Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.:  

Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.

 This blog, as we occasionally note has the intent . . . to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?

Well, okay, clearly its strayed way beyond that, but it's retained that purpose and is focused on the period from around 1900 until around 1920, which makes a lot other things, indeed most things, off topic.

But this past week there were a collection of things we ran across that really do sort of focus in on that a bit, and given us an example of how things have changed.

Taking them in no particular order, we have the story of baseball player Tommy Brown, about whom we noted:

Seventeen year old Tommy Brown became the youngest player in Major League Baseball to hit a home run.  Brown had joined the Dodgers at age 16.

Brown provides a good glimpse into mid 20th Century America.  Nobody would think it a good thing for a 16 year old to become a professional baseball player now.  Moreover, the next year, when Brown was 18, he was conscripted into the Army, something that likely wouldn't happen now even if conscription existed.  He returned to professional baseball after his service, and played until 1953 and thereafter worked in a Ford plant until he retired, dying this year at age 97.  Clearly baseball, which was America's biggest sport at the time, didn't pay the sort of huge sums it does now.

Tommy "Buckshot" Brown as born on December 6, 1927 and January 15, 2025, and gives us a really good glimpse of the world of the late 1930s and 1940s.  He'd dropped out of school at age 12 in 1939 and went to work with his uncle as a dockworker.  Being a longshoreman is a notoriously dangerous job and frankly the occupation was heavily influenced by the mob at the time.  There's no earthly way that you could be hired as a longshoreman at age 12 now, nor should there be.  But life was like that then.  My father's father, who was born in 1907, I think, went to work at age 13.  

People did that.

If you are a longshoreman at age 12, you are a 12 year old adult.

He must have been a good baseball player to be hired on in the Majors at age 16.  If that happened now, you'd have to be one of the greatest players alive in the game. But this was during World War Two, and baseball was scraping.

It was scraping as the military was.  The service had taken pretty much all the able bodied men who weren't in a critical war industry.  We don't like to think this about "the Greatest Generation" now, but by 1944 and 1945, the Army was inducting me who were only marginally capable of being soldiers in normal times.  Men who were legally blind in one eye and who were psychotic were being taken in, and I'm not exaggerating.  The recent incident we reported here of a soldier going mad and killing Japanese POWs makes sense in this context.  It's relatively hard to get into the Army now.  After World War Two men inducted were in good physical and mental shape.  By the last days of the Second World War not all were and we knew it.

Brown's story also tells us a lot about what economic life was like mid century.  Obviously, baseball didn't make Brown rich, and there was no post baseball career associated with sports.  He went to work in a factory.

Going to work in a factory, in the 50s, was a pretty solid American job, and another story we touched on relates to this.

The US War Production Board removed most of its controls over manufacturing activity, setting the stage for a post war economic boom.

The US standard of living had actually increased during the war, which is not entirely surprising given that the US economy had effectively stagnated in 1929, and the US was the only major industrial power other than Canada whose industrial base hadn't been severely damaged during the war.  Ever since the war, Americans have been proud of the economics of the post war era, failing to appreciate that if every major city on two continents is bombed or otherwise destroyed, and yours aren't, your going to succeed.

Having said that, the Truman Administration's rapid normalization of the economy was very smart.  The British failed to do that to their detriment.

Americans of our age, and indeed since the 1950s, have really convinced themselves that American Ingenuity and native smartness caused us to have the best economy in the world in the third quarter of the 20th Century, and that if only we returned to the conditions of the 50s, we would again.

Well, the conditions of the 1950s were a lot like the conditions of the post war 1940s.  Every major city in the world, save for American and Canadian ones, had been damaged, and many had been bombed flat.   It's not as if Stuttgart, Stalingrad, or Osaka were in good shape.  We would have had to nearly intentionally mess up not to be the world's dominant economy and that went on all the way into the 1970s.  The UK did not really recover from World War Two, in part due to bad economic decisions, until the 1960s.  West Germany, ironically, recovered much quicker, but in no small part due to the return of refugee German economists who intentionally ignored American economic advice.  Japan emerged from the devastation in the 70s.  Italy really started to in the 60s.  

Many of these countries, when they did, emerged with brand new economies as things were brand new.  Japan is a good example, but then so is Italy, which had been a shockingly backwater dump until the mid 50s.

Russia, arguably, has never recovered, helping to explain its national paranoia.

The thing is, however, that the myth as been hugely damaging to Americans, who imagine that if we were only whiter and had "less regulation", etc., we'd be back in 1955.  It's not going to happen, and we can't tariff our way back to the Eisenhower Era.

Of course, a lot of that post war era wasn't all that nifty. We had the Cold War, for example, and we often dealt with significant inflation, in no small part to inflate our way out of enormous Cold War defense budgets. . .which is probably a warning of what's to come when we realize we have to do something about the national debt.

Finally, we had posted on women and careers.  Well, sort of.  Anyhow, right after that we saw a Twitter post in which a young woman who posted on TikTok was being discussed for say:

I'm just so tired of living and working and doing this every single day, and having nothing — I don't know how I'm gonna get childcare when I have to work 40 hours a week because I can't even afford to feed my family as is.  I'm having medical problems. I can't even get into the doctor because X rays and MRIs are 500, let alone a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I need. Like, I can't afford anything. My doctors cancel my appointments.

This world is just not meant to be like this, we need to make change for us, for each other. Please.

