"It Was Him"

Pert, brown-eyed Joyce Goodman was a WAVE stationed at the San Diego naval base when she met Nolan Holdridge, a parachute rigger, early in 1945. Except for occasional asthma attacks, Joyce was a healthy young woman who rarely missed a day of duty driving a station wagon. While going out with Holdridge, she noticed a red rash on her wrists, but thought little of it. In 1946 they were married.

Soon the rash spread up Joyce's arms and down her body. The itching was almost unbearable. When Holdridge was shipped overseas, her rash went away. When he came back, so did the rash. Soon, on her way to work as a telephone operator in San Francisco, Joyce Holdridge was hiding behind a newspaper on the bus, wearing dark glasses to cover her swollen eyes, dressing in long-sleeved, high-necked blouses. In the evenings and on days off she never left the house, says she, because "I looked so terrible."

At the University of California clinic, all medication failed. Her condition was diagnosed as atopic dermatitis--or inflammation of the skin due to some abnormal sensitivity. What sensitivity, the doctors did not know. Joyce Holdridge was put to bed for two weeks at Fort Miley Veterans' Hospital, and the rash vanished. Back with her husband, it returned. "By this time," she says, "we knew it was him."

Allergy tests made with husband, Holdridge's hair oil, hair, dandruff and clothing proved nothing. But Psychiatrist Gordon Dayton found the explanation. During interviews, Joyce Holdridge became jittery and itchy, just from talking about her husband.

Still insisting that she loved her husband, Joyce decided that she had to part from him forever to get her health back. Refusing to charge mental cruelty ("He was a fine boy and a wonderful husband"), she sued for divorce on the ground that she was allergic to her husband. In Los Angeles, Superior Judge Ray Brockmann was afraid that to grant a divorce on such a ground would set a ticklish precedent.

Last week Joyce's marriage had been annulled on the ground that she was unable to perform her wifely duties. Said the judge: "Further contact with her husband is medically contraindicated."

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