4:25 p.m. Third Party Practice. Ronald A. Roth of Roth & Evans, Granite City (Collinsville), and Elliot R. Schiff of Schiff Gorman Krkljes, Chicago (Chicago).
MBA concepts enhance legal ability
Any lawyer with a client who has business interests will find attendance at one of two special ISBA Law Ed Series seminars, "MBA Concepts for Lawyers," mutually beneficial.
Participants will become familiar with the skills and concepts that are taught at business schools, and will gain insights for making decisions about the health, value and future stability of corporate clients and individuals.
The seminars will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Thursday, April 24, at the Holiday Inn, Collinsville, and Friday, April 25, in the Bank One Plaza auditorium, Chicago.
The speaker is Edward Adams, director of the Kommerstad Center for Business Law and Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he is the Howard E. Buhse Professor of Law and Finance.
A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Adams received a masters degree in business administration with highest honors from Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. He also studied international economics at the University of Freiburg in Germany.
Before becoming an educator, Adams practiced with Latham & Watkins in Chicago and Fredrikson & Byron in Minneapolis in bankruptcy, mergers, acquisitions, loan restructuring and commercial transactions.
He has received the Stanley V. Kinyon Professor of the Year Award twice at Minnesota, and at one time held the Julius B. David Chair in Law.
In his presentation, Adams provides easily adaptable techniques for reading balance sheets, income statements and cash flow reports to discover vital financial and legal issues.
He teaches specific skills for identifying red flags before they become problems for corporate governance, shareholders or the courts, both for family businesses and large multinational corporations.
Participants will learn to utilize simple net-present-value concepts to weigh competing settlement offers, to value the rights of dissenting shareholders, and to analyze cash flow in valuing an acquisition target.
The schedule of topics includes: 8:30 a.m., Introduction to Accounting; 10:15 a.m., Financial Statement Analysis; 1 p.m., Principles of Corporate Finance; 2:45 p.m., Understanding Stocks and Bonds.
For registration details, see the Law Ed Series pages in this issue.
Liability lurks in managed care
A program on Managed Care Liability will be conducted from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. The ISBA Law Student Division and Chicago-Kent's Health Law Society will co-sponsor the presentation and a reception that will follow.
Assistant clinical professor Edward M. Kraus will be moderator for a panel that includes Michele M. Jochner, administrative assistant to Chief Justice Mary Ann G. McMorrow and a member of the ISBA Board of Governors.
Other speakers are Robert J. Napleton of Motherway, Glenn & Napleton, a former ISBA board member, and Joshua G. Vincent of Hinshaw & Culbertson.
For more information, call Janet M. Sosin at the ISBA Chicago Regional Office, (312) 726-8775.
Nominations for the third annual Elmer Gertz Award will be accepted through Monday, June 2. The honor recognizes attorneys for commitment to the advancement of individual rights and civil liberties.
Sponsored by the ISBA Human Rights Section Council and the Blind Service Association, the award will be presented at a dinner on Thursday, Nov. 6.
For a nomination form or additional information, call Valerie Higgs at (312) 726-8775.
Nomination deadlines are Thursday, May 1, for the General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Section Tradition of Excellence Award, and Wednesday, April 30, for Young Lawyer of the Year Awards. The recipients will be honored during the ISBA Annual Meeting in June at The Abbey on Lake Geneva.
The General Practice Section recognizes Illinois lawyers for career-long community contributions and professional achievements, enhancement of the standing of general practice lawyers, and public service through civic organizations and initiatives.
Letters of nomination should include biographical details of the nominee's professional life and community contributions, bas association memberships and activities, a photograph and a brief statement in support of the candidate by the individual or organization submitting the nomination.
Letters should be mailed to Mary T. McDermott, Illinois State Bar Association, Suite 900, 20 S. Clark Street, Chicago, Ill. 60603.
The Young Lawyers Division Council will present two Young Lawyer of the Year Awards one each to a downstate and Cook County attorney.
