Steve Dimick — Law 'n' Stuff

Steve

*

Well I never been to Heaven

But I been to Oklahoma.

Well they tell me I was born there

But I really don’t remember…

Hoyt Axton, “Never Been to Spain”

*

1961 – 2005

*

Of course it was going to happen.  Everyone knew it and everyone refused to think about it.

The approach to Tinker’s main landing strip was dead center between the railroad track behind my first Midwest City house and Ferguson street, where we lived at 608.  We were less than half a mile from the beginning of the runway just inside Tinker’s security fence south of 29^th Street.   The planes were already so low as they passed over our back yard that you could count the rivets on the wings.

The nearly twenty years between the city’s founding and its first traffic fatality were due to planning.  Atkinson and Stewart Mott were right: those short, windy streets discouraged speeding cars.

The ten years between building the Glenwood Addition in 1951 and the first plane crash in 1961 were nothing but luck.

In mid-afternoon on August 25, 1961, an F-100 Supersabre jet fighter was making a landing approach when the engines died and the pilot could not make the controls respond.  A fire in the fuselage reportedly burned out the jet’s hydraulic lines.  The pilot ejected, landing himself safely, but the plane crashed into the 300 block of Ferguson, just three blocks from the house where Mildred, Rick and I had fled to be free and safe.

Seven houses were destroyed; a two-year-old and a four-year-old from one family were killed and seven other persons severely injured.  Had the crash occurred two hours later, when folks were home from work, the dead could easily have numbered in the dozens.  It was the worst tragedy ever to strike Midwest City, but it wouldn’t be the last.  The lucky charm was broken.

Not quite three months later, a C-131 cargo plane ran out of fuel, came in too low and its landing gear clipped a security fence on the Tinker perimeter, not 100 yards from the Glenwood area.  The craft crashed and broke in two, injuring eight of its eleven passengers but sparing the civilian population.

In August, 1962, a Tennessee Air National Guard cargo plane limped in for a landing on a runway covered with foam.  A month later, the pilot of a troubled B-57, rather than ejecting, stayed with his craft and  managed to guide it away from a direct path toward Midwest City housing and into an empty field.  Both pilot and co-pilot were killed.

From 1961 onward, the Glenwood area was a homeowner’s nightmare.  People tried to sell and couldn’t.  There were almost no buyers for the neighborhood directly in the flight path of Tinker’s main runway.  Just like the Air Force planes, property values crashed.  Those who could afford it took the financial hit and moved out.  Those who couldn’t stayed put, trapped.

The skies were calm again for a while until December, 1968, when an Air Force Phantom jet attempted an unsuccessful landing at Tinker, lifted off again and came in for a second try, trailing behind it a safety cable and webbing mechanism it had snagged on the runway on its first attempt.  On the plane’s second approach the steel cable and 3,000 feet of webbing snapped off utility poles and trees along ten blocks of Ferguson and neighboring streets, the falling poles and trees smashing cars and houses.

No civilians were injured this time, either.  At least not physically.  But the lower-middle-class housing addition began to be known as “Crash Acres” and property values, which no one thought was possible, fell even further.  People began abandoning the area, leaving their empty houses behind.

In a refrain that would be tiresome were it not so welcome, no civilians were injured when yet another F-100 Supersabre wiped out three houses and severely damaged two more in October, 1969, plowing first into an empty house at 716 Ferguson, just a block from 608.  A neighbor across the street told the press the house had been for sale for more than two years.

“The problem is, you can’t sell these houses,” he said.  “As a matter of fact, it might be hard to give them away.”

Finally, in 1973, county voters approved an $11 million bond issue to buy up nearly all of the land in the Glenwood area and turn the section into a green belt.  Some 836 homes were purchased over the next three years, sold at more than seventy auctions and then slowly moved out of the area.  It must have been a lucrative time for house movers.

The houses brought winning bids ranging from $250 to more than $4,000, with the little cracker boxes on Ferguson Drive fetching the smallest prices.  The Daily Oklahoman printed the prices for some of the houses but not all of them and I couldn’t find the price for 608 Ferguson where I dug my first fort beyond the back fence and flattened pennies on the railroad track.

**

I suppose you can call it a “green belt” if by that term you mean more than 300 acres of overgrown trees and bushes.  In California we generally think of “green belt” as more or less synonymous with “open space,” which Glenwood is not.  I wanted to walk the streets looking for old landmarks and old memories, but it is nearly entirely fenced off and posted with ominous signs:

WARNING

U.S. AIR FORCE INSTALLATION

IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER THIS AREA WITHOUT

PERMISSION OF THE INSTALLATION COMMANDER

*

I walk the abandoned railroad track from Reno Avenue, paralleling the security fence, for maybe a quarter mile before the fence crosses the rails, blocking further access.  My friend Dwain Webb’s house should be over there somewhere, but where?  Where was the house with the concrete fallout shelter underneath the front yard?  Have I gone far enough to be just behind Ferguson?

