If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

There should be more like him. Now there are none. The loss to the community is greater than the community can know, for his service was so quietly performed it drew little attention.

Services, I should say, for they were many and various. Services to individuals, to groups, to causes, to his profession, to the system.

He was an attorney. Are you thinking of the lawyer jokes and pejorative clichés we hear by the dozen? He was the antithesis of those. For one thing, he didn’t squeeze clients for money; rather, he would “lend” money to those who were struggling financially. And he did a lot of pro bono work, way more than any other attorney I have known.

Now and then he would take a “lost cause” case, and pursue it doggedly. Some concerned child custody, some were about personal injury or wrongful death, some arose from speeding tickets (he filed a “cert” petition to the U.S. Supreme Court for one!), one memorable case wrung damages from a prestigious law firm for legal malpractice, some took on a major hospital with numerous tentacles, and now and then he took on Children and Youth Services.

He often worked pro bono, as I have mentioned. That’s short for the Latin phrase, pro bono publico, for the good of the people (or of society). Injustice at any level, on any scale, is just plain wrong, and bad for all of us, and not to be tolerated, this lawyer believed. That belief was not theoretical only, on his part, but his guiding principle.

Even when he served pro bono, he did not expect his paralegal to do so. When he would call me “Dell” I knew that this indicated that I was to be his paralegal on some case. He might not be paid, or he might be paid little and late, or he might have taken the case “on contingency.” But he paid me by return mail as soon as I billed him. If I didn’t bill him promptly enough or did not include some service he considered billable, he complained. H hard-luck clients were billed late and lightly, if at all. Others were invoiced for judiciously fair amounts. There were no unnecessary services.

You might be thinking this financial oddity among lawyers made it up on fat-cat clients or when he prevailed in a big contingency case. You would be wrong. There was work he did that I did not help with, for he had research and writing and computer skills enough to be his own support staff whenever he had the time. He chose not to take on stacks of cases to get the retainers, and then juggle them with delays. He didn’t perform Time-Slips tricks, singing that cheerful song of that and related professions all the way to the bank: “Billable time, oh! billable time! I want it, I need it, that billable time…”

I am sure of that because there were no signs of such billing and financial activities on those occasions when he had me comb out a computer for him, or transfer the contents of stacks of 5.25-inch floppies to 3.5-inch ones and to the hard drive of a new computer and to Zip-discs or CDs.

He didn’t seem to be much interested in money for himself, although he did believe those who could pay, should pay. Decisions in favor of clients, when there was a monetary award, were acknowledgments of the rightness of their positions. Services he had provided had a value, and the lawyer was entitled to payment for those skills. But he also could waive all of part of his fee whenever he wanted to, couldn’t he?

This lawyer could afford to partly because he chose a frugal lifestyle, for himself. He didn’t claim that everyone should; that was just his personal preference. He was practical and generally opposed to waste. He bought carefully, hunted for bargains, and got maximum service from possessions.

He would keep and wear a flannel-lined shirt-jacket for years, but would want it to be mended so it would last longer and not be too disreputable. But he would give the shirt off his back, at least figuratively, to he thought needed it more than he did.

How did a lawyer get to be so caring and generous? Perhaps because he had been a social worker. Dawn Fink and Jay Paul Kahle are not the only attorneys with that kind of background!

Something drew him to social work, must be. Ideals, a desire to help people, would be my guess.

This Navy veteran, former amateur fighter and lifelong hunter once was a psychiatric social worker, a sike-sose, and worked in state hospitals, or psychiatric centers, such as the one at North Warren. Over the years he encountered many patients whose life problems stemmed from injustices. Or he found that they had needs that could not be addressed in the mental health care system, and the system could not or would not be improved by itself, but must be made to change, from outside, by another system: our system of justice.

So back in the 1970s the social worker (a man with a wife and child) did a 180 and headed off to Duquesne School of Law. I think the diploma on his office wall was issued in 1976.

Probably he earned that degree in jig time, because he was a quick study, and had an incredible mind, a MENSA type, full of curiosity.

He was curious and knowledgeable in all directions. Animals, nature, plants, how the body works, history, the universe, government, people, relationships, why things happened… He did not pry, and wasn’t given to malicious gossip, but he wondered why people did what they did, and how they might be able to do things differently.

As for our system of justice, that disappointed him often, he had ideas about how that could be improved. Health and nature, so connected as he saw them, must be kept in harmony. Beware the “deer tick,” he warned, from sad experience and out of mounting concern that Lyme is spreading and often not suspected, diagnosed or treated. You may have read his erudite, persuasive lettitors. There was one about the environment in The Bradford Era’s January 3 issue.

I hate that he has stopped watching birds and bears, and won’t be climbing into the woods with his little dog Nipotina searching for the first leeks, and foraging in general, or planting parsnips. It has been one day, and already I miss his emails, his wit, his friendship and warmth beyond measure.

He was the one and only, irreplaceable Chester B. Smith, Esquire, my very dear friend.

Peace.