She's right.

This was under the heading, on her post, of "This world is a scam".

The world?  Well, that's a little too broad.  But the modernized industrialized Protestant work ethic world of the West?  You bet.

Interestingly, one of the things she took flak for was buying some sort of baby bottle washer.  It's been a long time since there were infants here, but when there were, I recall we tended to use sort of a disposable system, not real bottles.  Having said that, I looked bottles up, and I can recall that we had some of the ones that are still offered, so I'm likely wrong.  Anyhow, washing bottles is no doubt a pain.

The irate people, who are probably generally irate simply because she had children, and therefore is not fully lashed to the deck of the economic fraud everyone is participating in, seemed to think that this therefore meant she was rich.  Not hardly.

FWIW, I looked up baby bottle washers too, and they really aren't that expensive.  They no doubt probably save time.  Time is money and of course we need to get those wimmen's out in the workplace where they can serve the machine.

Women only entered the workplace at this level in the first place after domestic machinery freed, or seperated, their labor from the house, where it had previously been necessary.  You don't see women being criticized because their house contains a vacuum cleaner, or a dishwasher, even though this is not intrinsically different.  

Indeed, this tends to be the one area where the right and the left are in agreement, and will yell about how society needs more baby warehouses, um daycares.  The left, of course, goes further and discourages having children at all, and would indeed expand infanticide if it could, one of the issues that gave rise to the culture was and the populist revolve that we're still in.  

At any rate, she's right.  The world is not meant to be like this. We made this horror, and others.  We can fix it.

Lex Anteinternet: Roads not taken.

Lex Anteinternet: Roads not taken.: 

Roads not taken.

I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective.  Given that, I can't help but look at the road not taken, particularly when I'm oddly reminded of it.

Brian Nesvik was just confirmed as the Trump administrations head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Brig Gen. Brian Nesvik.  His Class A uniform here (the horrible blue one that the Army has since ditched) shows him with a 1st Cavalry Division combat patch on his right pocket and what I think is a Combat Action Badge.

I'm not sure when most people start contemplating a career.  I sometimes hear people say the most unlikely things, such as "I always wanted to be a lawyer" or "I always wanted to be an actuary".  When I hear those things, I don't believe them unless the person is downright weird.

Existential occupations, however, are different, and I can imagine a person always wanting to occupy one of them.  I've defined existential occupations in this way:

Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species.  Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being.  It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grow them on their lots.  And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens.  It's in us.  That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.

It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note.  Clerics are in that category.  Storytellers and Historians are as well.  We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time.  They're all existential in nature.  Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that.  The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.

Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.

Being a soldier is, I think, an existential occupation, but only for men.  I'm not sure what to say about being a policeman of any kind, but I think that's likely the case for that occupation as well.

Growing up as a boy, one of the occupations I really wanted to do was to be a soldier.  It wasn't the only one I contemplated.  As noted here, I've always been really strongly attracted to agriculture.  Most days find me at my office practicing law, but that was never a childhood dream and it didn't occur to me at all until I was in college.  Law is the great middle class reserve occupation, truth be known.

At some point I began to struggle with my childhood desire to be a soldier.  It'd take me away from the state, which I didn't like the idea of.  I knew then, when I was more realistic about life choices than I am now, that I really couldn't hope for a career in agriculture, which is what I'd have done if I could have.  And the days of Wolfers and other professional hunters were long over, of course.  So around about that time, probably 13, 14 or 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a Wyoming Game Warden.

I didn't give up the soldiering idea right away.  But it occured to me that I could become a National Guardsman, and stay here in the state.  So I hit upon the idea of going to university, then doing a hit in the Army as an officer, and then coming back out and becoming a Game Warden while staying in the National Guard.  This idea was so formulated in my mind at the time that I imagined myself entering the Air Cavalry, which at the time was a really cool branch of the Army, and the serving with the Army National Guard Air Cav Scout Troop in Cheyenne.

I was still on this track when as a junior in high school my father and I spoke about my career plans.  By "spoke" I mean a conversation that probably had three or four sentences in it.  My father wasn't big on career advice for reasons I understand now, but didn't really grasp then.  My mother was much more likely to voice an opinion about education and what I should do than my father, but I tended to flat out ignore my mother, particularly as her mental status declined with illness.  She'd have had me enter one of the hard sciences, which I in fact did (I guess I listened to her some) and go to a school like Notre Dame.

Anyhow, I told my father that I was going to study wildlife management.  He only mentioned that "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees that can't find jobs". That was enough to deter me from pursuing that degree right then and there, so rare was his advice in this area.

As it happened, I pursued another field of science but I did join the National Guard, doing so right out of high school as soon as I turned 18 years old.  One of the reasons I did that was that I also was contemplating being a writer, and I thought I'd probably write on history topics. As a lot of history involves armed conflict, being in the Army in some fashion seemed like a good thing to do in order to understand the background.

I was right.

Indeed, joining the Guard was the last really smart career decision I made.  I'm clearly not very good at career decisions.

To play the story out, I was a geology major.  I graduated with a degree in geology, and couldn't find work as the oilfield and coal industries collapsed (sound familiar, Wyoming?).  While at Casper College law was suggested to me by a history professor (I have so many credits in history that I coudl have picked up a BA in it with little effort) and it seemed like a good idea as I didn't know any lawyers and had no idea what they did.

