Nuggets of Wisdom from Kentucky Lawyers

I grew up in Kentucky, living in Lexington for 25 years prior to moving to Charlotte in 2002. I have been a member of the Kentucky Bar Association, and licensed to practice in Kentucky, since 1997, and am a graduate of the University of Kentucky. With my blood running so blue, it was a rare treat to read this book over a spring vacation.

This book is based on the oral histories of some of the senior members of the Kentucky bar, the majority of whom were born before 1920 and have, since being interviewed, passed away.  There are so many nuggets of wisdom and humor in this book. A few worth sharing:

Norma Foster Adams (born 1931): “I was at Western Kentucky University and I was finishing my second year. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had good grades but no real interests. One day my grandfather said to me, ‘Why don’t you go to law school, even if you don’t plan on practicing? From what I’m reading today, that’s the best general education you can get. So I went to law school with that thought, that it was a great thing to teach you to think. I went to law school at UK after two years at Western. They called us the two-year wonders. I don’t have an undergraduate degree. There were probably three or four in each class whom they’d let in, as long as we had 60 semester hours. The tuition was $35 in 1950.”

Philip P. Ardery (born 1914): “I think I was the first attorney who objected to systematic exclusion of blacks from juries in 1949. My father was the judge and I objected to the exclusion of blacks. The Supreme Court just a couple of days prior to that had indicated that was reversible error. My father recognized that and he ordered that the sheriff go to the Kentucky State College and get a jury of blacks. I renewed my objection because that was a systemic exclusion of whites. The jury in that case was a very fine jury of faculty members. They were probably as well educated as any jury we had ever had. The man I represented was a black man who had killed a white man, and there was some evidence of self-defense. I objected because of the exclusion of whites. The jury deliberated for about an hour, came back and reported that they had made a verdict. The judge said, ‘Have you made your verdict?’ The foreman said, ‘Yes, Your Honor.’ ‘Well, what was it?’ ‘Before I tell you what it was I’d like to tell you what the circumstances were when we started our deliberation.’ ‘Go ahead.’ ‘The first thing we did was to kneel around the table in the jury room and prayed that God would give us the power and the judgment to make a proper verdict.’ ‘That’s fine. Now, what is your verdict?’ He said, ‘The verdict is guilty, and the penalty is four years.’ . . . . As far as I know, that was the first time there was a black jury in Kentucky.”

Rodney S. Bryson (born 1922): “The courtrooms were not carpeted. They had linoleum in them mostly. I can remember trying cases in Boone County in August. There was no air conditioning, of course, and everybody was in short-sleeves. It was so hot that the jury would keep falling asleep. You’d wait until you had an important point, and you’d drop a book on the floor. It’d hit with a slam and they’d all wake up and jump. Then you made your point and they went back to sleep. We used to do a lot more tricks than you do these days.”

Woodrow W. Burchett (born 1911): “Grover Cleveland Allen was practicing law then; he was six and a half feet tall. He was a whiz-bang of a criminal lawyer. We had a client who had shot a fellow about six or eight times. We knew he was going to have trouble explaining it, and we knew he wasn’t going to lie about it. So, Grover started smoking his cigar and the ash kept hanging on. It got to be as long as your finger. That jury got interested in when that ash was going to fall off that cigar when they were cross-examining our client. They never heard a question that was asked or an answer he made. Grover kept holding that cigar out and raising his hand and that jury would wa-a-atch it and I was watching everything. That ash never did fall off. They called a recess. We go in the jury room and I said, ‘Grover, what happened to your cigar?’ He pulled a big hairpin out of it. But he got the attention of that jury.”

James S. Chenault (born 1923): “When I became a judge in 1966, we had women on juries. Looking through some of my family papers, I found where my grandmother, Mrs. J.B. Stouffer, was the first woman juror in Madison County. They just disappeared from the courts, and one of the justifications was, ‘We don’t have any sanitary facilities. We’ve got male restrooms in courthouses. We don’t have women’s.’ In the 1960s they finally built a little women’s restroom off the clerk’s office.”

