1963 Houston Lawyers Look Back

By ANN ZEIGLER

Carolyn Dineen King, now Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit United States Court of Appeals, looks back at the year 1963 with a wry grin. It was the year she started practicing law in Texas, and she discovered one of the things they didn’t teach at Yale Law School—how to fix a copier at two in the morning when it’s just you, the machine, and the morning deadline for a big project.
Robert Dabney remembers that he worked in-house at a major energy company and was sent to Washington to attend a seminar on the newly enacted Uniform Commercial Code.
Otis King, later dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law, remembers representing civil rights demonstrators, along with whoever came in the door at his three-lawyer firm on Wheeler Street in the Third Ward. He and his partners were among the few African American lawyers in private practice in Houston, or for that matter, in Texas. And he knew of no African American women lawyers in private practice in 1963.
Alfred Hernandez, later a municipal court judge, then county criminal court judge, remembers preparing many of his own documents on the typewriter, since he couldn’t afford a full-time secretary and had to be careful about the expense of taking documents to a typing service.
Patent lawyer Tom Arnold remembers that Houston was the only major city where patent lawyers practiced within larger general practice firms as well as in specialized patent firms.
Mergers and regulatory lawyer Dan Arnold, who had been practicing for ten years at a mega-firm in 1963, recollects that in the early 1960s few firms had practice sections, so he did whatever work came in the door, whether it was a lawsuit, a will, a title abstract matter or a huge financing deal for one of the burgeoning real estate developers.
Practicing law seems to have been very interesting for lawyers in 1963, or at least very challenging.
The Houston Lawyer asked several lawyers to look back at their own practice and the city in 1963. We also looked to the Houston Bar Association’s history, as gathered by Eric L. Fredrickson in his 1992 book, A Commitment to Public Service: The History of the Houston Bar Association. The overall impression we got was that some things were only a little different. Some things were a lot different.
The “mega-firms,” including Vinson & Elkins, Fulbright & Jaworski, Andrews Kurth, and Baker Botts, had about 100 lawyers each, our interview subjects agreed. But most lawyers practiced solo or in firms of only a few lawyers. Very few firms had specialized sections, even among the mega-firms.
Each of the lawyers interviewed talked about what his or her own practice was like—the expectations they all shared of long hours under the stern supervision of older lawyers. Bob Dabney recollects lawyers sleeping on the couch in the energy company’s law library after working late into the night. Judge King recollects that the late night taxi fare from her downtown office to her home on South Shepherd on the edge of River Oaks was $1, plus a quarter for the tip.
Tom Arnold and Dan Arnold both remember that a “respectable” firm would never hire lawyers away from another firm, and a respectable lawyer would not consider an offer to move unless both firms agreed on it. Young lawyers were expected to stay put, work hard, and prove their dedication to the law, the firm and the client—in that order. And lest there be any doubt, it was made very clear that the clients belonged to the firm, not the lawyer. It was completely unacceptable for a lawyer to take a client with him if he moved to another firm, Tom Arnold recollects, and the lawyer who left was expected not to solicit the clients of his old firm for three years after changing firms.
For lawyers who started out solo, like Judge Hernandez, it was more of a struggle to get started and keep up, even as general practitioners. Judge Hernandez recollects that for many years before his appointment to the municipal court bench, his basic work was in family, criminal, juvenile and probate work for the Hispanic community and whoever else wanted his services. He did deeds and wills, at $50 each, out of his small office on Irvington, on Houston’s near north side, and competed with a small group of other Hispanic lawyers and several Spanish-speaking Anglo lawyers.
Dean Otis King, his brother and another recent graduate of TSU’s law school set up a firm which lasted only a year and a half before the three had to find other jobs due to lack of work. Fortunately, executive orders by the Kennedy administration instructed all federal departments and agencies to make a major effort to hire blacks. That meant that young lawyers could find work, although it was often not law-related. Dean King remembers one of his colleagues who worked at the Post Office and practiced law part-time. He himself worked at the Veterans’ Administration in an administrative job before moving to the National Labor Relations Board as the first black attorney in the Houston office.
Dabney remembers that his elders in the profession assumed that young lawyers had no “rights.” They only had the duty to work hard and learn to do things the right way. Older lawyers were expected to work closely with the young lawyers and lead by example. Dabney compares the experience of starting practice after law school to a military boot camp—listen closely, obey quickly, expect long hours and low pay.
Judge Hernandez remembers the advice from his elders in the Hispanic community, “Flies don’t go into a closed mouth.” So he used the advice to his advantage, and learned to listen well and then focus his response on the important facts, building a reputation as a good trial lawyer.
