Alimony Sam: The Man Who Wouldn't Pay
Part 2: Looking every inch a perfect gentleman
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Release Date: March 31, 2026
Looking Every Inch a Perfect Gentleman
By the spring of 1926, Sam Reid had been in the Glenn County jail for the better part of a year, and the jail had begun to reorganize itself around him.
He wasn’t housed with the general population. He had a special cot in the juvenile room above the sheriff’s office – quieter, better lit, closer to the telephone he had taken to answering when the staff was occupied elsewhere. In a nearby room sat jugs and barrels of confiscated wine and whiskey, evidence in various Prohibition cases. Sam never touched any of it.
He had his newspapers, a novel when he wanted one, and a late-model radio. Sheriff Roy Heard, a strapping six-footer with iron-grey hair and a twinkle in his eye, had become something close to a friend. 1
“My kid brought a birthday cake over to Sam the other day, on his 39th birthday,” Heard told a reporter in 1928. “Sam tried to blow all thirty-nine candles out in one puff, but he couldn’t do it. Five were left burning. When I told him each of them meant one more time he would be married, he almost fainted.” 2
The beard had grown considerable by then. Sam had vowed not to cut his hair or shave until the court released him of its own motion, and he was keeping that vow with the same stubbornness he’d brought to everything else. After fourteen months it had reached his shoulders. He trimmed the beard once a week, he allowed, strictly for comfort. Otherwise he left it alone.
Neighborhood children had discovered him. Any kid in Willows with a broken scooter or a pair of roller skates that had given up the ghost knew the way to Sam’s cell. He’d been a mechanic in the war and out, and he fixed everything brought to him, without charge, without complaint. When there were no toys to repair he picked up knitting needles and a ball of yarn and made shawls for old ladies.3
“Kids and old women have a warm spot in his heart,” one reporter observed. “But the marriageable sort of lady, such as the one who caused his incarceration — she’s out.” 4
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The letters started arriving not long after Sam’s story went statewide.
They came from men, mostly, but from women too – from Los Angeles and New York and points between, from people who had read about the red-headed “alimony martyr” in Glenn County jail and felt compelled to write. Sam read them all and answered what he could. The San Francisco Bulletin reported in December 1926 that letters were “flooding in on Sam daily,” and that he enjoyed every one.
A woman named Eva M. Bryann wrote from Los Angeles:
“You are a man among men. Don’t weaken. You certainly have backbone. So many are cowards.” 5
Adolph J. Mendes, deputy registrar of vital statistics in San Diego, wrote to express his “high regard and appreciation of a man who is willing to suffer as you have.” 6
From New York came a formal communication from the Alimony Payers’ Protective Association, which informed Sam that he had been elected an honorary member – dues waived, in case he was broke – because they needed him for moral support. Sam accepted enthusiastically.
The national secretary wrote from the Knickerbocker Building in New York:
“I cannot convey to you in writing the whole-hearted and ultra-sincere admiration that we men, to a man, have for you in your predicament. It is our ardent wish that you be spared to vindicate yourself and to expose the cruel and inhumane methods of the law that has persecuted you thus far.” 7
A local chapter was promptly established, with headquarters in the Glenn County jail. Sam served as president, secretary, and, as one paper put it, “Grand High Alimony Payer of the chapter, so far.” 8
Sam had little time to savor his newfound celebrity, however. He was also, by this point, becoming one of the best-read men in California. He’d worked his way through the state civil codes relating to alimony with particular attention, and his correspondence had taken on a distinctly legal edge.
In June 1926, while Sam was nine months into his residence, Phebe Brownell Reid married Walter Steuben for the second time, in Reno. And Walter quickly adopted Zada May.
This development didn’t escape Sam’s notice, or the notice of the press. It added a layer to the story that reporters found irresistible: the woman for whose benefit Sam was technically imprisoned had remarried the man she had divorced before Sam, the man whose attempted suicide had filled Northern California newspapers in 1921.
Sam’s argument that he shouldn’t be required to support that household had, in his view, just gotten considerably stronger.
He appealed to Governor Richardson in November 1926, writing that he was an ex-soldier willing to support his daughter but not prepared to pay alimony to a wife who had gone back to her former husband. Sam delivered, in the same letter, what he called a “tirade” against Judge Purkitt. The governor replied that the matter was a purely judicial one and he had no authority to intervene. 9
Sam wrote it down in his mental ledger and kept going.
The Glenn County Grand Jury had been watching the situation with growing unease.
