Alimony Sam: The Man Who Wouldn't Pay
Part 3: Out of jail on 48 hours’ parole
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Release Date: April 7, 2026
Out of jail on 48 hours’ parole
On September 29, 1928, three thousand veterans of the 363rd Infantry – “San Francisco’s Own” – paraded down Market Street in San Francisco for their tenth annual reunion.
Sam Reid led all the rest.
He rode under a banner that read: “Here I am – Sam Reid, the alimony martyr. Out of jail on 48 hours’ parole.”
He was wearing whiskers. False ones, as it happened – the real beard had been sacrificed to the sanity commission two years earlier, and Sam had never quite grown it back to its former glory. But for the reunion, the occasion demanded the full effect.
Close behind him rode Sheriff Roy Heard of Glenn County, Sam’s legal guardian and, by this point, his closest friend. The sheriff was not, observers noted, particularly worried about losing his prisoner. Sam, for his part, was not particularly worried about losing his landlord. 1
It had taken a small army to get him there.
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The campaign to bring Sam Reid to the 363rd reunion had begun weeks earlier, and it had gone through every official channel available before those channels ran out.
Joseph M. Cahen, president of the 363rd Infantry Association, had written to Judge Purkitt asking that Sam be granted a temporary parole to attend. The judge refused. Cahen appealed to Governor C. C. Young. The governor declined. Mayor James Rolph of San Francisco sent an impassioned telegram to Purkitt recalling Sam’s service in the Argonne and personally guaranteeing that the San Francisco police would return him to his cell. Purkitt remained unmoved.2
A delegation tracked the judge down in person – he was in San Francisco, as it turned out, staying at the Hotel Whitcomb – and pleaded their case directly. Purkitt told them the matter was out of his jurisdiction. Sheriff Heard was the man to see. Heard was located in Red Bluff. The veterans got him on the telephone. He talked it over with Purkitt. And then, on the eve of the reunion, Heard made a decision. 3
He drove to the jail, collected his prisoner, and headed for San Francisco.
On his own authority, without a court order, in direct contradiction of Judge Purkitt’s ruling, Sheriff Roy Heard of Glenn County took Sam Reid to the reunion.
He did, however, take the mild precaution of accompanying him.
The banquet at California Hall that night was the largest in the regiment’s history. Three thousand men, a decade out from the Argonne, gathered to remember what they had survived together. Sam sat at the head table beside Joseph Cahen.
Late in the evening, a telegram arrived. It had been sent to Judge Purkitt at Willows, as a final appeal, before the veterans learned he was in San Francisco. The telegrams had been forwarded to the Hotel Whitcomb. Purkitt had replied.
Cahen read it aloud to the room:
“Under no circumstances can Reid be permitted to attend the reunion.” 4
The banquet, where Sam Reid sat as guest of honor, went up in laughter.
“The big laugh came,” Cahen told the San Francisco Chronicle afterward, “when his response saying Reid absolutely could not come to the reunion was delivered at the banquet where Reid was sitting beside me.” 5
Sam told a reporter he was having the time of his young life. He didn't expect to make the reunion parole an annual event, he added.
“I’ll be out before the next reunion,” he said. 6
Sam returned to the jail the following night, as promised. Sheriff Heard drove him back.
Then the consequences arrived.
The Glenn County Bar Association convened an extraordinary session. The dignity of the court had been offended, the claimed. Sheriff Heard had taken a prisoner out of custody without a lawful order — which was, technically, an escape. The association voted to urge Judge Purkitt to cite the sheriff for contempt of court. 7
Purkitt agreed. Heard was summoned to appear the following Tuesday.
The 363rd mobilized immediately. Several San Francisco attorneys, all veterans of the regiment, volunteered their services for Heard’s defense. Cahen announced that the association would go the limit for the sheriff, and hinted at a “coup d’état” within twenty-four hours on Sam’s behalf as well. 8
Cahen went to see Sam.
