My last paid job was working as an election judge for the spring 2020 primary election. It was thirteen hours of civic service and there was no trouble. When was my first job? Was there any trouble? How about the next one? I’m referring to “trouble-trouble”, not John Lewis’s “good trouble” - maybe another essay to be written.
Misaligned.
My first paid work was mowing the family lawn in Proctor, Vermont, probably when I was 9 or 10 years old. The mower was a manual, boy-powered push mower with two wheels at the end of a reel holding four curved, spiraling blades that sliced grass off against a metal piece mounted at the bottom rear of the mower. A wooden roller followed behind the cutting platform, probably to keep the mower balanced and rolling forward or back. The handle shaft was well-patinated wood with a T handle at the top. It seemed old at the time. It was surely manufactured but it was easy imagining a blacksmith banging away at iron to make such a thing. When the lawn was smooth, the grass dry and moderately long and I got a good start for a long sweep across the yard, green confetti flew out behind the mower and the sharp sound of the blades against steel gave satisfaction.
The lawn was not big, our town lot filled mainly by house, garage, vegetable garden (one of two), raspberry patch, compost piles and bushes. A big cut-leaf maple in the front yard spread surface roots and added complications.
I was paid 25 cents for each mowing. I’d heard of an “allowance” from other kids in town but never expected one.
If you are a parent you know that the attraction of machines, instruments, tools is quite high for youngsters, until they are big enough to actually take them up and employ them for a useful purpose. That was me.
I suspect that I was told I had to stay home after lunch, not to go off with Dana, until I finished the lawn. Unhappy. Impatient. Without regard for excellence. I mowed. I pushed fast. I knew that I needed to keep the wheel lined up slightly on the inside of the slice of just-cut lawn. But I didn’t. Here and there a line of heady grass tufted up, waving in the sun.
I hollered “I’m done and I’m going to Dana’s” and pushed the mower back to the garage. It must have been a weekend as my dad came out the front door and surveyed the scene. “You’re not done, come back and finish this mess!” “No.” “What did you say?” “No!”
My parents spanked. Not frequently. Not severely. Not with anything but their hands. Did I get spanked for this defiance? I don’t recall, but I remember running around to the back of the house, my dad hot on my heels, no doubt more than ready to administer punishment. I am told by people who notice such things (well, one person) that I remain a bit careless in my mowing.
Pursued
At 12 years old, I got a paper route and delivered the Rutland Herald to about sixty families around our part of town. I had to buy the route from the previous carrier. It was 6 days a week, skipping Sunday, but maybe I am wrong.
In the summer, when the sun rose early and I could ride my bike with the bag of Heralds shoved into a wire basket on the handlebars, it probably took about 60 minutes. I am guessing it was about four miles when you include the walks up sidewalks or driveways. In winter it must have been two hours with buckled overshoe boots, layer upon layer of thermal underwear, pants, shirt, heavy socks, snow pants, parka, mittens, hat, scarf. One morning it was -38 degrees Fahrenheit. The water in my breath came through the scarf and froze my eyelashes together and the gloves had to come off to thaw the slush. It’s a good thing they had not yet invented wind chill or I would have been really cold.
I got up to my own alarm at 5 a.m., ate quickly and headed off with an earphone plugged into a tiny transistor radio. Until the sun rose, I could pull in a pop A.M. station from Schenectady, New York. Beatles. Rolling stones. Fairport Convention. The Hollys. The Who. The 1910 Fruitgum Company. The Beach Boys. The Temptations. Elvis. Petula Clark. Aretha Franklin. And the wild spoof series, Chickenman. ”He’s everywhere, he’s everywhere!”
The worst part of the job was going around to collect the 60 cents a week. Quite a few left money out for me Friday night to pick up Saturday mornings, but others I had to go and knock and speak with people. Sixty cents? Was it that little? I think so! I couldn’t have earned more than a quarter a week from each customer. I suppose $15 (plus a few tips) was not a small thing at the time. Other than the quarter for lawn work and the 2 cents per returned soda bottle that I collected around the ball field or road shoulders, I saw no other money.