Lots of people become lawyers that way.  Indeed, I know one other lawyer who became one due to the exact same advice from the exact same fellow.

But even at that, when I knew that I wasn't going to get a job as a geologist, I entertained picking up a BS in wildlife management. By that point, my father was supporting me in the goal.  Evan so, his advance five years prior stuck with me, and I didn't do it.  I ended up going to law school, and I ended up letting myself ETS out of the Guard, as I thought, in error, that law school is hard.

Law school, as an aside, isn't hard. Any idiot can graduate with a JD and pass the bar.  And while I only have experience with one law school, I dare say that this is true of any law school  Harvard JD? So fucking what?

Still, the idea resurfaced one more time.  A friend of mine and I went down to the Game Warden exam and I was offered a temporary summer job, the usual introductory way into the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at the time.  At that time, usually those who picked up summer work did it for a few years before being offered a full time job.  My wife and I had just gotten engaged, so I ended up declining the job.

Yes, I'm an idiot.

Well, not really.  But as noted, I'm not good at career decisions.

Brian Nesvik is a Casper native.  He  decided to become a Game Warden when he was fourteen years old and met a game warden on his first big game hunting trip as a licensed hunter.

He's 55 years of age now.  He's a graduate of the University of Wyoming where he received a bachelor's degree.  He was a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard from 1986 to 2021 and rose to the rank of Brigadier General.  Sources say he graduated high school from Cheyenne East in 1988, but I can't make that make sense.  I can accept it was 1987 and he was definitely in the Guard in 1986, the year I got out.  He's a 1994 graduate of the University of Wyoming, which would suggest that he did something else for awhile as even with the late 1988 date, that would have been six years after graduating high school.  I somewhat wonder if he had military service prior to going to university, but I don't know that.  He wears a 1st Cavalry Division DI as a combat patch, as noted, which is interesting.

His career as a game warden was very notable, and he became the state's chief game warden, the pinnacle of the game warden chain of command.  His military career is also impressive, noting the following:

Apr 18 Dec 21 Assistant Adjutant General, Cheyenne, WY

Jan 16 Mar 18 J3/7, Joint Fore Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Sep 15 Jan 16 G1, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 15 Sep 15 Chief Facilities Maintenance Officer, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Jun 10 Feb 15 Commander, 115th Fires Brigade

Apr 09 Jun 10 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Camp Virginia, Kuwait

May 07 Apr 09 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 06 May 07 S-3, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Oct 05 Oct 06 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 04 Oct 05 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery (FWD), Baghdad, Iraq

Oct 03 Feb 04 Executive Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jul 02 Oct 03 S-3, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Aug 01 Jul 02 S-4, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jun 00 Aug 01 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 97 Jun 00 Commander, Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Worland, Wyoming

Jul 97 Oct 97 Fire Direction Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 96 Jul 97 Platoon Leader, Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Gillette, Wyoming

Jul 94 Oct 96 Executive Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Jul 93 Jul 94 Fire Support Officer, Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Laramie, Wyoming

Jul 90 Jul 93 Fire Direction Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Dec 86 Jul 90 Flight Operations Specialist, 920th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), Cheyenne, Wyoming

His time in the National Guard and my own would have overlapped, but only barely.  My Guard service concluded in August, 1986, 39 years ago this month.

Shoot, by this time in 1986, I was probably just about to do my last Guard drill.

I wonder if Nesvik went to Korea with us?

Anyhow, it's interesting how something you thought of doing yourself, worked out for somebody else.

Indeed, frankly, I've known several for whom it did. Was I wrong in my analysis, way back when?

Well, maybe.  I was an indifferent high school student and sort of figured I would be as a college student too, which turned out not to be the case at all.  Externally, I look like a real success.

But then, we always have the backdoor view of ourselves, don't we?

 

This is an interesting article:

Catholic Parents: Free the Hearts of Your Daughters

The author of it, Leila Miller, had to know that she was really swimming against the tide with this one.

Indeed, I'm reluctant to even post on this, as there are a lot of pronatalist nutjobs out there right now that immediately latch on to such things.  But, here goes anyone.

Almost every Sunday I go to Mass at the same Catholic Church.  The celebrant there is an absolutely excellent homilist.  Probably most Priests give homilies that are good from time to time, but his are consistently great, which is rare in the extreme.  So much so, really, that I'd put him alone in this particular class in regard to those which I've personally experienced.

He's very orthodox, which doesn't keep a wide number of parishioners to attending his Masses.  In fact, for the first time last week, I could barely find a place to sit. I was attending with my daughter, who is about to go back to grad school.

Lots of weeks this parish features a fair number of young women wearing mantillas.  Not every week, however.  It's interesting . Some weeks they're all missing.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect that those are the weeks the Byzantine Catholic Church has Divine Liturgy in town.  The Byzantine Catholic service is conservative by default.

These are not the only young women there.  There are quite a few, but most dress like young women in this region do, if a little nicer.  My daughter, for instance, would never consider wearing a mantilla.  I know a few of  them, but only a few. There's the recently married nurse, whom I've known for a long time.  There's the young lawyer and her family.  And there's the girl working in the sporting goods shop.

The latter is particularly interesting as she just graduated high school about a year ago.  She's been working there for about a year as well.  Her concerned grandmother told me that she's been hoping that she goes to college and that she's very smart.  Apparently, she has no desire to do so.

