Interview. with. Joseph B. Cheshire, V. October 7, 1994 November 23, By Mary Elizabeth Jones

Transcription

1 Interview with Joseph B. Cheshire, V October 7, 1994 November 23, 1994 By Mary Elizabeth Jones Law School Oral History Project University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Original transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection Louis Round Wilson Library Copyright 1995 The University of North Carolina

2 Interview with Joseph B. Cheshire, V October 7, 1994 November 23, 1994 By Mary Elizabeth Jones Law School Oral History Project University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil Original transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection Louis Round Wilson Library Copyright 1995 The University of North Carolina

3 INTERVIEWEE: JOSEPH BLOUNT CHESHIRE, V INTERVIEWER: MARY ELIZABETH JONES PLACE: RALEIGH, NC DATE: OCTOBER 7, 1994 Tape 1, Side A MARY ELIZABETH JONES: We each take a person, and each member of the class interviews one person for the semester. JOSEPH BLOUNT CHESHIRE, V: Oh, and how did you happen to get stuck with me? MJ: Well, you were on the list. I'm not from the area and you were one of the few names that I actually recognized, and I thought it would be really interesting. We seem to have a lot of judges and there weren't too many criminal lawyers; just a name I recognized. JC: It's too bad. They're the best lawyers. MJ: Why do you think they are the best lawyers? JC: Because they're not afraid to deal with real issues, real people; they do what lawyers historically have done and that is try to help people, as opposed to make money. MJ: You've certainly taken on some of the -- I guess it would be the most difficult kinds of cases, some of the criminal defendants and some of the lawyers you've handled as well. JC: Yep, I sure have. You want me to sit over there or you got your little recorder right here. 1

4 MJ: Yeah, and it looks to me from what I can see over here like it's picking up just fine. JC: Okay. So do you have a little form that you go by, do you, to do these interviews or-? MJ: We have some general recommendations and we'll just go from there. JC: Well, ask away. MJ: One of the things that I found really interesting about you was I understand you come from a long line of lawyers. I think you're the fifth generation? JC: I'm the fifth straight, firstborn male of the same name to practice law in North Carolina; all their law licenses are right behind you, and all their pictures, except for mine, are there on the wall. MJ: Fifth generation; how far back in time are you going? JC: Well, the first law license is up there on the top left. You had to be licensed then in the county for one year and then the state. I can't remember whether it's 1836 or something. That was my great-great-grandfather, who's that gentleman with the halo around him there. MJ: He's the one who was a bishop as well? JC: No, his son was a bishop. The bishop is up there on the top right there. Joseph Blunt Cheshire the first was an interesting man. He lived at Hayes Plantation. Old man Hayes, at that time, was the largest landowner in North 2

5 Carolina and basically owned northeastern North Carolina, and he had no heirs. He took my great-great-grandfather on, and was going to turn over his business and his holdings. He had him read the law and was teaching him the plantation business, and great-great-grandfather became a lawyer and was very successful and very good at it, but he was called to the ministry. Old man Hayes told him if he went into the ministry, that would be the end of their relationship, and he went into the ministry anyway. MJ: So was it not practical for him to do both, ministry and- JC: No, well, Hayes didn't want him to be [a minister]; and he wanted to be a minister, and he ended up being the rector of Calvary Church in Tarboro for fifty years. MJ: Fifty years. How long did he actually practice law then? JC: Not long; I believe five or six years, something like that, and then great-grandfather followed the same course. He was a very successful young lawyer, and then was called to the ministry. He ended up being the Bishop of North Carolina and a very famous man. He was very active in civil rights, way before his time. MJ: Around what time period was that? JC: Well, the bishop quit being bishop before I was born and I don't know when he started to be the bishop, but he was the bishop for a long time. I think he stopped in '45 or '46, something like that. So he was the bishop through the '30s and the '40s, which was a pretty difficult time to be an advocate of civil 3

6 rights, which is what he was; and he was a real modern man, very learned man. He was a writer. And then my granddaddy, who is his son - the bishop had three sons: one of them was a general in the Army; one of them was an archconservative and moved his portion of the family to Hillsborough; and the other was my grandfather, who was a very gentle - in fact, I just visited his grave today and his headstone reads "A Man Without Guile." He was a wonderful man, a sweet man. He was deaf, and yet he was president of the State Bar and a very, very fine lawyer. And then of course, my daddy, who was his son, practiced law with my grandfather for a while and then started his own firm; still practices. He's the chancellor of the Episcopal Church, as was my grandfather. So there's a long line of church folks, as well as lawyers. MJ: Do you think the two blended well together? Do you think religion had any effect on the way they practiced law? JC: I think those four men - and I like to think myself, in many ways - are unlike a lot of lawyers - very human people, not a lot of airs, say what they think. Our middle name is Blount and we've always - all Cheshires have been blunt. They're kind of renowned to say what they think, and tilt at windmills, and go against the tide, particularly when it comes to human relations kinds of issues, and I think that that's probably tied up very closely with our religious heritage and our particular brand of Christianity. Lots of people have different brands of Christianity, and the brand that we have always been taught has been an 4

