INTERVIEW WITH

FLOYD A. BRYNELSON

December 18, 1991

Q: We are here at the offices of Mr. Floyd Brynelson and we are going to interview him about his experiences in the Dane County Bar. We are ready to start with your law school education, how you decided to go to law school and what that experience was like.

A: Well I originally intended to be an engineer so I enrolled in the engineering school and found out that I had to buy a drawing set and pay a lab fee for engineering and also pay a lab fee for surveying all of which would cost me about $50. So, since I only had $50, I decided that it was not economic and sound to spend that on one semester so I withdrew from the engineering school and went up on Bascom Hill and found I could take four courses, English, history, mathematics and German and thereby avoid all lab fees and the total cost at that time was $21.50 for the semester and the $2.00 library fee So it was a total fee of $23.50. So that way I could budget myself into two semesters if I could meet my other expenses.

Of course, this was during the time of 1932 and we were depressed financially. Almost all students worked for part of their expenses at that time. I got a room, a job, living in a basement room and I had to sort of paint and repair and make for my use. Then I used to make fifteen single beds every day for a rooming house. Take care of the bathrooms and the stairwells and so forth and that was my room job. Across the street I'd take German so I was eligible to apply for a meal job at the German house. So I worked for my meals at the German house and that pretty much set me up in business.

So, I was able to do my first two semesters in school. I worked on the weekends sometimes for spending money otherwise, that was the way I got through all of my education, including law school. This was, of course, for my bachelor’s degree.

Then I continued to look for a major and finally decided on the Commerce school and I went into the Commerce school and took about five courses in accounting and marketing and corporate finance and so on. Finally graduated from the Commerce school and then I was offered an opportunity to work for an insurance company and I decided that the type of work that I would be doing would be mostly auditing payrolls and I decided that I didn't particularly enjoy that. I decided to try to take courses at law school.

I actually took two courses in the law school before I graduated from the Commerce school just to test out my ability to get along because the law school had the reputation of being a pretty tough school. I took personal property and contracts and got along pretty well. Next, I started in full time and from that time on I decided that I liked the law and I became a lawyer.

I attended summer school because I would be taking a reduced program because of the outside work I was doing. Finally, I completed my law school in 1939 and we had a rather fine faculty, I thought. Probably the most prominent trust and realty professor, real estate professor that we ever had in the law school and he was a member of the law institute and was one of my favorite people.

I also joined Phi Delta Phi which was a law fraternity. I was able to do that because the girl who sat next to me, whose name was Virginia Collins, gave me $35 to pay the registration or the initiation fee and thereby I was able to join Phi Delta Phi. Of course I had to pay her back that $35 eventually——but my cash flow was very low and I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise. And there, of course, I made many more acquaintances. Including some of the prominent lawyers in the state that later went out and practiced.

As a matter of fact, last Saturday I invited two of my classmates from the law school had lunch with me and their wives. One of them was Jim Burke who became a reviser of statutes and retired. The other one was Charlie Drury who was from Portage and still practices law in Portage. His daughter is the wife of Joe Sensenbrenner, I think the former Mayor. She has now set up a law office. Anyway, these are immaterial details.

I think that a few comments about the law school itself would be in order. As you know, it still stands there, the old red sandstone building which is the building we all attended and enjoyed very much really. Although the floors were wooden and very creaky and the class rooms were large and not very well heated.

Mr. Page who was well known in contracts and wills ran a very tough classroom. You were never allowed to enter the classroom after the bell rang. If you tried to enter the classroom after the bell rang, he would send you out again saying the bell has rung, you stay out. You are just truant. In fact one of the professors in the school of economics, his name was Professor Martin, audited the course and he was just a visiting professor of another professor's course and he came late. I'11 never forget, he walked in late. He says, sorry sir, the bell has rung, you can't come in. So that was the way Page ran his classroom.

Almost all of the male students I think, smoked at that time, most of them smoked. We had a smoking room where we went between classes and down in the basement. It was so jam packed after every class. That was where we had our get—togethers and enjoyed each other very much. As a matter of fact in our class there were only four female students out of approximately ninety—five students, ninety—one of them were male students. The classes and the smoking room and the environment of law school was predominated by men going to law school.

At that time, you could enter the law school, you didn’t have any LSAT exams. Anyone who had finished three years of pre— law and had at least a 2.5 average could get into the law school. And if you had a degree as I believe I had before I entered the law school because I only had taken two courses you just had to be——you could always enter the law school. There was no requirement as far as grades were concerned. What the professors did was they saw to it that only qualified students completed their law school education. Then, I think the professors had an idea of who they thought would not make lawyers and some who would. As a result of that, we would start with about 125 students and the group really reduced itself down to about 90 at the end of the first year. That was because you had to have a 72 average to stay in the first year. There were some grades that were given that were very low. I remember Mr. Page gave a grade of 39 to one student. When you get one grade of 39 and you try to stay in the law school, you are obviously automatically dropped. At the end of the second year you had to have a 74 average and at the end of the third year you had to bring it all up to 77 and that was the year we were ready for graduation at that time.

There were very few married students in the law school. I'd say there were probably not over a half dozen. All of the men in the law school were dating the undergraduate women in the school. We had a rule, of course, that you could not come in the rooming houses after 10:30 at night. Everybody had to be in their houses at 10:30, those were called 10:30 nights. Friday and Saturday nights were 12:30 nights. So, we didn't always live up to that rule. I can remember some of our dates get into the house without the house mother knowing she was doing that. Maybe open a window and getting her in that way. That did happen.

