Transcript of oral history interview of CHARLES DYKMAN for Dane County Bar Association. Interviewer: Edward J. Reisner

Date of Interview: 12-3-13

Transcribed by: Ann Albert

Q           All right. It is December 3, 2013. I'm at the State Bar Center. I'm Ed Reisner with Judge Charles Dykman and we're going to do an oral history recording for the Dane County Bar History Committee. The transcription of this oral history will be on file and will be accessible in the future should someone want to do a biography of you or if we talk about a significant case or something. And so welcome.

A            Thank you.

Q           Let's go back to the beginning. When and where were you born?

A            Madison, Wisconsin, October 25, 1938. I went to Randall School for grade school and then to West High for junior and senior high. It was a different neighborhood at the time because it wasn't students so much. It was families. And so there were, I'd say, a half a dozen families with children about my age, and that's who I hung out with and did the usual kids' things.

Q           That was a neighborhood where there were a lot of university professors too; weren't there?

A            Yes. The professors tended to live on Spooner, Summit, and Prospect. But there was lower University Heights, where we lived. Of course, when I delivered papers I got to meet some of the neighbors.

Q           My research showed that after West High School you must have gone on to the University of Wisconsin for an undergraduate education.

A            That's correct. It was almost -- in this neighborhood and at this time, it was almost like 13th grade. Most of our class went on to the University of Wisconsin, and I was no exception.  I spent the first two years in a program called Integrated Liberal Studies. This was a program that had been set up and designed to give incoming freshmen and sophomores a broad education in the humanities. We started with Greek and Roman Culture and Anthropology. We moved into the sciences and did some of those in the introductory classes. So that's where I spent my first two years.  Because the University was so close and because my parents weren't wealthy, I stayed at home and was able to walk to school or ride a small motorcycle, much to the worry and displeasure of my mother. But that's about how I got around in those days.

Q           Was it during your undergraduate education that you decided you were going to pursue law as a profession and a career?

A            That's an interesting question. It was long before that that I told the family that I was going to be a lawyer, so I suppose this would be in grade school.  But I don't recall continuing with that belief. I worked for a radio station, which had the call letters WMFM -- it doesn't exist anymore -- and a person named Earl Fessler. I worked there as a classical disc jockey. And I also worked for Madison Gas & Electric doing maintenance of their substations. This consisted of cutting the grass and trimming the bushes and whatever. And in the wintertime and during I guess it would be Christmas and spring vacation, I would work at their -- at their maintenance center. I would be doing clerical work such as bringing up to date their transformer records. There was no such thing as a computer in those days.

Q           You mentioned you did two years in the ILS program as an undergraduate. What did you actually wind up majoring in?

A            I majored in speech with an emphasis on radio and TV. And I think at that time I had in mind that I would like to go into that, although as time went along, it became apparent that job longevity was pretty poor in this business and that the pay was relatively low. And I finally decided after I graduated from the University that I would interview broadly and see what happened.  I found that most people who were interested in what I had were people in sales, so insurance companies and grocers, the large ones, trucking companies, etc., were interested in salespeople. And although I did some interviewing with that, I wasn't particularly interested in what they had to offer. I have a feeling they probably felt likewise.

And so at that time, over the last couple of years in school, I began to think about continuing with my education.  I knew a man named Ed Main; he and I had worked together for Rodney Kreunen, who later became the railroad commissioner. But this was when he ran a motorcycle shop out on University Avenue. I was in sales and Don was in mechanics. We got to know each other. We took a motorcycle trip around Lake Michigan and kept up our friendship throughout undergraduate school.  So Don and I were talking quite a bit, and he had decided to go to law school. This was the old, old law school with the gargoyles. I talked to him upon occasion about this, and it seemed to be something that interested me.

So I then spent six months in the Army Reserve on active duty. And when I came back, I enrolled in law school. I remember I had to go to Marquette to take the LSAT because the timing wasn't right for Madison. The procedure or process was very different than it is today. The law school took in a great percentage of the people who applied, but then explained to you in your first few days that many of you were going to be gone at the end of the three years. That turned out to be accurate. Fortunately, I was one of those who        survived.

