Nov 19, 2004 4 min read

I had just finished scribbling a new message on the kitchen chalkboard when the 6-year-old walked in. No Whiners Allowed in Here. She read it and asked, “By ‘here,’ do you mean the kitchen or the entire house?”

“The entire house,” I said.

“Oh, great. Now where am I supposed to go? It’s cold outside and you are saying I’m not allowed in here. That’s great. Just great. What am I supposed to do?”

She punctuated her complaint with a foot stomp and a march toward the coat hook in a great show that she would accept banishment rather than comply. It wasn’t a reaction I expected. I had failed before writing the message to recognize that one might want to remain a whiner and therefore it would lead to homelessness.

But then I underestimated the power of stubbornness.

I could see her weighing her choices: cold and lonely outside with no one to hear her complaints; warm and cozy inside with the off chance that the no-whiner rule would be lifted. She stayed.

At six, her reaction strikes me as humorous. She might be stubborn but she’s trainable and hopefully she will grow into a broad-minded woman capable of looking at issues beyond her narrow self interests.

In my idealistic phase I actually believed that is what separated children from adults. But then I grew up and found the only difference is that adults wear larger clothing, find fault with the weather and grow hair in the wrong places. We are just as obstinate as a day-care full of two year olds.

In reading an Associated Press story about a once successful Philadelphia Main Line attorney, I couldn’t help wonder what H. Beatty Chadwick hoped to gain by his stubbornness. I suspect that life was very kind to Chadwick before his marriage soured. In a “War of the Roses” kind of case, Chadwick hid millions of his wealth offshore in order to keep it from the greedy hands of his ex-wife. Rather than pay up as ordered, Chadwick went to jail on a civil contempt of court citation.

That was 1995. He’s still there.

Stubbornness might lead to Chadwick’s death in a prison cell as he is now battling cancer. He insists that he lost the money in failed investments long ago. A series of judges have ruled otherwise. Neither side has budged much over nine years, and it doesn’t appear there will be any movement unless a team of forensic accountants unravels the money mystery.

There isn’t a thing wrong with having principles and sticking to them, but this is misdirected bullheadedness on the part of Chadwick and on the courts that have kept him locked away. Judges are expected to cut through the obstinate parties.

At least in the case of Nutkin, the Superior Court dismissed squirrelly charges filed by a tenacious game commission. Nutkin the Squirrel’s story can be found in an opinion authored by Justice Hudock. In a nutshell (groan), Nutkin was born to the wild of South Carolina and appeared to have led a contented life until falling from her tree nest. She was found and adopted by Barbara Gosselin and her family who nursed her back to health, built her a room-sized enclosure and grew as fond of her as any family pet.

When the Gosselins moved to Schuylkill County in Pennsylvania, Nutkin settled in with them. It could be the game commission wasn’t a large fan of Gosselin who testified in 2001 before the state House Game and Fisheries Committee “that every year ‘bubba’ hunters showed up in the woods near their house to drive out the deer, and the hunters were guilty of various other displays of bad hunting manners.” So when she and her husband the following year called to complain about a hunter slaying a deer near where they set out food on their property, a game officer arrived. He refused to investigate the possible poacher, but he did spot Nutkin in her room-size enclosure and demanded that the Gosselins turn her over.

Hudock wrote, “The game officer acknowledged that the squirrel was too old and too tame to be released to the wild. (A situation akin to that of an old appellate judge, like the undersigned, attempting to return to the boiling cauldron of the trial court after being tamed by years of peace and quiet above the fray. Chance of survival of both species are poor.)”

The Gosselins refused. The obstinate game commission filed citations. And for the next two years, the case worked its way through the courts, until finally on Nov. 5 the Superior Court ruled that the game commission needs to grow up, I mean give up, already.

a href=”mailto:E-mail: E-mail: ltraud@heraldstandard.com