Medicine: Holy Moses (Cont’d)

A Louisiana judge, a juvenile officer and a welfare worker decided that Mrs. Erne Crawford was fit to mother the baby boy whom she first swore a brindle dog dropped at her Louisiana cabin door, then admitted she had borne guiltily back of her woodshed (TIME, Nov. 23). Louis Crawford, her pious, abstinent, pale-eyed cuckold, after a good tussle with the Holy Spirit, last week pulled in his horns, took Effie and their two young sons across Lake Pontchartrain to New Orleans’ Charity Hospital to claim the babe.

As the complex Crawford family left the hospital, freighted with baby formulas, feeding schedules and pediatric advice which they could scarcely follow in their one-room shack. Effie told the world at large: “We all’s gonna name the baby Bert J. Moses Crawford. The Bert J. don’t mean anything, but we don’t want people calling him Moses.”