Sterling's Journey in life

/01

Very early life

  • My older brother, Mike, was born in Summer 1950 in a Chicago small town while our parents were attending Garrett Theological Seminary, a Methodist graduate school located on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, twenty or so miles away. Our mother, Mary Ruth (Thompson) Minor, was attending to obtain a degree that would equip her to hold a Sunday School Superintendent or similar position. Our father, Harold DeForrest Minor, Jr., was attending to obtain the degree of Master of Divinity, qualifying him to be ordained a minister (priest) in a Methodist or other mainline Christian church. This professional degree requires three years after completing college, the same number of years as a law degree, and only one year less than a medical, dental or veterinary professional degree, and only one year less than the academic degree of Ph.D.
  • My father obtained the degree and was assigned as minister of a Methodist church in Sioux City, Iowa, the state but not city where he grew up, and where he went to undergraduate school, first at Iowa State University (architecture) and then graduating from Morningside College (sociology). I was born in Sioux City in Summer 1952.
  • My parents had marital disputes in a couple of years and soon we left for relocation to Faison, North Carolina. As Iowa had been my dad's home state, North Carolina was my mother's. She grew up in the western part of the state, finishing high school in Winston-Salem and graduating from Greensboro College. Faison was in the east with the nearest cities being Kinston and New Bern. In a couple of years, Dad was assigned a church in the city of Durham. After a year in Durham, my father switched from being a church's minister to being an administrator in the church's geographical organization, which called a conference (aka diocese). While in Durham my other sibling, Gary, was born in Summer 1957. No sisters.

