Smart Spencers

Dr. Richard Spencer, the defendant, was represented in Chicago Criminal Court last week by his portrait and his wife. "I know the defendant," chattered white-haired Attorney Mary Belle Spencer. "I have been married to him all my life. It seems a lifetime anyway. He didn't come to court because he has no use for courts. . . ."

After handing the jury a portrait of her shrinking husband in army uniform, Mrs. Spencer got down to the business of explaining why their two daughters, Mary Belle Jr., 16, and Victoria, 14, had never been to school before last autumn. That the Spencer girls have indeed been lifelong truants is a fact which their mother has long made familiar to most Chicago newsreaders, but only recently to the school department of suburban Bloom Township. When Attorney Spencer had Fandancer Sally Rand arrested for indecent exposure in 1934, newshawks showed her a picture of her own shapely daughters in a bathing beauty contest (see cut) elicited this response: "My girls must never be repressed. Their minds must not be filled with other people's ideas. Neither has ever been to school. They are self-educated and they know everything. I don't know how they learned to read." (TIME, Sept. 10, 1934.) Last summer Mary Belle Spencer Jr was found lying unconscious beside outer Lake Shore Drive in brassiere and short at 2 a. m. Revived, she explained that she had fallen off a horse which she frequently rode in brassiere and shorts at 2 a. m. Since a lower court ordered the Spencer girls to school, their prosperous parent have sent them to fashionable Starret School. Last week's case, which concerned only the past truancy of Mary Belle, now past school age, came to Criminal Court on the Spencers' appeal. As an attorney for her husband, Mrs. Spencer put her daughter on the stand. Irrepressible Mary Belle testified that: 1) her father feared epidemics of smallpox and measles in the neighborhood school; 2) the pupils there were immoral and obscene. The judge shushed her when she started to name names.

It took the jury all night to agree. In the morning they found Dr. Spencer not guilty, privately congratulated the Spencers on a splendid job of educating their daughters."

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