Bob Adams is an old friend of mine and I am using his real name here because I wish to pay tribute to him. He’s gone now, smoked himself to an early grave, and I didn’t get to say goodbye to him since I’d long since moved away. But I think about him often and for my entire career in the law was grateful for what he taught me.
Bob was not a lawyer. He was a retired cop from Chicago, a gruff, leather-skinned no-nonsense sort of guy who said what he thought and didn’t think much of anyone. He was an investigator with the Public Defender’s Office in southwest Florida when I first arrived there, still in my 3rd year of law school, to intern. What I learned from Bob was worth so much more than all the high falutin’ crapola that they handed out in law school. Law professors know absolutely nothing about the real world or how to actually practice law. They live in an academic cocoon. But my friend Bob was the real world personified, complete with his own finely honed sense of justice, developed over years of dealing face-to-face with the worst in the human species.
Bob took me under his wing. He recognized that I had this shiny, wide-eyed aura about me that was sorely in need of a good tarnishing for my own good. We’d go into the jail and I’d watch amazed as he interviewed prisoners who were our new court-appointed clients, getting information from them that I never would have gleaned on my own. He showed me things about reading a police report…between the lines, as it were. He could interrogate a witness in such a way that the person would think Bob was on his side, even if he wasn’t.
Profanity was to my friend Bob the defining presence in his vocabulary. Spoken with his foghorn, pre-cancerous voice, it sounded as natural as a saw in a sawmill. Everything about Bob was old school, in the finest sense of the term. He would never have survived in the new, politically correct environment. Women were “sweetie” and “babe” and a number of other, less polite terms. Our boss, one of those terminally clean people that was afraid to shake the hands of his own clients, was a contemptible figure to Bob, who had himself lived and worked in the gutter most of his life.
What I learned from my friend Bob Adams was priceless beyond measure. I returned to the Public Defender’s Office once I graduated and, in just two years, this ex-cop realist had shown me how to actually practice criminal law. He taught me a practical, cut-to-the-chase method of working my cases so that I got more from everything that I did in less time. These were valuable lessons that I carried with me, to my unending benefit, for the rest of my career, things I might never have picked up on my own if left to my own devices.
It is impossible to overstate how much I wish that I could sit down with Bob Adams now, a cooler of Coors on ice between us, and reminisce about those days when I was a newly minted lawyer and he was a grudging, ill-tempered commentator upon the human frailties that beset us. I loved that leathery son of a bitch.
posted on May 3, 2008 9:21 AM ()
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I knew some old timers like that.