The depression was very much a part of our life. Everyone was short of money. Most of the students had some kind of job. And then a program that was called the NYA program came into existence. That was a way for students to earn about $15 a month. You were paid $4 an hour so you worked hours a month and you made $15. And that, of course, is very helpful because that was cash, whereas most of the room and board jobs were paid for in kind. Most of us in that economic status worked in the NYA program.

We had a very good social calendar in law school. Besides the fraternity we had the law ball which was an annual affair. I think it was held in Great Hall. We all went formal for that at that time. In other words, the men wore tuxedos and the girls wore long dresses.

One of the other things that happened at the time that I was in law school was——it was called the St. Patrick's parade. The engineers claimed that St. Patrick was an engineer and they voted one of the senior students to be St. Patrick. He led the parade on St. Patrick’s Day. There was a lot of preliminary activity prior to the parade itself. Most of us were gathering eggs and tomatoes and things like that that we were going to throw at St. Patrick when he went down State Street. But also, because the engineer school was right across the campus from the law school, and the engineering students——the bigger ones——would come over to the law school and kidnap a lawyer or two——try to——and then get into a tussle. Sometimes there were some pretty hard blows struck, but nothing that caused (injury). I mean the administration was aware of all of this——but, they considered this to be part of the environment of law school. So on March 17 the parade took place and St. Patrick sat up high so he was a good target and we threw rotten eggs and tomatoes and any fruit you had——you threw at St. Patrick. We tried to get him so cluttered up that he almost had to leave the scene, but usually St. Patrick was a tough guy and he sat there all the way through that.

That sort of carried through to graduation. When we had graduation at that time the lawyers weren't getting a bachelor degree, of course, at that time as well as the engineers. So, we were all in the commencement hall at the same time. so when the commencement took place, the engineers jeered for the lawyers and called them shysters and the lawyers jeered the engineers and called them plumbers. That was one of the traditional events in graduation.

After graduation, of course, from law school, the most important thing in a man's life was to get a job and hopefully get a connection with a good law firm. I had not been on any position to do any office practice prior to graduation because I worked every summer to get my money for the next semester for fees and so on. I finished ray last course in the summer of 1939, and Professor Rundell, then acting Dean Rundell because Dean Garrison had already left the law school, and Dean Rundell came to me one day and asked me if I was looking for an assignment to do my clerkship. I said yes I was. He said well I have an opening that I think you'd be interested in. So he arranged to have me meet with Mr. Ryan of the firm of Schubring, Ryan & Peterson. I went up and had the shortest interview I 've ever had. He, of course, knew that Mr. Rundell, or Dean Rundell had sent me up there, so he said when do you want to start? This was in September as I remember it and I told him I would start as soon as it was possible and he suggested that I start October 1. And so I began my clerkship on October 1, and that was to last for six months during which time he had to monitor my activity and report to the law school every month as to what I was doing.

In 1940 1 submitted to the bar and, of course, through normal procedure, since the court was not in session at that time, a member of the bar went before a member of the Supreme Court and moved my petition to the bar and that was all that was necessary and I became a full—fledged lawyer and also go before the Federal Court, District Court. Judge Patrick Stone was the judge there and he knew Mr. Ryan very well and remarked how lucky I was to be associated with a firm like that.

At that time, the Justice courts were very much a part of the picture of litigation. It had a jurisdiction of only $200, but it was amazing the number of cases that stayed within the $200 limit. There were the small fender bender automobile accidents and then there were the cases for collections. Some lawyers practically lived on their fees that they earned as Justices of the Peace. It is the least talked about, but Mr. Randall Colliers built his law office building as a result of his having been a Justice of the Peace for so many years. That may or may not be true, but that was well known among the older lawyers that they all practiced themselves——had all practiced in the Justice court in their day. That was where you spent your first couple of years practicing is going before the Justice of the Peace. Most of the Justices of the Peace in Dane County were lawyers. That was not true necessarily throughout the state. Many Justices of the Peace were lay people who had a flare for, or maybe had a judicial temperament, even though they weren’t lawyers. And they had a book, it’s called Bryant's Wisconsin Justice which they used to look up principals of law that they could not answer as they went along in the trial of the case. It was very interesting. Many people were very well versed in what was in that Justice's treatise. As a matter of fact, Mr. Ryan had been one of the editors of that treatise. He had been City Attorney, I believe, and at that time he had some side work like editing and writing articles and so forth. So, that is where I got my start.

The rest of the time I spent doing investigation. Mr. Sullivan of that law firm was a very prominent trial lawyer and defense lawyer. Of course, all of those cases that he had had to be investigated and I was on the road a great deal of time. I would have to borrow a car, usually. And then I would have to go out and interview witnesses and do measurements at highway accidents. How far they were in relation to other land marks and so forth and those were all done either by myself or with the help of a sheriff or deputy sheriff in the county in which this happened. So I became very familiar with the evidence that had to be introduced in those kinds of cases.