/02

elementary through high school

  • In Durham (Durham County) 1958-1961
Mike and I attended Hillandale School, a first through eighth grade campus of the Durham County schools. I followed Mike in having the teachers Ervin, Ash, and Browning. These women were all excellent teachers. The principal was Mr. Ash. The school building was at the east end of a huge block (there were regular suburban houses directly across the street on which the school faced), with only one other building within that many-acre block. That building was the Ash residence. The roads on the west and north sides were both dirt, not pavement. The few times I walked or biked to campus I used those dirt roads. A feature of the school I remember is that the library held several multiples of volumes compared to the library volumes at my next school. (Later, while at Duke University, also in Durham, I learned that the favorite school of the education students for student teacher training was Hillandale.) For the four years of being five years old through eight years old I lead an absolutely idyllic outdoor life in Durham. I learned to swim and canoe at Camp Don Lee, a Methodist family retreat place in Eastern North Carolina where my father ran the programming. A creek of slowly running water about 8-10 feet wide formed the border of our moderate-sized backyard in Durham. On the other side of the creek was several square miles of very walkable woods. Our parents and our friends' parents allowed us to roam freely, and we did. During one school day in third grade, I ran and jumped into the long jump sand pit. People told me I went very far. That summer we moved to Nashville.
  • In Nashville (Davidson County) 1961-1968
Beginning my fourth grade year, Mike and I attended Glendale Elementary School. There were two classrooms for each grade, 1-6. In fifth grade with Mrs. Holman, there were 40 students in our classroom. One of those forty was named Sterling Overton, the only other Sterling I have ever personally known. He was a nice guy. The geographical boundaries for the school attendees stretched from the boundary on the north towards downtown with a black school (schools were segregated by black and white back then) and a slightly lower middle class neighborhood, to the small neighborhood in the south that included the homes of several country music stars and the Governors' Mansion. The wealthier neighborhoods of Nashville were to the west and to the south of Glendale. In the fourth grade, I made 100 (highest possible score) in science every six weeks all school year. Interest in science stayed with me. The teacher, Miss Batson, became Mrs. Hobbs the summer after my year. He was an FBI agent who quickly became head of the Nashville Bureau. He was a good deal older than her and had a daughter a year younger than me, who was a part of my largest circle of friends at Glendale. Mrs. Holman, whose husband was the chief financial officer at the Church of Christ-affiliated college Lipscomb (now Lipscomb University) , was an outstanding teacher. Decades later she and my mother met again and walked a shopping mall together most every day. In either the fifth or sixth grade, I "ran away" from home, from my mother. As I was bicycling to the spot where I was going, Dad drove past on his way home from work, and we waved. I left between 5 and 6 pm, and came back to the house 10-12 hours later, at 4 to 5 am. I slept in a small woods behind a church's parking lot, toward a creek that ran along the main road, Franklin Rd. (US 31). In sixth grade, as recess ended one day, Tommy Parker and I were both still doing sit ups, he at 222 and me at 210. I long-jumped 16 feet; Gary told me years later that was a record that stood for over a decade. President John F. Kennedy instituted a nationwide physical fitness testing program; I ran 600 yards (on hilly grass terrain, not a track) in 1:43, placing my time in the top 1%. I neither liked nor had much respect for my sixth grade teacher. She would not include me in a small group of about 8 in the class, to whom she taught a more advanced math session. I made a drawing of her, hanging on a noose, naked, showing nipples and public hair. She made me sit on the floor in the hall outside the classroom for two days. At her or the principal's request, Dad took me to her house where I made a formal apology. The girl of my dreams in sixth grade was Elizabeth Haynes. My dream partially came true when we paired up as dance partners in Mr. Fletcher Harvey's dance and etiquette class at the end of sixth grade. Together we learned to waltz, foxtrot, introduce people, and place a silverware setting. In the blocks close to our house, I spent a lot of time with Mike, including boys his age, Phil Martin and Frank Tyree. My best friend over the three years was Tommy Parker, with Steve Faust very close in 5th and 6th grades, and with the girls Kathy Wilkinson, Julia Duke, and Marcia Robinson. The girl Lynn Greer and I raced each other to see who would finish a test first, and we both did well on the tests. Gary Clément's dad was the Tennessee governor through 1960, and a couple times he had me and another boy be picked up and delivered by a state trooper to visit the Melrose Theater for a movie night. For both the seventh and eighth grades I attended John Overton High School, a seventh through twelfth grade campus. It was the "second best" school in academics of the 38 high schools in Davidson County. I feel certain that 95-100% of its graduates went on to college, always including at least a handful to the Ivy League, service academies, and other schools with similar demanding entrance competition. Students were assigned to academic tiers in the seventh grade, so that (roughly) students ranked 1-30 were assigned Homeroom 1, students 31-60 Homeroom 2, etc. I hung out in seventh grade with a group of "hoods" as one of my affinity groups, but I was a "star" football player and the fastest sprinting seventh or eighth grade boy. For about a week, I was Lynn Anderson's boyfriend. That status terminated when I went home with Lynn, and although I had a prophylactic in my wallet and wild dreams of intercourse in my head, I made no advance, not even for a hug or kiss. Lynn and I had been at Glendale together and a couple of times had been in the group of a dozen or so who played "spin-the-bottle." Lynn became a cheerleader and was highly desirable throughout high school. The "miss" here was not missing the possibility of scoring a physical pleasure, which would have been terrible for each of us, but missing the possibility of maintaining a very desirable social relationship, and losing that through emotional timidity. I had no girlfriend during the eighth grade. For math in the eighth grade, I was assigned to group level 2 and groups 1 and 2 were to be taught Algebra 1. Within a week or two this was determined to be unworkable; I and one other student were moved up to group 1 and group 2 stopped algebra, reverting to a lower level instruction. The Overton varsity football, and especially basketball and track, teams were very successful. The best team was Pearl High School, the Black school nearest our home, which produced three NBA starting players from that squad. (Perry Wallace at Vanderbilt and James Douglas at Tennessee were the first Black scholarship athletes in the Southeastern Conference. Wallace became a lawyer and wrote a book about the horrors of his experience of rejection while Black at Vanderbilt.) My eighth grade track event was the hurdles on the ninth grade team. Overton traded places with Battle Ground Academy (where Mike attended) for first place during the State Track Championships. That summer after 8th grade, I traveled with a group of Nashville boys and adults to make the ten-day canoe trip out of northern Minnesota into Ontario, Canada. I carried one of the canoes over land between the many, many lakes in that territory. The rapid increase in strength and endurance was one of the most amazing physical transformations any of us had ever witnessed. I had gone canoeing several times at the Methodist family camps as a small boy, so I sat in the back of our three-man canoe, steering it using the "J stroke." You had to be 14 to go, so my turning 14 on the 10th day had qualified me. Battle Ground Academy, named for the Civil War Battle of Franklin, was established in 1889. During my period there, it was a small boarding and day school for boys; my entire senior class was 56. The private schools, including the Catholic schools, were in the leagues with the public schools. Freshman year, our football team won the state championship, was ranked thirteenth nationally, and had two All-American selections, at guard and running back. The next three years we won only one more football game. Don Denbo, the All-American guard, set the shot put state record, but the track team did not repeat as champions. I started on the ninth grade football team at halfback, cornerback, and returned kickoffs, but neither I nor the team were anything special. BGA did not support a ninth grade track team, so I was on the varsity running 440 yards. I was the only transfer freshman to have taken Algebra 1 the prior year, so I took Algebra 2 with about 8 boys who were in the ninth grade, the other 8 or so being in the tenth grade. Bob Smithson, the teacher who had a son with me in the class, was a real asshole. I mention him more below, but one of his characteristics was that he required each student to do two hours of homework each of the five school days, and he quickly learned how much we each could do. He enforced this and other rules by striking us with the sliding part of a slide-rule on the back of the thighs if we were wearing shorts, or otherwise on the palm. Yes. This was allowed to go on for decades. That summer, my Glendale Swim Club medley relay team won the Nashville City Championships, with me anchoring. Sophomore year my scholarship doubled from half tuition to full tuition, so the cost to my parents was the lunch, fees, and cost of books. My close neighborhood friend from age 10-13, Steve Faust, transferred from Overton. Steve was tall, good-looking, a terrific swimmer, a poet, and a laid-back dude, who was very smart. I took Dorothy Keenan on several dates, but we developed no chemistry. I knew her from Overton, and she went to the main girls prep school, Harpeth Hall. (Harpeth Hall supplied BGA and the top boys' school, Montgomery Bell Academy, with cheerleaders.) Educated at Harvard Law School, she chose Houston to begin her practice. I never ran into her here. I was asked to join and did join the high school fraternity Delta Sigma. There were boys from BGA, MBA, the public school Hillsboro, and a couple from the Catholic school Father Ryan. One of my classmates (from MBA) was Bill Frist, later the US Senate Majority Leader. The fraternity provided me with drivers for double dates, among other benefits. One of those dates was with Ginger Steele, who I really dug. We had gone out once before. The guy took the four of us to an old one room cabin in the woods, and I assumed he and his girlfriend went off in the woods and had sex. That was way out of my experience and appalled both me and Ginger; not surprisingly, she would not go out with me again. Sophomore year also brought, for the first time since sixth grade, year-round sports. I started at halfback on the junior varsity, but like the freshman football experience, neither I nor the team amounted to much. Mike was a veteran wrestler, and I joined him with the wrestling team. He was our wrestler at 138 pounds and I was at 147. We both won our share of matches. We each had very impressive upper bodies. On the track team, Mike led off the 4 x 110 yard relay, which I anchored. I also anchored the 4 x 220 yard relay team. Our track coach recruited a younger boy and entered a group of four 14-15 year old boys in the Junior Olympics for Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. We finished third in the 880 yard relay and I finished fifth in the 220. Darwin Bond, later a 1972 Olympian quarter-miler, won first place. 
  • In Franklin (Williamson County) 1968-1970
The summer after Sophomore year was filled with memorable activity after the Junior Olympics. First, I spent the beginning of the summer working on the cattle farm of Alan Anderson's family. Alan wrestled at the weight class one heavier than mine and was my partner every practice. He established a record adequate to go to the state tournament, although I do not recall how he faired. He followed Don Denbo as the starting right guard in football, and the shot-putter. He became a physician in Franklin and died in 2024 or 2025. The farm (it would be called a ranch in Texas) raised the Charolais breed of cattle, and raised the several crops that were cattle feed, but also raised maize and tobacco. It was in three non-contiguous parcels, two in the northern part of Williamson County and one in the northern party of Maury County, the next county south. I worked for ten hours a day for five days a week, and five hours on Saturday. The pay for that fifty five hours was $35. Because of Jim Crow laws, minimum wage was not applicable to farm workers, which is true even today. But, my pay was not that far below minimum wage of that time, 1968. Second, I was part of the Boy Scout troop of 33 boys, with three adult leaders to represent Middle Tennessee, West Tennessee, and Northern Alabama, for attendance to the World Jamboree in 4,000 acre Farragut State Park, Idaho, the first in the United States. I was selected as the Senior Patrol Leader and slept in the tent with the third adult, carrying the duty of arising first among the 36 and going to bed after all the other Scouts. As I detail in the Travel section of this Web site, we saw much of the Western United States and some of Canada. I made fast friends with a boy from Austria, our principal thing in common being a love for the song "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Third, our family moved from the Glendale area of Nashville to a house just off Hillsboro Road (US Highway 431) in northern Williamson County. The house, which was not much of a house, sat on a two acre lot. Within a few weeks, Mike went off to the University of North Carolina. I began that junior school year with Donna Dean, from Belmont United Methodist Church, as a solid couple. She attended Hillwood High School, a substantially Jewish student body. It was a drive of several miles to the northwest to get to her house, located not far into Nashville-Davidson County. Like Hillsboro and Overton, almost all Hillwood's students went on to college, but it had considerably less athletic success. One of Donna's classmates went with me to Duke. Donna was the first "love of my life" and truly I have continuously loved her (memory) as much as I have anyone. Working at night to decorate the gym for the prom, I drove a couple of other students to get some food and refreshment for the workers. Mr. Smithson found out and although there was no reason for me to know I could not take boarding students off campus, he assessed a serious punishment. Mr. Don Patterson, who was the teacher who oversaw all things boarding students, tossed out the assessment. Donna and I experimented with touching each other's genitals, but that was the most advanced step we took. Looking back, I have concluded I made a mistake in not engaging in intercourse with Donna. Senior year, I did not play football or run track. I won third place in the State Wrestling Championships, at 154 pounds. I lost all season only to Larry Ward, from Antioch High School. (The prior year, I had pinned someone in the first 45 seconds of the match; I believe that was Larry.) Donna and I remained a couple, until I, stupidly, cut it off in the early Spring. I was elected to the BGA Honor Council, which actually met once to hand out punishment for cheating, and I was the student body treasurer. My in-depth object of study was the nineteenth century Danish scholar Soren Kierkegaard, a Christian existentialist. In advanced placement English, we studied the poetry of our classmate Steve Faust, who also wrote the text in most of the yearbook in verse. At graduation, I ranked 15th in my class of 56, getting admitted into Duke University obviously based on factors other than academic rank. Our valedictorian, Dan Milam, was the other person in my class who went on to Duke. I had always been active at our church youth group, and as its senior high president I was named to be a member of the Council on Ministries at Belmont United Methodist Church. [A United Methodist church is headed by three bodies of equal rank, the Administrative Board (administration), the Council on Ministries (programming), and the Trustees (campus and buildings). The real estate is owned by the conference, not by the congregation. The ministers, who must hold the academic degree master of divinity and be ordained in the church, are not selected by the congregation but assigned to each congregation by the bishop of the geographic conference, usually for 3-4 year terms until becoming senior minister at a large church.] The summer after BGA I interviewed for and took a job at St. Thomas (Catholic) Hospital caring for five to seven assigned patients. The hospital was Nashville's leading location for open-heart surgery (others were done at Baptist and Vanderbilt hospitals); the most common surgery was the D & C, aka a surgical abortion. The hospital had long had an RN certification school, but had closed the school. For that summer, it hired students like me to replace the nursing students who had worked at the hospital during the summer as employee vacation support. We were trained and I made a score of 100 (along with one other person) on the test. This experience was a cardinal one in my positive development as a person. Wiping other peoples' asses on a regular basis teaches humility, and confidence, and is a job that would benefit every eighteen year old person who performed it. On duty one night shift I learned that I got a very high number (286) for the dreaded Vietnam War draft. I thus did not need my shoulder injury to avoid, nor college attendance to defer, military service in the war.

