On the Main Line

Philadelphia is not a slow town. It is big, rich, social. It drinks hard, plays hard. Especially on its socialite Main Line northwest of the city--in Radnor, Haverford, Merion, Ardmore, Bryn Mawr --where live the people who appear in the Sunday society supplements, is life regarded as a cocktail free to all who would drink. Such gay communities as socialite Philadelphia are ripe for tragedy. Last week tragedy appeared there.

To Green Hills Farms, a big, fashionable apartment hotel near city limits, went Francis A. Donaldson III, a muscular youth of 25 with considerable social eclat. He went there to try to settle a long quarrel with Horace Allen, a retired and impoverished woolen goods manufacturer, and his son Edward, 23, one of the ablest gentlemen riders in the East. Both the Donaldsons and the Aliens knew that young Donaldson and Rose Allen, 18, were lovers. Donaldson and her brother had been schoolmates at Haverford and bitterly disliked each other. As the altercation grew heated, Father Allen said afterwards. Francis knocked down Edward. Edward picked himself up, drove five miles to a friend's house for his shotgun. When he came back he deliberately blew a large hole in young Donaldson's stomach.

Edward was arrested for murder. Rose left home vowing never again to see her father or her lover's murderer--her brother. Then she changed her mind, visited Edward in jail, said: "I am here because I love my brother." To the police the elder Allen told of Mrs. Allen's deathbed request to break up her daughter's alliance, declared that pugnacious Francis Donaldson had previously knocked out two of his younger son William's teeth, had even punched his (Father Allen's) face in similar quarrels. He also said that the Donaldson family had refused to let their son make an honest woman of Rose.

The Donaldsons buried their boy, denied outright that they had thwarted the marriage. Said they: "A brutal and premeditated murder cannot be exploited by the futile attempt of a badly advised and distracted father who is trying to save his son by hiding him behind the skirt of a daughter whose character the father himself destroyed."

Philadelphia, sobered by death, waited breathlessly for the trial to begin. Because Edward Allen taught his children to ride, high-priced Criminal Lawyer John R. K. Scott prepared to undertake the defense, presumably on "unwritten law" grounds.

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