I can’t tell.  Through the fence nothing is familiar.  Just a tangle of weeds, bushes and giant privet hedges, once planted and trimmed by folks who probably worked at Tinker.

Once this was buffalo territory, home to the nomadic Comanches who hunted the buffalo on horses whose ancestors had been stolen from or abandoned by Spanish explorers long before the plains saw a fence.  The Seminole Nation called it home after their removal from the Southeast, and until their land was again taken from them after the Civil War.  As a part of the Unassigned Lands, it was opened for settlement in the Run of ‘89 and became wheat fields, divided into tidy 160-acre parcels.

We learned about the Run in school and I helped celebrate it every April in Guthrie.  They didn’t tell us that the fathers of the farmers who sold their land to Bill Atkinson probably galloped across the future grounds of Glenwood Elementary School to stake their claims.  They didn’t tell us that a Kiowa hunting party might have pitched camp on the very spot where a plane crash would later kill two toddlers.  Or perhaps along the creek under my railroad trestle.

They taught us history as a justification for what our grandfathers had done, not because it has any relevance today.

I walk back along the tracks in the direction I had come.  As I cross my railroad trestle, I can’t resist sitting down to dangle my legs over the edge one last time as I had done with friends at nine and ten and twelve to smoke stolen cigarettes and share secrets and dreams.  I thought about the stages of my life and my own history – also defined by fences, but marked more by opening gates than closing them.

*

Not becoming a juvenile delinquent or hardened criminal didn’t stop me from turning from a little shit into a big one.  My first wife never ceased reminding me what an obnoxious husband I had been in the first few years of our marriage.  And my former bookkeeper, no longer an employee but now a social friend, still ribs me about how tightly wound I was until after my divorce in the late 1980s.

“You walked around with a stick up your ass,” says Roni.  “We’d occasionally see this soft side of you show through and we’d all be surprised.  Mostly you just had this big chip on your shoulder.”

“Okay, Roni,” I sigh.  “You don’t have to hold back.  Tell me how you really feel.”

“It’s true.  Joyce [my then-secretary] and I used to talk about it all the time.  She felt just the way I did.”

“Great.  I thought she was my friend,” I grump.

“She was, Steve.  She loved you.  Damned if I know why, though.”

*

I haven’t engaged in any of Dwain’s Olympian temper tantrums since kindergarten, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like it sometimes.  Instead, I usually become arch and superior, for I, too, am a narcissist, with six of DSM-IV’s criteria to my name, including some of Mildred’s persecutory delusions and “a grandiose sense of self-importance.” This latter trait isn’t helped by things sometimes coming too easily to me, but is tempered by the common fear that someday “they” will find me out and take those things away.

Back in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974, after my second stint at The Oklahoma Journal, I refused to consider a spot on one of the many suburban dailies, although I was more than willing to do secretarial or mail-room work through a temporary agency.  After four months of unemployment interrupted by occasional temp work, I finally agreed to take a job doing public relations even though as a “real journalist,” I felt it was beneath me.

Two years later, I couldn’t take it anymore and was pacing the living room floor complaining and wondering what I was going to do with my life if I ever grew up.

“Well, when you were in college you sometimes talked about going to law school,” Cherylle offered.  “Have you thought about that lately?”

“That…is an excellent idea,” I snapped my fingers and pointed in approval.  The next day I called the admissions office at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and asked for an enrollment packet.

“How are your LSAT scores?” the admissions director asked.

“What’s that?”

“The Law School Admissions Test.  Everybody has to take it before they can even apply to a law school.”

“Okay,” I said jauntily.  “When can I take it?”

“Call this number and see if there are any more tests scheduled for this year,” she said.  I’m certain she thought someone so simultaneously cocksure and ignorant wouldn’t stand a chance at Boalt.

When I telephoned the testing service, I was told the last test which would qualify me for a fall admission was the following Saturday, but reservations were closed.  If I walked in with twenty dollars, though, and if they had an empty seat and an extra test, I just might be able to sit for the exam.

So, twenty bucks in hand, I showed up on Saturday for the test, was allowed to sit for it and scored in the top two percent of all test-takers nationally.  It wasn’t until I was in law school that fall that I discovered that my classmates nearly all took expensive classes to prepare for the LSAT and actually studied for it.

How was I to know?  I was just a dumb 28-year-old kid from an educationally deprived family in an anti-education state.

I applied only to Boalt and to the other local UC law school, Hastings School of Law in San Francisco.  I had no real intention of going to Hastings – except that’s where I was admitted, while only making the waiting list at Boalt.

What’s the matter?  Don’t they recognize my special qualities?

*

I had probably done much more growing up since I was sixteen than most of my contemporaries, but only because I started so late and had so far to go.  But I still had a lot to learn.