Then after a couple of years I used to sit with Mr. Sullivan and help him prepare a case and go ahead with the trial as if he knew what he was doing because so many times he didn't know anything about the case until the day the case was called. He didn't know the pleadings, but he knew nothing about the evidence. I had to brief him if we were taking an adverse examination or a deposition. I’d have to brief him on that right before the trial. It was amazing how he could try an awful number of cases——there were maybe two cases a week and then he'd go for the whole period trying either one or two cases every week all day long and running around the state. He’d go to Milwaukee and then he would be maybe in Ozaukee County and then he would probably be up in Brown County and then back in Dane County and so forth.

Most of the defense lawyers were the same quality and were also very busy. I 'm thinking now about Lawrence Hart of the firm of Lockey, Tobias, Hart & Zackney. I am very knowledgeable about Zackney in particular because he was the younger person in that firm and he was more from my generation. Mr Hart was already a tried and tested trial lawyer.

Mr. Beckwith who is, incidentally, a member of the firm of Foley & Lardner was a very good plaintiff's lawyer. He was known for his ability to get the damages high, as high as he could get them in those days. We had no verdicts anywhere near what you have today. The verdicts were——if you had a verdict for $50,000 you had just one tremendous case. It was very seldom that he went as high as $100,000. Most of the cases were between $15,000 and $25,000 range. You would have to have a very serious injury in order to get the kind of damages that warranted even a $50,000 verdict. One of the big differences is in the jury mind, today. There is a feeling that the value of cases has grown a great deal. People get a lot more money for the same kind of injury that was worth a fraction of what it is worth today in litigation.

Interesting thing about the practice was that the only person that you could really examine before trial was the adverse party. Which as a matter of course you could always have an adverse examination of the adverse party. But you did not take a deposition, even of expert witnesses, before trial, unless they were not going to be able to testify when the deposition was taken at the instance of the person who has been called as a witness. Which wasn't thinking by the adverse party. So, in my day, we had very few depositions. Very many adverse examinations. You very seldom went to trial without adversely examining the other party or you could adversely examine parties where you had cost complaints in the pleadings——you could adversely examine those parties as well.

The practice has changed a great deal. After World War 11 the rules were changed to conform to the Federal Rules which allowed depositions of all witnesses and made the procedure much more liberal in taking the depositions then the Wisconsin Statutes provided. So, that was one of the very interesting differences.

Of course, by the same token, we had two circuit judges in Dane County and that also included Sauk County. The Ninth circuit was Dane County and Sauk County and the two judges would alternate taking care of the cases up in Sauk County. One judge would handle Sauk County and part of Dane County. The other person was exclusively the Dane County Judge. Well, that didn't change much until after the war. They had hard working judges and they were very economical. You had the motions. In those days it seems that there was a lot of argument and differences of opinion as to how things should be pleaded, what the pleadings meant, and there was a common form of pleading. Now I guess that is the same as a motion to dismiss. It was called a demurrer and we used to non—suit a great deal in trial of defense cases where the plaintiff was claiming not to have put in a case. It was entitled to a degree.

The practice was much more confined to the two judges that were here, so you got to know the two judges very well. Judge Hoffman was an older judge and then Judge Sachtjen came in later, I mean Judge Reese came in later and those were the two judges that I knew in my practice.

There was a very interesting event just after I was committed to practice. I came from Florence County, which is a county—— if you know where it is——it is way north of Marinette County and it is up near the boundary between the upper peninsula and Wisconsin, Menomonee River. In that county there were only two judges and two lawyers. One was the county judge and the other one was the district attorney. The county judge at that time had gotten cancer and had died and the chairman of the county board had to make an appointment or had to get the governor to make an appointment as to who was to succeed this county judge. And he knew that I had graduated from law school, so he thought that I was qualified to go back up there and be county judge.

I got this invitation, I'll never forget, I was sort of shocked to think that anybody would invite a person of my age to be judge. I didn't know how to deal with it. I really didn't want to talk it over with people I was practicing for there. So I went over and saw Judge Hoffman. I showed Judge Hoffman the letter and asked what he thought I should do. He said well, Brynelson, you are in a good law firm here. I don't think I'd go up to Florence County, you will just be a forgotten person up there and you won't ever amount to much. Practice will be very limited and you will get some small fees, probably——your future will be very, very dull, as far as he could see. So, he encouraged me not to go back to Florence County to be the county judge, and, of course, I followed his advice and stayed and practiced law with the Schubring, Ryan firm, and I think that was a good way pending the problem.

One of the interesting things that happened every spring and fall, was the appearance at the call of the calendar. The call of the calendar was a common way of setting cases for trial. On that day if you 'd served your notice of trial and you all congregated in the courtroom, the judge sat there and he had the cases listed in some order, I think by number and then he'd call each case and have the lawyer stand up and tell maybe something about what kind of a case it was or he would know something about it. Then he would say, is it ready for trial? Then the lawyers would say, yes. And then he would set out the date. It happened all right there, so when you got through with the call of the calendar, you knew when your case was going to be called and you knew what judge was going to handle your case.

The pretrial motions were rather interesting at that time because there were a lot of motions made by a lot of judges, but the court's didn't have the time to set those for hearing as a separate matter so they were all set for hearing on Friday afternoon. Motions would be argued commencing around 1:30 and then they would go as long as was necessary to dispose of all the motions. Sometimes, of course, if there was a complicated motion, he'd adjourn it and set it for a separate hearing because he couldn't handle that on that particular day. So, you had your motions heard, they were argued by both sides, and I think you were given the limit of ten minutes each side, and then he'd dispose of the motion right there. He either granted it or denied it and that was the end of the motion. So, justice was dispensed probably much more readily because of the volume that that judge had to handle, he couldn't spend time studying those cases and very few briefs were filed as motions. Most of the briefing that was done were briefs and trial briefs information for the trial of the case.

