A Lucky Lawyer’S Life

By Paul Dewitt Carrington

This work recounts pleasures that I have enjoyed as a lawyer and shared with my family. I try to explain why and how I became a lawyer; my forebears played a major role in causing that outcome. I then identify many of the legal disputes and political issues in which I have been actively engaged since 1948. I will also recount how my romance with law and my professional good luck connected to an amazing family resulting from more than sixty two years of marriage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514486320

Paul Dewitt Carrington

Paul D. Carrington is a recently retired professor of law and former dean (1978–1988) at Duke University. He is a native of Dallas, a graduate of the University of Texas (1952) and Harvard Law School (1955). After serving a tour in the army, he commenced teaching law and has continued that career since 1957. He has been a member of the law faculties at Wyoming, Indiana, Ohio State, Michigan, and Duke. He has held visiting appointments at ten other American law schools and has taught in five foreign universities. He has given occasional lectures at over a hundred other law schools in the United States and abroad. He is the author or editor of nine books and numerous symposia and is the author of more than one hundred leading articles in academic legal journals. His work has been supported by the Ford, Guggenheim, Luce, and Rockefeller foundations. His writings have ranged across many legal and law-related topics, including civil procedure, legal education, contracts, criminal law, constitutional law, comparative law, and the history of the legal profession. Recent books are Stewards of Democracy (Harper Collins, 1999); Spreading America’s Word (Twelve Tables Press, 2005); Reforming the Supreme Court: Term Limits for Justices (edited with Roger C. Cramton, Carolina 2006); Law and Class in America: Trends Since the Cold War (edited with Trina Jones, NYU, 2006); American Lawyers: Public Servants and the Development of a Nation (ABA, 2012) Anti-Corruption Policy (edited with Susan Rose-Ackerman, Carolina, 2013). As an active member of the legal profession, he has served many diverse causes of law reform. He initiated efforts to secure enactment of the Uniform Commercial Code in Wyoming. It was enacted in that state in 1960, one of the earliest enactments of that legislation that has since become the law of every state. While teaching, he has represented numerous individual clients pro bono publico in support of their claims to civil liberties. In 1967–1969, he directed the American Bar Foundation study of the United States Courts of Appeal. In 1969–1971, he directed a study of legal education for the Association of American Law Schools funded by the Ford Foundation. In 1970–1973, he served as an elected trustee of the Ann Arbor Board of Education. In 1970–1975, he served the Federal Judicial Center as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Appellate Justice, organizing the 1975 national conference on that subject. In 1976–1978, he directed a program of law reform for the Supreme Court of Michigan. From 1978 to 1988, he was dean of the Duke Law School. From 1985 to 1992, he served as reporter to the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States. In 1997–1999, he directed a program on judicial independence and accountability for the American Bar Association, organizing a national conference on that subject in 1999. He helped organize the group in North Carolina that brokered enactment of a statute in 2001 providing for public finance of judicial campaigns, a scheme replicated in New Mexico, West Virginia, and Wisconsin and now invalidated by the Supreme Court. He also organized the group that drafted the Model Fair Bargain Act enacted in New Mexico in 2000 and supported for enactment in other states by diverse groups favoring protection of individuals from predatory business practices. He was, in 2000–2006, a member of the panel on law and science of the National Academy of Science. In 2000, he lobbied successfully for the National Automobile Dealers to secure Congressional relief from mandatory arbitration clauses in their contracts with manufacturers and, in 2008, for farmers securing similar relief from clauses in their contracts with firms processing their produce. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an elected fellow of the American Bar Foundation and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. His interest in international matters was first manifested in 1970 when he visited Colombian law schools at the request of the Ford Foundation. As a law dean, he was, in 1981, a leader in opening American law schools to students from China and, in the summer of 1985, taught at Jilin University in Changchun. He has since taught at the University of Tokyo and Doshisha University in Kyoto and at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg and Bucerius Law School in Hamburg. He is an elected member of the International Association on Procedural Law and has actively served on its programs, most recently in 2010. In 1995, he was a resident fellow at the Bellagio Center and, in 2002, at the American Academy in Berlin. He has also served clients in international matters. In 1986–1988, he devoted substantial effort to organize legal representation of Filipino sugar growers victimized by the corruption of the Marcos regime. In 2004, he served as a consultant to lawyers representing Bangladesh farmers whose lands were destroyed by an explosion of a gas well being drilled by a Texas firm; the aim was to provide an American forum for the farmers who would not be heard in a Bangladesh forum because of the prevailing corruption. Retained in 2007 as an expert, he presented to an arbitration panel of the International Chamber of Commerce an assessment of the corruption of the government of Equatorial Guinea. Since 1985, he has presented to many audiences the merits and demerits of American dependence on private enforcement of public law. He is, in 2013, actively advocating the use of that method to enforce international law and national laws enacted to deter transnational corrupt practices and has published several essays on the subject. He is also actively engaged in the politics of judicial administration in North Carolina, the legalization of marijuana, the reform of legal education to address the problem of excessive tuition accompanied by declining salaries for graduates, and the defense of public schools.

