Stille v. Stille

CONLEY,. P. J. This is a divorce case in which the wife, Myrtle Stille, sued the defendant, Joe R. Stille. The evidence received at the hearing covered 594 pages of the reporter’& transcript; much time.was occupied by testimony concerning what appears to be inconsequential things, such as the ownership of a quilt that Grandma Sisk had made.

'However, much of the area of decision is not questioned by the appellant. The divorce to the plaintiff, the awarding of custody of the son, and the award of alimony and child support to her are not attacked on the appeal, and it is apparent that the judgment must be affirmed with respect to those issues.which are not questioned by the appellant. The objections to the judgment on the appeal are restricted to the division of the. community property made by the court, and, with respect to these issues, the respondent concedes some of them.

Several of the matters involved in the judgment to which objections are made seem to us to be decided correctly.' Expressed in a slightly different way, as to some of them we do not believe that the appellant has shown that the decision by the trial court would warrant interference with the results of the court’s discretionary conclusions. But other grounds.of complaint are so clear that even counsel for the respondent concedes them; and such features will require us to reverse the judgment in part and to give directions relative to such .issues.

We shall examine in turn all of the adverse observations oí the appellant. The first paragraph of appellant’s opening brief is devoted to the contention that in a divorce case the trial judge owes a duty to adjudicate the ownership of all of the community property as between the contending parties, citing Cunha v. Cunha, 8 Cal.App.2d 413 [48 P.2d 130], and 16 California Jurisprudence 2d, Divorce, Separation, etc., section 170, page. 562. A divorce case is historically equit: able in nature and, as it is improper to adjudicate equity eases by piecemeal, the presiding jurist owes a duty not to leave some of the mutual property rights undisposed of. We find that the court faced up to its duty in this respect except in one instance in which the trial judge apparently forgot to divide a $30 balance of community funds, which had been left [667]on deposit in the Crocker-Citizens National Bank. That sum should be divided between the parties; the percentage of assignment specified in the findings for the wife and for the husband in other instances should be applied to the $30, so that the wife should be awarded 60 percent thereof, or $18, and the husband 40 percent, or $12.