The first lawyer I ever met was H.L. Franklin. Not that I knew at the time he was a lawyer. It was 1972, time for me to be baptized, and Dad recruited Lehman to stand as a godparent that day. Lehman's qualifications for the job were rather thin--he was a Howard Johnson's licensee, with restaurants in his hometown of Statesboro, Georgia, and at I-75 and Northside Drive in Atlanta. Dad was HoJo's director of franchisee relations working out of Atlanta, and he and Lehman had become great drinking buddies over the previous couple years. Lehman had apparently gotten over their first big outing together, a year-and-a-half before, when Lehman invited Dad and my mom to sit with him and Emma Lou as Georgia hosted Ole Miss in Athens in 1970. Dad is a son of Yalobusha County and lifelong Rebel, and on that particular day Archie Manning ran and threw all over the hapless Dawgs. I'm told Dad had a few beers, and wasn't particularly gracious.
By 1972 all that was forgotten, apparently, and on this day of my baptism Lehman arrived with a gift--who knew you got gifts for being baptized? In this case, it was an electric football set, one of those vibrating thingies with the little statuettes of football players floating across the tin field.
Over the years, it was my extraordinary good fortune that Lehman took an interest in how I was being raised, and finding my way in the world.
When I turned nine, a package arrived from Statesboro with a jewelry box inside. I thought maybe Lehman had sent me some fancy watch or somesuch. To my surprise, inside were what appeared to be some old rocks but turned out to be, upon inspection, a few minie balls and pieces of grapeshot. Below them was a handwritten note:
"These were dug out of our property from when Sherman's army passed through. Hopefully they were used to good effect on the Yankee invaders."
The March to the Sea was still a fairly fresh wound back then. They burned the Franklin homestead, I'm told.
Lehman always paid attention, had a lawyer's curiosity about the lives of others and what made them tick. He knew I was fascinated by the Civil War, living there at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain. Later, on the eve of the Gulf War, a package arrived for me in Dhahran from Uncle Lehman. Inside was a copy of the Ken Burns Civil War coffee table book, with a handwritten note of encouragement from Lehman scribbled inside. My folks sent me the exact same book that Christmas--Lehman knew my interests as well as they did.
In my elementary school years we always spent a few days each summer at the Franklin's beach house on Tybee Island. This isn't it, but theirs was almost identical.
My sister and I would spend the days playing in the surf with Julie, Laura, and Little Lehman, as Dad and Uncle Lehman sat in lawn chairs on the beach draining a cooler of Budweiser, solving the world's problems, and turning red as lobsters. Then Lehman would arrange for crabs and shrimp to be delivered to the house, and he taught us the joys of spreading newspaper on an old card table and spending an evening picking at crabs and feasting on boiled shrimp.
Later when I had my own sons, I took them there to meet Lehman. Sean was maybe two or three, and while the adults talked on his huge screen porch full of tired, comfortable wicker furniture, Sean hopped from chair to end table to chair and across the room, a whirling dervish of perpetual motion. "That boah is hiiiigh energy," Lehman said, in a southeastern Georgia drawl I can't begin to imitate.
Lehman got divorced in there somewhere, and one of my favorite stories of his life was his recovery and reinvention afterwards. He and Emma Lou both came from two of the leading families in Bulloch County, and the nastiness of the divorce caused a lot of his banking and commercial clients to back away. Suddenly, Lehman didn't have much to do around the office. Never one to give up, he took his savings and bought some double truck ads in the yellow pages and billboards along the interstate, and reinvented himself as a plaintiff's personal injury lawyer. And a damn good one, to no one's surprise. The first time I saw him after all that was out on Tybee in maybe 1989--he arrived in an old white Chevy pickup, with a black lab named Winston in the passenger seat, wearing khakis and an old tattered polo shirt. He was as happy and relaxed as I'd ever seen him, me now 25 and old enough to see him as a man.
Lehman had the greatest stories of life in the South as it was. In 1991, after the war, I stopped in Statesboro for the night on my way from my old assignment at Langley to my new one at Tyndall AFB in Panama City. Lehman lived in a big Frank Lloyd Wright house that had once been his father's, backing up to a dense pine forest. Back then he had a butler of sorts, an African American gentleman named Elvis, who brought us bottomless scotches and cold cracked crab while we sat on the deck and told stories, just as he and Dad had done before. We walked into the kitchen for some ice, and Lehman pointed to a spot next to the kitchen table.
