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ERLE STANLEY GARDNER by William F. Nolan
Page Number Two Shortly after the turn of the century, the author's family settled in the small mining town of Oroville, in northern California, where Charles Gardner became an expert in gold-dredging placer mining. His son was a natural rebel who chafed under authority. By 1906, at age seventeen, after lampooning his school's officious principal, he was suspended from Oroyule Union High School. He transferred to Palo Alto High School, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he managed to graduate in June of 1909. Erie Stanley Gardner's father wanted him to become a lawyer. Following high school, in pursuit of this goal, he went to work in a law office in Willows for twenty dollars a month. By that autumn, however, he was attending Valparaiso University in Indiana, where he lasted less than a month. During a fistic encounter in Gardner's dorm (which he had converted into a boxing ring), a professor was knocked down. Eventually, a warrant for Gardner's arrest was issued by the university. (He later claimed to have skipped town just "one jump ahead of the sheriff.) After a brief stint on a railroad construction crew in Eugene, Oregon, the youth headed back to California, where he obtained a job in the law office of E. E. Keech in Santa Ana. He spent fifty hours a week in lawyers' offices, and when he was not working or studying, he was boxing. In 1911, with both eyes blackened from an amateur match, he passed the California bar exam. That same year, at age twenty-one, Gardner opened his own one- room law office in Merced, a farming town in California's San Joaquin Valley. Business, however, was dismal. When he was offered the chance to work for I. W. Stewart, a corporation attorney in the southern California town of Oxnard (in Ventura County, some fifty miles up the coast from downtown Los Angeles), he quickly accepted. Oxnard was a raw, brawling young town then, notorious for its brothels and saloons- and with its own bustling Chinatown. An early champion of the underdog, Gardner soon determined that the Chinese were not receiving fair legal representation iii American courts. They were victims of severe, quasi-official prejudice and were being used as scapegoats, pawns in dirty local politics. Gardner took on their cause, brilliantly defending them in court against gambling charges, learning to speak their language, and becoming affectionately known to the residents of Chinatown as "t'ai chong tze (the big lawyer). During this period a young woman from Mississippi, Natalie Frances Talbert, began work in Stewart's law office. She and Gardner met, fell in love, and were married in April of 1912. A year later their daughter (and only child), Natalie Grace Gardner, was born. At the age of twenty-three, the young lawyer became a father. His law practice was experiencing problems. In defending the Chinese, he had alienated the district attorney, the local police, and the city council. A fresh opportunity soon presented itself. He was invited to join in partnership with Frank Orr, a respected young attorney in Ventura, the nearby county seat. Realizing that he was a pariah in Oxnard, he happily took a position in the newly established law firm of Orr and Gardner. But as a "compulsive rover, he grew restless. This roving spirit may have been what prompted him to leave the firm in 1917 to try his luck as a salesman. He spent the next three years as a rep for Consolidated Sales of San Francisco, crisscrossing the continental United States as he hawked automotive products to manufacturing plants. In later years he cited his experience as a sales rep as the foundation for his sales career as a writer. However, by 1921 the company had foundered, and Gardner was "dead broke. He was grateful for the opportunity to resume his full-time law practice with Frank Orr in Ventura. Yet he hated the office routine, much preferring what he termed "the good old rough-and-tumble of a courtroom fight in front of a jury (Hughes, p. 57). It was in court that he felt mentally challenged, and according to his biographer Dorothy B. Hughes, he was proud of his exceptional memory: "I could listen to the testimony of witnesses by the hour and recall almost verbatim what each witness had said (p. 67)." |