Sue Thy Neighbor

MANNERS & MORALS

Once Mrs. Alice Fox and Mrs. Katherine Rollo were friendly next-door neighbors, but the friendship didn't last. They started a spite quarrel for reasons that their neighbors in the Long Hill housing development in Waterbury, Conn, never did get clear. The showdown came when Mrs. Fox ran outside to tell Mrs. Rollo a thing or two and, to punctuate her lecture, kicked her in the stomach.

With the air of a woman who felt it was worth it, 32-year-old Alice Fox paid a $25 fine in Waterbury police court for breaching the peace. But she wasn't to get off that easily. Katherine Rollo, who had to spend six days in the hospital from the kicking, filed a civil damages suit and won a $1,200 judgment from her neighbor. She refused to accept payment of $2 a week: she wasn't going to wait any 1/2 years to collect, she said.

Out of Connecticut's colonial past, Mrs. Rollo and her lawyers extracted a Dickensian statute known as the Body Execution Law. Under that law, she had Mrs. Fox locked up in New Haven County jail to serve one day for every unpaid dollar of the judgment; she had to pay $10 a week to the county for the prisoner's room & board. Mrs. Rollo was losing money on it, but that didn't stop her. She wasn't moved by the sight of Mrs. Fox's husband trying to take care of the Foxes' three young children; in fact, every time she saw a member of the Fox family, she would break into The Prisoner's Song.

After Mrs. Fox had been in jail for 47 days of what might have become a 1,200-day term, she took advantage of an old Connecticut law herself. She took the Poor Debtor's Oath, under which a person swearing to less than $17 in assets may escape jail for unpaid judgments. This week Alice Fox returned to her family and her old neighborhood. What did she think of Neighbor Rollo now? "I will not mention her name!"

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