National Public Radio announced yesterday that it had received a bequest worth at least $200 million from the widow of the longtime chairman of the McDonald's restaurant chain.
The gift is the largest in the 33-year history of NPR, the nonprofit broadcasting corporation -- and about twice the size of NPR's annual operating budget. It is believed to be among the largest ever pledged to an American cultural institution.
The gift, which is largely in cash and will be made available to NPR early next year, is included in the will of Joan B. Kroc, 75, the widow of Ray A. Kroc. Mrs. Kroc, who died on Oct. 12, was a former owner of the San Diego Padres and a longtime philanthropist. In 1998 she gave $100 million to the Salvation Army, and last week the University of Notre Dame announced a gift from her of $50 million.
Kevin Klose, the president and chief executive of NPR, said that the broadcasting company had yet to decide how the money would be spent. For now, he said, ''most of it will not be spent; it is to be saved.''
He added that the NPR board would discuss how to spend the interest earned by the money. At an annual rate of 5 percent, it would generate about $10 million a year. The gift was first reported in The Washington Post.
Much of the gift is likely to be deposited in NPR's endowment fund, which has about $35 million, Mr. Klose said. NPR, which has an annual operating budget of about $100 million, receives about half its revenue from membership payments made by more than 700 independent radio stations that use NPR programming. The rest comes from foundations and corporations that sponsor NPR's programming.
Only a small amount of NPR's budget is in the form of direct grants from the federal government. But member stations rely, to some extent, on financing provided by the federal government and their respective states, and many of those stations have been under financial pressure in recent years.
Mr. Klose said that in weighing how to best capitalize on Mrs. Kroc's largesse, the great needs of member stations will be taken into account. In a news conference, he mentioned that many stations needed help acquiring the latest technology, enabling them to take advantage of the marketing and broadcasting possibilities of the Internet. But in at least one instance, he said, a station was in such dire financial shape that it did not have the money to acquire the parts necessary to broadcast warnings, in the event of an emergency, on behalf of the government.
It was Mrs. Kroc's affinity for one local station, KPBS in San Diego, near where she lived, that led to the donation to NPR.
Stephanie Bergsma, associate general manager for development at the station, said the roots of Mrs. Kroc's bequest sprouted in an indirect way.
In spring 2001 Mrs. Bergsma's husband of 28 years, Alan Bergsma, a psychiatrist, was admitted to a hospice as his bladder cancer became severe, she said. ''The first night, he wrote a letter to Mrs. Kroc, who had given the money to set up the hospice, thanking her for making it possible,'' Mrs. Bergsma recalled.
After Mrs. Bergsma's husband died, ''our relationship shifted,'' and the two women often went to lunch. She discovered that Mrs. Kroc was up at 4:30 a.m. listening to public radio and ''had a voracious appetite for public affairs.'' Mrs. Bergsma, who helped introduce Mrs. Kroc to Mr. Klose, said she was aware that Mrs. Kroc was going to leave a substantial gift, but had no idea of its magnitude until after she died.
Along with the donation to NPR, Mrs. Kroc left $5 million for KPBS, in addition to $3 million she had given the station several years earlier.
Few cultural institutions have been the beneficiaries of gifts as large as that received by NPR, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. One of the largest, worth $424 million, was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by foundations built on the Reader's Digest fortune.
Reacting to the NPR gift, Susan Stamberg, one of the earliest hosts on the public radio network and now a special correspondent, said, ''I'm changing my name to McStamberg.''