A Tale of Two Lawyers

By Barry Jay Freeman

A Tale of Two Lawyers is a combination of an entertaining fictional story with the educational revelations of informative nonfiction. After practicing law for forty seven years in Chicago, the author has a lot to say about the profession, and he says it in this book. It describes the colorful lives and loves of two Chicago attorneys, along with an in-depth, authentic exposé of the much maligned business of law and its most flagrantly practiced attorney/client conflict of interest—hourly billing.
The book begins at the story’s end when the unidentified newly-wedded husband and wife enjoy recent retirement at the poolside of their new Costa Rican beachfront home. The tale actually begins in the second chapter, where we meet roommates Mel Foster and Jerry Sloan, freshmen at Northwestern Law School in the 1950s. At the end of the book—after moving through law school, career advancements, varied clients, and life/love experiences of the two lawyers—we learn which thus ends his career and enters retirement with his love to live happily ever after. Colored by the author's critical observations and experiences in the practice, the tale follows Mel and Jerry as they pursue the legal profession down contrasting and divergent pathways. The two lawyers meet head-on at the end of their careers, facing each other in a class action battle that brings the tale to its fitting conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Jay Freeman
• Release date: Jun 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311134400

Barry Jay Freeman

Barry J. Freeman is a retired Chicago attorney, who now lives in suburban Lincolnshire, Illinois, with his beautiful, curly-haired wife, two face-licking, overindulged dogs, and two love-but-ignore-you cats. He and his wife have improved the world by giving it two female and two male children, who have in turn given them five wonderful grandsons destined to do great things. Since his retirement, the author has published two collections of his light poetry (Never Pull A Lion’s Tail and I Finally Pulled A Lion’s Tail (both of which are illustrated by awesome photos),and five novels (And Other Immoral Purposes, A Tale of Two Lawyers, The Wanted, Ahmed's List and Assassination in Santo Domingo). His first two novels explore the law business (a subject about which he knows well). He has also published two short books primarily for kids containing two illustrated short stories in verse (Nero the Hero and Who Are those Strange Creatures? The former is about a captured African elephant, and the latter is about a baboon, both of which become heroes. Writing has taken him out of the jaws of retirement and has become his full time passion.

Book preview

From the flower-filled deck of their Mediterranean style villa on Playa Tamarindo, he watched a white-sailed catamaran take advantage of a friendly breeze as it skipped across the calm harbor toward the darker, restless waters of the Pacific Ocean. Now, with the class action well behind him, he was happier and more at ease than he had ever been. He now lived in Costa Rica with his newly-wedded wife, worlds away from Chicago and the practice of law—the once noble profession turned money-grubbing business to which he had devoted most of his adult life. He was aging gracefully, nicely fitting into his silver-haired dotage years, retired, and now wealthy enough to live very comfortably for the rest of his life.

How about a Tequila Sunrise? yelled his lovely, soaking wet, softly suntanned, life-partner as she emerged from their swimming pool. Her shoulder-length, naturally silver hair and the turquoise of her diminutive bikini caught the best rays of the late afternoon sun as she attempted to get water out of her left ear by tilting her head and hopping on her left foot.

As he watched her amusing little dance, he admired the shapely body parts that nicely held her bikini in place. He was intensely in love with this woman with whom he now shared his life. I’ll take two if you’re making them, he yelled back. After the sun sets, let’s hit the lobster place on the beach for dinner. I have a gnawing taste for the double lobster dish—the one with pasta and lots of garlic.

Deal, she said, running up to him and planting a quick kiss on his right cheek. I’ll put on my best shorts and tee shirt. We’ll celebrate the six-month anniversary of our Chicago exit; never to leave this beach until death do us part.

But this is the end of the story—the old-fashioned Hollywood kind where the sun sets gently in the west. For its beginning, we have to rewind many years, back to law school, where the realities of the rest of their lives hit bright-eyed and ambitious college graduates and where they hatch careers in the lofty legal profession for better or for worse.

