Mrs. Green's Secret

Like many another adopted child, Harold Alfred Segur often wondered: "Who am I? Who are my parents? What is my real name?" He got no clues from his foster mother, Mrs. Mary Baker, a Boston woman who raised him from infancy. But he had a queer notion that his father was big, handsome Dr. Willard B. Segur, who married Mrs. Baker when Harold was seven. The doctor treated Harold better than most men treat their adopted sons. As a youth in Enfield, Mass., Harold often thought the doctor talked to him as though they were of the same flesh & blood.

The doctor was an attractive man, and had been a gay blade as a youth. He had played football at Princeton, loved beer, singing, the sound of mandolins; during his years at Dartmouth College medical school he had written the famed Dartmouth Song. But Harold Segur never learned anything about the doctor to substantiate his sense of kinship. When he was 21 the doctor showed him his adoption papers. They read: parents unknown.

Anonymity. Harold Segur grew up, gradually stopped worrying about who his parents were. He married, had four sons of his own, finally became a grandfather. At 58 he was a mild, grey-haired, paunchy, average man. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, had an average job (employment manager for a branch of the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Co.), lived in an average frame house in an average Worcester, Mass, neighborhood.

Last week his peaceful world blew up with a gaudy and scandalous bang. A deposition filed before a New York surrogate by a Manhattan attorney named Raymond T. Armbruster told a startling story. Armbruster's story: two months before her death last summer, a rich, British-born, Park Avenue socialite named Mrs. Mabel Seymour Greer told him of a girlhood indiscretion. She had borne a child out of wedlock in Boston more than half a century before. The father: Dr. Willard B. Segur. In Armbruster's opinion her child and only heir was the doctor's adopted son, Harold Alfred Segur.

Another witness turned up--Mrs. Greer's maid, a middle-aged woman named Annie Jackson. Mrs. Greer had confided in her too, had talked about her son periodically for 15 years. "She told me she had the feeling that he might come and see her," said the maid. "Oh, she was very anxious. She said she knew he was alive and had been taken care of by his father."

"If I Had Known." Harold Segur's first emotions we're bewilderment and pity. Cried he: "I never heard of Mrs. Greer. If I had only known, I would have hurried to her."

But he soon began to feel as though he were living under a magnifying glass. The tabloid New York Daily News began referring to him as a Love Child. The tabloid Daily Mirror, disregarding facts, made up a raffish story of its own. It suggested that Mrs. Greer had been secretly married to the late George V of England, concluded that Harold Segur was probably the Duke of Windsor's half brother. Segur grew more & more confused.

Was he Mrs. Greer's son after all? She had died at 65. He was 58. Unless she had lied about her age the whole thing was impossible. Mrs. Greer had not named him in her will, had left the bulk of her fortune (estimated at between $300,000 and $500,000) to Harvard University. But if he was proved to be her only heir he would be legally entitled to half of it. If the will was proved invalid, he could have all of it.

At week's end, with newsmen hounding him, Harold Segur didn't seem to know what to think.

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