Page 81 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

MORRY S. COLE, St. Louis MO, helped each of his three children set internationally rec- ognized aviation world speed records on their first birthdays. Corbin set the mark from St. Louis Downtown Airport to Lexington KY; Colby logged his flight from St. Louis to Madison WI. And Libby set a point-to-point aviation world speed record from St. Louis to Lovell Field Chattanooga TN in a 367-mile trip completed in two hours and five minutes at an average speed of 175.7 miles per hour. In addition to airplanes, Morry drives an antique firetruck, mostly in Fourth of July parades.
KEVIN B. COLLINS, Washington DC, graduated with a mechanical engineering degree and worked as a design engineer on airborne Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) cameras at the end of the Cold War while he did law school at night. Kevin took his first referral in 2006 from the public defender in Rockville (FACTL Paul DeWolfe). That began an indigent defense trial practice in which Kevin has been lead counsel in over forty-five criminal trials in which more than one hundred associates received meaningful stand-up trial opportunities.
PAUL W. CONABLE, Portland OR, grew his beard on a bet. He doesn’t gamble any more.
BARRY CONYBEARE, Saint Joseph MI, is a proud University of Michigan graduate. [OK, I must digress. I am an old man, old enough to have met many proud Michigan graduates. “Proud Michigan graduate” is a paradigm of redundancy; I have never met a Michigan graduate who was not proud. Prideful even. OK, I get it. They have good reason to be proud. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the rest of us. When I was an undergrad at Illinois, Bo Schembechler was asked what his game plan was for our upcoming football game. “I’ll hand off to my halfback until he rushes for a hundred yards; then I’ll put in his backup until he has a hundred yards; and so on. I just hope I won’t run out of halfbacks.” We were outraged. But Bo used six halfbacks that day. So readers and Barry will have to understand why I refuse to print his enthusiasm for Michigan.] In 2013, Barry’s family took an extended adventure through Europe. He marvels that he was able to do it with a total of zero calls and only three work-related emails over the entire nine weeks. [He calls that a testament to the skills of the lawyers and staff in his office; but we have to wonder whether he just doesn’t have all that demanding a practice . . .]
DANIEL K. CRAY, Chicago IL, incurred a gruesome leg injury just before high school that required a hip cast for five months and abandonment of a career in basketball or baseball, except as his sons’ coach, culminating in one season that included ninety games. But even a ninety-game schedule is seasonal, so Dan, as Winter approaches, works with Secret Santas, a charity that purchases, wraps, and delivers holiday gifts to children in financially depressed areas of Chicago.
MELISSA DAVIS, Concord NH, is the oldest of eight children and the first in her family to graduate college or go to law school. During law school, she slept on the steps of the Supreme Court on a Winter night to assure a seat for an argument the next day. Originally from California, Melissa moved to New Hampshire to become a public defender. She spent fifteen years at that before becoming the Director of the Criminal Practice Clinic at the University of New Hampshire. Melissa loves to travel and, so far, she has visited a dozen countries (favorite: Bali) and thirty-eight states.
DERRICK DEWITT, Oklahoma City OK, was born and raised in the panhandle of Oklaho- ma where his father was a rancher and his mother worked for a district judge and attorneys in town. Having been kicked, bucked off and run over by various animals on the ranch, he decided working inside a building with heat and air-conditioning was the better choice. Derrick and his wife completed the New York City Marathon together in 2011, and in 2019 they hiked over seventy miles in six days on the Salkantay Trail in Peru.
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