But the worst trouble I had was from Spooky, our big black cat, who one time decided to follow me on the route, not close, but 30 or 50 feet away and slowly. It was temperate weather and amusing for a time. But about half-way through the route, I had to turn around and return the way I came, passing a quarter mile of houses I’d already delivered to. I was on my bike and on a schedule.
Did Spooky know his way home? I doubted it. He roamed the immediate neighborhood but this was a half mile away. I finally coaxed him close and grabbed and petted him. He was happy. I put him in the basket with the papers and held him down with one hand and steered our way towards home with the other. He was not happy and I’m sure I suffered scratches. But mission accomplished.
Too Close and Too Far
Just before my 15th birthday, I got my first real job. I was a summer park attendant at Groton State Park, about 90 minutes drive from home and worked there 6 days a week from schools out till after Labor Day. For five summers. Yes, my Dad was with the Department of Forests and Parks. Call it connections. Call it nepotism. Call it child labor. Call it a great experience. I made about $800 that first summer.
I was assigned to Boulder Beach, the day use area (picnic and swim) on Lake Groton. My job was to clean the bathhouse and grounds every day, answer questions, collect entrance fees from a booth up the road, while my bosses, Charlie and Eula Gillen (retired farmers) took lunch breaks, rented out baskets for swimmers to store their goods while on the beach. 25 cents.
The first year I was assigned to ride with my work roommate, Michael, on the back of a flatbed stake-sided dump truck. We “toured” the Beach area and 3 camp grounds to pick up garbage - 4 days a week. These were 55 gallon steel drums and we grappled them up onto the rear bed of the truck, four feet off the ground, dumped them onto a pile of everything you might imagine. About the only worse smells I’ve ever endured are rotten potatoes. And our cat when it seemed like she was dying. Of course, sometimes there were rotten potatoes in those drums. The worst was a pick up after a big weekend and then rain, because the already full drums would contain another twenty pounds of slop.
At the back of the beach house was staff quarters. One room, two beds, one closet, two chairs, one table, an all-in-one stove, sink, frig/freezer combination and countertop over a small cabinet. Michael, recently graduated from Williamstown High, was my roommate and partner in garbage collection and late night rambles. He said that his grandfather was J.C. Penney and claimed that one of his high school classmates paid people to let him smell their farts. Maybe both things are true. Our bath was the lake, but I don’t recall using it much. (My mom or dad picked me up for my one day off each week and I drove home to Proctor [after mid-summer to Barre, where we had moved] for laundry, restocking and rest.)
Perhaps it was that odor, rather than the four year age difference, that made the lifeguards, Pam and Cisi, who had just finished their first years at college, so unattainable. Of course they were beautiful, but also friendly, kind and sophisticated. Strong swimmers. Pam played the guitar; I thought enchantingly. The Park Manager (and garbage truck driver) wanted them to wear red one piece lifeguard bathing suits, but they refused.
They shared a two bedroom cabin next to the one where Charlie and Eula lived, about a mile up the road. If we were not visiting Pam and Cisi 6 nights a week, we sure wished that we were.
There was a small contingent of young people who lived on the Lake and hung out through the summer. The Guares (3 high schoolers from Montpelier) ran the beach house concession stand where they sold soda, candy, frozen treats, chips, etc. They drove from their camp down the lake each day in an aluminum boat with a 6 horsepower Johnson outboard motor. One day, during my lunch break, one of them let me take the little boat out for a spin. Just outside the buoys marking off the swim area, I turned the handle too much and tipped the boat into the lake, swamping my maiden solo voyage. Happily it did not sink and we hauled it back to shore, bailed it out and it was no worse for the wear. Two cousins, the Rickers, whose New Hampshire families, like the Guares of Montpelier, ran funeral homes, were part of this lake contingent. And somehow Buddy Mundinger, who was even older than the life guards, came over all the way from Peacham, 5 miles away, and was often in the mix. Margaret Guare, between my age and the life guards’, was the only other female regular on the lake and probably felt a bit besieged by teen boyhood, though so far as I know, she was never the object of romantic interest from this crew at the Lake.
