A Jailhouse Pen Pal Is Heard From Again

    Got a real angry Mash Note today from an old friend — Jet Simrell.

    The return address was 306 N Broadway.  The County Jail.

    Jet, you will remember, is the man who ferociously dedicates his life to the proposition that  a woman's place is in the home.  Or, more specifically, in the kitchen.  And barefoot.

    His intensity has landed him into headlines, psychiatric wards and, currently, the County Jail where he is awaiting trial for sending death threats to a handful of Superior Court justices.

    Jet and I met a year ago, after he had sent me a rather startling printed appeal.

    It read, in part:

    "To divorced men, all the men and womanly wise females.

    "Do you believe we should and must have:

     "1- Organized effort to put men legally back in the driver's seat in the home?

    "2- Laws that will give a GOOD man the legal power to securely hold and protect his home and family against the whimsy and unbridled emotions of his dreamy, unrealistic, over-romantic mate?

    "It is man's fault! We let our guard down.  If we have any guts left we can restore men and women to their respective domains as nature intended.

    "I'm ready to give the remainder of my life to restoration of male-female identity in America.

    "I'm not a woman hater — I love 'female' women.

    "ARE YOU READY TO FIGHT?"

    Personally, I wasn't quite ready, I'm a little too timid to fight.  But I did print his warning in the column.  And we became friendly as a result.  When I finally met him he told me, as I had pretty actively suspected, that he was the victim of  a divorce in which his three children had been taken from him.

    Subsequently, Jet appeared on a TV interview with me and argued, quite lucidly, I might add, that our whole social structure was collapsing because women were so rapidly "defeminizing."

     "There was time," he claimed, "when women were content to use their feminine wiles on  a man.  Now they'd just as soon punch him in the nose."

    He charged that women themselves didn't really like this reversal of their natural role.  They would prefer being the coy, dainty things they were intended to be.  But today's unmasculine male won't let them.

    The result of this interview was astounding.  I was bombarded with mail saying that Simrell was absolutely right.  And almost all the letters were from women.

    But then, in his desperate struggle to put our houses back in order, Jet did a grotesque thing to bring attention to his cause.  He called the police one night and told them he had just killed a mother and her three kids.  He gave them his home address and hung up.  The police arrived and found that he had actually slaughtered a nanny-goat and her brood.  He was hustled off for psychiatric observation.  He wasn't heard from again until headlines revealed his threats against the L.A. judges.

    I wrote about it at the time it happened.  And today, a couple of months later, I finally got a letter from him bitterly accusing me of desertion.

     "With what words," his letter demanded, "does a man accused of being berserk write to his accuser?  For many weeks I have tried to reconcile the Coates who would write what you wrote about me last November . . . I can only think that you have, after all, just a shallow understanding of the extreme seriousness of our predicament."

    Of course, I have to say it again.  The antics of my friend, Jet, were berserk.  But I haven't deserted the cause.

    I'll tell you something.  Put aside his bizarre behavior for a moment,and consider just his message.  There's more than a germ of truth in his argument that what ails us is the emancipated woman.

    I'll tell you.  But, look!  Don't you tell my wife.