Chapter 1: The Law Is a Jealous Mistress

 

A dream around dawn today left me thinking my Senior Law Partners, whom I sometimes call angels, want me to fill in some blanks today about my legal training at the University of Alabama School of Law, which I entered in the fall of 1965. 

The dream included an Alabama Crimson Tide star running back, Major Olgovie. My younger brother was named Major, which was my mother’s maiden name. Major was an Alabama undergraduate when I was in law school, and we attended some Crimson Tide fall football practices together, using passes Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant gave our father to give to us. As I wrote in the Introduction, Coach Bryant’s Sunday show after each Saturday game was sponsored by Golden Flake and Coca Cola - “Great pair, says the Bear.” 

Anyway, I woke up from the dream around dawn thinking I was supposed to play a little football in today’s writing, and the way to do that was to go back in time and fetch something I wrote in 2019 about a southern lawyer who became a mystic.

…………………….

A few nights ago, I was told in a dream. “Life began on Hackberry Lane.” The University of Alabama School of Law was on Hackberry Lane in Tuscaloosa, when I attended that law school.

I well recall my first day in class. The professor told us to look to our left, then to our right. Two of us would not be around by graduation time. That would prove out. My recollection is that professor was Clinton McGee.

Professor McGee taught criminal law. It was said, after graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law, Professor McGee had entered the U.S. Military and was sent overseas to defend accused Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. It was said he was getting them off, so he was made a prosecutor, and the ones he prosecuted did not get off. Professor McGhee didn’t deal out a lot of As and Bs. He gave me a C. I deserved it.

Some years later, a law student name Roy Moore got nicknamed “Fruit Cake” by Professor McGee. Many years later, Moore got elected to the Alabama Supreme Court and then got removed because he put the Ten Commandments in the Supreme Court building and would not take them down. Moore got elected again to the Supreme Court and got removed again because of his religious fervor.

We had a law professor affectionately called “Hatchet Harry Cohen”, because he gave lots of low grades on final exams. He taught a real property course, based on a textbook he had written. I was assigned to a different section under a different law professor. I thought I was not learning anything, so I sat in on Professor Cohen’s classes in the other section. I memorized his textbook and made an A on the final exam. I had Professor Cohen for negligence torts the next semester. I fed back on the final exam what he had said in class. I made an A. Professor Cohen often talked in class of the difference between being a “legal monk” (law professor), and being a real lawyer.

We had a law professor affectionately called “Black Jack Payne”, because he was a legal scholar and wore a green visor when he researched ancient legal history in the law library, and he dealt out final exam scores of 21 to graduating seniors. He taught negligence torts, and arcane real estate law, and I was darn glad I didn’t get assigned to his negligence torts section, but was assigned to Professor Cohen’s section. (Many years later, my oldest daughter married Professor Cohen’s son. I told my son-in-law a few law school stories about his father.)

We had a law professor named “Bad Sam Beatty,” who had a PhD in law, and would drill into us that the Law is a Jealous Mistress. The first day of class, Doctor Beatty looked down at his roll sheet and said, “Bashinnnsky! I like that name, Bashinnnsky. Is Mr. Bashinsky here today?” I stood up, as required when a law professor called on us.

Doctor Beatty said, “Mr. Bashinsky, what’s the first thing you do when a client comes into your office?” There was nothing about that in the reading assignment for the first class. I said, “I suppose you ask him why he came to see you.” Doctor Beatty said, “Sit down, Mr. Bashinsky, you will never make it as a lawyer?”

Doctor Beatty asked if anyone knew what is the first thing you do when a client comes into your office? A fellow somewhat older than the rest of us, Billy Church, who had been a Baptist preacher, raised his hand and rubbed his first two fingers against his thumb. “Correct, Mr. Church”, Doctor Beatty said. “You get paid.”

Up the road in Birmingham, was Samford University, a private Baptist school, to which my Baptist Grandfather Bashinsky had given a great deal of money. Attached to Samford was Cumberland School of Law. The tuition there was much higher than at Alabama. Most of the Cumberland students  graduated. 50-percent of them flunked the state bar exam. 95-percent of my graduating class passed it. Before the bar exam, I spent several months studying my law school class notes. I think that’s why I passed.

But I skipped over a few other interesting things about Doctor Beatty.

It was said that when he was a new lawyer, Sam Beatty had represented a black man accused of a crime against a white person. Beatty was convinced his client was framed. The white jury decided otherwise. The white Alabama appellate courts agreed with the white jury. Beatty told the appellate justices that he would never practice law before them again. He quit. He got his advanced law degrees and became a law professor.

Doctor Beatty had a good friend named Ryan deGraffenried, who was a rising political star in Alabama, a good and decent man, who could have changed the course of history in Alabama, if he had been elected governor. If, the small airplane in which he was traveling had not crashed and killed him. Doctor Beatty told us a little about his departed friend, what a great loss for the State of Alabama! Doctor Beatty said he was too upset to continue. Class dismissed.

