true story of her gift.

"How did it finally happen?"   the reporter asked him.

The president told the reporter that it happened just as Miss McCarty said, that she had wanted to do something good with the money she had made.   It is not any more complicated than that, Mr. Fleming said.

In a world in which people are suspicious of things too good to be true, he said, Miss McCarty really was good and true.

You have a few kids.   You're doing estate planning.   You could take the "easy" route: equal shares for everyone.

But perhaps that's not the fairest way to distribute your wealth. Maybe, like Anna Heibult of Parker, S.D., you're hatching a secret plan.   Well, be careful.   Mrs. Heibult's scheme ended up last month before the South Dakota Supreme Court.

Her intentions seemed clear enough:   In 1990, she wrote a will leaving the largest share of the family farm to her son, Ronald.   He deserved it, she figured, since he'd been working on the farm for about 30 years.   Her other three children had moved to California.   But like other families that have tried to divide their wealth unequally among their children, the plan backfired.

In these days of depleted stock portfolios, families are looking even more closely at how tangible expressions of love are distributed.   Americans now in their early 70s will bequeath just 39% of their current wealth, consuming the rest before they die, according to a Rand Corp. study released this year.   However, giving more to one child - sometimes tempting when there are haves and have-nots within families - can cause friction.

Upset by Mrs. Heibult's plan, Ronald's three siblings persuaded her to include them as equal heirs.   In 1991, while visiting California, Mrs. Heibult paid a lawyer $850 to draft a new will.   Then, one of her daughters traveled to South Dakota with her to make sure she placed it in a safe deposit box.   That night, they lit a ceremonial backyard fire to "celebrate" by burning the 1990 will.

Mrs. Heibult died in 2000 at age 89, leaving just one signed will - the 1990 version.   "It appears that Anna fooled them all," wrote South Dakota Chief Justice David Gilbertson.   The court assumed that while dancing around that fire, she purposely burned the 1991 will.   It ruled that the disputed land, worth about $180,000, belonged to Ronald.

"My mother wanted to keep peace, but it's a big mess," say Ronald.   His three siblings aren't talking to him.

A few years ago, marketing executive Hank Green tried to persuade his mother to leave her entire estate to his recently widowed 49-year old sister.   Mr. Green figured he didn't need an inheritance, while his sister was straining to raise two kids on a modest salary.

His secret plan angered his sister, Ellen Krawczak, branch manager of an insurance company in Burtonsville, Md.   "It felt like when someone grabs an old person's arm to walk across the street, and they don't want to be helped," she says.

"I hadn't thought of her pride and dignity," says Mr. Green.

Their mother will now pass on her estate in equal shares.

When dividing up an estate, "every situation has its own fingerprint, so there's no cookie-cutter formula," says Mike Smith, of Deutsche Bank Private Banking, which administers estates for wealthy families.

To avoid giving well-intentioned gifts that cause strife, estate planners recommend honest dialogue without surprises.   Mr. Smith suggests key questions to consider.   Among them:   Will the gift enable the recipient to gain self-respect and freedom?   Will it create ill will?

Some parents decide to limit inheritances for very successful children, so needier siblings can benefit.   Estate planners call that "punishing success," and say it's usually a mistake.

Mr. Smith once handled estate issues for a family with four adult children, one of whom had become very rich.   This daughter wanted her full $300,000 share of her parents $1.2 million estate.   She saw it as her "birthright," even though she didn't need the money and her siblings did.

"If you took away the dollar sign and put a heart on it, that was the significance to her," says Mr. Smith.

Still, parents can't assume they're safe doling out equal shares.

Abe Munn ran a picture-frame business in Queens, N.Y., and one of his two sons, Jake, worked with him.   Each son has two children.

In 1986, Abe announced that he planned to leave his stake in the business equally to his four grandkids.   Jake was upset.   His "sweat equity" had helped build the business.   He complained to his father, which led to hard feelings.   In the end, before his dad died in 1990, he agreed to leave Jake much of the company, and to compensate his other son with other assets.

For those who find it too hard to talk with loved ones about inheritance issues, estate planners recommend creating a videotape for heirs, explaining their decisions.   It can be shown after they die, when the will is read.