"See that spot? When I was a boy one Saturday morning, I came downstairs for breakfast and none other than Herman Talmadge was passed out drunk on the floor, right there in that spot. He and my father had been up all that night drinking in the kitchen, and daddy left him where he fell. I had to step over him to get to the icebox."
For those of you unacquainted with Georgia politics, Herman Talmadge was Georgia's Governor and later Senator. I think his statue is still in front of the state capitol.
When it came time for me to leave the military on a new vocational adventure, once I settled on law school I suppose it was inevitable that I chose to leave Florida and attend Lehman's alma mater, the University of Georgia. We saw each other every now and then when he came up for football games, but not as much as I would've liked. There was a lot of Lehman in how I spent my time there--I was the president of the Georgia League, a social group comprised of folks who were mostly from rural Georgia and didn't want to practice in Atlanta. I can't explain how a Californian ended up in charge, but it happened.
When I graduated, Lehman and Dad had a plan for my next chapter--Lehman had been roommates with Felton Jenkins, a senior partner at King & Spalding in Atlanta, probably the most prestigious firm in the whole southeast. I had the grades and law review bona fides to compete there. My stubborn streak came out, however, and for whatever reason the only big law firm in Atlanta with whom I declined to interview was K&S. That one probably cost me several million dollars, but I just would've had to pay it in alimony.
Speaking of which, Lehman was a great source of commiseration and advice when my turn came to end a long marriage with kids. "That damn alimony is going to kick yo' ass," he assured me. He was right, but like him I managed to make it all work out for the best.
Over the last couple decades, Lehman would find an excuse to call me every few months with some arcane Florida law question about construction liens or real estate litigation for one of his clients doing business down here. His lifelong assistant Linda would call and ask if I had time to talk to Mr. Franklin. Of course I did, and momentarily he'd come on the line, usually with his law partner, to pick my brain about his case, the practice of law, and life as a lawyer in the small town South. I welcomed the chance to talk to someone who'd been a mentor of mine for decades.
Did I mention that Lehman liked to make money? He was completely baffled when I left the practice of law to teach--"Not much money in that," he observed correctly.
Maybe forty years ago Lehman repurposed the Northside Howard Johnson's as something more lucrative, dimming the old neon sign with the Pie Man bowing to present his baked goods to a boy and his dog (remember those signs?), blacking out the windows, and turning the place into an adult entertainment venue. My father, never exactly a prude, was mortified, like he'd desecrated a church. "If yo' daddy could see how much money that place is making . . ." Lehman observed, as if that settled the issue. I'm pretty sure it's is still there, churning out dollars a lap dance at a time.
Later he got into the organic honey business, a wholesome enough enterprise that I think that's his daughter Laura on the "about us" page. Looks just like her mother, that one.
As we settled into life here on the farm, I started making plans to fly the Cardinal up to Statesboro to introduce Lehman to Peggy. I figured he would approve, because she's definitely his type--beautiful, graceful, Southern, adventurous, and has spent a lifetime making her own money. As soon as the pandemic wanes, we'd be headed up that way for sure.
But yesterday Linda emailed and left me her cell number, asking that I call her about Lehman. Never a good sign. When I called her back, she told me Lehman had worked a full day on Wednesday getting a suit ready to file, gone home, went to bed and never woke up. He was 80. I asked her how she was doing, with her having worked for him since I was a kid. Sometimes taking an interest in another's feelings is a way to deflect contemplating one's own.
I've been extremely lucky in my life that my Dad had lots of help from other men who modeled the sort of person I wanted to be. In a way, I'm an amalgam of all of them--there's a high school history teacher in there, a naval officer turned priest, my faculty mentor at UGA. But somewhere near the top of that list is Uncle Lehman, who spent a lifetime showing me a way of living that resonated with who I am, but also pointed the way toward becoming something better, something as witty and driven and comfortable in his own old hide as H.L. Franklin, Esquire. Big shoes to fill.
So long, Uncle Lehman. I'll miss having your advice and example in these remaining seasons of life.
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