The jury system, of course, is much as it is today. I think that the lawyers of that day were probably more well known, although I think there are lawyers now who are well known for handling of their jury cases. But in that day it seemed to me that we had about half a dozen lawyers in Dane County who were very fine and talented jury lawyers. So, if you went over to hear a case in court, that was a matter of interest, chances are almost every case was one of these lawyers on one side or the other. So, the lawyers I have in mind were Mr. Beckwith for the plaintiff, Mr. Sutherland of our office, Mr. Hart, and Frank Ross from the Ross firm and Larry Hall for the plaintiff.

Larry Hall always said that he could get a divorce determined— -it sometimes took less than a minute to put in a divorce case. He prepared——he always prided himself on how fast he could get in and out of court in his divorce cases. Divorce cases were much different then because if you didn't have a basis for divorce which was in the statute which was a matter of fault, more or less, you had to worry about how to prove your case. Some of those cases were very difficult to prove because the only people involved were the parties to the marriage. Most of the time it became evident during the course of the proceedings in the court that one of the parties would take the position that maybe it would be best to have a divorce and that would be the end of it. However there were divorce cases at that time that were tried on the basis that there was no basis for a divorce. So, that was different than the no fault theory we have today.

After the war——during the war most of the young lawyers, and I was certainly one of them, had planned to join one of the services. I happened to join the navy and because I took mathematics during my undergraduate years and took calculus, I was eligible to get into the meteorology course. I went into the post graduate school and was there fourteen months and then became a forecaster. It was very interesting, when I got through with that course in Annapolis, I was given a certificate that called me an areological engineer and I always thought that that was interesting to think that I sometimes thought that I should be an engineer and now I got a certificate that calls me an air logical engineer. So I spent the time in my navy career forecasting the weather.

Particularly I was assigned to a bacterial warfare unit in the Gulf of Mexico and I forecasted most of the time down there because there was a highly classified experiment they were doing with bacteria warfare which was not known at all and as a matter of fact was kept secret from all people that there was such a thing as bacterial warfare. Because we understood that the Japanese were also doing this and that we had to be prepared with defenses against all types of bacteria.

I spent those four years that I was in the Navy doing a totally different thing than, a different profession than I had carried out during my years there. As a matter of fact, many of the officers who got through with their service, joined the weather bureau and forecasted the weather as a profession after that, which didn't appeal to me, of course.

When the war was over, I immediately contacted Professor Boisure who I knew was in Washington, DC. I asked him in a letter, I believe, if there was any opportunity for a lawyer in his division, because he was working for the office of the general counsel in the navy and they represented all those at the agency——there were some bureaus in the navy——the bureau of aeronautics, bureau of ships, the bureau of ordinance and so forth. All of those bureaus had attorneys. Most of them were naval officers, but most of them were civilian naval officers— —reserve officers. He said by all means, he said most of these people here are getting out right now and we need more people. 1’11 see to it that you get orders to come to Washington.

Practically a week later I was on my way to Washington and went to special school for the termination of contracts. We terminated contracts. The bureau through very large contracts. The uncompleted portion of the contract was obviously not paid for then the joint termination article that was in the contract——you were paid for only the completed portion of the contract. Well you had to have the proper inspections and so forth, and materials and people and then you had to review all that. Then the next thing you saw was this check that your employer or boss would get for maybe 10 million dollars and you were supposed to put your initials on that and there were some prosecutions in that place during that time and it was a little risky to just go ahead and sign something that had that amount of money involved in it. It was very interesting. I represented the contracting officer of the bureau of ships, and so those were mostly large contracts and the contracting officer was a captain. We sat through many negotiations with executives from U.S. Steel and New York Ship Building and Beaufort News and very large industries involved in ship building.

After that, of course, I came back to Schubring, Ryan and was invited to resume the practice of law there. I'11 never forget the day I took off my uniform and put on my civilian clothes. It gave me almost a feeling of insecurity and a feeling that the whole world was different and really almost made you feel as though you didn't know if you could cope with all of that. The emotion that was generated in that termination process. But, of course, that went over and I practiced law and by that time I was married and had a son.

So I came back to Madison from Washington. I'd met a girl in Washington that I married and so——she is still my wife——and we have six kids now. It has been a very successful and happy marriage. There were quite a few naval officers, army officers and so forth, who met their spouses through the course of their duties in the armed forces.

A large number of lawyers were coming back all at one time and it was difficult for some of them to get located. Some, of course, were able to go back to their firms.  The rule was, that required a former employer to re—employ people coming back from the service. Ofcourse that wasn't my situation because I had left the firm of Schubring, Ryan and I had practiced alone for a very short time, before the war and before Pearl Harbor. I wasn't resuming my former employment. I didn't think it wise to go back to Wonewoc and practice, although I enjoyed the small town.  I was a small-town person, really. I enjoyed the environment and the people I met in the community. But, having married a person from Washington, I knew that she would be much happier in a city like Madison than she would be in a community like Wonewoc was about less than 1, 000 people.

