THE VERDICT -- Robert Gardner

Many moons ago, more moons than I want to remember, I attained a kind

of instant judicial immortality when I tried the then-famous case of

Spreckles vs. Spreckles.

Young Adolph Spreckles of the San Francisco sugar Spreckles was living

on Balboa Island with his good-looking wife, Kay, who, incidentally,

later became Mrs. Clark Gable. She was a beauty and a very, very nice

woman.

While she was still Mrs. Adolph Spreckles, a difference of opinion

arose between her and her husband. The police were called and, by some

bizarre miscarriage of justice probably brought on by the publicity

generated by the names attached to the case, Adolph Spreckles was charged

with assault with a deadly weapon, to wit, a slipper.

The case went before a magistrate who, overcome by the publicity

connected with the case, sustained the charge and bound the defendant

over for trial on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon -- the

slipper.

It came before me as the Superior Court trial judge. I immediately

called the attorneys into chambers and asked a very pertinent question:

“You don’t really want to try this turkey, do you?”

The publicity-happy deputy district attorney insisted that a dismissal

would be a miscarriage of justice, and so we went to trial. I think that

the high point of the trial was when the defense attorney held up before

the jury the slipper, which was, according to the prosecution, the deadly

weapon, and said, “Ladies and gentleman, this is the deadly weapon. The

only way it could be deadly would be if I tried to swallow it and

choked.”

Needles to say, Adolph Spreckles was acquitted of the charge of

assault with a deadly weapon.

A nice O’Henry touch to this tale is that after Adolph Spreckles was

released, he bought more than 300 T-shirts, which he distributed to all

of the prisoners with whom he had been in jail. The T-shirts bore a

message in large letters across the chest that read, “I served time in

the Orange County Jail with Adolph Spreckles.”

All of which proved that although Adolph Spreckles may have been

somewhat less than an ideal husband, he had a nice sense of humor.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge. His

column runs Tuesdays.