On July 20, 1969, my second summer, we gathered at Phil Ricker’s family camp, one of the more developed homes on the lake - it had the feel of a suburban home and it had a television. We gathered that night in the den and watched Neil Armstrong, through the snowy poor reception, step onto the Moon. This wonder of science and technology and ambition, just 8 years after JFK laid out the challenge, was muted and way off-kilter for us. Not because of poor reception - we were used to that. Earlier that day a teenager, I think a girl with Down Syndrome, was found face-down in the lake, barely alive. The life guards pulled her out and did CPR and I called for emergency help. This was before 911 so I must have dialed “0” and spoken to an operator. The nearest ambulance service, also run by the Ricker family, perhaps using a hearse as ambulance, seemed to take forever to arrive from Woodsville, NH, 20 or 25 miles away. We learned the next day that she survived, barely. A day and night of close up trauma and far off glory.
Big Debit. It Was An Accident!
Barre is a city. A small city, but bigger than neighboring Montpelier, the Capitol of Vermont. It was and is a center of the granite quarrying and finishing industry. Downtown Main Street had stores - Homer Fitts women’s clothing, Woolworths, stationary and books, Ormsby’s appliance and electronics, records, Dunkin Donuts, photography, pharmacies, Post Office, The Times Argus, barber shop, paint, WSKI radio studio, Lash Furniture, Bond Auto, insurance agents, beauty parlors, lunch counter, etc.
And there were two or three banks, including
The Granite Savings Bank, owned by the Milne family. The front facade was, of course, blocky gray granite. I found an afternoon job there during my senior year of high school.
I had three assignments.
Every weekday the Coca Cola distributor’s drivers dropped off bags of coins collected from area vending machines. There were a half-dozen cloth bags, each about a gallon in size. I was tasked with checking the drivers’ totals. I poured a bag of coins into the rotating top of a stainless steel coin counting machine. It tallied the coins and discharged them into a chute into which I inserted a succession of paper coin rolls, filling and crimping each and replacing them into the bags. The errors were few and minor. I carried the coins downstairs and into the vault behind the teller counters.
When the coins were counted I looked for check orders. The Bank had checks pre-printed with its name and codes, etc. I put together a new customer’s checks like this. I filled a small stiff cardboard form with four horizontal slots, line by line, with 10 font slugs of type or blanks, to spell out the customer’s name and address. Form inspected and mounted into a small printer, I ran a test sheet to compare with the order blank. If all was well, I ran 25 check packets through the machine, assembled them into booklets and packed them with registers for mailing or pick up.
While I worked away on these jobs on the second floor, six or eight proof machine operators processed account deposits and withdrawals from accounts. These additions and subtractions were entered into manual machines and the checks and deposit slips sorted into proper slots. The first electronic calculator I saw was a year later when Uncle Herschel bought a $200 Texas Instrument that could add, subtract, multiply, divide only. Never much for math and maybe fearing reassignment, I never asked how the bank’s system worked.
The goal was that at the end of the day, the ending balance had to align with the day’s original sums and all the transactions.
Once, the imbalance was five bucks - or was it less, the 75 cents I’ve used in other tellings? It was Friday and proofers and tellers stayed on task into the evening and were told by the President, Mr. Milne, that the error would be identified that evening or when they came in on Saturday, always a day off for proofers. I think I heard the following Monday that the $5 or 75 cents was found the next morning. In my telling, I say I would have found 75 cents under a table to even things up without delay or formality.
The proofers were all women, vaguely “old” to me, probably 28 to 58 in age, friendly, helpful and certainly hard working. It was my senior year at Spaulding High School and they gave me a shiny orange, green and yellow patterned necktie as a graduation gift. I still have it. Thirty years ago I loaned it to my colleague so her boyfriend could enter into a downtown Minneapolis Ugly Tie contest. Sad to say, we did not prevail.
The third floor was a series of rooms used for storage. Old promotional items gathered dust, such as tiny compressed sponges with the GSB logo and name that grew 20 times when immersed in water. Christmas decorations, modest, waited in a jumble of boxes. Why was I up there? Maybe to put away the decorations? I had the run of the place.
