Two weeks after her wedding, a twenty-one-year-old woman is sitting in the Indianapolis city jail. She sits down for an interview with a reporter. The reporter asks if she has any advice for anyone else in her situation.
Her advice is pretty simple. When your husband plans a honeymoon, make sure he owns the car.
This is Hidden Lens History. Every day I open the newspapers from exactly 100 years ago, find the story worth sharing, and follow the paper trail as far as I can.
I found today’s story in the Indianapolis Times, September 16th, 1926.
The newspaper images in this story link to Newspapers.com. If you subscribe through these links, I may earn a commission.
The headline is “JAIL BRIDE ON WEDDING TRIP HERE,”
Her picture below the headline looks like it could be a mugshot, or a staged professional headshot. She’s looking straight into the camera, hair bobbed and waved, wearing a string of pearls around her neck and what looks like a dark dress with a wide collar.
Her name is Emma Catherine Jenkins. She’s twenty-one, from Louisville, Kentucky. Two weeks earlier she married twenty-two year old Nelson Jenkins. She calls him John. They’re both in jail, charged as fugitives with what the paper calls “vehicle taking.” The police say the car they were in was stolen at New Albany, Indiana.
And she tells a great story.
First, they print her advice to newlyweds. She says:
“When your new husband gets the idea of stealing an auto for cheaper transportation, discourage him, don’t help.”
“I got married, expecting to be happy, because I am in love and thought I was going to go big. Here I am in jail and John is over there, and it doesn’t look like either one of us is going to go very big for a while, does it?”
Then they print how it happened. They had been married two weeks earlier in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Since then they had been living in cheap, temporary housing. Here’s how she described it.
“John thought of getting a job at New Albany, Ind., and on Tuesday went there. We stayed at a hotel there with $5 left in our treasury. We asked the hotel manager to be allowed to sit on the front porch until the 1:30 a.m. train and while there another of the guests drove up and parked his car.”
Nothing wrong so far. But then then they started to admire the car of the man who just pulled in. And they also noticed the man also left his keys in the car. She recalls:
“’Couldn’t we travel swell in that?’ John said to me. I agreed so heartily that we were soon on our way, as the key was in the car and all we had to do was step on the starter.”
Chalk it up to young love and desperation at this point. But that’s when it goes from playful to down right callous. She said,
“When we arrived here we told his brother it was our car. We stole a license plate at Fifteenth St. and Senate Ave., hid the old ones behind a pole and threw the title card away.”
“We were planning to drive to Chicago today where John has another brother. We had $2 left, just enough to buy gasoline.”
A Sergeant O’Connor and his squad found them both at two in the morning, asleep in the car. She goes on to say,
“We had decided to catch a little sleep and I was in the back seat. When I awoke three big bluecoats were standing about the car.”
“Oh boy, that isn’t the grandest feeling in the world either.”
“John told them it was our car. I remained quiet, but you know you can’t get anywhere in this world not telling the truth so I up and told them the whole story.”
Which makes me wonder whether the police even knew about the stolen car. Maybe they were just checking on a couple asleep in a parked car at two in the morning, and she volunteered the rest. Her story continues.
“Now John wants me to let him take all the blame and be free and then come and see him while he is serving time, but how can I do that. I might just as well be in jail with him, and that is that.”
And here’s how the column ends. She says,
“I’ll tell every girl in the world that when she gets married, to see that her husband has a job or gets one. Either travel first class or not at all.”
“Honeymoons in jail don’t go so big, I’ll tell the world.”
I don’t know what the trial did to them, whether she served any time, or whether or not this was Nelson’s last run-in with the law. A quick search for their names didn’t immediately result in anyting. If somebody else wants to go looking, there’s a marriage at Jeffersonville, Indiana in late August or early September of 1926, and a Marion County booking and court docket that fall.
See you tomorrow - Chris
Source
The Indianapolis Times, September 16, 1926, page 39. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.