Nominees must be under age 36 and current members of the state bar association. Criteria include achievements in the practice of law, contributions to the profession, commitment to community service, and pro bono activities.
Nomination forms should be submitted to the ISBA Young Lawyers Division, Suite 900, 20 S. Clark St., Chicago, Ill. 60603. To obtain a form call Janet M. Sosin at (312) 726-8775.
The offices of the Coordinated Advice and Referral Program for Legal Services (CARPLS) will relocate this month from West Van Buren Street to suite 1850 at 17 N. State St., Chicago 60602.
The 10-year-old legal aid hotline staff expects to move into its new quarters on April 12, and hopes that the telephone numbers will not have to change.
CARPLS also announced in March that longtime senior staff attorney Allen C. Schwartz has been promoted to executive director, concluding a search that began when Leslie Corbett left to join the staff of the Chicago Bar Foundation.
Schwartz, a 1988 graduate of the Case Western Reserve University School of law, answered the first client hotline call when CARPLS opened for business in 1993. He had been associate director of the Cook County Court-Appointed Special Advocate Program.
If Mrs. O'Leary's cow didn't start the fire, who did?
Author explores archives in search of the answer
A review by ISBA Bar News editor Stephen Anderson of "The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" by Richard F. Bales, assistant regional Counsel for Chicago Title Insurance Co. in Wheaton (McFarland & Co. Publishers 2002).
* * *
The windy city of Chicago has reinvented itself time and again during its 170 years of incorporation. As its politics, its people and its architecture have evolved, so have the chroniclers whose many histories fill countless shelves.
"Every day the people of the city haul it away, take it apart, and put it together again," Carl Sandburg wrote. Yet, he adds, "The how and the why of the people so doing is the saga not yet written."
Perhaps not, with epochal specificity, but one episode that stands out is obvious: the Chicago fire of Oct. 8 to 10, 1871. In two nights and a day, about 300 people died and 100,000 others became homeless, as $192 million in property was reduced to ashes.
After 131 years, the trail of embers is quite cold. The question of how the fire started remains a mystery, despite perpetuation of the fable of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
Dozens of books been written about the conflagration, and chapters about it are included in hundreds more. Each anniversary is commemorated with newspaper and magazine articles, and fire prevention programs in schools and communities.
If one history can be considered the book to end all books about this metamorphic catastrophe, it surely is "The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" by Richard F. Bales.
The meticulous case that Bales has developed to prove that Mrs. O'Leary and her milk cow did not start the fire has been covered before in the ISBA Bar News and other periodicals.
Here it is again, thoroughly complete in book form, without the confinements of newspaper space or the creativity of freelance writers: 338 fascinating pages of text, illustrations, endnotes, appendices, bibliography and index.
There are two ways to read "The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" - as a casual reader with an interest in city lore, or as a historian who needs to absorb and archive a significant document.
The casual reader will be captivated, shocked and amazed by the vivid tableau of devastation, heroism, incompetence, ingenuity, criminality, vigilantism and fateful twists that saved some and doomed others.
But the casual reader may become annoyed after awhile with the frequent enumeration of endnotes that are collected after each chapter. You can flip back and forth in cadence, or finish the chapter and try to interpolate the small-print edification.
In fact, about 24 percent of the total linage in the five main chapters and epilogue is devoted to clusters of endnotes, even before one gets into the 129 pages of documentary appendices.
On the other hand, that is just the kind of scholarship and verification that will enthrall the historian who finds in the book a trove of priceless treasure.
"I hope that you enjoy reading how the Chicago fire really started," Bales penned on the title page of the furnished review copy.
As a "casual historian," I enjoyed the book from both perspectives. It is a work that belongs on the shelves of all Chicagoans. It provides the full story of an incident that has suffered 131 years of summarization and embellishment.
And it comes to the conclusion, as Bales has attempted to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that the infamous bovine was innocent and Catherine O'Leary was not culpable.
His skill at reading plat maps and legal descriptions was coupled with the stamina to devote six years to prowling Chicago Historical Society archives as though the verdict in a large lawsuit depended on it.