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1

A LUCKY DRAW: MY FAMILY ORIGINS

MY PARENTS. I was born lucky. Both of my parents were fortunate, well-educated citizens who were often preoccupied with my growth and development in my early years. But while my young life was mostly fun, they sometimes made it a little demanding.

My mother, Frances DeWitt Carrington, experienced a sheltered childhood. She was born in Dallas in 1896 as the fourth and youngest child in a close and loving family. She and her sister Imogene concluded their high school years in Dallas together in 1913 as two members of the first class to receive instruction at the private Hockaday Girls’ School. They then enrolled together at Wellesley College near Boston, where they roomed and graduated together in 1917.

The sisters sometimes shared their quarters with Mei Ling Soong, a classmate who came to Wellesley from China. Mei Ling would become the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, the commanding officer of the army and government of the embattled Republic of China that was, for many years, at war with Japan.

During their sheltered years at Wellesley, Frances and Imogene spent much of their summertime at their parents’ vacation home near Humarock Beach in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. After graduating from Wellesley, my mother taught briefly at Hockaday but decided that she was not suited for the job. That decision revealed a pretty good self-knowledge; she was prone to intolerance of the shortcomings of others, including even mine.

In 1921 she married my father, Paul Carrington, who had begun practicing law in Dallas in 1919. He was associated with a firm where the husband of my mother’s oldest sibling, Ireline, was also practicing. Her brother-in-law was Charles McCormick, whose father was a senior partner of the firm. Uncle Charles would also play a role in my life.

My sister Frances was born in 1923, and I was born in 1931. My father, in his memoir, compared the two of us:

[Our son] was a very different person from his sister, whose every quality was lovable. I suppose the greatest difference was that this child was all boy. From earliest infancy he had a mind of his own, a mind that could be guided and taught readily but one that was firmly insistent at all times on his doing what he thought right.

Even though sometimes wrong.

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MY FAMILY 1940

My mother was often affectionate but also dictatorial. Even in preschool days, I resisted her authority. She did not succeed in teaching me to play the piano that she so loved. Nor did the piano teacher she hired for that purpose, who found me inattentive to her instructions.

But I remember that my mother kindly read books to me whenever I was sick in bed, much as her parents had read to her. And in those days, before immunization, healthy kids spent many weeks in bed recovering from infections caused by childhood epidemics. I best remember her reading Winnie the Pooh, two books of poems by A. A. Milne, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, a work of history that healed my whooping cough infection.

My father was an alumnus of the University of Missouri and, like my uncle Charles, a graduate of the Harvard Law School. By the 1930s, he had a busy practice in his law firm and was also involved in many public concerns. He routinely spent six days a week at his downtown office (a thirty minute drive from home), arriving by 8:30 a.m. and leaving no sooner than 6:30 p.m. About a fourth of his office time was devoted to uncompensated service to charities and organizations serving the public good. But he seldom brought work home. He would usually then spend a few minutes before family dinner relaxing under his sun lamp. So, in the evenings he, too, read aloud to me, much as his parents had read to him.

In 1917, while finishing law school at Harvard, he had volunteered for military duty in the army and then served as a pilot in its air force. He was assigned to train more pilots and did not enter combat. His sense of public mission remained an element of his life and infected me.

As a patriot he did not resist paying high taxes if needed to pay the cost of government protective of the public good. But his politics were mixed. As a college student, he had majored in economics; and he had been persuaded to oppose John Maynard Keynes’ theories that justify occasional deficit financing of government to correct economic depression. He strongly believed in Adam Smith’s economics favoring open markets. He was therefore active in the politics of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.

