FULL TEXT: THE expensive golden stairs trudged by New York alimony payers may lead to Heaven sometime but not today.
Heaven is a place where harried husbands, with hands in empty jeans, won't have to go to jail every time they fall into arrears with their alimony.
The Alimony Payers Protective association, with a nationwide list of 1,000 members, is planning new moves in what it calls its war for men, women and children. The New York state Nugent bill, providing that men financially unable to pay their alimony need not be jailed, has just been killed.
"The women in Albany are too strong for us just now. But some day our time will come," says Robert Gilbert Ecob, chairman of the association.
"Today our jails, almhouses and other institutions are crowded with victims of domestic troubles," Ecob asserts. "There is the Alimony jail on West 37th st. in New York, and ten other alimony quarters in this city alone in which husbands may be imprisoned,'' says the crusader.
The number of men in the United States who pay alimony runs into millions.
The number who don't but they are either happily married, or happily unmarried. It's the number who won't pay alimony or can't pay alimony that the protectorate considers.
Jail for non-payment of alimony is really imprisonment for debt. Imprisonment for debt has long been illegal in these United States. But the imprisonment goes on just the same.
~ John Gasteiger Was the Founder. ~
The association now headed by Ecob was founded in the Alimony jail in January, 1927. A man in the Alimony jail has time to find a lot of things.
The founder was John Godfrey Gasteiger, grain merchant.
He claims that in five years he defended more than thirty legal actions brought by his wife Henrietta. He spent eleven months in jail as a conscientious objector. And he still has a great alimony future ahead of him.
In 1923 Gasteiger's wife sued for separation. She named another woman.
She was awarded $60 a week by the New York courts.
Gasteiger moved to New Jersey and conducted his business from there. His wife instigated new actions. He was ordered to pay $30 more a week by the New Jersey courts. He was also directed to post a $5,000 bond to insure payment.
He rebelled. He went to jail.
Next he was ordered to pay the amount of alimony which accrued while he fretted behind bars. He filed thirty actions for release. Mrs. Gasteiger claimed $5,000 arrears.
Justice Selah B. Strong came to the husband's aid. He declared a wife is not entitled to alimony while her husband is in jail.
The total was reduced to $1,432 on Strong's decision. Gasteiger was freed. The Appellate division immediately reversed the Strong decision. Gasteiger again hummed the "Alimony Blues."
Then he and his wife fixed it up "for the time being." He ended just about where he had been in the first place. He agreed to pay the $5,000 cash and a weekly amount until 1937. Then they'll make a new arrangement.
Ecob declares that the oldest member in the association is now past 70. He has been in litigation a week while he was lodged in the with his wife for half a century. Now she threatens to throw him into jail if he doesn't pay and pay and pay.
The youngest member is 19. He met a girl one week, married her the next and during the third she applied for alimony.
Ecob himself, although never in jail, has fought plenty of court battles with his wife, Margaret.
Unless another bill, similar to the Nugent bill, does go into effect, there isn't much hope for one fellow called Max Panish. Just now he says: "I'll always be in and out of jail, I guess, for I never will catch up with that alimony." He owes his Rose $4,000.
Max is a carpenter. He says that he never earned $50 a week. But he is required to pay that sum to his wife per court order just the same. As soon as he falls in arrears he goes to jail. He's been there five times in his thirty-five years of more or less married life.
Rose says that Max spends money on Fanny. But Fanny is just a girl Max can’t remember.
Recently Supreme Court Justice MacCrate declared that if Max is willing to give up all his property to his wife, he need pay alimony no longer.
Max retorts that there isn't any property. What little he had was wiped out by foreclosures during his trips to alimony prison. He's perfectly willing to sign away the infinitesimal remainder.
It is not the aim of the Alimony Payers Protective association to eliminate alimony in meritorious cases, states Ecob.
"But alimony will not cure domestic ills and irrespective of how much alimony is granted, the entire family suffers. Lawyers are the only ones who profit through divorce and separation cases. Some lawyers get more money than the wives," says Ecob.
The alimony laws are decidedly unfair, he adds.
He cites the case of Morris Appelbaum. Morris was in jail because he failed to pay his wife, Fanny $40 a week for the preceding eighteen weeks. Fanny died. She had been dead and buried for two months before any one remembered that Morris was in jail.
~ No, Morris Didn't Get the Estate. ~
It was discovered that Fanny had left a $13,000 estate and $500 insurance. But Morris didn't get it.
The protective association constantly fights the laws which require a man to keep up his alimony payments while he is in jail. Deprived of employment in the prime of life, most of the alimony martyrs have no means of earning the necessary alimony while incarcerated. Thus a man can be popped back into jail shortly after he breezes out. This can be kept up indefinitely.
