JOE KENT

I first met lawyer Joe Kent when he invited me for drinks at the Blind Tiger Pub to discuss my association on an appeal of a personal injury case he’d lost at summary judgment. Summary judgement is when a Circuit Court judge short circuits a case by ruling the material facts are not in dispute and one party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. No trial, no jury, its just the Judge ruling your case is over before it ever gets started. Joe was a well known lawyer in his own right and I was flattered he would consider associating me to handle the appeal.

We met at the Tiger down the street from my law office on Broad Street. Over a round of drinks, we discussed his case. It involved a roofer knocked off a roof of a house next to a golf course. He was hit in the head by a hooked golf ball and suffered a disabling brain injury. Joe spoke with the homeowners and learned living in the the house was like living in a shooting gallery. They told him they’d almost been hit by errant golf balls on countless occasions.

Now, it might sound like Joe had a pretty open and shut case against the golf course, but you’d be wrong. The law protects golf courses in the same way it protects baseball parks concluding people who go to baseball games assume the risk of getting hit in the head by foul balls.

Joe didn’t know that particular law and filed his lawsuit alleging the owner was negligent in the design and operation of the course. The owner of the course hired an insurance defense lawyer, who unfortunately for Joe did know the law, and promptly filed a motion for summary judgment. Courts give lip service to the idea the bar for getting a summary judgment is set high to protect the right to trial by jury, but in reality judges jump at any chance to clear their dockets without all the fuss and mess of jury trials whenever they can.  

Joe frantically searched high and low to find a golf course expert willing to testify it was foreseeable golf balls would strike strike people in adjacent houses based on the design of this particular golf course. To his credit, he found one, a retired golf course designer, living in California, who agreed to review Joe’s case but the time to respond to the insurance lawyer’s motion for summary judgment was fast approaching and Joe didn’t have time to send the photographs and documents out to the expert and get his report back before the deadline expired. In such cases, the court rule for summary judgment provides, “[s]hould it appear from the affidavits of a party opposing the motion that he cannot for reasons stated present by affidavit facts essential to justify his opposition, the court may refuse the application for judgment or may order a continuance to permit affidavits to be obtained …” Joe filed an affidavit explaining why he needed additional time but the judge ruled the applicable word in the rule was “may,” as in the Judge may or may not grant a extension and, needless to say, the judge didn’t and granted summary judgment tossing Joe’s case out of court. 

I explained to Joe he faced an uphill fight on appeal because he would have to show the judge abused his discretion denying his motion for an extension. Appellate Court judges avoid rulings lower court judges abused their discretion like the plague. I also told him, however, the issue was straight forward and hopefully the Court of Appeals would see the unfairness of the Judge’s ruling without him needing my help. Joe thanked me for my advice but, by that time we’d both had a couple of drinks and Joe had started telling me stories about his service in the Army during the Vietnam War. He was a good story teller and, next thing I knew, I found myself buying him drinks so I could hear more of his.   

Joe and I were about the same age and attended college on student deferments during the early years of the Vietnam War. Then old Tricky Dick Nixon became President and held a national draft lottery to end the obvious unfairness of student deferments. I drew lottery number 289, well above the cutoff to be drafted, but Joe wasn’t so lucky and drew a guaranteed ticket to boot camp. He decided to enlist in the hopes of landing a job as far away from the front lines as possible.

Joe told me his drill sergeant drilled it into all the recruits they were destined for the jungle, but Joe, a college boy, scored well on the Army aptitude tests and received orders to report for Advanced Individual Training at the Army Clerk School. After eight weeks of clerk training, Joe said he was loaded onto a military transport plane, flown half way round the world, and dropped off at what was then the biggest military base in the world, Long Binh, 20 clicks outside of Saigon. I must have had a starry-eyed look that said I’d believe anything, so Joe kept telling me his story.

He told me while he was waiting to be assigned somewhere out in the jungle, a captain asked if he would write some letters home to the families of fallen soldiers. Joe accepted the assignment but said he decided, if he was going to do it, he would write something meaningful. So he contacted the soldiers in the fallen soldiers’ platoons to learn as much as he could about the fallen soldier and wove what they told into moving letters of friendship, courage, bravery, and service into his letters home to their families.

The captain was so happy with his letters, he decided to keep Joe on his staff. Not only that, but the captain introduced him to other captains who detested writing the letters home as much as he did. As Joe embellished his story, he said before long he was living in a beautiful apartment in downtown Saigon, with a veranda overlooking a busy street, said he had servants and a staff of his own helping him write his letters, and that other captains vied for his help by offering him all manner of difficult to find black market favors.