In South Dakota, Mrs. Heibult left no video and no explanations, so her family wonders why she paid $850 to draft a will she intended to burn.   Chief Justice Gilbertson concluded: "$850 may be a small price to pay for a decade of family accord."

But even her son Ronald, who benefited from her act, is sad.   He wishes she'd made her intentions clear to his siblings.   He'd like to renew relationships with them, he says.   "I just don't see it happening."

Seymour Milstein, who, with his brother, Paul, presided over a multibillion-dollar real estate banking empire whit three million square feet of office space, 8,000 apartments and one of New York's oldest financial institutions, the Emigrant Savings Bank, died yesterday at New York Presbyterian Hospital.   He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was pneumonia, said his children, Constance and Philip.

Mr. Milstein and his more boisterous younger brother worked together for nearly five decades, lunching together daily at the Rainbow Room and taking family vacations together in Puerto Rico.   But in later years, as succession issues loomed, the rivalry between their sons escalated into a legal battle of operatic intensity.   The two factions hired separate public relations consultants and gave damaging information about each other to reporters.

In January, in what was seen as a first step in dismantling the real estate partnership, Paul Milstein's family outbid Seymour Milstein's family to buy a last vacant parcel in the Times Square redevelopment area - a parking lot on the southeast corner of 42^nd Street and Eighth Avenue - at a court-supervised auction.   The price was $111.1 million, many times the $5 million that the brothers and another partner had paid for the property in 1984.

Bur the brothers were never able to put together a project for the site.   Although they were able to prevent the state from condemning their property, they never realized their dream of playing a major role in Times Square's redevelopment.

In March, Seymour Milstein dissolved the family partnership that owned the Milford Plaza Hotel at Eighth Avenue and 44^th Street.   In court papers, he said that "relations within the family are strained to the breaking point" because his nephew, Howard Milstein, "had attempted to exercise unilateral control over the family's holdings."   His brother accused him of trying to cover up the deficiencies of his son, Philip.

The Milsteins' combativeness was not limited to family members.   In 1981, they outraged city officials and preservationists by demolishing the famous Palm Court lounge and gilded clock at the Biltmore Hotel on Madison Avenue, after promising to restore them as part of Bank of America Plaza.   Over the years, they also filed several lawsuits against the city, some of which were related to the Times Square project.

The quieter and more diplomatic of the brothers, Seymour Milstein was born in New York City.   His father, Morris, had founded Circle Floor Company, a floor and ceiling contractor that installed the floors at Rockefeller Center, World Trade Center and other buildings.   In 1941, Seymour Milstein graduated from New York University, and in 1945, he married Vivian Leiner, who survives him, as do six grandchildren.

Shortly after World War II, Mr. Milstein joined a second company started by his father, Mastic Tile Company.   Both companies flourished in the postwar housing boom, and in 1955, Seymour Milstein became Mastic's president.

Four years later, the company was sold to Ruberoid, a building products company, for $24 million.   Seymour Milstein became a Ruberoid director and vice president, but when it was bought by GAF in 1967, he was not offered a top job.   The brothers tried and failed to take control of GAF.

In 1970, the family took control of United Brands, the food company, and Starrett Housing Corporation.   They later sold the companies for a profit.   In 1986, they took over the failing Emigrant Savings Bank and pumped $90 into it.

In the 1960's, Paul Milstein built the family's first apartment house, the Dorchester Tower near Lincoln Center.   In the 1980's the Milsteins built Normandie Court and Windsor Court on the Upper East Side and the Liberty buildings in Battery Park City.

During their partnership, Seymour Milstein handled the financial details and was in charge of dealing with banks.   But though his new demeanor was quieter than his brother's, he was considered just as competitive.

In recent years, friends and business associates said Seymour Milstein had decided that breaking up the family empire would be preferable to allowing his nephew Howard to assume control.   Howard and his father have accused Philip, the chief executive of Emigrant Savings, of mismanaging the bank, and unsuccessfully sought to oust him and replace him with Howard.

Yesterday, Paul Milstein's family issued a statement in response to Seymour Milstein's death.   "We will always cherish the happy times we shared and our many years together," it read in its entirety.