He loved the challenges of the legal profession and mentored many younger lawyers, some of whom became his partners. He served as President of the Dallas Bar Association and of the Texas Bar Association and as a member of the governing council of the American Bar Association. He chaired the state bar committee that drafted a new Texas Business Corporation Act that was enacted in 1950. In 1974, he retired from his partnership but undertook to teach a rigorous course at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Law School. His course was titled "The Future of the Legal Profession;" his classroom was packed with students. Also, on occasion, he represented indigent clients. In 1980, he published a detailed account of his practice. And in 1982, at the age of eighty-eight, he went to a hearing of a Texas legislative committee to propose a series of amendments to the law that he had shared in drafting thirty-two years earlier.

My father occasionally fired clients whose business integrity he came to disrespect. For many years he was counsel to the Mercantile National Bank that was for a time the third largest in Texas, and he invested much of his savings in its stock. In his retirement years, he watched the bank fail as a result of bad loans that he had supposed that they would not make, but had made in response to the improvident federal legislation deregulating the savings and loan industry.

Among the clients who paid my father no fees were the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Boy Scouts, and two major hospitals. In his time, hospitals were immune to tort liability, so advising and representing them was not so big a job as it would become in the twenty-first century. He also served as chair of a committee raising funds for an addition to one charity hospital. As a reward for this service, its director promised that he and his family would always be treated in the hospital without charge for its facilities or services. That promise it was never asked to fulfill.

In politics, my father had been a strong supporter of Pres. Woodrow Wilson, and an admirer of Louis Brandeis, but he was a critic of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal government that engaged in deficit spending. He read Foreign Affairs and the Sunday New York Times regularly and was opposed to the isolationism of America First. He favored the nation’s earlier entry into the war against Nazi Germany.

As a communitarian in 1945, my father was among those who supported a campaign to merge the suburban Park Cities into the city of Dallas, notwithstanding the fact that he owned a home in elite University Park that would probably lose some of its market value if the merger had occurred. In his view, citizens had solemn duties as well as rights.

And during World War II, he strongly favored tight controls on prices, rents, and salaries that would prevent his clients and others from profiting from the war effort while thousands of guys were in combat in Europe or in the Pacific risking their lives for little pay. He was delighted to represent and advise the aircraft manufacturer that was producing in its nearby Grand Prairie factory the P-51 Mustang, the most successful of our fighter planes in combat in 1942–1944. He was a vigorous defender of tight gasoline rationing for civilians, and he made Spartan use of his own A sticker entitling him as the Mustangs’ lawyer to fill his tank.

In contrast, my mother’s politics were of the ruling class sort; she listened five days a week to Fulton Lewis Jr., a radio broadcaster who not only despised the New Deal, but came to favor the extremist Senator Joe McCarthy who made a career by accusing all his adversaries of being communists.

Regular church attendance was part of our family life. Until 1940, we drove downtown every Sunday to the Central Christian Church. My dad’s uncle Jim Holloway sang in the choir. I remember being baptized when I was four; it was Uncle Jim who dropped me into the church tub. When gasoline rationing was imposed in 1940, we transferred from the church downtown to the more convenient Preston Road Christian Church led by Minister Patrick Henry. Both churches were part of the liberal protestant sect known as the Disciples of Christ. That sect was the sponsor of Texas Christian University in nearby Fort Worth. My father passed the plate for contributions during Sunday ceremonies, while I attended Sunday school. He was devoted to his church and later invested much effort in raising funds to enable it to become the prominent Northway Christian Church located on the Northwest Highway.

My mother attended church regularly but manifested less interest in Reverend Henry’s sermons and prayers. Her Christian impulses were more evident later in life when she comforted the families of very sick kids at a local hospital. She also then made garments and toys for the church bazaar that benefited sick kids in need.

OUR HOME. The only home I knew before 1952 was what I thought to be the fanciest home on our block in suburban University Park, which was in the 1930s, and it still is, in 2014, a choice neighborhood.

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WINDSOR PARKWAY 1952

Living in that home at 4113 Windsor Parkway surely influenced my view of the world. Its exterior featured fancy clinker brick covered by English ivy. Inside, it displayed a winding staircase in the front hall, a living room with a piano and fireplace, a large dining room, a library, a game room with a pool table and other opportunities for recreation.

