Court Opinion

ID: 9830102
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 19:52:15.835512+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:12.683275
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
[3] Ed. Sehwabe died in 1901, and in the following year his widow, Rosa, married her present husband, who was in just as good circumstances financially then as at this time, and yet for nine years no effort was made to obtain possession of the children, and no desire evinced to even see them. The financial condition of the couple has not changed to any great extent, for in all of those years they have accumulated nothing but a little furniture. This is no reproach to them, but it indicates that their status is a fixed one. In an occupation in which there can be no reasonable hope for promotion, after years of labor for the same firm, Henry Schneider is getting only $40 a month as a waiter. He has two children by a former wife and three by the present one, and if the two Sehwabe children are added to the household, the seven people, not taking into account the children by a former wife, who seem to have been confided to the care and protection of their relatives, must be fed and clothed, the five children must be educated, and all out of a fixed salary of $40 a month. The rent for the two rooms about which Schneider testified merely pays the rent of the house. It is true that Schneider testified that he received enough in tips to raise his earnings to from $75 to $85, but the financial standing of a man cannot be based on the uncertain gratuities of a restaurant-visiting public, and the fate of little children cannot be made to turn on any such floating, fluctuating income.
It is a singular fact that no solicitude was manifested about the children during nine years or more, and at last, when it was tardily evinced, it followed a refusal upon the part of those who had been caring for the children ■ to put in the hands of the mother and her husband the small sum of money inherited by the children from their father. If Mrs. Schneider had been prevented, through the years of her second marriage, by poverty or misfortune, ill health or any other untoward event, from reclaiming her children, there might be excuse for her unnatural neglect of the children for so long a time, but none of those facts existed; the evidence tending to show that'at any time after the second marriage she was fully as competent to care for her children as at the time she demanded their custody. There must have been some other motive than motherly love that caused the belated effort to obtain custody of her children, and the evidence shows that the motive was to obtain certain money belonging to the children. Rosa Schneider testified that they had demanded the money from Henry Sehwabe; and further: “I did not undertake this suit until after I had been turned down in my demand for that money that I worked for.” She had receipted to the administrator for $310.25 in 1901, the whole of the cash belonging to the estate of her deceased husband, and had sold her life estate in a tract of land for $50, had then abandoned her children, and still was not satisfied, and demanded the money — the miserable pittance —of her children. Prom these facts, the trial judge was justified in finding that she was not worthy to be made the custodian of her children.
It is earnestly contended that in this opinion we are in antagonism with and disregarded several decisions of other Texas courts, but there is no conflict. Each one of the cases was decided upon the peculiar facts, as is this, and no conflict is possible. The trial court has by its judgment decided that Rosa Schneider is not worthy to have the care and rearing of her children, and the facts justify the decision. In the case of Peese v. Gellerman, 51 Tex. Civ. App. 39, 110 S. W. 196, this court sustained, a judgment denying a father the custody of his child, and the Supreme Court refused a writ of error. The father in that case was honest and upright, and well able to provide for his child; but the lower court placed it in the custody of an aunt, in whose care it had been for the eight years of its life. This court said: “If a man has voluntarily surrendered the control of his child for the first seven or eight years of its life, and permitted some one else to feed, clothe, and care for it, there is not much room for any sentimental dissertation on the subject of a court sundering the ties existing between the father and child. It is unfortunately the case that these ties are sometimes forgotten and disregarded until the child has reached an age when it may be useful'to. the parent, and then they are invoked. Such resurrected affection may well be viewed with suspicion, and the parent should be required to show that the interest of the child will be subserved by having its custody returned. If the doctrine of the Missouri case, cited with approval in the case of State v. Deaton, to the effect that, when a father sues for the custody of a child, no burden would rest upon him, except to prove the relationship, be the true one, still, when it appears that he has voluntarily parted with the custody of his child, contributed little or nothing to its support, and allowed some one else to do what he should have done, it seems that any presumption that’ might arise as to his peculiar fitness to rear the child would be destroyed; and that he would then be required to establish his superior fitness before he could be awarded its custody. There is no presumption that the promptings of parental- affection will cause a father to tenderly care for his child in the future, when he has failed to so act in the past.” The language quoted applies *268with peculiar force to this ease, which is a stronger case, for the reason that it appears that, after having neglected her children for nine years or more, the mother sought to deprive them of the small pittance left them by their father, and, failing to obtain it in that way, sought to obtain it by gaining the custody of the persons of the children. They had also reached an age when their labor would be valuable; one of them being a sturdy boy 13 or 14 years old.
The motion for rehearing is overruled.