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Transcript of interviews with Louis Wiener, Jr. by Eleanor Johnson, January-February, 1990

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1990-01-24
1990-02-01
1990-02-09
1990-02-23

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In this multi-part interview, Louis Wiener, Jr. discusses coming to Las Vegas from Pittsburgh at a young age, attending Las Vegas High School and University of Nevada Reno. He attended law school at University of California at Berkeley and passed the Nevada State Bar in 1941. He established a practice, Jones, Wiener and Jones, with Bob Jones and Cliff Jones and later with Herb Jones. He had another practice with Neil Galatz and Dave Goldwater, retiring in 1988. Wiener had other business ventures that allowed him to do pro bono work as a lawyer. Wiener discusses his family, including former spouses, his children, and various aspects of his career as an attorney in Las Vegas, representing hotels in the Greenspun antitrust lawsuit, and as an attorney for Bugsy Siegel. He says of his success, "I'm just lucky. I was here at the right time and I picked the right people to help."

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jhp000145
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Louis Wiener, Jr. oral history interview, 1990 January 24, 1990 February 04, 1990 February 23. OH-01974. [Transcript]. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d1dn42x9x

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AN INTERVIEW WITH LOUIS WIENER, JR. An Oral History Conducted by Eleanor Johnson The Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ?Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV - University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Stefani Evans The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas 1 This is an oral history with Louis Wiener on the 24th of January 1990 in his office on Foremaster Lane in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is Eleanor Johnson doing the interviewing. I'm really glad to be here, by the way. And I was so delighted to meet your daughter, Valerie. She's something. Isn't she darling? I just thought she was wonderful. Okay. The first question I want to ask you?and I want you to just use as much detail as you'd like?and it's to start back in your early memories as far as back as you can remember of your childhood, of your parents, your grandparents perhaps, what you remember about your growing up years, what happened, how they treated you, some of the experiences, the stories that you remember them telling you, any of those things, and just in as much detail as you'd like. Okay. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 28th, 1915. My first recollection of anything is when we lived on a street called Jancey Street, J-A-N-C-E-Y in Pittsburgh. The first time I can ever remember getting really reprimanded was when I attempted to pour cherry juice in a toy automobile as the, quote, gasoline to run the automobile. My mother punished me in some way; I can't remember exactly how she did it. Our family was moderately well to do. We were, I would say, in the upper middle class at that time. My father was a merchant tailor in Pittsburgh until we moved to Las Vegas in 1946. When my father married my mother, he was approximately fourteen years older than my mother and he would not marry her until she got out of her teens. So on the day she was twenty, they got married. My father was quite successful as a tailor, probably the outstanding tailor in Pittsburgh at that time and up until the market crashed. Dad was not a tailor in the ordinary sense of the word in that he would make the clothes; he was a designer tailor. He would take the measurements, 2 draft the pattern, cut the material. It would then be made up by coat makers or pants makers. He would then fit the people, decide what alterations had to be made, and then it would be delivered. He built up a very substantial business and was very successful until right around 1929 when the market crash came. And unfortunately, Stanley Warner Clark Theater Company bought my dad's location, which was on a main intersection in Pittsburgh, and built their very large theater where they had their stage shows and movies that they used to have in those times. Dad then couldn't find a downtown location. He had to move to a second floor location in downtown Pittsburgh. But the crash had come and my father's customers were people that used to buy ten, twelve, fifteen suits a year. They were all pretty wealthy people. The last thing they were going to do after they lost their money in the stock market was buy clothes. So it became very, very difficult for the folks to survive. My mother, after the crash, went down to my dad's business every day and maybe even a little bit before that she went down every day and she was there. My mother was the businesswoman in the family. My father was a mild man that...he just knew his profession, but he wasn't nearly as astute as my mother. We moved to Las Vegas in 1931; arrived here November 10th, 1931. My dad established a little tailor shop on the second floor over what was then Umba's Jewelry Store in the three hundred block on Fremont, later became Christensen's Jewelry Store. He took a couple of offices up there and started his little tailoring business. The first year, he one time told me, he netted about twenty dollars a week because nobody in Las Vegas wore suits except the pimps and the owners of the clubs. My mother was a very good seamstress and she sewed. Most of her work was with the girls that worked on the line. They were the only ones who spent any kind of money to have nice things made and Mother made their clothes. 