Q           So your undergraduate degree was 1961-62?

A            Well, there were two years in there. Let's see.  1962. One year in my undergraduate career I was exploring the idea of teaching, and I spent enough time investigating that and taking applicable courses that I didn't have the credits necessary, and so I spent an extra year.                                   And the Army was another year because it came right in the middle of a school year. So I was really two years behind my high school class. For instance, Harry Sauthoff, who was a high school classmate, graduated two years ahead of me from the law school.

Q           He's the first lawyer that you mentioned. But of course, he was still a law student when you decided.  Any lawyers in your background? Any family connections?

A            Yes. Two. And one I think was significant in my decision to go to law school Ed Main. Ed went on to a career with the Department of Administration and ended up as chief counsel for quite some time. At the time that I was working for the radio station, the station manager was Eugene Zagarowicz, who was in law school. I met Gene because I used to play a game on this radio station called "Sharpen Your Wits." Gene ran the program, and he'd ask the name of an entertainer was who was singing and other trivia.   And so I would answer, and if I won -- and I won quite a little bit -- I would win a pass to the Eastwood           Theater or a dinner at one of the places on the east side.  I had to go to the radio station to pick up these prizes, and I ran into Gene. He had mentioned that he was running a disc jockey contest and was going to hire a disc jockey. I thought this was splendid. So I bothered him about when was he going to have the contest. And finally he said, "Well, I'm not gonna have the contest. You can have the job." So that's when I began at the radio station.

Q           Gene Zigarowicz later with the Legislative Reference Bureau or Legislative Council?

A            I don't know that -- he may have done that. This would have been much later because when he graduated, he went into a partnership with Don Schneider, and at first, they were using the radio station as their law office. In the control room, which is where the DJs sat, he had a set of Wisconsin Statutes Annotated and maybe some others, so at times when I was playing classical music, I'd get quite a bit of time, and so I would look at WSA. And I found the cases rather interesting.  When Gene began law practice, I quizzed him about what is it like to be a lawyer. That too factored into my ultimate decision.  So when I started law school, I was still working at the radio station, I believe, and Gene Zigarowicz by that time had gone into a new partnership called Lent, Fisher, Schneider & Zigarowicz. That was Dick Lent, Jerry Fisher, Don Schneider, and Gene Zigarowicz. They were uptown in the old Motor Carriers Building, which is now, I guess, the courthouse, or maybe the jail. So Gene began badgering me about doing some law clerk type things with the firm. I resisted that at first, probably because he wanted to pay me a percentage of the collected fees on cases. For instance, they had a moderate collection practice, and so they did work for some banks and finance companies. I would do the paperwork and whatever it took to get these things going, and then I would sometimes do a little bit of what you'd call private detective work for them. I received one-third of the collected fee for things that they gave me to do, and if I brought something in, which I don't think I recall ever occurred, but if I were to, they said they'd give me two-thirds of the collected fee.

I continued that maybe for two years. In the summer, I did work for them. In those years, in order to be admitted to the Bar, you had to do one of three things; take a summer office practice course, work six months for a law firm, or clerk for the Supreme Court. I had no idea of clerkships. To me, I just didn't know that there were such things. So that wasn't an alternative.

But I did take the summer course. It was a very valuable course. We learned how to examine an abstract. We did divorce papers and obtained a default divorce -- on paper, of course. We set up a printing business for somebody. We turned it into a partnership and then a corporation and finally put it through bankruptcy. We did other things too.

Everything sort of slid from one thing into the next. I have told people that a lot of things that happened to me were purely accidental. I began to talk with Zigarowicz and particularly Dick Lent about employment. Dick and I got to know each other quite well. He had been a Deputy District Attorney for Bill Byrne, who then became Judge Byrne. Dick had just opened Lent, Fisher, Schneider & Zigarowicz and did, of course, a lot of criminal things.