My final daily assignment was to take a bag of checks to the Post Office, one-half block away, in time to get it on the 5:45 p.m.truck to Boston and thence to the Federal Reserve Bank, which provided transfer or clearing services for the region. A GSB customer like The Pines Motel manager on the Barre-Montpelier Road, would deposit a traveling customer’s Pawtuckett, Rhode Island check into the Pines’ bank account and expect the GSB to use that money to cover the Pines’ check paying the local linen supplier. If the Rhode Islander’s check fell under a proofing machine and did not get to Boston on the truck the next morning, that was a small but aggravating problem.
The time when I got to the Post Office five minutes too late and the bag of checks was delayed for a day, I learned the next day from Mr. Milne that that error was far more than aggravating, and that the lost interest from day’s deposit was of particular concern to him. No. I was not fired. Never have been fired.
I Nailed It!
After my second year at Macalester College in St. Paul I had decided against returning to Groton State Park for the summer. (I was succeeded there by my brother Philip.) I joined a crew of fellow students to rent a house in the neighborhood and split rent, meals, chores and experiences. Scott was a summer mail carrier with grannie glasses, long wild reddish Viking hair - a top neurologist and sleep specialist for decades. Another guy and a woman paired up with one of them. I remember bringing in a full bag of groceries from Applebaums that cost about $5. Bean dishes of substance (beans from a wooden bin at Mississippi Market Coop 2 blocks away on Selby feed body but not soul. Special Export beer.
But I needed a job.
My friend Dick had worked the year before at Allied Movers over where Hennepin and Central Avenues cross in N.E. Minneapolis. “It was hard work but good pay.” he said. I called and found to my surprise that they had no need for new labor! I am sure I looked for something in the want ads but nothing looked to be in range - of my talent, capacity or transportation (feet, bike or bus).
I walked over to the R.C. bottling plant off University Avenue west of Snelling. Summer - soft drink production and sales had to be on the upswing. Nope. Nothing there.
I started walking west along University, crossing the street frequently, stopping at a range of factories and businesses knocking on doors, getting rejected. (Retail? No, I didn’t look at retail or restaurant jobs.) Two or three miles west and at the end of a long afternoon, I turned left on Raymond to see what lay in the blocks north of the sprawling paper and recycling plant. At National Mower Company my luck turned! Two more hands were needed in the factory.
National Mower, founded in 1919, was run by its 90 year old owner Mr. Kinkaid (assisted by his son). The owner lived on Summit Avenue near Lexington and was said to have a turntable in his garage floor that made for easier car parking. The company still exists, a division of a bigger concern, having built a plant near the west end of St. Paul.
National Mower Co. machines have for many decades been made for commercial and institutional use with a major focus on golf courses. Not a rotary blade was to be seen, these were reel mowers, arrayed behind a National Mower tractor in gangs of three or five with three foot wide five-bladed steel reels on hard rubber tires, rollers, adjusters and frame. The reels, tractors’ frames, bodies, connectors and controls were fabricated there and engines were purchased from Briggs and Stratton.
I was occasionally called on to handle some secondary machine shop duties, using a drill press to deburr parts punched or drilled by the real craftsmen and a punch press on something for which accuracy was less critical. It was not a union shop. There was a foreman, 15 laborers and machine operators, a couple welders, a painter and the owner, his son and a couple of women in the office. And me. I was not involved at the office and worked mainly off the central floor of the factory. It was an old building, with old lights, faded paint, dirty windows, very heavy duty fans but no air conditioning. (It was repurposed as office space about ten years ago.) A pickup truck lunch wagon came by at 11 each day and sold coffee, soft drinks, cellophane wrapped sandwiches, cigarettes, candy, ITT Bakery goods, etc. No lunch room. I got along with everybody. We punched a time clock.
My main job was to be at the loading dock at the end of the reel assembly and finishing line. The reels hung on hooks like butchered pigs, five feet off the floor rolling out of the paint room. When dry (it happened quickly, lots of VOCs involved, I am certain) I grabbed a reel, 70 plus pounds, lifted it up and then down into place on a prebuilt pine form on a heavy duty dolly. I checked for paint chips or misses and fixed them with a spray bottle of NMC green. I packaged three or five reels together using additional pine forms, more boards and a pneumatic hammer.