Bales says he wrote the book because the existing fire-related scholarship omitted two important matters: a definitive cause of the fire, and a study of the inquiry investigation by the Chicago Board of Police and Fire Commissioners into its origin and the conduct of city firemen.
The inquiry lasted nine days in late 1871. The shorthand report was transcribed in longhand that filled 1,168 pages. The conclusion of the commissioners, which was published in the Dec. 12 issues of Chicago newspapers, was that no cause could be ascertained.
Not at all satisfied, Bales re-read every word, filled in the apparent blanks and corrected syntax as he copied the entire four-volume record. That project took two years!
He was able to reconstruct the recorded events, and "by scrutinizing the testimony of the 50 witnesses, I concluded that the board could have determined the cause of the fire had it really wanted to," Bales relates in his preface.
But Bales is absolutely, positively convinced that Mrs. O'Leary was not present when it happened and didn't know how it happened. That is made perfectly clear in Chapter Two, "The Exoneration of Mrs. O'Leary."
What is still not clear, however, is an indictment in "Chicago's ultimate whodunit," as Bales puts it. In Chapter Four, "The Real Cause," he impeaches the ostensibly false witness of Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan as though he were conducting a cross examination.
But other theories linger to be weighed by the reader - such as young men playing poker in the barn and smoking carelessly, or a neighbor stealing in for an evening noggin of purloined milk.
Through the years, Mrs. O'Leary "was never able to rid herself of her unwanted and unwarranted notoriety," Bales laments, and she never permitted her likeness to be photographed or sketched.
The author quotes from the unsubstantiated statement in the Oct. 9, 1871, extra edition of the Chicago Evening Journal that "The fire broke out ... at about 9 o'clock on Sunday evening, being caused by a cow kicking over a lamp in a stable in which a woman was milking."
In Mrs. O'Leary's testimony at the inquiry (published on pages 217-221 of the book), she swears to have been in bed with her husband when Sullivan awakened them with news that the barn was on fire.
And in a notarized statement, published in the Oct. 20 issue of the Tribune (and on pages 157 and 201 of the book), the O'Learys swear that the cow was milked and a horse was fed hours earlier and they "had no lamp in the yard or barn that night or evening."
Bales does not divulge the location of the graves of the O'Learys, and that detail is also expunged from their death certificates. He does publish his own photo of the O'Leary monument in the Chicago cemetery where they repose.
It is 10 feet high, he reveals, "and topped with a draped urn, which is a symbol of death and mourning."
Purple Heart medal arrives 60 years later for Horsley
It took only two years of active duty in England for Army Air Corps 1st Lt. Jack Horsley to be injured in 1943, but 60 years passed before he received the Purple Heart he had earned.
Assigned as staff judge advocate in County Essex, south of London, Horsley was seriously wounded when a German shell struck his office hut. "I was mad," the retired Mattoon attorney said. "I hadn't been able to finish reviewing the reports."
Early this year, he was notified by the Department of Defense that an oversight in awarding him the decoration had occurred, probably because there had been no time or opportunity for a ceremony during the siege of England.
"I surmise that the War Department, now the Department of Defense, did a survey of some old records and located persons who either received medals or had been awarded medals but never received them," Horsley said.
A Federal Express package containing the engraved Purple Heart arrived at Horsley's home on Feb. 18. It won't ease the pain, which he still experiences at times, but the medal enhances the pride he felt in serving his country in war.
"I wasn't a combat person," he told a reporter for the Journal-Gazette in Mattoon. "I carried a .45, as all officers did, but it was only fired at a target."
A 1939 graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law, he had been commissioned a second lieutenant two years earlier after completing the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program on campus.
Horsley left the service after the war as a lieutenant colonel and years later achieved the rank of honorary reserve brigadier general.
Among the 23 books he has written is "Memories of World War II in the European Theater," in which the incident of his war wound is described.
A licensed attorney since April 19, 1939, and longtime partner in Craig & Craig, Horsley retired from trial practice in 1997 but continues to counsel other lawyers on a conference basis.