7 extraordinary forgiving brand of Christianity, an embracing brand as opposed to an excluding brand. I think that ties in a lot with the type of people that each of us are, and I think that that's been passed on from generation to generation by the way we were raised, that what we were taught were proper values. MJ: Going back to your great-grandfather the bishop, what were some of the civil rights issues he was involved with? JC: He was one of the bishops in the United States to integrate his churches; that was a pretty big deal. MJ: I guess it is, that recently in history. JC: Yeah, it's hard to believe. When I was a little boy we had black and white fountains, and I'm not very old. I know my dad was one of the leaders to integrate the bar and my dad's only seventy-six, so when he was not much younger than I am, he was leading the fight for blacks to actually be members of the North Carolina Bar Association. I mean, it has not been very long. A lot of things have changed. When I was at Wake Forest Law School we had two women in the entire school, and now half the class are women. We had maybe two or three blacks in the entire school. So things have changed a lot and historically there's not a lot of time that's gone by in that, but my greatgrandfather was a very renowned civil rights advocate at a time when certainly that wasn't very popular. My grandfather was a very renowned civil rights activist, as was my father, as was I. I was blackballed at several fraternities in Chapel Hill because of my feelings about black people. That's been - I think the 5

8 integration issue in my family has probably been one of the driving forces in my family for at least four generations and something that I think we're probably real proud of, at least I'm proud of it. MJ: Do you think their stance on civil rights hurt them much? Do you know any stories about trouble in the community, or ostracism? JC: Well, I think the Cheshires - certainly our blood flows as blue as anybody's blood in North Carolina. We have been here for a long time, and we've been in the upper crust of society and intelligentsia and all of that stuff in North Carolina for a long, long, long, long time, and we have always been looked at, kind of, as the - I don't want to say black sheep because I think that's wrong, but people know where we stand. While we've caught a lot of grief for it within the upper class, they also have a tremendous amount of respect for our willingness to say what we think and do what we say as opposed to a lot of people who talk a good game and don't do it. So I think most people have respected our ability to do that. And then of course there's a large segment of society who has a great feel for you when you are willing to take that kind of stand when other people who are privileged do not take such a stand. So I wouldn't say we've been pilloried in the community. I certainly would say that people think we're a little strange. And of course, they're probably right. But I think the Cheshires, the lawyers, have been damned with a - or blessed with a real deep sensitivity to those who don't have as much as we have, and I'm very proud to be a member of a family that has demonstrated that kind of sensitivity through public service in a 6

9 way that I think is appropriate. It's a very fine lineage; it's a very difficult lineage to live up to. My son is named Joseph Blount Cheshire VI; and he is a firstborn male, and he has felt an inordinate amount of pressure. I think that the pressure on him - I think with each generation the pressure becomes greater for a number of reasons. There are more people to live up to and with the incredible attention of the media, in this day and time, when a person is successful everyone knows it as opposed to a smaller group of people, so everyone expects you to live up to your dad and that's a hard thing to do. MJ: Or your grandfather. JC: Or your grandfather or great-grandfather. For years and years, I practiced law all over the state of North Carolina, and until about six or seven years ago, every time I would go into a county, no matter where it was, people would come up to me and say that they wanted to meet me because my greatgrandfather had baptized them, or consecrated them, or married them. It was amazing. I mean, old women and men would just come up and want to touch me because my great-grandfather had touched their lives. He apparently was a great man. I never knew him. But he was very short, looked like Santa Claus and was a great preacher, apparently. MJ: Do you feel that your heritage has been kind of a mixed blessing? I mean, in terms of, on one hand it's been very positive, and on the other hand, it's a lot to live up to? 7

10 JC: Well, I think in a selfish way I'd say it's a mixed blessing because when I was a young lawyer I used to suffer myself internally, not externally, with people believing I had what I had because of who I was, and that used to bother me because it wasn't true. But during that time I was also very, very proud of it, and as I've grown older, I've been even more proud. You can see the biggest wall in my office is dominated by their law degrees and their pictures and paraphernalia that, for the most part, addresses them or my practice. So I can't think of a family that I would be prouder of being a member of. MJ: Did you ever think about not naming your son Joseph Blount Cheshire? JC: Not for a moment. The only time I ever thought about it was after I grew up and got mature enough to realize what kind of a yoke I'd put around his neck. If I were having a child at my present age of forty-seven, I would not name him Joseph Blount Cheshire VI, and I've told my son I hope he will not name his son, if he has one, Joseph Blount Cheshire VII. But he has told me that once you get to be the sixth, if you have a son, there's no way you can be the person that stops it, and I understand that. MJ: Would you like him to be a lawyer? JC: I suppose the answer to that question is yes, I would like for him to be a lawyer, but there's a very, very large part of me that hopes that he won't be. This has got to stop some time. I wanted to be a high school teacher. I wanted to coach sports and teach history. And I don't really know if I'm a lawyer 8

