Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

aid clinic at the law school. When I tried to send law students into judge Butt’s court to represent indigent clients, the judge required the students to qualify their clients under a nineteenth-century statute that permitted free legal assistance only when a person’s assets were worth no more than ten dollars and the clothes on his or her back. It was an impossible standard to meet for anyone who owned an old clunker car or a television or anything else worth more than ten dollars. I wanted to change the law, and I needed the help of the Arkansas Bar Association to do it. I also wanted the bar to provide financial assistance to the legal aid clinic at the law school to help pay for a fulltime administrator and legal secretary since it provided real-world experience to future lawyers. Vince was the head of the bar committee that oversaw legal aid, so I went to visit him. He enlisted several other leading lawyers to help me, including Henry Woods, the state’s premier trial lawyer, and William R. Wilson, Jr., a selfproclaimed mule-skinner’s assistant―a “swamper”―who was also one of the best lawyers around. Judge Butt and I appeared before the state bar’s executive committee and presented our opposing arguments. The committee voted to support the clinic and endorsed repealing the statute, thanks to the support Vince recruited.

After the 1976 election, Vince and another Rose Firm partner, Herbert C. Rule III, came to see me with a job offer. In keeping with the firm’s steadfast efforts to follow proper procedures, Herb, an erudite Yale College alum, had already obtained an opinion from the American Bar Association that approved the employment by a law firm of a lawyer married to a state’s Attorney General and set forth the steps to be taken to avoid conflicts of interest.

Not all the Rose Firm lawyers were as enthusiastic as Vince and Herb about having a woman join them. There had never been a woman associate, although the firm had hired a female law clerk in the 1940s, Elsijane Roy, who stayed only a few years before leaving to become the permanent clerk for a federal judge. Later appointed to succeed that judge by President Carter, she became the first woman appointed to the federal bench in Arkansas.

Two of the senior partners, William Nash and J. Gaston Williamson, were Rhodes Scholars, and Gaston had served on the committee that had selected Bill for his Rhodes Scholarship. Herb and Vince took me around to meet them and the other lawyers, fifteen in all. When the partners voted to hire me, Vince and Herb gave me a copy of Hard Times by Charles Dickens. But who could have known what an appropriate gift that would be?

I joined the litigation section, headed by Phil Carroll, a thoroughly decent man, former prisoner of war in Germany and first-class lawyer who became President of the Arkansas Bar Association. The two lawyers with whom I worked most were Vince and Webster Hubbell.

Vince was one of the best lawyers I’ve ever known and one of the best friends I’ve ever had. If you remember Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, you can picture Vince. He actually looked the part, and his manner was similar: steady, courtly, sharp but understated, the sort of person you would want around in times of trouble.

Vince and I had adjacent offices at the firm, and we shared a secretary. He was born and raised in Hope, Arkansas. The backyard of his boyhood home bordered the backyard of Bill’s grandparents, with whom Bill lived until he was four. Bill and Vince played together as little boys, although they lost touch when Bill moved to Hot Springs in 1953.

When Bill ran for Attorney General, Vince became a strong supporter. .

Webb Hubbell was a big, burly, likeable man, a former University of Arkansas football star and an avid golfer, which endeared him to Bill from the outset. He was also a great raconteur in a state where story telling is a way of life. Webb had a wealth of experience in all sorts of fields; he would eventually become Mayor of Little Rock, and he served for a time as Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He was great fun to work with and a loyal, supportive friend.

Hubbell looked like a good of boy, but he was a creative litigator, and I loved to listen to him talk about arcane Arkansas law. His memory was phenomenal. He also had a tricky back that would sometimes go out on him. Once Webb and I stayed at the office all night working on a brief that was due the next day. Webb lay on the floor on his hurting back spouting citations of cases back to the nineteenth century; my job was to run around the law library hunting them down.

In the first jury trial I handled on my own, I defended a canning company against a plaintiff who found the rear end of a rat in the can of pork and beans he opened for dinner one night. He didn’t actually eat it but claimed that the mere sight was so disgusting that he couldn’t stop spitting, which in turn interfered with his ability to kiss his fiancée. He sat through the trial spitting into a handkerchief and looking miserable. There was no doubt that something had gone wrong in the processing plant, but the company refused to pay the plaintiff since it argued that he hadn’t really been damaged; and besides, the rodent parts which had been sterilized might be considered edible in certain parts of the world. Although I was nervous in front of the jury, I warmed to the task of convincing them that my client was in the right and was relieved when they awarded the plaintiff only nominal damages. For years after, Bill used to kid me about the “rat’s ass” case and mimic the plaintiff’s claim he could no longer