Battle for Hildy

After 20 months of hiding, the slight, balding clothing salesman made a mistake. He dickered with a Miami Beach car dealer and got a good trade-in on his battered '54 Oldsmobile. The auto dealer made a routine title check with Brookline, Mass., where the car had been bought. When the clothing salesman picked up his new Chevrolet, a Massachusetts state police lieutenant and a Miami cop arrested him. The charge: kidnaping.

Behind the charge against Melvin Bentley Ellis, 45, and his wife Frances, 37, looms a bitterly felt religious conflict: the Ellises are Jewish and Hildy McCoy, the freckled, honey-blonde first-grader they adopted as a ten-day-old baby six years ago, was born of an unmarried Roman Catholic mother.

Miami's Peace Justice Malvin Englander last week rejected a Massachusetts demand for $5,000 bail, released the Ellises in the custody of their attorney, pending an extradition fight. To reporters, meanwhile, the Ellises told the story of their struggle for Hildy.

Won't It Bother You? A few weeks after the Ellises took the first legal steps to adopt the baby privately (i.e., not through an adoption agency), Hildy's mother, Marjorie McCoy, then a nursing trainee, demanded that Hildy be taken from the Ellises and put in a Catholic institution for adoption by a Catholic family. She claimed she did not know until after she signed the adoption papers that the Ellises are Jewish (they say she knew). At no time did she say that she wanted to keep Hildy herself.

In September 1953 Probate Court Judge James F. Reynolds of Norfolk County ordered Hildy returned to Marjorie McCoy, on the basis of a Massachusetts law (several other states have similar statutes) which says that "when practicable," adopting parents should be of the sarne religion as the natural mother. An appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Court was denied in February 1955. That June Hildy's mother appeared with two social workers at the Ellises' Brookline home and demanded the child. "Hildy was terrified," Mrs. Ellis recalls. "I said to Miss McCoy, 'Won't it bother you that she will cry for me and for her daddy tonight if you take her?' "

The Ellises would not give Hildy up, but offered to rear her as a Catholic if they could keep her. They were turned down. In all, they made 22 appeals to the State Supreme Court, lost all of them.

Free to Choose? On June 15, 1955 Judge Reynolds gave the Ellises 48 hours to surrender Hildy. Frances Ellis took Hildy and went to Tuckahoe, N.Y., the first of several stops on an underground railroad manned by friends and relatives. Her husband followed. Together they moved to Levittown, Pa. (then left after Hildy was mentioned in a newspaper as a birthday-party guest), White Plains, N.Y., New York City, Thompsonville, Conn., Scarsdale, N.Y., and Portland, Me.

They arrived in Miami last May, determined to stay there and try to adopt Hildy under Florida law. Ellis, who had sold his Brookline dry-cleaning plant, took a $60-a-week job spotting clothes for a dry-cleaning firm, then found a better one covering Florida for two clothing firms. They entered Hildy in a private school, made no attempts to hide their identity. Of Hildy, Ellis says:

"She knows she is an adopted child. She knows there is something going on, but she doesn't know what. I don't understand how the religious difference could mean so much to some people. I try to lead a clean life and I have a deep and abiding faith in God. Through the last five years I have done a lot of praying to him. Hildy says grace--a nonsectarian grace she learned at school. On ceremonial days, I say a prayer in Hebrew and she lights the candles. But we haven't taken her to the temple. She is too young for that. She will be free to choose her religion when she is older."

More Sacrifices? While the Massachusetts press generally steered clear of commenting on the case, the Pilot, official newspaper of the Boston archdiocese, last week sharply questioned the fitness of Miami's Peace Justice Englander,*accused the Ellises of "trickery, delay, defiance, mendacity," and suggested that their "propaganda battle" for Hildy was "expertly coached and financed." Recalling European cases in which Hildy's situation was reversed--e.g., France's Finaly boys and The Netherlands' Anna Beekman, Jewish children raised by Catholic families during the war and demanded back by Jewish organizations and relations--the Pilot said: "We are asking only for the same kind of justice . . . Thoughtful Catholics have long wondered why Jewish religious leadership, never notably reticent in meeting issues, has so long failed to speak on this one."

Massachusetts Protestants supported the Ellises last week in a plea by Boston's Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord that Hildy be allowed to stay with the Jewish couple, "whose love and loyalty have been attested before all people," and a telegram from the Massachusetts Council of Churches to Florida's Governor LeRoy Collins, urging that his decision "be based primarily upon the welfare of the child."

Meanwhile, it seemed possible that Hildy's mother might change her mind, ask to keep Hildy herself (three years ago she married Gerald R. Doherty, an architectural engineer, has a two-year-old daughter). When Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo returns from a Miami Beach vacation he is expected to ask for the Ellises' extradition. The Ellises hope that Florida's Governor Collins will refuse extradition. Said Melvin Ellis: "Mrs. Ellis and I have made every sacrifice that any parents could have made. If more are called for, we will find the strength and the means to make them."

*Englander, before becoming peace justice, was named in a conspiracy charge in 1951, in connection with an adoption racket in New York. He was never tried because Florida refused to grant extradition.

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