Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (20 page)

As usual, I am reminded of something that Dad said. It’s kind of a gruesome recollection in some respects, but Dad loved his cigarettes. He had been smoking since he was old enough to walk. One day, when he heard some of his buddies complain that the price of cigarettes had gone up again, he replied, “Boys, they’re just getting up close to what they’re worth.” That’s the way I feel about these drugs. I know that Mitch would have agreed with me.

D
URING OUR THIRD
and last year of law school, the tension rose among us would-be lawyers as to where we were going to be employed upon graduation. I have since come to the realization that your first job out of school is probably one of the least important occurrences in your life, at least from a career standpoint. Whatever it turns out to be, you probably won’t do it for very long. New grads, bright-eyed but inexperienced in anything but school, develop in different ways. In the case of law grads, some lose interest in the law altogether once they realize that, in addition to being an interesting profession, it is the way they are going to have to make their living. Some of the best students get hired by the best and largest law firms in the nation, which consign them to a back room researching, writing memos, and becoming the base of the firm pyramid, which is designed to achieve large profit margins for the partners at the top. Sometime during that first year, the young lawyer
realizes that it ain’t the kind of law work that they make movies about.

For many, the first job out of law school is the beginning of a career of job-hopping from firm to firm and in and out of government—a pattern that lasts a lifetime. Staying in one place with one firm for an extended period of time is pretty much a thing of the past. And so is the idealism of many young lawyers. The profession has changed over the years. As I was coming out of school, it was clear that we were becoming a much more transient and commercialized society and the legal profession, after standing apart as a pure profession for a couple of centuries, was becoming very much a part of the society around it. The notion of going into law not to become wealthy, but because of the status, independence, and respect it brought, was rapidly becoming a quaint notion. Journalism and the legal profession are the only two jobs in America directly protected by Constitutional amendments—the First and the Sixth. That comes with special responsibilities, including not being, primarily, a commercial enterprise. Neither profession has fully lived up to that responsibility. I longed for the “good old days,” at least as I perceived them. But in 1967 my focus was much narrower and probably more intense than most—a focus befitting a twenty-five-year-old married man with three children. I just wanted a job.

My uncertainty was cut short when I received a letter
from A.D. offering me a job with him. He was prepared to double the size of his office—from one to two. The firm would be called Lindsey and Thompson, and I would start out at $50 per week until I could develop my own clients. Sarah and I looked at each other and smiled. We knew we were going home. I would be a small fish in a small pond, with every confidence I could grow faster than the pond.

So the table had been set for me. I was going back to my hometown to do the only thing I ever wanted to do—be a country lawyer.

It turned out that practicing law in Lawrenceburg in the 1960s was a lot like it was in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, but without anyone who looked like Atticus Finch. The pace of the practice was pretty well demonstrated by a young lawyer who excitedly told some of the older heads having coffee one day, “I had a great week last week. I got a $100 case and a couple of small ones.”

However, when you’ve been chomping at the bit to practice law, as I had been for several years, nothing is too small to stir a young barrister’s juices. I couldn’t wait—so I didn’t.

A.D. had bought a little one-story frame house about a block and a half from the courthouse and turned it into our offices. We had “Lindsey and Thompson” painted on the door in gold leaf. And at the factory, Oscar and Ed had made
a desk for me and a library table with legs on it from an old piano. I called them the best-looking legs in town. After screwing in a light fixture one day, I had left a screwdriver sitting on our new table. Uncle Robert walked in, took a look at it, and said, “Ah-ha, a tool of the trade.”

I started sitting in on meetings with A.D. and his clients, helping out where I could and even voicing an opinion or two. Actually, I became quite involved in some of the cases in the office. The only problem was … I wasn’t a lawyer. As I recall, it took a couple of months from the time we took our bar examination until we heard the results. It seemed like the wait was a lifetime. I had studied for the bar in a cold sweat—day and night. The thought of not passing the bar with the responsibilities I had and all that awaited me was terrifying. With me sitting behind my new desk with my name on the door and Sarah, my family, and her family close by, it seemed like Western civilization was waiting to see my bar results. My thoughts kept drifting back to “What if I don’t pass?” My smart-aleck comments during my college days about the philosophy shop on the square didn’t seem so funny now. Finally, the word was circulating that the bar results would appear in the next Sunday’s edition of the
Nashville Tennessean
. The papers would come on early Sunday morning and be delivered to a little shack there in Lawrenceburg for distribution by the paperboys. On the following Sunday at about 3 a.m., I was waiting when the papers arrived. We cut a batch open, and sure enough my name was
on the list. I had passed. I sat down on another stack of papers and read the list over and over again. Each time my name was still on the list. The exhilaration swelled up inside me. This little column in the newspaper represented the first time that I had truly achieved something important, against odds, and by sustained effort. I felt that now I was beginning to earn the respect of my friends and family that I so badly wanted. I wondered what Mrs. Buckner would think.

The next morning when I walked into the office, A.D. and Helen had taped the column of those passing the bar on the door. Move over, Clarence Darrow.