11 because of the fact that I was motivated years ago by the reading of The Diary of Anne Frank, which is my memory, or whether I'm a lawyer because all those other people have been lawyers. I know that played a part. And if my son wants to be a lawyer, I hope he'll be one, but he says to me, quite frequently - of course he's a child of the '80s, my oldest son - he says to me quite frequently that he doesn't want to work as hard as I work, and if a lawyer has to work that hard, he'd really just as soon not be one. So in many ways, I hope he won't be. It'll take an awful lot of pressure off an awful lot of people. MJ: How old is he now? JC: He's twenty. That's him in that picture right there on the left. MJ: You have two sons? JC: I have two boys, John and Joe. John's more likely, I've always thought, to be a lawyer. He's a little more self-possessed, although Joe would be a fine one, if he'd get his mind to it. But law is not all people think it is; you'll find that out. MJ: In what way? JC: It's become a mean-spirited profession, I think. Winning has become much more important than doing the right thing. Even when I started practicing law in the early '70s, people would - if you slipped up and missed a deadline, people would say, "Gee that's okay; I do the same thing." Now they rip your heart out. If you really knew that you had a client who came in who had $100,000 and was willing to spend 50 [$50,000] and you really knew that they 9

12 weren't going to succeed, and it was in their best interest not to do what they were going to do, you would be proud to tell them not to and convince them not to; now too many lawyers just take the money and stir the fight. I think probably all of culture is like that. The other very difficult thing about being a lawyer, particularly if you happen to be a good one and care about it, is that it's very bothersome to have the vast majority of society hate you because you're trying to do the best you can do to benefit your clients. I've got a lot of friends who are dentists who say how hard it is to be a dentist because everybody who comes to see them hates to come see them. We don't have that problem because people generally like their own lawyers and hate all other lawyers. But society has cast us in a role that, to some degree, we deserve, but to some degree, we don't, and it's tiresome to be hated simply because you're trying to do a good job. MJ: I'm interested to hear you say that because a lot of the older lawyers and judges that have been interviewed, especially men who are in their sixties, seventies, eighties, they always remark on that, about how much pleasanter it was to practice in the earlier days. I'm surprised to hear you say that because I wouldn't think it would have changed that much. JC: Changed unbelievably. MJ: When do you think the change started? JC: It started in the early '80s. You know, there's been a lot talked about the Reagan Revolution, and when you use the term "the Reagan 10

13 Revolution", I don't think you're necessarily are trying to classify bad things to President Reagan. But I remember I used to go speak to students all the time at Chapel Hill for years, and Wake Forest, and other law schools, and young lawyers, and until about 1981 or 1982, every time I would speak, at the end of the speech the young lawyers and law students would come up to me and want to know how they could make a difference and [were] excited about the prospects of getting out there and representing poor people and people against big corporations. Never once did you hear the word how much money could I make. And then in the early '80s, all of a sudden, the first question that would come [was], "Well, how much money do you make doing what you do? How much money can you make being a criminal lawyer? How much money do you pay for starting salaries?" I'm just not saying this is the legal profession. I think it was the entire society for years and years. I've always told young lawyers - 'cause I've done very well practicing law, but making money has never been my top priority - and I've always told people that if you will practice law and not care about making money, you will make a lot of money. If you go to work practicing law caring about [nothing but] making money, you may make money, but you'll be a sorry human being. I really think the law turned away from being a profession and became a business in the early '80s, and lost a lot of its humanity and caring, plus the fact that law schools became cash cows for universities. When I went to Wake Forest in 1970, Dean Weathers allowed people into Wake Forest who he thought were good people. I mean, you had to have some 11

14 minimal amount of intelligence and minimal scores on the LSATs and stuff, but basically, if you were a good person with common sense that wanted to be a lawyer and you had the right kind of motivation, he'd let you in. Then in the '80s, all of a sudden, it became it doesn't make any difference what kind of person you are and how well you're motivated to help people or be a lawyer, all that mattered was what were your grades and what were your test scores. Well, the truth of the matter is that very good lawyers, quite often, are not brilliant people. Very good lawyers, quite often, are people who are motivated through common sense and decency to want to help people, and quite often people with huge IQS [who are] highly motivated to get grades have no common sense, have no scruples, have no idea what life is like outside of the technicalities of a book, and I think, to a large extent, that's hurt the profession. We're not like doctors. Doctors have to be really smart. They've got to do a lot of technical stuff. Unless you're a tax lawyer or an estate planner or something like that, you don't have to be a genius to do this for a living, but you do need to have a lot of self-motivation and common sense, and I think that hurt us, too. But of course when I started practicing law in Wake County there were thirteen people on the indigent list. Now there are like 300, and that's added to the destruction of the camaraderie of the practice of law too, the numbers, the population growth and all that. MJ: Do you think there are just too many lawyers, period? 12