Our home was three blocks from the Preston Road Pharmacy with its ice cream counter, six short blocks to school, and seven blocks to the Dallas Country Club, where I learned to swim in 1936. My instructor there was Tex Robertson, later the celebrated head swimming coach at the University of Texas.

My parents moved into our home in 1931, soon after my birth. They made some significant improvements in 1937. But they sold it and moved out in 1952 shortly after I married and went off to law school. Perhaps they were tired of the stairs or the lack of central air conditioning. But for two decades it was my beloved home.

MY DEWITT RELATIVES: A RESOLUTION OF THE CIVIL WAR. My mother went to see her parents, the DeWitts (Old Pard and Nana to me), several times a week. They resided at the Melrose Hotel, about four miles from our home. The hotel, in addition to daily guests, housed several score of older residents, some of whom were often seen chatting on the front lawn or in the lobby. I was taken to see Nana and Old Pard about once a week for ten years. My aunt Mimi (Imogene) often appeared on the scene. And I occasionally stayed overnight at the DeWitts’ apartment.

Nana was my most skilled childhood teacher. She had been a professional school teacher and principal. She liked to recite Shakespeare to me on whatever topic we might be discussing. She also liked to recite or read poetry. And she remained, for many years, the most popular speaker at several Dallas women’s clubs.

Her husband Edgar (Old Pard), like his wife (Nana), had also started out as a schoolteacher. He was born in Massachusetts in 1857; she was born in Alabama in 1861. Their relationship was a striking resolution of the horrors of the Civil War.

Edgar’s mother, Mary Ann Damon DeWitt, died three weeks after his birth. But she left him, her only child, with a poem expressing her love for him. He published her elegant poem on the flyleaf of his autobiography.

So Edgar was then raised by his maternal grandmother and would have little contact with his father, Clark DeWitt, who was a descendant of those Puritans who had settled in Salem on the north shore of Massachusetts. Among my Salem ancestors was Rebecca Town Nurse who was famously executed as a witch in July 1692. In 2001, I took many of my descendants to visit Rebecca’s home and church to acquaint them with their ancestor’s misfortune.

The grandmother who raised Edgar was Rhoda Phillips Damon, a Yankee descendant of south shore Plymouth Pilgrims. Her first husband, who was the grandfather of Edgar, was Zechariah Damon. In 1856, Zechariah went to Kansas with John Brown to fight against the spread of slavery in that state, and he died there of influenza. One of Zechariah’s sons, Albert, had gone to Kansas with him, but when his dad died, Albert returned to his widowed mother, Rhoda.

Grandmother Rhoda, with baby grandson Edgar, returned to live among her Phillips family kin at Weymouth Landing in Plymouth County. There, her early life had not been hard. As a nine-year-old child, she had been taken by her father to the 1825 dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument marking the place of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. There, she shook hands with the speaker, the Marquis de Lafayette. (So my grandfather Edgar was only three handshakes away from President Washington, and I am only four away!)

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RHODA PHILLIPS DAMON MONROE

While Edgar grew up under the care of his grandmother at Weymouth, all three of his uncles went to war against slavery. One died in combat at Antietam and one at Norfolk. The third, Albert, who had gone to Kansas with their dad, lost a leg at Gettysburg. Deprived of her husband and three of her four children, Rhoda married a second husband in 1866. So Edgar then acquired a step-grandfather whom he revered as a kind man. Rhoda would live to celebrate her centennial birthday.

Edgar was sent to a public school that assigned him to the same teacher for all six years. He then worked in a shoemaking shop where he was encouraged to read classical Greek literature. After three years on the workbench, while reading classics with his bench partner, a Weymouth benefactor sent him to preparatory school at Phillips Exeter Academy for a term and then to college at Yale for his freshman year. His benefactor’s business then failed. That left Edgar to find his way without funding. He found that he was able to pay his tuition at Dartmouth by teaching the high school in Cummington, Massachusetts.