Most of the young women I know, and I know them only barely, are either newly minted lawyers or friends of my daughter.  My daughter, as noted, is in grad school. Some of those young women are as well. Some have graduated from school already and are in the early stages of careers of one kind or another.  Because we live on the shores of jello belt, a few are Mormons, who are already married (Mormons tend to marry young) and have children.

There are a lot of misperceptions about Catholics, including Catholics and marriage.  Catholics do not, and never have, tended to marry young.  The opposite is actually the case.  My parents were in their late 20s and early 30s when then married.  My mother's parents were about the same.  I think my father's parents were in their early 20s, which isn't up there, but it's not as if its a teenage wedding either.    Anyhow, most Catholic women fit in to the general demographics for American women in general on these topics, although not strictly so.  The mantilla women are outliers.

What do they all hope for?

That's hard, if not impossible, to say. Each person's hopes and dreams are personal to them. . . but. . . well, within the confines of the nature of our species.

So perhaps they're more determinabel than we might think.

Non existential careers, which are most careers, are not really something that makes anyone fulfilled.  For that matter, they don't really make anyone actually happy.  But people are sold in the idea that they do.  Indeed, the way that comes in up in the subversive movie Office Space so frequently is what makes the movie actually profound:

Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.

Joanna, in Office Space.

What feminist who yearned for careerism failed to grasp is that men didn't really want it either.  It was foisted upon them.

One of the things about the existential occupations is that they all existed when we were in our aboriginal state, t hat state not really being grasped by a lot of people.  People like to look back and think that we were "cave men" at that point, but that was never actually true for our species.  For most of our time here on Earth we lived as hunter/gatherer/farmers.  Interestingly, the farming aspect of this, which was t hought to have been a revolutionary development, was with us when we were still hunting and gathering, which should have been obvious as modern hunter/gatherers tend to also farm.  Those occupations have stuck with us in one form or another all along.

What also was with us was our basic natures.  No matter how you conceive of our species coming about, we've always paired up, male and female, and we've always had children.  Everything, in fact, centered around that.  While we imagine ourselves to be very complex, we really aren't.  That remains our basic natures and for most of us, defines, if you will, what we really want.  The existential occupations served that purpose.

Things began to become unhinged from that as we developed more complex societies, as once we do, something always goes amis.  Greed has a lot to do with it. Somebody will get into a position where he, and its usually a he, wants more of everything, food, resources, women, than anyone else.  Wealth always corrupts.

Still, even with more and more advanced societies over the centuries, it wasn't really until the Industrial Revolution that the basic nature of life started to be wrecked.  We should not idealize pre Industrial Revolution societies, which had plenty that were wrong with them, but something that wasn't wrong with them is that men and women tended to work close to the land, and close to each other.  A 17th Century English farmer, for example, might not be farming a farm he owned, or tending sheep that were his, but he was working close to nature and probably normally saw his family throughout the day.

The Industrial Revolution changed all of that.

Industrial capital needed labor and it took male labor, at first, out of the village and into the factories.  It's not that simple, of course, but the reasons that it was mostly male is.  Originally most industrial jobs required a fair amount of physical strength and endurance, which men have more of.  Where this was not true, it might be recalled, children and women were in fact employed, although that always meant, at first that they were poor.  

And, additionally, two other things were at play, one of which we've already touched on.

The first one is that biology worked against the conscription of women into the workforce at first.  There was noone to take care of children other than women and almost always those women taking care of the children were the children's mothers, for host of additional biological reasons.  The second one was that domestic life required female employment in the home.  There were exceptions to all of this, of course, but they were exceptions proving the rule.

None of this, however, goes against industrial employment being unnatural in and of itself.  Men whose fathers had come and gone throughout the day now left for industrial employment early in the morning and came back at night.  They didn't see their families throughout the day, and indeed, as time went on, teh gruelling nature of industrial work created a sort of mateship amongst blue collar workers that previously had really only been seen amongst servicemen.  When that occurred, it came to often be the case that when they got off work after a long day, the first thing they did was to hit a blue collar tavern, and then come home.   One lawyer's site on the net notes how the author's father worked a schedule like this, hit a blue collar bar every night, and cheated on his wife with the women found there, who would largely have been working there.

White collar and professional employment followed the pattern.  

If you look, for instance, at the practice of law prior to industrialization, lawyers usually worked out of their houses. Doctors did as well.  Indeed, almost anyone who "ran a business" outside of farming did.  John Adams, for instance, practiced out of the same farmhouse that he farmed from.  Once again, this meant that people were not really separated from their families much.

This even shows with some of the occupations that we regard as the wildest, or perhaps the freest.  Trappers in the American West, for instance, were married into native families at a high rate and took their spouses with them.  Career soldiers who made it to the upper NCO ranks, or who were officers, tended to bring their families to frontier posts with them.  

But as industrialization developed, the workplace industrialized.  Lawyers moved out of offices and into firms that moved into houses used only for that purpose, and then into downtown office buildings.  Doctors moved out of their houses into a professional building.  Every male began to leave early in the morning, and come home at night.

None of that was natural on a day to day basis.

The introduction of domestic machinery made much of the formerly necessary female labor surplus. AS that happened, they too began to be available for out of the home employment.  Between World War ONe and World War Two domestic machinery was revolutionized, but its introduction was retarded by the Great Depression, and then World War Two.  After the war, the new domestic machinery flooded the markets and female labor was released from the home at an enormous rate.

