Anamosa - A Reminiscence 1838 - 1988

has been on the bench.
When a judge takes office, he not only takes on a new
job, but a different way of life. Not a better or worse way
of life. just different.
It immediately becomes manifest when you are
hovered over by persons trying to anticipate and satisfy
your every whim. Clerks come immediately to the
counter at county offices. Some lawyers, whose
fondness for you was previously carefully concealed.
start laughing at supposed witticisms of yours that
even you didn't think were THAT funny. Your parking
place is zealously guarded by the attendants. Your have
a rent-free ofiice — no, not an office, a CHAMBERS. You
are given a new security blanket, called a robe.
When you enter a courtroom. people rise. You don't
sit behind a platform, you are on the bench. You are not
addressed as Bob Ford or even Judge Ford, but as Your
Honor. People don't just come up to the bench. They
ask to approach your august presence, presumably to
bask in it, while they advocate their point of law.
Attomeys' criticisms are muted and veiled in words
as delicate as a lilac bud. They don't say — to your face,
anyway — that you are wrong, or worse, but that
“perhaps. in view of the court's heavy workload, your
honor didn't have this latest decision called to his
attention or perhaps we were not clear in our
presentation ' '.
People come to see you, and always at your
convenience. All of this is a little heady, and you begin
to feel that perhaps you don't need the bridges to get off
the courthouse island (in Linn County) when you go to
lunch. You begin to believe that your most banal and
trite comments about the government or the weather
are profound observations.
And you refer to yourself in the imperial “we. "
And you have the power to send people to prison, to
separate children from parents, and make or break
business. All in all, an important job that you would
iind completely satisfying and, except for the
unpleasant aspects to which I have just alluded, a most
satisfying life.
But there is a price to be paid and the bill soon
becomes due. You are never more popular than when
you first enter the bench. This popularity erodes, like
the soil of an Iowa farm, when you make your first
decision. At best you can only make half the lawyers
and litigants happy at any one time. You begin to notice
that, in the vernacular, you are ceasing to be ‘one of the
boys.’
I ask you sometime to try this experiment when you
are with people on a vacation with whom you are not
acquainted: When they ask your occupation, tell them
you are a judge. You will iind it is a real conversation
killer. They look at you as if you were an undertaker.
To avoid this, I once told some people in another state
that I was an insurance agent, but it didn't help.
Conversations with some laymen who were friends
become stilted. They do not call you by your first name.
They think you want to talk only about court cases.
They start to tell of a will contest in Wisconsin in which
their cousin was involved. They think you care whether
Klaus Von Bulow was convicted or acquitted.
Conversely, they believe you care nothing about the
Hawks. or are indifferent about the fate of the Cubbies.
(A lawyer told me once of a friend of his who had seen
me at a basketball game and was suprised that judges
went to games.)
Then there are those who are not so admiring. They
tell old jokes like God borrowing a judge's robe to help
him feel divine. etc. Judges are blamed for the high
crime rate, and when one does something about it. he is
known, not affectionately, as ‘Maximum Bob.‘ When
we are easier, we are branded as soft bleeding hearts. A
person once critically told me that criminals hated to
see us go to our semi-annually judges‘ conference in
Des Moines because there was no one left in town to
give them suspended sentences.
Some believe that pomposity is our strong suit. They
do not terribly mind if we stop for a beer as long as we
do not appear to enjoy it. But, as a result, not only are
we political eunuchs, we are almost classified as
inanimate objects. Granted, we do not take vows of
celibacy. but the verbal nomenclature lends itself to
this concept of being inanimate. We are referred to in
the third person as “The Court." Although we make the
decision. it is not personified. The Court did it, not Bob
Ford. You listen to jokes in your coffee group about “we
can't have a football pool; the judge is here and he
doesn't like gambling." In schools, our kinds were
asked if they were narcs.
As a district judge once told a Supreme Court justice,
“It's also lonely in the middle."
The Jones County Calf Case
Forward
by Bertha Finn
The Jones County Calf case has been cussed and
discussed, cited in legal cases and published in many
newspapers across the United States. The suit, which
began in the old courthouse in Anamosa when Robert
Johnson was 37 years old, would last for 20 years.
Attorney Charley Wheeler, who defended him
throughout the many court proceedings, described
Johnson, the first time he met him, as:“tall and
straight as a lance." He had long tawny hair. He had a
full tawny beard. He had smiling grey eyes. His hair
and his beard made Bob look like a lion, and that is
what he was. He was one of thoserare men whose
courage mounts and grows. Trial judges were setting
aside our verdicts, and the supreme court was setting
aside our judgments, during all of those years old Bob
was just the same. He never weakened. never gave up
151
and one day he walked to his modest home, greeted his
faithful wife Mary Ann (who had stood by his side
through all the trials), and sat down in the kitchen with
her, and he dropped his head, the first time he dropped
gis proud head in his life. She went to him and he was
ea
In a correspondence received by this writer from
former Anamosan, H. Leslie Wildey, an attorney.
practicing law in California at the age of 92, and
alluding to one of the Millers involved in the calf case
wrote, “The Jones County Calf case has quite a place in
legal lore. I recall sitting on our porch facing First Street
and ‘old man‘ Miller drove past. He was driving a horse
about 15 years old, in a high wheeled iron rim sulky.
and my father commented, ‘there goes everything that
is left of three fine farms" . The rest had been consumed