Before I graduated, Dick asked me if I wanted to continue with them on the same financial basis. I said I would. Very shortly after that, I would say the next Spring, the firm broke up. Dick Lent went into partnership with Hugh Oldenburg. And Dick asked me whether I would join him as an associate in that partnership over in the old First National Bank Building, which is now the glass bank. And I did.  Room was tight. There were only two offices, so Dick and I had to share an office and make sure that our appointments with clients didn't conflict with each other.

There was one secretary. Eventually we got another. But the secretary was very experienced and did much of the, for instance, probate paperwork.  Unfortunately, she and I did not get along. I guess I wanted her to do secretarial work for me, and she didn't want to.  So I did a lot of my own. An additional secretary was brought in part-time, and I was able to use her help.   I continued with Oldenburg and Lent.

The firm moved over to what was the Bank of Madison, which was on the corner of Martin Luther King and the Square. And I continued doing the same sort of thing plus more. They added another clerk, I guess, whose name was Stuart Schwartz, who became a Dane County judge, and later after I left, Dan Rottier. 

So by this time, I was doing what they were doing, which was a general practice. Hugh Oldenburg had been general counsel for Oscar Mayer, and so he had all his old Oscar Mayer friends. His theory was that if you do whatever legal work they needed and you didn't charge them too much, eventually they would have an automobile accident, and half the time it wouldn't be their fault. That worked for Hugh. On the other hand, what it did was to generate a lot of small things, which didn't have much in the way of fees. Those were the cases he gave me.

Q           And at that time, you were still on a percentage of the fees of cases that you worked on?

A            Yes. So as you might expect, I tried to bring in my own cases and receive two-thirds of the fees. So I recall, just as if it happened today, on Saturday morning Hugh would bring in somebody who he'd gotten to know at Oscar's and would say, "Chuck, this is my good friend Bill, and the police somehow seem to think that Bill was driving drunk (or whatever), and I told him that you were really good at these things and that you'd take care of that for him." So, of course, I got into those cases.  Now, I mean, it wasn't just traffic. It was smaller cases. It was some divorces. It was all of the type of things that blue-collar folks are getting into. Now, what that did, however, was to teach me not just the law, but the business of a law practice. And that was very valuable.

Q           Let's take a step back. You mentioned you attended the old law school, the 1893 building on Bascom Hill. But you must have only been in that building for maybe a year.

A            That's correct. I never spent any more than a year in any law school building. The first year was in the 1893 building. If you've been there, you know what it was like. It was kind of a nice old building, but it sure was an old building.  And the second year that building was torn down, so I spent my second year of law school in a variety of University buildings, a lot of them in Commerce.  By the time that my second year was finished, the second building had been finished, not the present one, and so I spent my third year in the "new" law building. There was some of the old law school left, the addition, which was pretty much the library.

Q           So do you have recollections of professors or fellow law students? It's harder when you are split up in different buildings.

A            Yes. I don't have a lot of reflections. By this time I was married and living on the east side of Madison, and so I wasn't on campus except for school and some studying. So I didn't get to know my fellow students the way that I would have had I lived on campus. But I did and I do recall some of the professors. I knew Professor Conway, who taught civil pro. He had a dry wit. I recall him calling on me one day and asking me a question. I gave him what I thought was the answer. I remember his response. He said, "Well, that's not a bad answer, Dykman, but you're wrong."

Of course, I had Professor Rice and took contracts with him. I was the first class using the Uniform Commercial Code, which had just been passed. Professor Skilton taught it. This was a lucky thing. Somehow I took the course out of sync, but it was a really good thing for me because all of the work that I was doing later for several banks was intimately involved in the UCC. 

Q           All right. I wanted to take you back to the law school before I forgot about it.

A            Yes.

Q           Now, you graduated. You worked for several different small law firms. And I think you were talking about how valuable it was to learn the business of law.

