NEWS CLIPPING

by Rob Lopresti

Yesterday, for the second time, we featured a chapter of The Man In Court by Frederic DeWitt Wells. Just for kicks and giggles I decided to see if I could find out any more about the man. I found one story that tells us a bit about life in the Good Old Days.

In 1913 Wells wrote a letter to the New York Times about a case that appeared before him as magistrate of the Ninth District Municipal Court, Three years earlier a woman named Shriver had stored two trunks containing her family’s belongings in a storage warehouse. A month later she became ill and wound up in the hospital for the insane on Ward Island. Her only relative, daughter Mary Shriver, paid fifty cents a month for the next two years to keep up the fee on the storage. As the Times reported: “All of her worldly possessions were in the trunks, but because of the fact that they were stored in her mother’s name and because of the latter’s mental condition, there was no way in which to obtain their release. She sought relief in the courts, with the result that, through the law’s delays, she lost her employment and her condition has been rendered even more precarious.”

Justice Wells, our hero, looked into the case. “The young woman is honest, industrious, and absolutely respectable,” he said. “She felt that the courts and the law were against her, and that she would be compelled to pay 50 cents a month for years to come or else surrender all claim to her property and that of her mother.” He reported in his letter that the owner of the storage unit was willing to release the trunks only if someone gave him a $200 bond against possible liability.

An anonymous reader of the Times came up with the $200, and Mary Schriver presumably got her goods back. There is, alas, no follow-up to tell us the rest of the story. That’s the peril of nonfiction; no tidy endings.

One final tidbit. Two months after the stock market crash in 1929 Justice Frederic DeWitt Wells was hit by a car in Manhattan and died at age 56. Thanks to the wonders of the written word and the World Wide Web we can still read his thoughts and deeds eighty years later.

Another thread from the web

I found the two stories about Wells by going to the New York Times website and using their free search box which allows you to hunt through the newspaper all the way back to 1851. The very early stuff is free full-text, like the 1913 article. But to read the whole 1929 article, I would have had to pay.