3 My sister, who was a very accomplished pianist and studied in Pittsburgh Musical Institute for years, taught piano in Las Vegas and taught most of the children of the executives or big men in Boulder City. I worked in a grocery store. Between all of us I think we made, the first year we were here, maybe fifty dollars a week. We lived in a one-bedroom cabin, which is still standing between First and Second on Clark. It was a frame house then; it's now stucco. My mother and father slept on the coal porch. I slept on a couch in the living room with the springs sticking up my back. My sister and grandmother slept in the only bed in the house and it had a hole in it about a foot in circumference?in diameter I should say that somebody had dropped a cigarette in. I remember it distinctly. At that time we paid fifty-five dollars a month for that old one-bedroom cabin, which was very high for 1931. In any event, that's how we came to Las Vegas. Intervening, in Pittsburgh from the time I really remember things was when I was about six years old and I had an accident; I fell down the steps of our home. In those days everybody lived in two-story homes. They didn't have one-story homes; there weren't many of them. I injured my left arm. The ulna separated from the radius or vice versa and it impeded my ability to rotate my left arm. My mother noticed it when I was eating because I ate with my left hand and I had to kind of hold the fork backwards in my hand and she noticed that. They started to take me from one doctor to the other. In those days orthopedic surgery was so much at an infancy it was difficult to get a doctor. They finally got a doctor. He was really a nice man, Dr. Fisk. He operated on my arm. The procedure was to separate the bones? they had overgrown?and to separate them. The first time they closed my arm up, the bones went right back. So they then operated on my leg; took some fascia out of my leg, put it between the bones, and that's the way they held them apart. That's how rudimentary orthopedic surgery 4 was. Instead of winding up with an arm that was just lacking the ability to rotate, I wound up with an arm that's five inches shorter than my right arm now that I can't rotate my hand at all that the wrist is frozen so that it doesn't go backwards, it doesn't go from side to side, merely my fingers will go forward. I wound up with what they call an ankylosed elbow; it's a bent elbow. But it never impeded me. I competed in sports much to my parents' chagrin. They were always afraid I was going to hurt my arm again. So it has never been an impediment to me except that I can't grasp things too well with my left hand and I can't lift as much as I could if I hadn't been injured. There wasn't anything untoward in my life, my early life. I, like all kids, went to Sunday school, to the temple. In those days we didn't have what they call bar mitzvahs in our temple; we had what they call a confirmation. So instead of being bar mitzvahed at thirteen, we were confirmed at sixteen; that's when we were supposed to be a man and woman. I can remember one incident in my temple that?I wasn't really religious. I went to Sunday school and I went to services when we had to. I observed high holidays and I guess on occasions broke the fast on Yom Kippur with a ham sandwich. The only thing I can really remember about Sunday school is that on one occasion we had a test where we had to write out the Ten Commandments long form. They were about a paragraph long. They were quite long. And I don't think anybody took the time to learn them in that long form; it was quite a task. I sat in the front row of my Sunday school class and I had a Sunday school teacher that had really thick-lens glasses. Some of the other kids and I cooked up a deal that we were going to cheat on the examination. We were going to copy the Ten Commandments from the paper, book or card we had with them. So the only way we could do that with the teacher being right at the desk in front of us, is we blew pepper toward the teacher 5 and it affected her. She had to take her glasses off and she was sneezing and she wasn't paying any attention. I can't remember whether she left the room or not, but it really disturbed her. And we copied the Ten Commandments while the teacher was in the condition of being pepperized so to speak. I can remember that and I can remember the day of my confirmation. That's about all I remember of my religious training. My dad and mother were not really religious in the sense of attending temple all the time. In fact, my father after the crash and my mother attended Christian Science Church for two or three or four years because they felt psychologically they could get a lift there that they weren't getting at the temple. My father became, I think, disenchanted on one of the high holidays when he went to temple and he heard somebody talking business in the lobby of the temple. And he came home and he says, "I'm not going back because if they talk business they're not religious and I don't have to go there to be religious." And he always lived