Ending one chapter in a long and bitter family feud over the estate of the rock legend Jimi Hendrix, a judge here ruled Friday that Mr. Hendrix’s stepsister and her cousin had mismanaged his estate.

But the ruling, coming after a colorful seven-week trial that drew many Hendrix fans to a courthouse in downtown Seattle, Mr. Hendrix’s hometown, was also a blow to his brother, Leon. At issue in the case was the will of their father, Al, who received the rock star’s money after Jimi Hendrix died without a will in 1970 in London.

Leon Hendrix was seeking to overturn his father’s will and gain control of about a quarter of the $80 million estate.

Judge Jeffrey M. Ramsdell of King County Superior Court ruled that Leon Hendrix was not entitled to anything from his father’s will, other than a single gold record left to him when his father died in 2002.

Leon Hendrix’s struggles with drug addiction, his failure to complete a treatment program, his unwillingness to work and his continual demands for money were the major reason Al Hendrix cut him from his will, Judge Ramsdell also said in his decision.

The judge also ruled that Janie Hendrix, 43, Jimi’s stepsister, had breached her duties as trustee of the estate by failing to make payments to the 10 family members for whom trusts were created in Al Hendrix’s will.

A family feud over the will has raged since Al Hendrix left control of the estate to Ms. Hendrix, a cousin, Robert Hendrix; and some of Al Hendrix’s children, but not Leon. Ms. Hendrix went on to start a multi-million-dollar company called Experience Hendrix. The ruling on Friday allows her to retain control of the company, but she will no longer have a say in how trust payments are disbursed to the rest of the family.

Holding back tears and surrounded by microphones and cameras, Ms. Hendrix said she was “thankful and grateful” that the judge did not invalidate Al Hendrix’s will. Friends and relatives of both Leon and Janie Hendrix overflowed into the hall outside the courtroom. Supporters of Leon Hendrix wore white shirts that read “Jimi’s blood runs through me” and “His legacy lives through his family and friends.”

Though Leon Hendrix, 56, did not get what he was seeking from Friday’s ruling, he said he was optimistic that he would prevail in a separate civil suit seeking damages from his stepsister, who he accused of coercing Al Hendrix into disinheriting Leon and his six children.

“We won a little victory, and we’ll win the war later,” Leon Hendrix, surrounded by supporters, said outside the courthouse.

In 35-page ruling, the judge also ordered Janie and Robert Hendrix to pay the lawyer’s fees for some of Al Hendrix’s other children who were suing along with Leon Hendrix.

Ms. Hendrix was somewhat philosophical about the outcome of the case, saying: “Jimi wrote a song about Leon and it was called, “It’s Too Bad.” The lyrics to that song are what this is all about.

Just days after the father’s death, factions in the family began fighting for control of the estate, with one side accusing Ms. Hendrix of undertaking a scheme to disinherit Leon Hendrix and his children and the other side claiming no wrongdoing and contending Leon Hendrix was unstable.

Ms. Hendrix and her lawyers conceded that management mistakes were made, but it was part of learning to run a multimillion-dollar company. They also argued that any inappropriate personal expenses had been paid back to the estate.

“This lawsuit cost millions of dollars and that’s going to come from my dad’s estate, sadly,” Ms. Hendrix said. “You just get really close to the finish line and then the finish line gets moved.”

The Hendrix estate may be one of the most-litigated for a rock star, said Charles R. Cross, a Seattle writer who is working on a Hendrix biography. Mr. Cross said he perceived the lawsuits within the family as being driven more by internal family strife than by Mr. Hendrix’s millions.

“It sort of gives an indication of the fractured family” Mr. Hendrix grew up in, Mr. Cross said. “This was not Leave-It-to-Beaver-ville.”

A British woman who was unimpressed when a lawyer called to say she had inherited an “old book” from an unknown relative has learned that it is one of six known privately owned first editions of Shakespeare’s collected plays, published in 1623. The last to be sold at auction fetched $7.4 million; Agence France-Presse reported yesterday. The woman, identified as Anne Humphries, who lives in Stockport, England, now plans to put up the book, known as the First Folio, for auction on Oct. 7. The book belonged to a woman in London who died in 2002, leaving no known heirs. A genealogist spent two years tracking down Mrs. Humphries as the closest living relative.