In 1883, with his Phi Beta Kappa key earned at Dartmouth, Edgar, with a senior partner, imagined starting a business in a former slave state. They sailed to Galveston, Texas, but their Reconstructionist partnership dissolved before any business commenced. Edgar soon found employment with Ginn and Company, a Boston publisher of school books. He became a very successful salesman, chiefly serving schools in Texas and Oklahoma from his office in Dallas. A special achievement was his recruitment of southern authors of a national history book that was a big success in the school book market. He rose to become a partner in the Boston firm, earning enough to acquire the summer home in Plymouth County situated among the homes of his business partners and not far from the home of his ancient grandmother Rhoda, who cherished his children. And Edgar would, in 1953, be celebrated in an obituary published in the Boston Herald for his personal generosity in helping many good but impecunious students find the means to attend college.

Edgar’s wife Imogene, Nana, the mother of four DeWitt siblings and my all-time best teacher, was born in Alabama on the day the Civil War started at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Her family, like Edgar’s, was devastated by the war.

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EDGAR AUGUSTUS AND IMOGENE WALKER DEWITT, ABOUT 1890

Nana’s father, Calvin Walker, was a lawyer and a professional surveyor who had trained for a year at Georgetown University. He had inherited a hundred slaves and was a vigorous advocate of secession by the southern states. His wife, my Nana’s mother, Elizabeth (Lizzie), had Quaker ancestors and was among the first graduates of a new women’s college in Macon, Georgia. With Calvin, Lizzie bore ten children.

Calvin and Lizzie each lost two brothers in the Civil War. One of Calvin’s brothers (Nana’s uncles) served the Confederacy and died at the Battle of Antietam where Edgar had also lost an uncle who was there fighting on the Union side. It is a special feature of my family that I lost two great-uncles in combat who were apparently shooting at one another.

As a slave owner, my great-grandfather Calvin Walker had been excused from combat by a law of the Confederacy enacted to keep slave owners at home to keep control of their slaves. After the war, having lost his slaves, Calvin tried to start a business in Macon, Georgia, but he soon became disabled by alcohol. So his wife, Lizzie, made the decision to move their family to Texas. They settled the family on a small farm near the village of Calvert. There, Lizzie would run the family’s affairs. While running the farm, she homeschooled her eight surviving children. Calvin tried to start a law practice in Calvert, but his alcohol problem was evident. He failed of election when he sought the office of County Surveyor.

His daughter Imogene (my grandmother Nana), after being homeschooled by her mother Lizzie, was trained as a schoolteacher at the new Sam Houston Normal Institute in Huntsville, Texas. Edgar DeWitt first met Imogene Walker in 1884 when he tried to sell her school some Ginn and Company arithmetic books. She was, at the time, the principal of the school in Denison, Texas. She later moved to Dallas to preside over a high school there. In 1888, she again encountered Edgar, the bookseller, and this time, an enduring relationship began. They married in 1890, and by 1896, they had four children. In 1903, their great-grandmother Rhoda, then in her nineties, would ride trains from Boston to Dallas to pay them a visit.

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THE DEWITT CHILDREN 1903

Their parents’ time together was assessed by their father Edgar’s letter to their mother Imogene on her eighty-seventh birthday:

I think this is your birthday—eighty seven years ago you saw the light in this genial southern climate. About three years earlier, your friend was born on the windy side of a jagged hill in bleak New England. How we came together through the manifold changes that took place, only our dear Lord can tell, but it came about and since 1884 we have been staunch friends. I wish I had words to fitly express the great love that is in my heart.

Both Nana and Old Pard lived over ninety years. And I had regular visits with them for twenty years, so I experienced their aging. My favorite account of that process is that Old Pard liked to listen to football games on the radio, but when the wrong team crossed his team’s forty-yard line, he would turn the radio off, at least for a while.

In addition to these grandparents, my mother’s sisters and brother were each a significant part of my childhood experience. Every year we all had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners together, usually at the Melrose. And we shared other family encounters as well. I still remember Humarock Beach from our 1934 summer visit to my grandparents and Long Beach, California, as the site of our 1937 DeWitt family gathering.

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DEWITT SUMMER HOME, HUMAROCK BEACH

The senior DeWitt child was Ireline. A graduate of Wells College in upstate New York, it was she who had married Charles McCormick, then a Dallas lawyer. By 1937 when I first knew the McCormicks, Charles was a professor at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago, a noted scholar on the law of evidence and thus the intellectual descendant of the famous John Henry Wigmore, the Northwestern dean. The McCormicks were then living in Chicago. But in 1940 Charles moved to the University of Texas to become its law dean.

