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RG-50.549.05.0007

In this country? I would like to think that 1t could not happen in this country in our lifetime or in anybody else’s lifetime. I think that when you read about any sort of fanatical behavior, when you read about... it’s only been a hundred years or a little more, well a hundred fifty years since lynchings were pretty commonplace in the South. And we had a, quote, “legal system’, that was not as... we didn’t have transportation systems, and we lacked a lot of the modern conveniences, so that I think our life was a lot more rural. But it seems to me that communities were pretty heartless about... I mean that there was, in the South more so than any where else, but on a large scale, African-Americans were property. I mean they were property. And anyone, and people seemed to accept that in a fairly major way. I don’t know that it would happen just to Jews. And obviously the Klan had put Jews and Catholics into a group, blacks. But you know, we see things, we see the American Indian in this country for years having, in not the very distant past, being treated as a second-class citizen. You see... but in the next fifty years probably the white population as it is, or, quote, “Caucasian” population, will probably be a minority in this country. So I don’t know. I do think that people can be fairly heartless. I mean we’ve had this, even with the go around with theTen Commandments we’ ve had in this state recently, that we have educators and superintendents who don’t seem to get it, and don’t understand or can’t understand why anyone would object to putting those Ten Commandments on the walls of the school or a public building. I mean that’s always pretty scary to me, and they wield a lot of influence. And they could be leading, they could decide that they’re going to march on any one of us. Any lawyer who lived in a local community that promoted, who was representing the other side. I don’t know that you would see anything like what happened in Germany, on that massive a scale, where you’re filling boxcars with thousands of people on a schedule that end up being cremated and killed and gassed. But I think people can, there are leaders that appeal to emotions and that in, just the same as the abortion clinics, you have folks who would like to defend the 100 fact that they can kill somebody because their view is different than their own. So I think it’s possible and I think it is probable they’II continue to happen as long as you have open gun, as long as gun laws are the way they are. And as long as you have people who believe in these fairly, I don’t know, fundamentalist religions. Wars are fought. All the things that we’ve seen in the last few years, and maybe this country 1s a little different because of its tendency to become more homogeneous, both culturally and racially. But you think of all the Tutsis and the Hindus and you think Kosovo and you see all of these people and you see massive... as far as they’re concerned it is a Holocaust. Right? I mean they are being killed in massive numbers. We just aren’t there. I don’t know and you feel pretty helpless over here trying to do anything about it. So I don’t know, we can always rationalize it by saying those aren’t very civilized countries. But all of these things seem to be done... I mean look at Israel and the Arab countries. Both sides, certainly the Arabs, think that all of this is for Allah, and most of these massive killings are religious wars. And they are done in the name of God for one side or the other. Or the ethnic issues up there in Russia. I mean tanks... so, who’s to say that can’t happen here? I would like to think it wouldn’t happen here because of all the different pressures that keep the country going. For one thing, we’re so materialistic, people want to keep making money and they want to keep a society and keep the economy going. And wars and internal fighting and disputes on a large scale, they ruin countries. I think if it’s nothing more than that sort of selfish self-interest and political interest, that people know they’re not going to allow anything of that scale to happen without calling out the National Guard or something. At the same time you see on the television, you see all those things that you think somebody was just writing a fiction plot a few years ago, they can happen. Whether it’s biological warfare or some goofy, this computer virus stuff. We see that everything is possible with technology. But I don’t know that anyone, these days, in this country, I’m not sure that we would have to fear a Holocaust. I do think that minorities who live in fairly isolated situations, I think are always somewhat vulnerable. Here in Floyd County now, it’s a nice thing to say, we now have a mosque here in Eastern Kentucky, which is, I think, a real milestone. And we do have more and more African-Americans and people of other cultures, who have, are finding a home and generally acceptance, at least in some economic, to some economic extent. But I don’t know that they are not always somewhat vulnerable. To some extent there are people who are here because the area has needed more physicians and for economic reasons and they are excellent citizens. Whether over time, like the osteopathy school or if the economy gets worse, people, they will have become enough of this community where they would stay and would speak their mind. I thought they were, they were totally silent during the Ten Commandment debate. I had encouraged some of them to speak out, because they were the most affected. So, you, you know, it’s the same way with the Jewish communities during, the Jewish families that moved South in the earlier days. They stood by, they were in their communities, they were merchants in these towns and they could not join country clubs and they were being discriminated against. They had African-American maids at home. And they were certainly willing to live in a segregated society, because it was economically favorable to them. I think I may have said that earlier. I think those things are, those are difficult ethical, philosophical issues. But it has to create a certain level of discomfiture for people who are doing that.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Why don’t we go back and we were talking a little earlier about how we might get some more detail about your work on the Neshoba County case. So, go back to there and then work forward again. Last time we talked about it, you mentioned a little bit about how you had been working 101 on that case, but what were the details of what you were doing exactly on that case? The murder of the three civil rights workers.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I worked on the case twice. The first time was in the grand jury when I was talking to you earlier this morning about the fact that after the FBI has investigated a case, then we get the witnesses together. And after the incident had happened in the summer of ’64, we had a grand jury in Mississippi, a federal grand jury. But that was before there were any confessions. And SO we went to Neshoba County and the FBI had uncovered a number of other police-brutality cases that, where local officials, the sheriff and local police had acted illegally when beating blacks, primarily. And we only knew the circumstantial evidence of the killings of these workers. We did not have a confession and so there was not any clear evidence. We did not have an indictment of that. Then there was subsequently a confession. When Jean and I came back from... yeah, then the indictments went to the Supreme Court, when there was an issue about, after the confession, when there was an indictment, there was a legal issue about whether these indictments stated a claim under federal law, because they also involved private conspirators along with some police officers. That question went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. It was decided in 1966, I think, and Jean and I got married in 1967. When we came back from our honeymoon, we, John Doar called me... at the time was I still working in the Southeastern section? He asked me to come down and work on the Mississippi case if I felt like my honeymoon was over. And we were in New York at that point. We’d been down to Saint Martin in the Caribbean. And I said to Jean that I just thought probably with this I was ready to go back to work to try and finish this case.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

How long had it been since you had gotten married?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

We were, we were still on our honeymoon. We got married in February, 1967 and this was February, 1967.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Okay.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

We flew back, back. We were out of the country probably ten days and we were going to spend another five, four or five days in New York seeing some plays or something. But when you were were back in this country and this case was ready to go or we were ready to get in and get ready for trial. So I kissed her good-bye and I went to Mississippi. And I spent, specifically actually, I primarily did two things. I spent almost a month interviewing people who were prospective jurors in the case. Because nowadays they have psychologist, psychological, they have these jury experts that are sitting, that sit with the lawyers and who’ve done big sophisticated background checks and they’ve even sometimes tried cases to juries to try them out. They’ll have a mock trial and have a mock verdict. But by learning through the black community, who the members of the white community were that might be trustworthy and who were supportive and who thought this was a dreadful thing, this killing of the three workers and who were upstanding citizens and who would know people, basically, I created a notebook of information about the jurors. I mean we didn’t know who the twelve would be. You get a list of about forty or fifty. And so I collected information on these people by word of mouth primarily. And met a lot of people, and then put this notebook together for John Doar, who was my boss and for the U.S. attorney for trial, which they used in selecting the jury. 102

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RG-50.549.05.0007

How were the forty people selected in the first place?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

They’re chosen out of the jury wheel, at that time in most states, they were chosen off the voter list, the voting lists. You put all the voters... it’s a federal court, so the district is much larger than just a county. So you’re more apt to get people that cover a much larger area. And I think the trial was in Biloxi, in the Southern district of Mississippi with Judge Cox. And so these jurors were somewhat spread out. I mean it wasn’t all the way across the state, but it was in Southern Mississippi in several counties.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

And was there some kind of quota with the jurors, where there were supposed to be a certain amount white and a certain amount black?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

No, but there were blacks on the jury, but the blacks were, they were struck. Now I was in some earlier trials in the early, when I first came, we had a trial in Georgia involving SNCC workers, who were some voter registration workers, including several of whom were black. And then later with the trial of Fannie Lou Hamer and they were all white jurors. It was really at a time before, again it was something at the time that was not challenged as being unlawful, the system for selecting jurors and that resulted in no blacks being on the jury. Now this particular jury, now in the Southern District, you would think, probably, that half the people on the jury would have to be or close to half would have to be black, because the voting requirements have been so slackened. Because that was another part of this whole civil rights struggle, was they were using literacy tests at the time. I’m pretty sure... and that would make sense, because the number of black voters back then was still very, very small, and so you had very few blacks. And they were not, probably every qualified, voting black was probably in the jury pool. So, I don’t know if they were out of the, let’s say the twelve, that were called initially or fifteen, as they were being struck, there may have been several who were black, but they were struck, so that the jury was an all white jury. But I was, of course, felt pretty good, because we got a conviction. So I felt like that work was at last helpful. The other thing that I was, we had always, the way we did our trials in the Civil Rights Division... I may have talked about this before. We’d have two people inside the courtroom putting on the case and then the fellows outside the courtroom who were responsible for preparing witnesses and making sure, and having things go right. In the Neshoba County case, my other responsibility, well there were several others, but my one major responsibility was to firm up the identification of the workers. And that was... of these three civil rights workers who were killed. And that was done through their dental records. We went back and found who their dentists were and the dentists’ charts and compared them, in the event that that was in dispute. I don’t think we put the dentists on, and it may be that it was admitted, but we did that. And then there was clothing that had been retrieved from the workers, and the whole issue of proving that they were who we claimed they were, that they had been the murdered workers. And then I did a lot of other, I did some... there were other parts of the case, where you’re trying to make sure that everything is together. And some of the witnesses were not heard. There were people who, a deputy sheriff at one point picked up a young woman who was an Indian—there was a Choctaw reservation in that area—who was an Indian, and she overheard a conversation. But she didn’t speak English. So when we wanted to go talk with her, we had to find an interpreter to try to tell us what she was saying. I think actually she did testify, 103 because she overheard them saying something that indicated they knew what was about to happen or that they were going to stop the workers when they let them out of jail that night.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

