MANNERS & MORALS: The More the Merrier

MANNERS & MORALS

Although the Mormon church has banned polygamy since 1890, some fundamentalist heretics practice it in defiance of church and state. Last week, Arizona authorities were trying hard to catch one of them. The fugitive: George Merlin Dutson, excommunicated middle-aged Mormon.

Dutson, according to a Maricopa County prosecutor, not only has married eight wives (plus an earlier one who divorced him in the 1920s for starting out to get others), but has had them all toiling cheerfully for years to support him. Sheriff's officers arrested six of them on a charge of "notorious cohabitation" last week. Four (plus ten children) were working happily together on a ten-acre farm near the town of Mesa. One (with eight children) was toiling on another farm, and a sixth was hard at work running a store and gas station. The two other wives live outside the state, one in Salt Lake City, one in Rock Springs, Wyo.

According to their neighbors, the six Arizona wives also go from door to door in their spare time selling homemade layettes and spectacle-cleaning tissues. But even after jailing Hilda Dutson, 46, Arline Dutson, 48, Hazel Dutson, 55, Lura Dutson, 44, Sara Dutson, 43, and Anna Dutson, 33, the local law didn't have too much hope of catching their lord & master.

The women, all neat, cheerful, housewifely types, obviously harbored no jealousy of each other, and they had nothing but admiration for Dutson. They were not bothered at hearing that he was courting three more women. When asked where he was, they answered happily, "Between here and there." At week's end it seemed likely that Dutson had jaunted off to Mexico, where, Mormon Bishop Wendel Davis suspects, he maintains a sort of foreign branch with two wives.