The veterans had wanted to pay Sam’s back alimony for years. Every time they had offered, Sam had refused. He was in jail for a principle, he said, and he would not let anyone pay his way out of it. He’d held that position through two governors, a sanity commission, and three and a half years of a county jail cell.
Now Cahen put it to him plainly. The 363rd would pay the alimony – eight hundred and eighty dollars in arrears – and Sam would walk out a free man. If Sam refused, Sheriff Heard would face contempt charges alone, and the man who had given Sam his one day of freedom might end up occupying his cell.
Sam argued for hours. Then he argued through the night. Then he argued through the following morning, right up until the moment court was called to order.
A few minutes before ten o’clock, he said yes.
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Willows was in a holiday mood the morning of October 9, 1928.
Shops had closed. Men and women had driven in from thirty miles around. The courtroom was full an hour before the hearing began, standing room only, politics and the World Series temporarily set aside. Three years and sixty-nine days after Sam Reid had walked into the Glenn County jail with money in his pocket and a principle in his chest, the town had come to see how it ended.
Walter Dold, the San Francisco attorney retained by the 363rd to defend Sheriff Heard, rose as court was called to order and asked for a thirty-five-minute continuance.
When court reconvened, Dold informed the judge that Sam Reid had tendered a check to the clerk of the court in payment of all alimony and child support owed – purging himself of contempt.
The check was signed by Joseph M. Cahen. 9
Sam stood against the side wall with the other spectators, watching. He had not taken a seat at the counsel table. He was not, technically, a party to the morning’s proceedings. He was just a man in a courtroom, about to become a free citizen for the first time in nearly four years.
The room filled with cheers and applause.
Judge Purkitt, who had sent Sam to jail and kept him there through every appeal and maneuver and appeal again, said the payment ended the case. There would be no further prosecution unless Phebe filed a new charge. It was understood that she would not.
Sheriff Heard pleaded guilty to contempt. He threw himself on the mercy of the court and was fined two hundred and fifty dollars. The 363rd wrote that check too.
“There isn’t a man in the outfit,” Cahen told the judge, “who won’t go the limit to vindicate Heard.” 10
Sam walked out of the building into the October sunlight. Promoters were waiting with stage offers – his story, they had calculated, was worth real money on the lecture circuit. He turned them all down flat.
“It’s great to be out again,” he said, and then promptly left for San Francisco. 11
The story doesn’t end there, though the newspapers mostly let it.
Sam went to work. In January 1931, he stood in line at the California Department of Public Works with other men looking for employment during the Depression, and was spotted by two officers of his old regiment who happened to work there. They put him on a highway crew – four dollars a day, three days a week, pick and shovel. He was forty-two years old. 12
Zada May Reid – the child at the center of everything, the nine-month-old whose custody had sent her father to jail for more than three years – died on April 16, 1931. She was seven years old. Scarlet fever, after two weeks of illness. Blood transfusions could not save her. 13
Sam came to Orland for the funeral. He wasn’t permitted to enter the Steuben home to view his only child’s body. He stood at the graveside in the Orland Cemetery and buried his daughter at a distance, the way he’d known her. 14
Phebe filed suit against him afterward for seven hundred and seventy-nine dollars in medical and burial expenses. The legal proceedings dragged on for years. Sam filed a demurrer. Phebe sued by publication when she couldn’t locate him. The suits were still moving through the courts in 1933, eight years after the original contempt charge. 15
In 1934, Sam ran for county supervisor of Plumas County. He never remarried. He died on June 10, 1968, in Plumas County, California. He was eighty years old.
Phebe outlived Sam by thirteen years. She died in Chico in 1981, having been, in the end, Mrs. Walter Steuben for more than fifty of them.
The Glenn County jail where Sam Reid spent three years and sixty-nine days of his life was replaced in 1931. The Sacramento Bee noted the occasion with a brief item about the county’s most colorful former boarder, now working for the highway commission, and about another picturesque prisoner – Lee Yen of Willows, who was known locally as the “Chinese of Many Arrests” because of his interpretation of various sections of the Wright Act.
