Marion

"McCaw's empire building had begun, though no one at Stanford had any inkling of this side of his life. McCaw quietly ran his business by long-distance telephone, calling managers in Centralia and checking with Marion on estate litigation and creditor negotiations. His penchant for secrecy would ultimately become a tremendous business asset. "He put a helluva mask on," says Fred Morck. Jeff Ruhe was a close friend at Stanford but always knew that McCaw maintained a private zone. "He's a great listener," says Ruhe, who later became an executive with the ESPN sports network and is still a friend of McCaw's. "He doesn't give away much, but he takes in a lot.""

"years before he died, Elroy had reorganized the cable company in Centralia. In this deal, Elroy created two classes of stock, a preferred class for himself and another that he "sold" to his sons. The dividends went to Elroy, but the sons got the company and could buy out the preferred stock. Elroy also set up a $50,000 trust fund for each son. He never bothered to tell Marion or the boys."

"Marion always believed in the paperwork. That attitude of having good paper, strong paper, documenting things, making sure you're very careful. . . . Marion instilled in us one of the McCaw attrib- utes, which was to outdocument people. Be smarter in documenta- tion of everything, things like programming agreements and acquisitions agreements A lot of people think that a highly leveraged company is an out-of-control company. What they don't understand oftentimes is that the companies that are highly lever- aged have the most control. People assume that a company that is wild and woolly in its acquisition strategy and moving along at a breakneck pace, that the rest of the company is like that . . . [that]"