A            Yes. So after I had been working for Oldenburg and Lent for five years, I concluded, and I now recognize the audaciousness of this, but I told them that I thought that I knew enough to be a partner. In retrospect, I should have recognized that the answer would be "no." But at the time, for whatever reason, I thought this was what ought to be done. So they thought about it for maybe a month or so. And finally I said, "I'd like to have an answer." And I had a talk with Dick. I was always closer with Dick than with Hugh. Hugh was a good businessman and a            good lawyer in that he knew his judges and he knew how to try cases. He would not function well in today's litigation. He was not into much case law or statutes. He operated on what he had learned, and that was another generation past.

So Dick and I talked about it because I had come over with Dick from Lent, Fisher, Schneider & Zigarowicz. We discussed it, and he said “no”, that they weren't going to do that. He didn't raise the issue, "Well, maybe you're too early and let's talk about it later." It was pretty much a "no." At that point I decided that I would open my own law firm.

Q           About what year?

A            Well, this would have been early 1970.

Q           1970. Okay.

A            Yes. It may have been that I was overly impressed with my own ability. I think that had something to do with it. The things that I had been doing with Oldenburg and Lent were not the types of sophisticated lawyering that is done today. I didn't know that. So I thought that I would do as well as or better if I moved on. Also, there was a history. Hugh Oldenburg had over many years had a number of young lawyers working for him, and they all left after about five years.  And I think it was because Hugh was unwilling to get into a partnership with them. So it may have been that. And it may have been just me wanting to be entrepreneurial. Or it may have been dumb luck or whatever. 

 I decided I would look around. I found an office share with purchased secretarial work with Jim Quackenbush. He was maybe ten years older than I was, maybe less than that. But at any rate, he had a going law practice at 139 West Wilson Street very close to the courthouse. He agreed to rent me an office and let me pay some of the secretarial salary. I agreed.  And then, of course, the question from Oldenburg and Lent came, well, what about the clients you’ve been working for and the things that you're doing.        Dick and Hugh were not interested in doing this work for the banks and some of the finance companies. It was routine. It certainly paid the bills. They paid when you billed them. But it wasn't something they wanted to go back to doing. And so they readily agreed that I could take that with me. And I did. The value to that was that it paid the overhead. And so I began with that. Things went along, and I did not notice a downturn in income. My income kept increasing. I was able to eventually add two secretaries and somebody to do the collection things with the banks and the finance companies. I moved across the hall by this time into some more offices. I guess then we had three -- three offices, four offices.

A lot of the clients at Oldenburg and Lent came to see me. Some I recall quite well. And they would refer their friends. So I had a mainly blue-collar practice, but with an unusual small to middling practice with Jerry Fisher.

Jerry Fisher didn't practice law. He was a real estate developer and apartment owner. Real estate developers and landlords invariably get into lots of lawsuits. And Jerry did.  Jerry is a brilliant man, and he also was very picky about his business. He was not about to have anything shoddy done for him. That raises the question of what is shoddy and who has followed the contract and who hasn't.  So I began representing him and then a partner of his by the name of Art Grandlich. That was I would say maybe a fourth of my practice. But it was big-time. There were some bad times in the construction business, and I remember at least starting to represent Jerry in a foreclosure with facts that were well outside the usual foreclosure. That took quit a bit of time, and I was surprised, but Jerry was perfectly willing to have me representing him.

Eventually, on that case he ended up hiring another law firm. I helped them. They were from a big law firm in Minneapolis which specialized in these types of foreclosures where the defense was. You set me up and you made the conditions such that they were illegal or unethical or whatever. And so that that was the work I was doing, as well as the evictions and whatever.

So I did that, and my practice and income increased each year. It was successful. In my view, I was successful, and it was fun. I enjoyed it greatly. I didn't have expensive tastes, so it was enough income for me. I was able to buy a small house, a car, and a sailboat, that sort of thing. So it was getting better, and I was able to have law clerks from the University of Wisconsin Law School. Let's see, what names. Jim Sweet. He's a partner at Murphy & Desmond. His wife was a secretary of mine. She then went to law school. She's now the bankruptcy judge in Eau Claire.