The only thing that kept a greater expansion of female labor in the workplace, and by this we mostly mean the office, heavy industry was still off bounds, was biology.  The pill took care of that.

The results were nearly inevitable, even if never expressly stated as desired.  Now that women could be free of biological reasons not to work, they soon had to work.  First generation feminists took up the cause in publications like Coso, which was basically the flipside of Playboy, with the same evolved message.  Joy and meaning was found in the (white collar) work place.  Sex was for entertainment. Your value is your work, and nothing else.  The same line of crap that men had been force fed for years wsa now force fed to young women.

Problem is, it's all a lie.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not stating that women should not work.  What I'm saying, really, is that men have to.  We have no other choice in the world, and most of us will occupy jobs that are just jobs, and nothing more., even when they are well paying.  But the basic nature of our species, that cries for the home to be the focus of our existence, and in which the old occupations still cry out, is unchanging.  And for women, part for that basic nature is to be mothers. For men, part of it is to be fathers.  

Being a mother remains a more demanding role than being a father, when children are young.  When they get older, this is less the case, but the entire "let's warehouse the children" nature of modern life is existentially immoral and we know it.  We managed to come around, in a capitalist society, to the same position the early communists did, and for the exact same reason, warehousing kids means the mother must work.

Not can, but must.

And the pressure to do so remains massive.  Nobody really advocates for women in this area, as it would men the actual return to a pre pill, pre first generation feminist, world outlook.  That'd be bad for capitalism as there would be fewer workers, and worse yet, consumption would decline.

But, frankly, that's' the way it ought to be.

I've already noted it once, but I was recently at a legal event in which there was a huge number of lawyers.  One thing that was noted was how many Catholic lawyers were there, which was in fact quite a few (Catholics here, however, are a minority).  Something I observed, however, is how many older lawyers there were.

On that, there was in fact a comment, from lawyer in his early 70s (maybe very late 60s) to another in his very late 60s.  "Lawyers don't like retirement".

If that's true, it's phenomenal.

I typed most of this entry out a while ago, but after I did it, Jerry Spence passed away, and I noted it here on the blog.  I'm not sure why I even did.  I guess it's just because he was a notable Wyoming figure.  After I did it, it occured to me that I don't think I noted the passing of former Wyoming Senator Al Simpson, who was also a lawyer from a long established family of Wyoming lawyers who have played significant roles in the state's history.  I should have.  He was quite a character.

One of the reasons that I'm a bit surprised that I noted Spence's passing is that I'm not a Spence fan.  I'm not a Spence enemy either, but the extent to which a certain group of people simply worship him astounds me.  Since he died, those close to him, semi close to him, and others who simply know his name have engaged in near hagiography about him.  I actually had somebody stop me just yesterday to related how they were deposed by Spence and his crew back in the day as a defendant in a case in which he represented a plaintiff.  You could tell he was proud of that fact, and obviously thought I would be really impressed.

I'm not.

I knew of Spence way back when I was in grade school, actually, which means back into some date in the early 1970s and I just don't get it.  I guess I don't get worshipping any lawyer.

I particularly feel that way as I am a lawyer.

Daniel Webster noted that “Most good lawyers live well, work hard, and die poor.”  I think there was a huge amount of truth to that.  There's still an element of true to it, but the "live well" part is pretty questionable..  

Working hard as a lawyer brings in less money than a person supposed, usually, and at any rate, lots of lawyers. . . and lots of other professionals for that matter, spend money as quickly as they make it.  As an oddity, right now, I drive the oldest vehicles of any lawyer I know.  I don't regard them as old, but the newest one I've had for twenty years.  The point is, a lot of people just burn through cash, and at a certain point, they have to keep working.

A bigger factor is, however, that the practice of law just burns out the core of a person's personality until, in many instances, there's nothing left.  Lawyers who have left the law often joke about being a "recovering lawyer", but at a certain point, there is no recovering from it.  All forms of work, if engaged in for a long time, or indeed any human endeavor you engage in for a while, changes you permanently.  It's part of your experience, and you are hardwired to react according to your experience.

I was going to go on and say more about this, but my original draft was extremely harsh, so I took it out.

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again.

Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything - or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!

Col Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai. 

Related threads:

Work with meaning and the meaning of work.

Labels: Commentary, Daily Living, Distributism, Existential Occupations., Mid-Week at Work, Retirement, Subsidiarity, The Practice of Law, Women, Work

A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.

Labels: Agrarianism, Christianity, Death, Existential Occupations., Health, Hobbies, Introspection, Killetarianism, Medieval Europe, Mid-Week at Work, Old Age, religion, Retirement, Work

Lex Anteinternet: Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling...

Lex Anteinternet: Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling...: 

Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling thread.