Unfortunately, Joe’s exotic oriental lifestyle ended abruptly when some big shot politician from back home called the captain’s colonel to thank him for the wonderful letter his constituent had received. The embarrassed colonel didn’t know anything about it, was furious he hadn’t received credit for the letter, and promptly pulled the plug on Joe’s letter writing operation. Next thing Joe knew, he said he was riding down MeKong River on a swift boat headed for the delta where soldiers were actually doing the dying.

At this point, I have to admit to you that I’ve told this story to people who served in Vietnam and would know, and they’ve uniformly told me Joe’s story was complete fiction. Captains didn’t write those letters, but, me, that night sitting in the Blind Tiger Pub drinking drinks and listening to Joe weave his tale, I didn’t have a clue. Maybe it’ was because I felt guilty never having to serve that made me want to believe Joe’s story of his beautiful letters back home.

          It turns out Joe won the appeal he wanted my advice on without my help and, no sooner had Joe’s case was restored to the docket, then the insurance company offered a shit ton of money to his disabled client to settle. I learned about Joe’s triumph late one night when there was a knock at my door. I opened the door and, there to my surprise was Joe standing on my porch carrying a whole case of Dewar’s white label scotch on his shoulder. Joe’s said it was his gift to me for my advice on his case but I suspect, it was just Joe’s way of getting gullible me to sit down, crack open a bottle, and listen to more of his stories.

          Joe died suddenly of a heart attack a few years later. He was a solo practitioner and didn’t have a partner or an associate to help wind up his law practice. His wife, who I think was worried what ethical skeletons might be lurking around in his office, asked if I would help shut his practice down. I, apparently not only being gullible but soft hearted, agreed having no idea what I’d be getting myself into. His office had files stuffed in cabinets and drawers in no particular order and stacks of letters and papers piled high on every flat surface. In the center drawer of his desk I found letters he’d written to his clients and friends over the years. Letters apparently written at all hours of the night. Reading those letters I learned it was indeed true Joe really did have a gift for writing beautiful letters.

It was in those letters I first learned of a wonderful story Joe never told me. There was a young foreign exchange student, a Muslim, living in Charleston during the genocide against Muslims in Sarajevo . He lost his sponsor and his student visa had expired. Deportation would have meant almost certain death. Joe’s letter recalled there was another student at the school the Muslim boy attended, an orthodox Jew, who invited the stranded exchange student to live with his family. The family was willing to open their hearts and take the student in. Joe wrote lovingly about how the family agreed to respect the student’s Muslim faith and celebrated the religious holidays from both religions as long as the boy stayed with them. What the family couldn’t offer, however, was a solution to his expired visa and they turned to Joe for help.

Joe didn’t know any more about immigration than golf course law, but that didn’t stop him from agreeing to help the young man. He doggedly pursued the young student’s visa case and, no matter how many brick walls he ran into, he never gave up until finally the young man was granted asylum. He went on to graduate and attend college in the United States and went on to earn citizenship. In the process and over the years Joe and the young man developed a close bond of friendship expressed in Joe’s letters.

To show once again just how small the world really is, it turns out my wife, Mary, worked with the mother of the Jewish family who took the young student in. I learned this when we attended Joe’s funeral and Mary ran into her former colleague. The mother filled in more of the details that would be missing from Joe’s letters. The story began when soldiers visited the student’s village outside of Sarajevo looking for “volunteers.” As fate would have it, the student missed being pressed into military service because he had had appendicitis and was recovering from surgery. His family knew, however, the soldiers would be back and arranged for the boy to become a foreign exchange student in America to escape almost certain death.

I understand there are people who may cringe at the very thought of any Muslim being granted asylum never mind citizenship in the United States but my friend Joe wasn’t one of them. I found out just how remarkable the young man was when I learned even though he had become a U.S. citizen and graduated with a Ph.D. in biology, after the genocide ended, he volunteered for specialized training and returned to defuse land mines in his homeland. He still lives there today but kept in close contact with Joe and continues to keep in contact with his adopted American family.

Joe’s story, like so many, unfolded unexpectedly. I was disappointed to learn his story of his service in Vietnam wasn’t true but comforted reading his letters to this young man in which I learned it was true Joe wrote beautiful letters, if not to families of fallen soldiers, then to clients he helped over the years he was a lawyer. They were letters of friendship, courage, bravery, and service written by a friend I miss deeply and would give anything to meet again back at the Blind Tiger Pub so he could buy me drinks, ask for legal advice he didn’t need, and tell me more stories.