And I also had as an intern Don Bach. Don was very good. Judge Norris Maloney stole him from me. Don had went on to political stuff. He became the Governor's counsel, a variety of things. He and I have kept up a relationship.

Q           So your practice -- when you opened your doors, 1970, that continued until you ran for the Court?

A            That's correct.

Q           And that first run must have been in the eighties?

A            I was elected in 1978.

Q           '78?

A            That's when the Court was set up.

Q           Okay.

A            I'm not sure that I initially had my mind set on being a judge. I always found it interesting, and I would look at what the judges did, though as much for the litigation value as anything. But it crossed my mind. It did. And when Bankruptcy Judge Bessman retired, I gave some thought about putting my name in to be the bankruptcy judge. But just at about that time, the legislature and Wisconsin's people organized the Court of Appeals.

Q           I might have had a small role in that as a lobbyist for the State Bar working with the committee that restructured the courts, Carrol Tusant and Jeff Bartell and --

A            Yes. I have the -- I have the book that came of that coming up with the ideas for court reorganization. This is one of those things where I can't tell you when the light bulb came on. For a period of several months, I knew that the Court of Appeals had been organized. I also knew that this wasn't going to happen again and that if I did want to be a judge, I'd better do so now. In addition, my brother was working for the Legislative Reference Bureau.

Q           Peter?

A            Peter, yes. And he, of course, was, you know, rubbing elbows with legislators, and he and I would have lunch often. So at one time I said to him, "You know, they've set up this Court of Appeals. I wonder if I ought to run for that." I remember we were sitting at Wong's Chinese Restaurant.  And he said, "Oh, you wouldn't do that."  I said, "Why?"  He said, "It's way too much work to run for anything." He said, "It just isn't the thing that you would want to do." Now, you got to remember, he's my younger brother, and so the fact that he felt that I couldn't or wouldn't perhaps piqued my interest, so I became interested. Peter is the only person I knew that knew anything about this.

After I decided I might run, Peter said, "Well, you've got to see somebody, at least somebody in the legislature to kind of get you off on the right foot."  I said, "Well, I don't know anybody."  He said, "I'll tell you who you want to see. You want to see Bill Bablitch."  And so I did. And I treated this much as I would treat a contested lawsuit. There's a lot of similarity.

So I remember going up and knocking on Bill Bablitch's door. He was the Senate Majority Leader.  I had never met him in my life. I went up and I told him what I had in mind. His wife, Martha Bablitch, was running. And he immediately wanted to know what term I was interested in.

Q           There were three: Two-, four-, and six-year?

A            That's correct. And his wife was running for the initial four-year term. So I lucked into the right answer. I told him, I said, “You know, nobody in their right mind would run for the two-year term, and so I think if I ran for the two-year term, I'd be unopposed.” As it turned out, I was very significantly wrong, because there were five of us, including my second cousin, who announced the same day that I did.

Q           Who is your second cousin?

A            Sam Piper. My middle name is Piper.

Q           Okay.

A            So Worth Piper is his given name, but he was known as Sam.  So Bill said, "Well, you're going to have to learn a few things.” Then he said, "I'll give you a hand, and I want you to talk to my aide here, Dave Helbach." So I did. And Dave and I got down to business of how do you do these things. I thought that I could do this for $5,000. And I had $5,000. That, of course,   turned out to be very wrong. I think it turned out to be $20,000. In those days, that was a lot of money. And so I began doing the sorts of things that I thought would be helpful and those things which Dave Helbach had me doing. He was very helpful in introducing me to people, particularly in his area, which was Stevens Point. The three, the big four really, are Madison, Janesville, La Crosse, and Stevens Point. That's where most of the population in District IV lives.

So my campaign proceeded, and I know I agitated a number of Dane County judges because I was forever wanting to postpone something in order to campaign. But they were, as it turns out, they were helpful in that respect. They didn't try to push me and get me to, you know, go to the hearing regardless. It was -- let's see. I guess the campaign started in maybe October of '77 and ended in April of '78.

