Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (18 page)

It was obvious from the beginning at Vanderbilt Law School that we were not in Lawrenceburg anymore. My fellow students were mostly from the best schools in the country and at the top of their class. However, not for the last time, I applied a surefire recipe for success. I had put myself in a position where I had no choice but to succeed. The alternative was too grave to consider (including having to get a real job).

Before long, our family had settled into a routine that would see us through law school—one that we were familiar with, including Sarah becoming pregnant again. In 1965, we had a handsome baby boy to the delight of us all, although I can imagine our families were wondering just how large our household was going to become before I started drawing a
paycheck. We named our baby Daniel after Sarah’s uncle A.D., and while he was basically healthy and strong, he provided us with the first real terror of our parenthood. He started having seizures, and under doctor’s orders we would lay him on the floor and sponge him with water until he revived. It seemed like forever as he lay there with his eyes rolled back. Soon these episodes subsided without lasting effects. (He, like Tony, is a good, successful guy and lives with his wonderful family in Nashville.) But I do believe these experiences had lasting effects on Sarah and me. We had never truly recognized how lucky we had been until then.

People decide to go to law school for a lot of different reasons. Some want to use their legal knowledge to save the world (not that many, really, but some), some want to go to Wall Street and get filthy rich, and some consider it to be a convenient landing pad while they decide what they want to do when they grow up, usually with Daddy’s help. Me, I still wanted to walk into a courtroom and show them who was boss. I felt that the curriculum did not serve my purpose terribly well. With the exception of one class on courtroom procedure, there was nothing very practical about it. We followed the case law method, immersing ourselves in various arcane appellate court decisions, not to learn the law but to learn how to dissect and analyze the legal opinion in the case under consideration. A phrase was heard often: “We’re not here to teach you the law. We’re here to teach you how to think.” Of course, anyone as smart as we thought we were
was of the firm opinion that they already knew how to think. We “thought” that this might be a waste of time. That was until we received our first round of grades, at which point many shattered egos were heard to say that they “thought” they needed a beer.

It also occurred to me that a fellow like myself who had majored in philosophy shouldn’t squawk too much about not being taught enough that was practical. Grade shock, classroom humiliation, and onerous assignments were, of course, part of an old law-school tradition to break us down. Sometimes I felt the plan was definitely working. I knew that I was—at school, at home, and as a night clerk at a local motel. But I knew that Sarah was working as hard and doing as much or more. She was teaching high school English. In the morning, the babysitter would arrive and Sarah would leave to teach. Tony and I would get picked up by my law school buddy, Howard Liebengood, then we’d drop Tony off at school and go to class. When Sarah got out of school, she would pick me up and I would take her home and leave for my job at the motel. When I would get home, she would be in bed. Many days the only chance we had to talk was when she was taking me to work.

Howard and I had hit it off immediately. He was a funny, outgoing guy with a ready smile whom everybody liked. He was a conservative and a Hoosier, from Plymouth, Indiana, and married to a sweet, smart girl, Deana, who also taught school. We became friends for life.

Meanwhile, I was still learning life’s little lessons. Much like in college, my grades steadily improved as I settled into my various tasks. But unlike a lot of my classmates, I had to work hard for everything I achieved. I had a setback my first semester, when my grade point average dropped below the B I had to retain for my partial scholarship. The school withdrew it. I was a little upset and of the opinion that the school was hasty in their decision. Therefore, I punished them by obstinately refusing to reapply for my scholarship money when my grades qualified me again. During my second year, we learned that there was a new scholarship available for someone in our class, and it was based totally upon need. You can guess who I thought would be a worthy recipient. Several of my classmates told me that they expected me to get it. They gave it instead to a judge’s son. The chip on my shoulder wasn’t getting any smaller. I was getting a little tired of God’s apparent attempt to motivate me through the dumb actions of human intermediaries. But I guess it was still working. I won Best Oral Argument in the moot court competition and was selected for the three-person national moot court team the next year. But it didn’t pay any money.

After my second year of law school, we moved back to Lawrenceburg for the summer. A.D. had given me the opportunity to clerk in his office. He practiced solo, in the same office where he and Pap had lawyered for many years. It was upstairs in an old building on the square. After climbing the stairs, the first thing one noticed was that the hallway
was lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling—sort of a
Psycho
effect, but with Southern charm. It led to a two-room office filled with the aroma of old books and tobacco. After many years of bachelorhood, A.D. remarried, and “Miss Helen” did the secretarial work in the front room, where I hung out, along with a fairly steady stream of local politicians and A.D.’s friends and cronies, and shot the breeze. In the unlikely event that an actual paying client would come by, he would be taken to the back room for a modicum of privacy.

Although the space was a little cramped, it was the place of many happy hours for me, spent smoking my pipe and searching for obscure precedents that would deal a devastating blow to our local legal opponents in the case at hand: a property dispute, a divorce, or the never-ending quest to determine who got to the intersection first.

The level of regular legal traffic in A.D.’s office probably would not have justified my clerkship. But this summer was different. In 1966, Lawrenceburg was in the middle of labor turmoil the likes of which we had never seen before. The Teamsters Union had decided to make an all-out effort to unionize the Murray Bicycle Plant, my former employer, as well as some smaller firms, including the Lindsey’s furniture plant.

