Castagnera on Legal Rights

Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires: Chapter One May 15, 2010

PART ONE: THE MOLLY MAGUIRES
CHAPTER ONE (1987)
It’s the summer of 1987 and I’m seventeen years old. We’re careening along Interstate 90, heading west through South Dakota. I’m driving, Mom is riding shotgun and keeping careful tabs on the quality of my driving. “Slow down, Ned. Let him pass you.” “Watch out. Is that a motorcycle I see ahead there? Why don’t they make them wear proper helmets out here?”
I’m doing my best to ignore her, as well as my fourteen-year-old sister, Katy, who is providing us with sporadic dramatic readings from something she just purchased called the “I Kid-You-Not Road Atlas.”
“Hey, Ned-o,” she says, “Listen to this. In Nebraska it’s illegal for a barber to shave a customer’s chest hair.”
I reach for the volume knob on the radio-tape player and turn up the sound another notch. Though Mom is only allowing us to listen to classical music (“Both for my sanity and so you two cultural Neanderthals learn something during all the hours we’ll be cooped up in the van.”), Brahms in both ears is better than Mom in one and Katy in the other.
“Neddy, are you listening?” Katy is sprawled across the middle bench of the Plymouth Voyager that Pop drove brand-spanking-new from the showroom just three days ago. “In Arkansas it’s illegal to blindfold cows on highways.”
“Oh, my God,” exclaims Mom at that moment. “Is that a cow up there on the road?”
“No, Mom,” I respond. “It’s just another biker.”
“Well, don’t pass him. Your father says motorcycles are liability lightning rods.” Whatever that means, I think to myself.
“In Gainesville, Georgia, it’s illegal to eat chicken with a fork,” Katy plows on, giggling softly from time to time as well. I give up trying to ignore the two females in my life.
The Old Man, however, is having no such problem. Having curled his bulk into a big ball on the back bench of our new van, he is quietly snoring away, oblivious to Katy’s dramatic reading of unusual American laws and Mom’s running commentary on road conditions and the quality of my driving.
Like the van, the trip was Archie’s idea. Both were the products of a new prosperity which had visited the McAdoo family of Havertown, Pennsylvania, in the wake of my Dad’s successful settlement last August of a somewhat sensational (at least locally) lawsuit. The case involved AIDS discrimination in employment… something of a novelty in those days; the Old Man had successfully represented the plaintiff. But the real news was that the guy killed himself in the midst of the litigation. No matter… Pop’s publicity was excellent.
Always a solo practitioner, Archie had experienced a steady stream of new clients, including a labor union which had obtained his continuing counsel on employment law issues in return for a fairly handsome monthly retainer. So busy had he become that he had hired a part-time law clerk, a third year student from nearby Widener Law School, whom he had high hopes of being able to hire on a full-time basis after she graduated and passed the Pennsylvania bar.
And seemingly despite, rather than because, of Pop’s notoriety as the successful advocate of a gay HIV victim, Mom’s Christmas present from her employer, Regional Econometric Forecasting Group, at the end of 1986 had been a promotion from controller to chief financial officer. In short, the “long green”, as Archie had taken to calling it, was rolling in. And, so, my Dad had decided it was time for the famiglia McAdoo to take a “real vacation.”
In fact our family vacations to date had all been of the classic Havertonian variety: a week, two if we were really lucky, at the Jersey Shore. The more affluent your folks, the closer to the beach was your rented house. The McAdoos usually had a pretty long walk to the shoreline. Only in the past four or five years — and then only because Mom had been promoted in 1982 from head bookkeeper to controller at REF Group— did Katy and I discover how awesome it is to have a door that opens right out onto the dunes, the beach and the breaking waves. But, Mom, ever the frugal faction in her sometimes fractious marriage to my Dad, had continued to insist that a substantial portion of her salary be socked away for our college educations and their retirement at some indeterminate time beyond that.