So, she understood English, but couldn’t speak it?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Right, she just spoke a very broken English and she remembered some phrases that they had said when she was picked up. They gave her a ride. I don’t remember how we tracked her down, but it was something that was helpful like that. The grand jury, I worked on the grand jury a while, one of my roles was nothing more than a logistician. I was in Biloxi, getting people driving from Neshoba County, but the grand jury was sitting in Oxford. And we were moving, I was doing a little more than that, besides interviewing. I kept taking people to the airport and sending them from Biloxi to Oxford. Keeping the witnesses going. That took, we had a lot of logistical issues in getting, finding these people way out in the country and brining them down—especially African-Americans—who had been mistreated, and getting them to the airport and getting them up there and back. But then the fact that there was a conviction in this case, John did a, really quite a remarkable, did a very, very good job in presenting the case. It was a big effort. It was a very sad thing to kind of work on that.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Did you... you strike me as a person with a lot of energy and a lot of drive to go on, but did you ever just feel depressed and have trouble getting out of the bed in the morning? Or is that just not an issue for you? (Laughing. )

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Back then or now or?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, in any of these. I mean, I would, just picturing studying the dental records of these people who had been brutally murdered for working on a good cause. And then you’ve done other work since then that’s had to have been very depressing. I just wonder how...

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Oh I think you feel, it always has an impact on you. I think that just for this purpose, you never forget the smell of those clothes... End of Tape 8, Side B 104 Tape 9, Side A

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RG-50.549.05.0007

This is tape nine, side A. Will you, will you just repeat what you had started to say?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I was just saying in that particular situation I always can picture, we had the clothing put away in boxes behind the door. But it was really... the stench of those clothing was so strong, that it was always there. And for some reason that always stuck with me more than the dental records. Well, you do, you feel very badly for the families, you feel kind of not very forgiving, I think, for the people who did this. And of course, there were some church burnings before that. The atmosphere around, in Mississippi and Neshoba County among the, in the white community and among the Klan, that particular group of Klansmen, Sam Bowers®, the mastermind of this one, who also was behind the firebombing of another African-American, who was a voting rights leader in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Vernon Dahmer, who, they firebombed his house. These people were just pretty evil. They were violent, and just bad people in that sense. So I think you have a, if anything you’re probably driven. I don’t know that I ever felt depressed, I think most of us, and at the time this was a pretty highly motivated group of lawyers, who worked in the Civil Rights Division. It was a very relatively small group of lawyers in the early ‘60s. It was sort of a sidelight, but I mean Congress’s commitment to civil rights was not great either. The Division had very few lawyers working on civil rights cases when I started in 1962. And they had to beg for any money, and so there were very few of us and we worked on these voting rights cases, it took an enormous amount of time and it was hard to do more than two or three of them. We’d spend months looking at records and microfilm. And we worked extraordinary long hours. He couldn’t understand why people who were family men with children would want to go home at the end of the day and not come back and work at night or work on Saturdays or work on Sundays. Of course, there were some folks who got divorces over that hard work, just as they do in the Service, I think. So I don’t know, I think that lawyers get depressed when they lose cases. And we lost, we lost many cases in the early stages in the lower courts, voting rights cases and others, because the judges themselves were segregationists and were appointed and came out of that society. So we had to appeal their decisions before and they were reversed and all of that took time. So, when you work hard, it doesn’t matter what, if you work hard... then when we knew we were going to lose, it’s... and then you did lose, you’re sort of prepared for it. And you really are trying to put the case together in the first level, so that it’s a compelling case to the next level. And that’s what happened, we overprepared and we generally won, eventually we would win. And then gradually the law started to change. It took a very long time, and so I’ve said many times it was fortunate or maybe because of that slow pace and the limited role of the federal government, that somebody like Martin Luther King had to come along. Or that blacks had to organize themselves and realize, as so often happens, that people have to organize and that movements get started and that direct action has a place. And it all sort of came together in this instance around the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That’s when Jean and I met. We were in Selma, we were in this case, this voting rights case, this Dallas County case was a case, the first voting rights case under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that election. I think we may have talked about that before. 63 Sam Bowers, circa 1925--. As a leader of the Mississippi KKK, authorized the murder of Mickey Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers murdered in Neshoba County, MS, in 1964. Bowers spent six years in jail for his role in the murders. In 1998, he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of the black activist Vernon Dahmer. 105

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RG-50.549.05.0007

We did. Is there anything else you want to say about the Neshoba County case?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

I don’t, not really, I think. There was a very good, made for T.V. movie about that case. I’m often asked about “Mississippi Burning,” which is a popular movie that came out, which was not really accurate in many ways. But I thought it depicted the hatred of the atmosphere at the time fairly well, and some parts of it were there. Jean and I have a, at our house, the painting of the sailboat in our living room is from the restaurant called, it was from Meridian, called Wideman’s Restaurant, which was where we worked out of the Meridian office, which is close to Neshoba County. But I don’t think so. I mean, one of the other last things beside the Kent State thing that I did at the Civil Rights Division was to, you know after these folks were convicted, then they appealed their conviction and it went on. That took a few years. And I think one of the other last things that I did was to file a brief opposing their last motion not to be sent off to prison. I wrote the response to that and then they were picked up. Then they finally went to jail. So that was about 1970.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Do people ask you to speak about your civil rights era experiences very often?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Not, it only comes, it comes up, well, my friend Ned Pillersdorf, who is a practicing lawyer here, teaches a class on the court system, on I think, civil liberties and the law. And he generally has speakers come in, other judges and I usually come in for a night with him. And I’ve spoken a few other times, but really not very much. And I’m not sure that that many people are aware of what I did. I mean I don’t particularly publicize it. If I’m giving a speech and somebody’s writing some background about my legal history, theyll generally mention that. But I don’t really do much speaking about it. Usually the schools have a unit on it. There’s a lot of, certainly a lot of written materials and most of those... Taylor Branch’s books quote my boss, there’s a lot in Taylor’s books about John Doar™. And usually when books are written like that, that’s who they are going to write about. I don’t know that I’m anybody necessarily. But locally if people ask, I will talk about the cases. I mean I’ve spoken a few times, not recently about the legal developments of these, of how we put these cases together and the Voting Rights Act and the impact of the Voting Rights Act. But then I left in 1970 and I’ve been doing this legal services work for thirty years. And unless those things come together somewhere, it’s become part of my, sort of distant past, except for reunions of Civil Rights Division lawyers and some of the ongoing contacts I’ve had with people. So not really very much.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

I wondered if you want to say anything else about the desegregation work you were doing in Houston? You mentioned it in the last interview. One of the things that you mentioned in the last interview that I thought you might want to comment on now, 1s that you said it was the beginning of the Nixon administration and you were seeing that that there was kind of a move away from real advancement with civil rights. And that Houston, working in Houston, there was not a, you didn’t give much detail, but 1t seemed you weren’t very hopeful for things moving in a real positive direction there. Do you want to talk about that? °¢ Taylor Branch, author of the trilogy America in the King Years. 106

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I think probably what I had reference to was after Richard Nixon was elected and William Mitchell became Attorney General®°, they did not want to continue to seek bussing of students as a remedy to undo segregation. And bussing, Charlotte had accepted a bussing remedy and several other states, too. The problem is when you have a segregated community, so that white students, black students are, if you don’t use something like bussing, you can’t achieve very much integration, unless you pair up schools where the two housing districts happen to be close. Where they call that pairing of schools. You could pair schools that are in nearby neighborhoods. But the Nixon administration, so the Nixon administration really backed, not only on bussing, but they generally felt, I think, that the position of the Department in the past had been too strong towards moving towards integrating classrooms. And they were more inclined towards free choice, which would essentially leave student... the schools white and black, with some very few exceptions. And the Houston case was filed right after the Nixons came in and we did ask for bussing as a remedy. And it was the last case that they allowed that to go through. In fact, the Assistant Attorney General, who was probably called on the carpet about it a little bit, because it had gone to him and he had approved it. And I don’t know that he was brand new, whether he really focused on it as much as he might have. But the Attorney General had to, I think had to sign it as well. We went forward in that case. It was a very large case. Houston was the third-largest school district in the country. I can’t remember, a couple of hundred schools. They had, what they had done is spent millions and millions of dollars building new suburban schools outside, on the outer fringes of Houston. At the same time they let the inner-city schools decay, so it was really doubly bad. It wasn’t just, in some school districts they tried to upgrade black schools to prevent desegregation. In Houston they didn’t care. They spent all their money on white schools and let the black schools get worse. So, but then at the same time they bussed white kids past black schools and blacks past white schools. So we asked for, I had an expert from Miami, Florida, who was an expert in school desegregation matters. What a minute, maybe he was from Austin, Texas. Mike Stolee. I guess he was from Austin. Well, one or the other. And he testified as to the need to bus and that using bussing as a remedy would produce a, basically an integrated school system, with all the advantages that might come, or that could come with that. There was much more to it in the case than that, but basically that was it. The other phenomenon at the time was that the Chicano community was just developing, so that it was like we had three donuts. You had a core of inner-city black schools, then you had a small, growing donut around it of Chicano communities and then you had all the whites on the outside. But racially, Chicanos were treated as whites at that time, and probably still are. There’s a designation for themselves, but we were trying to desegregate a school district that had traditionally been black and white. And so one of the things that the judge in the case did, was pair up some white schools with Chicano schools, which I wasn’t particularly happy about. I mean I don’t know that we had achieved very much, as we had hoped to do. There were some other things. We didn’t get a lot of bussing, but we got, the Board was required to spend massive amounts of money to get, to upgrade schools. And the other, probably the best thing that happened was they threw out the School Board. They voted in a new School Board that was much more moderate. And they got rid of the lawyer who had gotten rich representing the Board and keeping the system segregated. This case that I was working on had been filed many years before that and the NAACP had sort of reactivated it and urged the government to enter the case, which we did. And so when we moved down there with four or five lawyers, and Jean came °° This is a misstatement—John Newton Mitchell (1913-1988) was Attorney General under Richard Nixon, 1969- 1972. William Dewitt Mitchell was Attorney General from 1929-1933 under Herbert Hoover. 107 with me, we had not been married too long and we rented an apartment, we lived there four or five months getting ready for this trial. And when it was over, we took a big trip and nine months later our son Michael was born. Actually we went to Canada, up to Calgary and... you ever been up there? Lake Louise, Banff. Wonderful country. Houston, I still sort of scratch my head a little bit. I haven’t kept up with what... there was an appeal of that order. And I wrote part of the brief on appeal. Still have it with me. But I always felt a little badly about the limited result of the pairing of the schools, but I think it helped a great deal in the long run in different ways, to move that system from what it had been, where they had just let the black schools deteriorate into such terrible condition. Then let’s see, Michael was born in 1970, I still had a hearing, a pre-trial, I think, not a pre-trial, but a conference right after he was born. We delayed it because I expected him to be born in April. So, that was April 1970. I think that’s about it. I don’t know if you’re thinking about something else in the case.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

No, I just...