Such was the case of Harry Silverman, a metal worker. He was ordered to pay his wife Stella $15 a week while he was lodged in the Raymond street jail.
But I don’t see how I can produce the money while I am locked up, he said.
And there was Victor Clarke, musical director. Sixteen years before, he had been divorced from Ethel Mae Clarke. At that time he declared that he would not contest her suit for divorce if she would not ask for alimony. No alimony was fixed, says Clarke.
Sixteen years later, through a Supreme court order, the wife demanded $7,875. Clarke said he was unable to pay. He went to jail for five months. Then he was dunned for the $490 which accrued while he was in jail.
"Through bitter experience we have discovered that today men have no rights, because no matter what they do or say, they are always wrong. A wife has the right to persecute her husband for an entire lifetime. Some professional golddiggers have even been known to attack their husband's relatives and seize his entire estate after he is dead. Most of the boys now in jail have nothing left from their former prosperous days except the gold fillings in their teeth," says Ecob.
Yet there's the other side of the case:
One who left his wife in temporary poverty in was Louis Sherwin, dramatic critic. He, too, spent months in Alimony jail.
Sherwin, at one time the fiance of Mary Miles Minter, motion picture actress, was put into jail by Ann Winsor Sherwin in 1924 after she and her children and been evicted by a court order- from an old Long Island mill in which she, was living. Sherwin made the most of his time in jail and pounded away at nis typewriter. Nowadays writers are not allowed to use their typewriters in jail because it disturbs the other alimonyites.
Warden Kane takes care of "the boys" at Alimony jail in 37th st.
He declares he knows a married man from a bachelor by sight. One out of three of the inmates are from the upper strata, he says. Some of the men enter voluntarily. When their wives receive no money, the women grow less truculent. The average stay of a "guest" is from a week to a month, I although, of course, some stay much longer.
Of the latter is Samuel W. Reid, northern California s alimony martyr.
He stayed in jail at Willows, Cal., for more than three years rather than pay his wife $20 a month for the support of a child. He offered twice to care for the child if the daughter were put into ' the custody of some one other than his wife. The court refused.
"I will stay in jail rather than yield to conditions repugnant to me," he said. And stay he did. Now his wife is remarried and is willing to let the payments lapse.
California now has an amendment to the code which awards alimony to husbands. Since the amendment has been passed, two women have been cited for contempt of court and in order to es cape jail sentences were forced to pay their back alimony. Which the men call merely "tit for tat."
Strangely enough, a woman is the chief crusader in the battle against the alimony system in Illinois.
She is Mrs. Bessie E. Cooley, second wife of V. P. Cooley, president of the Alimony club of Illinois. She gives all of her time, when she isn't assisting her husband in his Chicago dental practice to helping rehabilitate men whose only crime was the inability to pay alimony.
"A respectable citizen having no criminal record comes out of jail a broken and embittered man with but one thought that of revenge against the social order or system which makes it legally possible to crush him," she says. "Hellimony is more like it."
"Many wives cause trouble," says Warden Kane, "when they find that their mates are happily remarried. The Alimony club members don't think much of wives unless they are second wives," he said.
And sometimes not then.
There is the much married Conway Tearle of stage, screen and alimony court.
Tearle has been married thrice. From 1912 to 1921 he paid $25 each week to his first wife, Josephine Park Tearle. In 1921 the amount was raised to $75 weekly. His second wife, to whom he was sending $55 each week, remarried and dropped her claims.
But Mrs. Josephine Park Tearle was and is persistent. In 1928 she attempted to have the $75 weekly raised 1,000 percent, to $750 weekly. Simultaneously, Tearle attempted to have the sum relowered to $25 weekly. Mrs. Tearle won $100 a week.
The first sixteen weeks he was delinquent $1,653.
The Tearle's alimony troubles will probably be heard from again. Tearle's present wife, Adele Rowland, has stood by him for a decade.
One who has been just one jump ahead of the jail and may yet see the inside of it, according to the missus' promises, is Hugh McQuillan, baseball pitcher. Six times he paid his wife, Nellie, in the nick O- time. On the seventh occasion he was held in contempt of court. If he enters New York state without paying his arrears he is liable to be committed to jail.
Among the women Ecob has met in his alimony war are:
A woman who had her husband arrested while he was attending a funeral. One who had her husband arrested while he was a patient in a hospital. One who had two husbands in jail. One who persuaded her second husband to collect alimony from her first spouse. One who threw her husband into jail so that she might live with her boy friend unannoyed. And another who refused alimony and then had her husband jailed for not paying it.
[Ruth Reynolds, “It May Be True That Woman Pays, but It’s Man Who Goes to Jail,” Sunday News (New York, N. Y.), Apr. 14, 1929, P. 44]
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