Strong Advocate: The Life of a Trial Lawyer

2. A Shaky Start

6 2 A Shaky Start They say we are products of our environment. Were we raised by two parents, one, or none? Was our home religious or atheistic ? Were our mentors honest or devious, criminals or saints? Were they intelligent or dull, industrious or loafers, white or blue collar? Were their examples good or bad? Did we live in luxury, comfort, or poverty? Were we taught good moral values or left to our own devices? How did any of us become what we turned out to be? Both of my parents were college graduates, very unusual in the 1920s; my father was a graduate of the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy (now Missouri University of Science and Technology) with a degree in mechanical engineering, and my mother a graduate of Southwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Missouri State University) with a degree in education. Dad, an outstanding student, accepted a coveted position with the Johnson Controls Company in Boston, Massachusetts, after graduating in 1925. The couple had every right to be optimistic about their future, so joy and hope were abundant when my only sibling, John Frank (Jack), was born on October 17, 1928. Fate was not to smile for long, however, and two nearly simultaneous calamities dashed their dreams: the Great Depression, which forced Johnson Controls to release more than half of its employees in 1930 and 1931, and a mysterious illness that struck A Shaky Start 7 Dad in 1931 and rendered him a near invalid for the rest of his life. Dad developed a tremor in his arms and hands, which became stiff and partially paralyzed. He walked with a limp, and his speech was slurred. Doctors remained perplexed for the rest of Dad’s life about either a name or a treatment for his incapacitation , but its consequences did have a name, “unemployment” at Johnson Controls after January 1, 1932. With the Great Depression in full force and with an unemployed wage earner, all the family needed was an additional financial burden, which came when yours truly, Thomas Gorman Strong, entered the world on December 6, 1931. Without work or any prospect to find it, the couple and their two sons, one just two months old, moved back to the farm of Dad’s parents near Marshfield, Missouri, in February 1932. With record-setting droughts that turned farms into dust bowls in the 1930s, and the Depression that made farm products worth almost nothing, the family found itself unable to make mortgage payments or even pay the property taxes. The handwriting was on the wall. Dad could not work, and the farm, which was ultimately lost to creditors in 1936, became an albatross. Mother was our family’s last hope to avoid living in one of the nation’s many slums or tent cities, or as recipients of some charitable organization or agency. She hunted for a teaching position and, after one and a half years, found it at Oakland School, east of Springfield, in the fall of 1933, until moving to nearby Blackman School two years later. In the summer of 1936, when I was four and a half years old, we moved eight miles west of Springfield, closer to Mother’s new job teaching at Bennett School. Mother’s first year at Bennett brought home $65 per month, $520 for the year, our only income . We were poor, even by Depression standards, but we were more fortunate than many. My experiences, still vividly etched in memory, had a major impact on the type of person I would 8 Strong Advocate become. Meager family finances, my home environment, my mother’s values, and my father’s later success as an engineer, despite his affliction, affected me in ways I neither recognized nor appreciated at the time. The Bennett years brought stability, a time and place to establish roots. Our house, sheds, and ten acres, which we rented , were one-half mile east of Barnes’ Store and one mile east of school. The rent, $9 a month, was reasonable even though it consumed a fifth of our yearly income. The L-shaped house, with three rooms downstairs and two up, was in sad shape, decaying after years of inattention and vacancy. The roof leaked so badly that when it rained outside, it rained inside—just not as hard. On a frigid winter night, when the wind whistled through the cracks in the walls...