The truth is, also that the practice of law was a lot different for other reasons. For instance, the office procedures were different. Now, of course, I go through our offices of about 30 lawyers in the Axley Brynelson firm, of which I am one of the senior partners——senior retirees, right now. But there is a terminal on everybody's desk and there is word processing and an accounting system all computerized. There is networking going on to gather information——people can access that information. It is almost bewildering to a lawyer of my age to see that happen and I’m sort of glad that I don't have cope with that.

At that time we had no copying equipment to amount to anything. They came out with a wet process that was attempted to be used to make copies, but it was so cumbersome, you had to go through this wet process and then you had to dry the copy. We had it in our office, but it wasn't too successful. Then, of course, later on there were.  I remember back years that came out with other equipment. But, at that time, it was not uncommon for a secretary to sit at her own mechanical typewriter and have to pour out 15 copies of something. Of course, the strength it took to get through that amount of paper was no small feat. And, of course, if you made a mistake, you had to dismantle all those copies and erase because there was no automatic erasure system. So, the practice of law from the standpoint of the office was just a lot more difficult, and many tedious hours for those secretaries at that time. Of course, if you had a lot of parties to some litigation and they all had to have copies, you would have to make all those copies manually. That was a very different situation.

The same things maybe with the research. In my day we had the Digest——l can't remember what the name of the digest is-—but the large, old digest, and we all had to learn the key system in the digest so we could find the cases we needed and, of course, there was a lot of time spent in the library on important cases.

One of the important cases I worked on very early was a case in which a rich bachelor gave all of his money to the Madison General Hospital. That will was drawn by a very eminent lawyer, Mr. Stroud. Somehow or other another lawyer got in touch with this fellow when he was about 85 years old and convinced him that he should give his money to other certain individuals. He had a plow business on the east side of Madison and they convinced him that they could keep him employed as long as he lived. Well, he was 85, so that was no big feat. In that case, we had to get that will set aside and get the money back for the hospital, which we succeeded in doing. I will never forget working on Saturdays and Sundays on that case because it was supposed to come up for a motion for summary judgment and it was a very complicated case. Before the motion was heard, I got four people——individuals who were going to get these assets from the plow company and employed a testator. They threw in the towel and they moved to settle——they each got $1, 000 and their attorney got $1, 000 and that was the end of the law suit. That was because, really, the preparation we had done, testified that kind of a result.

It seems as though young lawyers – I don’t know if it is true all over, but a lot of young lawyers were pretty good researchers at that time and put in a lot of manual type of research. Now you go into Lexis and that kind of thing and find cases that we had to look for on the advance sheets and sometimes we didn't have advance sheets in those days. It was all done in the very cumbersome way and with all of your notes were hand written and so forth. Then you had to prepare a brief and satisfy your law school teacher who wasn't a very good lawyer who would review your material to see if he thought you could win with it. That was one of the cases that I had that I thought was more or less one of the more important things in that it happened to me in the year that I was elected to be a partner in the firm, so I always thought that that case had more to do with ray being elected to the firm as a partner than anything else I did.

There were some interesting differences between the litigation that happened in my day and today. We didn't have the rule of frivolous law suits that we have today so that as far as you were concerned, you hoped that you could get any case considered to be a frivolous law suit if you were on the other side, but there was no special penalty for having a frivolous law suit. In other words, today under the rules, as I understand it, if it is proved to be a frivolous law suit, not only do you have to pay the statutory costs, but you may have to pay other additional costs that the judge may assess.

The other thing that is very prevalent today is the amount of litigation and the feeling that people have that they are entitled to relief for almost anything that you can conceive of. In other words, it seems to me that it is a reflection of our society——we are a much more permissive society than we were in the older days. In other words, you'd be allowed to understand the rules of evidence had changed. And what’s more the rules of heresy are not nearly as carefully monitored as they were in my day. So, you have, I think, an environment in the courts that is a lot different and I think there are a lot of lawyers that are probably not as skilled as the lawyers were in that old day as I mentioned. I think the judges are accommodating practice to the talent that is before them.  That is my feeling about it.

When I think about, you know, people like Judge Jackman. Jackman was one of the outstanding trial lawyers. He represented the Medical Society and he was known as a medical practitioner, you might say. He handled all of the malpractice cases, practically, in Dane County. He was a very talented lawyer and had spent over 30 years in the practice of law before he was elected to the bench. You had a different kind of judge when you had a judge like Judge Jackmon, than if you have a judge that has never had much trial practice in his career. Most of the judges——Hoffman and Reese——were judges who were very skillful in understanding what the lawyer had to do in that day to get his evidence and his case in and get his case before the jury.

Besides that, I don’t know anything unusual that happened. The specialization was probably not nearly as great then as it is today. Although, in my own personal situation, there was an opportunity given me because of my acquaintanceship with the then vice president of the telephone company, to represent General Telephone and Electronics Corporation, which was then known as Commonwealth Telephone Company in the State of Wisconsin. Mr. Ryan had been a public utility lawyer for many years. He was very knowledgeable in that area——and had spent his entire career in the electric utility business. Mr. Moran who was the vice president and general manager of Commonwealth wanted someone who would dedicate himself to understanding the telephone business and become his lawyer at first call and that lawyer in our firm. So, he had to go through Mr. Schubring, the head of the firm, and say I'd like to have this situation so I can have a person who could respond to my problems and I think Mr. Ryan is a very fine lawyer, but he is very busy with the power company and he is at the age now where I don't think that he wants to learn all about the telephone business . 1 was chosen to represent, at that time, Commonwealth Telephone Company.

