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Showing posts with label Growing up in the 1980s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Growing up in the 1980s. Show all posts
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Sunday, August 17, 2025
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:
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.
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Tuesday, June 3, 1975. New rules for boys and girls.
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare promulgated rules prohibiting separate physical education classes for boys and girls and schools from excluding pregnant students from the classroom.
I can't recall this happening, and I wonder if there were nuances to it. In junior high, which I was just going into, PE classes were definitely separated into male and female. They were not in high school.
I can only recall one pregnant student while in high school, and she was married.
Uganda nationalisted all land holdings.
Sultan Alimirah Hanfere, leader of Ethiopia's Afar people and of the Afar Liberation Front, declared war on the Ethiopian government.
Last edition:
Saturday, May 31, 1975. Laying down arms.
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .
Cary Grant and Myrna Loy from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.
People think I am exaggerating when I say 50% of people's problems, strife and anger would go away if they just started dressing well, but I'm not. Dressing in a way that makes you feel good about yourself will make you feel better about others and the world too.
This is both a revived thread, and a new one. It's one of many topics that shows up here in one way or another, including in stored drafts that I start off on, and then fail to finish.
This one started: I wrote my first entry here and put it up for posting to be run yesterday.
Then I read this on Twitter:
I had an attorney I had never met show up at my office to take a deposition one day in blue jeans - blue jeans! I was insulted and lost respect for that attorney. How we dress does matter. It is a form of manners.
I agree with that comment in that how we dress, matters.
But it does show the regional nature of things, but still we should consider this carefully.
I've posted on this before, but I used to wear dark black Levi's or Lees to court on occasion, combined with a sports coat and a tie. When I did that, I'd wear cowboy boots as well. Wearing cowboy boots to court is isn't unusual here. I've seen it done a lot.
In retrospect, I haven't seen the jeans, such as I noted, with sports coat and tie all that often, but I have seen it. I very rarely do that anymore, however. Part of the reason I do not, however, is that I don't travel nearly as much as I used to, thanks to COVID 19 and its impact on travel and the law. Travel was routine, COVID came in, and hard behind COVID were Zoom and Teams.
Indeed, I've appeared in a few Teams hearing recently in which the Judge was in the same town as me. Prior to Teams and Zoom, we had a few telephonic hearings we'd do, but if we were in town, we were expected to show up.
Not anymore.
Anyhow, I've seen a lawyer wear blue jeans in court exactly once. That particular lawyer was a working stockman and was appearing in the court in the county in which he lived. Nobody said anything. He was otherwise in jacket and tie. I have seen lawyers in blue jeans in depositions plenty of times, however. Most of the time prior to COVID it was in combination with jacket and tie, but even in the couple of years before COVID this was changing.
I still wear a tie.
I had some lawyers from Texas show up a while back and they were in jeans and new cowboy boots. There's working cowboy boots (all of mine are of that type), "ropers", which aren't cowboy boots, dress boots that locals wear, and then the weird dress boots that locals don't wear, but Texans do.
I don't get that kind.
Anyhow, in order to wear cowboy boots as dress shoes, you have to know how to wear cowboy boots. Some people affect a high water appearance with their dress shoes, and frankly do so on purpose. Men's trousers are supposed to "break" over the shoes. I.e., you aren't supposed to see the socks. But for some odd reason, some Ivy League educated people wear their trousers "high water" so you can always see their socks.
Stockmen, Sheridan Wyoming, 1944. This is an interesting photograph and it must have been taken as something was going on in the town where the photo was taken, Sheridan Wyoming. The clean white shirts are a pretty typical semi formal dress for ranchers. All the hats are good (clean). Only he older rancher with the beat up Montana Peak hat is wearing a suit. The stockman on the left is wearing baggy jeans that drape over his heels, still a very common way to wear them amongst working stockmen. All of the visible heels are "doggin' heels" which are common only amongst working stockmen.
Cowboy boots, properly worn, are never ever worn high water.
Anyhow, it's interesting to note, note that Atticus does, that years ago I went to a Federal Trial in Cheyenne in which I was making a very limited appearance. After the day I had dinner with the defendant, who had been a Supreme Court Justice in Montana (where they are elected). The main lawyer in the matter wore a suit every day, but he wore dress cowboy boots with them. The retired S.Ct justice, when that lawyer got up to do something, turned to me with real anger and noted, as I was wearing a suit with wingtips, that "I'm glad to see somebody dresses like a lawyer around here".