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Just a large, urban school case. Took a long time. Lot of records, lots of lawyers working with us. And I was able to get Jean to come with me on that, to work on the case.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

You talked about how you had come to Kentucky and the whole process of establishing yourselves in Prestonsburg and some of the challenges involved in that. And I thought maybe you might want to say a little bit more about... one of the things that has struck me, just in reading a little bit about Appalred and the early years and your talking about it last time that we talked here, is that when you talked about the difficulty of getting established, you said that it was difficult. But from what other people have said, they suggested that 1t was a lot more difficult than you let on the last time that we talked. I wondered if there’s... I mean you had mentioned that you had trouble renting a place and so forth. But what else was happening besides that, during that time? Did any of the difficulty make you feel like, “Okay, if things don’t turn around soon, we’re out of here?”

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RG-50.549.05.0007

I don’t, I don’t, no, I don’t think I had thought about being out of here. There were a couple of things probably, one was one of the earliest cases that we were involved with, involved the local health care establishment, for example. There was a federal program in here, that wanted to set up what is now a federally funded health care clinic, that Eulah Hall was associated with. But the governing agency was a Community Action agency, which had some public officials and local doctors, who were either on the Board or very close to the governing Board and they basically didn’t want this thing to do anything. They were going to use it primarily as a taxi service to... they had a trailer, which was fully equipped sitting out, for example, at Mud Creek, but all they used it for was people would go to the trailer and then they’d drive them into Prestonsburg to get their medical services from Prestonsburg physicians, that would get money. So, they were reimbursing them for services, but they wouldn’t allow anybody to be treated out there. Not even a nurse to give them shots. And then they employed a doctor. The local medical establishment threw a lot of roadblocks into his getting a license. And it was just a lot of trouble getting it. So the welfare rights groups came to me and we filed some administrative complaints and basically threatened to close the thing down. I mean their decision was if it wasn’t going to work and be responsive, let’s just not have it. Let’s not waste the money. Well, two things happened, one was, of course, that Jean wasn’t sure who her doctor would be, since 108 they were all mad at us. And so she wondered if she could get any child care, any medical care for her son, who was less than a year old, or just about a year old. And then the establishment, the doctors or the agency complained to Congressman Perkins® about it and he asked for an audit by the General Accounting Office of what we were doing, not just in this case. There was at the same time a lot of hostility by local lawyers to having our get started. They thought basically we were going to take money out of their pockets. So the GAO sent an inspector here, which wasn’t too... but he was in our office for about a month. He looked at all, every piece of paper and then he issued... they ended up issuing a report which was really very favorable and complimentary. And when I called Congressman Perkins to ask him about this thing, about his request, he said not to worry about it. He was doing it to placate the local officials. He was sure it was going to work out okay. So there were things like that. And I had the local Bar was quite hostile. I went to them on one occasion and asked them, told them I wanted to set up a system to refer clients to lawyers who, if the clients weren’t eligible for our services, if they made too much money, that we wanted a fair system. So, would they want to give me a list of the lawyers in some order, the ones that would take certain cases and not take... So he appointed a committee to look into it. The President said he thought that was a good suggestion. Well, the committee met and their resolution was to suggest that we leave town, that we not practice law here without their permission. It was sort of an indication of the atmosphere. I mean there were a few, well I don’t know that we had any lawyers who were outside. There were a couple of lawyers who had been here earlier, who had had a run in with me, but they were philosophically supportive of free legal services. Because I wasn’t the... when I first came, there were some lawyers who had been working here with welfare rights folks. They started something called Mountain People’s Rights. They saw their role more as being organizers than as being lawyers. They had not gotten their licenses, so we had a serious difference of opinion about how this needed to be done. Cold air out here. Oh, that’s the air conditioning, that’s what that is. Is it too cold?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

It’s all right with me. You cold?

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No, it’s just blowing down, I didn’t know where it came from. So, there were those things. And I mean the medical... and the fact that I had hired, the first two lawyers I hired, J.T. Begley, Joe’s son, who had just come out of the Marines and gone to law school and Mort Stamm, both of them were living in Lexington and were staying down during the week and then they would go back on a weekend to their families. So, it was not a, it took a while to, I really didn’t have any friends or that much of a support system, especially since I was also sort of fighting with the other lawyers who had been here. And Jean was a new mother and was just trying to get to know a few people who might share values, because the lawyers, the wives of the private practitioners, were really garden club types or people who were pretty much interested 1n money and materialism. But she then, she started, gradually started teaching childbirth classes. That was a big, sort of avocation of hers and got her to have an interest outside of being at home. So I think the first, those early, that early year was probably... wasn’t much lonesomeness, I think it was beautiful. I mean we knew, at the time we were not so sure that we would be here that long. I think 1t was much more, as you said, “They’re not going to run me out of town. We’re going to set this up. We’re going to get started. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done.” Legally there were many more black and white, if you will, issues. The law was, I mean the law did not 6° Carl Dewey Perkins, 1912-1984, represented the 7“ Congressional district in Kentucky from 1949 until his death. 109 favor welfare claimants. A lot of things which we take for granted today, like the right to a hearing and the right to your medical records, if you’re involved in one of these, those things had not been established and they seem very basic. So there were a number of these, almost every time you looked at something involving a poor person against an official in one of these agencies, including the environmental stuff. There was so much to do and so much that needed to be done, that very few others were doing, that the work was very, very interesting from the very beginning. It was very challenging. We were just sort of outsiders, who were not particularly welcome in the community.

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What about among the clientele? What kind of relationship did you have with most of the clients? Was it just strictly professional? And did you feel a good rapport?

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Oh I think people who come to you as a lawyer for free service, especially who are just, who realize that lawyers are there, who want to help them and are interested in them and are treating them like people. And then when they see that in court they are meeting the other side with the same, if not even better, with more competent lawyers, they’re pretty proud of that. And I think the clients have been... always from the first day, even when I was in the Civil Rights Division when I represented the United States, I always admired them a great deal. Most of them had difficult lives, have serious problems. They’re very genuinely nice people. They don’t always have the advantages that the rest of us have. Sometimes in the domestic relations cases, there really aren’t any winners and the children are losers. And I don’t know... we have a lot of debates in legal services about the value of spending so much time on domestic cases. And back then probably the divorce rate was probably twenty-five percent, today it’s over fifty. So, the demand for what we do in that area, because people fight over kids. And the legal system hasn’t adjusted. You have to have a lawyer in these things and there just aren’t enough lawyers to go around. In this area there aren’t enough people who can afford lawyers, so you either have people who go without representation, if they don’t... or they have to look to us. But on some of the larger issues, the consumer cases or even the evictions or the others, that generally oftentimes you have an opportunity, to help someone make a real difference in their lives. As you can see in the case listings that we put together, I think that those are all very significant, very important. I think that’s so, but it was not an easy start. And now in retrospect, it doesn’t seem like it’s not such a huge amount of time. And I think, I’ve always said I don’t twist anybody’s arm to come to this program. You have to want to be happy in a small community and that has pluses and minuses. You can’t get lost in anonymity, which I think small towns have a lot going for them. But at the same time you can feel very isolated if you’re going uphill, and we often are. I mean you’re stepping on toes a lot.

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Does that happen still?

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Well, we still step on toes. I think now there are, we don’t, I don’t like to step on toes if we don’t have to do that. And we try to avoid it and we’ll try to negotiate cases before we file them. I think the program now, thirty years later, has a lot of support and so, public support, so people sort of expect to see that periodically. When they see a case that’s in the paper, where we’re taking on as somebody would say another cause or fighting, filing a case for someone who’s an underdog or who’s against the county or a hospital or against a coal company, they sort of take it for granted. I mean they understand that back then it was very unusual and the clients probably 110 were, I’m sure, supported back then. I just think that people feel a little more empowered today. The economy has been bad, and I think the coal industry over time has done, it has not been very good, without being forced into making changes that are, to require, which require safe mines and low dust levels and environmental measures that make, that will restore the property after mining. All of those things have come... End of Tape 9, Side A 111 Tape 9, Side B

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This is tape nine, side B.