Employee elections had been conducted and the union was voted down, but that was just the beginning of the fight. The Teamsters filed unfair-labor-practice charges against the
companies, accusing them of intimidation and a raft of other offenses. For a little company like Lindsey’s the fines and penalties, not to mention the effects of losing a new election, would have been disastrous. Ed and Oscar had started in the business as teenagers and worked day and night to build it up. They provided jobs to mostly country folks, and paid wages that would seem small to most outside observers but were not bad by local standards. They especially didn’t like being told that they couldn’t talk to their own employees about what they thought was in the best interest of them and the plant. A lot was at stake. Although the factory had provided Ed’s and Oscar’s families with pretty good livings, the profit margins were small. Fortunately for them, they had access to the most high-powered legal team in those parts—A.D. and me. There was just one problem. A.D. knew nothing about labor law … and I knew even less. What we did know was that the hearing examiner for the National Labor Relations Board had taken testimony and found against Lindsey’s and the case was on appeal to the NLRB. Fortunately, the appeal was pretty much a fact-based exercise. A.D. and I spent hour after hour going through transcripts of the hearing, preparing our brief to the NLRB.

I had never seen A.D. work before. He was brilliant. During World War II, he had worked in New York as a military investigator of some sort. He never talked much about it, but occasionally he would reminisce about his days in New York as he wistfully recalled them. He was a big fan of Thomas
Wolfe and was one of the most well-read guys in the area. He simply got tired of all of it and came home to the little town to practice law with Pap. He knew the trade-offs and he loved what he was doing, but his experiences had left him a bit more cosmopolitan than he was willing to acknowledge. The NLRB also challenged him as the local legal fare never had before.

There were union fights, skirmishes, and lawsuits filed almost every other day that summer, and many Murray hearings were held at the courthouse. Observing the large team of Murray lawyers in from Atlanta, it occurred to me at the time that they were indeed specialists but they were no smarter than A.D. He was doing the same kind of work and was a heck of a lot cheaper. My guess is that he never received a dime. The Lindseys just did things for one another.

While these battles were being fought out in the courts and before the NLRB, an uglier side of the conflict was being played out in the streets and at the factory gates. The Teamsters’ main goal was to get new elections for union recognition at the factories. While the legal efforts were pending, they sent “business agents” from Nashville to organize and rabble-rouse. Teamster sympathizers left their jobs and started congregating at the factory gate at Murray to hassle nonstriking workers and stop them from going to work. Hell broke loose. Trying to interfere with a man’s livelihood, especially when done by outsiders, was not something to be tolerated by the average Lawrence Countian. Fights broke
out in twos and threes, and then in larger numbers. The local chief of police was hospitalized. Gunshots were heard in the distance. At Lindsey’s they threw bricks through the front-office window and injured Sarah’s mother. However, the main action was at Murray, and it was getting worse. The police department called for volunteers. I borrowed a pistol from a friend of mine and showed up at the police station, where several of us were “deputized.” The city fathers established a system whereby the fire station siren would be activated when the thugs showed up, usually at the Murray gate during the change in shifts. Often it was brother against brother and father against son. Each side was armed, untrained, without leadership, and mad as hell—all of the ingredients for a major disaster. One night the siren went off and we headed for Murray. Strikers were pelting cars with rocks as they were going through the factory gate. After a lot of shoving, cussing, and threatening, things finally calmed down. This scene was repeated a few times until it was obvious to the union organizers that we outnumbered them and would not back off. I have no idea what I or any of the rest of the crowd would have done if real violence had broken out. Miraculously, no one was killed.

Just as miraculously, the NLRB overturned the hearing examiner in the Lindsey case. We had won. The result of it all was that neither Lindsey’s nor Murray was unionized. Mainly, it was due not to the legalities of the matter, but because most of the workers simply chose not to unionize.
They felt they could deal with management better themselves. It had worked so far. And they, for sure, were against allowing a bunch of outsiders and roughnecks to tell them what to do.

For me it was a story about the Lindseys as much as anything else. They had stuck it out and were fortunate enough to have a good lawyer in the family. Their closeness and even clannishness made it one for all and all for one, allowing them to afford to fight. My understanding was that a year or two later, when Oscar and Ed made some office furniture for A.D. and a desk for me, it was largely in payment to A.D. for what he had done. It cost far less than what they would have had to pay lawyers from Atlanta, but it meant a lot to A.D. and to me.

When you are doing manual labor, whether it’s digging a ditch or working at an assembly line, you get to see humanity with its clothes off. Sometimes it’s not a pretty picture. Sometimes it is. In other words, it’s pretty much the same as in a law office or a business, but without the pretention.

The lessons I learned that summer solidified some feelings I had. For one thing, I saw that good old boys coming in off the farms can’t be counted on by the activists to line up on the left because of class resentment. The working men whom I had encountered liked to think for themselves and, unless personally disrespected, were not naturally resentful of “the man.” And what made it that way was not so much that they were delighted with where they were at any particular moment
in their life but their belief that they could and would do better tomorrow.

I knew where people like my folks and the Lindseys had come from. I knew of the economic transition that they had made while all the time keeping their families together and making them stronger. Since the beginning of our country, we have been a nation of dreamers and hard workers, and we’ve encouraged and rewarded them. We seldom envy achievers because we know that we are free to take our own shot at success. Even though most of my working buddies did not have the prospects that I did, for all of us it was not as much about yesterday or today as it was about tomorrow. What we did with it was, largely, up to us.

Back in law school for my final year, I had to smile when asked what I had done on my summer vacation. I wanted to say, “Well, I won my first case, carried a gun, and busted a strike.” But I wasn’t sure how well that would have gone over—or whether it would be believed, for that matter.