Showing posts with label Illinois divorce laws. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Illinois divorce laws. Show all posts

19. The Morenus Marriage Ends

 "She Said She Would Rather Live By Herself"


Cover from a pulp fiction novel, 1948. Source

The biggest event for Nan in 1947 was her divorce from Richard Morenus. Their divorce hearing took place on June 19, 1947 at the Superior Court of Cook County before Judge Edwin A. Robson. Richard, the plaintiff, was represented by lawyer Ralph C. Blaha; M. G. Kaufman appeared for Nan, the defendant.

Nan did not attend the hearing. In Illinois in 1947 “a divorce decree was granted to any spouse who provided the necessary evidence to prove the other spouse guilty of an act that constituted a legal ground for the dissolution of marriage,” history scholar Katherine L. Caldwell explains. “Divorces could only be granted to an ‘innocent’ party, so if it were determined that both spouses had sufficient grounds for divorce, no divorce was possible.” [I know - Catch 22.]

One of the many grounds allowed by Illinois law was “willful desertion without reasonable cause for over a year,” and one year’s residence in the state was required before a divorce petition could be filed. The legal process required an adversarial form of complaint in which the plaintiff had to make formal charges against the defendant in open court. Because most couples separated and got a lawyer to negotiate the settlement prior to going to court, uncontested or default cases were the norm, and one party – the defendant – did not usually appear in court. [Source: Caldwell, Katherine L. “Not Ozzie and Harriet: Postwar Divorce and the American Liberal Welfare State.” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–53.]

Richard Testifies

Excerpt from Richard's testimony on June 19, 1947. Certificate of Proceedings, Superior Court of Cook County, Illinois.

Excerpt from Richard's testimony on June 19, 1947. Certificate of Proceedings, Superior Court of Cook County, Illinois.
 

Richard testified on his own behalf, with his lawyer asking the questions. He claimed that he had been living in Cook County since 1928. When asked about the circumstances leading up to his separation from Nan on February 22, 1946, Richard stated, “It was necessary for me to make a business trip and be away for a considerable length of time and she refused to accompany me and said she would rather live by herself.” He went on to describe where they were living in Sioux Lookout. “Living as we were it would be impossible for her to live alone,” he testified. “If I stayed there it would mean giving up my business so we could live there. I was living on an island and we were living alone and there was no one there to take care of the heat but myself and she couldn’t possible live there alone. She said, ‘You live your life and I will live mine’ and she took a place to live and we lived separate since.”

Kaufman, Nan’s lawyer, asked only three questions of Richard. When asked if he had attempted to get Nan to come back to the United States with him, Richard answered yes. “She refused to come back?” Kaufman asked, to which Richard again answered in the affirmative. “You haven’t lived with her since then?” No, replied Richard. Blaha interjected, “He is a writer and he travels to get the scene of his stories.”

Witness Testimony

A deposition by Frank Ross, taken on Richard’s behalf in Toronto on June 6, 1947, was then presented to Judge Robson. Ross, a resident of Toronto, said he had known the Morenuses for a year and a half. He claimed he had observed them living together, stating that Richard gave Nan “all attention and all affection that a husband could give a wife.” Ross said Richard had left Sioux Lookout in about August 1946 to take a job in Chicago. “I was advised by the husband that the wife refused to accompany him,” he testified. “If Mrs. Morenus deserted Mr. Morenus,” Ross was asked, “will you state the time, place and other facts of circumstances known to you which attended such desertion.” Ross replied, “The wife refused, as I am advised, to accompany the husband to Chicago in 1946. I was advised by the husband that he had reason to believe that the wife had been unfaithful to him.” (My emphasis.) Ross concluded his deposition by stating that Nan was still living in Sioux Lookout.

Excerpt from the deposition of Frank Ross June 6, 1947. Certificate of Proceedings, Superior Court of Cook County.