Q           And did that involve a primary election?

A            It did. And the five people, if I can remember, were Milo Flaten. And he came in first in the primary. I came in second. Andy Sommers became a municipal judge in Fitchburg. He came in third.

Q           Your cousin, fourth or fifth?

A            Yeah, fourth. And Bob DeChambeau came in fifth.  So now I had to do a general election. Early on, I hired a one-person advertising firm. Kate Speers was her name. She was a very good writer. I felt fortunate that I had had my undergraduate degree in speech, radio and television. She wrote up some pretty good stuff. I did it, and I thought I did it pretty well. A number of people told me that they'd never seen anything like this before and that they concluded, and I agreed, that television was the ticket to success.

Recently, people have discussed being a judge for a long time with me. And I've told them remember that the secret to success, at least at the beginning, is being able to convince more than half of the electorate to pull the lever with your name. Whether that has any correlation to legal acumen or whatever is a question that is interesting.  So I went through that general election, and I was successful, the most successful I ever was. I carried 24 of the 24 counties.

Q           So that was 1978?

A            Yes.

Q           And you were reelected?

A            In 1980 I won another contested election. I have the record for number of contested elections for a Court of Appeals judge.  So in 1980, I was up for election again, and a man              by the name of Joe Thomas decided that he was going to run. He was the Governor's aide to the legislature at that time. He had a very good thing going. Governor Schreiber had just appointed him to the newly-enacted Nursing Home Forfeiture Appeals Board, and he had an attorney and secretary helping him. When you start something new, you're not going to get business for a while, and so he was pretty much free to do a lot of campaigning. And he did.

So we went through the campaign. I focused on experience, of course, because I had nearly two years of experience. And I began comparing. Joe never would contest this. I continued to be more enthusiastic about it, and I would say I had all this experience and my opponent had very little except as a politician. Eventually I got down to saying my opponent had little experience. And I finally said my opponent had never been in a courthouse in his life, which turned out to be true because he'd been in   politics. He was a Georgetown graduate, that was his thing. He'd been an aide to a bunch of senators and whatever.

At any rate, I was successful, and I won a six-year term.

Q           And that took you to 1986?

A            Yes.

Q           You ran again?

A            I ran again, and I was unopposed. That took me to -let's see –

Q           '92.

A            -- '92. Now, by this point, I had written a number of opinions. And whenever you write an opinion, there's somebody that's going to be unhappy. And so I'm sure that by this time there were a significant number of unhappy people. One of them was Jim Olson with Lawton & Cates. Jim was and is a good trial lawyer. He's spent a lot of his time trying cases. I viewed it as unfortunate that he had set up a big trial up north. It was over some kind of trouble in a housing development. And he was going to go to trial for a month. But it settled. And he received significant fees from that. So now he had a lot of time and money. And there I was.

So I tried to convince him that this wasn't for him. And by this time, some of the people that I knew, one of my law clerks particularly, said, "Well,       I'll see what I can do," and came back and said “There's no way in the world you're ever going to convince Jim not to run. He's just going to do it because he wants to do it.”  So we did the thing again. And I was successful again. I was not as successful. For instance, I lost -- I lost Dodge County. I knew what was coming up in Dodge County because by this time, I'd gotten to know a lot of the Fourth District lawyers. I would go to some of the bar meetings and whatever. And I discovered that a very well-liked Dodge County ex-district attorney was named Jim Olson. So he and I spent a little bit of time. By this time he thought I was okay and he was going to help me out. So we spent a lot of time up there on the radio and other places with the theme, "This is the real Jim Olson." It didn't work, and I lost Dodge County. But I won the big counties. And that's what it takes to win in District IV.

Q           So that was 1998. You ran again in 2004?

A            Yes, that's right. I ran again in 2004. And I was unopposed. Jim Olson and I had lunch together after the election, and he said, "I thought I could win this," he said, "but I couldn't. My conclusion from all of this is that the job is yours for as long as you want it."  Jim is a good guy. I mean, I didn't like him when he was campaigning, but that was because of the way it was.