I had not used such a tool before. A string of nails, glued together with red glue, feeds into the, what shall I call it, the chamber. When I pulled the trigger and pressed the bulky tool against the frame 1/2 inch above my target, the switch at the front depressed and a nail was expelled with significant force. I would build up assemblies of 3 or 5 reels and move them on the low slung dolly to a side of the loading dock.
The design of the switch placement and trigger combo was, I am sure, much safer than earlier versions. It was not fool proof. It turns out that if you are nailing close to the edge of the frame and twist the nailer off to the side it is possible to activate the front switch with the nail discharge aperture no longer on the wood. Hence I pulled the trigger and pinged a nail off the back of the balding foreman’s head. 35 feet away. No injury! A reprimand, of course.
I was rehired 2 summers later and biked from there one mid-morning to meet with a University of Minnesota committee that considered my application for resident tuition status. Wearing my very sincere and very dirty coveralls I made my case and got the discount. And have been a resident ever since.
Shipwrecked.
Find the right circumstances and you might find yourself qualified for the most unexpected employment. Such was the case during my junior year abroad at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
NHK is the BBC of Japan and the dominant broadcaster there in the early 70s. Their most popular programs were their year-long samurai drama series shown on Sunday prime time. The family I lived with and I watched these every week.
In January 1974 a new series began and we watched.
Imagine the delight when I came home and told the Furuya family that I and several fellow “gaijin” (foreigner) students had been recruited by NHK to play American sailors whose ship was wrecked in a storm off the island of Shikoku in about 1820. I think we each got paid something approaching $1000 for this adventure. A lot of money for the time. No, I didn’t have a visa with work authorization.
We had two brief scenes totaling less than 30 seconds of screen time. The first was on the deck of the sailing ship in the storm. The filming occurred at Japan’s Coast Guard Academy where a fully rigged two-mast sailing ship sits on the grounds. Not in the water. We donned our ill-fitted sailor costumes and waiting directions.
Here’s how they created a very convincing storm scene that sunny day on dry land. The crew mounted cameras on raised platforms on one side of the ship, fitted with gimbals that the crew rotated up and down or back and forth, moving the cameras in heavier and heavier storm swells as the ship sat on solid land. Huge industrial fans blew a storm along the camera side of the ship.
We were brought on board and positioned on deck under masts and spars. On the “action!” signal, with the cameras rocking and the fans blowing, film crew members threw buckets of water in front of the fans and created a quick gale that soaked us as we hung on as if we were about to be tossed overboard.
A week later we were called to a studio where we donned our uniforms again and were led to a set that replicated the dark hold of the ship where we slept. I was given a single line. I don’t remember what it was, neither did I when we were filmed as I distinctly remember stumbling over the few syllables. No problem, it was in English and not a key plot point. By the way, I also blew my one line in our high school production of Up the Down Staircase. A classmate played a character in blackface.
The night of the broadcast was one of great excitement at our home in Funabashi-shi. Grandmother, mother, father, three kids, a visiting college-age cousin and I gathered to watch. The two scenes were over in a flash, but still a triumph for the whole family. The artificial storm was very convincing on the screen. This was before VCRs or re-broadcasts but NHK headquarters in the famous Ginza district of central Tokyo re-played fans’ favorite programs, so of course we took a trip there to relive my 30 seconds of fame.
Stop Bus!
During my last year of college I took a job driving school bus on morning routes and occasional special trips. My career was almost over before it started.
I had not changed my driver’s license to Minnesota, a prerequisite to me getting a bus driver license and the job.
No problem. I’d been driving forever, like five years. I’d even driven in a city. Once, in Montreal, five years before. Maybe another time in Boston. I passed Minnesota’s written tests, car and bus, no problem.