The Morenus divorce hearing took about 15 minutes. As with all Chicago divorce cases of the day, Judge Robson only had the information presented to him by both parties. He had no way of ascertaining whether or not that information was true. “The ritualized, perjurious testimony made a mockery of [a judge's] courtroom,” Caldwell writes (1998), “and the important decisions about the divorce itself and particularly the post-divorce finances were kept out of their control.” Frustrated judges tended to simply ratify whatever settlement agreement had been negotiated before the hearing. Judge Robson, who soon went on to lobby for the reform of Illinois divorce laws, issued a divorce decree to the Morenuses.

Divorce Decree

The divorce decree from the Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois is dated June 27 of that year - immediately prior to Nan's departure in July on her canoe expedition with Joe. According to the decree, Nan was given due notice of the suit. Richard had apparently been living in the State of Illinois for over a year preceding the divorce filing. He claimed that "during all the time he lived and cohabited with the said defendant, plaintiff conducted and demeaned himself as a true, kind and affectionate husband." Richard claimed that Nan had left him on February 22, 1946 and had never returned.


Decree for Divorce, June 27, 1947. Source: Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois.
 

On June 27, 1947, Richard and Nan's divorce was official. Richard's fifth marriage was over, and he was already living with Nora Smith in Escanada, Illinois. They married on October 1, 1948 in Minnesota. 

As for Nan, I have not yet been able to determine her whereabouts from August of 1947 until she turned up in northern Saskatchewan in the autumn of 1948. Nan's friend, 94-year-old Dorothy Maskarine told me in a phone call (June 18, 2021) that she heard Nan went to Edmonton, Alberta, possibly with a man named Joe. Bob Lee writes that Nan had gone to Squamish, BC. [Source: The North Called Softly, Prince Albert, SK. Unpublished, 1977.]

One thing is clear, however. Nan was determined to become a prospector.

 

NEXT: Nan the Writer, Part 2: "The Woman's Bushed!" - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: Road to Divorce - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

 

©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.

 


18. Road to Divorce

Wilful Desertion

Early in 1946 Nan's marriage to Richard Morenus was over. According to their divorce decree of June 1947 (see next post), Nan had "wilfully deserted and absented herself" from Richard "without any reasonable cause and without fault on his part" since the day of February 22, 1946. To obtain a divorce in the State of Illinois in those years, one of the grounds was "willful desertion without reasonable cause for over a year." Other legal grounds included adultery, bigamy, habitual drunkenness, extreme cruelty, attempt to murder a spouse, or infection of spouse by venereal disease. Nan and Richard went for the least humiliating grounds for divorce - wilful desertion. To achieve that, they had to live apart for over a year. In addition, one year’s residence in the state of Illinois was required by husband and/or wife before a divorce petition could be filed. Richard moved to Chicago.

On September 26, 1946, Richard, living in Chicago, sold his interest in their beloved island on Abram Lake, Ontario to Nan for a dollar. This was likely done as a property settlement in preparation for their divorce. Ironically, Richard's Maclean's article "From Broadway to Bush," in which he praises Nan's virtues as an outdoors woman, had been published only 25 days earlier.

 

Land transfer from Richard to Nan, #38363 dated September 26, 1946. Source: Ontario Land Titles Office, Kenora, Ontario.

On March 24, 1947, Nan sold the island to Ernest and Marion Linton of Chicago for $7500. Richard had sold his interest in the island to Nan for one dollar just six months earlier, so she made a tidy profit on the land sale. It is likely that Richard facilitated this sale as a way of ensuring Nan was looked after financially after their divorce.

After this land sale, Nan lived - for a short time, at least - in Sioux Lookout. Perhaps the Lintons allowed Nan to keep a place on the island for her own use. Perhaps she stayed in one of the 32 resident rooms at the Sioux Lookout YWCA. Testimony from the witness in the Morenus' divorce, recorded on June 6, 1947, states that Nan had been residing in Sioux Lookout "on the last occasion I saw her which was about a month ago." That timeline does not jive well with what I do know about Nan's whereabouts. Unless her piece "The Woman's Bushed!" for Maclean's magazine is pure fiction, in the spring of 1947 Nan was away for several weeks on a prospecting expedition.