William P. Curlin, Sr. (born 1933): “Back in the ‘60s the court would appoint young lawyers to defend people. . . . . Judge Meigs appointed Fred Bradley and me. We were both young lawyers. Fred had been out about a year before I was. Fred was later county judge, state senator and commander in the Air Force of the international guard. Fred and I interviewed the witnesses. Judge Meigs had a pretrial conference and wanted to set it for trial. And so he asked me, “Mr. Curlin, how long is it going to take to try this case?’ I said, ‘Judge, I don’t have any idea. I’ve never been involved in a murder case. It’s going to be long and involved I know that.’ Fred Bradley says, ‘Three days, Judge.’ ‘Fred, how do you know you can try it in three days?’ And Fred says, ‘Because I’ve only got three suits, Judge.’ And we tried it in three days.”

Georgia Mae Nelson Dunn (born 1908): “I dressed in suits that had the tailored look. I never did go into slacks. Of course, I don’t think at that early stage they were wearing slacks so much. But when they did, I never did wear slacks. I just would not wear slacks. One reason was because when I put them on, there wasn’t any slack in them.”

Marshall P. Eldred (born 1904): “I was trying a case in Louisville one day and the land owner was a widow. Her lawyer asked if the farm was productive. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘It was productive. My father raised six children on it.’ Everyone in the courtroom burst out in a tremendous laugh and Judge Swinford laughed too.”

T. Kennedy Helm, Jr. (born 1918): “My first client was a distant cousin who wanted a lease written. I charged her ten dollars. She was horrified because I cashed the check. She said, ‘I know I’m your first client and I thought you’d frame the check.’ But I needed the ten bucks.”

Herbert D. Sledd (born 1925): “The judges took a summer vacation because there wasn’t any air conditioning, and you didn’t work in the hot, humid weather if you could avoid it. There were set terms for the juries. At the end of June, the court went out of session until October. That’s when lawyers did a lot of their office and and appellate work.”

Robert M. Spragens, Sr. (born 1920): “In law school, I was already married and class started at eight o’clock in the morning. I had a very bad habit of arriving perhaps three or four minutes late. One morning Professor Moreland asked me, ‘Spragens, I wish you would just leave that goodbye kiss off one morning and get here on time.’ I said, ‘Professor Moreland, I get a whole lot more out of that kiss than I do your class.’ That was a mistake.”

Samuel J. Stallings (born 1905), on the subject of picking up at the Louisville, Kentucky airport former president Harry Truman, to be the keynote speaker at the Kentucky Bar Association convention: “I took him out to the university, just the two of us in a car. He’d had a few drinks that morning at ten o’clock in the morning. We were walking across the campus and I had him by the arm. As we walked along, he was stepping like he was stepping over ditches because he had had too many drinks. I said, ‘Mr. President, there are no ditches here. You don’t have to step that high.’ But it didn’t do any good, he kept on.

Samuel Steinfeld (born 1906): “One time, I handled a small estate when the deceased had no children. The nephew of the deceased walked in. He’d paid my fee and everything was over, and he put down on my desk five $20 gold pieces never in circulation. A hundred years old. He said the family so appreciated the way the estate was handled that they wanted to show gratitude. I had five grandchildren later and I have each one of them a $20 gold piece.”

Rucker Todd (born 1923), founding partner of the Louisville-based firm known today as Frost Brown Todd, LLC, one of my former employers: “I thought that it was possible to build a law firm if you hired the brightest, most honest people who were out there. If you brought them into the firm, integrated them in the firm, it could not help from being a great law firm. …. At the time, we were trying to offer $2,900. Cincinnati was $3,200 or $3,600 and it was difficult to compete. We were just out-priced by these other cities, but if we could find somebody to whom we could appeal on the basis that this is a great opportunity and this is a fine, honest law firm, you will be proud to practice here, we could catch them and maybe we caught some who had Louisville connections that became natural for us.”