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It seems that companies just won’t regulate themselves. They will not. We’ve seen that over and over again, whether it’s the chemical industry or the mining industry. Because where people are looking for profit, primarily, they don’t want to shut something, a mine down, long enough to fix what’s broken or to take real measures to keep dust levels down until somebody has made them do it. Because every time you do that, you have to slow production down a little bit and you won’t produce as much. So, as a result you have a high incidence of black lung disease and you have an unfriendly worker environment. Finally things have started changing in the last few years. So now I think it’s much more accepted, if that’s the right word, I think people even can understand or they see it happening and they see that that’s probably one of the roles that we play. And that we have done over the years, but I think at the same time they can see that what we do is responsible. That we have good lawyers. That we don’t make up law suits and that generally there’s a good reason for what we do. When we can do something in the community, like the housing project, where we’re working with public officials, who are now, who want to do something for people who let’s say live in substandard housing, out of their own sense of duty or their own feeling that everybody’s entitled to have a decent place to live in. If you’ve got that sort of in county government, then those are people we can work with and not have to sue. I mean, I’d like nothing better than to have us, to be able to put ourselves out of business. (Laughing.) But, I don’t know, I think that’s a long way off.

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You talked last time about your, about a few of the cases... Do you need a coffee break? (Laughing.) Do you, okay, so last time you talked about the Broad Form Deed and how that case was dealt with and the victory that resulted from that. And you talked about the development of the community in David and I’m wondering... and you also talked about the establishment of the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which was called Fair Tax Coalition first, and the work that that organization started on doing. So I think those were the main things that you talked about during this era that you have been in Prestonsburg. I’m wondering if you want to highlight anything else from those years? Go into detail about anything else?

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Well, I think we’ve... there are some other sort of unique things that we’ve done. I think I’m very proud of the work that we’ve done on behalf of coal miners, who have refused to work in unsafe conditions. We established a mine safety project, where we represent those miners in seeking a reinstatement and damages for having been fired unjustly—excuse me—or discriminated against unjustly. I think that’s been real successful. And the lawyer who did that for a number of years, Tony Oppegard, who is now the Assistant to the Director of the Mine Health and Safety Administration, who was an Appalred lawyer in West Virginia years ago. I think that’s been very significant. We’ve represented a lot of disabled coal miners in applications for black lung benefits, this federal program, where so many people, right now, ninety-five percent of the people are denied, because the governmental regulations are so severe and it’s so difficult to obtain the claims. But we still manage... and the private bar hardly does those cases at all. So we’ve worked with the Black Lung Association, Bill Worthington, for example, officers of the Black Lung Association, in trying to get Congress to be, relax those requirements and to have better regulations that are fairer, that we see a more reasonable number 112 of people be approved for black lung benefits. We have won many of those claims, the ones that we’ ve screened and where private attorneys finally gave up. Because it takes so long for private attorneys to get their fees and because they’re so complex and take so long, we’re going to get another lawyer to come in pretty soon, nearer in the next few months to do that. And the mine safety and black lung work sort of go hand in hand. The same thing is true of coal miner, of pension benefits. We had a case we went to the United States Supreme Court on involving pension benefits where we lost. But it really helped them, I think, in some ways to re-write their requirements. But Gracie, it’s the Gracie Robinson case, a woman up here, a widow up in Auxier, whose husband had worked over thirty years in the coal mines, but had not stopped working and applied. And he died in the coal mines in an accident. And the requirements for obtaining a widow’s pension was that the miner should have applied for a pension and stopped working. And since he was killed in a mine accident they said he hadn’t applied for his pension, they wouldn’t give her her pension. We said that was arbitrary. If he’s worked thirty years and you only have to have twenty-five to get a pension. And he wanted to keep working, that it was like punishment at that point. We won and then we lost in the District court and then we won in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and then we lost in the United States Supreme Court. But they did actually re-write that provision in the bargaining contract. But I think the work we do for low, for disabled miners has been really important. I think the... in the last few years we’ve started a migrant farm worker program up in Richmond, where we got some money from the legal services Corporation to help migrant workers throughout the state. We have a very small grant. It’s only about 35,000 dollars, so we’ve done that co-operatively with a program in Texas that represents these folks full time. And we’ve managed to file some of the first cases with respect to working conditions. I mean there are cases where the workers come up here and the grower breaches the contract or at least our workers claim the growers have breached their contract by not providing the working time that they claimed they would or the working conditions under which they would work. And the program, the Western Kentucky program had the grant a few of years ago and they just could not really find the workers and we were, by getting together with the people in Texas, the paralegal from Texas came up and who helped... who helped to do this project, did the outreach work. And oh [YAWNS|] and for example he would meet the bus, the Greyhound bus coming in at one o’clock in the morning at the station and give out his card to the workers and then they would know how to contact him. That kind of thing. And you have to be bilingual, obviously, but I think that’s been a very, even though we have very few migrant workers out here in Eastern Kentucky, there are a number of other areas in the state, especially where they have large tobacco farms in Western Kentucky, that’s where we’ve had so many of our cases. I think most recently the development of our housing coalition here, called LINKS*’, where we’re doing this huge home repair project. With all the groups that are coming in from out of state. And just bringing all these agencies together under one roof, so they can collaborate and work together, I think has been a real positive development. Showing people how they can, I mean we’ve pulled together a lot of different agencies and non-profits, who are all addressing housing issues, into one collaborative. And I think everybody’s been real pleased with that. I think we’ve been able to do that because we don’t have any axes to grind or turf. We just said, “We want to do this and we’re willing to do it if you all will cooperate and we can seek funding together, and do some cooperative work.” And so now I actually am sharing a grant with the fiscal court, which would have, and for a worker here, who is a young woman who came from Jean’s program. A participant, who 1s very, very °” Low Income Housing Coalition of Eastern Kentucky. 113 bright and who has moved up very fast. Who is a single parent. Could go to law school if she were willing. And that makes me feel good. And we’ve had a number of people like that, who are single parents, who have been on welfare, who have worked with us in a training situation over a few months’ time and have really, really sort of progressed so quickly and come out of their shell and have moved on to good jobs. I think we have a pretty extraordinary group in most of the offices. It’s a good program to me, I mean if I go through the senior staff in this organization, I’m just really proud of who they are and what they do. Many of them have been with me a long time and each of them has different skills, but they’re all committed to what we, this representation of low-income persons, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to have lawyers. Whether it’s for a mundane situation or something that is pretty exciting, that will really effect a lot of other people in the future. I think we’ve, I think we do very, very good legal work and I think we have real committed people who are doing it.

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Do you want to say anything, you’ve been mentioning that it’s been kind of a turbulent time for legal services in general. Do you want to say something about your perspective on the state of legal services and what direction it might be taking?

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Well it’s all conjecture. I think those of us who have been doing this a long time are sort of, have been disappointed the last few years, because we really have not been able to get appreciable new funding at the federal level. And this program was established at the federal level to provide free legal services to the poor and to be a non-political program. When it was the last, one of the last things that President Nixon signed, was this Bill that created this corporation. And we expanded and got additional money from 1974 to 1980. And we went from like forty million nationally or fifty, to three hundred and twenty-one. And when Governor Reagan came in as president he was ready to destroy, to get rid of legal services, because of his experience. They had sued him in California. And I won’t go through all that history, but really since the Reagan and that first year, instead of getting rid of us they made a compromise and we lost twenty-five percent of our money, which is a lot. And we’ve never really recouped that money. We’re now still not at the level we were in 1980. So that most of us have half as many lawyers as we did in 1981. We were able to... but there have been many efforts in the meantime in Congress to just eliminate the program. And we’ve been able to forestall that, which says a lot. Because congressional support now is pretty strong. Unfortunately the subcommittee chair for legal services is from this District. It’s Hal Rogers from Somerset. And whereas he’s able to bring back lots of money for other local projects, he has never, either he’s not a fan of legal services, or he is trying to mollify the people above him and the others whom he works with, because his latest... for the last couple of years, that committee has passed out a recommended budget which is only about half the size of our funding level, 140 out of 300 million dollars. And that’s been real disappointing, but he likes to say that he is keeping it going and that there are budgetary shortages, and that the other people on his committee are not as strong as he is. And he would be supportive. And besides he knows that our supporters will be able to get the funding level up on the floor of the House, once it gets to the floor. And that’s what’s happened. But I’m disappointed in him. I wish he were a little more aggressive or could do more at his end, which he probably could if he wanted to. But... excuse me just a moment. In the meantime we ve been fortunate to get some money through the State Legislature and I think that’s been a real positive thing in the last few years, where our own legislators have recognized the importance of legal services. We did not get any more money this year, but we did get a repeat 114 of last year and so about half of our funding is now state funding. I think it’s conjecture, as I was telling you there are lots of possibilities. I think our current corporation feels that it’s more efficient to have a single entity in the state, covering the state. Because the President of the corporation is a former private attorney from the state of Washington, however, where they have a very effective, single state program. Time will tell us what will happen there. I don’t know. And some other... anybody else? I think I sust lost my train of thought.

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Well, it sounded like you were basically finished with your train of thought, weren’t you?

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I was talking about the state funding, right? That we didn’t get any more funding this time or that we were... how far did I get with state funding?

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Said that this year, you’re at the same level that you were at last year. You weren’t cut anymore, but...

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We weren’t cut and we were very pleased that we were able to get additional money last time. We have two sources of state funding, one for the filing fee and one for a general appropriation. And this time, many programs did not get increases. There were a lot of one-time expenditures, like the Science Center, got a litthke more money. But I think a lot of ongoing projects, except for the new ones like the childcare money that I think actually, some of it’s out of the tobacco money. So, this is a year again, where we have no more new money, state or federal. And that makes it difficult because if you want to give people salary increases, you either have to lose positions or something else to free up additional funds. I don’t know whether... and so there is this tendency in our funding agency to pull programs together. There is the thought that state- wide programs are more efficient. I don’t think there is any real proof of that anywhere. I mean I don’t know that they have evidence of that. It may be more efficient to administer, because one person can make a decision instead of four. You might be able to be more homogeneous around the state. I would like to think that legal services is here to stay. I think for the most part it is. I think there are people in Congress, who think of, that it could be organized differently. When I was talking about a state-wide organization. Or whether... I know that one of my counterparts in Virginia would rather be part, consolidate with us, because our client population is so much the same. The Appalachian counties do have a lot in common. Whereas in Virginia you have only, all of the state in West Virginia is in Appalachia. And Virginia, a small part of the state is in Appalachia. So, whether they would allocate enough resources to that one or two programs in that corner is something that time will just have to tell.

