With the tragedy in Tuscaloosa today, my focus has been on my old home much of today. When I came to work this morning I had thought that I'd spend some time blogging about a mentor of mine from a place I lived and worked even before Tuscaloosa — my colleague at Oklahoma City, Von Creel, who taught me a great deal about teaching and about legal history. Von's retirement dinner is this evening in Oklahoma City — at the Cattlemen's Steakhouse in Stockyard City, of course, where else would one have a retirement dinner for a man whose career was spent in Oklahoma?! (Well, perhaps at a barbeque restaurant, like the County-Line, but that's a story for another time.)
Von occupies a very important place in my heart. Way back in 1994 when I arrived in Oklahoma he was already a legendary figure there. Von was a beloved figure among the students and the faculty — and I had the good fortune to have an office between Von and another legendary teacher, Dan Morgan. They both spent a lot of time with me, talking through teaching methods — and things like how to structure a class, how to re-trigger students' attention part way through class, how to keep things moving while still making sure students learned something, and, most importantly, to make sure that I delivered useful content. It's easy once you've been doing this job for a while to make it seem natural, but for me there was a lot to figure out and Von and Dan spent time that I'm sure they could have used on something more enjoyable to help me and, ultimately, my students.
Von was legendary for all sorts of reasons — he had early in life clerked for Judge Alfred P. Murrah (made world famous because of the Murrah Federal Building, which was destroyed in April 1995) and had worked with David L. Boren. Von has an enthusiasm for his students and a fondness for them that causes him to spend a great deal of time with them — and also to deliver lectures in civil procedure, federal jurisdiction, and conflicts that were just what they needed to head out for practice. In this era in which there is such a premium on publishing, Von follows a more student-centered model.
It was our shared love of history, though, that drew me to Von. For Von has an extraordinary knowledge of many areas, but particularly of Oklahoma legal history — and it was Von who gave me an appreciation for just how much the local history of a place might be used to write a story that carried one far beyond a particular location, for how one might generalize from a micro-story. After my first year, Von moved to the floor above me, to an office with a beautiful view of the campus and also of Route 66, which passed alongside campus. I spent a many hours sitting in Von's office, listening to him talk about his work on Oklahoma during the dust bowl and other parts of the state's history; Von was able not just to tell a wonderful story — for he his a great storyteller — but to tell why that story mattered. And to tell how it related to other stories — even in the most unexpected of ways. His deep, deep — and I shall hazard a bold statement here — unparalleled knowledge of Oklahoma legal history, allowed him to ask key questions about why lynchings were taking place in greater numbers in some areas of Oklahoma than others. Von pointed out that in the early 1920s, one attorney general was beginning to punish lynchers in some cases — and that led to questions difficult to answer about the shifting political winds in Oklahoma. Why some prosecutions but not others? In a world where scholarship all too often flattened out nuance, Von's knowledge allowed him to portray very textured stories.
Von realized that history must be done at the local level to begin to tell a complete story — and he is able to do it at a very micro level. I recall in particular one afternoon sitting in his office looking over a composite picture of the Oklahoma bar from about 1920 and Von mentioning that at this point there were — I'm a little hazy on the details here — several African American member of the bar, but that the bar became more exclusionary after that. It was this sort of attention to detail that Von brought to his classes and that benefited me as a young historian. A mass of details, often pointing in conflicting directions, makes up a story and a series of stories make up a trajectory of law over the twentieth century. There are so many stories that I'd like to tell, like the introduction Von gave me to the Tulsa riot commission, which had such a powerful impact on my scholarship. And when I wanted to learn more about a very obscure episode of what in Oklahoma was a called a "negro drive" — an attempt to run African Americans out of a town — Von was there with help in locating the records.
There was, perhaps, one other thing that drew us together. Von has a good sense of humor and always had just the right phrase when there was bad news from the administration, as there was with more frequency than we would have liked in those days. We all need more of Von's perspective and sense of humor. He was, in short, a colleague with a sense of perspective that I found comforting.
At some point I'd like to talk about the volume that Von and Bob Burke wrote about the history of Oklahoma City's law school. It's a charming volume, which charts the origins of the school in a night program that was designed to help eager working-class students during the 1930s and 1940s; then it moves to the merger with Oklahoma City College, a Methodist institution and the school's modern history. This invites comparison with Laura Kalman's book on a very different institution, Yale Law School. While Laura focuses on the jurisprudential ideas of the titans at Yale, Von's and Bob's quite different history tells an important and complementary story of legal education — of what it meant for mostly working class students to go to law school part time. Von does not focus on jurisprudence or the ideas of the faculty members; he's interested in the process of education and the results of the education. As I read it, I kept thinking, this is what a legal education meant for many — and how they remember it: as training for helping their community and for stepping up the ladder of the social and economic hierarchy.
Knowledge and insight are wonderful traits — and Von, ever a gracious and careful interpreter — put those traits on display. He was a wonderful mentor and teacher to me, which is why I think of myself as one of his graduate students. Everywhere I go I carry the lessons Von imparted.
I wish I were in Oklahoma City this evening for what promises to be a wonderful celebration for a modest and generous man, a fantastically knowledgeable, perceptive, and precise scholar, a fabulous teacher, and a wonderful mentor.
Here is Art LeFrancois' quite amusing tribute to Von.