HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: Death trap -- tragedy befell Thomasville girl in 1956
Sep. 24—THOMASVILLE — In the early to mid-1950s, Americans came up with a new term for refrigerators:
Death traps.
In those days, refrigerators were not closed with the magnetic mechanisms found on modern fridges, but with latches that made it impossible to open the door from the inside. As a result, unsuspecting children — a child playing hide-and-seek, for example — would sometimes crawl inside an abandoned refrigerator, shut the door, be unable to get out, and suffocate in the airtight appliance before anybody could find them.
For North Carolinians who may not have been aware of the danger, a Thomasville case made it painfully and tragically clear.
The year was 1956. Only a year earlier, the state Legislature had passed a law making it a misdemeanor to abandon, discard or store a refrigerator — or an icebox or similar apparatus — without first detaching its doors, hinges, latches and lids, to ensure a child couldn't become entrapped. The law had passed with little fanfare, and it stayed out of the headlines until September 1956.
On Sept. 6, a High Point Enterprise headline told the tragic story: "4-Year-Old Thomasville Girl Victim Of Icebox Suffocation."
Her name was Alice Caye Watson, and her family lived in a basement apartment on Wood Street. The family's landlord also lived in the house.
The morning of Alice's death, she and several neighborhood playmates — ranging in age from 3 to 5 — were playing on the front porch of the house when she climbed into the icebox.
Another child apparently shut the door, and then the other children were called to lunch, so they went home, unwittingly leaving Alice in the icebox.
Before long, Alice's mother, Sudie Mae Watson, began looking frantically for her daughter. It wasn't until the other children returned and opened the icebox that they found her, already dead.
News of the little girl's death understandably rattled the community. Aside from the obvious tragedy that had taken place, however, police determined a crime had been committed, as well.
The landlord, 56-year-old real-estate agent Jack Everhart, was charged under North Carolina's new icebox legislation — the first time the law had been enforced since its passage — for leaving the appliance, with its door intact, where children could get into it.
The sad case went before a jury the following month. Everhart contended that the icebox actually belonged to another man who had left it on his porch to be repaired, but the state pointed out that the statute's wording said "discarding, abandoning or allowing to remain." Everhart was found guilty and faced possible sentencing of two years in jail, a fine or both.
Ironically, Alice's grief-stricken mother showed sympathy toward her landlord.
"I don't think Everhart is guilty — I see no reason why he should be punished," she told the court.
The judge, however, felt otherwise and handed down a most unusual sentence: He gave Everhart six months in jail and a $500 fine, to be suspended if the defendant agreed to pay Alice's funeral and burial expenses, pay for a monument at her gravesite, and establish a $500 memorial for an annual essay contest on highway and home safety.
More than 65 years later, a 2-foot-high weathered monument in the Liberty Baptist Church Cemetery pays a tender tribute to the little girl whose tragic death made news not only across the state, but in other states, as well:
Alice Caye Watson
May 26, 1952
Sept. 6, 1956
Darling, We Miss You.
jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579