15 JC: Oh, I think there are a lot too many lawyers. Well, let me change that and say I don't think there are too many lawyers; I think that there are too many lousy lawyers. And I think that there are more bad lawyers than there are good lawyers. I think that's sad. So, as long as you have lots of good lawyers, I think that's fine. But when you inundate the population with a lot of bad lawyers, I think that's the problem. MJ: When you say lousy, I assume you mean not so much their ability to practice law as their ability to be what you would consider professional? JC: I'd say both. I'd say technically lousy and common sensically lousy and lazy lousy. I'm generally not a great admirer of the quality of people that we have been turning out as lawyers in the last twenty years. MJ: I guess, obviously, the first starting place would be to cut down on the number of people they're letting in, but... If you were going to go to the University of North Carolina and they're going to make you dean of the law school, what would you do? JC: I would start by having a more real study of the people I was letting into law school, and I would attempt to figure out some way to study their backgrounds to determine what kind of people they were as opposed to what kind of brains they had. That would be the first. And I would refine the curriculum to do away with a bunch of the esoteric crap, for lack of a better word, that "nationally recognized" law schools feel like they have to teach to people. I would teach much more of the practicalities of the practice of law; I would spend much 13

16 more time teaching ethics and responsibility and professionalism and common sense approach to problem solution. I would try to institute an intern and residency program. I would probably try to expand law school to four to five years for the purpose of having an internship and residency program, which lawyers would get paid to do, as doctors do, so they could learn from good practitioners how the law should be practiced. And I would try to instill more practical aspects of law. I would try to expand the teaching of the law as a societally helpful profession. I mean, professions - we're supposed to have four, aren't we? We're supposed to have the media, which is not doing a real wonderful job, and I separate them out; we're supposed to have doctors, lawyers, and ministers. And truly the professions were all designed as professions because we were supposed to help people, to benefit society. I'm not sure we really do that any more, and so I'd like to see more of that brought back. MJ: That's interesting, because you're talking about going back to the way probably your great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were in the law. JC: I think we'd be much better having people read the law. I think you'd be a whole lot better lawyer if you spent three years reading the law under me than you would be going to Carolina for three years. MJ: Well, the one thing I noticed is, I am working as a clerk now, and I find the law interesting, but I find my clients and their problems a lot more interesting than the cases, the cases you read in the book, and you [inaudible] get something out of it, but once you put a face to it, I think- 14

17 JC: One of the beauties of being a criminal lawyer is that except for the exceptional case, you really don't need to know much law. You need to be a much better minister, sociologist, psychiatrist, financial planner, family consultant than you do lawyer, and I think that's one of the reasons why - although it's very difficult because people put the burdens of their life in your hands - it's different; it's a more holistic approach, and we are different and we're looked at as different by the regular bar. But you're right; dealing with people's problems is what we're supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, now the vast majority of lawyers who are in power, in control of state bars for example, are the corporate lawyers who represent the big corporations and never see human beings. I mean, they see another suit. But they never see people and they never see what their policies affect, and I think that's a little bit sad. MJ: Did you study ethics when you were at Wake Forest? JC: I did, yeah. We had pretty heavy ethics at Wake Forest due to Dean Weathers' influence. He was an old Southern gentleman, and he believed in ethics a lot. That's not to say it all took, because I've got three or four members of my law school class who are presently in prison, but a lot of that has to do with drugs and [a] changing world and all of that, but I think that the ethics that we were taught was basically read ethics opinions. That's really not what I mean by ethics. We need to have situational ethics. Lawyers need to come talk to law students about the real world and situational ethics. In my practice of course, I have two specialties. One is representing lawyers and one is representing people charged 15

18 with crimes, and we find - Alan Schneider, that young fellow that stuck his head in here who works for me, he specializes entirely in professional responsibility law - and we find that a vast majority of the lawyers that we represent for ethical violations have no earthly idea of what the ethics code is. We represent lawyers here in 1994 who have no idea that lawyers are supposed to have trust accounts. It's stunning what we see. MJ: I know at Chapel Hill we have to take one two-credit class in a three-year period, and there's really not enough time. JC: I think you should take a two-credit class every semester in ethics. Ethics is the most important thing in life, much more important than whether you understand some concept of the UCC. I mean all - UCC, you can open it up and read it and research it. You can't do that with ethics. I mean, you can open up the red book or the RPCs and read them, but ethics is a situational thing; it's a life thing. It's something that you have to be exposed to in a real way and we don't do a very good job with that anymore. MJ: Do you think that's because we expect people to be coming out of law school prepared for these things, which apparently they're not? Do you think there's not as much mentoring? JC: I think absolutely. There's no question about that. I don't think people that come out of law school are prepared for anything. I mean, my law school years - and I think I got a good legal education. Wake Forest, when I went there, was a good North Carolina law school, kind of like Campbell is now; then 16

19 they had to worry about being nationally recognized so they went to pot, in my opinion, but I don't think... I mean, I may have accumulated a lot more knowledge than I realized, but I can't remember one single thing I ever learned in law school helping me in the practice of law except the West Key System. Other than that, I can think of nothing. Maybe it taught me how to think more analytically, a little bit, but it didn't prepare me for going in a courtroom or dealing with a crying mother or understanding the concepts of - not the legal aspects, but the concepts of why one corporation would want to take over another, or what really is meant by estate planning, or how to advise someone about their financial situation, or how to advise two partners who are having an internal dispute as to how to stay together, or how to deal with a husband who wants to leave his wife when he shouldn't. I mean, nobody - and you walk out at twenty-three or -four years old... See, the problem with being a lawyer today, in my opinion, is you can't walk out of med school at twenty-three or twenty-four years old and operate on somebody in a brain operation without going through your internship and being monitored. You can walk out of law school and try a death penalty case the day after you get your license. You can open up your office and destroy someone's estate plan in five seconds and nobody teaches you how to do those things. When there were many, many less lawyers, I don't think law school was any different, but the difference was that there were so few lawyers that when you 17

