Country Lawyer: A Collection of Cases, Comments, and Characters

After practicing law in the San Francisco Bat Area for five years, and then moving to a small town in Indiana, it never ceased to amaze me as to the difference in legal concerns and the real life situations that exist between the two. It was as if I had stepped back into another and prior century. This is a collection of cases, and discussion of circumstances as encountered in practice and on day-to-day situation reflecting day-to-day concerns and reactions to people and true life as it existed half a century ago.

Born and raised in a small town in Eastern Kentucky, I served in the Marine Corps in WWII in the South Pacific before returning to the states to go to school. After getting a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, I moved to the West Coast to work for a large corporation as an engineer. A bout with Tb forced a vacation that caused a change in life perspective, and allowed the getting of a law degree at the University of California - Berkeley, and subsequent law practice in Berkeley, before moving to a small town in Indiana for law practice. Six years there, with cases coming in that reflected the difference in life style, I returned to Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay Area, where I now live in retirement. Now, over fifty years later, the composition and the character of the legal matters I handled loom large in retrospect. They reflect the raw side of life that a "country lawyer" had to deal with in stark contrast to what I had left and what I returned to in the city practice. These stories are of real people, with real problems, that reflect the raw side of life as seen from in front of the bench and sometimes from behind it when I was asked to sit as judge.