Consequently, even with Dad’s substantial fee from the HIV settlement, and the significant, steady increase in his income after that, Mom initially had resisted Archie’s idea of a “real vacation to show the kids America.”
Archie had lobbied hard and long. But I don’t think his alternating rounds of cajoling and badgering would have moved Mom, if Maggie Mulhearn hadn’t come into the picture. I think it was in mid-January that she approached Pop about representing her. Since the beginning of the New Year, Archie occupied a four-room office suite in a reconditioned old house, just a few blocks from our home. It had once been a branch location of the Haverford Township Library, and was now a ‘professional building’ of sorts. Another solo practitioner, Bernard “Bail Bond” Brennan, and an Indian chiropractor, Dr. Something Singh, occupied the two other, somewhat-larger suites in the building.
It was for the best that Maggie Mulhearn had turned up there and not in Pop’s old office at home — which had now reverted to its intended function of dining room, complete with antique table, chairs and sideboard, Mom’s Christmas-cum-Promotion present to herself — because Maggie Mulhearn, when I got a look at her a couple of months later, proved to be a Celtic heart-stopper.
Flaming red hair, which was either naturally curly or permed into the most romantic mane of bouncing ringlets my teenaged eyes had ever seen, topped a flawlessly smooth, white complexion. A prominent nose flanked by two big, radiant blue eyes, and underlined by full, pouting lips came together to create an effect far greater than the mere sum of the parts. Maybe much of the beauty came from within. I know now that can sometimes be the case. Back then I didn’t analyze, I just appreciated.
Maggie Mulhearn was one of those Irish women who freckled, rather than tanned, in the summer, and then held onto some of those freckles on her nose and high cheekbones all year long. The freckles made her look adolescent — and therefore just that much more attractive to little ‘ol teenage me — though she was 26 or 27 when she approached Archie in the winter of ’87 with her unusual project.
Maggie Mulhearn, as Archie recalls vividly her telling him during their first consultation, was a direct descendant of Black Jack Kehoe. Film enthusiasts, like my Mom, remembered that the famous Scotch actor Sean Connery had played Black Jack in a 1970 film called “The Molly Maguires.” In that movie, filmed by Paramount Pictures in a little Pennsylvania coal town about 90 miles north of Philadelphia, Kehoe is portrayed as the leader of a secret society that is remembered for wreaking murder and mayhem on the coal mine owners and supervisors who exploited their Irish miners and laborers in the 1870s.
“That’s not true,” Maggie Mulhearn had earnestly explained to Archie, her big, sincere eyes starring straight into his, until (he told me much later) he had to break the spell by turning and making a note on his legal pad.
“My great great grandfather was a labor leader and a politician,” she continued. “The capitalists framed him because he and his union were becoming too powerful. His political organization was gaining too much influence in the mine patches.” The mention of “capitalists” led Pop to detect a rare 1980s leftist concealed beneath the affluent — in fact, independently wealthy — Ms Mulhearn.
After allowing the ebullient Maggie to chatter on about Pinkerton detectives and biased juries and agents provocateurs, Archie finally tore his watery, middle-aged eyes from her seductive gaze and inquired, “What would you like me to do about all this? To me it sounds as if you have the material here for a very good book, Ms Mulhearn. Perhaps you should take a stab at writing it. Or maybe you could find a journalist, or maybe an historian at one of the local universities, who would have an interest in writing all this up. But that’s not me… I’m just a lawyer.” I can see Dad, who hates to tell a client or potential client — especially one as attractive as Maggie Mulhearn — “no,” shifting uneasily from one big buttock to the other and staring at his legal pad or his size 12-trip-D shoes as he says this.
Maggie Mulhearn at this point in the consultation became perhaps a little impatient with what was, however unintended by my Father, a rather patronizing statement of the obvious. Just as clearly I can see her leaning forward and putting her determined face so close to the listener’s that in this instance my slightly embarrassed Dad had no choice but to meet her eyes with his own limpid gray pools.