Occupational identity refers to the conscious awareness of oneself as a worker. The process of occupational identity formation in modern societies can be difficult and stressful. However, establishing a strong, self-chosen, positive, and flexible occupational identity appears to be an important contributor to occupational success, social adaptation, and psychological well-being. Whereas previous research has demonstrated that the strength and clarity of occupational identity are major determinants of career decision-making and psychosocial adjustment, more attention needs to be paid to its structure and contents. We describe the structure of occupational identity using an extended identity status model, which includes the traditional constructs of moratorium and foreclosure, but also differentiates between identity diffusion and identity confusion as well as between static and dynamic identity achievement. Dynamic identity achievement appears to be the most adaptive occupational identity status, whereas confusion may be particularly problematic. We represent the contents of occupational identity via a theoretical taxonomy of general orientations toward work (Job, Social Ladder, Calling, and Career) determined by the prevailing work motivation (extrinsic vs. intrinsic) and preferred career dynamics (stability vs. growth). There is evidence that perception of work as a calling is associated with positive mental health, whereas perception of work as a career can be highly beneficial in terms of occupational success and satisfaction. We conclude that further research is needed on the structure and contents of occupational identity and we note that there is also an urgent need to address the issues of cross-cultural differences and intervention that have not received sufficient attention in previous research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Skorikov, V. B., & Vondracek, F. W. (2011). Occupational identity. In S. J. Schwartz, K. Luyckx, & V. L. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of identity theory and research.

How some lawyers apparently want the public to imagine them.

A number of relatively recent experiences has lead me to post this thread.

Posted around town are some billboards by a lawyer who is apparently specializing in plaintiffs' cases and criminal defense.  I don't know him well, but I do know  him.

When I first met him, he came across, quite frankly, as a metrosexual.  I was quite surprised later on when I learned that he'd grown up on a ranch, and that he had a brother who now ran it.  Now, however, he appears on billboards with a huge mustache in Western attire and saddle and portrays himself as a cowboy.

And I guess, by cowboy, I mean both real cowboys and the movie image of a cowboy.

Cowboys, and that is of course a real occupation, have been a popular cultural image since the late 19th Century.  It's really interesting to me, as somebody who is a stockman and who has, accordingly, done a fair amount of cowboying, how cowboys continue to have a sort of wild image that they acquired in that time period.  I love working stock, but most of it isn't anything like what movies portray.  Maybe none of is, which is why  the popular Yellowstone television show tends to anger me.

Of course, being a lawyer isn't anything like portrayed on television either.

Anyhow, I never tell people that "I'm a cowboy", but I find that I"m referred to that way, in the working sense of the word, from time to time.  Or, people will refer to me as a rancher the same way from time to time.  I'm always a bit flattered when they do, as if I'd had my ruthers in the world, which I haven't, that's what I would have done full time.  I can't say its my occupational identity, however, as I'm well aware that I don't do it full time.

Affecting the image, however, miffs me.  It's fake.  If you simply come across that way, as you are naturally that way, that's one thing.  Using it to promote your legal career, however, is bullshit.

Indeed, on real cowboys, not all of which are men, today:

Come As You Are

I guess this gets back in a way to this thread:

A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .

If you are going to be a lawyer, look like one, it's what you actually are.

And, by the way, there's at least one politician in the state that does the same thing, and I'd have the same criticism about.  He's not a lawyer, but a commercial landlord.  

Anyhow, it also gets to the weird association that the law picked up at some point with cowboys around here.  I don't know when this occurred, but it might have been about the time that Gerry Spence's book Gunning for Justice came out.  Spence didn't try to portray himself as a cowboy, but he did take on a Western influenced style, wearing a fringed jacket and a cowboy hat as a matter of course.  Spence being sui generis has been able to consistently pull that off whereas those copying him tend to look absurd.

Anyhow, "Gunning for Justice" is actually a phrase that's been around for awhile and he didn't introduce it, as t his movie poster from 1948 demonstrates:

Spence's use of it, however, seem to have pushed into another sort of use, at least locally.

On this, it's interesting that the cowboy image can be coopted this way, whereas other "manly" professions genuinely cannot.  Fighters (boxers) have been a little bit, and I suppose that was an obviously one, but nobody, for example, talks about "whaling for justice".

Anyhow, dressing up like a cowboy for affect if you are not punching makes you a Rexall Ranger, not a cowboy.

While I'm at it, a Wyoming lawyer has affected the cowboy appearance for her columns on one of the local electronic journals.  In this case, she's gone for the a way too big hat big pushed way up on the forehead so you can see the face look, which to a working stockman looks absolutely absurd.  The same journal actually as a working rancher who wears his hat correctly as a columnist, and up until recently had another who did the same.

As a total side, if you notice in old cowboy portraits they often have their hats pushed to the back of their head, something moderns have wondered about, and for which they've even assumed that must be how they wore them.

No, the cameras were bad.

Isom Dart at Brown’s Hole Wyoming.

If they hadn't pushed them up some, their faces would have been in shadow

On identifies, I had a couple of odd encounters recently, one of which involves mental decline, and the other which involves gender attraction.

I'll start with the latter one first.  There's an older profession that I don't know well, but who've I've been familiar with for a very long time.  Somebody much more familiar with him than me dropped that he's a homosexual.  I was shocked.  Not because homosexuality in general shocks me, but because it was very well closeted for decades.  Indeed, he's married with children.

I suppose that might be the rule for people north of 70, the closteting, that is.

In retrospect, it pretty quickly made sense for some reason.  It just explained some personality quirks that I'd long noticed.  The point of posting it here, however, is that if it's true, he's lived a lifetime with sort of an interesting strained identity.

He's not the only one I know of who is alleged to be in this category.  Frankly a fairly well known person in the region is claimed by some insiders to fit this as well.  In that case, it's more notable for his public opinions on things, which would be generally contrary to this inclination, assuming its true.

Now, I'll note that I have the typically misunderstood Catholic views on homosexuality.  I'll also note that one of these individuals is a co-religious, and the other was.  My only real point in noting all of this is to note that it must be a strain to live an entire life with a sort of false identity, assuming that its true in either case, which I can't really say for sure.