Given that at that time I often wore cowboy boots at work and even at court it was quite ironic.
The last time I wore cowboy boots in a trial was over a decade ago, I'm sure.* It was a relatively long trial and I'd basically cycled through my dress clothes so I wore a sports coat, black Levi's and my cowboy boots. Nobody said anything, but later the plaintiff's lawyer grieved the judge over something in another case and claimed, referring to this one, that he had favored me as he hadn't said anything about it while he had, she claimed, about her shoes. I don't recall anything ever being said about her shoes.
That was the last time. I didn't want to be seen to be inappropriate in any fashion, again.
That does bring up suits, however.
My legal assistant dresses professionally every day. I really should. I do a lot, as there are things I go to constantly in which I appear as a lawyer, and I feel that I should dress as a lawyer is expected to, when I do, which involves at least wearing a button down shirt (usually white) and a tie
I do the same for depositions, but I"m almost the only one anymore. I'll go to a deposition and everyone is dressed down in blue jeans and the like. People actually comment as I'm not dressed in that fashion.
Indeed, I went to the eye doctor's the other day and was dressed for work, which on that occasion was khaki trousers, button down shirt, and a tie. The person who checked me in joked that "I was too fancy to be there".
Times have really changed. I recall a time when you went to the doctor's office and the doctors where wearing ties, or alternatively a smock that buttoned to the neck.
Physicians in the 1940s
Dentist into the 1980s, which I know due to my household, wore a dress shirt and sports coat to work, then a dental smock at work. My father preferred clip on ties, probably has he had to change back and forth.
When I was growing up, I didn't know how to tie a tie.
Probably a lot of kids in my generational cohort didn't. I didn't wear ties growing up. I never went to a school that had uniforms, and the dress code, to the extent there was one, seems to have largely pertained to junior high, where (boys) were not allowed to wear t-shirs advertising beer, and girls were not allowed to wear halter tops. I can recall a boy being sent to the office once for wearing a beer t-shirt, although he'd worn it before, and a girl being sent for wearing a halter top that was quite a bit too less, so to speak.
Junior high and high school here were like the Wild West when I attended and by high school the authorities had simply given up on dress codes, I think. We were largely self policing however, as by that time self appearance standards start to awkwardly kick in. Kid from ranches dressed lake cowboys of the era and they were the real deal. Otherwise we wore typical clothing of the era, which often involved t-shirts, which is odd to look back on now as I'm always cold and I never just wear a t-shirt anymore (I've had people comment on that). Girls had generally become quite self conscious and therefore wore nicer clothes than boys as a rule, although the code, to the extent there was one, had clearly been suspended to the extent that I recall being confronted in a crowded hall by an amply endowed girl I did not know who had chosen to come to school in a very thing t-shirt and no brassier, which would have gotten a person sent home in any other era.** It was shocking enough that I recall it even now, over 40 years later.
Events, I'd note, largely didn't require a tie. I.e., school events. We didn't dress up for nearly anything. More significant social events, however were different, such as weddings or funerals, which is tough if you don't actually own any dress clothes and you've never had to wear them, particularly in the 1970s. The 70s were a black hole for dress clothes with awful suits and loud or pastel colors. I recall my father and I having to go out to get some dress trousers for me for a wedding and ending up with pastel light blue polyester dress pants, a true horror. I hated them then, and I still do.
Anyhow, a self declared position of mine in my late teens was that I was never going to have a job in which I had to wear a tie every day. It was arrogant and naive, but it did express my career goals quite well. I thought at the time I'd work outdoors in one of the sciences.
Be that as it may, soon after high school I attended basic training, and learned how to tie a tie there. The Army still issues ties. I still tie a tie the way I learned at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.
Even as a geology student I started to learn how to dress more formally, and thankfully the horrific polyester era was over. For the most part I dressed every day as geologist in the field do. I wore L. L. Bean chamois shirts in the winter and t-shirts in the summer. By that time, however, I was gravitating strongly back to the rural dress patter, reinforced by basic training, where we the original patter heavy BDU shirt every day, unless it was the surface temperature of the sun, at which point we could go down to t-shirts. Cowboys, you'll note, almost always ear long sleeve shirts and frankly anymore, I do too. Just recently, in fact, somebody asked me "do you ever wear a t-shirt". I truthfully answered, "yes, underneath a long sleeve shirt".