Technology in 1963 was not exactly at the quill pen stage. But the only way to achieve speedy production of documents was to dictate clearly, then stay out of the way of the secretary and her typewriter. The designation “cc:” for “carbon copy” still had a literal meaning in 1963—sheets of carbon-ink-backed paper were layered between sheets of regular white paper, and the typist produced as many as 10 carbon copies (assuming an electric typewriter rather than a manual one, and very thin onionskin paper for the copies).
And on the subject of dictating, law firms provided two options. Either you dictated to your secretary as she wrote what you said in shorthand, or you went high-tech and talked to a machine. For most of the high-tech types, this meant the Ediphone, which recorded onto wax cylinders. After the cylinder was played back and transcribed to paper, it had to have one layer of wax scraped off by hand to expose a fresh wax surface for the next use. Either way, a secretary would type the dictation on a typewriter, give the draft to the lawyer to review and revise in writing, then produce the final with the required number of carbon copies. In the early 1960’s the Ediphone wax cylinders began to be replaced by Dictaphone machines with a reusable plastic belt. The magnetic tape, first on reels then in cassettes, was not yet on the horizon. Many solo practitioners, of course, simply faced the typewriter directly.
One of the biggest revolutions in office technology, our subjects agreed, was the introduction of the Xerox plain paper copier in the early 1960s. It replaced the Thermofax copy machine, which made only a single copy at a time onto light-sensitive brown paper, which could not itself be recopied. Even sitting in a file in a dark drawer, the Thermofax copies slowly turned dark, became illegible, then brittle, and finally crumbled into oblivion. Serious copying had to go out to a copy service, which understood the nature of a captive market and charged accordingly.
According to all our interview subjects, in the early 1960s, Houston was a city on the verge of huge expansion. Shell Oil Company had chosen downtown Houston for its headquarters, and other major energy firms followed quickly, with huge office towers springing up around the earlier “skyscrapers” such as the Gulf and Esperson buildings. Crowds still filled the sidewalks, walking between the downtown department stores. The Rice Hotel was the scene of the action for the city’s business leaders. The Loop was just being built, and the asphalt pavement on Westheimer stopped at River Oaks Blvd, with the remainder of the westbound street paved in crushed seashell conglomerate. The Galleria was under construction and other near-westside office towers were not yet in existence. One of the unintended, negative effects of the rapid expansion in the downtown area was to take a significant amount of the business away from the thriving commercial district on Dowling Street, east of downtown.
After many decades, the Houston Bar Association moved its offices out of the courthouse in 1963, to a 460 square foot suite in the Houston Club Building, at a total monthly rent of $185.
This was also the year the HBA began participating in the Texas prison system’s pre-release program, with volunteer lawyers giving a series of lectures on legal topics to inmates about to be released, along with lectures by various businesses and agencies with other practical advice about life “on the outside.”
On a more ambitious note, the HBA turned its attention to the need for criminal defense of the indigent after the United States Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963). According to Eric Fredrickson, an existing program, the Houston Legal Foundation, was designated as the managing agency for the Houston Defender Program, Legal Aid Society and Lawyer Referral Service, which were funded by several large charitable foundations and a grant from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity’s Legal Services Program. Participation by all HBA members was mandatory, although membership in the HBA itself remained voluntary.
In 1963, Houston was also a city where civil rights issues were being addressed, but very quietly. Houston did not see the huge media-connected public conflicts that traumatized other Southern cities. Integration did arrive, one institution at a time, as described in several of the other articles in this issue. Until 1965, the Houston Bar Association was still an all-white (and almost all-male) segregated organization. African American attorneys had a separate association, the Houston Lawyers Association (which is still in existence, addressing matters of particular concern to lawyers of color). As Dean King recollects, the early 1960s were the staging period for the growth in opportunity for all three of Houston’s largest ethnic groups. But at the time, the rules of segregation applied. African American lawyers could not go into the coffee shop in the basement of the courthouse to meet with clients. To get something to eat, they would have to walk some distance to one of the small restaurants serving African Americans.
And that UCC seminar Bob Dabney was attending in Washington? He was there when the news came of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Houston lawyers’ lives changed in yet another way that day, as did all Americans, in ways none of us can articulate.
Our thanks to each of the lawyers in this article for their generosity in giving us extended interviews, and to Eric Fredrickson for allowing us to use the information from his book in this article.

Ann Zeigler is an associate editor of The Houston Lawyer. She practices bankruptcy law with Hughes, Watters & Askanase, LLP.

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