Roy N. Vance, Jr. (born 1921): “I was in the Army for four years, three months and 16 days, and was discharged in August, 1946. I went back home [to Kentucky] and started practicing law again with my Uncle Richard Bryan, and I practiced with him from 1946 to 1949, when I was elected county attorney over the incumbent of 17 years. I was hoping to contest that office at the end of his thirteenth year, but I wasn’t finished with my service. I had a little rhyme when I got on the bus to go to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, to be inducted. It was ‘Friends and neighbors, if I’m still alive, vote for Vance in ’45.’”

Also from Roy Vance: “As far as I know, I hold the world’s record for having lost the biggest civil verdict in the history of the universe. I defended a truck driver in a personal injury lawsuit at Eddyville, Kentucky, in which he had gone to sleep at the wheel and run over an automobile, killing the sheriff’s wife’s mother and father and making an invalid of the sheriff’s wife. They had sued for $1,500,000. . . . We tried the case over a period of three or four days and the jury came in with a verdict and handed it up to the circuit judge and he read off, ‘We the jury find for the plaintiff in the sum of $749,000.’ Well, that was a shock, but it was well within the reasonable limits. They had sued for a million and a half and the woman had the most terrible injuries you could possibly imagine. So, I just talked with Judge Johnstone about the case and I said, ‘Well, before I go back to Paducah I’d better get a copy of the verdict.’ I had them make me a copy and I read it and it said ‘We, the jury, find for the plaintiff for past and future medical expenses, $250,000,000; for past and future pain and suffering $250,000,000; and for loss of consortium, $249,000,000, for a total of $749,000,000.’ The jury had meant to give $749,000, but they just didn’t know when to quit adding on zeros to each figure. The jury had already been discharged and gone home. So, I had to file a motion to set aside the verdict on excessive damages and the judge sustained it promptly. We then settled the case within insurance limits.”

John K. Wells (born 1915): “My mother was Ruth L. Wells, and she was the second woman lawyer in the Big Sandy Valley [of Kentucky]. When my father practiced, my mother was his secretary and, of course, the secretary usually knows more than the lawyers anyway. After he was shot and killed, she tried to work as a secretary and court reporter and found that was difficult. So, she studied laws in law offices. In 1928, she took the Bar exam and passed, and she practiced from then until her death in ’47. She was in a case in Prestonsburg, representing the city. The plaintiff had fallen in a manhole and had sued the city. The trial was about half-finished and opposing counsel was getting more and more irate. He told the court he wanted to object to Mrs. Wells smiling all the time. Every time he said something to her, she would sort of smile and the jury would begin to smile back at her.

Also from John Wells: “I would tell young lawyers that if they are workaholics, they are in the right profession. If they are not, they probably ought to look around. To be a successful lawyer, you’ve got to be willing to dedicate yourself to the point that everything besides your family takes second place to the practice of law. So many of the young people come out of law school and go back to the local town with the idea that they are going to live a normal life, i.e., they are entitled, like everybody else, to work eight hours and then drop everything they are doing and go home with their family or pursue some avocation. But it doesn’t work that way. The only way that I could excel was to outwork the opposing counsel. With the law becoming more and more complicated, you are going to go into court against someone who has spent half his time in this narrow field of law.”

Natalie Stearns Wilson (born 1933): “I really thought that there would be an answer to every legal question that people could ask, and I always wanted to know the answers to all the questions. That’s not the case in the practice of law. But I enjoyed it.”

And perhaps my favorite: Henry A. Triplett (born 1928): “I oppose advertising and direct solicitation, and people say, ‘Well, you oppose advertising because you’ve got an established practice.’ I said, ‘Well, I didn’t have one in 1954.’ I represented people for free. I took older lawyers home when they were drunk. I took their wives’ ugly nieces to the barn dances, and I was active in my political party and did those things. I still think that’s the way you need to do it.”

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