“I know you’re a lawyer, Mr. McAdoo,” she pressed on. “And a very good one from things I’ve read and heard lately. And it’s a lawyer I want and need. I don’t want my great great grandfather’s story told again. I want him pardoned.”
For some reason he could never quite articulate, Archie felt compelled to write her words down on his legal pad, very precisely. As I’ve said, I think he couldn’t stand to stare into those extraordinary eyes for too long and used his note taking as a means of escape from them.
“Well, justice, they say, is blind,” my Dad replied lamely, not knowing what to make of this beguiling, insistent young woman, who seemed determined to retain his services to somehow reopen a case that had climaxed in an official execution some hundred and ten years earlier. “Sometimes it loses sight of the truth, and eventually the truth is lost forever.”
“That’s just it,” insisted Maggie Mulhearn. “Do you mind if I smoke?” She pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes and a cheap Bic butane lighter from her purse and lit up before Archie, a bit surprised that such a “wholesome” (his word) “girl” (also his) smoked (unfiltered cigarettes at that!), could say no. “That’s it exactly: I want the world, and especially the justice system, to remove the blindfolds and see my great great granddad’s innocence. And you’re the lawyer who can do it… I think.”
At last Archie turned away from his legal pad, swiveling his creaky oak sheriff’s chair so that he faced his would-be client squarely. He turned so abruptly toward her that his reward was a face full of exhaled cigarette smoke.
“Oh, dear. I’m so sorry,” said the persistent Ms Mulhearn.
“That’s all right,” my Dad half gasped. “Look, I still think a good historian is…” He was stopped in mid sentence by the check which she apparently had drawn from her purse along with the cigarettes. Made out in large green letters, the draft was for ten thousand dollars on the First Pennsylvania Bank.
“Perhaps this will express my seriousness, Mr. McAdoo,” she stated flatly, holding the beige colored check with its Kelly green ink, almost directly under my Dad’s bulbous nose… which no doubt could very nearly smell the money. “I am authorizing you, as my lawyer, to travel wherever you feel in your judgment you should, examine whatever relevant records you can locate — starting with a good deal of material I have in the trunk of my car right now — and when you have satisfied yourself of Black Jack Kehoe’s innocence, institute whatever proceedings, or lobbying or whatever is required to have him pardoned.”
Well, you’ve probably guessed that Pop took the check and the… what? The case? Not really. “Assignment” is what we have always called it, down to the present day. He also walked out to Maggie Mulhearn’s car… it proved to be a Porsche … and took custody of two cardboard boxes that she had jammed into its tiny boot. The boxes, appropriately labeled “Jameson’s Irish Whiskey” and obviously obtained from a liquor store, were not filled with spirits. Or were they? The boxes, when Archie opened them after his new client had departed, where stuffed with books, articles and notes written in a neat, rather large penmanship that matched the handwriting on the green and beige check.
Archie walked the check down to the bank, then stopped on the way back at MacDonald’s and wolfed down two Big Macs, a large order of fries and a strawberry shake in hearty celebration of this latest windfall from his new found reputation. On the way back to the office he distractedly munched one of Mickey D’s apple pies.
Back in his office, seated not in the hard sheriff’s chair but rather in a cracked-leather easy chair in the corner near the window, he idly browsed through the materials in the first Jameson’s crate. Selecting a battered paperback, “The Molly Maguires” by a college professor named Wayne Broehl, he began reading. But soon the combination of warm sunlight streaming in the window with its western exposure, and the fairly massive amount of pure MacDonald’s fat in my Father’s stomach, sent Archie swirling downward into a somnambulant state from which he could not pull out. Broehl’s tome resting in his ample lap, the great, crusading lawyer of Stanley Avenue, Havertown, Pennsylvania, snored rather delicately as he slept the remainder of the afternoon away.