Right after the war, all of the material and labor had been frozen, pretty much, during the war, and so no improvements had been made to telephone service over the whole period of that four or five years. Of course, before you can be geared up, you need to manufacture new equipment and that took another couple of years before you could get going——and then there was the question of the capital that had to be raised to pay for this stuff to put it in. Then the associated increases in rates because of the new investments. So, there were some very interesting problems in the practice of law with this new problem. I can remember we went to hearings on service, plus it was not uncommon to have people 14 or 15 people on a magneta line and then have the old crank type telephone, so this was throughout the rural area of Wisconsin, this was the way that service had been invented. People were complaining—— they knew that--—as a matter of fact, they were complaining during the war——we were at the disadvantage of having our former president at the telephone company say, well, as soon as the war is over you are going to get new service. Well, the war was over and the new service wasn't forthcoming. We were being called in to respond to the problems associated with that delay——getting the telephone equipment and the service.

I spent a lot of time and I've traveled with the staff. We used to have a circuit. We’d start out and we'd go as far as Lake Michigan——they had about 90 exchanges at that time. Most were rural. The biggest ones were Wausau, Two Rivers, Rice Lake, Edgerton, which was the largest. The big communities were served by the Bell System and that was Milwaukee, Green Bay, Eau Claire and Madison and so forth. None of those were available to a small independent at that time. As a result, because of the nature of what was going on, the big centers got the equipment on a priority basis because they served more people and it would be beneficial to a larger community to have telephone service that was adequate and so forth. Whereas in the small communities there weren't as many people involved, but that didn't mean that they weren't noisy about what was going on. They were the kind of people that came to the commission hearings and they made a lot of noise. We used to call sort of a recess and then we would try to explain to them, in a friendly way, off the record, what exactly was going to happen. We almost always had a schedule which we had fixed up in advance, saying this is when we are going to have the new service in, and this is what it looks like it is going to cost you, and so forth. In that way, we were able to sometimes get those people off the back of the telephone company because we had a plan worked out in advance.

I went through that period and, of course, most of the municipalities hired special lawyers to represent them in opposition to the utilities who were seeking rate increases.  So, you were battling with city attorneys some times. You had a rate case——and, of course, most of these rate cases involved more than one exchange——in other words, they were state—wide rate cases. So you had maybe 20 or 30 city attorneys showing up at these rate cases fighting your application. Of course, some of those people hadn't had much background in the telephone business so all they could do was get up and say that the telephone company was unreasonable and then they tried to prove that the service had been so poor and, therefore, we were not entitled to a rate increase. Well, they get into the problem of what to do first, do you give them the rate increase and then try to improve the service or do you have to improve the service, and if you don't have the income, you can’t proceed with your conversion plans. Those are the problems you get into when you are trying the rate case.

As a result of that I was very active in the telephone association. I got to represent about 30 telephone companies and co—ops in the state. As opposed to the standpoint of being known in a particular way, I became known as a sort of telephone attorney and got to represent a lot of companies merely because I was a member of the association and they knew who I was and they thought my services were worth using them when they had to have it. I continued in that vein until I retired——when I turned over my telephone work to Mr. Hardy, who is now in our office, and Mr. Dorschel does some of it. I am sort of a counselor to them.

In the course of that time, then when I was about ready to retire the question of the name of the firm did come up. Mr.  Pearson had passed away. The firm, at that time was Pearson, Brynelson, Herrick & Gehl. Then Gehl had went with the power company and became counsel for Wisconsin Power and Light. Frank Bucaida and Jim Herrick and myself, we were the old men in the firm. By that time the firm had grown to almost as large as it is today——over 20 lawyers always and probably close to 30. They had opened an office in Wisconsin Dells at that time.

Advertising in the law business had become the order of the day. Contrary to the practice when I grew up in the law business——you could hand out a card to show who you were and where you practiced, and you could put that card in the newspaper too. You could put just the card in, stating who you were and where you were located, but you didn't say anything about your specialties or anything like that in.

Anyway, because of the increasing advertising that was going on and the feeling that we should spend money. At least I think they were told by financial advisors that it would be well for them to institutionalize the name, and so if they spent money on it that would be a continuing benefit to the firm. So, as a matter of fact I had retired by that time—— when they were involved in this discussion, and our firm had grown.

Mr. Easton and Harms were two practitioners over in the Anchor building who were seeking to join some larger firm. They came over and a deal was made when they came over. Mr. Easton was one of the persons that was very strong about getting a name that could be institutionalized. The fact was that they tried different names, Herrick was, I was the oldest member, Herrick was the next—-Ax1ey had already retired for several years. So, they tried out different names and I think they chose it purely on the basis of how they thought they went together. They decided that Axley Brynelson was a good combination and that was just because it sounded well to their ear. It wasn’t based upon any particular expertise or standing in the community or anything like that. It was based frankly on how it sounded, although I imagine that they took into account that we were not the kind of lawyers that would demean the name, but that wasn't the principal consideration. All of the lawyers at that stage were equally competent. But they had to choose from among the names that were available and they had first knew that the people who had been in the firm longest and that were probably the best known in the community.

The other thing that I think I have to say a word before we close about Mr. Ryan. He was a very unusual man. He was a counsel for the Bishop, the catholic Bishop. I was very close to Mr. Ryan, and I not a catholic, but Mr. Ryan had me involved in many catholic enterprises which involved the Bishop.

