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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[2481-11/23/21]
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