by the religious motto if you treat others as you want them to treat you, you're religious. So they weren't really religious. They did attend, I believe, after he came here some Christian Science services for a while here. And then the Jewish population in Las Vegas was quite limited when we came here; I think maybe thirty, thirty-five, forty people. On the high holidays we would all attend the services. At that time they were in the Elks Hall over Adcock and Rono's Department Store on Fremont Street. When we came to Las Vegas that's about as much?I had several close friends in Pittsburgh, two of them particular that I still communicate with and I still see at least once every year either going back to Pittsburgh or they come out here. They were kids that I knew. One of them from the time I was six years old on, he was my friend. He's still alive. The other one has now become a multi-multimillionaire. We became friends, I guess, when we were ten, eleven or 6 twelve and we're still friends. He became a steel tycoon, a wonderful guy, one of the few Jewish kids who played football in those days. They called him "Dynamite" because he was a dynamite football player, "Dynamite Levenson." The other friend was Bobby Fleishman. But my years in Pittsburgh were uneventful. I was a pretty good student in school, an average student I'd say. I had to study. My folks were pretty demanding on the studying part. When we moved out here I was in my last year of high school. I went to Las Vegas High School at Seventh and Bridger, graduated from there when Ms. Frazier was the superintendent of schools and the principal. I wasn't able to participate in organized sports. So in order to become involved I became a yell leader. I was a head yell leader at my high school in Pittsburgh, which had about forty-five hundred students, and then became the yell leader in Las Vegas High School and later went on to University of Nevada and became the head cheerleader at University of Nevada, which was a lot of fun. I graduated from Vegas High School in '32 and my folks weren't able to send me to college. So it wasn't until 1933 that I entered University of Nevada in Reno and was only able to do that because they had a system in Nevada at that time they called a Vocational Rehabilitation. I don't know whether the department still exists. The head of it was a Margaret Bauer, who was the mother of Grant Bauer who was later a judge in Reno. When you had a crippling defect, which I guess I did, they paid my tuition, fees, books and paper and pencil and things like that, and I had to pay room and board and spending money. But they paid fees, books, tuition and supplies, which was the difference between going to school and not going to school because my folks didn't have anything to send me. I was an average student in the university. I guess I probably would make what they'd call a three-point-two or three-point-three or maybe a three-point-five average. When I graduated 7 from University of Nevada, I had wanted to go to law school, but my folks didn't have any money and I didn't feel I could work while I was going to law school. So I laid out of school a year. During the early part of the first year I laid out, I was going to go back to school and become a schoolteacher. One of my close friends in the university had become a schoolteacher and he taught school in Deeth, D-E-E-T-H, Nevada. And when he told me what it was like?and I think he made twelve or thirteen hundred dollars a year or something ridiculous and he got snowed in for four months during the winter and ate nothing but lamb for four months?when he told me what he was going through and what he was getting paid, I decided I didn't want to be a schoolteacher. So I worked around Reno, did some bookkeeping work, and I officiated basketball and was able to make a pretty good living. During about the first six months I was out of school before the basketball season started, I didn't have any money. I think I was making twelve dollars a week or something like that. So I slept on the floor of the dormitory in one of the student's rooms. I put a pillow and a blanket underneath his bed and I would pull it out at night and I'd sleep on the hard floor with a blanket underneath me and a blanket on top and a pillow because I didn't have twelve and a half dollars a month or fifteen dollars a month to pay for a room someplace. I thought that I was fooling the master of the dormitory. At the end of the first semester, he came up to me. He was a very firm professor, Horowitz. He said, "Was it tough sleeping on the floor?" He had known all the time, but he didn't say anything. When I was school I had lived in the dormitory because at that time Jewish students could not get into any of the fraternities at University of Nevada except one and it was one that I didn't like. My senior year I could have gotten into the Sigma Nu Fraternity because one of my closest friends was the president and he had gotten the national that summer, when he was not in Reno, to agree to take in Jewish students. Up to that time all but the one 8 fraternity didn't take in Jewish students. Another thing. When I was in Las Vegas High School, I was the only Jewish boy in the high school. When I entered University of Nevada, I was the only Jewish boy in University of Nevada and there was one Jewish girl by the name of Rita Winer, W-I-N-E-R. I think in my junior year Bert