TEXAS: Visitors in Limbo

When he was young, fortune smiled on Thomas Craighead Buntin of Nashville, Tenn., but he was disconsolate. He was a rich man’s son; he had a $300-a-month job as the nontoiling, unfirable general manager of his grandfather’s insurance business, drew a $200-a-month allowance from his doting mother, had a pretty and loving wife, three children, two cars, social position and all the creature comforts. By the time he was 28, nevertheless, he seemed to be fizzing toward self-destruction like a lighted skyrocket.

He was a tall, fragile, handsome young man. He had moods of burning exhilaration. They were followed by moods of suicidal depression. He drank wildly. His father had committed suicide; Tom Buntin talked with animation of killing himself. One night his wife awakened, found him holding a pistol at his head and knocked the weapon aside. Buntin got so scandalously drunk one afternoon in September 1931 that he broke into the home of two horrified spinsters and was hauled off to jail. When he disappeared two days later, many of his friends believed he had left town to do away with himself.

Legally Dead. A little later some of them began wondering if they had guessed wrong. Buntin’s ex-secretary, a dark, quiet girl named Betty McCuddy, vanished six weeks after his disappearance. Missing-persons bureaus all over the country were asked to watch for Buntin. Chief distinguishing mark: a left ear that stood out almost at a right angle from his head. But neither Buntin nor well-fixed Betty McCuddy—who had left $10,000 behind in a Nashville bank and $27,000 in a trust fund—was heard from again.

Buntin carried $50,000 in insurance. In due time, his wife went into court to claim it, and in 1942 the Tennessee supreme court ruled that he was dead. Mrs. Buntin married a wealthy Nashville banker. Buntin’s sons grew up; two of them married. Twenty-two years passed. Then, last month, an attorney representing the New York Life Insurance Company went into a Nashville court, announced that Buntin was still alive, and began an action to recover the $31,894 residue of his insurance.

A Search for an Ear. Now Nashville burned to know what he had done with his life. Only a shred of information leaked out from the insurance company: Buntin was living in Texas, probably in a citrus-growing area, under an assumed name. The Nashville Tennessean forthwith started one of the oddest chases of all time: it sent a young reporter named John Seigenthaler to the biggest state in the union to look for a thin man with a protruding left ear.

Seigenthaler walked the streets, checked the police, the hotels, the credit bureaus of a dozen Texas towns. A fortnight ago, by rarest coincidence, he saw a grey-haired, bespectacled man with an oddly shaped left ear step off a bus in Orange (pop. 21,174), Texas. Seigenthaler was instantly discouraged: the man limped badly. But the reporter followed his quarry through a quiet neighborhood to a white, comfortably unkempt frame house. The thin, limping man was Thomas D. Palmer, a television salesman. His wife, a motherly looking woman, worked as a court reporter and often toiled at home after hours, typing legal documents. They had six children—two married daughters, a son in the Marine Corps, a crippled 14-year-old boy named Duncan, who walks with elbow crutches and braces, and two younger girls, Margaret, 16, and Mary Ellen, 12. Seigenthaler checked for three days. Then, certain that the Palmers were really Tom Buntin and Betty McCuddy, he introduced himself to them. Resigned, troubled, they soberly admitted their identity.

Seigenthaler offered them $1,000 for their story. They refused. “If money had meant anything to us,” said Betty McCuddy, “we wouldn’t have done what we did. We were in love.” But in the days that followed, some of the tale emerged anyhow. The course of love had not been easy. Running away had not cured Buntin of drinking. In Brownsville, where the couple settled in the early ‘305, he had lost job after job as a car salesman and service man. A fall from a curb had damaged his hip so badly that he had walked on crutches for years. All during their hard new life together, Betty had worked to make both ends meet.

“After All These Years.” But for all that, it was obvious that the two were happy. In his way, Tom Buntin had met the harshness of life bravely enough. He lost jobs, but he always got new ones. He was cheerful and well liked, even by men who fired him. He became a good salesman and as the years passed, drank less and less. The Thomas D. Palmers lived for their children, and in the end their fortress was their big, respectable, close-knit family.

Last week Tom Buntin and Betty McCuddy savored some of the joys of rescued castaways: Tom Buntin talked to his aging mother on the telephone, and Betty McCuddy talked to her father, who had long since given her up as dead. Betty learned for the first time that her mother and only brother were dead. “After all these years,” she cried, and bit her lip. The Palmer children were shocked and disturbed. Two days after the excitement began, daughter Elizabeth Ann bore her first baby. The child was dead. Reporters besieged the green-roofed house. After their 22 years, middle-aged Tom and middle-aged Betty were back again in the world they had abandoned.