/02

elementary through high school

  • In Durham (Durham County) 1958-1961
Mike and I attended Hillandale School, a first through eighth grade campus of the Durham County schools. I followed Mike in having the teachers Ervin, Ash, and Browning. These women were all excellent teachers. The principal was Mr. Ash. The school building was at the east end of a huge block (there were regular suburban houses directly across the street on which the school faced), with only one other building within that many-acre block. That building was the Ash residence. The roads on the west and north sides were both dirt, not pavement. The few times I walked or biked to campus I used those dirt roads. A feature of the school I remember is that the library held several multiples of volumes compared to the library volumes at my next school. (Later, while at Duke University, also in Durham, I learned that the favorite school of the education students for student teacher training was Hillandale.) For the four years of being five years old through eight years old I lead an absolutely idyllic outdoor life in Durham. I learned to swim and canoe at Camp Don Lee, a Methodist family retreat place in Eastern North Carolina where my father ran the programming. A creek of slowly running water about 8-10 feet wide formed the border of our moderate-sized backyard in Durham. On the other side of the creek was several square miles of very walkable woods. Our parents and our friends' parents allowed us to roam freely, and we did. During one school day in third grade, I ran and jumped into the long jump sand pit. People told me I went very far. That summer we moved to Nashville.
  • In Nashville (Davidson County) 1961-1968
Beginning my fourth grade year, Mike and I attended Glendale Elementary School. There were two classrooms for each grade, 1-6. In fifth grade with Mrs. Holman, there were 40 students in our classroom. One of those forty was named Sterling Overton, the only other Sterling I have ever personally known. He was a nice guy. The geographical boundaries for the school attendees stretched from the boundary on the north towards downtown with a black school (schools were segregated by black and white back then) and a slightly lower middle class neighborhood, to the small neighborhood in the south that included the homes of several country music stars and the Governors' Mansion. The wealthier neighborhoods of Nashville were to the west and to the south of Glendale. In the fourth grade, I made 100 (highest possible score) in science every six weeks all school year. Interest in science stayed with me. The teacher, Miss Batson, became Mrs. Hobbs the summer after my year. He was an FBI agent who quickly became head of the Nashville Bureau. He was a good deal older than her and had a daughter a year younger than me, who was a part of my largest circle of friends at Glendale. Mrs. Holman, whose husband was the chief financial officer at the Church of Christ-affiliated college Lipscomb (now Lipscomb University) , was an outstanding teacher. Decades later she and my mother met again and walked a shopping mall together most every day. In either the fifth or sixth grade, I "ran away" from home, from my mother. As I was bicycling to the spot where I was going, Dad drove past on his way home from work, and we waved. I left between 5 and 6 pm, and came back to the house 10-12 hours later, at 4 to 5 am. I slept in a small woods behind a church's parking lot, toward a creek that ran along the main road, Franklin Rd. (US 31). In sixth grade, as recess ended one day, Tommy Parker and I were both still doing sit ups, he at 222 and me at 210. I long-jumped 16 feet; Gary told me years later that was a record that stood for over a decade. President John F. Kennedy instituted a nationwide physical fitness testing program; I ran 600 yards (on hilly grass terrain, not a track) in 1:43, placing my time in the top 1%. I neither liked nor had much respect for my sixth grade teacher. She would not include me in a small group of about 8 in the class, to whom she taught a more advanced math session. I made a drawing of her, hanging on a noose, naked, showing nipples and public hair. She made me sit on the floor in the hall outside the classroom for two days. At her or the principal's request, Dad took me to her house where I made a formal apology. Also in the sixth grade I engaged in anal intercourse with another boy, I never repeated it with a male, but I did have more sexual experimentation with both sexes before vaginal intercourse arrived rather late in my development. The girl of my dreams in sixth grade was Elizabeth Haynes. My dream partially came true when we paired up as dance partners in Mr. Fletcher Harvey's dance and etiquette class at the end of sixth grade. Together we learned to waltz, foxtrot, introduce people, and place a silverware setting. In the blocks close to our house, I spent a lot of time with Mike, including boys his age, Phil Martin and Frank Tyree. My best friend over the three years was Tommy Parker, with Steve Faust very close in 5th and 6th grades, and with the girls Kathy Wilkinson, Julia Duke, and Marcia Robinson. The girl Lynn Greer and I raced each other to see who would finish a test first, and we both did well on the tests. Gary Clément's dad was the Tennessee governor through 1960, and a couple times he had me and another boy be picked up and delivered by a state trooper to visit the Melrose Theater for a movie night. For both the seventh and eighth grades I attended John Overton High School, a seventh through twelfth grade campus. It was the "second best" school in academics of the 38 high schools in Davidson County. I feel certain that 95-100% of its graduates went on to college, always including at least a handful to the Ivy League, service academies, and other schools with similar demanding entrance competition. Students were assigned to academic tiers in the seventh grade, so that (roughly) students ranked 1-30 were assigned Homeroom 1, students 31-60 Homeroom 2, etc. I hung out in seventh grade with a group of "hoods" as one of my affinity groups, but I was a "star" football player and the fastest sprinting seventh or eighth grade boy. For about a week, I was Lynn Anderson's boyfriend. That status terminated when I went home with Lynn, and although I had a prophylactic in my wallet and wild dreams of intercourse in my head, I made no advance, not even for a hug or kiss. Lynn and I had been at Glendale together and a couple of times had been in the group of a dozen or so who played "spin-the-bottle." Lynn became a cheerleader and was highly desirable throughout high school. The "miss" here was not missing the possibility of scoring a physical pleasure, which would have been terrible for each of us, but missing the possibility of maintaining a very desirable social relationship, and losing that through emotional timidity. I had no girlfriend during the eighth grade. For math in the eighth grade, I was assigned to group level 2 and groups 1 and 2 were to be taught Algebra 1. Within a week or two this was determined to be unworkable; I and one other student were moved up to group 1 and group 2 stopped algebra, reverting to a lower level instruction. The Overton varsity football, and especially basketball and track, teams were very successful. The best team was Pearl High School, the Black school nearest our home, which produced three NBA starting players from that squad. (Perry Wallace at Vanderbilt and James Douglas at Tennessee were the first Black scholarship athletes in the Southeastern Conference. Wallace became a lawyer and wrote a book about the horrors of his experience of rejection while Black at Vanderbilt.) My eighth grade track event was the hurdles on the ninth grade team. Overton traded places with Battle Ground Academy (where Mike attended) for first place during the State Track Championships. That summer after 8th grade, I traveled with a group of Nashville boys and adults to make the ten-day canoe trip out of northern Minnesota into Ontario, Canada. I carried one of the canoes over land between the many, many lakes in that territory. The rapid increase in strength and endurance was one of the most amazing physical transformations any of us had ever witnessed. I had gone canoeing several times at the Methodist family camps as a small boy, so I sat in the back of our three-man canoe, steering it using the "J stroke." You had to be 14 to go, so my turning 14 on the 10th day had qualified me. Battle Ground Academy, named for the Civil War Battle of Franklin, was established in 1889. During my period there, it was a small boarding and day school for boys; my entire senior class was 56. The private schools, including the Catholic schools, were in the leagues with the public schools. Freshman year, our football team won the state championship, was ranked thirteenth nationally, and had two All-American selections, at guard and running back. The next three years we won only one more football game. Don Denbo, the All-American guard, set the shot put state record, but the track team did not repeat as champions. I started on the ninth grade football team at halfback, cornerback, and returned kickoffs, but neither I nor the team were anything special. BGA did not support a ninth