In the summer of 1944, I spent two thoroughly enjoyable weeks at the McCormicks’ home in Austin. My best memory of that time is a political discussion with Uncle Chas. As a liberal Democrat, he was angry with President Roosevelt for discarding Vice Pres. Henry Wallace from the Democratic ticket as the sickly President sought and would secure reelection to his fourth four-year term. I sensed that Ireline did not share her husband’s liberal politics, but she loved her status as the wife of the reigning dean.

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The second DeWitt offspring was my uncle Roscoe. He was highly respected as a professional architect in Dallas. He had followed his dad, Edgar, to Dartmouth and then (like two of his brothers-in-law) trained professionally at Harvard. His professional career was interrupted by World War I when he volunteered as an infantry officer and served in combat in France. After the war, he returned to practice in Dallas.

In 1940, Roscoe was hired to plan housing facilities for the hundreds of workers who were building fighter planes in nearby Grand Prairie, Texas. Then Roscoe’s wife, the mother of his two daughters, divorced him. So he went off to war a second time in 1943, this time as a major. He was assigned the duty of identifying treasured ancient buildings in France and Germany that the army should try to avoid destroying. After the war in Europe ended, he was an officer engaged in the effort to recover art that Nazis had confiscated from Jewish owners.

On his return to private practice in 1946, Roscoe remarried and returned to his practice in Dallas, designing several public hospitals and two fancy Neiman Marcus department stores. For the federal government, he designed several post offices and planned alterations to the Supreme Court, to the Senate chambers in the Capitol, and to the Library of Congress.

The younger DeWitt daughters were Imogene and my mother, Frances, the roommates at Wellesley College. Mimi developed talent as an artist and was notably kinder than her two sisters. Her husband, Don Hicks, had played football for Baylor University and inherited a printing shop in Dallas. He liked to play badminton, Ping-Pong, and pool with me, and I loved him. But for a time, he had a drinking problem, and my parents were sometimes critical of him. Alas, unlike his three brothers-in-law, he had not attended graduate school at Harvard.

MY CARRINGTON RELATIVES: PIONEER FAMILIES. I never encountered my dad’s parents, William Thomas and Mary Holloway Carrington, who remained in Missouri, the state in which they and their parents were born. Will and Mary, like the DeWitts, were both schoolteachers, so all four of my grandparents began their careers in public education. They met as classmates at the Normal School in Kirkwood, Missouri, an institution much like the one in Texas that was attended by my other grandmother, Nana. Will and Mary married in 1879 and taught in public schools together for over a decade. They had two sons, William born in 1884, and my dad, Paul, born in 1894. Grandfather Will published two autobiographical works; one is titled Mary Holloway Carrington.

In 1890, Grandfather Will was elected as the State Superintendent of Public Instruction holding an office in the Missouri capitol in Jefferson City. My dad spent much of his childhood there, and found an opportunity to earn some money by meeting the train daily when the legislature was in session so that he could pick up a stack of St. Louis newspapers and deliver copies to legislators at the capitol.

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A story told by my dad was his visit with his parents to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. He was then nine years old. On the train returning home to Jefferson City, he complained bitterly that he had not seen the Fair. He had not ridden the newly invented Ferris wheel, nor visited the encampment of the Igorrotes who had come from the Philippines to be exhibited as cannibals, nor visited the big zoo, nor tasted the new hot dog, nor seen Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley perform, nor enjoyed other celebrated features of the Fair because his selfish parents had spent so much time campaigning for his dad’s reelection to public office by greeting Missouri voters at the state museum on the fairground. His dad acknowledged the justice of his young son’s complaint and arranged for him to return alone on the train, to stay for three days as a guest of the same hotel at which he had stayed with his parents. His mother resisted and was indeed hysterical at the prospect of her nine-year-old son traveling alone, but she packed his bag and pinned his name and address on his shirt.

He made the journey to St. Louis on the train alone, but only after removing his name from his shirt. He stayed under the daily supervision of the hotel’s desk clerk. In three days, he visited all the World’s Fair sites he wanted to see, and he discovered hot dogs, ginger ale, the Hershey bar, and the ice cream cone that were all new inventions first tasted in 1904 at the Fair. And he returned his packed bag to his mother in Jefferson City, unopened. Ever after, he celebrated world’s fairs wherever they were held.