I can think of one particular project. In those days there was no perpetual care in the cemetery. The catholic cemeteries were billing the survivors for the care of the grave sites. And, of course, as time went on, a lot of those people passed out of the picture and there was a question of who are you going to bill for all these things. I can remember going through all their records and trying to find the proper people to send the bill to and I did that for the Monsignor who happened to be at St. Rachel's cathedral at that time. I worked with him trying to get these names and so forth. Finally, they went to perpetual care and that solved the whole problem which I think was a good result, because they never could have carried on the way they were before.

Mr. Ryan died very suddenly in Mississippi from an aneurism. He was 83 years old, but he was very active. He had four cases pending in the Supreme Court of Wisconsin at that time. His reputation as a practicing lawyer was still very much known in the community.

I’11 never forget the Bishop O' Connor who was Mr. Ryan’s client, conducted his funeral. He made some remarks about—— Mr. Ryan was the kind of a person — he seemed to know a lot about a lot of things. He was the kind of person who knew a lot about agriculture, of course partly because he was practicing in the electric utility field. He knew a lot about medical practice and so forth. He had a great insight into life generally. Of course, the Bishop was aware of that because he had been very close to Mr. Ryan because Mr. Ryan had been representing him in Madison related to the Diocese.

Anyway, when he conducted the funeral he said, I want you to know that those of you who are here today should plan that the Bishop should conduct their funeral. I am conducting Mr.  Ryan's funeral because he was my advisor and his name was registered in the Vatican and it's my duty to conduct his funeral. Don't expect that I conduct funerals of any parishioner in the Diocese just because they request it. 1 want you to know that so you won't embarrass yourself by asking for that. That was stated at his funeral.

That is true about Ryan. He was a very interesting person. He talked about cases during his early practice. He was a philosopher and he said to me one day, he said, now Brynelson, remember, the thing that you were hired to do is to give service. That is the most important thing that you will ever do as a lawyer. He said the fee doesn't matter. You always get paid. Don ^I t worry about that. Give good service and that will take care of everything. That was his philosophy. He was a very generous person with his time and took care of a lot of visiting Catholics because they knew he represented the Bishop and they thought he had the influence with the Bishop and some of those problems were those kinds of problems.

Particularly when they were going to remodel St. Bishop's Cathedral. The Bishop had no cathedral in his diocese which he could call the Bishop's Cathedral. So they decided on St. Rachel's to be his cathedral. In order to make it appropriate in size, as I understand it, they had to enlarge it, and that meant that they had to excavate to enlarge that.

A lot of Catholics from the fourth ward, who'd been members of this church for their whole lives, got very frightened that they were going to lose that——that steeple was going to come down. Of course, the more it got talked about, the worse it got. I can remember people coming up to see Mr. Ryan saying we 've got to stop that——we can't have the people digging around that cathedral because that steeple could come right down and the cross and all that’11 come down and there will be a terrible disaster.

Mr. Ryan, he sort of allayed them by saying, why don't I just get insurance from Lloyds of London. He said, you know if they' 11 guarantee it, then we can be sure that it is being done properly. The truth was that the premium for Lloyds of London was so high that the diocese wouldn't pay it so they had to work it out with the contractor. So what they did was they would shovel by hand a short space and then they'd back fill that—you know, they'd do their construction and then they'd back fill as they went on so there never was a large area that was open to excavation at one time. That seemed to allay the people in the fourth ward who were excited about the potential of having that happen.

All I can say at this time, in conclusion, is that I have enjoyed very much the practice of law. I have worked very hard at it. Even after I retired, I stayed on as general counsel for the telephone company when I was here. I was here ten years as president. Part of that time was in addition to my being a full-time lawyer. So, I would sort of be a part— time president to start with. But then, as you know, the telephone business has become very complicated and technologically advanced and so on, so I found it necessary to retire from the firm and come out here full time. I finally retired, finally from the presidency of the firm at the end of 1990——1ast year.

During that time, one of the things that's been most difficult was the fact that there were large holding companies that sought to merge with our company. We’ve been one of the fastest growing companies in the State of Wisconsin because of the area here in West Madison which has been growing very fast. The increase in telephones has been phenomenal. We’ve increased by 8% to 9% a year in the number of telephones where the average growth in the telephone industry is 3%. It varies from 3, maybe 5%, but it is unheard of to have an 8% growth that continues right along.

So we were in that stage and it became well known in the industry that this Mid—Plains Telephone Company was a very fast-growing company, and that it would be a good find for a large company. So, the result was that several companies, while I was president, came in——it included General Telephone, Ameritech, Rochester Telephone, and it included the company that finally made the move to have a hostile takeover was Pacific Telephone.

They came in here into this very room. It came as a surprise to me that I had an appointment with a man, I didn't know that he was bringing in executives with Patel——as we call them—— Pacific Tel. Com. He laid an offer on the table and said this is our offer, we want to buy your company. I said, well the directors had voted not to sell the company. I said, I think you should not waste your time on making an offer to a company. He said, no, we are going to make an offer. He said, I'm going to leave that with you and he said I want you to respond to it.

Well, it was a difficult situation for me because you have a duty to your shareholders to tell them what is going on and so forth. I consulted with my firm and we decided that we would not open the offer, we would just send it back to Vancouver, where it came from. Well, they got the offer back unopened and then they proceeded to put in the newspaper and said that they had made an offer. So they published it in the Milwaukee Sentinel and the Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal and so the campaign was on. We had to decide how we were going to fight that.

