You Can’t Take Them With You

Retired Texas poultry worker Eddie Cooks’ marital troubles did not end with his death. A funeral limousine hired for his grieving family would not have been large enough to hold the three women who insisted they were his widows and promised to show up for the cemetery burial service Thursday. Cooks, 62, was struck by a car last week when crossing a street. His four brothers and seven sisters said they were not sure how many women he had legally married and divorced. Records show Cooks was legally married to at least two women, one who died and one who divorced him. Before the service, Fort Worth funeral director Gregory Spencer said seven women had called him claiming to be Cooks’ legal widow. “It’s a mess,” Spencer said. He had never confronted so many grieving widows of the same man in 17 years in the business. To settle the dispute, he said none would be allowed to ride to the service in the family limousine. “We’re just through with it,” said a disgruntled Darnell Stafford, one of Cooks’ sisters. “If they want to ride, they will have to get their own family car.” But only one of the women actually showed up at the funeral, and Spencer said afterward: “Things went beautifully. It was a lot better than I thought.”

--When James Grbac returned from a morning trip to the supermarket in Franklin, N.J., with his 15-month-old son, Jonathan, he was confronted by three men who asked him directions. While the son remained in the car, the three men began hitting Grbac. He says he had never seen them before and had no idea what it was all about. “They just started beating me,” he said. “They kicked me to the ground.” Inside their second-story apartment, his wife, Nancy, clad only in her pajamas, heard the commotion, looked out the window, steeled herself, and jumped. “I just unconsciously jumped,” she said. “There was nothing else to do. I had to help him.” Her head hit some shrubbery and her body hit the pavement, bruising her. But police said her dive drove the men off. Grbac now calls his 33-year-old wife “Wonder Woman.”

--Jack D. Pitts, a Republican House candidate, was canvassing a neighborhood in Smithfield, R.I., when the husband of a woman he was talking with began choking on a meatball. The candidate rushed into the house and administered the Heimlich maneuver several times, dislodging the food from J. Fabiano’s throat. Fabiano, a longtime Democrat, said he will probably ignore his party allegiance and vote for Pitts in November.