In 1906, my grandfather Will became the founding president of the Springfield teacher’s college that matured to become Missouri State University. He left that job in 1917 to go to Washington to join the war effort. After that service, they returned to Jefferson City.

I also never met my father’s older brother, the junior Will who practiced medicine in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and served for about twenty years as the presiding chair of the elected local school board there. I did, over time, meet most of my uncle Will’s six children. During World War II, his son Bill served part of his time in the military in Texas; and two of Bill’s five sisters, Lucy and Emily, also came through Dallas while serving as military nurses on their way to the Pacific combat zone. I was told, in 1946, that my ailing uncle Will was offering to participate in the testing of the atom bomb at Kwajalein by exposing himself to radioactivity that might perhaps cure his critical prostate cancer or at least provide some useful data on that possibility. His offer was declined. He died not long thereafter.

All four of my Carrington and Holloway great-grandparents were born in Missouri as children of pioneers who came from Kentucky. Their families had been brought by pioneering parents to frontier Kentucky from Maryland or Virginia. My father’s paternal grandfather, the first William Carrington, had served Callaway County, Missouri, as its county judge. His signature was therefore on county bonds, so when the county defaulted during the Civil War, he mistakenly felt obliged to pay some of the county’s debts with his own money. Maybe the county still owes him reimbursements for those payments, with interest, payable to his descendants? I once offered the opportunity to advance our family’s claim to a Missouri trial lawyer, but he said he was too busy to take our case. But he got my signature agreeing to let the little old church in the village of Carrington, Missouri, pave a parking lot on land to which the title was uncertain.

It bears notice that the Missouri Carringtons were not descendants of the more famous Virginian Paul Carrington whose church pew abides in Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg, next to that of Thomas Jefferson. My grandfather was sometimes asked if he was related to that Paul, and on that account, my father was named Paul.

Mary Holloway Carrington’s ancestors had been among the first settlers of Boone County, Missouri. One, Thomas Holloway, had earned a land grant there for his voluntary military service at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans that concluded the war with Britain. The Holloways had two distinguished female ancestors. One, Sarah Clark Lynch, was a cofounder of the Quaker Meeting House that still stands as a museum in Lynchburg, Virginia. She was remembered as a widow with four children who refused to flee her home when violent Iroquois invaded the area. And as a pacifist Quaker, she also refused to arm herself with a gun as her neighbors urged her to do. So when the warriors loudly arrived on her land, she simply told her children to get under the bed while she went out on the front stoop of her cabin and told the rampant Iroquois to go away. And they did. This brave Sarah was recorded to be a great-granddaughter of the celebrated Arapahoe princess Pocahontas and her husband, John Rolfe.

My grandmother Mary Holloway Carrington had several brothers. One was my father’s uncle Jim, James Lemuel Holloway, who had settled in Dallas in 1904. She recorded one memorable experience of her childhood. Preferring not to engage in the racist politics of the Civil War, her family took a trip to New Mexico to sell some horses. While they rested in Kansas, daughter Mary was allowed to pick flowers on a hill. But then a tribe of warriors came over the hill. She just barely made it back to the family’s covered wagon, and happily, the warriors then settled for food.

In 1935, as noted, my grandmother Mary’s brother, Jim Holloway, participated in my christening at the Central Christian Church in downtown Dallas. Uncle Jim had, like his sister Mary, started out as a schoolteacher. In time he became a school superintendent in Fort Smith, Arkansas, but then decided to become a doctor. He studied homeopathic medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and then opened his practice in Dallas, Texas. Curiously, his wife, Mary, embraced the Christian Science faith rejecting medical science during the week that her husband commenced his medical study. I knew her only as a decrepit lady in a wheelchair who passed away. Uncle Jim kept his singing voice and his carpentry skills to the end, but at ninety-nine, he accidentally drove his car into the opening door of a police car and lost his driver’s license. I now think about that accident when driving.

