Word: law
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...minutes he is sitting up straight, his forelock is hanging in his eyes. His talk, with a native Indiana tang, is even more vigorous. To hell with formality. He talks as men do in the locker room, and spices his profanity with the Bible, Shakespeare and law. He spills out figures, dates, technical facts, historical parallels. When the argument grows hot his eyes get hawklike and his stubborn upper lip stiffens. If an opponent wilts under his fire, Willkie is disgusted. He doesn't want the argument...
...Willkie, was a lawyer and a wealthy landowner in the town of Elwood, Ind. (pop. 10,685). His mother was also a lawyer, the first woman member of the Indiana bar, and besides tending her family (six children, of whom Wendell was the third) helped her husband in his law practice. Elwood was then riding high. Natural gas had been discovered and the supply was so plentiful that no one took the trouble to turn out the street lights by day. It was just as cheap to let them burn...
...long pants they found plenty of work in summer moving abandoned Elwood houses into the country to be used as outbuildings for farmers. Their home was a sort of perpetual debating society. They kept more than 6,000 books around the house and old Herman Willkie, back at his law practice harder than ever, woke his children in the mornings by shouting quotations from the classics...
Gunnery. Graduated from law school in 1916 Willkie went into law practice in Elwood, dropped it on the day War was declared because he had a family hatred of anything Prussian. He became a lieutenant of field artillery, learned to like gunnery, never learned to like army discipline. While he was in training at Camp Knox, Ky., he and Edith Wilk, onetime town librarian of Elwood, were married. Held up by a blizzard, Lieutenant Willkie was two days late for the wedding, turned up with a frozen, bedraggled bridal bouquet. Sweet-faced Edith Wilk carried it to the altar...
When Willkie got back from France, where he spent several months defending court-martialed soldiers from army discipline, he got a job in the Firestone legal department at Akron, later joined the law firm of Mather & Nesbitt and became one of the attorneys for Northern Ohio Power & Light (now Ohio Edison Co.) and other "vested intersts" (the Willkie Indiana pronunciation). He also mixed in politics: debated against the Ku Klux Klan, spoke for the progressive doctrines of Bob La Follette, the elder, fought the nomination of William Gibbs McAdoo at the 1924 Democratic convention because of the Klan issue...