Amnesia Carries West on Jaunt to Florida and Cape

"When one curtain went up, the other sent down," stated Thomas h. West, Jr. '50 last night, unable to recall anything specific about his two week amnesia attack that led him as afar afield as Jacksonville, Florida.

Under the assumed name of John Christy Moran, "a combination of my uncle's name and Aunt Mary Anne's" he was holding down a Cape Cod cranberry bog when he recognized his picture in a Boston paper under a $1000 reward caption last Saturday. His real name and old associations flashed back to him, and he quickly telegraphed his parents from an Orleans drug store.

No Recollection of Trip

Actual details of his Odyssey were completely blacked out by the amnesia. But a Railway Express Agency receipt for his large sea bag dated October 28, from Jacksonville, a registration slip from a Philadelphia lodging house on October 30, and a job application to the Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole marked what he thought were the limits north and south. Thus the Montreal resident who reported him there on October 29 was clearly mistaken.

The sea bag recovered in his Orleans hotel room, which accompanied him during the war years on Pacific duty with the U. S. Navy, contained several changes if clothing, including bits of formal attire, that proved effective in helping him elide police detection. West smiled as he noted a single black dancing pump included in the inventory.

Unknown to his trackers, West also was carrying $200, a cash debt collected from a friend the day before he disappeared. Police and private investigators had been working on the assumption that he had only $10 with him, since no checks cleared his account in a Milford Bank.