Opinion
July 3, 1951.
Appeal from the Court of Record, Escambia County, Ernest E. Mason, J.
A.A. Fisher, Pensacola, for appellant.
Coe Coe, Pensacola, for appellee.
The wife, Clara Susie Sorrells, sued her husband, Clarence Eugene Sorrells, for separate maintenance and later he filed his bill for divorce. Eventually the suits were consolidated and the chancellor after hearing testimony produced orally before him and considering depositions decided that the wife should prevail, the husband not, and that he pay her $17.50 weekly for fifty-two weeks.
All the questions presented here by the husband involve the sufficiency of the evidence to establish the charges made by him against his wife, and by her against him. All must be answered in her favor by invoking the familiar, if not hackneyed, rule that issues of fact determined by the chancellor will not be disturbed unless he appears clearly to have been wrong. In this controversy there was abundant testimony to support his views on the main issues.
Finding no fault with the conclusion that the wife was entitled to separate maintenance we are, nonetheless, puzzled by, the court's restricting the payments to the arbitrary period of one year.
The financial circumstances of the parties are meager. The household furniture, worth but a few hundred dollars and an automobile, the value of which is not shown, seem to constitute their entire property. The husband makes about $50 per week; the wife earns nothing and has no apparent prospects of doing so. Besides, she is sixty years old and in failing health. She lives with her son.
No criticism is offered of the amount awarded, but only of fixation of the date when the periodic payments shall cease. We have found no basis in the record for such adjudication. The applicable statute empowers the court "to grant such * * permanent alimony and suit money as the circumstances of the parties may render just * * *." Sec. 65.09, Florida Statutes 1949, F.S.A. The "circumstances of the parties" do not justify any reason to anticipate that the wife will be capable of caring for herself after a year passes, or will come into such wealth that the husband will be relieved of his responsibility to maintain her. The parties are not divorced and so far as any one now knows his liability for her support at the end of one year will be as real as it is now.
The relative financial worth of the husband and wife also convinces us that she should not have been denied suit money and counsel fees. So the cause is remanded with directions to revise the decree by deleting all reference to a terminal payment and by incorporating such provisions for suit money and counsel fees as the chancellor shall believe to be fair.
Affirmed in part and reversed in part.
SEBRING, C.J., and TERRELL and HOBSON, JJ., concur.