Los Angeles, CA–A casual, passing by reference to an alimony/child support injustice from the 1960s in a recent Los Angeles Times obituary. The subject is former Times reporter Ted Thackrey Jr.
Sean Thackrey, his cousin, writes:
Ted was my cousin, much beloved in a sort of irritable way by myself and by my beloved and sort of irritable newspapering family (my father, Eugene, also worked for the Times)…[he was] a Korean war veteran, and…the experience had traumatized him apparently beyond cure, or at least beyond any cure available to him; in other words, it simply marked him in some way he never got over…
But I only knew him as he was a bit later, mostly in the early 60’s. One of my favorite memories of him was a visit, unannounced & when I was perhaps 20, to his then apartment in Venice or Manhattan Beach, or wherever it was (he tended to move around).When I knocked, I could see through the window that he was intent on a strange ritual involving paper cards with notes written on them; just as I’d come to the door he’d thrown a handful of these cards up into the air, and they’d settled on the carpet. He was delighted to see me, so forth and so on; we talked for a bit about the obvious family trivia; then I gestured at the cards on the floor, & asked what in the name of hell he was up to.
He explained that he had so many alimony and child support payments past due, while his salary at the Times hardly paid for the rent, that he’d taken [outside work]…[italics added]
Why should any father ever be in such a situation?
The full Los Angeles Times obituary is here.