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Do you want to take a break and stretch out?

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I think I need...

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Well, the other thing that’s been so difficult with legal services has been the restrictions that Congress has placed on us in more recent years, which prevent us from filing Class Actions or challenging Welfare Reforms, accepting attorney fees, not being able to represent prisoners. Those things all seem to, one could view them as making us second class lawyers. There is no real, rational explanation for them when the preamble to the legal services Corporation Act states that you should not interfere with the professional responsibility to your client. And that clients 115 have the right to have full representation from legal services lawyers. So there’s, it’s not a very favorable atmosphere to work under. It doesn’t mean we still can’t do ninety-five percent of the cases, because many of them still fit into, aren’t affected by those prohibitions. But it is something that needs to be changed. And it’s purely a political affair. And you have the national opponents of legal services, who are always looking for one more anecdote to pull out as being the kind of thing that goes on. I mean, no one’s perfect. So you find somebody’s statistics aren’t quite right and all of a sudden everybody in the country has to be on guard for an inspection, even though we... the way we are funded is by the number of poor people in our areas, not by the number of cases we do. So there’s always a level of, if not harassment, of paperwork that grows and grows and leaves less time for the real work that needs to be done. But at that same time it’s good that we are able to get this money because you really can’t fund this kind of work with private fundraising. You could do a limited amount of it, but not very much. We, I think we’re fortunate to be able to get good lawyers. We don’t pay equivalent salaries. And we have people coming to work with very large, outstanding loans from undergraduate and law school. We’ ve instituted a small repayment program that is helpful. But we’ve just increased our starting salaries to $27,000, which is a big step forward. It’s still behind many of the private firms and many of the state and federal agencies. And then we only go up about thirteen hundred a year for, first for nine months and then for a year. But all the same, I think we’re competitive and we have some good benefits. And we are able, have been fortunate to get people who are really committed. So I am very proud of the work we do. I am very proud of the people who are here and who do the work. We have wonderful relations, I also should mention with the spouse abuse shelters. That’s another project we’ve started in the last few years, 1s to have specialists who work, who represent abused spouses at domestic violence hearings. And we’ ve gotten very involved in that area and I think the family court judges appreciate us and the shelters appreciate us. And it is a huge amount of our practice, more than we would like. But it’s one of those societal problems that we have to deal with, so we are very interested in the rights of children and the rights of these women. Of course, it’s wonderful to have people like my wife, Jean, out trying to help move them, gain some independence and get back into education and develop their careers in a way that they can be productive and independent on their own. I’ve been real proud of the people that have come from her program into my office, both for representation and several who, at least one of whom is employed now as a full-time person here. It continues to be pretty exciting work. I never, never lack for anything to do. Close to the end? End of Tape 9, Side B 116 Tape 10, Side A

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Okay, tape number ten, side A, an interview with John Rosenberg. I guess now would be a good time for you to say something about your work with establishing the Science Center.

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Okay. Well, I was a chemistry major as I think you know, and I think that we’ve always known that the scores of our students here in science and math were very low and that science, math and technology was not valued very highly. So a number of years ago, maybe nineteen, somewhere between 1990 and ‘92, I asked teachers, some teachers to come together and some other folks in the community to see whether we might not start a, developing some ideas for improving math and science, and what they thought. And what we learned was that teachers were very uneasy about teaching math and science. Many of them had very poor backgrounds during their teacher training and they were ill-equipped, especially at the elementary level, to try to present scientific concepts. And they really wanted more hands-on activities to support them. So we, we sort of met periodically and then over the next couple of years. And then I saw a small video segment, or heard about it, about a college up in Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania, Juniata College®®, which had obtained funding for a science van, where a chemistry teacher was driving a van around and dropping experiments off at high schools, dropping off equipment that the schools couldn’t afford to buy. And was like a sort of Johnny or Jeanie Appleseed, would tell school A about what school B had done with these things. Over the course of several years the number of incoming students at Juniata College who were, who majored in or who showed an interest in science, studying science-related courses, like tripled. So, I thought it would be, then got to thinking that we would like to, wouldn’t it be nice if we did something like that. I had not, I don’t think had really thought about the planetarium theater kind of thing yet. But we were meeting and we got a small grant back about 1990, maybe ‘94 as a result of this work and this group that kept meeting. We realized that we could maybe establish a center like that if we could get some funding. So, we got a little money out of the legislature, I think 75,000 dollars to hire a consultant. One of the legislators here in this area, Greg Stumbo°’, was interested in technology and with KERA” having come in I think there was a strong, an atmosphere that was conducive to getting some funding. And I thought we should start off in a small way, so we hired a consultant from West Virginia, Mike Howard, who had worked in the Kentucky educational system, to do some community meetings and help us look at more specifically where we fit and what kind of activities would be helpful. And it sort of reinforced what we had already known in some ways, that teachers wanted hands-on Mr. Wizard kinds of things. And that if we could bring presentations to them and do something like the science van and educational programs, that that would be helpful. And I don’t know where I first came up with the idea of trying to do a planetarium or a science museum or really, I thought it might be nice if we could even replicate a coal mine. But I started, we started talking that up and realized that if we had a modern facility it would be really meaningful. And I also learned that you could, they had these portable planetariums that you could take around to schools, which are little... they call them planetarium in a foot locker, where you blow up, it’s like a vinyl thing and you blow it 68 Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. 6° Stumbo was elected Kentucky Attorney General in 2003. Before that, he served 12 terms as state representative from Prestonsburg. 70 KER

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Kentucky Education Reform Act. 1990 act mandating statewide restructure of the educational system. 117 up in a classroom and you can put thirty kids 1n it that will watch a star show and other educational shows. And so, by the time the next legislature rolled around, I think we got 200,000 dollars. We were able to increase our operating grant and on a fairly short notice we got a local architect to put together just a schematic of what a theater and planetarium might look like and what it could do, and that we would, and that... I think we may have even still been thinking about a coal mine. And we put together a board, I organized a board of directors that included representatives from Morehead and from the Alice Lloyd” and Pikeville College and PCC” and Hazard and the teachings, the science teachers and the regional educational cooperatives to give us a good cross-section of membership and also a good geographical cross- section. And it’s been, and that’s basically the story. And they helped me, we went to convince them, during the last legislative session, our local legislator agreed to get behind it and we made a presentation to the Governor and he liked it and called me at home one day to go over the budget. Wanted to know why I had a budget item for rent. He was very meticulous. “Why do you need this three hundred dollars when you’re going to have...?” I said, “Governor, we won’t be in that place for a couple, few years yet. We need a budget place, we need an office.” But anyway, we got through that with two and a half million dollars, and then this time... so we planned some more, but because of the reorganization of the college, Kentucky college system, KCTCS and UK”, the two years went by without any building. There was a lot of planning, but we just got caught in the upheaval of this educational thing, until KCTCS could get on its feet. So, in the meantime we put together a proposal for another million dollars, probably should have been for more. And after all the wrangling, we were one of the fortunate ones at the end to get the million dollars, because Greg Stumbo, who 1s from here, is a pretty powerful figure and was essentially, he and Benny Ray Bailey, who got beat in this last election, were able to pretty much get all the one-time funding projects through that they asked for. So, now we are, we just last week had our meeting with the architects and KCTCS folks and college representatives and we are settled on where the site is going to be and we have a basic floor plan. And I hope two years from now the building will be standing. It probably will be. And then that means another legislature will have passed and hopefully we might even increase the operating costs of our group. We got a little more money for that. But I’m very excited about what we will be able to do, both for students who are in this region, who can’t really, who never see this sort of thing at this sophisticated level. There is now a planetarium at Eastern in Richmond, which a lot of people don’t even know about. But I think if we do this well, it can stimulate a lot of interest in science and technology. We have now decided to expand our laboratory facility so that we will be able to, from a classroom into a sort of laboratory classroom, so we can do experiments in DNA fingerprinting and other chemical experiments, at least demonstrative experiments. And we’re coming up with what I think is pretty exciting. Our Director we’ve hired is from Pike County, he was born there, although he grew up in Michigan. And we have, as I say, a very good board and so I’m, I think that it will be a very important part of the future of Eastern Kentucky. I think that we now have a new industry in Pike County, a knowledge-based industry, where a call center, Microsoft, 1f you call an 800 number for Microsoft and you need help on your computer, they’ll pick up the phone down there and give you answers to technical questions from their computers, which is a breakthrough in terms, because our coal economy is declining so quickly in terms of the number of people they can hire. So this is an area that we have to 1” Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, Kentucky ”? PCC: Prestonsburg Community College 3 KCTCS: Kentucky Community and Technical College System. UK: University of Kentucky. 118 move into, that I think can have an appreciable effect on kids. People want to be scientists and they want to be astronomers and they want to be explorers and they can see that happen. And I think that’s what the role of this building is going to be. And obviously, you know, we’re going to need more money and I could spend all my time raising money for this facility for that matter. We’re going to be hiring a development director, but I’m very much invested in this project. So that’s what it’s about.

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And are you, what are you picturing your role to be in future years?