20 came out of law school you knew you were going to get mentored because you were going to go to work for a lawyer who would mentor you, and if you didn't go to work for a lawyer who would mentor you, there were so few lawyers that everybody knew what you were doing. If somebody saw you screw up, they wouldn't let you. They'd grab you - I had it happen to me when I was a [young] lawyer all the time. I'd be up there doing something in court and an older lawyer would stand up and say, "Your Honor, can I just have a second?" and he'd grab me and take me in a side room and say, "Joe, you're messing this up; let me tell you what to do." That doesn't happen anymore. MJ: I guess things are just so competitive now. JC: Well, I knew it was going to happen. People used to tell me right after I got out of law school, that when a teacher would assign cases, people would go into the library and try to find the case and somebody would have ripped it out of the book. That's when I said, "Boy, we're in trouble!" MJ: You said you didn't learn much useful in law school; where do you think you developed your sense of what is ethically correct? JC: From my dad and from my high school, Groton School. I went to Groton School outside of Boston. I think I learned a lot of ethics from that. I think ethics, to some extent, is kind of innate. Robert MacMillan always told me that - he's an older lawyer here in Raleigh, very prominent older criminal lawyer - he always said, when you're about to do something, if any part of you questions whether it's right, it's probably not; and I've found that that's exactly correct. 18

21 MJ: Do you find that any of the ethical rules artificial, or do some of the things that they require you seem counterintuitive to you? JC: A lot of them, yeah. One of the problems with ethics rules is that they are developed by people who sometimes don't have an understanding for the particular thing that they are passing the rule about, or [they] have a dog in the fight, on one side or the other, and sometimes that can be real difficult. You know, now, in this day and time, we're dealing with all this sexual stuff and what effect does the accusations of sexual harassment have on the lawyer's ability to be a lawyer, and that's an interesting area. You know, we're about to begin imposing morality questions on whether or not a person should be able to be a lawyer, and I think that's a little dangerous, but some of the technical issues of ethics are sometimes pretty problematic, but I think mostly what Robert MacMillan said is true: if you guide yourself by if you ever doubt anything you're doing, you're probably doing wrong. MJ: Well, given how strongly you feel about this area, why do you defend lawyers who are in trouble? JC: Well, I find that a lot of lawyers who are in trouble are people who can be saved. I'm one of these people who strongly believes that you ought to get a first chance. I like to take people who are in trouble and try to help them understand why they're in trouble and try to give them another chance. I've found that in doing that with lawyers, you can really create great lawyers. Sometimes you don't; sometimes the people you represent are just terrible people. 19

22 But sometimes they just don't get it, and if you can show them the right way - or sometimes they have an alcohol problem, or a drug problem, or a relationship problem, or a financial problem - then there's all kinds of things that you can do for them. It's the same reason I represent other people in trouble. I mean, it's not really any different; representing lawyers in trouble is no different than representing people that are charged with crimes. MJ: But how many lawyers are actually willing to do that? I mean- JC: To do what? MJ: To represent lawyers who are in trouble? JC: I'd say it's a very, very small group of people. Lawyers can be very difficult clients, too, I might add. MJ: I would imagine so. JC: And generally I have to be kind of hard on 'em, but I find that lawyers who get in trouble and are willing to deal with it, like I said before, can be saved and turned into great people. I've always - for example, although I wish I didn't have to pay as much taxes as he's made me pay, I kind of like Bill Clinton better than I liked George Bush because I'd rather have somebody whose problems I know than somebody whose problems are all in the closet. I think that sometimes people that are really human and they wear their human-ness on their sleeve, or they get in trouble because they're like all the rest of us but they just kind of got caught, can end up being better people than those people that we 20

23 don't quite know what they're doing back there living that pious life that they like to paint themselves as living. MJ: Is that maybe why some lawyers are uncomfortable? They know they're not quite as ethically correct as they should be? JC: Oh, I think - you know, I'm representing Mark Kirby, at the present time, in this billing case - and my favorite expression in the whole world, I guess, is "bit dog howls," and I'd never seen so many pious, particularly big-firm lawyers howling about the case of Mark Kirby. It's very rare that you can examine anybody's life and see perfection. I think that probably particularly goes for our profession. People put an awful lot of faith and trust in us, and when people put their faith and trust in you, there's a lot of room for abuse. MJ: Going back a little bit - when you were growing up, how conscious were you of the fact that your father was a lawyer? I mean, did you hear a lot about his work? Did it influence you much? JC: No, I went away to school when I was twelve. The world was a different place in the '50s, when I grew up. Your daddy rode the bus home in the afternoon; you met him at the bus stop at 5:00; you went and threw the football. You knew he was a lawyer, but newspapers didn't write much about that stuff; you didn't have a TV to listen to all the conflict in society. He was kind of just your dad, who was a lawyer and- 21

