Introduction: My Mamma Figured I Would Be a Lawyer

When I started my freshman year in public high school, my father said I should take a typing class. He knew how to touch type and said it would be a valuable skill.

The typing class was me and another guy and about 30 girls. I got up to about 40 not entirely accurate words a minute by the end of the first semester, and made a B. I did not improve the second semester and made a D. 

I can imagine there were people over the years who would have been much happier if I had not learned touch typing 😎.

*************************

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1942. I grew up in the upscale white over the mountain community Mountain Brook, sometimes called The Tiny Kingdom. 

During my childhood, I mostly felt I didn't belong on this planet. My favorite novels were science fiction. I was convinced people lived on other planets and some of them traveled in space. 

I viewed grammar school as being sent to jail. I liked play period and weekends, holidays and summer vacation. I viewed church services as being sent to jail. I liked Sunday school. I hated yard work.

I loved to fish and came to love to hunt. I was pretty good at football, basketball and baseball, and became pretty good at golf, which was my father's sport. He was very good when he was young, a scratch player - at or below par. He could have turned pro, but he went into business after navigating B-29 bombers from Guam to Japan in World War II. He told me golf is really important, because all business deals are made on the golf course.

I made fair grades in grammar school, and usually got C in conduct. For talking too much. The first report card in 7th grade was all Cs and a D in conduct. My father blamed the Cs on the D. Said I would be sent to a local private boys school if I made another D in conduct. The next 6 weeks report card was all As and Bs and a D in conduct.

One day my mother accused me of doing something I said I had not done. We went back and forth a while. Yes, you did do it, she said. No, I didn't do it, I said. Finally, she said she had the memory of a camel - she never forgot. I said camels go for a long time without water, elephants never forget. End of argument. She retold that story many times. 

I didn't reach puberty when I was supposed to. I quit all sports that involved locker rooms. I was doing poorly in public high school. I felt like I was the only person ever who never reached puberty. I was in a living hell. My father enrolled me in the private high school he had attended in another state. I went into puberty soon after that, the middle of my 16th year. Whew!

The private school was run by Presbyterians who were convinced Nikita Kruschev was the AntiChrist, they were the Elect, Christ would return in their lifetimes. The 80-year-old founder told us in New Testament class that he and his wife had only had sex three times, twice to have children, once for pleasure, and he regretted the third time ever since.

I got born again, briefly. Then, I quit standing up or raising my hand in daily convocations when we were asked if we were saved, or wanted to be saved. I had no problem with God and Jesus, who intimidated me. I had a problem with the people running the school. But they helped me get into Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

I joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which still lived in the Confederate uniform and flag era, even though it had maybe a dozen brothers from way north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Interestingly, the "mystic goodies", revealed during the secret initiation, were based on the Holy Grail. The fraternity's creed was Dieu et les dames. God and the women. I met my future wife on a blind date at a KA party. We were married on July 4, 1964, before my senior year. I graduated the next year. Thus ended the happiest years of my life, and since.

Not caring to watch more Vanderbilt football, and not knowing what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and since my father had often told me that he wished he had gone to law school, because knowledge of the law was really important in business, I enrolled at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa, about 60 miles southwest of Birmingham. My bride and I moved to Tuscaloosa. We were financially supported by inheritances from my father and his uncle-in-law.

I watched Alabama Crimson Tide football games, and thanks to my father's business relationship with Paul "Bear" Bryant", I was at a lot afternoon fall football practices near the law school. 

My father owned Golden Flake, which he had bought from his father and his father's brother-in-law. They had bought the company from its founders to lure my father back to Birmingham after World War II, in which he was an Army Air Corps Pacific Theater combat aviator. 

My father learned the business from the ground up. Golden Flake competed head-on with Frito-Lay. Coach Bryant promoted Golden Flake potato chips and Coca-Cola on his Sunday afternoon TV show after each Saturday football game. "Great pair, says the Bear," meant Golden Flake and Coca-Cola throughout Alabama.

I attended summer law school to graduate early.

My mother, who had more friends than anyone I knew, died of cancer during my second year in law school. My friends and my brother and sister's friends were in shock. I was numb, never grieved. She was miserable a long time. Was going to file for a divorce from my father until her mother said, if she divorced my father, it would kill her. Years later, I would think my mother died and divorced my father and her mother.

My Vanderbilt sweetheart became pregnant and bore a beautiful baby boy in July 1967. She was worn out. I got up in the wee hours and brought our baby to her, to nurse. I then changed this diapers and put him back in his crib and my wife went back to sleep. I washed out his diapers in the toilet and went back to sleep.

I felt like I was in paradise, literally. 

For seven weeks.