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Well, I’ve been the chair of the board since its inception. Whether they’re going to kick me out any time soon, I’m not... but I may, and I’ve been pretty active in that particular role. I don’t know. I mean I think it’s very exciting. Actually it’s the result of, and in part it goes back to my scouting days, because when I... did I talk about scouting before? When I was growing up and Bud Schiele? Maybe I mentioned at the time that that inspired me to sort of get involved with this here. Because we added such a wonderful museum in my home in Gastonia, now, which grew out of a very small effort that started there. And I mean there is, certainly we will need people to volunteer to do everything from just showing kids through the place to actively being a part of the soliciting group or... and I will probably be involved. But I’m still very interested in practicing, in the practice of law. And if I were not doing legal services work, I’d probably be down the street with my friend Ned, and at least part-time working with him or working on my own, or taking in a few cases, because I enjoy doing them. So, I’m not sure that I would just stop and do the Science Center. Or maybe I’d be working with the housing group down here. I think I’d like to get our... I mean when you, it’s kind of getting to what else I’d like to be doing. I have a number of other interests, but I know I enjoy working. And I think when my daughter is out of graduate school and I feel like we have no more immediate important, sort of potentially major expenses within the family that I would stop. I mean I could stop I suppose. But I think it’s a great development. There may be something else that comes up in the community. I mean I’m very involved with the historical group, the Friends of the May House, where we’ve renewed this, restored this old building, which I’ve been a part of for twenty years. And I’m still working on some of their legal documents to get a conservation easement at the moment. And I’ve been proud of what we’ve done in that particular thing. And we need to raise some money, because we want to try to get that building open and keep it open. Everybody that is there is a volunteer and nobody has time to do any fund-raising. And that’s just one of those things. And I know that from my experience where I am here, I’ve done a fair amount of fund-raising. I don’t get a lot of private money, but I’ve written a number of those grants and I know the system that you, how you do it. And I know I could do that there. So, there’s plenty for me to spend my time on. Where I would do it, and I might still, you know, in the practice of law if you get an interesting case and it’s a big case it can eat you up, timewise. It’s like putting together a play or a book or radio program.

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You mentioned your mother a little earlier and what’s your, when you meet up with her and see her, do you, do you usually talk about your family history at this point? What kinds of, what kind of relationship do you have with her?

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Oh, we’re very close. I think she 1s close to all three of her children, maybe more so than ever since my father passed away. And at various times, last time when mother was here we did a 119 little more oral history. I always tend to, it’s one of those things you just sort of get yourself into. You may be talking about Passover and trying to remember what the lemon cream recipe was that she used to do. And then you talk about how Passover was in Germany. And then who their friends were that came to Passover and all of a sudden you’re into some history that you’d forgotten about or when she went off to learn to cook as a young girl. And so she’s still, the stories are still there. Not all of them are recorded. And she still corresponds with people in Germany. Her mind 1s very good and she really enjoys being with us, so it’s fun to travel with her. Jean has a really good relationship with her. I think my father was a very dominant, strong personality, a very smart man. And mother grew up in a small country town. And I think being a traditional, they had a very traditional relationship, where he was sort of the power figure in the family and she cooked and kept house and was very proud of her motherly role, as many Jewish mothers are. But Mom’s really pretty sharp. And I almost want to say I think her mind’s gotten even better in the last few years, maybe because of, by having to be a little more independent and living on her own, she has, you know, it’s broadened her horizons somewhat. But...

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How old is she now?

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Huh? She’s eighty-eight. She’ll be eighty-nine in August, ninety next year. But she’s very strong physically and very, still gets on her bicycle. So she’s keeping up. When my sister took her on a cruise recently to the Panama Canal, they got off at some island to go sight-seeing and it turned out they were going up a mountain somewhere and she still kept up with everybody. And I think people, people are always quite amazed at her energy and her, you know, sort of... she’s very lively and very friendly, very outgoing. People can’t believe that she’s eighty-eight years old. There are others like that around now, who are eighty-five and ninety, who get around and I’m hoping I’m still in that, will be in that category. And I’d like to have that, I suppose I was probably saying I wish I had the time to, since she is so interested in traveling right now, that I would like to have more of an opportunity to do that with her. Or for the three of us to go, but Jean... when you are working, you do it in pieces. And so my brother and his wife have gone to China and so that’s why I went to see her with Jean last weekend. Now we’re trying to plan another trip or two. So I think I was just saying, I wish she were either down here or... I think she’s living in a good situation. She’s in a high-rise for the elderly up in D.C. But she is very dependent on her family, because the people in the house, most of them are her age or older. Well, they’re about, many of them are in their eighties and many of them are not in as good a physical condition, so she’s always helping others. So she hasn’t made very many connections with people who are her age and want to keep doing things, other than come down to eat and maybe go shop for groceries. We see that and so while she is in a mood to want to be able to do that, you know, you kind of want to accommodate her if you can. But I think between the three of us, we can get to do that. But when you have a calendar that is related to your work, you’re limited in that ability. You want to plan a trip in August and Jean’s got to start back to school or something. You can’t just pick up and go as easily as if you were not working at all.

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Has she or have you had any interest in visiting, I know you’ve been back to Magdeburg, but you mentioned it was more of a sightseeing trip. Have you had any strong interest in doing a more investigative trip? Maybe going to Leer where your father was born? 120

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I'd like to go to Leer, actually Jean and her mother went to Leer, years ago, when they drove through. There’s a, I have a film at home. Do you speak German? By a German, by a filmmaker, whose name I’ve forgotten at the moment, that I just—Mother hasn’t seen it. I was surprised. I made a copy for her—of a homecoming to Leer by members of the Jewish congregation. You know many of the German communities have sort of welcomed back members of the Jewish community, who lived there and who emigrated because of the Holocaust. And there is this group that came back to Leer. And there’s a film about that group. Now there were no relatives of mine in that that I know of. But I would be interested, actually when we were in Washington last time and my mother, I was looking for the phone book actually, which is in a closet. And it was sitting on a little book that, I can’t remember the name, in German. It was a German recipe book, in which you wrote recipes and Mother had kept it. And there was a folded up piece of paper in there and it was a letterhead of my grandfather, of my father’s father, Meir Rosenberg, who was a junk dealer, who, unfortunately committed suicide when my father was very small. Killed himself. But it was his letterhead, on which my mother had written a recipe. And she didn’t even know she had it, I just happened to unfold that piece of paper. And the recipe is just something she’d been... wrote in like a little notebook. But it covered many years. It was like she started 1t when she was a new bride. It was actually bought for her when she was going off on this trip as a young girl, when they sent her off to learn to cook, to a pension that was near Frankfurt, which didn’t work out. So she brought it back and started writing. And it begins in German. I think over at the end some of the recipes are actually in English in this country. But she had that thing from Meir Rosenberg, which I don’t know where that came from. And my father, of course, was in a school, in an orphanage in Hanover. And I’ve never, because when his father died after a few years during the Depression, there were nine kids at home and so his mother just physically, could not economically take care of them and she sent three of them off to an orphanage in Hanover. I’ve never looked into, I don’t know much about that period. And his brothers and sisters, of course, are dead. I think one of his sisters, who is now dead, who went to Israel, did go back to Leer and sort of close the chapter on that. And I don’t know the business, you know, went out. We did go to Mother’s home. I think I may have mentioned. The butcher shop and the house where she lived was torn, was no longer there. The houses on either side of the house... which I suspect is due to the fact that her dad ran a butcher shop and they slaughtered animals. And when he went into the, when they left in 1936 and it was taken over, they continued using it as a butcher shop and I think it probably just rotted. Because of its use and constantly having water and blood and other... being used as a manufacturing facility, probably just, you know, decayed. But we met a number of her contemporaries in that town. There’s still a club of her schoolmates. I may have mentioned that the first time around. I don’t remember.

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Yeah, you did, yeah.

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So, you know I have some interest. I don’t know that I feel like a genealogist. We do have a family tree at home, which one of the distant relatives in Norfolk Virginia did, which identified a number of people who are related, that I didn’t know, some of whom we now know. And my brother did a family tree that goes back pretty far on my mother’s side. And there are a lot of her relatives are in the Chicago area. And cousins and cousins I’ve never met, some of whom I’ve talked to. Magdeburg, I thought was interesting. Berlin is... I mean in a way, to me, the attraction to Germany is that I know the language and when you are there, you know that there’s 12] this, because of the language, that sounds like a language you know or that you know the nuances, even if it’s your... fourth or fifth grade, that there’s very little language barrier. The language brings with it a familiarity. Not that it’s home, but it’s like home. That this is a place you’re from. And it doesn’t evoke all that hostility in me now, thirty years later. And I would be interested in whether the Jewish community, the Jewish community in Magdeburg and a number of the urban areas is growing again, not huge, but is growing. And Berlin is an exciting city. I think more from a tourist standpoint, wonderful museums and they are the parts of Germany I’d like to go see. But I don’t know that I would spend a lot of time trying to dig out more information. It’s interesting, when I saw that. And last time I was up there I saw... and I now have, or I came across my father’s, the certificate that released him from the concentration camp, which you’ve seen copies of, I’m sure, other copies of. And that sort of thing. I think they’re very significant. And I think Michael, our children are interested in this history. How much of it... and they are somewhat conversant with it. Well, I don’t guess either one of them have been back through this, I would... I’m just as interested in taking them to England, where I spent quite a bit of time in the Service. But I think both of them probably want to sort of look at this in their own way.

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Have they asked you and did they ask you much as they were growing up about what you remembered about your early years before you left Europe?

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Oh yeah, I think both of them have. At various times we’ve talked about the history and then they’ve read about things that I’ve written obviously. They’ve read my talks. And they’ve heard, both of them have talked a good bit with their grandmother. And I think they’re both cognizant of the effect 1t’s had on the family. That it is an important part of our history. It would be nice to, I don’t know if we’d ever have the time to re-do it all, but neither one of them have been to Europe yet. I hope they go. We’ll see.