I'll also note that homosexuals of that vintage who did not present themselves as "gay", which is different, may have had a better understanding of marriage than many.  Catholic Answers Hugh Barbour defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman to produce children for the worship of God, which while it may be more than that, that captures a lot of it.  People like to say that before Obergefell homosexuals couldn't marry, but that's simply false, if we consider that marriage is a unique institution between two people capable of reproducing and bound to care for those they create.

Going on to occupations, I've also run across recently a situation in which I've been dealing with somebody whom, once again, I don't know that well but who is still working fulltime and whose clearly suffering from some compression loss in the psychological cylinders.  I'm not their pal or anything but it's sad to watch.  It's also sad to watch, however, somebody whose psychological identify is so closely identified with the practice of law, they can't leave it.

I've known more than one lawyer who practiced into advanced old age with no mental detriment.  But it's also the case quite frankly that a person's physical clockworks, and often their mental ones, start to slip a bit after the hands hit 60 or so.  I'm frankly not convinced at all that allowing people to practice a profession after some point in their 60s is a good thing, and I don't think people should carry on into their 70s.  For one thing, it's just sad.  Surely there was something else that interested them once.

Back to occupational identities.

One of the really minor features of this blog is the M65 Field Jackets in the wild. page.  Minor.

I like M65 field jackets.  When I was in the Guard I had at least six of them due to having bought two and having been issued four more.  The reason I was issued four is that at Ft. Sill the switch from OG-107 to BDU was going on and we were issued OD field jackets. As soon as I got back, we were issued BDU field jackets, and told to keep the old ones.

I gave one of the OD ones to a girlfriend who had need of a jacket while I was in university, and then eventually I just got to big, i.e,. gained weight, or filled out, whatever, and couldn't wear the size I'd been issued.  But I still had the next larger size, Large Regular.

Well, time, etc.

A surplus store here had a whole bunch of uniform items here before they went out of business and I bought several BDU ones.  I just really like them.  I picked up a OD one for my son, as they're a nice coat, but naively didn't for myself.  The OD ones you can wear for daily wear really.

Well, here recently I found a Greek Lizard pattern one for sale and I bought it for hunting.  Which meant that I had three woodland pattern ones, one desert pattern one (a gift of an old soldier) and a Lizard pattern one.  Then I saw the current multicam pattern one for sale on Ebay, which I ordered.  Finally, I decided I needed an OD one and bought one of those off of ebay.

Some of these have the US Army tape on them.  One, the multicam one, came with paratrooper wings from the former and his name tape.  I took the name tape off and the paratrooper wings.  I'm not a paratrooper.  The OD one came with a name tape, the U.S. Army tape, and two unit patches.  I took everything off but the US Army tape.

For reasons that are silly, and I can't explain, I ended up ordering name tapes.  I can now sew those on.

Why?  I'm not sure.  I don't need name tapes on old uniform items for any rational reason.  Rather, I was required to do it back in the day, and I still feel like am now.  Indeed, it would make a lot more sense to take the US Army patch off the OD one so I can use it for its intended purpose of regular daily wear.

Odd

Well, I found a M1943 replica on sale and ordered it.  It won't have any patches.

I need to stop buying them.

As a further aside, a Carhartt coat is much warmer.  My old one is pretty much blown out now.  It was a gift from my wife and I've been resisting getting a new one, even though I need to.  Guess I'm hoping for another one as a gift so that I don't have to buy it.

Back to occupational identities for a moment.  It occured to me how, when I was young, men had much less of one. They genuinely seemed more well rounded than men do today

People always like to claim things were different, if not outright perfect, when they were young.  But it does seem to me that genuinely men were quite family oriented. That meant that their professions and occupations were focused on providing for their families, but it also meant that their professions tended not to be all that they were, including to themselves.  I can vaguely recall some men who were very career oriented being criticized for it.

Every man that I knew when I was young tended to almost be identified by a collection of interests.  Medical professionals were often hunters and fishermen.  Indeed, I don't know one who wasn't.  Some were dramatically so.  Men who had come into professions from farms and ranches tended to still be identified with their origin and retain some contacts with that life.  I knew a fireman who was a pretty good amature geologist, another who was a car restorer, and another who was the first long distance runner I ever knew.  More recently professionals, or at least lawyers, have almost become cartoons of themselves in some instances, only engaging in the law or perhaps one activity that's sort of socially approved for lawyers.

It isn't good.

Last Sunday I ran this item:

Pack Animals - the 🇩🇪 German Mountain Infantry Brigade

I knew that the Bundesheer has a mountain infantry brigade.

I've sometimes thought that if I had been born in Germany, which I'm very much glad I was not, I'd have opted for a career with this unit.  Outdoors. . . animals, etc.  By the same token, if I had been born French, there's the Chasseurs Alpins.

Hmmm. . . 

Well, I didn't opt for a career with the Wyoming Game & Fish, so I'm probably just fooling myself.

Have a nice day at work.  

Mehr Mensch sein,

Lex Anteinternet: The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia.

Lex Anteinternet: The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Wa...: 

The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The top half of the March 1967 centerfold depicting the 19 year old "Fran Gerard".  This photo was taken from Cynthia Blanton's webpage, where it appears in this fashion (i.e., you can't see her nude) and is put up here under the fair use exception.  No doubt if the full centerfold was spread out, Camuglia's happy smile would not be what attention was drawn to.

