Ten years ago, sometime in 1992, I began this venture of writing something each month. It went under different names at the time. I have just reread some of those musings and they are amusing! Here is one that I like recalling and it has a present application!
“Writing a paragraph a day keeps the dust away. Somebody already said this I’m sure. Writing makes for analysis, precision, and thought. The trouble is, like my father used to say, ‘Thoughts of what, and really, who cares?’ I don’t have an answer. I suppose a lifetime of dictating letters, responses to other letters, petitions, briefs, etc. just can’t be tossed aside; it’s an addiction, like running. You feel good doing it and yet never really have to know why. You did it (the running) to lose weight, then to compete and now to stay in shape. Writing becomes a necessity: first, to make a living and then it created a habit that’s hard to put quietly to rest. Early in the practice I even wrote a weekly column called “The Foxchase Lawyer”. It was a rehash of legal ideals, ideas and problems. The deadlines did just that-kept you in line so you had to finish one and start the next.”
This was written sometime in April of 1992 but I find it just as applicable today. I still hear the “Who cares?” expressed to me by several people and I still don’t have an answer.
Those same pages talk about my walks with my father. I was a young lawyer in his office from 1958 until 1966, when he quit. During those times we would have occasion to walk a few blocks from our office to the City Hall where the court rooms were located. On the way we invariably had to greet, and in some cases stop and chat, with some passing friends of Dad’s. They were usually some one who was prominent in politics or the judiciary of the city. He did these things without any attempt to show off to his son, but he never overlooked mentioning, as we left the party, ” that was so and so he’s a judge on the blank court, or whatever was his position “. He was an active participant in the city’s affairs. One day in my early practice I was in line before a judge to make an application for Bail . After waiting sometime it was my turn to approach the bench, when there was a stir in the courtroom as someone entered with a burst and a came directly up to the bench next to me. It was, as I was to later learned, the then well-known Attorney Cecil B. Moore. He began to address the judge and I informed him that I was next. The Judge asked me to step aside since Mr.Moore had so many applications, or whatever. Since he was the “judge” I had no choice. Later Mr.Moore asked me who I was, (it was more like ‘who did I think I was?’) He mentioned the Marine Corp. He thought I should have known who he was and acted as a PFC marine does in presence of a General. I thought otherwise but said nothing. His day of reckoning came not too long after. I mentioned the affair to my Dad and he remembered that the said important attorney was appearing and had appeared before him as a Master in one of his divorce cases. Dad as usual being opposed to divorce in principle made certain, contrary to most Masters at the time, that there was “evidence” of the alleged cause. It had given Mr. Moore much trouble and repeated hearings still without success. It so happened that a few days after General Moore had snubbed this private, he walked into our office just as I was passing the front door. He was coming for another one of those hearings on this divorce matter. He stopped and gawked at me. He said,” Oh, your related to ‘that McSorley’!” I smiled and said yes, sensing he now wished he had a friend, not an unhappy camper, in the court of ‘McSorley-The Master’. Time put Mr. Moore and I together one more time. I had been appointed as an assistant counsel in the murder case of In-Ho-Oh, a Korean student beaten to death by a gang on a street in West Philadelphia. It was a highly publicized matter. The Mayor, then Dilworth, was pictured in Time magazine and elsewhere, crying at the wake for the young man. Cecil B. Moore,Esq. had the first of nine defendants, Flip Borum. His trial lasted several weeks. He was convicted and Mr. Moore filed motion for a new trial. This was a required step in procedure prior to appealing to a higher court. The case I was on was of Harold Johnson he was number 6 or 7 down the line and it was nearly a year before he was tried. I was assisting John Walsh the appointed chief trial counsel. Borum had received a death sentence. Our client was found guilty and given 10 to 30 years (as I now recall). We filed an appeal when our motion for a new trial was summarily denied. Under the law appeals in first-degree murder case go directly to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The chief appointed counsel, John Walsh, wanted nothing to do with the appeal. It was my ballgame. I hit a home run. The case was reversed and a new trial ordered. It resulted in Borum, Mr.Moore’s case being considered reversible since the evidence presented was similar. Shortly after the Supreme Court decision, which made the front pages of the then “Evening Bulletin”, I was standing on Broad Street near Girard Avenue, as I recall, and a car pulled up and offered me a ride into City Hall. The driver was Cecil B.Moore, Esq., He advised me that the District Attorney was ready to deal with a new sentence for Borum rather than a new trial. He congratulated me on my success and wanted to thank me for helping his client. In our case, we made a deal with the DA for Harold Johnson who had been by that time in jail for 7 years. He was released upon agreeing to turn state’s evidence in any future trials made necessary by the Supreme Court’s decision. Mr. Moore now made me, so it seemed, at least a ‘staff sergeant’ in the Philadelphia Corp of Lawyers. Cecil had a tough life. He became a victim of John Barleycorn, or booze as it sometimes referred to, and died fairly young. While we were driving into City Hall I saw confirmed what had been a rumor about him, namely, that he was living out of his automobile. It certainly looked it. Today there are signs on the parts of Columbia Avenue in Phildelphia that read “Cecil B. Moore Avenue” placed there in memory Cecil. I like my father had had some contact with those whom some would call “prominent” in the legal society of the city. I vividly recall some years later passing one day through the City Hall Court yard and saluting an old friend, Supreme Court Justice, James McDermott. I learned not two weeks later that on Father’s day he went before the Supreme Judge. But I hadn’t greeted him because he was a Justice but, just like my Dad, because he was a friend. I prayed for him upon hearing the news.