Q           You recall that your first campaign, 1978, you thought $5,000 would do it, and it went about $20,000. Your last one was unopposed. But do you have any recollection of how much it may have cost?

A            Oh, an unopposed one will be a few thousand dollars, maybe two or three. 

Q           Okay. Back to '98 when you ran against Jim Olson?

A            That was about $100,000.

Q           Five times as expensive?

A            Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I financed most of this. I did this by saving what I could. And I would purchase municipal bonds, which matured at the appropriate time.

Q           Yeah. One of the research -- or one of the websites that I looked at, Judgepedia, says that -- and I don't know if they asked you this or how they came up with it, but they said your most notable ruling was Holmen Concrete Products.

A            Me?

 Q          Yeah. Holmen Concrete Products versus Hardy Construction Company, 2004, affirming a lower court ruling that held a municipality is liable to subcontractors for its failure to ensure proper bonding.

A            Oh, yeah.

Q           That doesn't sound like you think that was your most notable.

A            No, I don't. I mean, I'm sure it had -- it had its place. And of course, if you ask anybody, they're going to think about something in the area in which they practice or which affects them in some way.

Q           Yeah.

A            So I'm sure there would be a lot of people who like this or that.

Q           So in 26 years on the Court of Appeals, what do -- what case or decision do you remember?

A            I remember two of them. Maybe more. Three.  The first one is Hoida versus M&I Bank.

Q           You're showing me a lapel button, "Hoida, Inc. versus M&I Midstate Bank, 291 Wis.2d 283. Duty lives." Interesting.

A            Well, now we're going to go back. Another of my professors at Wisconsin -- and I have mentioned this to you -- was Richard B. Campbell. He was a torts professor. And I think he always felt that maybe by teaching at Moo U, he wasn't getting the attention that he should, as did this fellow from Michigan named Prosser. But he had a concept or a theory, which I believed because I was young and impressionable, was perfection in negligence. And so I took all of his classes that I could take. 

I enjoyed trying negligence cases. I have no idea why I am so interested in this, but it's a wonderful intellectual exercise for me. Paul Gartzke said to me one time, "I don't understand why you have such an aberrant interest in this." I can't -- that's the best I can tell you. Everybody likes something. I liked this. I used Professor Campbell's theory as an attorney, and as I was writing opinions, I would bring some of this into the discussion.

I think the first significant one was an appeal of a criminal case. The defendant's lawyer failed to bring in some DNA evidence in a rape case. The defendant got convicted. Eventually, I think he was exonerated, and he sued his attorney. Gosh, what was his name? (Answer: Willie Nunnery).

At any rate, the question was whether Nunnery was negligent. Judge Deininger wrote the opinion. I tried to talk him into not doing it the way he was doing it, at great length. I was totally unsuccessful. So I wrote a dissent in which I laid out Wisconsin negligence methodology as taught by Professor Campbell. I heard not so much from criminal defense lawyers, but from lawyers in the negligence area. A couple of professors at the law school were sort of interested in what this was. At any rate, I remember that case.

Then I was assigned the Hoida case. I was able to significantly use Professor Campbell's theory. It eventually got to the Supreme Court. Justice Roggensack wrote the opinion and affirmed. There were a few things that I'd rather she hadn't written, but she pretty much bought into Professor Campbell's theory. This. Previous to her opinion, I did a talk to the judicial conference, and at that point I had used another button as a come-on.

Q           "No proximate cause" button?

A            And then two more, I guess, that I'm remembering, the last one in this area was one called Tesar v. Anderson. I spent a lot of time on Tesar. Tesar laid out Professor Campbell's theory about as well as I could do it. That was the last case that I wrote, except for some when I was a reserve judge.

I remember another one, which wasn't on this issue. I wrote a dissent in the Columbia County v. Saddle Ridge case, which was a tax case. I tried like the dickens to get Judges Higginbotham and Bernie Bridge to agree with me. They weren't about to do it. So I wrote a dissent. Saddle Ridge went to the Supreme Court and it reversed 7-0.