Sarah and I had made the acquaintance of a young couple who had moved to town from out of state, and the husband turned out to be my first client. It had to do with his will. It didn’t quite rise to the level of importance of drafting a new will. He wanted me to review one that he already had. I inquired as to his present circumstances and his plans. I reviewed the documents, even absenting myself to sneak a look at a statute in the Tennessee Code. I then pronounced the document adequate and not in need of revision. I was very pleased with myself. It seemed to me a classic example of American jurisprudence being played out. The wise counselor—learned in the law and a trustworthy recipient of his client’s most personal information—providing his sound judgment with regard to most important matters. Oh, the majesty of it all. I charged him $5.00.

Eager to get into court, I took a case that probably didn’t
pass the main test for a lawyer to take a contingency fee case to court—the probability of success. If I didn’t win, I wouldn’t get paid. My client—a young man whose last name was Wisdom—pulled his car onto Highway 43 running out of Lawrenceburg from a dirt road into the path of an oncoming large truck. I had noticed that in everyday parlance, people would often use the term “run over” when someone would get hit by a car. In my boy Wisdom’s case, saying he was run over was not hyperbole. He was run over. He had tire marks across his stomach. I was flabbergasted by the fact that the boy was not dead. But as folks around town would say, “Them Wisdoms are tough.” That seemed to explain it.

The unfavorable facts of the case served as no deterrent to Wisdom, who needed a payday, or to me, who needed a case. I scrounged around in the law books, and we sued the trucking company on the theory of “last clear chance,” a legal doctrine that basically says that even if the plaintiff (Wisdom) is negligent, if the defendant had an opportunity to avoid the accident or had the last clear chance to do so, then the defendant can be held liable, unless the plaintiff had engaged in willful or wanton misconduct. So I argued to the jury that even if Wisdom had been negligent in pulling out in front of the truck, he was not guilty of willful or wanton conduct and the truck had time to avoid Wisdom’s automobile easily.

On the other side, representing the trucking company’s
insurer, was a young lawyer from Columbia, Tennessee, named Charles Trost, who was not a lot older than I was. Charlie now practices law in Nashville and has remained a good friend over the years. Anyway, Charlie and I went round for round arguing our case. The facts of the case were clear (unfortunately). Therefore, it seemed that my oratorical skills were going to have to carry the day—so when I was arguing to the jury, long after it had become time for me to sit down, I felt this tug on my coat as I walked by counsel’s table. A.D. was trying to suggest surreptitiously to me that when you are in a hole it is best to stop digging. Still, I kept pounding. My client was not guilty of wanton actions.

The case went to the jury, and hours later it became obvious that they were deadlocked, unable to reach a verdict. Finally, Judge Ingram declared that we had a hung jury. It meant that we would have to try it again.

The jury was dismissed, and as I was gathering my papers at counsel’s table, one of the old fellows who was on the jury walked over to me and said, “Fred, I just want you to know I stuck with you. I think you were absolutely right. The boy was not ‘wantin’’ to get hurt.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The old guy was in the right church but in the wrong pew. I thought about this fellow many times over the years. Whether in law or politics, it’s not so much what you are saying that’s important. What’s important is what is being heard. Also, the more I thought
about it, the more it occurred to me that this old farmer’s thinking was not that far off from what the writers of that statute meant.

Sarah and I settled into the pleasant predictabilities of small-town Southern life where we had both been raised, where three generations of our family now lived. It was also where every street, park, or building brought back memories (and sometimes cringes) of games, jobs, fistfights, dates, and the first time for almost everything. We lived in a little house on the edge of town about ten minutes from the office, church, and the Little League baseball field. For the little guys, we had a minor league in which Tony played and I coached.

Sarah taught high school in Summertown, a sixteen-mile commute. It was even a smaller and a more country town than Lawrenceburg, and Sarah would come home with tales of kids talking about Sunday dinner of possum and chocolate gravy.

Law practice was the standard small-town fare of wills and estates (if you use the word estates loosely), property-line disputes, divorces, drunk-driving charges, and an occasional serious crime. Every morning, the lawyers would congregate in a little room in the upstairs corner of the courthouse that served as the general sessions courtroom, where we argued over misdemeanors, small claims, and who got to the intersection
first, and to see what the Highway Patrol catch had been the night before.

Monday morning was what we called the “couple of beers docket.” The Highway Patrol would parade the DWI offenders in one at a time and, whether the plea was guilty or not guilty or whether they were knee-walking drunk, most of them had had the proverbial “couple of beers.” The idea, of course, was that the defendant would be more credible if he acknowledged lack of perfection in his defense of the outrageous claim that he was drunk as a skunk.

After court, four or five of the regulars would congregate at Beckham’s Drug Store to drink coffee, laugh about one another’s clients, talk politics, and negotiate cases.

Not too long after we tried the Wisdom case, Charlie called me up and we settled, avoiding another trial. He had talked his insurance company into offering a modest but satisfactory amount, as I recall. I never was sure whether Charlie pushed to settle the case because he didn’t want to go through another one of my final arguments or because he didn’t want to risk the uncertainties presented by a Lawrence County jury.