The current law school dean, also a law professor, resigned being dean, he just wanted to teach. Doctor Beatty wanted to be dean. He was not selected. A law professor from up north was brought in to be dean. He instituted mandatory class attendance, which was really dumb, I thought. Alabama did not want lawyers, who had to be made to attend class. It wanted lawyers who were dedicated to the law. I said as much during a feedback meeting the new dean held.

Doctor Beatty announced he had taken a job teaching at the Cincinnati School of Law. He his last class would be Uniform Commercial Code that summer. He was teaching Judicial Remedies. About ancient legal remedies, still part of Alabama law. Instead of his usual mostly low grades, he gave out only As, Bs and Cs. I got a C, and I was grateful.

Thinking Doctor Beatty was making a statement to the law school bosses, and he would do it again in his summer Uniform Commercial Code class, a lot of graduating seniors signed up for that class. I signed up for the class. I studied my ass off. The final grade sheet had 3 As, 5Bs, perhaps 10 Cs, and about as many Ds and Fs. I got one of the Bs. By then, Doctor Beatty had moved to Cincinnati.

We started hearing rumors of how it was going in Cincinnati. Doctor Beatty was making his students stand up when he called on them. They were not used to that. He was disturbing their comfort zones in other ways. He was teaching Uniform Commercial Code. We liked hearing that. 

A letter came from Doctor Beatty’s students, asking for a copy of his final exam in Uniform Commercial Code. A genius among us, not I, sent them a copy of Dr. Beatty's UCC final exam grade sheet, on which was scrawled, “Suck wind, Yankee Bastards!” We heard Bad Sam really liked that letter.

Later, I heard Doctor Beatty left Cincinnati to teach at Mercer Law School in Macon Georgia. Then, I heard he was working in a Macon bank’s trust department. I worried he was in a soul crisis.

Then, I heard Doctor Beatty was back in Tuscaloosa, practicing law.

Then, he ran for the Alabama Supreme Court, and got elected. I went before him on an appeal from a case I had lost on the pleadings in the Birmingham courts. He and the other justices ruled against me.

I dedicated KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? : “To my Law Professor Sam Beatty, who taught me how to think.”

Many years later, as I was emerging from the black night (1999), Doctor Beatty called me from Tuscaloosa, said he was coming to Birmingham to have lunch with a friend at The Club, he’d like for me to join them. I was, well, flabbergasted, but there was no way I would not be there.

It was a fairly low-key lunch and discussion, but some deep currents were touched. Three men, who had seen plenty, who recognized we were a bit different.

I told Doctor Beatty that I had long wondered something. He asked me what it was? “You sometimes gave me a really hard time in law school.” He smiled, said, “Because I really liked you, Sloan!”

I don’t know if Doctor Beatty read any of my books. I don’t know why he called and invited me to join him and his friend that day. I had no further contact with him in this life. But then, maybe he was who told me in my sleep recently, “Life began on Hackberry Lane”?

  

There was yet another The Club event when I was coming out of the black night. A law school reunion, during which I learned a classmate named Billy Scruggs had become the president of the Alabama Bar Association.

In law school, Billy had teamed up with Billy Church during the moot court competition, and they gave me and my moot court partners fits.

Billy was a great banjo picker. He worked at fishing and hunting shop in Tuscaloosa. He and Billy Church did pro bono apprentice legal work in the local courts, and gave local lawyers fits.

After law school, Billy Scruggs went back Fort Payne, his hometown in north Alabama, to be a country lawyer, fish and hunt, and keep playing his banjo. He jammed with a group of musicians he had grown up with. In time they became known as the band, Alabama. Billy became their lawyer. He helped them and himself make a whole lot of money, in Sweet Home Alabama, which was not one of their songs, but maybe it should have been.

About a year ago, I traveled through Fort Payne and stopped for lunch at a diner and struck up a conversation with a local at the counter bar. I asked him if he had known Billy Scruggs? Yes, he had known MR. SCRUGGS. Then came stories that left me thinking Billy was a giant among men in his hometown.

Billy Church practiced law in Birmingham, and eventually ended up in a small town east of Birmingham, where he was a country lawyer of some renown, and took up and played a lot of golf, I heard.

I never became a country lawyer, and I didn’t do all that great as a city lawyer, but I did write some interesting books based on my time as a city lawyer. And the four novels were a trip. Two were self-published: KUNDALINA, ALABAMA and HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale. 

KUNDALINA, by "Jake Carruthers", is a romp about a young man whose Pleiadean human father wanted him to be a lawyer, but his lady love, who turned out to be a shaman is disguise, and the Cosmos had other notions. It can still be found at online used book stores. 

HEAVY WAIT is a romp about a very good Birmingham trial lawyer whose lady love Fate dealt a really bad hand, and then he was given a new lady love, and they and a lot of other people were turned upside down and inside out and every which away but loose. HEAVY WAIT died and went to heaven, or somewhere.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com