Chapter Two: The Tale Begins

If you had the stomach to follow the overpowering smell of garlic through the hallowed corridors of the fifteenth floor of Abbott Hall on that night in late May, mid-1950s, your nose would have led you to Room 1535. Northwestern University’s Abbott Hall is a modern twenty-story semi-skyscraper erected in 1940, located on the university’s Chicago campus on the city’s near north side. The University built it primarily to provide intellectual cohabitation for its medical, business, and law school students. It was to serve as an incubator for its elite fledglings, to hatch in them lofty professional standards that would shape their futures as worthy warriors in the honorable pursuit of their chosen profession.

On that particular night, the emerging warriors of Abbott Hall’s Room 1535 were two garlic-reeking law school freshmen roommates preparing to study for their Legal Ethics final exam, scheduled for the following morning. They had absorbed the odoriferous garlic in abundance at a legendary Italian grease spot a few blocks from campus, where earlier in the evening, they snarfed their all-you-can-eat dinner of spaghetti marinara, garlic bread, and a few liters of Chianti.

Why in the hell did we take this stupid course this semester, anyway? Jerry asked rhetorically without taking his bloodshot eyes from the notebook, standing open on the cluttered desk in front of him. Notebooks in those days were of the paper variety: lined pages between flexible paperboard covers, used with pen or pencil and held together by spiraled wire. The invention of the laptop computer type notebook didn’t happen until almost twenty-five years later. The few computers then in existence (none of which were even close to the notebook/laptop variety) were double the size of Room 1535. These were the dark ages.

By now, we could’ve been on a beach somewhere making out with some hot student nurses from the twelfth floor, Jerry continued. He pushed his chair back from the desk and kicked over the notebook with his shoeless feet, which closed as it fell on the desktop (the actual top of his desk; not to be confused with a desktop computer). Most of this ethics crap is pretty logical anyway, he said. Rule of thumb: do nothing that conflicts with your client’s interests—clients come first and all that bullshit. I think I’ll crap out and go over my notes in the morning [famous last words].

Mel lay on his bed with his open notebook propped on his stomach. He groaned and snuck a squelched, garlic-laden belch. I don’t feel too good. I haven’t touched these damn notes since I wrote ’em in class. I thought we could go over the stuff together tonight, but I guess your eyes are closed. I better at least skim ’em before I doze off. You’re right, though. It’s a multiple-choice exam, and the answers should be fairly obvious [more famous last words].

Of course I’m right, Jerry mumbled. "I’m always

right."

In five minutes, they were both asleep. Jerry was sprawled face-down on his bed on top of the covers, shoes off but otherwise fully clothed. Mel lay face-up, notebook flat atop his bloated stomach, fully undressed except for his Jockeys, snoring loudly with each inhaled breath of garlic-tainted air. In their haste to reach unconsciousness, they left their door wide open and left burning the single central ceiling fixture that provided light for the entire room along with the copper-colored desk lamps. The lamps illuminated a semester’s worth of clutter, strewn in disorder atop their multi-scarred and wobbly wooden desks. Because most of its occupants had already finished their exams and left for the summer, the 15th floor was ultra-quiet. The extreme quiet allowed the roommates to remain undisturbed through the night until sometime after the intense spring morning sun burst through their wide-open window.

A tick-tocking, wind-up alarm clock occupied the only available space on the crowded nightstand separating their beds. But, because neither of them had set the alarm, they both awoke instinctively at just about the same time—twenty minutes before the Ethics exam was scheduled to begin. Panicked, they hurriedly pulled themselves together, slammed the door behind them, and hit the community bathroom down the hall to urinate and splash water on their numb faces. They caught a descending elevator, ran the three blocks to the law school and into the lecture room, barely making it before the doors closed, and the proctor passed out the tests.

About an hour and a half later, Jerry arose, stretched, and placed his pencil behind his ear. He handed his bluebook to the Proctor at the front desk, yawned noisily, and walked out into the marble-floored hallway. A few minutes later, Mel followed, and together they emerged from the collegiate Gothic-styled, ivy-covered building into the warm spring air without saying a word. Minutes of silence passed as they walked back to Abbott Hall, eyes down, heads bowed, hands buried in pockets as if deep in thought.

