Introduction to My Personal Story
When one approaches the twilight of life, memories are a treasure. But the twilight metaphor is relative. Babies will be born on the day that I die. The sun is not setting for them. But they won’t and can’t experience what I have experienced. Having lived a rich and full life, and reached its twilight, and am convinced that it is worth sharing, for my family, and others. With each death, much is lost.
While this effort will be somewhat autobiographical, it is not really about me. I am writing about what I have seen, heard, tasted, smelt and felt. Like a witness testifying at a trial, this is my testimony. Although I believe very strongly in things unseen, my evidence is empirical. The evidence I will present draws on my own experience, and the trial is not about me.
I will present my evidence in short essays, descriptions and anecdotes. The path that I have followed in life has led through fascinating landscape, and has always been interesting. The essays, descriptions and anecdotes are snapshots depicting the view from the path. The landscape will be familiar to many, but I believe that my particular vantage points will create new and different impressions.
The twilight encompasses all. This writing comes in the twilight of my years, and am making every effort to describe the view while the light is still gleaming! But a second application for the twilight metaphor is the twilight of a way of life. It was a way of life that I saw briefly in the early years, that is quickly fading from everyone’s view and memory.
A third application of twilight is the twilight of law. Law has been the love and work of my life; my vocation and my avocation. Civilization as we know it was built on our fundamental faith in law and justice. The future of civilization and of all possibility for life together depends on the continued existence of the law that has provided the structure for Western Civilization. But these essays, descriptions and anecdotes will show that the edifice of law is fractured, that the faith on which it depends is changing, and even vanishing, and that law is endangered. But in its twilight, it still gleams.
The essays, descriptions and anecdotes will be presented as free standing entities. They can be read separately from each other, with meaning. But like snapshots, they portray a larger reality. They will be factual, and facts, always give rise to multiple epiphanies. Leaves provide shade at the same time that they provide photosynthesis. The descriptions, anecdotes and essays will point to a larger reality. But I will just tell the stories in anecdotes, and present the ideas in essays, and leave to the reader the application or selection of the appropriate epiphanies and concepts.
As I reflect on the events of my life, there are certain persistent themes. I was born in rural Macon County, Alabama. The County is predominantly black. But I had little association with black people (or white people either, for that matter), in my early years. I chose the legal profession, and was elected Circuit Judge. Race, racial politics, the gambling issues that seem to have a relation to racial politics, the Civil Rights movement, and social impact of the Voting Rights Act have been recurring themes. Interest in these matters led me to delve deeply into law, morality, economics and politics.
Choosing the divisions in the stages of my life was an interesting task. At first, I was tempted to divide the writing project by decades, and that could have made sense. But eventually I realized that places of residence would also be an interesting and accurate portrayal. I was born in 1942 in “The Little House” and lived there until 1950, when we moved to a larger house that Uncle Jody, Daddy’s younger brother, had built up on the “big road”, which, of course, was not big at all. We moved briefly to the “Carr Place” in 1953, but we were there only a few months. Before the end of 1953, we returned to the house that Uncle Jody had built, which was my parent’s final home.
I was still living in the Little House when the Macon County public school system sent a school bus to the door and transported me into a strong learning environment that had dramatic impact. I will tell the story of the Shorter Public School in these essays. Macon County was the battleground for school integration during the Civil Rights era, and in the turmoil, the Shorter School was eliminated, and its loss was the loss of a powerful mission. It was a wonderful school, and the story needs to be told. It was there that I met Miss Mary Christine De Bardeleben, and I tell her beautiful story on this site.
I continued to live in the house that Uncle Jody built until I completed high school and departed for Huntingdon College in 1960. My relationship with Huntingdon was a strong and lasting relationship, and I tell that story in the essays found on this site. Betty and I were married in 1964, after I completed the work at Huntingdon. We began our life together in Tuscaloosa where I was studying law at the University of Alabama. The relationship to law became the main theme of the life story, with interesting twists and turns.
After I completed Law School, we returned to Montgomery, and I began the practice of law with Hill, Hill, Stovall and Carter, a well-established law firm. After three years, we moved back to Macon County to “The Cloud House” on the Old Federal Road. I continued with the Hill firm until 1974. The law practice continued in various contexts, until I was elected Judge in the Fifth Judicial Circuit in 1982, while still living in the Cloud House.
Four years after election as Circuit Judge in Alabama’s Fifth Judicial Circuit, we moved to Lilly Avenue in East Tallassee, where we lived until 1999. We then moved to our current dream home on Lake Tallassee at 463 Riverside Drive. In 2000, I lost the bid for reelection as Judge, and reentered the practice of law.
In retrospect, the different residences coincide nicely with the stages of my personal development.
The early years in the Little House recalls a largely forgotten, but charming rural culture of the forties. I mainly lived in the house that Uncle Jody had built, located on an unpaved gravel road, during the fifties. The winds of change were certainly present, but we went on in the old ways throughout the fifties, oblivious to the upheaval already in progress. Looking back, World War II lay at at the heart of all these changes. The events that ensued destroyed any possibility of a return to the “home”–the way of life—that I had known up to that point. The upheaval climaxed while I was at college and law school in the sixties. Because I was in a cloistered world of ideas and intellectual challenges, where everything was new and different for me, I did not fully appreciate the extent of change in the world I had known until later. The entry into law practice in 1967 with an old established firm in the Cradle of the Confederacy and the birth of my first son, Philip, was all engaging! By the time the second son, Mike, was born we were well on our way to moving back to Macon County, against the current of “white flight.” The political and social changes continued strong into the seventies, and Macon County presented an interesting observation post for those changes. Macon County drew me like a magnet.
The early eighties brought my Judicial election, and an even better observation post for my strong interest in the social forces that make law work. By the mid-eighties, various factors brought us to a decision to relocate to Tallassee, nearer the center of the Circuit, and seemingly more secure politically. I was reelected in 1988, against opposition, and unopposed in 1994. I became deeply involved in judicial education, both as student and teacher, and you will find those stories, and stories about the judicial work itself in these essays.
In the meantime, however, there had been other interesting developments, that involved the relationship to the United Methodist Church. I had volunteered as a lay speaker in the early 1970’s. I served the Church in many roles, and that is an important part of my story, and I tell it in these essays.
And then in 1999 we found the dream home on Lake Tallassee, but the Judicial career was about to end on a surprising note and for reasons that are difficult to explain or even fathom. The ensuing years brought new opportunities, both in the law practice, and in challenging civic work for the community, and I will share those stories.
Now, the twilight is here. I am largely retired, but feel that I’ve a story to tell! In my retirement, I am thinking, writing and enjoying my garden. I have always been a gardener, I’ve shared vegetables with neighbors, and I will share the story with you!
In the words of Abraham Lincoln, I write with malice toward none. I will shy away from anything hurtful to anyone, to the full extent possible. Likewise, there are things that I know—stories I could tell—that are bound to confidentiality, and those you will not hear.