Goldwater, who's an attorney in Reno, he came to school. And I believe that David Goldwater, who was later one of my partners here, came to school either when I was a junior or a senior. And then Rita Winer brother, Herb Winer, he came to school. But there was no problem; there was no prejudice except that the national fraternities wouldn't let you join. But that didn't keep me from going to dinners at their houses and going to their dances. Nobody knew the difference. There was no prejudice, blackwise or religiouswise. There just wasn't anything, in Nevada. I don't know whether there was in other parts of the country. But in Reno and Las Vegas, they didn't pay any attention. If there was prejudice, nobody knew about it. At that time I think there was quite a relatively small Jewish population in Reno. When I was in university I participated in the student politics. I was a senator for the dormitory for years. Then when I got out of school, as I say, I laid out a year. And then Harold Tabor, who later was a district judge in Reno and a district attorney in Reno, I became friendly with him. I went to court with him while he tried cases both in federal court in Carson City and Reno. He encouraged me to become an attorney. I had wanted to be an attorney, but he encouraged me. I didn't think I had the means to do that. So I made an application to Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley, University of California, which was where Harold had gone in which he was a graduate. Out of four hundred applicants, which we thought was a lot, they accepted a hundred and two and I was one of them. In order to go to school at Berkeley because my folks still didn't have any money to 9 amount to anything, I moved to Compton, California, and lived with the parents of a very close friend of mine, Pat Eaton. I lived with his folks in Compton for three months. And since I was over twenty-one, I then could declare California to be my residence. My tuition was then seventy-five dollars a semester instead of being a hundred and fifty for an out-of-state student, which I couldn't have made. My folks had to scrape the best they could to get the seventy-five and the twenty-five or thirty dollars that I needed for books and things. When I was at law school they sent me thirty-five dollars a month for room and board and then my dad would sent me a five-dollar check every two weeks and he'd say, "Hold the check as long as you can." And that would be for my paper, pencil, my Sunday meals?we only got one meal at the boarding house?my cleaning, drying, whatever, any shavings, haircuts. So I had a dollar a month to spend and I spent that on a milk shake once a week and I got a Coca-Cola once a week. If I didn't have the milk shake, then I could have two or three Coca-Colas. And I went two years like that. The third year in law school, we started a twenty-one game. I always had an extra five or ten dollars when I went back to school. We started a twenty-one game the Friday or Saturday before school started and agreed that at one o'clock on Monday when the Campanile bell rang to go to class that would be the end. No matter where you were you had to quit. There would be no more gambling the rest of the year. So at that time one of the boys that lived in our rooming house was a very wealthy kid. We still correspond. He owed me a quarter when the bell rang and he doubled his bet and he doubled his bet and finally his last bet was thirty-two dollars. And he lost it and he owed me sixty-four dollars, which he could have paid me. But instead of that he bought my student activity card, which was twelve or fifteen dollars, and then gave me four dollars a month for the whole year of school. So therefore, I had five dollars a month to spend, 10 which, boy, I was really rich. We could go spend seventy-five cents for dinner on Sunday instead of forty cents for dinner. In those days if you didn't get a beverage or didn't get desert, you could get a dinner for forty or forty-five cents. And if we went to the Italian restaurant that was near the campus on Sunday, it was sixty-five cents. So I then could graduate to the sixty-five cent meal. I was just an average student in law school. As a matter of fact, my first semester I thought I flunked out of school because I took one course, what they call Common Law Pleading, which you never use. It was a historical background course. About a month or so before the end of the semester I lost my book some way; it was stolen or something. And I didn't have a book for the rest of the semester, so I had to try to use somebody else's book. When I took the exam in, I was just pathetic. I wouldn't have deserved an E-minus. But the rest of my grades were A's and B's. I came home and I told my folks that I had flunked out of school. Well, in those days at Boalt Hall if you flunked a course, you had to remain out of school a year, come back and take that examination the next year, and if you passed it you could get into school the following year. But you could have all A's and flunk one course and you couldn't stay in school. Instead of flunking out, my professor, Mr. McBayne, who later became a very close friend of mine who was an older man, he gave me a D-minus, which kept me in school. When I went back to school that spring, I went to see him. I said, "That's probably the worst paper you ever read." He said, "Well, it might not be the worst, but