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HE IS A. L. ALEXANDER WHO
BEGAN GOODWILL COURT TO
HELP THE NEEDY. READ HIS
INSPIRATIONAL LIFE STORY
By MARLY TALMADGE
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WHEN men feel their hearts break at the tragedy of life, they try to silence the inner voice of truth by asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Haven't you yourself, sick with pity, turned away from some glaring example of social injustice, wanting to help, yet admitting your inability to, even feeling relieved when your back nned?
There are many ways of ' escape from our social consciences— movies, novels, friends. But sometimes there are men who cannot escape as we do — who feel all the suffering, the misery around them, and are driven to find some way of helping.
Such a man is A. L. Alexander, the originator of Goodwill Court, the man you hear introducing each case to the judges on the broadcasts which last month became a coast-to-coast network series under the sponsorship of Chase and Sanborn. Goodwill Court is his childhood dream come true — the result of an inner need which has driven him all his life.
Alexander's mother was a Boston school teacher. In her there was this same driving, irresistible urge to help, implanted perhaps by the sights she saw in the slum district
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where she taught. Often she took her son with her to her classes, pointed out the helplessness of the ignoranr and underprivileged children. "A few dollars," she would explain, "make the difference between happiness and misery."
Watching these children grow up. Alexander saw the way the cards had been stacked against them before the game began. Serious and studious, he had little gaiety in his nature.
Even then, immature as he was. he realized how often lives could have been saved, misery changed into happiness, by the money necessary for medical or legal advici Some day, he promised his mother, holding her hand, some day he would bring this help to those who needed it. Today, years later, that boyhood promise has actually changed the courses of many lives!
He didn't find his goal easily. He didn't, in fact, even know what it was at first. For years he groped, as a police reporter, then withdrawn from the world in a theological school, still later in New York's organized charitable institutions.
He was sixteen when he got a job as a cub reporter on the police beat. The experience might have turned his idealism into cynicism. Again and again he saw legal protection denied to the very people who deeded it most, because of their ignorance of the law, which judges always said was no defense. Instead of weakening his idealism, this only increased the flame of his desire to help and it gave him a bulwark of practical knowledge.
He heard the stories of helpless women who had to endure mistreatment because they could not afford divorces. He knew intimately one young couple whose lives were ruined because of rigid divorce laws. (Continued on page 70)
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Above, Alexander and the letter he wrote to the author of this story. He has ipent all hit life trying to find tome way of preventing suffering.
For fne Goodwill Court, sponsored by Chase 0 Sanborn, see page 52.