24 Tape 1, Side B JC: You'd have to ask people who were practicing law back in the '50s, but I don't think that lawyers were - I don't want to say as special; I just think they were different. They weren't in the spotlight quite as much, and their children didn't know they were in the spotlight. When I grew up, it didn't feel like it was anything special; he was just my dad. I knew he was a lawyer; I knew his dad was a lawyer; I knew all that, but he was just my dad. MJ: Did he work long hours? JC: No, he got on the bus at 8:00 in the morning and got off the bus at 5:30 in the afternoon. He'd go into the office on the weekend, occasionally, but it's not like I work. But I think life was a lot simpler. When I started practicing law, we still had carbon paper and typewriters. That's really hard to believe because I'm not an old man. We didn't have automatic typewriters, much less computers. The Xerox machine had just showed up and it was one page at a time. There were obviously no FAX machines and all that, so technology has made the practice of law a lot harder, not easier. MJ: Does it make it move a lot faster? JC: It makes it move a lot faster. I mean, you used to have two or three days to worry about if somebody sent you a letter, and you could kind of pretend you didn't get it on Wednesday because they knew you might not have, and then you knew they wouldn't get your response back until Tuesday. Well, now you get a letter at 9:00 in the morning and somebody expects to have your response back 22

25 at 10:10 in the morning on the FAX machine. The unfortunate thing is it's allowed you to do three times the amount of work you used to do, and yet the cost of it has required you to do four times the amount of work, so - when all this stuff in my office came out, it was all "the whole world's going to be better, [because] we've got all this technology." Well, the whole world's not better; it's worse. Everything just happens faster. MJ: Well, at least you can check for typos. JC: Yeah, I can spell-check now because I can't spell, so - but I don't like computers. They intimidate me. MJ: Are you an only child, or do you have brothers and sisters? JC: I'm an only child. I have no brothers and sisters. Like I said, I went away to school when I was twelve, so I kind of feel like I had thirty-five brothers growing up because I went to a boys' school, but I wish I did have brothers and sisters. MJ: Did you have much extended family nearby, like cousins or anything? JC: Nope. Just me. MJ: Do you think you were a lonely child? JC: Very. I had lots of friends - I've always had friends - but I think I was very lonely. Being an only child is not easy. The statistics, unlike what people's perceptions are, show that only children are generally the most successful. I think it's because they're so driven. But it's not a great way to be, 23

26 particularly when you get older. When you get older you wish you had some brothers and sisters to call about Mom and Dad getting older and talk about things when you worry about them. I don't know if you have brothers and sisters, but it appears to me that all my friends who have brothers and sisters have a whole lot easier time talking to them than they do to other people. MJ: Well, you know, it's different. You may not have - I have an older brother, and on the one hand, we don't have a whole lot in common, but on the other hand, you have something that's kind of absolute. JC: He's your brother. MJ: Yeah. JC: And your mom and dad are your mom and dad. MJ: Right. JC: For better or worse. Well, I have a wife who I've been with for twenty-seven years, so she's kind of like my sister, brother, mother, father, best friend. MJ: Are your parents still alive? JC: Yes, still about the same they've always been. My dad's seventy-six and my mom's seventy-two. MJ: Do you live close to them? JC: Yeah, they live here in Raleigh. I mean, we live out in the country and they live in town. MJ: I guess you've pretty much lived in Raleigh all your life? 24

27 JC: I've lived here; it's been my home all my life. I went to Groton School when I was twelve, and left there when I was nineteen and came to Carolina, and went to Wake Forest, was in the Army for a while and came back here; so I've been here most of my life. In fact, almost all of my life until we moved out in the country, I lived within a mile two different houses, but within a mile of each other. MJ: Has Raleigh changed a lot? JC: Oh, my God. When I went to high school, Raleigh was 62,000 people; Gary's bigger than that now. I mean, Raleigh was just a tiny, little place. It's unbelievable. I go back and think about it all the time. There was no Crabtree, there was no North Hills, there was no Six Forks Road, except it was a country road. You know, the Beltline was woods. When I was a little boy I lived on Buckingham Road off Lake Boone Trail, and there was no Ridge Road. There was nothing past there. I mean, that was the farthest out as you could go; unbelievable. It's gotten to be a big city. North Carolina's changed; it's just changed and not for the better. MJ: It's attracted a lot of migration in the last few years. JC: A lot. That's why we call North Hills, the whole north Raleigh area we call the "Yankee ghetto." MJ: I keep hearing people make remarks about north Raleigh and I never quite understood - 25