The final one I recall was the Lemke case, Lemke v. Lemke, a post-divorce case. And this case is of very little interest to anybody except an appellate practitioner because it focused totally on a variety of standards of review, ended up with a reversal of a circuit judge in a post-divorce case. It was a fight about maintenance and child support. The reason I remembered it is because it was for me the culmination of something I had been learning in my years on the Court of Appeals and finally understood.

Q           2010 comes along and you decided not to run again?

A            That's true.

Q           Served long enough, wanted to enjoy your retirement?

 A           I'd say that's pretty close. I'd done it for 32 years. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy it. It wasn't that I couldn't do it. It's that there were other things to do, such as teaching at the law school, some gardening, and other things that I had wanted to do and now I ought to have time to do. Also, somebody else ought to have a chance at this. And that, of course, is Brian Blanchard.

Q           And do you find that you're busier now than you ever thought you would be?

A            Oh, yes, yes. My neighbor told me, "Chuck, if you want to get something done, do it before you retire." Since I've retired, I have taught a negligence class at Wisconsin's Law School where I have taught Professor Campbell's theory, with a few changes, but not much. I have done a -- I've spoken to several bar associations for many years on the previous year's appellate cases. And I have taken on what I said I was never going to do. I've taken on a pro bono case, an administrative review.

Q           The last item on my list of things that we should talk about is advice for new lawyers. As you were talking, of course, the legal market or the employment market for lawyers is so bad right now that I think many of them would be happy to start where you did, taking a percentage of collection cases because otherwise, they might not have any money coming in.

 A           I have told a number of young lawyers this. True, problem is that there are too many young lawyers and not enough business. That may not be true. But the real problem is that the economics of the law practices of the practicing lawyers is such that they are scared to death to take on a new associate. They are not going to pay a new lawyer what they used to pay them in the past. 

 So I have advised a number of young lawyers, you are not going to cost anything if you do it as I did. Agree to work for a firm with a few lawyers on a contingent fee basis. True, you're going to have to have an office. You're going to have to have secretarial help, except young lawyers today don't reality need secretaries. So you can and you want to look for the things that the experienced lawyers don’t want to do. One of those is collections. It is the low thing on the totem pole. In fact, in 1978 one client who wasn't enthusiastic about my campaign suggested, "Dykman is just a collection lawyer, why would you want to hire him." Collections aren't glamorous. But you learn. You're going to go to small claims court, and you're going to learn much law. You're gonna make a little money. If you do a good job for your employer, who knows where that might go?

So that's the advice I would give. Work hard. Be ethical. Don't fudge the proof or your beliefs. Judges remember these things. Still, I wouldn't want to do that myself today. I mean, I wouldn't want to start a new practice today.

Q           Yeah. Is there anything else that you have to add?

A            Well, you're pretty good. You started at the beginning and have done everything from soup to nuts. I don't know that there's anything more that I'd want to add to it.

Q           Fine. Then I want to thank you.

A            You're welcome. And thanks to the Dane County Bar. I'm sure they are spending time and effort and everything.

Q           Yeah. And I'll tell you what we do next, and that is we're in the middle -- we're in between transcription services now, but as soon as they find another transcriber, we'll transcribe this. I will give you either an electronic version or Microsoft Word or a hard copy. Feel free to, you know, mark, it up any way you want. We'll amend it before we do anything. And when it's all -- when you're satisfied you like the way it looks, then we'll put it in the file with the others. When I did these for the law school, we actually -- and what I will do also is I'll burn this interview oral on to a disk.

A            Sure.

Q           When I left the law school, I turned over my oral histories -- I had about a dozen or 15 of them, I think -- to the State Historical Society. So, you know, sometime in the future, somebody may actually listen to you tell about this.

A            Well, I don't know. I tell people that former Court of Appeals judges don't pull much water. But it's been a very -- it's been a very satisfying thing.

Q           Good.