I have absolutely no idea how I did. How about you? Mel finally said. I guessed at practically every one of those suckers, and for every question there were at least two possible right answers. Luck be with me today. He looked like death as he glumly walked beside his roommate. His thick black hair was uncombed, and his half-closed eyes barely disclosed the red that prevailed beneath the lids. One leg of his wrinkled khakis covered one brown loafer, but the other remained stuck in his sock and thus fully revealed the other loafer—tassels and all. His 5’10" stocky frame lost about two inches due to his expressive shoulder slump, which clearly demonstrated the gravity of the moment.

Jerry looked at him and shrugged his shoulders. Who the hell knows how I did? All I know is that I finished. I‘m finished for the year. I hate law school. If I flunked, I’ll take the damn course over, and grades be damned. If I ever graduate from this place, I’ll get a job on my good looks and thrilling personality. He smiled his fake smile, the smile that flashed so easily for photographs. Despite his slept-in clothes and student pallor, when he smoothed his brush-cut blond hair with both hands and picked his head up, his blue eyes came alive, and he was ready for action. He impulsively landed a quick surprise jab on Mel’s slumped left shoulder, and with fists jabbing the air, accelerated into a slow backward trot that kept him well out of Mel’s counterpunch range.

Mel and Jerry had become close friends since they were serendipitously thrown together as roommates in Room 1535. Jerry Sloan was a Notre Damer—a second-string quarterback with a 1-0 record. His win came when the ND first-string star quarterback suffered an injury in the last minute of a crucial game against Pennsylvania. Jerry threw a game-winning touchdown pass in the final seconds that, by providence, the receiver caught after it bounced out of the hands of a defender— right into the hands of his receiver. He thus had a perfect record and always considered himself a star. At 5’11’’, Jerry personified the athlete of confidence and good looks, always appropriately dressed (except when he wore slept-in clothes) and very easy with the girls. He enjoyed relative intelligence, came from an upper-middle-class family that lived in Dayton, Ohio, and had every intention to get by with around a C average.

Melvin Foster grew up in Olympia Fields, Illinois, a small up-scale community about twenty-five miles south of Chicago. His family lived in a large Williamsburg Colonial on a wooded three-acre lot backed up to a golf course. The golf course belonged to Olympia Woods Country Club, of which his parents were long, active members. They commuted from their house to their club via the family golf cart, custom-made to resemble a Cadillac. His father was a named partner in a small law firm specializing in bankruptcies, where Mel worked in the summer when he wasn’t traveling or playing golf. He almost made the University of Michigan golf team in his freshman year, but he three-putted the 18th green during the fall tryouts and missed the cut by a stroke. Mel measured an inch shorter than Jerry, his build was less than athletic, and his manner of dress was less than carefully put together. He had medium cut, thick black hair, carefully parted on the left side—that is, when his hair was combed, which wasn’t very often. He often had to prevent his natural bangs from covering his eyes by brushing them back with his right hand, fingers spread. When Mel smiled, less frequently than Jerry, his mouth stretched from ear to ear, and his otherwise somewhat expressionless face lit up like the sunrise. Mel had intense brown eyes and the kind of dark looks that could change from plain to handsome at the hint of a smile. You would not call him gregarious, as sometimes Jerry could be, but he had a pleasant personality, a soft voice, an intelligent manner, and was well-liked by young and old alike.

Both Jerry and Mel made it through their respective undergraduate schools with grades sufficient for acceptance by Northwestern, which satisfied Jerry’s ego and Mel’s father’s status concerns. They both enjoyed the basic privileges of their parents’ upper-middle-income brackets and thus were able to live in a manner to which they were accustomed while attending law school. During the three weeks preceding Northwestern’s orientation, Mel traveled through Europe, while Jerry spent the summer living with three male college friends on Martha’s Vineyard at a beachfront summer home that belonged to one of them. One could summarize the avowed mutual ambition of both Abbott Hall roommates as follows: make it through law school, get a job, and grow up to live about the same life and lifestyle as their fortunate parents.

When they arrived back in Room 1535 from their Ethics exam, they ate some stale Oreo cookies and simultaneously belly-flopped on their respective beds. Jerry said good night, and both slept soundly (with alarm set) for the next two hours. Jerry planned to pack up his ’49 turquoise Plymouth convertible and head for the highway before the five o’clock rush hour. He would make it to Dayton before midnight, with a short stop for dinner. That morning Mel’s father had driven the family station wagon to his LaSalle Street office, and he left work early to help Mel empty his room. They would go together to Olympia Fields, have a few father-son beers, and meet Mrs. Foster for dinner at the country club in celebration of the completion of Mel’s first year.