I can't remember any that were worse." He said, "What happened?" And I told him I lost my book and didn't have any money to buy a new book. And he said, "Well, why didn't you come to me and I would have bought a book for you?" This professor made me call him Butch, Butch McBayne. He was an outstanding professor at the university. And I said, "Well, that would have been pretty presumptuous to come to the 11 professor and ask him to buy me a book." Well anyway, from then on his course was the primary course for me. He taught us evidence. He taught us practice and pleading. I was always in the top five or six kids in his class because I just studied harder for him and I wanted to prove to him that he did the right thing. In any event, I went on to graduate and I moved back to Las Vegas after I took the state bar in Reno. I started practice November the 8th, '41, which is almost ten years to the day that we'd come to Las Vegas. My first case I got at five minutes after seven the first morning. The kid was living with me, sharing my bedroom because you couldn't find a place to stay in Las Vegas. And I was living at my folks'. He was working at a drugstore at First and Fremont, the old Las Vegas Drugstore. And some girl got off the train. I remember her first name, Minyon. She came down and she stepped in the drugstore to get a cup of coffee and she told him he was here for a divorce. And he told her, "I've got just the attorney for you." He sent her across the street. And I made a hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee about five minutes after I opened my office; it wasn't my office. My first office I shared with Paul Rawl. He was then the city attorney. In return for doing all of his work, he agreed to let me use his consultation room if he wasn't there or the reception room if he was there. The office was about twelve feet wide and about twenty-five feet deep, very small, and it had a plywood partition between the reception room and the office. That lasted for about three weeks because Paul, he didn't do much other than divorces. He was a city attorney, great guy, but he just wasn't much of an attorney. But he was a great guy, not dumb, but he just hadn't had real good training. But he kind of got the idea that because I was getting cases that he should get part of my fee even though, like the first case I got at five after seven, ten after seven the first morning, he didn't even come to the office until ten or ten thirty. I never 12 went to the office later than seven o'clock this the morning from the day I started. Even now I come down at five thirty, five o'clock. But I've always been and early riser. For years and years and years I went to the office at five o'clock. I used to stay until five at night and now I leave by one or two o'clock or three o'clock in the afternoon. I didn't think that it was a good idea being with Paul because he resented the fact I was getting some divorce cases, but he never would have got them because he wasn't there. And people in those days used to come off the train and walk down the street. Our office was in the Beckley Building at First and Fremont; that was the first law office on the right-hand side of the street as you came down the depot. They'd just walk upstairs. We used to get what we call walk-ins; I'd get two, three or four a week. Anyway, I went next door to Paul's office and there was a little old German draftsman. Fritz was his first name; I can't remember his last name. And he had an office, but he didn't use the front reception room because he just had the back part for drafting. But in his office, the same size as Paul's, the door was in the middle of the office and the door through the partition was in the middle to get into the back room where he had his drafting board. So he rented that to me for like twenty-five dollars a month, which I then had. When I went with Paul, I didn't have five dollars, so I couldn't rent an office. And I put the desk on one side of the door and a two-seat chrome Naugahyde couch on the other side. If I was in the room with a client and somebody wanted to see Fritz, they'd walk in the door and between the client and me and they'd walk into Fritz' office. And I was busy. Oh, I was busy because there were sixteen lawyers, I believe, when I started practice; I was number seventeen and there was so much work. The older fellows, who were all great attorneys, they didn't want to handle it. So I was working twelve hours a day. I couldn't believe how much money I was making the first year. I didn't know there 13 was that much money in the whole world. Anyway, after about a month I went into Fritz one day and I said to him, "Fritz, it doesn't really make any difference where you do your drafting, does it?" So any event, Fritz moved out. So then I had my own office for the first time and I got a secretary. At that time secretaries didn't earn very much money. I remember my first secretary, I paid her a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, which was about as much as anybody in town was making, I believe, except maybe Leo McNamee's secretary and she had been with him from the time at memorial and she was a great secretary. I think she made a hundred and thirty-five or forty. But I paid the girl that much because I needed somebody that had some talent, too, to help me. I started out and at that time we had one judge, Judge Marshall. Is that