The foreman, John Thomas, visited Sam in his cell in the spring of 1926 and came away troubled – not, he would later insist, by Sam’s argument, but by the long, flowing beard, by the cheerful intractability, by the sense that a man who could sit in a county jail for a year and call it a matter of principle might not be entirely right in the head.
In December 1926, the grand jury voted unanimously to recommend a sanity examination.
Sam was delighted.
“They could never prove me insane,” he told anyone who would listen, “as I know more than most of the members of the grand jury.” 10
The commission was assembled: four physicians, including the medical superintendents of the Stockton and Napa state hospitals. The hearing was set. A large crowd gathered at the courthouse to see Glenn County’s famous “Alimony Martyr,” “Jail Hermit,” and whatnot.
They were disappointed.
The day before the hearing, Sam sent for a barber. He had his hair clipped close and his auburn beard shaved smooth. He appeared in new clothes throughout. “Mr. Reid looked every inch a perfect gentleman,” the grand jury foreman wrote afterward, with barely concealed irritation, “instead of the stubborn, bull-headed being that he seems to be.” 11
The commission pronounced him sane. Sam was returned to his cell. He immediately began growing a new beard.
“All right,” he told the court. “I like it here.” 12
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The sanity hearing had one lasting consequence Sam perhaps hadn’t anticipated: it gave him someone to sue.
He filed a $15,000 damage suit against John Thomas, foreman of the grand jury, alleging that the insanity charge had damaged his reputation. This was, by any measure, an ambitious legal maneuver for a man conducting his affairs from a jail cell without a lawyer, but Sam had been studying. The suit would grind through the courts for years. 13
Meanwhile, the war of words in the press was heating up considerably.
In January 1927, John Thomas published a long, careful letter in the Sacramento Bee laying out the grand jury’s findings – the investigation of Phebe’s home in Orland, the testimony of neighbors, the conclusion that Zada May was being properly raised and that her mother was “a proper person” to have her custody. Thomas’s letter was thorough and measured, and it made Sam sound, if not dishonest, then certainly mistaken. 14
Sam replied eleven days later, also in the Sacramento Bee, in a letter that took Thomas’s document apart line by line.
Thomas had claimed Sam told him he had never grown his beard before. Sam called that false. Thomas had characterized Sam as satisfied with his surroundings. Sam said he had said no such thing.
Thomas had presented the grand jury investigation as disinterested. Sam pointed out that Thomas had known Phebe since she was a small child, that Phebe had attended card parties at Thomas’s home during Sam’s imprisonment, that the grand jury’s secretary was Judge Purkitt’s brother-in-law, and that one jury member was Phebe’s own uncle.
He also, for the first time in public, published excerpts from the letters Phebe’s mother had written him during their marriage – letters describing Walter Steuben as a thief under police surveillance, as a man who had “done many, many things” nobody knew about. He quoted Phebe’s own letter asking whether Sam had told his family she had been married before, and suggesting he could explain it either as a non-support divorce or as what “the public all knows up here” – a phrase whose redacted completion the newspaper declined to print.
“The one-sided investigation in my case,” Sam concluded, “has brought to light some facts that the public did not know.”
He signed it from the Glenn County Jail, Box 706. 15
By the summer of 1927, Sam had begun his third year in jail. A reporter from the Oakland Post-Enquirer made the trip to Orland to find the other side of the story.
Phebe received her graciously. The home was vine-covered, set among trees, with wide porches and a well-ordered garden. Little Zada May, three years old, was just waking from a nap when they arrived.
Phebe had given no interviews in the two years since the story had gone national. She declined to comment on Sam directly. But she was not without opinions.
“I think he has an instinct for the dramatic,” she said. “Perhaps he should have been an actor. I do think he is really enjoying this sensation of imprisonment.”
She paused. “If he is, should I deprive him of that pleasure?”
Then, more quietly: “Perhaps I am as stubborn as he is. But I feel that it is his moral obligation to pay a certain nominal sum to his child as long as he is able to. That is my belief, and I shall stand by it.”
Her mother, who sat nearby, added: “All this fuss over forty dollars a month for the baby. My daughter has no need of alimony and never did have.”16
Sam read the interview in his cell and replied the following week in the Glenn Transcript. Phebe had said she was standing for a principle. Sam had thoughts about that:
“I am of the opinion that she is upholding the same principle that she used in getting her divorce, or the principle that John F. Thomas used when he brought insanity charges against me, or the principle that the Grand Jury used in investigating the home where my baby is being raised, and then she may be upholding the same principle that Judge Purkitt used in deciding the divorce case. But if she is upholding a principle, it is far from being the same principle that I am staying in jail for.” 17
He was, if anything, sharpening with age.