A few days before I was due to start picking up and delivering St. Paul kids to school, Aunt Elizabeth picked me up with her car and we drove to the test range in Arden Hills. I FAILED! She took me back for another try the next day and I passed. There was still the road test with the bus. This was administered by the bus company - Friday before the Tuesday start of school. You will not be surprised to hear that after 20 minutes of practice on the grumbling, manual transmission yellow bus I passed muster and was on the road picking up innocents a few days later.
Or to learn that casualties included a big rearview mirror that I took off on the entry to the bus barn and some paint on a car parked at the corner of a snow-constricted St. Paul street.
Happily, I got on fine with the kids - apparently not the case for the afternoon driver of this route as the company hired a neighborhood mom to ride both the morning and afternoon routes from the Summit-University neighborhood to Longfellow School. The Murray Junior High kids who I ferried to a garden-focused program every morning cheered for me the time I stopped at a red traffic signal, looked right and left and right again and drove on through the red light. I kept my bus driver’s license for some years, just in case.
COPY CATS.
While in law school I worked in the local office of the National Lawyers Guild. The NLG, despite the medieval noun, is the organization of left-of-center lawyers, legal workers and law students. Founded when the ABA was segregated and very conservative. When I was active, locally we championed affirmative action, supported the American Indian Movement (AIM), helped invent the concept of sexual harassment, boycotted Nestle, opposed U.S. imperialism, organized legal observers for political demonstrations, came out for gay rights, etc. The House Un-American Activities Committee called the NLG “the shock troops of the left.” Yes, we welcomed communists. And FBI informants who claimed they were communists. I wonder if the mouthy ultra-leftist who got punched out by Clyde Bellecourt of AIM at an NLG national convention I organized in Minneapolis was an informant? One can only hope….
The shock troop work was neither glamorous nor shocking. Organizing meetings, collecting dues, putting on movie nights showing The Harder They Come to raise money, splitting hairs, un-indoctrinating law students, putting out mailings to a list of more than 200 contacts, soliciting and producing a regular newsletter.
We used old technology for the Twin Cities NLG Newsletter. Mimeograph technology.
It worked like this. A plasticized stencil sheet was inserted into a typewriter and you typed the content of the newsletter onto the sheets, page by page. The type ball (we had a Selectric) struck and made a letter-shaped hole in the plasticized layer of the sheet, then another and another and another. If you made an error, but not too many, you could save a sheet by dipping on some chemical over the errant hole, letting it dry and re-typing. Once complete, the sheet was clipped onto the drum of the mimeo machine. The drum rotated as single pages of paper passed mechanically through the machine. Ink, often blue ink, was applied through the stencils and onto the paper. Two hundred times. Then the page one stencil was removed and page two substituted. Two hundred more pages. In my tenure, I came to know the meaning of “ink-stained wretch” and experience the frustration of having the piles of printed page flying here and there and everywhere about the office.
Twenty years later, my colleague Maury, then a fair housing leader in HUD’s Chicago office, told me a mimeo story of his own. Maury had once worked for a community organization in Chicago and was considering returning to his roots after a stint with HUD. He went to meet his old boss to discuss this at the organization’s church-basement offices. He talked through his options and observed the bustle of activity - all of it familiar to him. Except for the efficiency of the mimeograph machine operator. The pages were coming out as sharp as from an off-set press. Not a sheet fell to the floor. Each page fell onto a perfectly aligned stack. The young operator moved with grace. When the boss introduced them and they shook hands, Maury saw no mimeograph ink on his fingers. “Maury McGough, I want you to meet one of our new community organizers, Barry, Barry Obama.” A very few people can do just about everything exceedingly well.
The Wilkinson Law of Professional Responsibility Complaints.[1]
The legal profession regulates its members. Lawyers pay registration fees annually and part of these fees go to the cost of the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility established by and under the ultimate control of the Minnesota Supreme Court. On average 40 Minnesota lawyers are publicly disciplined each year - from reprimands, to suspensions, to disbarment. More, about 100, get private admonitions or private probationary sanctions. Lawyers also pay, as part of their fees, for a fund that reimburses clients who have lost money due to their representation by dishonest lawyers. In 33 years up to 2020, the fund paid out $8.6 million. Payouts range from a few thousand to a half-million dollars. I see two friends’ names on the list of those bad actors. Sad.