The best news a lawyer ever receives, after a representing a client in a criminal matter, is that the client-defendant turns his life around. It doesn’t happen often that you have such a dramatic informing as I did some ten years after the Harold Johnson matter. I was then, in 1970, the Commissioner of Records for the City. I had an office on the first floor of City Hall. Over the door of the office in the hall was sign with my name on it. One day my secretary came in and informed me that there was a gentleman outside asking if I was ‘the’ Mr. McSorley who had represented at one time a Harold Johnson. I told her yes. She then escorted Harold Johnson into my office. We had a reunion. He had turned his life around. He was a father of four and working at making a good life for himself and them. It was a pleasing moment for both of us. I can’t think of any other time when I had such great confirmation that people can, and do, change.
I had a few criminal cases after Ho. But in 1971 I was retired (?) by the then elected Mayor Frank Rizzo from position as Commissioner of Records. I was just a practicing lawyer but with seven children and I was looking for a subsidy. I did get several defense attorney appointments and found myself in one case defending a client where the ADA (Asst. District Attorney) was a young man named Ed Rendell. He later made a name for himself as “America’s Mayor”. However jury trials for me came to a crashing close when Adrian Lee a columnist for the “Evening Bulletin” wrote a story about me. He noted that I was now sitting on the Jury Commission, i.e., those who sought qualified people to serve on Juries and at the same time I was representing defendants charged in criminal matters before juries. He had some idea that I, as a commissioner, had some inside information on the jurors to be selected. It was baloney. The information was a matter of public record. It was available to the District Attorney as well as the defense counsel. Nevertheless, I had a superior who was apprehensive of any derogatory information about his commission or its members be circulated, regardless of the truth or falsity of the same. He required me to give up appearing before juries. So it came to be that I never again tried a criminal jury case.
The article by Adrian Lee was very flattering in many ways since it told the story of my successes and how much I had been paid for many many days of trial that compared to the price most criminal lawyers charged and received for similar service, it was a bargain. The only thing, aside from the factual error about my having inside dope, which really annoyed me, was the picture accompanying the article. In it I was fat. It had been taken when I ran for the Legislature in 1966.The article was published in 1971. I was running by then and had have even completed a marathon. I was down to 155 lbs. I was some 50 pounds less than I was in the picture. It was not even the same face. But I had the consolation which my father once offered about having something written in the newspaper about you, namely, as a young lawyer it can’t hurt as long as the spell your name right. They had done that.
In a theater here in the next week or so the play “Da” will be performed. June and I saw it when it was on Broadway several years ago. It is the story of young successful Irishman returning from London to Dublin to settle his father’s affairs. The dad had died and most of the scenes take place in the Father’s (Da) house. As the young man roams about the house he keeps bumping into the dead Da. They keep going over matters left unsettled in his Da’s mind but of no consequence or the like in the Son’s mind. It is a typical representation of an Irish belief and tradition. The old man never leaves you even when you both leave the house/home or he dies. He is always there looking over your shoulder to correct your actions or warn you about taking some. It happens. Let me tell you that in my life even though my father died in 1970 he still keeps reminding me of what I should be doing, or forgot to do. I have a picture of him standing with a prayer book in a church. It was taken by a professional photographer at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington as he was witnessing his oldest son, a new bishop, celebrate Mass. But I really don’t need the picture to be reminded of things he propounded, like “stop wasting your time!” etc.
It seems somewhat appropriate in this month of remembering famous political figures of the past that I looked back to some less famous political figures in my past. I hope we didn’t bore you too much and that not too many will give it one of my father’s “Who cares?” reviews.