That was a real tough packet of problems, how we could beat this because they offered much more than our stock sold for in the open market. But we had a very loyal subscriber body here in this area. They know they were getting, for their value, good telephone service at the lowest cost of any telephone company you see in this area.

We decide to split all of our employees up into small groups and then we campaigned with the shareholders and addressed that subject——what would happen if they were taken over. We tried to point out to them that here would be an absentee owner who would be up in Vancouver, WA and the only thing he was interested in is the earnings per share. He wasn't interested in all these other things. So we drummed very heavily on that.

Of course, they came back and put this in the newspaper and such——you may have seen this in the newspaper, it was there for some considerable period. We called a special meeting of the shareholders because we had to respond to this timely, even though in the beginning we weren't going to. We had a very successful meeting and the vote was——80% were in favor of retaining the company in its original form, only about 16 or 17% voted for Pactel.

So, that was one of my closing activities and that success is one of those things that only happens once in a lifetime that you have the opportunity to do something like that. It worked out very well. Of course, the employees here had been very frightened to think that they might a 11—— cause the idea was that if a big company takes you over, they consolidate. They were taking over a lot of companies in Wisconsin and they would consolidate a lot of their activities. The engineering firm would probably go, the accounting firm and data processing would be from a central location. We could point out to our employees that they were fighting for their life around there. They were very, very excited about the whole thing and they worked very, very hard. They were very realistic about getting the telephone shareholders to vote in favor to retaining the present business. I think because we won by such a large margin we haven’t have any inquiries since that day of the special meeting.

I also thought that they were publicizing——Pacte1——what a wonderful company they were, and of course, when they lost, I had to be a good idea if we sent out to Vancouver the result of the election so that their local people could see that they aren't always successful in doing what they want to do. That more or less concludes my presentation.

Q: I was wondering if you could take a couple more minutes to talk about the old courthouse and the construction of the new one. Was there much public debate about it? What did the old courthouse look like? How did the change come about?

A: Well, the old courthouse, I think, had pretty much the same exterior that was on the law school. Red sandstone building. It was two stories high. The floors were some kind of tile—— very interesting designs. The courtrooms were not very well lighted. I can remember that Judge Hoffman, particularly, had a special light that he had that he could turn off and on, that he could have right at his desk so he could see the work he was doing.

Most of the circuit courts——two courts were on the second and third floors. One court was on the second floor and on the third floor so when going to the second floor, most of us just walked up that one flight, but to get on the third floor, you'd get into the old elevator. The old elevator was the kind of elevator you would expect in a warehouse or something like that. It made a lot of noise and it was built with the grill work around it and as you went past the various floors, you could see out——just exactly where you were going. That was one of the things that was talked by lawyers a great deal, is the elevator in the courthouse.

It was quite apparent after the war that the old courthouse was inadequate. Not only for the purposes of the judges and their staff, but the register of deeds offices, clerk of court office, assessor’s office, and all those offices——county offices were inadequate, and were very old and I can't remember that there was much opposition to building a new courthouse.

The question was where was it going to be built and how much money were you going to spend for it. As I remember it, the county board decided to hire an architectural firm that was well known in this community and relied very heavily on their advice as to what the courthouse should be. I can't even remember exactly what was on that site, where the courthouse now stands, the city—county building as it is called on Martin Luther King, Blvd., as you know.

So, several questions came up in the construction of this as far as lawyers were concerned. Which the first thing we wanted to know was, you know, was there going to be adequate space for library——there was always a county library. A lot of the younger lawyers and sole practitioners didn't have a library of their own so they had to rely on that library. That was one of the things that came up.

The other thing that came up was a room that would be adequate to confer with people that were charged with crimes——so that you could confer with your client in an environment where you didn't sit with other people in it, and have a kind of conference. We wanted to make sure we had adequate space for that. Those were questions that came up as far as the law was concerned. I think that the county and people in the county more or less relied heavily on the recommendation of the architectural firm as to what had to be done to provide an adequate courtroom and courthouse and fill our needs at that time. That went through without any great problem.

One of the big problems that we felt——the lawyers felt——was the air conditioning. No air conditioning was provided for in the plan. That was because the budget was not big enough to provide for air conditioning. The truth is that maybe for the first ten years, there was no air conditioning in the courthouse. As time went on and air conditioning became the order of the day, it became apparent to the county board that they should have air conditioned the courthouse. So, now it is air conditioned, but I believe it was more expensive than had they done it to begin with.

Other than that, I know very little about the interior or planning of the courthouse. I was not on any committee that did that work.

Q: In the old courthouse, was the jail and the police offices in the same building?

A: I 'm not actually too sure about that. I believe it was in the same business, because I can't remember any other place where the jail was. I know that the sheriff was in that building, and so I would assume that the prisoners that were confined to jail were in that building.

Q: Did that old courthouse occupy the whole block between Main and Doty and Fairchild——was that the only building on that block.

A: The only building on that block. From the standpoint of the scenes from the outside it was an architecturally pleasant building to look at. Just like the old building at the University campus. I think one of the lovely buildings on campus is the music hall. Those kinds of buildings maybe aren’t very well designed from the standpoint of efficiency, but they are graceful and very pleasant to look at.

Q:  Thank you very much for telling us your memories.