In November 1927, Sam wrote to the editor of the Willows Daily Journal, which had been calling him a “jail hermit” in its coverage. The letter ran to several hundred words and did not mince anything.
“Ninety per cent of your write ups are nothing but dirty little lies,” he informed the editor. He questioned whether the man had formed his principles in the front line trenches or had “stayed home and wore a Yellow Suit.” He suggested the editor would make a fine mate for Aimee Semple McPherson, the famously theatrical evangelist then in the news for her own spectacular scandals.
He signed it: “Very respectfully, Sam W. Reid.” 18
He was entering his fourth year. The county, the courts, two governors, a grand jury, and the entire Glenn County Bar Association had all tried to move him, and none of them had. He’d cost the taxpayers approximately a dollar a day, every day, for nearly three years. Glenn County was beginning to discuss, without entirely joking, whether to put a sign on the jail facade.
“See ‘Alimony Sam,’ world’s champion alimony martyr.” 19
It would take his old regiment to do what the law could not.
Copyright 2026 Lori Olson White
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End Notes
1 Homer L. Roberts, “Spends Four Years in Jail Rather than Pay Alimony,” Chino Champion, Chino, CA, March 23, 1928, P. 2.
2 Homer L. Roberts, “Spends Four Years in Jail Rather than Pay Alimony,” Chino Champion, Chino, CA, March 23, 1928, P. 2.
3 “Alimony Sam to Appeal His $15,000 Damage Suit,” The Chico Enterprise, Chica, CA, May 22, 1928, P. 2.
4 Alimony Martyr Must Stay in Jail; “I like it here,” Prisoner Replies When Told Verdict of Glenn Judge,” The Colusa Daily Sun, Colusa, CA December 1, 1926, P. 1
5 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.
6 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.
7 Alimony Sam’ Gets Letter of Sympathy,” Enterprise-Record, Chico, CA, April 27, 1927, P. 5
8 Alimony Sam’ Gets Letter of Sympathy,” Enterprise-Record, Chico, CA, April 27, 1927, P. 5
9 “Pleas Filed by Martyr in Alimony: Sam W. Reid Petitions Governor to Place Baby in “Decent” Home,” The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA, November 4, 1926, P. 3.
10 Alimony Martyr Must Stay in Jail; “I like it here,” Prisoner Replies When Told Verdict of Glenn Judge,” The Colusa Daily Sun, Colusa, CA December 1, 1926, P. 1
11 “Action of Court in Reid Case Defended: Foreman of Willows Grand Jury Declares Alimony Prisoner is in the Wrong,” The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, CA, January 1, 1927, P. 11.
12 Alimony Martyr Must Stay in Jail; “I like it here,” Prisoner Replies When Told Verdict of Glenn Judge,” The Colusa Daily Sun, Colusa, CA December 1, 1926, P. 1
13 “Alimony Sam Seeks $15,000 For Reputation,” The Times Standard, Eureka, CA, March 23, 1928, P. 1.
14 “Action of Court in Reid Case Defended: Foreman of Willows Grand Jury Declares Alimony Prisoner is in the Wrong,” The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, CA, January 1, 1927, P. 11.
15 “Sam Reid, Glenn’s “Alimony Martyr,” Replies to Letter of Foreman of Jury,” The Chico Enterprise, Chico, CA, January 11, 1927, P. 7.
16 Bettina Angelo, “Willow Man spends Two Years in Jail. Mother Cares for Tot as Father Stays in Jail to Avoid Support Payments,” The Oakland Post Enquirer, Oakland, CA, June 4, 1927, P. 1 & 4
17 “Sam Reid replies to Former Wife’s ‘Exclusive’ Story,” The Glenn Transcript, Willows, CA, June 24, 1927, P. 1.
18 “Sam Reid Gives Journal Old-Fashioned “Roasting;” Objects to “Jail Hermit”, Willows Daily Journal, Willows, CA, November 26, 1927, P. 4.
19 “Alimony Sam to Appeal His $15,000 Damage Suit,” The Chico Enterprise, Chica, CA, May 22, 1928, P. 2.
Looking forward to the next chapter!
You have got me well hooked on this one! Nice to see his picture too.