It is easy to file an ethics complaint against a Minnesota lawyer. In part due to my service on an advisory committee, on-line complaint forms are available in six languages. A very frequent source of complaints and one often upheld is that the lawyer has failed to promptly handle a case or to communicate effectively and in a timely manner with a client.
So what is the WLPRC?
Exhaustive and rigorous study shows the following: The Wilkinson Law of Professional Responsibility Complaints: The character of the subject lawyer is in inverse proportion to that of the character of the complainant. Careful statistical analysis[2] presented here demonstrates the clear truth of this Law.
WLPRC
Complainant’s Character
HIGH ………………………………… ..............................………………. LOW
Joking aside, a lawyer involved in helping clients with family disputes or working with people with mental illness can count on getting complaints. And dealing with complaints is stressful, so it is easy to conclude that it is “bad people” complaining about “good me”. The WLPRC is my stress management experiment. The following are illustrative of the kind of challenges the system brought to my desk[3]. Looking back, it’s good that OLPR exists and operates professionally.
In Magenta X case a person, imprisoned on felony conviction, complained to OPLR that my statement to a court on behalf of a client was false and violated the felon’s rights. I was aghast to learn that a mandatory exception to the lawyer-client privilege exists for investigation of ethics complaints and I was forced to turn over confidential information, given to me by my client, to the OPLR. After some months of review, the complaint was ruled to be meritless but it was a very stressful experience.
In the Yellow Y case a client insisted that I advance a claim in a contract dispute that I knew to be entirely without legal merit. After decades in practice, I knew two important things as this dispute heated up. One, make a detailed record of all interactions. Two, when you are in trouble at work, get your boss involved right away, as your boss might have dealt with that trouble before and, even better, your boss might even get between you and trouble. I did that. The OPLR dismissed the complaint without investigation.
In the Blue Z case a client’s adult brother filed a complaint with OPLR that I had failed to follow his directions for the case. The complaint was dismissed without investigation as I was required to follow my client’s direction and the client’s direction only. It’s a mistake to take a measure of “character” in this situation it had nothing to do with it - I felt at fault because I had failed to adequately explain to the complainant that I represented client, beginning to end.
Happily, I can report that there is no Orange O case where a righteous client, say Greta Thunberg, brought a complaint that exposed my failures of character, by let’s say, failing to inform her about the status of her case. That case might yet come. Though not from Ms. Thunberg, who can probably find a lawyer with more resources than I have at hand.
Dope Shirt, Mr. Wilkinson.
My entire professional career was with the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis, later renamed Mid-Minnesota Legal Assistance. I missed the lofty sociability connotations of the “Society” since that happened. I did some work on our mission statement, tag-line and logo over the years and tried to make sure that names did not end up with questionable or silly acronymic pronunciations like “Gerbils” (Greater Boston Area Legal Services), Sniff-Laugh (San Francisco Legal Aid Foundation) or Lal-shack (Loose Association of Legal Aid Housing Advocates and Clients).
I did not pay enough attention to silliness of my own. One morning I came into chambers in Juvenile Court on a matter before Judge Allen Oleisky. He said: “Did you have a hard time getting up this morning, Mr. Wilkinson?” and nodded at my chest. Dark sport coat, unremarkable tie, white dress shirt. My white t-shirt with a large orange cartoon character stolen, I suspect, from the distinctive Disney seven dwarves design, advertising a mattress company[4], lit up the room. I had dozens of t-shirts and this was showy, was ugly and advertised a terrible commercial product. How did I get so Dopey? It certainly made me Bashful for a time.
[1] 13 Journal of Misapplied Mathematics and Apocryphal Law, 1978-2018 (2022).
[2] How to Lie With Statistics, D. Huff. (Huff was later paid by big tobacco to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link.)
[3] Facts are changed to avoid disclosing client identities and information about their cases.
[4] Not Land-O-Nod Mattress Co., where I worked an afternoon janitor job for a year. Their logo was tasteful and I never saw it on a t-shirt.
Comments
Post a Comment