28 JC: Yankee ghetto. I guarantee you it's eighty percent Northerners. They all vote Republican. It's just different; different world. MJ: Can you tell me about the house that you grew up in? Do you remember that house you grew up in very well? JC: Oh, absolutely. I started off growing up - in fact, I just walked around it today. My grandmama and granddaddy's house on Ambleside Drive, they built it back in 1916 or something. [A] beautiful old two-story white-pillared house. It's just a gorgeous old Southern home with big old oak trees and no air conditioning, of course. In the summer you would smell the outdoors; [it would] be warm in the house, but the shade trees would keep it kind of cool. And of course when you didn't have air conditioning you were never really that hot because you were used to not having air conditioning. Now we have air conditioning so we're really hot if we're not in the air conditioning. Then we moved to a little duplex which is now a State College fraternity house. [We] lived there for a while until I was three. My first two memories in life - one is playing in the side yard at my grandmama's house, and the other is watching a cardinal on the bird feeder at that little duplex. Then we moved out to what was the real suburbs out there at Lake Boone Trail. I guess our house was maybe 1500 square feet and was considered a very nice house. By today's standards, people would not think a prominent lawyer would live in a little house like that. I loved that house. I used to ride my bicycle to school every day, ride it back home, run it up in the yard, run up the front stairs, open the door and yell for Mama, and she'd 26

29 always have some cookies for me. It was very pleasant times. You had a little neighborhood with all your friends in it, played ball in the front yard. Different today. Kids miss a lot. I think sometimes that maybe I was in the last generation of kids that grew up that way. MJ: Not quite. JC: Before TV, before cars, before malls. A little bit different. MJ: I take it your mother didn't work? JC: No, my mom didn't work. Well, she worked - she wouldn't like me - like jurors; you have to say that to women jurors: "Did you work outside the home?" Because you'll only one time make the mistake of saying, "Do you work?" and have a woman look at you and say, "Well, I don't have a job outside the home, but yes, I work." You only have to hear them say that one time to never make that mistake with a juror again. But she was at home. MJ: Do you know anything about your parents' courtship and how they met? JC: I do. My grandmother was Russian - my mama's mama - and she married and fell in love with my grandfather, who was head of the YMCAs in Russia before the revolution. He was a Baptist minister, and during the revolution, of course, they left Russia and came over here and my grandfather taught at Vanderbilt. My mama was working as a telephone operator, and my dad was in the Army in Nashville. They met there and had a courtship and married. I had a very famous and highly visible pornography trial in Nashville about six years ago, 27

30 and the federal courthouse was right across the street from the chapel where my mother and father were married; so I had the chance to go into the chapel on my way back and forth from this horrible pornography case, which I always thought was an interesting thing. MJ: Interesting juxtaposition. So you have ministers on both sides of your family? JC: Yeah. My maternal grandfather was a Baptist minister and junior high school principal most of his life. You know, Baptist ministers back in the old days had two jobs - one real job and one ministerial job. He was a neat old man. I never got to know them real, real, real well, unfortunately, but they were fine people. MJ: Were they too far away? JC: Well, they were a long way away back in those days. I really don't know why. I guess you depend on your parents to make you close to your grandparents and they never seemed - I don't know whether they were not interested or whether they were a long way away or - I know that my mama's family were very right-wing, mostly because of what had happened in the Soviet Union. They hated Communism, and I think they half considered my family to be Communist. I think there was a lot of tension between my father and my mother's family politically, and I think he kind of chose to, rather than have problems, just to stay away from them. MJ: Do you think your mother minded? 28

31 JC: I'm sure she did. I think my mama's always been very sad that she didn't spend more time with her family. MJ: Does she have brothers and sisters? JC: She has a brother, who was a U.S. Attorney in Idaho and is now general counsel for Boise Cascade, which a very large paper company. He worked his way through law school jumping into forest fires and decided he liked it out there, so he stayed. And she has a sister, who lives in North Augusta, South Carolina, whose husband was one of the first jet test pilots for the Air Force, and a brother who's a forester. Kind of a diverse family. MJ: How did Russian immigrants end up in Nashville? JC: They kind of ended up everywhere, and I really don't know. They went through Vladivostok; and a lot of the family stayed in San Francisco. Granddaddy got a job teaching, so that's where he ended up. To tell you the truth, I don't know how they got from Nashville to North Augusta, South Carolina, where they spent most of their life, but that's where they lived most all of their lives. MJ: How old were your parents when they were married? JC: That's them right behind you, holding me. They were pretty young. They got married - Daddy'd not gone to law school, so they got married pretty young, kind of like me and Caroline did. They've managed to live together all these years. MJ: Was it during World War II? 29

32 JC: Yeah. MJ: Did he serve overseas? JC: No, he was a military intelligence officer. He'd follow people around Tennessee that they were afraid were spying on the atomic bomb thing at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, so he had a pretty cushy war job, I think. Probably a good thing; I wouldn't be here [because] he might have been killed. MJ: That's always a possibility. Did they have a very long courtship, or was it one of those wartime... JC: I think it was pretty quick, one of those wartime jobbies. Of course, the truth of the matter was, when I met my wife, I would have married her the next day if I could've talked her into it, so maybe it's in the genes to meet and marry in a hurry and stay married for a long time. MJ: You were saying you originally lived in your grandparents' house; I think that was your- JC: My daddy's parents; my daddy's mommy and daddy. MJ: Could you tell me that story you told earlier today about - was it your uncle Fred? JC: Which one? MJ: You spent the night in his room? JC: You want to hear that story for the tape? You like that story? MJ: Yeah. I think it's a great story. 30

