Ottilie

In Hamburg, Germany, Ottilie Stufmann. daughter of a university professor, told George Umbach last year she would marry him. He left for the U. S. to make his fortune, found no job. Last September Ottilie followed him to Manhattan, married him. George got a room in The Bronx by working as a janitor. A child was born, died of malnutrition. Then George lost his janitor's job. Because he was an alien illegally in the U. S., he could not apply for relief. The couple moved to the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River, where they went on starving. They rigged up a tent, pitched it each night in Palisades Interstate Park, struck it at dawn to avoid arrest for vagrancy. George picked up odd jobs. When the tent began to fall apart and bad weather set in last week, the Umbachs moved to a 4-ft. cement culvert that drains rainwater from the Palisades slopes into the Hudson.

One rainy day last week George stood at the culvert's entrance, staring gloomily at the trickles draining into his culvert home. Ottilie was housekeeping inside the culvert. Suddenly a wall of water appeared coming fast down a drainage trench. It roared past George, swept up Ottilie, smashed her against a curve in the culvert, carried her on to the screen at the culvert's end. Police found her body, every bone broken. Said George: "I've wept so much in two years I have no tears left."

Fortune On Manhattan's East Side, a rumor of an uncle who had died six years ago in South Africa leaving a $17,000,000 fortune burst on the tenement home of Abraham Starr, 58, impecunious Polish-Jewish ironworker, his wife Leah, his seven grown children and brood of grandchildren. The facts were that a Montreal lawyer had seen in the hands of a stranger a Polish newspaper listing the will of one Harry Koslack or Kozack who had bequeathed at least $1,000,000, maybe $6,000,000, to his sister who had married a man named Stareselsky. There were Starrs in Montreal who had changed their name from Stareselsky, brothers and sisters of Abraham Starr in Manhattan. Their mother's name had been Koslack and one of her brothers had gone to South Africa. It looked good to the lawyer, to the Montreal Starrs, to Abraham Starr, to the newspapers. But by that time the stranger had disappeared with his Polish newspaper.

Over the Manhattan Starrs' little flat and blacksmith shop swarmed a scourge of salesmen. Mother & Father Starr protested, "We still work until we get the cash. . . . Then, maybe mama and I go to Palestine like all good Jews want to do."

Finally a South African law firm cabled that a man named Kushlick had died in 1929, leaving his wife and five children $6,000.

Said Mother Starr: "Now I can get some sleep."

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