Jerry had shaved and showered, packed his car, and was ready to go by around three-thirty. Almost all packed by then but still putting books and things in boxes, Mel paused to say goodbye to his roommate. He extended his hand and grasped Jerry’s.

See ya, old buddy, Jerry said. Think about where ya want to live this fall. Your suggestion that we find an apartment somewhere around here sounds great to me. Drop me a note when ya make up your mind. So have a great summer, and go easy on the chicks. Be in touch.

You be good, old man; I’ll let you know as soon as I can. Have a great summer yourself—I know you won’t leave the chicks alone, so don’t make any babies, Mel said, smiling as he watched his friend head for the elevators.

Chapter Three: To Graduation

Both Mel and Jerry barely passed the Legal Ethics exam, but pass they did. Mel spent the summer working Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at his father’s firm, Foster & Davis. He played golf and read mystery novels most of the rest of the week. He dated one female (blonde daughter of a club member) heavily for half the summer and switched to her close friend (auburn-haired daughter of another country club member) the second half. When Labor Day finally arrived, he said good-bye to both women and sent them on their merry way back to their respective eastern colleges.

Jerry became terribly bored in Dayton, drove to Massachusetts, and spent the summer waiting on tables in the Berkshires. While there, he had three affairs, including two weeks of bliss in the cabin of an older woman who had a powerful New York lawyer absentee husband.

In July, Mel wrote Jerry that he’d found a one-bedroom furnished apartment at 54 East Scott Street, about a mile and a half from school, in a great near-north neighborhood with lots of action. It’s in a small old building with a creepy landlord and stairways that squeak. Oh, yes, it will only cost us seventy-five dollars a month each, with utilities! So get your ass here ASAP. Our lease starts in August (that is if you agree to all this).

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

The first week in August, Jerry, with dark suntan and sun-bleached hair, decided not to let a month’s rent go to waste and made his way back to Chicago. Mel found himself too comfortable at home, in his convenient country club surroundings, to rush his move into the Scott Street apartment and so didn’t join Jerry until the day after Labor Day—a week before classes were to begin at Northwestern. Jerry visited Mel at his home on one weekend and occasionally went to the Foster and Davis office to lunch with Mel and his father and chew the fat while watching Mel do humdrum tasks: like cleaning out old files and keeping the loose-leaf legal periodicals up to date.

Fifty-four East Scott was a veritable beehive, buzzing with social activity from apartment to apartment. Most of the women tenants had recently emancipated themselves from school and their families. Before love and marriage and the inevitable baby carriage, they happily worked in the small, pricey North Michigan Avenue (and vicinity) women’s shops. Jerry epitomized what they were looking for to lead them through their emancipation, and he happily assumed the responsibility. He well-played the not-get-serious-with type while getting serious still remained in the future for most of them. Therefore, Jerry’s nights were seldom lonely, since, on most nights of the week, one female building resident or another happily kept him company in the Rush Street bars and, on many occasions, between his or her bedsheets.

When Mel finally moved in, he found his residence somewhat restricted when Jerry needed privacy. They reached a strategic agreement ensuring that Mel got equal time when the occasion warranted. The trouble was, however, that Mel’s sexual opportunities were minimal. The females of 54 East Scott saw in Mel the seriousness best avoided for the moment. However, they did find him more than acceptable as a companion for exploring the wealth of nightlife within their lively neighborhood. So he had little need for the kind of privacy monopolized by Jerry, and, through no fault of Jerry’s, Mel did not get equal time. The smidgen of jealousy that eventually settled into Mel’s cockles in no way affected their close relationship. Thus, when school began in earnest, they took it on together as they had done as freshmen.

So it developed that Mel did a lot of his studying at the law school library while Jerry did most of his in the apartment— often with diversions. However, the roommates usually studied for exams together, and in the process, Mel filled in for Jerry the bits of learning he missed because of those diversions. They both achieved a respectable B average. Sometimes they even realized enjoyment in the intellectual exercise that went along with a case-by-case study of the always developing common law.