grade track team, so I was on the varsity running 440 yards. I was the only transfer freshman to have taken Algebra 1 the prior year, so I took Algebra 2 with about 8 boys who were in the ninth grade, the other 8 or so being in the tenth grade. Bob Smithson, the teacher who had a son with me in the class, was a real asshole. I mention him more below, but one of his characteristics was that he required each student to do two hours of homework each of the five school days, and he quickly learned how much we each could do. He enforced this and other rules by striking us with the sliding part of a slide-rule on the back of the thighs if we were wearing shorts, or otherwise on the palm. Yes. This was allowed to go on for decades. That summer, my Glendale Swim Club medley relay team won the Nashville City Championships, with me anchoring. Sophomore year my scholarship doubled from half tuition to full tuition, so the cost to my parents was the lunch, fees, and cost of books. My close neighborhood friend from age 10-13, Steve Faust, transferred from Overton. Steve was tall, good-looking, a terrific swimmer, a poet, and a laid-back dude, who was very smart. I took Dorothy Keenan on several dates, but we developed no chemistry. I knew her from Overton, and she went to the main girls prep school, Harpeth Hall. (Harpeth Hall supplied BGA and the top boys' school, Montgomery Bell Academy, with cheerleaders.) Educated at Harvard Law School, she chose Houston to begin her practice. I never ran into her here. I was asked to join and did join the high school fraternity Delta Sigma. There were boys from BGA, MBA, the public school Hillsboro, and a couple from the Catholic school Father Ryan. One of my classmates (from MBA) was Bill Frist, later the US Senate Majority Leader. The fraternity provided me with drivers for double dates, among other benefits. One of those dates was with Ginger Steele, who I really dug. We had gone out once before. The guy took the four of us to an old one room cabin in the woods, and I assumed he and his girlfriend went off in the woods and had sex. That was way out of my experience and appalled both me and Ginger; not surprisingly, she would not go out with me again. Sophomore year also brought, for the first time since sixth grade, year-round sports. I started at halfback on the junior varsity, but like the freshman football experience, neither I nor the team amounted to much. Mike was a veteran wrestler, and I joined him with the wrestling team. He was our wrestler at 138 pounds and I was at 147. We both won our share of matches. We each had very impressive upper bodies. On the track team, Mike led off the 4 x 110 yard relay, which I anchored. I also anchored the 4 x 220 yard relay team. Our track coach recruited a younger boy and entered a group of four 14-15 year old boys in the Junior Olympics for Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. We finished third in the 880 yard relay and I finished fifth in the 220. Darwin Bond, later a 1972 Olympian quarter-miler, won first place. 
  • In Franklin (Williamson County) 1968-1970
The summer after Sophomore year was filled with memorable activity after the Junior Olympics. First, I spent the beginning of the summer working on the cattle farm of Alan Anderson's family. Alan wrestled at the weight class one heavier than mine and was my partner every practice. He established a record adequate to go to the state tournament, although I do not recall how he faired. He followed Don Denbo as the starting right guard in football, and the shot-putter. He became a physician in Franklin and died in 2024 or 2025. The farm (it would be called a ranch in Texas) raised the Charolais breed of cattle, and raised the several crops that were cattle feed, but also raised maize and tobacco. It was in three non-contiguous parcels, two in the northern part of Williamson County and one in the northern party of Maury County, the next county south. I worked for ten hours a day for five days a week, and five hours on Saturday. The pay for that fifty five hours was $35. Because of Jim Crow laws, minimum wage was not applicable to farm workers, which is true even today. But, my pay was not that far below minimum wage of that time, 1968. Second, I was part of the Boy Scout troop of 33 boys, with three adult leaders to represent Middle Tennessee, West Tennessee, and Northern Alabama, for attendance to the World Jamboree in 4,000 acre Farragut State Park, Idaho, the first in the United States. I was selected as the Senior Patrol Leader and slept in the tent with the third adult, carrying the duty of arising first among the 36 and going to bed after all the other Scouts. As I detail in the Travel section of this Web site, we saw much of the Western United States and some of Canada. I made fast friends with a boy from Austria, our principal thing in common being a love for the song "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Third, our family moved from the Glendale area of Nashville to a house just off Hillsboro Road (US Highway 431) in northern Williamson County. The house, which was not much of a house, sat on a two acre lot. Within a few weeks, Mike went off to the University of North Carolina. I began that junior school year with Donna Dean, from Belmont United Methodist Church, as a solid couple. She attended Hillwood High School, a substantially Jewish student body. It was a drive of several miles to the northwest to get to her house, located not far into Nashville-Davidson County. Like Hillsboro and Overton, almost all Hillwood's students went on to college, but it had considerably less athletic success. One of Donna's classmates went with me to Duke. Donna was the first "love of my life" and truly I have continuously loved her (memory) as much as I have anyone. Working at night to decorate the gym for the prom, I drove a couple of other students to get some food and refreshment for the workers. Mr. Smithson found out and although there was no reason for me to know I could not take boarding students off campus, he assessed a serious punishment. Mr. Don Patterson, who was the teacher who oversaw all things boarding students, tossed out the assessment. I was the apple of another BGA student's sexual eye, and I "allowed" him fellatio on me several times. Donna and I experimented with touching each other's genitals, but that was the most advanced step we took. Looking back, I have concluded I made a mistake in not engaging in intercourse with Donna. Senior year, I did not play football or run track. I won third place in the State Wrestling Championships, at 154 pounds. I lost all season only to Larry Ward, from Antioch High School. (The prior year, I had pinned someone in the first 45 seconds of the match; I believe that was Larry.) Donna and I remained a couple, until I, stupidly, cut it off in the early Spring. I was elected to the BGA Honor Council, which actually met once to hand out punishment for cheating, and I was the student body treasurer. My in-depth object of study was the nineteenth century Danish scholar Soren Kierkegaard, a Christian existentialist. In advanced placement English, we studied the poetry of our classmate Steve Faust, who also wrote the text in most of the yearbook in verse. At graduation, I ranked 15th in my class of 56, getting admitted into Duke University obviously based on factors other than academic rank. Our valedictorian, Dan Milam, was the other person in my class who went on to Duke. I had always been active at our church youth group, and as its senior high president I was named to be a member of the Council on Ministries at Belmont United Methodist Church. [A United Methodist church is headed by three bodies of equal rank, the Administrative Board (administration), the Council on Ministries (programming), and the Trustees (campus and buildings). The real estate is owned by the conference, not by the congregation. The ministers, who must hold the academic degree master of divinity and be ordained in the church, are not selected by the congregation but assigned to each congregation by the bishop of the geographic conference, usually for 3-4 year terms until becoming senior minister at a large church.] The summer after BGA I interviewed for and took a job at St. Thomas (Catholic) Hospital caring for five to seven assigned patients. The hospital was Nashville's leading location for open-heart surgery (others were done at Baptist and Vanderbilt hospitals); the most common surgery was the D & C, aka a surgical abortion. The hospital had long had an RN certification school, but had closed the school. For that summer, it hired students like me to replace the nursing students who had worked at the hospital during the summer as employee vacation support. We were trained and I made a score of 100 (along with one other person) on the test. This experience was a cardinal one in my positive development as a person. Wiping other peoples' asses on a regular basis teaches humility, and confidence, and is a job that would benefit every eighteen year old person who performed it. On duty one night shift I learned that I got a very high number (286) for the dreaded Vietnam War draft. I thus did not need my shoulder injury to avoid, nor college attendance to defer, military service in the war.