Lee Yen had succeeded Sam as Glenn County jail’s most memorable – if not longest – resident.
The new jail went largely unoccupied at first. The county’s most recent star boarder, interviewed on the subject, declined to move in.
“Me bother about the jail?” said Lee Yen. “No. I’m all through.” 16
Sam Reid would have understood completely.
Copyright 2026 Lori Olson White
| Part 3 of 3 | Start from the Beginning| ← Previous Chapter | Margin Notes →|
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End Notes
1 “Alimony Sam Freed to Join Army Buddies: 3,000 Veterans of 363rd Infantry Parade with ‘Martyr’ in Lead; Granted Day’s Liberty,” The San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco, CA, September 30, 1928, P. 3.
2 “Reid, Alimony ‘Martyr’, Gets Day’s Freedom for S.F. Party,” Enterpsie-Record, Chico, CA, September 30, 1928, P. 1.
3 “Had Great Time with Pals, Says ‘Alimony Sam’: Reid returns to Glenn Co. Jail after Reunion Day with War Buddies,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA, October 1, 1928, P. 3.
4 Maurice A. Raiser, “Sooner Stay in Jail than Pay Wife Alimony: Amazing case of the red-headed World War veteran, “Alimony Sam,” who has spent three years behind California prison bars “for a principle” and will return for life if the courts so decree,” The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, December 16, 1928, P. 9.
5 “Had Great Time with Pals, Says ‘Alimony Sam’: Reid returns to Glenn Co. Jail after Reunion Day with War Buddies,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA, October 1, 1928, P. 3.
6 “Alimony Sam Freed to Join Army Buddies: 3,000 Veterans of 363rd Infantry Parade with ‘Martyr’ in Lead; Granted Day’s Liberty,” The San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco, CA, September 30, 1928, P. 3.
7 “Bar Group Backs Judge for Jailing Alimony Sam,” Woodland Daily Democrat, Woodland, CA, October 2, 1928, P. 1.
8 “Court Action Possible Say Bar Leaders: ‘Fine Stuff,’ Replies President of 363d as Battle Brewing,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA, October 4, 1928, P. 13.
9 “Buddies Pay $880, Free Alimony Sam: But Sheriff who Let Him Out to Attend Reunion of 363rd Must Pay $250 Fine or Occupy Cell Himself; ‘Martyr’ Released After 3 Years in Glenn County Jail When War Comrades Raise Fund Set by Court,” Oakland Tribune, Oakland, CA, October 9, 1928, P. 1.
10 Maurice A. Raiser, “Sooner Stay in Jail than Pay Wife Alimony: Amazing case of the red-headed World War veteran, “Alimony Sam,” who has spent three years behind California prison bars “for a principle” and will return for life if the courts so decree,” The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, December 16, 1928, P. 9.
11 Maurice A. Raiser, “Sooner Stay in Jail than Pay Wife Alimony: Amazing case of the red-headed World War veteran, “Alimony Sam,” who has spent three years behind California prison bars “for a principle” and will return for life if the courts so decree,” The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, December 16, 1928, P. 9.
12 “Alimony Sam. Reid in Pick-Shovel Job,” The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, CA, Janaury 28, 1931, P. 6.
13 “Daughter of Sam Reid dies of Scarlet Fever,” The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, CA, April 17, 1931, P. 9.
14 “Alimony Martyr of Glenn Faces Suit,” The Sacramento Union, Sacramento, CA, July 31, 1931, P. 3.
15 “Sam Reid Files Answer to Suit,” The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, CA, May 30, 1932, P. 9.
16 “Star Boarder to Avoid Glenn’s New Jail,” The Sacaramento Bee, Sacramento, CA, January 2, 1931, P. 12.
This story just became more incredible. Amazing!
Phoebe certainly seems to be a 'piece of work'.