Jerry found he actually liked his class in tort law. It convened in Lincoln Hall, a large chamber closely modeled after the British House of Commons, and so for him, it took on a special flavor. Northwestern’s silver-haired Dean, Harold Havingmoor, taught the course and made it come alive for Jerry. In his first lecture, the distinguished dean, hands clasped behind his back, looking at the ornate ceiling as he spoke, said to the class, Torts are not little cakes with fruit inside and whipped cream on top. Torts are civil—as opposed to criminal—yes, civil wrongdoings resulting in injury or harm. They are the basis of a claim for damages by the injured party. As he listened attentively, Jerry thought damages in tort cases, which he knew as personal injury cases, were responsible for fat fees. Traditionally, the plaintiff’s lawyer pocketed one-third of the total award. He knew plaintiff PI lawyers were some of the richest in the profession, increasing his interest in the subject.

You should know that the primary aim of tort law, the dean continued, "is to provide monetary relief for the damages suffered by plaintiffs and to deter others from committing the negligent or intentionally harmful act perpetrated by defendants. A tricky concept in determining whether or not an alleged wrongdoer’s negligence is responsible for an injury is the legal concept of proximate cause. As you now know from reading the cases I assigned you, the concept of proximate cause limits a defendant's liability for his negligence to consequences reasonably related to his negligent conduct. Although it might seem obvious whether or not a defendant's negligence has caused injury to the plaintiff, the question of causation can often be challenging.

Suppose, for example, he continued, a defendant negligently causes an automobile accident injuring another driver. As a result of the impact, the injured driver's car downs a utility pole and knocks out the neighborhood’s electricity. The defendant's negligence obviously caused both the other driver’s injury and the power failure. We would agree that the negligent defendant should be liable for the other driver's injuries. But should the defendant driver also be liable for damages suffered by a neighborhood resident whose electric alarm clock fails, causing him to lose his job for being late for work? This question raises the issue of proximate cause. To be liable for the payment of damages, a defendant’s negligent actions must be the proximate cause of plaintiff’s injury.

The dean paced back and forth. His eyes scanned the thirty students writing every precious word he spoke. OK, answer this. A plaintiff standing in a work zone marked ‘Keep Out’ suffers a broken leg when a car that has brake failure strikes a precariously placed barrel. The car recently had its brakes repaired. The struck barrel rolls over the plaintiff’s leg and breaks it. Is he entitled to damages, and if so, from whom? He repeated the question. Jerry, who rarely volunteered to answer a question in any class, bravely raised his hand, and the dean, without hesitation, pointed to him and nodded. Jerry stood, and with the confidence of a star Notre Dame football player who did his homework, confidently answered: The mechanic hired to fix the brakes, obviously didn’t do it right. He should have known his negligence reasonably could have caused such an accident, and therefore his negligence was the proximate cause of the injury. If the plaintiff’s lawyer is any good, the mechanic should pay the plaintiff through the nose.

Really? said the professor, looking quizzically at Jerry. Your reasoning is OK, but isn’t the plaintiff somewhat at fault himself? He shouldn’t have been there in the first place, so shouldn’t his own wrongdoing be considered an intervening cause absolving the mechanic from responsibility? And how about the negligence of the person who placed the barrel in a precarious position? Isn’t he the more direct cause of the injury?

Jerry’s face turned beet red, and he blurted out, Shit, let the jury decide. I certainly can’t! Sue all the bastards! Laughter erupted from twenty-eight of Jerry’s twenty-nine classmates and awakened the twenty-ninth from a short nap.

Applause for Mr. Sloan! shouted the dean. No one in my 15 years of teaching this course has answered that question so colorfully and, I might add, so correctly. There are a dozen answers, and it doesn’t matter how we reason because a jury will theoretically work it out. There are questions of proximate cause and contributory negligence all over the place. Kudos, Mr. Sloan.

