An Indiana Man: Attorney Carl M. Gray of Petersburg
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1 AN INDIANA MAN: ATTORNEY CARL M. GRAY OF PETERSBURG Ralph D. Gray Bloomington 2013 2 Addressing the Indiana Supreme Court Law Day, 1963 3 Dedication To Bill (The Reverend William O. Harris) A wonderful friend, minister, Historian, librarian, and role model Whose gentle nudges over the years Prompted the completion of this project 4 Contents Page Introduction 5 Chapters 1 Portersville Beginnings 14 2 The Education of an Attorney 29 3 Getting Started 54 4 Senator Carl M. Gray 69 5 Returning to the Law, Full Time 95 6 Cases and More Cases: The 1940s 124 7 Gray and Waddle: The 1950s and 1960s 165 8 The Indiana University Connection 191 9 Final Years 215 10 Legacy 238 A Note on Sources 254 5 Introduction "I never intend to retire. I'm enjoying my profession too much." Carl M. Gray, 1961 he honors rolled in late in life. In 1966, for the first time in its history, the Indiana State Bar Association recognized the lifetime achievements of one of its T members and past presidents by holding "Carl Gray Day" during its annual convention in French Lick. The seventy-year-old attorney from Petersburg, still busily engaged in his practice, was honored through day-long ceremonies that were capped by an evening banquet. Among the speakers at the gala were Governor Roger D. Branigin, a long-time political ally and fellow attorney; United States Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John S. Hastings of Chicago (formerly an attorney in Washington, Indiana, which neighbors Petersburg); Indiana University President Elvis J. Stahr; and the 6 presidents of both the national and the state bar association, the latter of whom, Paul Rowe, had masterminded the affair from the beginning. Similarly, but on a grander scale, Carl M. Gray was the recipient of the distinguished Fifty-Year Award bestowed by the American Bar Foundation at its annual convention in New Orleans in 1978. The Petersburg attorney, still in practice more than sixty years after his wartime admission to the bar in 1917, was honored that day along with Senator J. William Fulbright and three others, two distinguished attorneys from large cities and major law firms and a professor of law at Yale University. By contrast, Gray had been a small-town county seat lawyer all his life, representative of what by then was decidedly a minority group within the legal profession, but he had been able to distinguish himself over the long years of his practice and countless civic involvements. More recognition came in the 1980s, through an article in U.S. News and World Report saluting senior citizens who were still active and contributing members of their communities, and when former State Senator Carl M. Gray addressed the Indiana General 7 Assembly more than sixty years after his election to that body. As expected upon that occasion, Gray reflected a bit about conditions then and now, and discussed some of the legislative issues of six decades earlier. As usual, too, he injected some humor into his remarks, noting for example that the first thing he had done upon joining the Senate was to vote to increase legislators' salaries (a measure that was adopted). Then, quite unexpectedly for honorees upon such occasions, he began to speak about current issues before the state and the nation. Most specifically and in a bipartisan spirit, he endorsed Republican Governor Robert D. Orr's educational proposals then pending before the assembly, challenging the legislators to do something right for the youth of the state. After this, the 92-year-old ex-legislator went to a football game at Indiana University, and then returned home to resume, in at least a limited way, the practice of law that had been his life for more than seventy years. As he said in an interview in 1961, when he was 65 years old, "I don't know how to retire," and he never did. 8 My intention in the pages that follow is to trace the career of this remarkable attorney and civic leader. I undertook this study at the request of Mr. Gray himself, although he evidently had in mind a much more modest personal memoir that would mainly include reminiscences of some of his more memorable cases. His death in 1989, at the age of 93, precluded completion of the original project but led, with the support and encouragement of various family members and certain administrators at Indiana University, an institution Carl M. Gray had served with pride and devotion as a trustee in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to this current endeavor. When Mr. Gray, Carl, first suggested that I undertake this project, I had to decline because of other commitments. But it was an intriguing opportunity and upon his second request, I accepted with the understanding that I would not be able to devote all my time to it until I had completed two other major writing assignments. I had, however (and fortunately, because Carl, already at an advanced age during our preliminary discussion, passed away shortly afterwards), begun a survey of the source material available and conducted a few interviews, not only with Carl himself and 9 some of his close friends and relatives, but also with perhaps a half- dozen of his professional associates. But when I asked Carl where his personal papers, mainly his correspondence over the years, were located, he replied, “I don’t have any.” This both surprised and worried me because such personal and contemporaneous files are basic tools for a biographer. As I soon learned, however, Carl did have a fairly extensive cache of such records, but they were filed within his huge collection of case files, more than ten thousand of them. For example, one “case file” was labeled “Rose Bowl Trip, 1968,” and other “case files” also contained other discrete records and correspondence regarding different aspects of his life. It is true, though, that Carl’s office correspondence was not extensive. Instead, beginning just after the start of his law practice, Carl relied heavily upon the telephone to conduct as much business as possible. He explained this to me by saying that early in his practice he had become the attorney for the local telephone company, and part of his compensation was free telephone service including long distance calls! This permitted him to stay in touch with not only other attorneys around the state and eventually the nation, but also to converse regularly with political allies, of which there were many, 10 particularly following his service in the Indiana State Senate. It was a common practice for Carl to make political calls around the state, including several to the governors, particularly the Democratic ones such as Paul V. McNutt, Henry F. Schricker, and Roger D. Branigin. Unfortunately, however, following Carl’s death in 1989 and my recovery from an illness in 1992, just when I was ready to begin regular and steady work on this biography, Carl’s family, specifically his niece, Judy, the executrix of his estate, denied me further access to Carl’s papers and inexplicably failed to respond to repeated inquiries on this and other matters. Judy even refused and did not allow others such as Carl’s former partners, in the Gray, Flieg & Biesterveld law firm, and his long-time secretary, Georgia Sutton Coleman, to answer even one simple question-—have these papers, invaluable to me and to the historical record in general, been preserved or were they destroyed? Originally these records were stored in the upstairs rooms of Carl’s former law office on Main Street in Petersburg (where I made some hasty but quite helpful searches in the late 1980s), but eventually, the law office having moved to a new location on Ninth Street, the old office was 11 leased or sold to others. But no one has yet revealed to me the fate of Carl’s enormous case file records. Earlier, I had arranged for the librarian of the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis to examine these files and this resulted in an offer from the Society to house, organize, and then make them available, according to terms agreeable to the family, to bona fide researchers. This offer was refused and even now, whether or not the papers, which contain (or contained) a veritable history of Petersburg and Pike County during the years of Carl’s long tenure as one of its leading attorneys and citizens, have survived is not known to me. There is, however, an extensive public record regarding this man and his achievements (in newspapers, magazines, court records, and more) as well as in the memories of countless individuals and fellow attorneys who willingly have shared their recollections of the man from Petersburg with me. So I have tried to carry on with the project. Indeed, my own “Carl Gray File” consists of at least six cubic feet (six banker boxes) of material, so there are ample items to draw upon, but, of course, the best first-hand 12 records—-letters to and from Carl-—are available only in limited numbers. In some ways, it is a relief not having to go through such a massive amount of material found in the case files and in some places the narrative below will reveal gaps in the record, but enough remains, I think, to do justice to the memory of this enormously important man from Indiana, one whom I am pleased to say is a distant relative. Several people have helped me in this project including all those I interviewed some time ago and who are cited in the footnotes.