Logic suggests that someone who has served as public guardian, a lawyer appointed to represent minors in court, would be a by-the-book mother to her own children.
But logic rarely appears in stories about Mary Belle Spencer and her daughters who regularly wound up in the news early in the last century.
Spencer was Cook County’s public guardian from 1918 to 1921, among the first women in that role, when she left office after a somewhat shaky tenure that included an accusation she tried to intimidate witnesses in a juvenile case.
Her parenting style garnered as much publicity as her legal career. She believed her daughters, Mary Belle and Victoria, were entitled to what was regularly described as a “do-as-you-please” childhood. That philosophy made the exploits of the free-spirited girls a godsend to editors scrambling to fill their pages on slow news days nearly a century ago.
Neither daughter went down her chosen path because they had been neglected by their mother. She indulged them, and many of the items written about her in the city’s newspapers seemed to be there simply because she “raised her daughters to do as they please.”
In 1936, the Spencer family’s story went national via an item in Time, the chatty news weekly.
The Spencer girls “had been brought up without repressions or inhibitions,” Time reported. “They threw their Christmas tree out the window without a word of parental rebuke.”
Home-schooled, “they learned life from transcripts of testimony in Chicago criminal courts; they won beauty contests; rode like Amazons; behaved as they pleased.”
Allowing such freedom was put to a stress test on a number of occasions, including one night in 1935. While other family members were asleep, Mary Belle, 14 at the time, slipped out of the family’s Chicago Heights home and went for a bareback ride on Bob, her favorite horse, to visit some cousins in Hyde Park.
Finding no relatives at home, she started to ride back but fell asleep and tumbled from her horse, according to news reports. She was discovered on the bridle path by a motorist who got her to Illinois Central Hospital, where she was found to be uninjured.
Spencer’s freestyle child-rearing would raise a few eyebrows even today, when the cultural winds blow more freely. In the 1930s, children were still viewed through Victorian lenses: They were miniature adults, in need of character-building discipline, due no more indulgence than the full-scale version.
Mary Belle Spencer might have been genetically predisposed to marching to the beat of a different drummer. Her father went off to the Alaskan gold rush of the 1890s, and while he was away his wife and daughters moved from Wisconsin to Chicago. He returned empty-handed but with endless tales of adventure to spin at the family’s dinner table.
Mary Belle enrolled in Northwestern University’s law school, even though the legal profession was an iffy career choice for women at the time, and for many years to come. In the Tribune and other publications, Spencer often was invariably referred to as a “woman lawyer.”
Gov. Frank Lowden jump-started Spencer’s career by naming her Cook County’s public guardian in 1918. Her tenure ended just three years later when she submitted her resignation to a new governor, Len Small, saying her law practice demanded her full attention. The Tribune noted that another reason might have been that she had just given birth to her second daughter.
The two girls, and their mother’s litigious nature, sparked much of the interest in the family in the years to come.
When Spencer’s daughter Victoria was 15, she was to perform in a chorus line at the Oriental Theater. That resulted in a dust up between Mary Belle Spencer and the show’s producer when she insisted her daughter be slotted for a “specialty dance,” according to Tribune reports.
In 1936, Spencer and her husband, Dr. Richard Spencer, rendered a split decision on their daughter Mary Belle’s marriage to a 21-year-old former high school football star, with whom she had eloped.
The mother wanted to have the union annulled, saying their daughter was “only 16 and too young to know what it was all about.” Dr. Spencer had no problem with the marriage and told the Tribune he had spoken to his wife about it: “Last night I got her on the phone and asked her to leave the kids alone and quit that stuff.”
In 1937, Mary Belle Spencer sued her husband, accusing him of embezzling a trust fund established for their daughter Victoria.
Police were called to the Spencer home in 1938 after she allegedly “shellacked” one of Victoria’s suitors “with a milk bottle and hammer,” according to a Tribune account headlined “Spencerian Drama.”
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Although she vehemently opposed her young daughter’s marriage, while public guardian she had sanctioned the wedding of a 16-year-old ward of the court and George Du Bok, purportedly the girl’s 50-year-old stepfather.
Spencer defended her decision by claiming the groom wasn’t the bride’s stepfather, just a man who lived with her mother. To Judge Henry Horner, that must have sounded like what lawyers call “a distinction without a difference.” Horner took all juvenile court cases away from Spencer.
She disputed Horner’s authority to do so but resigned almost two years later on Dec. 3, 1921. “My law practice demands my full time,” she explained.
She was putting a good face on her embarrassing situation. In fact, her practice didn’t change much when she left the public guardian’s office. In a courtroom, she was akin to a bulldog that won’t let go.
But she also remained in the public eye because of her child-rearing style and ongoing family issues.
In 1935, Spencer and her husband found themselves in a court battle over their decision to educate their daughters at home, declaring the public education system “a means of spreading disease.” Dr. Spencer fought a court-ordered fine of $5, and eventually the couple enrolled their daughters in private school, the Tribune reported.
When her husband was charged with keeping their children out of school, she appeared on his behalf. After she spoke for two hours and 10 minutes, as the Tribune reported, the judge asked how much more time she needed.
“‘I’m just getting started,’ she told the court. Justice Shapiro awakened his bailiff, continued the case one week, and departed,” the Tribune reported.
Personally opposed to capital punishment, she took on a case of a Mexican inmate who was one of six prisoners convicted in 1926 of murdering an assistant warden of Stateville Penitentiary. Two of those charged subsequently escaped, and another was killed in an attempted getaway, according to news reports. A gallows with three nooses was prepared at Will County Jail in Joliet.
Her client was offered a reprieve if he would testify against the white gang leader. Spencer told the court her client responded with a parable:
“When you go on another man’s raft and it’s out to sea (and) it is sinking because of the extra weight should you cast the other man out that you alone might be safe?”
Spencer’s efforts to get a stay of execution for her client failed, and all three men were hanged.
Despite her noble battles for worthy causes, Spencer was still perpetuating petty family feuds on the day her husband died on July 11, 1938. She wound up in the Willow Springs police station after engaging in a screaming match in a “dispute over his body” at the funeral parlor.
Emotional fireworks didn’t mark her own passing at 59 in 1942. The Chicago Daily News uttered a virtual sigh of relief, observing:
“The turbulent career of Mary Belle Spencer has ended — in the quietness of death.”
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