My Vanderbilt sweetheart and I had a terrible argument about whether she would take our baby to her hometown to see her brother off to Thailand with the U.S. Air Force, where he would service American bombers during the Vietnam war.

The argument really scared me. I agreed to to the trip, drove them to the Tuscaloosa airport and watched her board a Southern Airways DC-3 and went home. Two days later, a fellow law student who lived nearby came to my home to tell me my wife and called and asked him to come to tell me our baby had died in his sleep. She wanted someone to be there with me, when I Iearned of it. 

I was devastated. And, I was wrecked by recurring thoughts that my won would still be alive if his mother had not make that trip to her home town. I wept a lot. I was furious a lot.

The Vietnam war was revving up. Two of my law school classmates were in the military and they were called up. Students with deferments were drafted when they graduated. Married men were being drafted. Fathers were not being drafted. I had lost my father deferment. 

I roiled for a few weeks between enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps.and fighting in Vietnam, and enlisting in the U.S. Army and hoping to get into the Judge Advocate General Corps and being a military lawyer and avoiding combat. If I elected for a student deferment, I was assured of completing law school.

I drove to the Draft Board in Birmingham and filled out an application for that deferment and drove back to Tuscaloosa. About a week later, my wife learned she was pregnant again. I drove back to the Draft Board and told the same lady clerk who had taken my deferment application what had happened. She said she was sorry, the deferment I had applied for was irrevocable. She said she would show me the application.

She walked to a green filing cabinet and pulled out a file and looked in it and said there had been some mistake. I asked what mistake? She said I filled out the wrong form and would have to do it again I said, no thanks, I'll go with a father deferment. I left feeling as if the weight of the world had been lifted off me, and God had done it.

In January 1968, I left law school with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree and would spend the next three months studying for the Alabama Bar exam.

 

My beloved black nanny died.

A law school buddy a year ahead of me had moved back to his small south Alabama hometown and was practicing law with his father and his father's law partner. An esteemed lawyer in my father and his father's hometown, Troy, Alabama, offered me the spare office in his law firm and the use of his secretary. He had lost his own son many years before.

My father and his father were against it, and I chickened out  after being offered a clerkship with U.S. District Judge Clarence W. Allgood in Birmingham. His law clerk had quit in the middle of his clerkship to practice law with his father in Birmingham.

About a year into my clerkship with Judge Allgood, I woke up one morning and my bowel was jammed. There were no prior symptoms. My internist couldn't figure it out. It scared the shit out of me. I lost confidence. Judge Algood advised me against going to work for Golden Flake, which seemed safer to me. Judge Allgood offered me another year working for him. I felt I needed to move on and went work for Golden Flake. 

Judge Allgood is the first person portrayed in a little book that fell out of me in the fall of 2004, which can be read for free by clicking on this link.

https://afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com/

Then come five other exceptional Alabama people, who greatly influenced me in my youth, but it took a bit longer for me to realize how much they truly had influenced me. The 2nd of those five was the daughter of African slaves, who came to my parents' home looking for work around the day I was born. She loved and raised me as one of her own.

I had worked at Golden Flake during summer vacations before I attended law school. 

Throughout my youth my father had said of Golden Flake, "Son I built this business for you!" I felt awful every time he said that. 

Perhaps working for my father full time might have gone differently, if first I had gone into the practice of law and tried that for a while.

After four years, hoping to save my life and my soul, I left Golden Flake to go into the practice of law in Birmingham with a small law firm that had nothing to do with my upbringing in Mountain Brook. 

My physical health had been horrible since I was with Judge Allgood. It was amazing that I gutted out practicing law, feeling every day like I was dying from cancer in my gut. 

My 1st marriage had somehow survived losing our infant son, who was named after me, who was named after my father. The just as sudden illness that came after I chickened out about being a country lawyer in my father's hometown, Troy, Alabama, was almost more than I could bear. 

The illness laughed at doctors and natural cures and healers. If I found something that seemed to be helping me feel a little better, suddenly everything got a lot worse, until I quit using what had made me feel a little better. I came to think the illness was intelligent and wanted me to leave it alone.

My Vanderbilt sweetheart and I now had two beautiful daughters, whom she mostly raised with the help of a wonderful black woman who worked for us several days a week. As I struggled  to work for my father, and then to be a lawyer. I did a lot of practicing on clients, and some clients I actually helped. 

I think the straw that.broke this camel's back was our older daughter was hit on her bicycle by a slow moving Volkswagen in front of our home and she nearly lost a lower leg and foot. It was not the 90-year-old driver's fault. Our daughter had darted out in front of the Volkswagen. 

I had my senior law partner sue the driver anyway. It was a weak case, the settlement was small. By then, my wife and I were separated. I gave her the settlement. After a while, she moved back to Tuscaloosa with our daughters. 