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I’m wondering about, I’ve been trying to kind of frame a big, biggish question for a while. Maybe it’s not a question, maybe it’s just an observation, but you’ve, in your work have kind of devoted yourself to people who, really you naturally don’t share a whole lot in common with, I mean as far as your own background and your own tradition. And in some ways that’s why... because those people were separated from mainstream culture and because they were disadvantaged in various ways, that’s why you felt the need to work with them. But yet it seems that your own tradition as a Jew and as a refugee from Nazi Germany has been an important part of your identity. I kind of wonder how you’ve kept that connection with your roots and with that tradition alive and whether that’s been a difficult balance for you in a context that’s so separate from it. I think so many Jews and in particular so many refugees, so many survivors have felt the need to be among people who really understand what they’ve been through and who had experienced something similar to what they’d experienced.

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Well, I don’t know. I think some people just feel the need to continue to... I mean I think you have stated it, that there are people who want to be in an atmosphere where they think others are, that only people who have been through something like that or close to it, can understand them. Maybe it’s just like our veterans or sometimes they’re the same thing. I mean, I’ve appreciated being in Eastern Kentucky very much, in terms of also learning about this culture and its history. 122 The crafts and the independence of people who are here and their ancestors. I’ve always admired people who have lived in a rugged way, and appreciated the environment, and... End of Tape 10, Side A 123 Tape 10, Side B

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I’ve always liked being in smaller towns. Just the trusting nature of people who are in smaller communities, whether it’s Gastonia or whether it’s rural people generally. And people who, we used to, I used to say when I worked selling chemicals up North it’s... again you never, you always wonder about generalizing, but it’s like when you’re a salesperson, if you walk into a place in the South, people assume that they can trust you until you prove that you are not trustworthy and do something wrong. And then you’re done for. As opposed to going into many of the urban places where one might think that, they begin by thinking they can’t trust you and that you’re going to pull one over on them. And it takes a long time to have them either trust you or have some confidence in you. That’s probably, you know, it may be that that’s old hat. I think there’s still a lot of that here. And that that’s just sort of being country people. I don’t know, in terms of not having that much of a surrounding, maybe part of that may be the fact that I’m married to a Quaker. I mean I did not marry someone who 1s Jewish. And we accommodate that to the way we want to, and once you... so you make somewhat of a break from the tradition that permeates the homes of Jewish couples and families where both couples are Jewish. So, Jean is, obviously gave up some of her ties to being in a Quaker environment where she was a very much involved in young Friends activities and probably never foresaw that she would be married to somebody who was Jewish, although Quakers are very, probably the most tolerant group, religious group that is out there. So maybe that has something to do with it. You know, I can never look into somebody else’s brain and I don’t know what motivates people, why people happen to be narrow-minded or not narrow minded, or what... You know, there are great differences among Jews, as you were saying at lunch, in the way, in the philosophy of the Holocaust Museum and how it should be run. I have, my mother’s sister, at least one if not both of them, but one of them for certain, would say she would never step foot into Germany again. I mean there are many Jews who came from there, who think it’s heretical to go back to Germany and would never forgive anybody and would draw the line in the sand. Whereas Mom went back and would go and continue to have some correspondence with people. And they were very touched to see her and she was touched to see people she went to school with. My ties, and you know I still have very good friends who I went to school with in North Carolina and Gastonia and that sort of thing and in the Service. I think it’s all, I guess it’s one humanity. I mean I think you just, you kind of try to get the most out of what you can, wherever you happen to be. And that has been pretty, I think that in terms of relationships here hasn’t been that hard. I think the most difficult, the big difficulty is that, one difficulty is that most of us who are professionals in legal services or in others, who are in a helping profession or if that’s the way we choose to live our lives, in a sense we live a pretty, we live, really, a middle-class life with our own surroundings. And we have most of what we need. We are not disadvantaged the way our clients are disadvantaged. On the other hand, our value systems are totally different from our counterparts in private practice or in the business community. So we don’t share a lot of their values. And so you have to kind of make your own life and if you need a lot of friends in the community that may be difficult. And I think to some extent that’s why you have turnover in communities. Or because you become absorbed in your own world and you do stay so busy and you do enjoy the work that you do, that that takes up a lot of your time. Which is some of, I think, the kinds of stuff that Jean and I keep going, that keeps us going. Whereas in a place like Washington, even if you’re working all the time, you’re... and legal services is probably that way, you’re socializing and working with the same group of people, because you’re always 124 together. And so you don’t really need a lot of outside help. I think that’s... and that’s why I said earlier, the school, I think when your kids start to school, you start to develop much more of a base in the community and you meet parents. Maybe even socially your friends become, at least for a few years, the parents who have kids in schools like you do. And that social engagement helps to, I think, draw you into the community and start thinking about things like a Science Center. I mean the first ten or fifteen years I was here, the idea of, you’re just going uphill all the time. And even the idea that, that you might be working together with the business community. I mean when I was filing these coal cases, the very notion of trying to seek funding, from say the coal council that’s given the Science Center some money to design coal exhibits. I would have said, “We can’t do that.” We had a big debate, I was on a Bar committee that was doing a booklet for the elderly, health care for the elderly and rights of the elderly. And whether we should get money, accept money from Humana, because we were suing Humana. I said, “I don’t want any of Humana’s money.” Well, we eventually took Humana’s money and gave them a, I can’t remember. The other committee members said, “Let’s get the money, don’t worry about it and give them a little acknowledgement. You can sue them. Let’s get their money.’

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Get their money twice.

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Right, get their money twice. Those are philosophical issues that are hard to grapple with. That’s why I say, now that I’m sharing a grant with a judge. I sued that judge, ten years ago ina strip mining case, he was in the Service. And we’ve had a couple of knock-downs, but he wants, he’s very... I think he, you know, he’s like a lot of other political figures, but he came up the hard way and he wants to see this be a better place to live. And he’s willing to invest his time to try to improve housing and clean up garbage and do things that bring in industry. And as long as we don’t bump into each other over other things, I think that’s a good thing to do. And so those are the kind of things that help make being in the community more, when you start thinking well maybe we can do things with others and make this a better place for everybody, even if we have to step on some toes. The problem in agencies like these is the temptation with many agencies, of course, especially state, to jump over, it’s too easy to get co-opted. And so you, as you were talking about, the problem in the museum or any institution, if you start becoming cautious because you’re afraid somebody’s going to cut your money off, or you’re going to lose your job or something is going to happen, then you lose the effectiveness. And I think we’ve been able to avoid that, I think, pretty well. I think people know, have known me, that I don’t want to get into that position. And the people on both sides of the fence, that I’m not going to do that. If I did that, I'd stop one or the other. That I think that... it doesn’t mean that you can’t compromise. But it is, you get put into those positions and that’s hard, especially when you have funding sources that are problematical. I mean, that’s hard. Like the migrant cases, when we had some publicity in one of the migrant cases that we filed and people went screaming to Congress. My counterparts are worried we’re going to lose the money in the State Legislature if they find out legal services is involved in this case. That kind of stuff can be really hard, and you just try your best to get through it. But I’m pretty pleased with where we’ve come. I hope whoever takes over will keep it going that way. Most of the people who run my offices, I think, have that philosophy. I can’t remember what you asked.

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Oh, it was a while ago, it was that big, that big kind of question. 125

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Did we ever talk about the end? Did I ever give you the answer to the big question?

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Well, I think you addressed it, yeah.

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Oh, you asked about the identity thing.

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Yeah.

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You know I don’t know, sometimes it’s hard to know, to answer. And you can go on and the reality is you don’t really know the answer.

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Sure.

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You just have some ideas.

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The questions are just kind of little ways of getting you to talk about things anyway. (Laughing. ) They’re not necessarily to find out the answers.

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You’re wonderful at pricking, at getting somebody started. And I can begin to see why some people, why someone like yourself does so well. I mean this must be hard just to listen to folks go on, but you can see why some folks start writing books collaboratively and are willing to just sort of, finally you turn it all over. Say, “Well, just ask me and I’Il talk a while.’

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People like me love listening to stories, it’s fun. (Laughing. )

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One thing I’m not good at is, I don’t have many stories. I know there are people who can tell them. Jean’s father is a marvelous storyteller and he’s ninety-two. And he remembers jokes. I mean hundreds of jokes. And I try to get him, have gotten him to put some down on his computer or to type them up. Because he, Jean knows, has heard many of them. But it’s amazing. And I cannot remember a joke five minutes. I'll hear one and think it’s wonderful. Boy that will be easy. I won’t forget that. I can’t even remember the punch... it just does not stay with me.

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I think you underestimate yourself, because you’ve told a lot of stories in this... I mean, we’ve got ten tapes full of...

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Of something!

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Is there anything you want to say to close the interview?

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To the world? To the world?

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Here’s your chance. (Laughing. ) 126

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I don’t know. I think give Arwen Donahue an award for having listened to all these hours of going on. I don’t know that there’s much more to add. I feel very lucky. I mean I guess I just would say whoever, if you think back on the fact that I was born into a Germany... I think that my father was in a concentration camp. If you think back on all the experiences that I’ve had, I’ve been a pretty fortunate person to have been through all these various experiences and to have people appreciate them and to be where we are today and to have so many different connections. I think one of the nice things that Jean and I’ve been able, have had a nice opportunity to do is just, we talk about Sherry Arms today. There’s so many of those people, either in the Service or in the law, because she’s in the work that she’s in and because of our interest in education, we’ve just met so many people across the state. And have had a chance... and if it wasn’t education, it’s the people, those couples she taught childbirth to, because many of those kids are growing up now. When you go to the grocery store and they say, “Look Jean, that’s my twenty... see that, he’s that baby!” And here’s this guy about six feet three inches tall. And you see all these, you know, you kind of look around you and you say, well, you’ve had a little opportunity to do something that made a difference over time. I mean it’s not over yet. It’s not an epitaph.

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I don’t know if you’ll ever have one. You just keep going.

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Well, people are getting older these days, aren’t they? What is the oldest person you’ve interviewed?