/03

college and law school

  • In Durham (Duke University) 1970-1974
Going back to Durham was a thrill for me. Dan Milam and his parents drove me to the campus and the dorm in which he and I had decided to share a room. While of course we knew each other on some level, we were not close. Generally, that year Dan was gone from the room when I woke up and was in bed when I got back to the room. We lived in an all-male freshman dorm. I was elected president of the dorm and was thus a delegate to the Student Government. Dan finished the year with the number one grade point average of all freshman students across all three undergraduate schools, nursing, engineering, and arts & sciences. By the end of our sophomore year, Dan and I had become a bit closer. Duke's main office building had been overtaken by students the previous Spring, and while the atmosphere was nothing like Berkeley's, as an intellectual center it had many "leftist" students inclined to protesting the Nixon Administration, and the Viet Nam War specifically. The university's president, Douglas Knight, an academician, was replaced during the Spring semester with a politician, former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford. As governor, Sanford had pushed hard to modernize the southern state, especially by emphasizing highway, scientific (medical) research, and education spending. His selection was, by everyone's hindsight, a brilliant decision by the Duke board of trustees. I experienced the benefit of Terry Sanford's leadership. He ran to be the Democratic Party nominee for president in 1972. One of my fraternity brothers, Curt Moffitt, was a significant cog in the Sanford campaign machine. Duke's institute for public policy, established just before I got to Duke, was later renamed for Sanford. He will be mentioned here again. Within a few days, the freshmen went to a central building (I remember sitting on the floor with a big crowd) and signed up for classes. There, I talked with a red-headed and bespeckled gal for awhile, and less than enthusiastically she accepted my invitation to go hear The Moody Blues in the basketball arena, which was in 1972 while I was attending, named Cameron Indoor Stadium. While my memory is probably somewhat wrong, I do not remember having a single other date the first semester. I made an "A" in Zoology 11, my anticipated major, and an "F" in third semester French where all instruction and testing was done orally in the French language, after my taking two years of high school French conducted largely in writing. (Second semester, I got myself appointed to a commission that succeeded in getting the language requirement removed. That episode does not make me proud.) I spent a fair amount of my time - too much time - functioning as president of the dorm and as a delegate to the student counsel. I was rushed hard by three fraternities, including one known for being rich boys (they could not tell I was a student on financial aid), but I joined SAE. I was selected as "top pledge" and got a paid-for week at SAE leadership school for the summer. While it was founded at the University of Alabama, the fraternity's headquarters was at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. This is the place where my parents went to graduate school, so it was exciting to go there. At Duke, the fraternity groups were one type of residential unit, so 80% to 95% of fraternity members lived together in a portion of a continuous residential building of 3-4 stories for men that formed a number of quadrangles, one residential unit (fraternity, independent house, or freshmen) separated from another by fire-proof, lockable doors. Also on the West Campus were two dorms that had been built recently that were high-rises compared to the quadrangles. No freshmen lived in the high-rises. All the women lived in four-year dorms located on the East Campus, a mile away with busses running between campuses. There were some classrooms and several academic departments located on the East Campus, as well as a large auditorium, to go with the dorms. The East Campus is closer to downtown Durham, indeed readily walkable. By the time I arrived, 1970, Duke was a highly competitive place to obtain admission. It is more competitive for admission today (say, 13th then versus 6th now). During my years the undergraduates were purposefully engaged in continuing competition: (1) Unlike in the Ivy League schools, at Duke grades more or less followed a bell-curve so that the C+ was very common, whereas at the Ivy League it was more or less assumed you would make an A, with a B for a lesser than expected performance, and (2) unlike at most colleges, there were no part-time students allowed, so everyone enrolled had to take a minimum of four and a maximum of five classes, making us all operate with the same academic load. Finally, there were no basket weaving classes for athletes or other students. (Instead, there was an established program for tutoring the athletes as part of their membership on a team.) The second semester of Freshman year brought a good deal more social life than the first. In addition to the fraternity rush, I was getting more dates. Tina Brasheer and I went out probably four times; and although there was no magic, we enjoyed each other's company. One of the SAE customs was a weekend trip to stay in a specific beachside hotel in Surfside. This usually involved about a dozen couples, always a male and a female in a room. The group consisted mostly of established couples, not dates. I asked Ann Cochou to go. We barely knew each other. One of the activities of the group was playing a game that mimicked The Newlywed Game then on TV. The game asks questions to explore the degree of familiarity the couple has with each other. (What brand of toothpaste does your partner use?) Well, Ann and I "won" for getting the most correct answers. Ridiculous, and fun. No sex by the way, which I had certainly not expected. A campus living arrangement that had started the prior year was the placement together of several dorms as an organizational group. For my sophomore year, our group of four dorms, three male and one female, was placed as the four sides of one quadrangle on the West (old men's) campus, named Few after a former university president. The Few Federation of the four dorms also was assigned a dean, making these federations somewhat resemble the residential colleges at Oxford and Rice University. The federation even offered a couple of courses with half course credit each semester. I was selected the federation's president. I would have to say it was not a good choice for my ultimate career advancement, as it was a simple continuation of my being president or chair of whatever organization I was around. That did not really help me grow as a person. (I did do a really good job as president, ably providing service for my fellows.) Just a few days into the semester, Bob Penn and I were outside the fraternity house, and a great looking gal come up to us. Doranne Meny was a freshman from Dallas. She agreed to a date, and we became a couple into the beginnings of the next semester. One of our first get togethers was the Fall trip to Surfside beach. Doranne was a very serious student, and as our general rule we went out only Friday or Saturday but not both, and not during the week. Early in our relationship her Dallas high school boyfriend was set to come spend the weekend, and for some disgusting reason she told me that they had engaged in intercourse in high school and might that weekend. She and I never did, and that was a defining negative event in my life development. It took me many decades to overcome the feeling of masculine shame, and feeling of general social failure, that sexual rebuff and others while at Duke caused. I was replaced in her life by the guy in the class behind me who got into Harvard Medical School. Both he and I had unruly shoulder-length hair. She may have married him, as she got an MBA from Harvard during years that would have overlapped with his medical school. During Christmas Break, I had remembered that fraternity brother Ray Freese invited all to join a group for New Year's Eve in Times Square. His home was in Northern New Jersey and I decided to hitch-hike there and join the group, as I had no car to take for the several days involved. Dad drove me out to I-24 in the Northeast part of Nashville. It took a while, but finally a large truck pulled over - he was going all the way to Cincinnati. Bear in mind I had hair parted down the middle that was about shoulder length, and I had a full beard. He let me out near downtown Cincinnati. I walked a few blocks and went into an old "fleabag" hotel. I got a room, and walked back out for dinner. I had brought E. M. Forster's Howard's End in paperback and entertained my self with it and the TV. When I got out on the road, I was picked up this time by the very first car that went past me. What fantastic luck! He was going all the way to Philadelphia. Near Cleveland, he picked up another hiker, who was going to exactly the same town in NJ as I was, Metuchen. With three of us in the car, I now spent a fair amount of time with Howard's End. The other hiker was in school at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. We tried for a couple of hours (it was very cold) to get a ride down the road to Metuchen, with no luck, and then to NYC with no luck. Finally we asked for Philadelphia, and soon got agreement for that destination's railway station. We took turns staying awake and sleeping in the very scary station. We got the train to Metuchen before 6 o'clock and in Metuchen bid each other adieu. I walked all the way to Ray's house and surprised his mother with my arrival. Several guys were already there. It was December 30th. All five of us slept in one queen bed. Two others joined us on December 32st, and late afternoon we all headed out for Times Square. We drank Rusty Nails and had dinner in a place that closed at 10 for the employees to go celebrate themselves. Times Square was so full that on two occasions I was penned in so tightly by the crowd that my feet were lifted off the pavement. All the guys but me were going to Florida, so we headed out to spend the night in the fraternity dorm at Duke. The next