Tom Courage: Mantis summer at a Providence law firm

Praying Mantis

Photo by Mihai C. Popa

Industrial Trust Building, aka “Superman Building,’’ in downtown Providence. It’s been empty since 2013.

Tom Courage, a retired partner at the Providence-based law firm of Hinckley Allen, sent us this.

Law firms used to be quiet places in the summer. In many places the courts shut down during the summer, or at least slowed their pace to a crawl.

At my firm, young lawyers could only take vacations during the summer. Many offices shut down when the temperature exceeded a certain level.

Hinckley Allen had a legendary senior litigation partner named Matthew Goering. About half of the firm stories during my tenure were about Mr. Goering, who combined gruffness with an absurdly stilted Victorian manner of speech.

We also had a young litigation attorney, Thomas Gidley (who grew into legend, but was still a mortal person at the time of the events described here). Gidley, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, was one of the most literate attorneys I ever met, able to quote and draw on the wisdom of Chaucer, Yeats and everyone in between at will, and on any subject.

This was complemented by a dark sense of humor and redneck political views, which he displayed openly and with undisguised relish. This went along with being a conspicuously provocative Yankee fan in the midst of Red Sox Nation. You could not be around Gidley for very long without witnessing his reverence for Ronald Reagan and Reggie Jackson, his twin deities.

In short, Gidley was a fun person to be around. (Ed. note: this is actually true.)

Shortly after Gidley’s arrival at the firm, in the late 1960’s, Providence was afflicted by a cycle reminiscent of the plagues of Egypt, except with Praying Mantises instead of locusts. The windows were kept open, and Praying Mantises happily body surfed on the breezes through our offices in the Superman Building.

At the end of the work day, Gidley had just made his way uphill through the sweltering air to his modest quarters on the East Side when his phone rang. Worse, it was Mr. Goering. Mr. Goering’s voice needed no personal introduction, and never received one.

“Are you inextricably occupied?” was the terrifying growl transmitted over the telephone wires, words from which no deliverance would be forthcoming. In short order, Gidley found himself occupied in Mr. Goering’s living room, in the presence of Mr. Goering, Mr. Goering’s pet bulldog, and a small cardboard box held by Mr. Goering.

It is the box that requires an explanation, but this story cannot be told without first taking due note of Mr. Goering’s dog. Everyone knows the meme about owners looking like their dogs; what makes this story unique is the broad consensus that, in this case, it was Mr. Goering who looked like that first.

Okay, the box. The point of the box was that it was the perfect size for incarcerating Praying Mantises.

Your author must apologize for the reader’s justifiable impatience. Every story has its salient facts. The problem with this story is that these facts cannot all be told first. So let me lay it out in what might be seen in retrospect as a coherent sequence. Salient fact #1: Mr Goering’s wife took justifiable pride in her rose garden. Salient fact #2: the same weather conditions that caused a plague of Praying Mantises also caused a plague of Japanese Beetles. Salient fact #3: Japanese Beetles eat roses. Salient fact #4: Praying Mantises eat Japanese Beetles.

Your author is visualizing that the perceptive reader has processed the salient facts, and that the story is already taking shape in the reader’s mind.

And, indeed, the next morning found the young Dartmouth and Yale Law School graduate (in his neatly pressed blue suit) crawling on all fours among the parapets of the Superman Building, 400 feet above the traffic humming on the streets below, hunting down the Praying Mantises that would hopefully save Mrs. Goering’s roses. And stuffing them in the cardboard box so thoughtfully provided by Mr. Goering.

All of us (then) young lawyers agreed: It was pretty much a typical day in the life of a young Hinckley Allen lawyer.

Epilogue

There are those who suppose that life in a law firm is one of dreary monotony, every spark of human imagination snuffed out by ponderous Latin phrases. Your author himself can’t help but wonder what “real life” would have been like.