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That’s a good question, probably ninety. There’s a, I don’t know, have you heard the things on NPR? The Hundred Years of Stories? A friend of mine, who’s producing these. I won’t transcribe it.

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One of these involved...

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Why don’t you repeat that you are going to talk about a couple of cases, because I didn’t get that part either.

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Yeah, I was just going to tell you about a couple of... when you said is there anything else and then we started talking about stories. And I said I didn’t really do very well with stories, which I don’t. I’m not a storyteller. But I thought I might mention a couple of experiences, just about legal cases that I was involved with that I don’t know that I’ve mentioned. The first one is one in the early ‘70s or in the early ‘70s that involved the Paintsville Housing Authority. A family, part Indian, named Elsie, the father was named Elsie Dale. They lived in a shack, in an old house and their house burned down. And so he applied to get into public housing and they wouldn’t let him in. So, I went over there and when I got there Elsie had taken some of the charred timbers that were left and put them up against an old automobile, his car. And the family was living there. And they applied for public housing and they wouldn’t let them in. They wouldn’t let them in because the community treated them as black, not as... I mean Indian. They were dark-skinned. But they were very poor. And so we went to the Housing Authority. We started investigating. And it turned out that the Housing Authority had also threatened to kick out some unwed mothers. And then there was a guy named, what was this fellow’s name? He was a veteran. A single father. They didn’t want him to... he wanted to get in with his child. They didn’t want 127 him in. The woman who was running the place, Maxine somebody, was very... she let you in if she knew you. It was who you knew. There was nothing fair about the system and she just didn’t want them in the project. So, we filed a lawsuit. It was one of the first large cases that we had filed. And on the way up there, I had to get, we had a hearing, we were to have a hearing in Lexington for preliminary injunction. And we were trying to get the witnesses together. And that night I was going to pick up the fellow who was the veteran. And I couldn’t. He wasn’t at home. And I finally found him and he was drunk. And I had to get him up there. And so I finally got him in my car, and we got as far as Salyersville and I filled up the gas tank. And he was riding with me. And he wanted, as we were leaving the gas station, he wanted to get out. And he was... what did he want to do? He started to hit me. I threw hot water in his face. Oh, I threw my coffee at him. And I remember the coffee spot stayed on the side of the car. So, we then drove, we started driving, I had this old Peugeot in 1970, because Jean and I had bought it to take a camping trip. We brought it to drive down here. We had a ‘59 Volvo and we had this old Peugeot. And we had like a ‘62 or ‘66 Peugeot, which we had taken on our camping trip. So, we got halfway to Lexington and I started having car trouble. I got out of the car to look under the hood. And my witness, who was still partially drunk, then locked me out of the car. And the stars were out. I remember, it was a beautiful night. He wouldn’t let me back in. What was his name? Elvin... Anyway, I bet I was out of the car for about half an hour. He finally let me in. We got into Lexington about 1:30 in the morning. Next morning he was sober, and he got on the stand and he was a very, very good witness. And I had a blow-up of this big automobile with the timbers and Elsie Dale got on and testified. He had four kids. He needed a four-bedroom unit. And the clerk of the court started crying. I mean it was so sad, they wouldn’t let him in. But the judge would not order the Housing Authority to let them in. He said I could try to prove that there was further discrimination and as it turned out that day... And the unwed mothers, Effie Pickelsheimer was her name. She testified. We put on a strong case, but the judge was not going to do anything that day. So anyway we came back. But I always remember throwing this coffee. Thirty years later. What was his name? He had a short, fat... he eventually, the same person was indicted because he shot a guy in the back, who had started a fight with him. And I went to visit him in the jail about twenty years later after that particular... Crum was his second name. It wasn’t Elvin Crum, what was his first name? Well, we ended up having a number of grievance hearings. I got the know all the tenants in that project. This case went on for about two years. In the meantime they were tearing down a new section, an old section of Paintsville. So we were able for Elsie, he really wanted a house of his own. And as part of the settlement of this case we were able to get him a Farmer’s Home House built by the Community Action Agency. He never got in the housing project. But they were such a nice family and you knew the only reason they didn’t live in the project was because they were not white. We did finally get a very good, agreed court order that required them to set up a very fair system. And for years after that they wouldn’t... anytime there was a question about whether somebody should get in or not, they would call me, because they didn’t want to go back to court. But it was a case that went on forever. And finally really was resolved in a very favorable way for the clients in that housing project. I was thinking, another, when we talk about the effect cases have, I represented a group over from Pike County, who, they were supposed to strip mine above their, they were going to strip mine this holler above their homes in Poor Bottom off Maribone Creek over in Pike County. And the families were worried that the strip mine was right over their houses and that the rocks and boulders were... So when we looked into it, we learned that there were deep mine workings that had been worked out inside the mountain and that if they strip mined around 128 the front side, they were in danger of hitting those old deep mine workings which were filled with water. And the water would then potentially be a real problem to the people down below. It just could come out in gallons and wash away houses. So we had a couple of hearings in Frankfort and one of the lead plaintiffs was named Edith Easterling, who was very much involved in the case against the McShurleys, which is when the Appalachian Volunteers were here’*. I don’t know if you now about that? There was this series in The New Yorker about this couple that was arrested by the local prosecutor. The case went to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Anyway, Edith’s daughter was name Sue Kobak, she’d married a young man in Washington. And she was home and she went to the hearings with us. And they couldn’t find, we were the only folks that could represent anybody because it would cost a fortune. There were no lawyers around who would represent this community to try to stop the strip mining. It had actually already started. I had a wonderful expert, a guy who had been an inspector. And she went to the hearings with us. And I didn’t know this until later, after she got home, she applied to go to law school and went to law school as a result of seeing this experience. And actually an experience that had a favorable outcome. The administrative judge said that we were right in that they had left, this information about the water in the old workings was not on the permit application. And that he considered it to be a danger to the family and they stopped the strip mining operation totally. Edith Easterling a wonderful person, a remarkable woman. And I didn’t know until after was in... and Sue went to law school and had a difficult time as an Appalachian student for a couple of years. She later married a doctor in Clintwood and she’s a city attorney in Clintwood, Virginia. I was just thinking back about those sorts of human, and you become... you were asking me earlier, you become very close to your clients. She had organized that little holler. And it potentially was a really serious problem. We did a lot more strip mining work than we have in recent years because some of the lawyers who worked for us are now doing that in private practice. I just recently represented somebody in Letcher County, whose name had been left off, their property had been left off a mining map. They just left them off because they didn’t... and they knew, they knew that she owned the property that they wanted to mine and that she wasn’t going to let them mine. And so they left, they thought, I think, they could get away with it by just leaving their name off the map, which they are required to put on to show the property that they intend to mine, figuring they might just pay her damages when it was over. And she was outside, this is an older widow, looking up there and saw the trees getting cut, coming over the hill. It was one of the cases that I did. And then we stopped them from going any further and the state agreed that they should not do that. So I don’t know, I was just thinking back on Elsie Dale and the people you get to meet in these cases, who have to be pretty gutsy to stand up against pretty moneyed interests, who pay big bucks for lawyers and who hire people in the community, who hire their... I think one of these folks had a son who was a truck driver for the same company that had mined, that was mining that strip mine. You’re always running into that, that sort of situation. But in every one of these cases, you know, whether it’s in legal services or it’s the discrimination cases like Fannie Lou Hamer, and the people who... Eulah Hall always reminds me of, you mentioned Eulah Hall. You know Eulah and I went to Washington together because in this health care case. I don’t know if I mentioned that the first time, when Eulah started this clinic and I was telling you this morning earlier about the medical clinic when they wouldn’t let these folks do this medical thing. What happened then, we asked for a hearing and she was my witness and I took her to, we went to Washington and we had an administrative hearing. And they came back down here and did a big 74 Vista workers arrested under Kentucky Sedition Statute 129 investigation and they threatened to close it. They ended up reorganizing it with a new board of directors, and...

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RG-50.549.05.0007

They threatened to close the clinic?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Clinic, yeah. The clinic, the program that was in being, because it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. And then so they ended up reorganizing that clinic with a new board.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

The Mud Creek Clinic?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well that’s what turned into the Mud Creek Clinic, which is now a nationally-known clinic. Back then it was called, yeah, I guess back then it was just the Mud Creek Clinic. There was a period of time, it went through several phases, where it was called Big Sandy Health Care, whatever... back then it was really under the Community Action Agency. But eventually it became the Mud Creek Clinic. Then that clinic burned down. Jean, she got her nursing degree, did her internship out there after it had been burned down. They put a phone on the telephone pole. And Eulah kept the place going in her house. No one believed she could do it. In three weeks she raised like 200,000 dollars over the telephone. And this was a social worker with a fifth-grade education. And she raised enough money, maybe it wasn’t two hundred, to build a new clinic. And it’s been expanded several times since then. Now they have a dental clinic and a daycare center and it’s a real wonderful institution. That was a place, the only place... and a good friend of ours became a doctor there. That’s the place where we took our kids. Now it’s run by a federally-funded group called Big Sandy Health Care up here. They also run a clinic in Magoffin County and one in Pike County. And Eulah has stayed right with it. I mean she’s won these wonder woman awards. She’s on lots of boards and lots of committees. And has just kept on, but day to day she’s still the social worker out there. And she’s represented people in social security and black lung cases, and has really learned it. Recently had her picture hung in the Capitol in that Women’s Galleria, you know, one of those, the Kentucky Commission on Women, Women of the Year things, or whatever they call them. I’m real proud of her. I think she’s quite a testimonial to what people can do when they want to do it. And she worked with us for a few years as an outreach worker with Appalred. So those are the people you come across, you know. Hard to beat, right? Well, I guess we can call it a day.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Okay. Well, thanks.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Oh, I should also mention.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Yeah?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Did we ever talk about the Jewish community in Williamson?

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