Opinion ID: 2615683
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Residences

Text: The home place of the defendant in which he resided with his family prior to his departure for Idaho was adjacent to the office from which his nursery operations were directed. It is a two-story house of 8 rooms or more and, as shown by the picture in evidence, is a substantial and attractive structure surrounded by abundant hedges, shrubs and other flora. It was started during the depression years when costs were low and finished and occupied in 1940. The defendant  estimated its worth at $20,000. Its exterior appearance suggests a far greater value. Perhaps more important is the fact that his Oregon home was set in a community where he has spent all the years of his life. A relatively short distance down the road from his house was the farm place and home of his aged and ill father, for whom he had manifested great solicitude. Across the road from his father's place was the home of his only brother, with whom he was on most amicable terms. Because of Elwert's long and uninterrupted residence in that countryside setting, it is reasonable to assume that nearby were many families and neighbors known to him from childhood days. This, he asserts, he left behind to make a new and permanent home in a strange locale where he had never been before he stepped from the airplane in Boise in August, 1948. His own self-serving declarations of an intention to establish an indefinite domicil in Idaho are at best so hazy, vague and imperfect in substance that they do not meet four-square the three essentials of domicil laid down in Reed's Will, supra, 48 Or 504, and by their nature are so weak as to conjure a great suspicion as to his veracity. See Kennan, Residence and Domicile, 90, § 39; Jacobs, Law of Domicil, 555, § 455. This distrust is increased when we contrast his home in Oregon with the establishment he called home in Idaho. In Boise he established his residence in a cheap rooming house which was, as he testified in the Idaho case, as cheap as I could get. He took his meals elsewhere. Evidently it was too cheap for Greta because he abandoned the place at the time of his Idaho marriage to her. It was a residential situation out of line with his customary standards of living, his station in life and substantial financial worth. District of  Columbia v. Murphy, supra, 314 US 441. It did not comport with the manner of living of one who only three months before was able to afford a prenuptial honeymoon in the Hawaiian Islands or who made flying trips to Mexico to consort there with officials of that government concerning potential business matters of substantial magnitude.