morning I said goodbye to them and started hitching to Nashville after they let me off on I-85. Mike picked me up on I-40 when I got into Nashville very late at night. Also during sophomore year I came to appreciate that a high percentage of my courses could include graduate students. In fact, in my major of zoology there were only three exclusively undergraduate courses, the year-long introductory course and comparative anatomy. I decided to pursue those courses, loading up on high-level great literature courses. While my schedule never allowed for Shakespeare, I took literature courses under fabulous professors with Ph.D. candidates on a range of authors: Goethe, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Dante, Five Twentieth Century French playwrights, Five Twentieth Century British playwrights, and I was able to do somewhat the same with a bit lower quality professors but super graduate students in political science. There was, of course, a downside. I did not make an A in any of those high-level, non-science classes. All said and done, I do wish I had taken the year-long introductory course in economics rather than the year-long course in organic chemistry. Duke is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. During my four years, Duke was a poor football performer and a middling basketball performer, but not so the conference as a whole. North Carolina, Maryland, and North Carolina State basketball teams were each ranked first in the nation during those years. I would attend about two football and eight basketball games a year. Duke had fabulous soccer and lacrosse teams. Freshman year I trained with the wrestling team. The wrestler I would have had to beat was undefeated in Rhode Island. Instead, I re-separated my left shoulder, an injury that limited me somewhat to a lot the rest of my life. Junior year, President Sanford named me to a commission that considered whether to continue fielding a football team. The commission voted to eliminate the football program; wisely, Sanford rejected that advice. As a university, Duke has fared better being aligned with Stanford (with a major sports program) than being aligned with the University of Chicago (without a major sports program). Spring semester I did not make the beach trip to Surfside. I had no girlfriend second semester, but did really dive into dancing, and I was a very popular dance partner at SAE band parties. My roommate, Ed, was a senior zoology major, who did not excel academically. The number of zoology majors that year was in the thirties, but by my class, two years later, it was the most popular major with over two hundred. Duke was a pre-med factory, but not all of us made that journey to medical school successfully, and Ed was also one who did not. The SAEs as a whole proved to be an academic powerhouse, as that year we were the campus living group with the highest grade point average. Junior year started out fine. I continued as president of the Few Federation and developed a very good relationship with the federation's dean. My roommate was Anton Nielsen, pre-med (and his girlfriend Wendy Keitel, also pre-med, who graduated that year). Anton was from Florida and Wendy from New York. We got along great. My older brother Mike had graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill (political science) and was now in Washington, D.C. at American University pursuing a two-year master's degree in international relations. He rented a basement room from a couple in Bethesda, Maryland. I went up and spent a weekend with him. A nursing student, Sally, and I were a couple most of the semester. She proved to be yet another frustrating sex partner, as she begged off with the explanation that she would herself be sexually frustrated when we inevitably broke up and she therefore would not have steady access. (I am not making this up!) I had an unusual dating situation one Saturday. I arranged for horse-riding with one student in the morning, and horse-riding at a different facility with a different student for the afternoon. (When booking I did not believe I would go to both.) The morning was terrible, as the "ride" was pretty much the two of us going in a circle at a walking pace. While we had had a long, lively, and deep discussion before I asked her out, we never spoke again. The afternoon ride and dating result were different. Marilyn David and I were each up for a real horse ride, and we got one. We were part of a group of six starting out at the edge of a forest, with no pressure to stay with the group. My horse was spirited and in control subject to my suggestions. After a good journey through the woods the horse and I came to a gully beside the road and she jumped it with abandon but with great care proceeding into a gallop. We finished the hour ride with cantor and trot and no gallop. Marilyn and I became non-romantic friends for quite a while. Today, I remember her fondly. I resigned as president of Few Federation. The president of our SAE chapter was a naive, brilliant, good-old boy from rural, Southern Georgia. Shelton, we decided, had had a disappointing conflict with a woman before he leapt from the fourth floor of our dorm to the sidewalk below. I went to concerts with the Allman Brothers Band in the theater auditorium and with The Grateful Dead and with Traffic in the football stadium, among others. I worked in the lab of a physiology professor, primarily with a student who was getting both an M.D. and Ph.D. The work of the lab was mapping the brain of cats. The exciting course for the semester was "Functions of the Cell Surface" dealing mostly with receptors signaling the cell nucleus and the mitochondria. In November, dad had a heart attack (a blood clot cutting off blood supply to a part of the heart itself - a myocardial infarction) and was placed in a hospital. On a Sunday after a couple weeks it was announced to me that he would be discharged that week. A couple of days later, just before Thanksgiving and his 47th birthday, his heart stopped (cardiac arrest) and never started again. Tuesday, a religion professor whom I knew slightly from my boyhood in Durham, looked me up and told me in person of dad's death. Mike arrived the next afternoon from Washington to drive us to Nashville, as had been planned. (Being on financial aid, I could not have a car on campus.) He arrived with a six-pack of beer in the backseat. Through a fluke of miscommunication, Mike did not know dad had died, nor did I know that Mike did not know. This led to Mike being very shocked at a time when he was not psychologically prepared for the shock. Beer was had. Mike grew out of control. We ended up on the side of Interstate 40 with Mike fighting me so hard I felt he might be trying to kill me. That situation did come under control as a driver stopped for us, then took us for a phone call in the nearest town. We ended up spending the night with a Methodist minister and his family in the town, and getting on a bus to Nashville the next day. Soon after I got back to Duke I saw a psychiatrist for one session to discuss the episode. Seeing the psychiatrist was reasonable, but was not necessary. Mike's reaction was extreme as a life event but was reasonable and not extreme under the circumstances with which he was presented. He was the most influential and important person in my life, more so than my parents, any teacher or other adult leader, or any peer. The event did demonstrate that I could remain stable in the face of an exceptionally stressful emotional force. Later in life, I would meet but not be able to fend off a different exceptionally stressful emotional force from my daughters. I addressed that period in a Kindle memoir I wrote in retirement. I was not unmoved by dad's death and mom's widowhood. As a stress relief mechanism, I asked the Goethe professor if he would allow me to produce my final paper for the course over the Christmas break rather than earlier, during final exams. He granted my request. I likely used Vanderbilt's library in Nashville for researching the paper. Soon into the second semester of junior year, I met at the SAE dining table a sophomore transfer, Amelia (Mia) Purcell. Mia became the second "love of my life." She had attended Stephens College in Missouri, where her mother was chair of the psychology department. That year her stepfather was a higher education consultant, and the next year president of Westminster College. I spent a few days in their home with the three of them during my and Mia's courtship. Mia lived in an off-campus apartment on the other side of Duke Hospital from the West Campus. She drove a black Ford Thunderbird from one of the years the model was large. She loved it. As I have mentioned, I did not have a car at school. When Mia and I broke off our relationship in the Fall, we each lost enough weight to looked emaciated, and then got back together. It did not last. The stress that lead to the breakup was our disagreement about her living with me that summer in the house I had leased near the East Campus. For the coming school year, as housemates I recruited the first Duke student to obtain admission to Harvard Medical School in several years, the top undergraduate piano student (we moved in a grand piano owned by the university), and another fellow who went to medical school. This year, senior year, I had a car. President Sanford enlisted me in a small committee tasked with approving (his idea) for the Class Gift, a long term effort to endow a chaired professorship. I drafted the agreement between the class and the university. While many students subscribed over the first post-graduation decade, the gifts never totaled enough to actually engage a scholar for the chair. My final girlfriend at Duke was Amy Hogue. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and studied a year in England before law school. By absolute chance, we ran into each other, in 1983, on a street in Los Angeles (her city) while I was there as a lawyer representing an oil company based in Houston. We were able to arrange lunch. The commencement speaker was Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. My mother and brothers attended. The university awarded exactly 1974 degrees that year, 1974.
  • In Dallas (Southern Methodist University) 1974-1977

