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2010 News Articles › Ayscue Remarks: John J. Parker Award
Ayscue Remarks: John J. Parker Award
Article Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Written By: Education Law Section Seeks Nominees for Distinguished Service Award
John J. Parker Award Response
E. Osborne Ayscue, Jr.
June 26, 2010
As best I can remember, I never met Judge John J. Parker.
He had moved on to Charlotte before I was born, and he died while I was in law school.
But I grew up in the town he had grown up in,
I grew up in the church where he had worshipped, and my father was a lawyer who had grown up in that town and in that church, and during my father’s formative years, judge-to-be John J. Parker had practiced law there.
And so from my earliest recollection, “Judge Parker” was a presence in my life.
And that was long before I went to Charlotte to practice law and came to know his son, Francis,
And long before I taught his grandson and namesake in a seventh grade Sunday school class,
And long before I spent all those days and weeks and months in the Federal courtroom in Charlotte with that magnificent portrait of Judge Parker looking down from above the judge’s bench.
And so, this award and the name it honors have a particular significance for me.
We are all the products of opportunities that have come our way, whether or not we earned them, of decisions we made, often without knowing the consequences, of those who opened doors for us, often without our knowing it, who gave us support when we needed it and cautionary advice when we needed that, indeed of everyone who has played a part in our lives.
In my case, it began with parents, the first of their families to go to college:
A father who worked his way through college and law school and who hung out his shingle to practice law in his home town nine months after the Crash of ’29.
A mother who had once taught in a one-room schoolhouse in a small village in Wayne County, who had saved an article from an old Saturday Evening Post about a school that was light years from Monroe, North Carolina.
That led to the opportunity to spend my last two years of high school in an academic outward bound school in the frozen North, where merit trumped who you were and where you came from and where hard work, critical thinking and clear expression were not just something you were taught; they were survival tools.
And then a choice which to this day I cannot explain to forego the Ivy League education to which all my Andover classmates aspired and instead to return to my state university, a choice that in those days bordered on heresy.
A choice that I could not have anticipated would lead me to spend seven of the next nine years in a university that had become the leader in making North Carolina a moral beacon in a region beginning to emerge from its troubled past, a state that was witnessing the transition from the generation of Dr. Frank Porter Graham and Judge Parker to a new generation that had come home from World War II determined to make theirs a better world, people like Bill Friday and Terry Sanford.
And I had no way of anticipating that many of the people with whom I studied and played there would become the leaders of the next generation in that emerging world.
And in an era when law firms hired new lawyers only occasionally and did not even recruit at the law schools, I had the good fortune to land in a law firm led by a remarkable collection of people:
Fred Helms, the most thoroughly tenacious lawyer I have ever known,
Bill Mulliss, whose quiet, thoughtful example led me for years after he was gone to approach a difficult decision by asking myself, “What would Bill Mulliss do?”
And Jim McMillan, who as a federal judge was to have the courage to face the ugly truth of a segregated society and to use the powers of his office to force his neighbors to face and deal with it.
Perhaps most important, those three taught us, not by preaching, but by their own examples, that being a lawyer meant more than winning trials, closing big transactions, having important clients, getting your name in the paper or making money, that it is about “we,” and not about “me,” and that these were values that were meant to be passed on from generation to generation.
My career as a lawyer began fifty years ago on September 5, 1960, when Jim McMillan, the then forty-four year old president of this Association who would become my principal mentor, drove me to Chapel Hill to spend my first week as a lawyer in this Association’s brand new practical skills course for beginning lawyers, a course on how to find the courthouse.
Then, after the ten years or so I spent learning to be a trial lawyer, a friend from my Chapel Hill days, Jack Hunter, opened a door by asking me to join the committee he chaired, and put me to work on a major project, one that ultimately led to my long involvement with this Association and from there on through other doors that others opened for me to serve in ways I hope have been useful to our chosen profession.
Like all of you, my life has been shaped by those with whom I have been privileged to practice, those I have contended both with and against, by my colleagues, down to the young lawyers of this generation who have kept me in touch with their world of change, while making sure that I retained a proper measure of humility.
And finally, Emily, my wife of almost fifty-three years, who has tolerated far too many days on airplanes and in meetings of various lawyers’ organizations, a support without which I could never have done whatever I may have accomplished, and who, in addition has raised four children, one of whom is here, who have gone on to successful lives of their own and who have produced eleven grandchildren, one of whom is also here. Emily has also given far more than her share to the world in which we live. I am confident that she has served on more church, civic, educational and charitable boards than have I.
One short small-world side trip and I am almost done. Emily taught American history at Durham High School to help put us through law school. Willis Whichard was in her first home room. One day she came home and told me that a bright young senior had interviewed her for an article on new teachers for the school newspaper. By coincidence, that bright young high school senior of fifty-two years ago, David Gergen, will be your principal speaker this morning.
I return to where I began: We are all the products of opportunities that came our way, whether or not we had earned them, of decisions we made, often without knowing the consequences, of those who have opened doors for us, often without our knowing it, who gave us support when we needed it and cautionary advice when we needed that, indeed of everyone who has played a part in our lives.
I am deeply aware that though this plaque has my name on it, it really belongs to all those people who have been a part of my life to this point.
It belongs to them, but it is going back to Charlotte with me, and it is going on my office wall.
I am deeply grateful, and I thank you for this honor, which I will treasure for the rest of my life.
Thank you.