My parents taught me well, but it took some time for me to learn.
In law school our professors dressed professionally every day. Men wore jacket and tie every day, and one professor, our business law professor, wore a suit every day., Oddly, it didn't make an impression on me at the time, but it sunk enough, I guess, that by the time I was getting ready to graduate I knew how to dress like a lawyer. By the summer before I graduated I owned two Brooks Brothers suits, one bought for a wedding, and two Brooks Brothers ties. I still have one of the ties.
I don't have either suit. Suits, I've found cause an odd waist line expansion on me such that all I have to do in order to gain weight is buy a suit. In fairness, at the time I bought the first two I was incredibly, probably dangerously, think. There's a long story behind that, but I'm not naturally really thin. My father and grandfather were stout. Not fat, but stout. My mother was think, and seemingly everyone in her entire family is. I seem to fit in somewhere in between, but having been a bit stout when I was in junior high and the first two years of high school (and then having rocketed to thin), I've always been a bit conscious of it and I do tend to watch my weight. I'm as heavy now as I've ever been, but I'm still not approaching stout.
When I was first practicing law, the rules of dressing were made plain to me on day one. In the winter we wore shirt and tie every day. In the summer, we could wear polo shirts in the office. Court rules had at one time provided that during the summer lawyers could wear short sleeved dress shirts and ties, and dispense with jackets, and the "Summer Rules" were still cited, even though they were no longer published as they had been. I've never owned a short sleeved dress shirt and I've never appeared in court without a jacket. About fifteen years after that a new district court judge imposed new rules, which included no khaki trousers in court.
Still, even before COVID, things were really changing. You'd see lawyers wearing ties in their offices less and less. Levi's began to appear. And COVID just put things in the basement. Lawyers will now appear in Zoom meetings with the Court without jacket and tie (not me). I had one senior Court lawyer hold a meeting in which he didn't have one. It's been odd.
And I dress way down in the office if I don't have to meet anyone.
I presently have two suits, only one of which I really like. I wish I had a double breasted suit like two Brooks Brothers suits I've owned in the past. They seem really hard to get now. The good one I have is a heavy wool suit. I have a grey wool suit that's just too thin. I need to have, really, at least two more suits but I haven't had a long trial since COVID and I keep thinking, at age 61, that I only have a few more years of practice and I don't want to invest in work clothing that will likely outlast me.
The other one now has some very tiny holes, which would likely indicate some moths got to it at some time. It's hard to notice, but there there. It's embarrassing.
So I need to get some new suits, I guess.
And not just that
Ties I've had from the first years of my practice have really lasted, but I'm starting to throw them out as worn. I can't really ignore that any longer. And having waited to long, the bill for suiting back up is going to be monstrous, and at age 62, sort of a bad, if necessary, investment. I'll have to practice until I"m 80, or start wearing ties to Mass or something, to make that pay off.
Footnotes
*I've never had a pair of "dress cowboy boots", like many people do. I've had cowboy boots for a long time, of course, but never a fancy pair. Every pair I've ever owned was a working pair, even if they were reserved for office and town wear at first.
My regular cowboy boots. The ones I wear to work, when I wear cowboy boots to work.
I wear cowboy boots in the office less than I used to for a couple of reasons. One is that I often wear a pair of "ropers" that were bought for my son. They're Ariats and really comfortable, and look Western. The other is that I have arthritis in my right foot from an accident years ago, and my old cowboy boots sometimes get uncomfortable, and sometimes they don't, at the office.
**
"Mr. Bernstein: A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."
Citizen Kane.
I have found this observation from this movie to be really true. The fact that I can recall the incident clearly is something I find curious. That was the one and only time I ever encountered the girl noted, and I'm not pining for her, nor even proud of the recollection, but it's really clear. I stepped around a student and she was right there. She was short and Hispanic and looked up at me, but she was really showing, and probably conscious of it and embarrassed. I was too. It was only a very brief encounter, but for whatever reason, I can still recall it pretty readily, but I don't think about it every month.
Memory is interesting.
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