 During law school, each student is exposed to the study of torts (obligations we owe as a member of society), contracts (obligations we owe by our agreement), property (the law dealing with assets), legal writing (making legal arguments and contract drafting), and our constitution (relationships with the government). Most students also learn about court procedure including evidence, the criminal law, creditor rights, family law, wills and inheritance, government revenue collection, commercial transactions, and the law of artificial persons. Students will learn in much more detail about only some of these areas: maritime law, oil and gas law, labor law, entertainment law, patents and trademarks, courtroom skills, international relationships, procedure in appellate courts, administrative agency procedure, alternatives to courts, various remedies for wrongs. This coursework is spread over three years, building from the basic to the more detailed and specialized. Students will also work with practicing lawyers during the school years and summers. While the phenomenon is really unbelievable to those who have not experienced it, the law school process changes persons dramatically, especially in two ways: the process in the mind of seeing, analyzing, and solving human problems ("think like a lawyer"), and methods of use for the English language (from creative and artistic to highly precise). The socialization process in college of attention generally to individual and group relationships, shifts significantly and adjusts to dealing with the law firm and courtroom spaces in life (and for some, workings of the business world or the legislative world). At SMU's law school in my first year class there were 8-10 persons who graduated from Duke, about half when I did in the prior year, and about half in earlier years. I tended to hang around those persons. In the first semester, I came to the firm conclusion that the average law student at SMU simply did not measure up to the quality of students I had experienced at Duke. This was pure stupidity on my part. The faulty conclusion was aided along by my doing so well on the practice exams that I just barely missed the cutoff, based on these exams, for the small number of students elevated in the first wave to the staff of the law review. Also stupidly, I did not join in forming a study group of four to eight who would work on issues together. Aided also in my being scholastically worn out, I did not take my law studies with nearly the seriousness and time I should have, especially my second and third years. Consistently, the best grades were earned by the students who had not gone directly from college to law school. First year I shared a regular, furnished apartment with John Alton, whom I had known slightly at Duke. His father was a courtroom lawyer with a small firm he headed in Columbus, Ohio. John was a delightful guy. Being in Dallas, her home town, I contacted my sophomore year girlfriend, Doranne Meny before she went back to Durham. We did get together, first at my apartment, and then for a second date with her introducing me to her family at their suburban residence. Early in this first year there was an emblematic academic event. Our torts professor so intimidated and humiliated one student during a "Socratic Method" engagement that the student left and never returned, never coming back to a law school class. The signature event is Moot Court ("moot" in this context being a synonym for "pretend"), which culminates in the crowning of a single team as champion. Every student must participate as one member of a two-member team. Each team must produce a paper, which is assessed separately from the oral production that yields the winning team. My partner was Neil Schneiderman, whose father was a somewhat significant lawyer. We were not great. Perhaps the most telling outcome of our teaming up was my return to the ranks of ordinary cigarette smokers from the group that had been successful quitters. Before the end of the first year, I made two significant decisions for the future. I accepted a summer position back in Nashville with the District Attorney's office. That took me out of Dallas and into Nashville. Secondly, it meant being in a government office, not a private law firm office. Neither choice was faulty per se, but neither was really in my best interest. The choices represented inertia at work. My decision to go to law school, for example, was not inertia at work. My second end of year decision was to attempt to elevate saving money as a characteristic, and that was a very poor choice. It removed me from the ranks of those who took up the business of being a "serious law student." Ernie Laun and I agreed to rent a second story space from the grandmother of a student who was to live with his wife on the first floor of an old house (pre-1920) that she had made into a duplex, but not modernized. (My rent was $50 per month, rather than the couple hundred dollars a month for my regular apartment of first year.) Neither Ernie nor our classmate downstairs was a serious law student, making the three of us negatively influencing each other. Ernie and I shared a strong interest in using the law in leftist causes, and a love of music. That summer after first year while, and because of, working for the District Attorney, I took on a date another student, who shared about as much interest in sex as I did. So, finally I was a virgin no longer. Later in the summer, the District Attorney's personal secretary, Roberta Wise, drove me from an office event to my car parked in a shopping center lot. We lingered in her car and talked for quite a while, including speaking about her pre-teen daughter and son. While 33 years old to my 23, I asked her out. We remained a couple for more than a year, she traveling to Dallas. Roberta was the third "love of my life." Decades later, she married that District Attorney, Tom Shriver. I spent the second summer of law school in the District Attorney's office. Third school year I worked in Dallas for Ken Stillman, of Leviton & Stillman, two Jews who were very different from each other, with Stillman the courtroom lawyer and a generation younger than Leviton. This year I took two advanced labor law courses. One of the former Duke students in my law school class was Bill Kamenjarin, a member of SAE who was a senior my freshman year, and whose name I learned but whom I did not meet. He married his high school (Chicago) and Duke sweetheart, Taffey Cannon, who was a novelist of mild success. Through them I met her sister, Christine Cannon, a fourth year veterinary student. We were a couple during the last part of my third year of law school. Bill, Taffey, and I drove in my car to spend a few days in New Orleans, as Chris could not go. Chris stopped by to see me in Franklin on her way to her new veterinarian job in suburban Chicago. Mom had given over her master bedroom to us. Chris drove my boyhood friend Steve Faust to Chicago, where he became, among other things, a professional ballet dancer for a couple of years. This was additional evidence that Steve was a remarkable person, for he had not studied ballet as a boy.











