OCR Text |
Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Widow Curses Legacy That Kills Faith of a Lifetime By BILLY ROSE Whenever an out-of-towner says, "What have you got in New York that we haven't got in Punxsutawney?" I throw a copy of the Manhattan Classified Phone Directory at him. On page 1067 listed under "Missing Heirs," is a man named Theodore W. Roth 'whose business it is to find money. I first heard of this gent on a radio program and this morning, in a mood to muse and meander, I stopped in to see him at his office on West 42nd Street. "Glad tn see von." said Mr. Rnth. 1 - "You don't happen to be related to a Sam Bramson of Paterson, do you?" "Not that I know of," I said. "Too bad," said Mr. Roth. "Bramson "Bram-son left a hundred thousand dollars and I'm trying to find a relative I can give it to." "Is there much unclaimed money lying around?" "About eight billion bil-lion dollars," said Mr. Roth, "mostly In forgotten bank accounts. stock going to all that trouble she wanted me to check and make sure her claim to the estate would be clear and undisputed. I, of course, turned the letter over to the police." DO YOU HAVE any trouble collecting col-lecting your fees?" I asked. "As a rule," said the climber of family trees, "the heirs I turn up are pretty grateful. There have been cases, of course, where the only thanks I got was a dirty look." "As for instance?" "Well." said Mr. Roth, "there was the time a widow refused to believe me when I told her I had located a twelve-thousand-dollar bank account left by her husband. I finally convinced her to sign the necessary papers, but when I handed her the twelve thousand, she said, 'I curse the day I ever met you and I curse this money too.' "It turned out she had always loved her husband and was devoted to his memory, despite the fact that their life together had been a hard one. He had always pleaded poverty pover-ty when she needed a dress or a new pair of stockings, and she had believed him. Now that she saw him for what he was, she was understandably under-standably bitter. "Sure, twelve thousand dollars was a lot of money, but it had destroyed de-stroyed the faith of a lifetime " six of them have been thrown into jail, a couple have committed suicide, sui-cide, and several lawyers have been disbarred for phonying up evidence. One of the applicants was Adolph Hitler who argued that the next of kin was a German citizen and that the money should be sent to the Fatherland. I'm happy to. report he didn't get a dime." "You must meet a lot of screwballs screw-balls in your profession," I said. Mr. Roth dug into his desk and brought out a letter. It was from a woman in Massachusetts who claimed that one of her ancestors ances-tors had deeded -a cranberry bog to an Indian squaw, but that the deed was faulty and she wanted the property back. The bog, she explained, is now known as Manhattan Man-hattan Island. "Last year," Mr. Roth went on, "I got one that was even wackier! A girl in Texas wrote in to say that only a second cousin stood between her and a chunk of oil land worth a million dollars. She was planning to murder her kinsman, but before held in escrow, un- Billy Rose collected insurance policies and inheritances in-heritances nobody has claimed." "WHAT'S THE biggest case you ever worked on?" I asked. "The Garrett case in Philadelphia," Philadel-phia," said Mr. Roth. "Back in 1930 a lady named Henrietta Edwina Garrett died and left property worth f?rty million dollars. So far over six tVmsand people have claimed it, |