Nan is Hospitalized Again

Nan continued to live in northern Ontario on her own throughout 1946 and at least part of 1947. On February 21, 1947, she was admitted to Sioux Lookout Hospital (now called the Meno Ya Win Health Centre) for eight days. The hospital's Health Records Department was only able to locate her admission record which indicates that her physician was Dr. Bell. Her patient chart was not located, or else the hospital decided not to tell me about it. 

It is possible that Nan had undergone further treatments for her chronic abdominal problems - perhaps even another emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer. In her article in Maclean's called "The Woman's Bushed" (August 15, 1947), she mentions her long convalescence after "months of fever, pain and the smothering confinement of sickness." I asked Nan's friend, 94-year-old Dorothy Maskerine, if she knew why Nan was hospitalized in 1947. "I can't tell you that," Dorothy quickly replied. I got the feeling Dorothy knows, or at least she knows what the rumour mill in Sioux Lookout said. [Source: Telephone call to Dorothy Maskerine, Dryden, Ontario, June 18, 2021.]

In his book Crazy White Man, Richard writes that, at some point prior to 1947, he went into the hospital at Sioux Lookout for surgery to repair a torn peritoneum. He was also under the care of Dr. Bell whom he called "the bush doctor." I checked but there is no record of Richard ever having been admitted to the Sioux Lookout Hospital. 

The Sioux Lookout General Hospital was built in 1922 and operated until 1951 when a new hospital was built.

Richard describes the 16-bed hospital as a frame building about the size of a large, two-story house that had two wards on the first floor - one for white male patients and the other for Indians. (Nan writes in her Maclean's article about Jim Chief that a "makeshift ward to handle Indian cases was set up on a winterized porch" of the hospital.) The second floor held the operating rooms, wards for female white patients including a maternity ward, and two private rooms, one of which Richard allegedly stayed in. 

Alarmingly by today's standards, Dr. Bell told Richard that his experiences with the Indian patients, segregated in a separate ward, did not include maternity cases. “During the twenty odd years I’ve been here in the bush, I guess I’ve delivered about five thousand babies and not a single one of them an Indian,” Dr Bell told him. “The squaw just goes into the woods and has a baby and, with that perfectly normal function accomplished, goes back to her work.”

A Big Adventure

About a month or so after Nan was released from hospital - perhaps April - and while she was still recovering from her illness, Nan embarked on a major adventure with a man she refers to only as "Joe." (I asked Dorothy Maskerine if she knew who Joe was. "Everyone knew Joe," she replied in our phone conversation of June 18, 2021. "He just kind of turned up in Sioux Lookout and hung out at the Hudson's Bay Company store." Dorothy is going to try and find out Joe's last name for me.)

The twosome took a 240-kilometre, 20-portage canoe trip in search of high-grade ore. It was summer and she was excited to get back into the bush and do some prospecting, her latest passion. They did not find the high-grade vein they were prospecting for, and when the excursion was over Nan was reluctant to return to Abram Lake. "I had caught prospecting fever," Nan writes in her article "The Woman's Bushed!" for Maclean's magazine (August 15, 1947). "The stern, inhospitable region fascinated me and some day I meant to return." [See post Nan the Writer, Part 2: "The Woman's Bushed" HERE]  

Nan had another reason for not wanting to return to Abram Lake. Her marriage to Richard was over. He was living in Chicago - and by the summer of 1947 he was with another woman. Nan was living - possibly alone - in Sioux Lookout.

 

NEXT: The Morenus Marriage Ends - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: Tension in the Bush - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

 

©Joan Champ. All rights reserved.