October 2007

Grandma Was a Lawyer

by Jennifer C. Rydberg

Not many of us have the privilege of having grandmothers who were lawyers. Mine was born on a small tobacco farm in Carlisle, Kentucky, in 1900. While it was a tough existence, her family was better off than most at the time. In 1918, Grandma took two suitcases and a train ride to Washington, D.C., to seek her fortune and build a life. 1928 found her with my two-year-old mother, pregnant, without a husband, broke, and in the beginning of the Depression. She returned to the farm, where my uncle was born.

Grandma, whose husband had developed amnesia and left after suffering a devastating brain injury, was not content to be a farm daughter. Once my uncle was weaned, she left her children on the farm and traveled to -Cincinnati, where she found employment as a stenographer in the Veterans’ Administration, and a room in a boarding house across the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky.

Lawyers were lucky to have any clients during the Depression, especially paying ones. Several Cincinnati lawyers banded together to teach law school classes at the Cincinnati YMCA Night Law School (years later absorbed by the University of Kentucky) as they attempted to provide for their families. Grandma, an intellectual person, decided to get a law degree there. Grandma was 32 when she started, and worked five-and-a-half days a week as a clerk-typist, attending classes at night. She shared a double bed and a bedroom with another roomer in a widow’s home. After expenses, her meager earnings were sent to her mother to pay for her children’s needs. She financed her law school education by borrowing against a life insurance policy. Friends gave her clothes. Her landlady refused rent while Grandma attended classes, but Grandma still contributed her share to the food kitty that was used to purchase food for all the tenants. My great-grandmother, by then a widow herself raising my mother and uncle and running the tobacco farm alone, wrote her: “I am glad you are taking the law course and in time to come I am sure that you will do something with it.”

Grandma finished law school and graduated on June 18, 1937. My mother, then 11, remembers that she was allowed to pick out a $2.98 dress for the occasion, instead of choosing only from the $1.98 selection in the store, which, for her, was a very rare treat. Grandma’s bar review course book, now in my office, was very similar to the bar review materials I remember studying 30 years ago, as were the practice questions.

On September 18, 1937, Grandma and her family drove a car to Frankfort, where Grandma appeared before the Kentucky Supreme Court to be sworn in. My mother was allowed to sit on the front-row polished bench to watch. Her most striking memory, though, was celebrating the occasion by going to a restaurant, getting chocolate pudding for dessert, and paying for a meal — an unheard-of extravagance at the time. Later that week, Grandma was mailed a letter by the court clerk requesting the $6.50 license fee. She was requested, “in order to expedite the matter,” to send “a post office money order or certified check for this amount to save the delay in having a personal check cleared through the bank,” something she most certainly did. Her law school diploma and certificate of admission to practice are proudly displayed in my office.

World War I veterans still had Veterans’ Preference Points in 1937, so after earning her law license, Grandma continued to work as a clerk-typist. She accepted that, and did not consider that she was treated differently from a man or subject to any discrimination. Once World War II fully involved our nation, she finally became eligible for a position that utilized her education, and moved to the Adjudication Division of the Veterans’ Administration. She served on administrative review boards that determined the eligibility for exemption from military service of men who had been drafted. The job required a command of medicine as well as law. Because she was a woman, she served as a citizen member of the review board, not an attorney member. Again, she simply accepted without complaint what would today be considered an unacceptable discriminatory slight. She considered herself fortunate to have a job that had allowed her to support her children through the Depression, including sending my mother to the University of Kentucky and my uncle to a high school academy. To save money, she continued to reside in boarding homes. As a woman, she was given assignments in fairly undesirable geographic areas, away from her family.

When World War II ended, the veterans came home, again with Veterans’ Preference Points, and Grandma was demoted for a year or so from her high-paying $4,520/year authorization officer position to a clerk-typist. She considered herself fortunate, again, that she did not lose her job as many women did throughout the country at the end of the war. She was eventually reinstated to an attorney position. This resulted in moves to Lexington, Louisville, Columbus, Philadelphia, and eventually to Huntington, West Virginia. Huntington, a coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, was considered a hardship location, so Grandma was given a significant raise when she moved there. It was in Huntington that she retired from the Veterans’ Administration in 1966 with what she considered to be a generous pension.

Grandma maintained an active interest in law and politics throughout her retirement years. Experienced in administrative and Constitutional law, she watched every minute of the Watergate hearings, and deplored the deterioration of ethics in law, politics, and business.

It meant a great deal to Grandma when I chose to go to law school myself. We stayed in close communication during those years, although jurisprudence was not often a topic of our conversations. She financed a third of my law school education, which occurred in far more comfortable circumstances than did hers. When I graduated in 1977, she stayed with me for the occasion. I was still studying for final exams when she arrived. I vividly recall her picking up my administrative law textbook, and caressing it as she always did her books. My administrative law professor, a Seattle civil rights attorney, was a remarkable orator who had been a product of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, and was a contemporary of Joe Kennedy, who died in World War II. I was to quickly find out that Grandma’s mind was as well-honed as his. She simply moved her fingers down the table of contents, which listed topics and U.S. Supreme Court Cases spanning more than two centuries. Grandma, then almost 78, knew those cases like the back of her hand — the subject of debate, the holdings and minority positions, and which justices stood on each side of the decisions in all of the cases — and described each of them eloquently. I simply sat in amazement as I listened to her.

My law school application required that I answer the topic, “Why I wish to go to law school.” I knew my initial answer at the time to be too self-centered and materialistic to be acceptable, so I turned to Grandma for help. My reasons for being a lawyer have long since become more altruistic. While I cannot recall what I submitted, Grandma picked up her red ball-point editing pen, wrote this on her legal pad, and mailed it to me.

It is a universal and never-ending study. From the earliest historical period laws have been enacted enabling people to enjoy certain rights and privileges and requiring them to perform certain duties. Law enters our lives from the hour of our birth and may not leave even with our burial.

History shows man has learned moral and ethical standards from the history of religion and law. Unjust laws or laws wrongfully interpreted can ruin a man’s life or destroy a nation. The study of law requires a search for truth and facts about many other professions, such as medicine, commerce, banking or agriculture. I think I will find law very, very interesting and that I will be better qualified to know what to do to promote the welfare of my country and its citizens as well as myself.

Ruby Flanagan Buchanan Wrench died in 1983, having made the world a little bit better with her commitment to the rule of law, the Constitution, and the role lawyers play in the order of our lives, and in pioneering the places we women have in law today. 

Jennifer C. Rydberg is a solo lawyer practicing estate planning, probate, and family law in Kent. She and her husband raised two Eagle Scouts. Her website is www.jcrlaw.com.