I was near the top of the stand-by applicants for my top law school choice thanks to a criminal law professor who had been imprisoned during World War II as a conscientious objector and who argued strongly for me in the admissions committee.  So when a Boalt admittee or two either dropped out or were admitted to Harvard or Yale, I moved up the list and became one of 350 first-year law students at Boalt Hall.  I was the second or third oldest student in my class.

Because of my self-perceived worldliness and experience, I felt myself to be a cut above most of my classmates, but that attitude only lasted for three or four weeks.  These kids were sharp and I was overmatched.  They went on to become judges, professors, poverty lawyers, environmental activists and partners at major law firms.  I went to work for an attorney who had been a judge but who was removed from the bench for his gross improprieties by the Commission on Judicial Performance.

I graduated somewhere in the top fifty percent of my class, but nowhere near the top ten percent.  LSAT scores are evidently only a rough measure of a student’s ability.

Although I received an excellent education, the most valuable lesson I took away from Boalt was not law, but how to apply it and why.

Professor Kessler, a jovial man with a thick German accent, had spent a lifetime studying and analyzing contract law.  Retired from Yale Law School, he spent his last years teaching contracts to first-year students at Boalt.  Most of the hypothetical situations he posed to us seemed to involve orphans and “vidow ladies” who had gotten themselves into unfortunate contracts.

“I feel sorry for her too, sir,” the designated student might answer.  “But it’s fairly clear from the cases we’ve read this week – and particularly Smith v. Jones – that she entered into the contract freely and voluntarily.  She’s a big girl and the law presumes she knew what she was doing.”

“Ah,” Kessler would pounce.  “But vhat about ze doctrine of economic vaste?  Or vhat about Section 90 of ze Restatement of Contracts?  Can you use vun of zese to give me a theory zat vill do justice?”

We thought The Law was The Law.  Kessler taught us that our job was to use The Law to argue for a correct result.  There’s always a good argument, he drummed into us.  You may not always win, but you should always try.  The Law is imperfect and it’s up to you to protect the “vidows and orphans.”

*

My first boss, the defrocked judge, was a laughing, back-slapping, hail-fellow-well-met type.  He was also a liar, a bully and a man who never did a good deed unless people were watching.  He knew little law, but was one of the county’s most successful bullshit artists.   And he knew how to get and keep the clients.  I had nothing but contempt for him.

“Okay, six o’clock tonight we’re going to the grand opening of So-and-So’s Auto Glass.”

“Whaddaya mean ‘we?’”

“He’s a client.  That’s where the money comes from.”

“He’s not my client.”

“Steve, you have to like people in this business.”

“So being a good attorney isn’t enough?”

“You have to like people.”

He didn’t, of course, except as an audience.  But you can learn from anybody, if you pay attention.  Over the years, I’ve come to realize how much I learned from him – however slowly – and wish I had been a bit more appreciative at the time.  Not much, mind you, for he reamed me royally just before I left to go out on my own.  But if I hadn’t been such a slow learner maybe it wouldn’t have taken me so many years to finally earn a decent living and to be named “Best Attorney” for nine of the last ten years by the votes of scores of loyal clients in my local newspaper’s annual poll.

*

The divorce was bitter and brutal.  Nine years of doing family law still hadn’t taught me enough about understanding and empathizing with my clients’ pain.  But a close friend who let me camp out in his spare bedroom when I was homeless and rootless told me “If nothing else, this is going to make you a better divorce attorney.”

It did.

“You’ve been so different since your divorce,” Roni, my former bookkeeper said.  “You know, you’ve actually turned into a nice guy.”

Roni vaguely echoed what a high school classmate had told me forty years earlier at one of those small parties where the kids are trying to be adults and are talking about adult themes.  We were “psychoanalyzing” each other.

“You’re just all bluff,” she said.  “You’re so insecure that you think people aren’t going to like you, so you put on this gruff exterior to make it come true.  The people who really know you realize it’s not true.”

But it was counselor Mark who finally got it through the thick Dimick skull, although it took a couple of years.

“I know Steve,” he told Marianne in my presence.  “He’s a good person.  He really is.  He takes care of his retired partner.  He feels his clients’ pain.  You and he have sort of adopted your friend Chris with Asperger’s Syndrome because he doesn’t have anyone else.  He would die for Kristi.  He does volunteer work without asking for thanks.

“And he cares.  He really cares.”

When I stopped counseling, Mark told me I should never say I was “cured.”

“Let’s just say you’re in remission,” he said as we hugged goodby.  “Try to stay there.”

*

I had been sitting on the edge of the trestle for a good half hour.  I hadn’t told anyone in the family that I was coming back to Midwest City for the 40^th reunion.  I had too much to do and too much to see in only five days.  I got what I came for, although I still don’t know quite what it was.

It’s time to go home.