Lex Anteinternet: Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.: I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article.  That isn't mentioned in either o...

Sort of going down the rabbit hole, I suppose, on this one, but the story is so illustrative of certain things, most of them pretty sad, so it's worth an additional, illustrative, look.

Cynthia Blanton replied to the post here, which was extremely nice of her to do, on her being a doppelganger for Francis Anna Camuglia, the March 1967 Playboy "Playmate", who appeared in that role as Fran Gerard.  It turns out that my comment that they were close in age was not only correct, but there's an added freakish element of. The two young women were just eight months apart in age and, while Blanton had not met Camuglia, they had even been schoolmates in the same California high school, Granada Hills High School, prior to Blanton's family moving only shortly before March 1967.  

Camuglia's obituary simply notes that she "attended" the school, which causes me to suspect, with nothing to back it up, that she might not have graduated.  Her life would likewise suggest she didn't graduate.

The high school still exists, but is a charter school now.  It was nearly new then, having opened in 1960.  It seems to have consistently been a well regarded high school.

Camuglia was just a teenager when she appeared in Playboy and only barely out of high school.  And not only was she only 19 when the photos ran, give the nature of production, she was 18 when they were taken.  

One year younger would have made this child pornography.

Not that this would prove to be a deterrent for Playboy.  At least two of the Playboy "Playmates" were 17 years old when their photographs were taken, and the magazine knew that at least one of the girls had that young age. They waited to run that girls' 17 year old nude photographs until she turned 18, which would not have made it legal, but rather likely to be undiscovered.  Another seems to have lied about her age, although seemingly this could have been checked up on.  One girl was specifically run as a recent high school grad who was the "youngest" playmate and getting her high school wish to be a centerfold, when in fact she was 17.

Early on, Playboy was under a serious European threat for advancing pedophilia, although oddly enough from its cartoons.  It turns out, however, that it did in fact go as low as it could go, age wise, for nudes, and even lower than legally allowed.

To add to the sadness of this, Camuglia's first husband had divorced her, or vice versa, just a month prior to these running.  When he married her he was 37 years old. She was 18.

I don't know the reasons for the divorce, or the marriage.  What did an 18 year old see in a 37 year old. I don't know what he saw in her, but her physical attributes were no doubt undeniable. The marriage lasted only seven months and he disappears from the record.  A person has to wonder if the Playboy spread brought about the divorce, although that's pure speculation.  The odds wouldn't have been good for its survival at any rate, given the odd age disparity.

Her next marriage was in 1970.  She would have been 22 years old at that time.  Her second husband doesn't seem to be mentioned on her headstone, however, which suggests that she was not married at the time of her death.

Her father died in 2010, and her mother in 2016.  Their devotion to each other, and their children, is noted on their headstones.

Undoubtedly another Playboy photograph, but as she more likely actually appeared.  Fran Camuglia didn't actually wear glasses.  This was taken from an entry on Find A Grave and is likewise put up under the fair use exception.

I don't know where this all goes, but its a sort of morality play on bad decisions, combined with a lack of societal safe guards, and declining public morality.  It's perfectly legal for a 37 year old to marry an 18 year old, but it's almost never a good idea.  I'd guess her parents opposed it, and we don't know the story behind it.   Really short marriages of much older men to teenagers have historically tended to be explained by pregnancy or mistaken belief in pregnancy, and the 18 year old Camuglia could fairly easily pass for an older young woman.  Male interest in her can easily be explained by her obvious, apparently, physical assets, something which has apparently caused her to retain a fan base forty years after her tragic death.

It's hard to believe that this story wouldn't have worked out better if Playboy hadn't been around to exploit young women.  I'll spare repeating all the details that were given in the documentary on the magazine, but they're horrific.  Suicide wasn't limited to Camuglia.  Murder was visited on at least one Playmate and visited upon a person by one.  According to the documentary one young woman associated with the magazine died at a party and her body simply disappeared.  One suicide scrawled her opinion on Hugh Hefner graphically on a wall in the apartment where she killed herself.  A host of "bunnies" was  used by men at an event physically in a way that traumatized them.

What, if anything, Camuglia endured we don't know.  Maybe only having her 18 year old body be the object of, well, for forty decades, which would be odd enough, and which would also contribute to psychic loss.

In 1967 when Camuglia appeared in the magazine, in middle class society the magazine was both accepted and regarded as dirty.  It claimed for itself that it managed to become the Stars and Stripes of the Vietnam War, and as grossly exaggerated in Apocalypse Now, it was so accepted by that time that Playmates appearing in the way that movie stars had in World War Two and Korea in the combat theater occurred.  Pinup girls didn't appear overseas in the earlier wars, even though they existed.

At the same time, however, the magazine remained a "dirty" magazine and there were legal efforts as late as the 1970s to try to address its obscenity, although they failed.  Being n the magazine branded those who did it in ways they could not escape.  Whatever happened to Camuglia, she apparently couldn't escape it.

Well, may God rest her soul and may the perpetual light shine upon her, and all who endured such tragedy..

Related thread:

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

Labels: 1960s, 1967, 1970s, 1980s, 1985, Commentary, Growing up in the 1960s, Growing up in the 1970s, Playboy Philosophy, pornography, Teenagers, The relationship between men and women, Women