I recently found the 'Visalia Times-Delta' newspaper online. This is a newspaper that was published in Visalia, California, a town near Woodlake, California, where Dwight lived between the early 1920's and the early 1950's. There is another newspaper, the 'Woodlake Echo', that I would like to peruse someday, but right now, this newspaper is not available online. Both newspapers are held in the local public libraries in Tulare County, California. There are only two newspaper articles from the 'Visalia Times-Delta', and both tell unfortunate chapters that occurred during his life while in California.
Here is the first article from the 'Visalia Times-Delta', dated October 20, 1941: 'Highways made slippery by yesterday's showers boosted the weekend accident toll in Tulare County, according to reports in the California Highway Patrol office here today. Nine persons were injured over the weekend, none critically. Cars driven by Jimmy Green, 19, of Visalia, and Dwight Dodge, 50, of Woodlake, collided near Orosi at 8:30 p.m. Sautrday, Green's car striking a pole after the collision.'
The other article from the 'Visalia Times-Delta', dated July 10, 1950, reads: 'Dwight Dodge, 59, Lemon Cove, is in the Sequoia Hospital in Woodlake with major injuries after an unknown vehicle ran his pickup truck off the road in Lemon Cove early Sunday morning and it hit a culvert. Jimmy Burchett, 15, also of Lemon Cove, received minor injuries.'
The towns of Woodlake and Lemon Cove are just a few miles apart in Tulare County, California; a rural county in central California, between Fresno and Bakersfield. The second newspaper article is very important because it confirms where his residence was when the 1950 Census was taken (three more years before this Census is released).
Within a couple of years, he was divorced and living in Midland, Oregon. His wife, Ruth Edgington, divorced him in Nevada and was married to a widower named Donald A. Maxon, a life-long resident of Tulare County. They married in Las Vegas, Nevada in September of 1952. According to her marriage license, she divorced Dwight in September of 1951 in Reno, Nevada, on the grounds of desertion. I am in the process of locating their divorce record.
There is a reason why Ruth filed for divorce in Nevada; at that time, the residency requirement for divorce in Nevada was only six weeks, as opposed to one year nearly everywhere else. Reno in particular was the divorce destination from the 1920's through the 1960's because it was so much easier to obtain a divorce in Nevada then almost anywhere else. I'm hoping that I can locate their divorce record. Once I do so, I will finally be able to locate their marriage record.