I remarried. She was an artist, no longer painting after she borrowed $3,000 from a son of another boss in the Tiny Kingdom, in exchange for him getting her next two paintings. 

Upon learning of that, I went to my bank and got a cashier's check for $3,000 made out to the other son of the boss and gave it to her and told her to take it to him and get herself out of jail, which she did. Yet, she did not want to paint, even though she had more talent in her right hand that I had ever seen.

Finally, she decided she would like to teach young children how to draw and paint, and she found a place to rent in English Village, adjacent to Mountain Brook, and I gave her the money to open her school, which she seemed to enjoy, and her students seemed to like being there.

Perhaps part of that was compensation for my not wanting to have any more children, and birth control methods were not working for either of us and she got pregnant twice and had two abortions that really traumatized her, and so I got a vasectomy, which really traumatized her, and it traumatized me.

By and by, I met a fellow teaching a survivalist adult education class at UAB (University of Alabama, in Birmingham). By then, I had become an avid vegetable gardener in my back yard. He lived out in the country west of Birmingham. He had a bunch of rare breed chickens that laid different colored eggs, and a large vegetable garden.

He was the Executive Director of the local Planned Parenthood, which was receiving death threats from right wing Christians. He asked me to provide legal advice, which I did pro bono. I was not a strong abortion rights person. I knew a bit about abortion by then. I knew the damage my wife suffered. However, I didn't see any pro-lifers offering to adopt unwanted babies, or paying mothers of unwanted babies to raise their unwanted babies. 

By then, I had persuaded my artist wife to start painting again, if I wouldn't push her to try to sell her paintings. That went okay for about a year, when I persuaded her to put her paintings in a gallery owned by a woman whose husband was a lawyer I knew. Among artists, the gallery owner was not popular. She and my wife came at odds over a gallery showing. I told my wife, if I got into it, all hell might break loose. I got into it and all hell broke loose. The owner kicked my wife out of the gallery.

The angel of starving artists must have been on the job. The gallery owner had advertised a show in the Birmingham Post-Herald, and the showing artists were named. The owner invited my wife to bring her paintings back to the gallery. 

The other artists' paintings were hung and there was no wall space, so the owner stood my wife's paintings on the floor, leaning against the baseboard. A Birmingham newspaper's review of the show praised my wife's paintings, but said they were hard to find on the floor.

Heh.

I obtained a Masters in Tax Law from the University of Alabama School of Law. I hoped that would energize my law practice, but it didn't. I then went out on my own for a few years.

My wife drove down to Pensacola for its annual public art show in a city park. She won first prize in water color. A couple of years later, she drove down to Orlando and won first prize  for water color in the Disney World art show and was given the blue ribbon by Mickey Mouse. 

My law practice had dwindled down to a leaky faucet in output. 

I wrote three books, which did not make the residential real estate and legal industries particularly happy with me. My artist wife was my Muse. 

The books received good reviews and got me lots of media interviews but did not make me much money, because I was impatient and paid a publicist to promote the books before they were in bookstores. 

HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?

SELLING YOUR HOME $WEET HOME

KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers

The Prentice-Hall Division of Simon & Shuster ended up with all three books. 

Jane Pauley interviewed me on The Today Show about the homebuyers book. Also there was the General Counsel of the National Association of Realtors. We discussed real estate brokers and agents trying to represent both sides - conflict of interest. The General Counsel didn’t think it was a conflict of interest.

I hardly killed all the lawyers in the 3rd book, but I heard some Birmingham lawyers were upset- perhaps they thought they saw themselves in the book? 

One chapter, "Don't Kill Your Lawyer!", was about clients no lawyer ever wanted to have as a client. 

I had not yet arrived at the notion that the only way to kill all the lawyers was people stop using lawyers, which would result in pandemonium given how deeply imbedded lawyers are in American society, and elsewhere.

An artist son of another boss, who was a good friend of my 2nd wife, had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, where he was doing well as an artist, subsidized by his father. They invited us out to stay in their guest cottage. We stayed two months in the summer of 1985. 

By then, I was interested in what looked to me like not of this world phenomenon. It was not a religious interest. I had grown up in Christendom, attended its churches. What I was interested in was something else altogether - or so I thought at that time.

I saw a lot of interest in that something else in Santa Fe. Decided I wanted to move there. Invited my 2nd wife to move there with me. It was an artist's heaven. 

I had a pretty good amount of money from various inheritances. That’s how we got by.

She still lives in Santa Fe. 

I live in the Birmingham Southside apartment building, in which I lived two other times after I quit running away from home. 

I can't imagine much interest in what all happened to me when I was a runaway, but some of it might bear telling again.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com