In 1952, I took my fiancée, Bessie, by to meet my great-uncle Jim. He told us that he had asked of those in command what advice might be given to his son, Rear Adm. James Holloway Jr., to assure his promotion to Vice Admiral. He was pleased to show us a letter from President Truman assuring him that his son, James Jr., was doing a good job, needed no advice, and might soon be promoted. And indeed Junior did, in due course, serve as the Navy’s Chief of Staff. And his son, James III, would also, as a naval aviator, become an Admiral, and also, in due course, the Chief of Staff. But meanwhile, in 1955, Bessie and I would attend Uncle Jim’s centennial birthday event in Dallas.

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It bears notice that all three James Holloways published autobiographies. All are lively tales of public service.

SISTER FRANCES AND HER CLAN. As a child I did not find much in common with my sister, Frances, who was eight years older. As noted, my father declared that we were radically different. Frances was an exemplary student at the Hockaday School, the girls’ school attended earlier by my mother and our aunt Mimi. There were, of course, regular family dinners six days a week at our home on Windsor Parkway, usually at about seven, soon after my father’s return from his full day at the office.

One of those dinners I recall because Mimi and my mother took the occasion to welcome their Wellesley classmate, Mei Ling Soong, who toured the United States in 1942 to raise support for her Chiang Kai-shek’s government of China. Sister Frances was permitted to sit at the table with the madam, but I was told to stay upstairs.

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MEI LING SOONG

And there were always family Sunday dinners after church; these were sometimes family picnics. But I remember no dialogues with Frances. She sometimes took me along when we went horseback riding with her 1930s boyfriend, Barry. And I was sometimes invited to play badminton, Ping-Pong, or pool with her other friends when they played at our house.

For some years, especially when Frances was away at college, I was closer to my cousin Virginia Holloway, who moved into our home in 1937. She was the niece of Uncle Jim and a graduate of the University of Arkansas where her father was a professor. She got a job at a Dallas bank and stayed with us until 1943 when she married one of my father’s law partners, Arthur Riggs. It was Virginia who gave me the nickname Buck in response to my objections to being called Sonny or Little Paul. And she especially liked to take me to SMU basketball games.

Following our mother’s plan, Frances graduated from Hockaday and went off to Wellesley College in the fall of 1941. In November, just before the event at Pearl Harbor, she went to Annapolis to attend a dance with her cousin James III. She arrived to find that the future admiral was being disciplined and could not attend the dance. But when the nation entered the war, she transferred to the University of Texas. There Frances took up with Dan Henry Lee, and in 1944, they married. The Lees had a good marriage, producing a clan of delightful descendants whom my wife, Bessie, and I have long enjoyed.

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HENRY AND FRANCES

We assembled all the Lees in 1994 for a weekend reunion celebrating Frances and Henry’s fiftieth anniversary. And all their descendants attended our fiftieth anniversary party in Durham in 2002. Hank, the eldest, is the one that I knew as an infant. He became a lawyer, and we have taken him along to Europe a couple of times. He and Clark have a pretty close relationship. His brother Paul visited us in Wyoming in 1959 for a camping venture. His sister Ellen did the same in Indiana in 1961 and his brother Stewart in Michigan in 1967. We have visited Dallas many times over the years to visit with Paul and Ellen and their families. We have also kept up with Stewart over the years. He and Hank attended my birthday dinner in Washington in 2015. I remain in touch with all of the Lees and with some of their descendants.

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SERVANTS. The servants employed at our home were also part of my upbringing. Every home in our deluxe neighborhood featured a servant’s quarters attached to the garage. Those quarters were accessible from a one-lane alley that ran down the middle of every block of residences. One night in the fall of 1932, our family servant Laura Mae was murdered in our servant’s quarter. The felon was her husband, who (I was later told) explained that she had become a snob after spending a summer in the DeWitts’ place at Humarock, Massachusetts. What punishment was imposed on him? I never heard.

My mother then hired QT, a major force in my life for about four years. QT had other duties, but she took loving care of me. I noticed that my mother did not treat QT as a family member, and I was distressed when QT quit the job. I had also noticed that my mother’s mother, Nana, who had been born to a slaveholding family, always treated her help, Tilmore, with fully equal respect. I remain curious that my mother was less respectful of her dark domestic servants than was her mother or her sister Mimi or my father. Her older sister Ireline manifested similar racist superiority.

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In 1938, QT was replaced. My mother was able to hire couples from the village of West (about seventy miles south of Dallas), where apparently there were no jobs for the town’s Bohemian immigrant population. But for a time