/04

Working life +

Husband, father, grandfather

  • In Nashville 1977-1981

 At the end of the first week in June, 1977, I arrived at home with Mom and lived there for a few days. Ben Harrison, a law school classmate, and I had decided to get a place to live together. Ben grew up in Knoxville, the son of the then president of a large bank in Knoxville, and had gone to Vanderbilt as an undergraduate. Ben had gotten a position with a very good firm, known for litigation. One of its partners, Jim Sasser, had that January became the junior senator from Tennessee, a Democrat who served two terms. I had been hired by Martin & Cochran, also a prominent firm, but a small one. I did not know it at the time, but it was actually two firms, Joe Martin Senior and Joe Martin Junior were partners, and that firm formed the named partnership with solo Carmack Cochran, whose third associate I became. Joe Jr. grew up in Nashville society, graduating number one in both his undergraduate and law school classes at Vanderbilt and marrying a beautiful, society woman. One of the partners at the other firm with which I had a final interview labeled Cochran as Nashville's greatest lawyer at the time. All three men were engaged in labor law as one principal area of practice. One reason I was hired by Cochran was because of my labor law emphasis in law school. His oldest associate, John Lentz, was really independent by this time, and starting January 1978 became simply a renter of his space. John's clients included Tammy Wynette and Tom T. Hall, two Grand Ole Opry stars of the first tier. The other associate was Rhea Bucy, a Vandy graduate, four years my senior and a civil litigator with an emphasis in business bankruptcy. Ben and I found a large attic bedroom to share that an old woman had on offer, while we looked for a proper two bedroom apartment. Within weeks we found a place we thought suitable for young men in our positions. Joe, Jr. had a daughter my age, and while not beautiful like her mother, she was very good looking, very classy, and very desirable as a date. We went out on the town once. I felt lucky but did not relish having a future with the boss's daughter. Tennessee law allowed law school graduates, who had not passed the bar but were under the general supervision of a licensed lawyer, to appear in court alone. Within a few weeks I had tried, and won, my first case, alone. I proclaimed in my own mind, and out loud to a few persons, that this experience was even better than sex. Rapidly, I tried two other cases alone, and won them too. After that, Rhea took me along to jointly conduct a bankruptcy case hearing; he expressed that he was not very impressed with my work in that hearing. He did not provide very much mentoring, leaving me alone to learn by my mistakes. Somewhat contrary to Rhea's expression of my incompetence as a courtroom lawyer, I won 13 of my first 13 trials or dispositive hearings in the first 2-3 years. However, after the first thirteen, all of which were before judges only, I had two jury trials, both of which I lost. I won and lost other trials and hearings. Carmack got me involved right from the start with labor negotiations. In the late 1970s, Tennessee still had quite a few labor union contracts. Martin & Cochran represented companies. A contract would be negotiated and then remain in existence for several years before a new contract was negotiated. The negotiations would last for several days, and sometimes for more than a week. Many, many points are covered, and so the process was really reaching conclusions of a whole series of agreements. I enjoyed these sessions immensely. Carmack and I tried together one dispute under the Fair Labor Act, and we prevailed against the worker's claim. She appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, and alone I wan before the Board. However, shortly thereafter, when he was 73 years old, Carmack died in the summer of 1978. On the face of it, Rhea and I were unemployed, without office, and without staff. Thank goodness, that status did not last even a week. Rhea met with Ms. Cochran. Rhea and I, as partners, would continue the business, with our payment to her simply of the collected hourly rate fees for his work. Rhea first met with Tad Harris, and then the three of us met about the three of us forming a partnership to continue the business. Tad was a litigator, a year more experienced than Rhea, and had appeared before bankruptcy courts on occasion. Bucy, Harris & Minor was formed, created a partnership with Martin & Martin, and continued on practicing under the name Martin & Cochran. So, beginning in 1978, I was a partner in a top (AV) rated law firm, earning 20% of the profits to Rhea's and Tad's 40% each. Each year, it turned out I had made quite a bit of money. Too much for someone of my experience. We explored merging with another firm, and received offers from Fred Thompson (Watergate lawyer and actor) and the combination litigation and office practice firm Harwell, Barr, Martin & Sloan. We did not merge in 1980. It would have been a dead end and terrible for me to be with Thompson, but the other firm might well have lead to a very happy life for me. Rhea and Tad removed me as a partner in early 1981. Around the time Carmack died, I went on a blind date suggested by a woman I knew from church, who was the immediate boss of the woman at issue, Carol Lorance. The date was in September 1978 and was to attend the first concert of the season of the Nashville Symphony. Carol was the manager of the Juniors department of the second most prominent department store in Nashville, Castner Knott. Our mutual friend was Emmy Taylor, the Juniors buyer, who is a year older than me. It was not long before we knew we were in love, and I proposed in January, 1979. We married at the downtown Methodist Church in Shelbyville, Tennessee in June 1979. My mother, to whom I introduced Carol only in April, did not like her. And, kept not liking her until we divorced in 1997. In Nashville, Carol and I participated in a fine social life. We were very fast friends with Mary and Calvin Lewis. Carol and Calvin had been high school classmates at Shelbyville Central. Mary and I had a very special bond of love and respect (the love was not sexual or even romantic, but I considered it deep). We purchased a nice suburban house in a subdivision in Brentwood, Williamson County, Tennessee. Brentwood sits near I-65; the thirteen mile drive to the law office in downtown Nashville took 14 minutes from driveway to parking garage. We had a male Beagle, who was a fabulous dog. He regularly maintained acquaintance with the cows and other animals of the farm across the highway, US 31 (Franklin Road), that ran four houses and a very small church away at one end of our street. We were active members of the large Brentwood United Methodist Church (where Minnie Pearl and a number of other celebrities attended), and where I was selected to the Administrative Board. Franklin, where my high school, BGA, is located, is the seat of Williamson County. Carol and I maintained relationships with Franklin, Brentwood, and Nashville, but mostly Nashville. Another of Carol's high school classmates, Jim Cooper, was soon elected as Nashville's member of Congress. (Cooper's father had been governor.) During the Spring of 1981 I began looking for a position, and in the summer took a trip with Carol to Houston for a week of interviews. The following Monday I received a call and an offer from Mickie Sheinfeld (Sheinfeld, Maley & Kay), the premier bankruptcy firm in the Southwestern US. I started in October 1981. I was one of five lateral hires during the last half of 1981 and first half of 1982. Soon, I was smiling so much so often that it was talked about several times. I was in awe of our building and the many other skyscrapers in Houston. After a year, I received a promotion to "participating associate" starting January 1, 1983. The position was like being a "junior partner" as I had a set percentage of the firm profits and participated in partnership meetings with a vote on all matters except the office lease and the admission of new partners. By 1985, my name was familiar to some members of the business reorganization bar, nationally. In late 1984 and 1985, I was considered for being made partner in the annual process. Only one of my class of lateral hires was made partner, Nancy Friedman Atlas, who was later selected as US District judge early in Bill Clinton's first term. For 1986, during which I was to move to a different firm, my salary was set at my compensation of 1985, $120,000. For the rest of my working life, into 2017, I never made that much again. Early in 1982 Carol and I received an acceptable contract for our Brentwood home and purchased a home in Houston, located in the very desirable 1930s city near downtown, West University Place. The new home cost, to the dollar, twice as much as the sales price of the Brentwood home, but was quite a manageable sum for us, even at the nearly 17% mortgage rate then prevailing across the country. Carol had been hired by the largest department store chain in Houston, Foley's, to have a turn for months as a department manager before become the assistant juniors buyer, at a salary similar to my initial law firm salary. We began our family later that year, as Elizabeth Anne Minor was born February 1, 1983. Not quite two years later, Lauren Camille Minor was born October 10, 1984. We planned to have no more children. Carol became tight friends with Julie Harris (two blocks away) and her two daughters who were the same age as ours. Julie's husband, Steven, had been two years behind me at SMU Law School, although I did not know him. We socialized with them much as we had with Mary and Calvin in Nashville. Our circle of friends grew fairly large, especially after we left the large church a bit over a mile away, St. Paul's United Methodist Church, located across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to join the West University Place United Methodist Church. Carol and I were active in West University life. As I had been at St Paul's, I was selected to the Administrative Board at West University church. During 1986, we built a new house in West University. That year, we discovered the benefits of the absolutely extraordinary medical environment in Houston. Libby developed a pain in her left leg and hip during a Sunday morning and by late afternoon we saw her pediatrician and went home. Later that night (I think it was about 10) he called with the news that he had figured out the malady, and had arranged for surgery in the morning with a surgeon who had just published a paper on the exact illness of the hip. The surgery was successful. I was selected to the quaisi-judicial body the Zoning Board of Adjustment, where I soon became vice-chair and later chair. Carol was the campaign treasurer for a man we knew from our children's softball and soccer teams in his successful run for mayor in the 1990s, Bob Kelly. These were years of owning two tuxedos at the same time and attending charity balls. However, between 1984 and 1986 I "caught" depression and was in the significant throws of its spell by 1988-90. We determined we had to sell the house we had built, and had a contract within one day and made about $90,000 from the sale. Only a portion of that money was used for the down payment on the next nice home in West U, and so we went forward with $72,000 of savings. The savings amount was chipped away. However, we were quite socially active as we were officers in the West U Elementary PTA, Carol raising the most money to that point with the annual auction and with the carnival, and I supervising a major upgrade of the school park and assisting in coaching the girls in club softball and especially soccer, as I was Libby's head coach for three seasons. But when Carol and I filed for bankruptcy in 1996, I was completely under the control of depression, acting neither as a husband nor father, and in early 1997 Carol filed for divorce. After we sold the house in May, 1997 we were out of the city of West University Place, Carol in a high rise near where the girls attended, St John's School, and I in an apartment not far away from West U. We flamed big and then flamed out in the fifteen years of West University Place life. Meanwhile, on the working front, a lot happened.