33 JC: My Uncle John was born in He was my daddy's younger brother, and they later had a sister, younger sister. Uncle John died in 1932, on February twenty-first of tuberculosis. When I was twelve years - I used to spend a lot of time at my Grandmama's house when I was little; but then when we moved I still stayed there all the time, and I always slept in Uncle John's room. They had a big old house and it had a tiny, little room upstairs that was an interior room, which was Uncle John's; and it was off my grandmother's bathroom, and the reason that Uncle John had that room was because he was always so sick that Grandmama and Granddaddy could hear him through their bathroom and check on him. When I was a little boy, Grandmama would always put me to bed and then she'd go put her nightgown and robe on and come in and sit at her dressing table, which was in that little room. She had long, beautiful, red hair, and she'd brush her red hair out, a hundred times, and I'd go to sleep. Well, one night that happened, and I went to sleep; and I woke up, and I knew that somebody was in the room. I thought it was Grandmama. So I said, "Grandmama," and nobody answered. So I was kind of scared and I rolled over and opened my eyes, and I realized there was a presence in the room. It wasn't a person, but I couldn't say it wasn't a person; but it wasn't a person, but it was a presence. It was a distinct, visible presence. And I felt this great comfort from this presence, and the presence would kind of get closer to me and I would feel even more comforted and very warm. Finally I went back to sleep and the 31

34 presence left, and I went back to sleep. The next morning I mentioned it to Grandmama and she turned stark white, because that had been the anniversary, the same night that my Uncle John had died in that room when he was twelve, which was the same age I was. MJ: Had anyone ever sensed anything there before or since? JC: No. Well, I think from my grandmother's reaction that she had. She never said it, but I've always believed that she had. MJ: Do you think she would have found that incompatible with her religious beliefs? JC: I doubt it. MJ: Just didn't like to talk about it, I guess. JC: Yeah. It was very interesting. I've always been very enthralled by that - by that story, because I know it happened; I know I didn't dream it. Interesting story, interesting little thing. MJ: Did you grandparents live close enough for you to go over there, on your own, on your bike or-? JC: Yeah, when I got old enough to ride my bike, yeah, I'd ride over there. They lived in Cameron Park, which is a very old part of Raleigh and I guess they lived three miles away from me, something like that, three or four. I'd ride - in fact, I was thinking when I was walking around their house today, I'd not thought about riding my bicycle, and I was walking down the sidewalk and a 32

35 vision just came in my head of me whipping down that sidewalk on my bicycle. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. MJ: Did you like school in the elementary years? Did you enjoy it much? JC: I always hated school. Now I know I had Attention Deficit Disorder; then nobody knew what it was, and I had a very hard time with school. Always did pretty well. I mean, I could get a high B average without working. I think when I went to undergraduate school at Carolina I probably didn't go to thirty percent of my classes for four years and graduated with a 2.8. Never did anything. When I went to Wake Forest Law School, I read my last case October of my first year; never read one again. In fact, I was a legend at Wake Forest because everyone knew that I never read the cases; all the teachers knew, but I had this incredible ability - still have it - where I can stand up and you can give me a piece of paper and by the time you get your question out to me I can answer it if it's on that piece of paper. Teachers used to try to get me, catch me all the time, and I wouldn't even have [a chance]. When I'd sit with my friends they would slip me a brief. The only time I ever got caught was one time somebody gave me the wrong brief and I - it was in Dr. Webster's class in real property; and I got the book in real property, actually, but he asked me to recite this one case, and of course I hadn't read it; I'd never read any of them. And somebody gave me a case and I stood up and recited it beautifully. He just looked at me and said, 33

36 "Well, Mr. Cheshire, that was a beautiful recitation of the next case we're supposed to read, but not this one." "Well, thank you for the compliment." But I'm sorry I didn't [study], now. I think for some people school takes a certain amount of maturity, and I just never had it. I think I have the maturity level now of about a thirty-year-old. I've just never been very mature. You can probably tell that from my office. MJ: No, I think your office is great. You're an Opus fan? JC: Yeah. I like Opus. MJ: Do you like "Outland"? JC: What's "Outland"? MJ: "Outland" is the current strip that they- JC: No, no, I don't look at the cartoons anymore. MJ: I don't either, once they stopped "Bloom County"- JC: Yeah, I don't know when I quit, but I don't look at 'em anymore. MJ: Why are there so many pigs in here? JC: I like pigs. My wife grew up on a farm, and her uncle had a pig farm. We used to go there all the time, and I just like pigs. I think they're neat. So I kind of collect pigs a little bit. MJ: My mother says they are the smartest farm animals. JC: Yeah, they're real smart and they're cute, so I just kind of pick pigs up every now and then. MJ: When you were growing up, what did you do for fun? 34