After that, Jerry especially loved Torts. It amounted to another accidentally completed pass for that last touchdown. He was a star again, and law school took on a whole new meaning. That night, the roommates enjoyed several beers to celebrate Jerry’s new stardom. They brought home two slightly inebriated Michigan Avenue beauties by night, sober Saks Fifth Avenue salesgirls by day, and they shared the bedroom—all four of them—in the spirit of mutual well-being. Mel wasn’t to be outdone. He took a Labor Law course from W. Willard Wirtz, the labor law specialist who later became the Secretary of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Professor Wirtz posed a question to the class designed to evoke the wrong answer.

A railroad had run steam engines since its inception. Steam engines required an engineer and a fireman. The fireman assumed the responsibility of supplying fuel for the fire and kept it going to produce the steam. In the natural course of modernization, the railroad switched from steam to diesel engines, which required no fire and thus no fuel for a fire. The railroad began to get rid of its firemen when the union intervened and said they couldn’t do that. Who was right?

Mel had the same idea as everyone else in the class: of course, fire the firemen. But that answer seemed much too simple. Sure enough, though Mel tried to make himself small and invisible, W. Willard Wirtz noticed his cowering and saw fit to call on him. Mel’s answer came from a short-circuited nerve buried somewhere in his large intestines.

It depends on whose perspective you are looking from, he said in a voice so strange that he, himself, didn’t recognize it. He had no idea whatsoever what he meant. The great W.W.W. ran to Mel’s seat and shook his trembling hand.

That is the first time any student in my class has answered the question correctly, and I have been teaching this class for a long time, he said. Labor and management will, of course, usually give the opposite answer, and it matters not who is right. There are different considerations on both sides, but it is important for an arbitrator in a labor dispute to recognize the possible validity of both arguments. The answers aren’t always practical. So, Mr. Foster, you get the prize for today.

Thus, both Mel and Jerry had inadvertently triumphantly scored in class with a non-answer, so ambiguous that they had no idea what they answered. They thus learned that the law more than likely doesn’t supply lawyers with one, and only one, answer. There are usually two reasonable, legitimately arguable positions, and it is a lawyer’s job to support his or her preferred answer with applicable legal precedent.

Statutes, rules, and regulations are often subject to interpretation, and thus themselves engender disputes. Carefully drafted contracts, wills, and trusts are likewise often the subject of interpretive disputes. The vast majority of disputes settle out of court, but lots of them wind up in court. Written court decisions are the basis of the common law and remain as precedent for those cases with factual similarities that follow. Mel grew to like researching an issue: pouring over indexes of legal encyclopedias and then into hundreds of volumes of reported case decisions to find fitting language written by a court in explanation of the resolution of a pertinent issue. He had both the mind and the patience for it. Jerry had the mind but not the patience.

The best lawyers, or combination of lawyers, are those with sufficient knowledge and imagination, capable of developing arguable positions to their client’s benefit, with the resources and research ability necessary for finding legal precedent that supports those positions, and the ability to sell those arguments as winners. Winners attract good clients who pay good fees. A necessary skill for success in the law business is the appearance of being a winner, whether or not such appearance is the actual case. Jerry had that appearance from the day of his Tort class triumph and for many years thereafter.

To generalize, there are essentially two kinds of lawyers: the in-office desk jockeys and the in-court litigators (in the UK, solicitors and barristers, respectively). Those in the smaller, non-specialized firms tend to do both, but rarely-the- twain-shall-meet in the larger, departmentalized firms. Macho litigators tend to abhor dealing with the painful specifics and legalese of formal documentation and coded rules and regulations. In contrast, those of the other persuasion would rather not endure exposure to mano-a-mano combat, refereed by a holier-than-thou scary person called Your Honor. The same division, litigators vs. non-litigators, exists amongst in-house corporate lawyers, government lawyers, labor lawyers, administrative lawyers, and generally in all the nooks and crannies that comprise the practice of law.

Some litigators rarely see a courtroom but do most of their work in the trenches (dealing with investigation, motions, witnesses, depositions, and documents ad nauseam), only to see the cases settle prior to trial. On the other hand, non-litigators sometimes have to appear in court as advocates, which for them is a common cause for gastric acidity. Law students generally will go where the best job leads them, but inbred personality will be the final arbiter when it comes around to their ultimate career choice. Those litigators that actually try cases for a living—the trial lawyers—tend to be of the uninhibited gregarious variety. Career paths, however, are highly unpredictable.