George? George Marshall. The way I got admitted is an interesting story. Judge William Orr, who was then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was a pinochle playing partner of my father when he was in Las Vegas. They used to play pinochle at the Elks Club all the time. He called my dad on a Thursday, I believe, and he told my dad I had passed the bar. So the next morning I went over to the clerk's office and Lloyd Payne was the clerk. And I said, "I've been admitted to the bar. Would you swear me in?" He said, "I don't know anything about it." And I said, "Well, Judge Orr called my dad and told him I was admitted. So would you swear me in?" I don't remember whether he did or not. But I said, "Why don't you call Judge Orr and find out if I've been admitted?" So whether he did or he didn't, he swore me in as an attorney. Then he said, "Why don't you go down and see Judge Marshall and tell him you've been admitted?" So I did. Judge Marshall appointed me right there to defend a criminal case. The 14 trial was supposed to start a week from the next Monday. I'll never forget. The case involved lewd and lascivious conduct on the person of an eight-year-old girl; that happened in Boulder City. I really wasn't equipped to defend anybody like that. In those days, of course, you had no probation. So if you didn't go to trial and pled guilty, you went to the penitentiary. If you tried the case and you got convicted, you went to the penitentiary. So everybody tried the cases. There wasn't any reason not to. In those days they paid us fifty dollars to defend a felony case and a hundred dollars to defend a murder case. George Marshall appointed me six times in the first six months I was admitted. So I had six jury trials in the first six months, which was the greatest thing in the world for me. It wasn't very good for the guys I defended because they didn't get a real good defense, but most of them probably were guilty, anyway. The one I defended on the lewd conduct, I don't think he was guilty, but he had previously been tried on the same charge and Art Ham, Sr., had represented him and had gotten him acquitted. But Art Ham, Sr., was really an outstanding lawyer. He was much, much, much better than I was. But in any event, the best thing that happened me was those six jury trials. And the best thing during the trials was that Margaret Hinson was the court reporter. Her brother, Vic Brauer, was later a court reporter, too. But in those days, as you see it on television, the objection?it's irrelevant; incompetent and immaterial?you see them object. But that's not a good objection if for any reason the testimony is admissible. That's what they call a general objection, so the court can overrule it. You have to say it's irrelevant in that it happened too long ago or whatever; you have to give a reason. Well, I was so young that I knew better, but sometimes I wouldn't give a reason. Margaret Hinson, who was the court reporter and took great shorthand like a demon, she'd say, "I didn't hear what your reason was, Mr. Wiener. Could you repeat it?" So she 15 gradually educated me. She was my friend and she gradually educated. After six jury trials I was pretty good. But I attribute most of it to Margaret because she was all over me like a wet blanket. If I didn't do it correctly, she'd say, "I didn't hear it. Could you repeat it?" Well, she heard everything. She was brilliant. But she would tell me; she would help me. The district attorney didn't care. Those days they always had the best of it, anyway. That was my original experience. And George Marshall was exceptionally good to me. He would help me. I was at that time the youngest attorney in years to practice in town. We had such people as Leo McNamee, who was absolutely the greatest, Frank McNamee. We had Art Ham, Sr., Ryland Taylor, Judge Foley, Sr., the father of the present Judge Foley. Louie Cohen, who was probably the greatest criminal lawyer they ever had here including Claiborne and Oscar Goodman. Louie Cohen was just outstanding. Harry Austin, who was city attorney. They were all tough, tough, tough. We used to fight over three hundred and fifty dollar cases like they fight over three and a half million now. They were the toughest taskmasters. I mean I got an education every time I went up against one of them. I practiced by myself for about a year and then Cliff Jones had gone into service and his partner was a great lawyer, but I don't know what happened; he didn't come to the office half the time. So Cliff came back to town one time and asked if I'd move into his office in the same Beckley Building, but he had a whole suite on the corner. And I moved in and tried to salvage what of his practice I could and my own practice. I practiced that way, individually, until 1946. And then January first, '46, I took Bob Jones in as my partner. Bob had formerly been an FBI agent and had been in Morris and Grave's office. And then in April of that year, Cliff came in resigned from the bench; he in the meantime had become a judge. He came in the office. So instead of having the firm Wiener, Jones and Jones, to make it sound good we named it Jones, 16 Wiener and Jones. I'll never forget Bob. I think the most he ever made in his life was maybe seventy-five hundred dollars, maybe. And the first week he was in the office we took in thirty-two new divorce cases and the second week we took in nineteen. I'll never f