Helping the Widows

National remorse over the Kennedy assassination helped to make Mrs. J. D. Tippit the best cared-for policeman's widow in U.S. history. After the President's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot Patrolman Tippit in Dallas, Mrs. Tippit received $650,000 from 40,000 donors across the nation.* Last year 88 other U.S. policemen were killed in the line of duty. What of their widows and children?

Until recently, most Americans merely read about the murders of policemen and felt sorry. Now there is a growing movement called the "Hundred Clubs" for expressing the citizen's condolences and appreciation in a more meaningful and a more helpful way.

The idea can be traced to Detroit Car Dealer William M. Packer, who in 1950 dunned 100 friends for $100 apiece to aid the widow and newborn child of a murdered rookie patrolman. That started what is now a 453-member Detroit Hundred Club, with annual dues of $150 and a treasury of more than $300,000. So far, the club has given 77 widows and their children $321,000 for everything from unpaid mortgages to scholarships and cash for unpaid bills. It covers Michigan state troopers as well as policemen and firemen in Detroit and 50 nearby communities.

Packer's idea has been copied in 18 other cities as diverse as Cleveland, Memphis, Louisville, Indianapolis, Akron, New York and Orlando, Fla., though not yet in Dallas. Last month it was taken to Phoenix by a newly arrived charter member of the Detroit club. Just eight days after 100 citizens started the Phoenix Hundred Club, it handed its first $1,000 check to Mrs. Herman Nofs, widow of a 71-year-old deputy marshal who was murdered by his own gun in a scuffle with teen-age burglars in nearby Youngstown, Ariz. Deputy Nofs's death stirred such a response that the Phoenix Club may now increase membership to 350 and already has plans to pay life insurance premiums for all local policemen and firemen, hopes eventually to extend coverage to every lawman in Arizona. Grim proof that it is needed came once again last week: a 48-year-old Phoenix sheriff's lieutenant was killed during a gunfight, leaving a wife and three children--the latest beneficiaries of the Hundred Club.

*She has put half the money into a trust fund for her three children, refuses to say what she has done with the other half. The only signs of her new affluence are a new car and color TV set.

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