Chapter Four: The Graduates

Northwestern’s Law School graduation class, along with its undergraduate schools and other graduate schools, assembled in the football stadium on its Evanston campus, ten miles north of downtown Chicago. After three long years of grinding education and togetherness, Mel and Jerry earned their diplomas and were eager to step separately into the real world. Both sets of parents witnessed and celebrated the occasion, Jerry’s from Dayton and Mel’s from Chicago’s south suburbs. Mel’s parents graciously hosted a celebratory dinner in honor of the graduates at the Union League Club, their city club away from Olympia Woods Country Club, and a cast of hundreds received invitations and attended the sumptuous buffet and open bar affair. Many of the Foster & Davis clients were in attendance, making the multiple bucks laid out by the firm tax deductable as client entertainment.

The open bar became the main attraction for hosts and guests alike. Thus, the two fathers felt little pain when the time for toasts arrived, just before the ostentatious chocolate-dripping deserts appeared on the long table at the back of the sizeable, flower-laden banquet room. Glasses were tapped, and shhs were sounded as Mel’s father, Dan, wobbled to the microphone, closely followed by Mel’s mother, Alice. Dan was slightly shorter than Mel, and medium-sized everything else, with thick, white wavy hair that blessed him with a distinguished lawyerly look. Alice was attractive, slim, and taller than Dan and Mel in her high heels with dark brown, blonde-streaked, permanently waved, spray-puffed hair. Even with several drinks in her, she held herself upright and steady and showed red cheeks as the only sign of her over-consumption.

Dan Foster took the microphone first. Alice and I’d really like to thank you all for coming to this ‘spicious occas - occasion in honor of our son, Mel, and your dear friend and now ex-roommate, Jamie-uh-Jerry. We are very proud of the two of you, even though you didn’ make Coif or Law Review. You did make graduation, though, and that’s why we are really proud of you tonight. I’d like to announce I will be very proud to welcome Mel into our firm, and we know he will beat the sh-the hell out of his old man both in the law courts and on the golf course. Jerry’s Dad wants to say very few words—no, he can say as many words as he wants to. He stumbled over to hug his son as applause broke out amongst those few who were paying attention.

Tom Sloan, a 5 foot 11 inch, dark, severely balding, in shape (except for a serious bulge at the belt), once handsome dress store owner and solid citizen from Dayton, Ohio, brought his little, plain, frail, almost totally gray-haired wife to the microphone. Both carried one of many Stoli vodka on the rocks consumed during the evening. They both grinned and bumped each other as they sashayed their way up to the microphone.

Thanks, Dan. Tina and I’d like to thank the Foster family for throwing this wunnerful party and bein’ like a mom and dad to our son Jerry. We are sure proud of both boys for makin’ it through law school and having a great time to boot. I know they had a good time ‘cause I paid Jerry’s bills. He paused for slight laughter. But now he has to pay his own bills and make a few bucks in the law business. We were damn proud when he became a star quarterback at the Damer, and we are proud again as parents of a Northwesterner. We love you, boys, and hope you get rich together. Alice tells me they are now serving dessert, and from the looks of things, it sure is a good one—or lots of good ones. So let’s get over there.

People were too eager to get to the overwhelming dessert table to offer any applause for Tom Sloan. But he was too busy trying to get over there himself to notice. Chocolate everythings covered the table, including hot chocolate sauce flowing from an actual fountain, small individual cakes, pies, puddings, ice cream scoops, and a large chocolate cake with ‘Congratulations Graduates’ written in red frosting on the top. Mel and Jerry filled their plates with as much as they could crowd on them and settled back in their front-and-center seats at the head table and attacked with enthusiasm.

Our parents are sure whooping it up, aren’t they? Jerry said with his mouth full of cake. He swallowed and jabbed Mel in the upper arm, Hey, friend, you never told me you’re going into your dad’s firm. I thought you were just thinking about it.

Well, Mel answered, wiping some chocolate sauce from the corner of his mouth with his food-stained, white linen napkin, "it’s a living. I figure I will park there while I study for the bar exam,