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"Reminiscences After Sixty-Four Years at the Bar" |
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New York State Bar Association Bulletin, December, 1947
Reminiscences After Sixty-Four Years at the Bar
What makes for a satisfying life-time at the Bar? Who better to answer the question than one who can glance back over sixty-four years of active legal practice? The observations which follow are not intended so much as a biography of an attorney, as the calm and thoughtful reminiscences of a successful upstate lawyer whose life span stretches from the arrow to the atom bomb! "When you ask me what it's like to be able to look back on sixty-four years in the practice of law, I'm reminded of Viscount Haldane's answer to the question, 'Would you like to live your life over again?' He concluded he 'would not if I could take the chance of living life over again.'[2] For, as Haldane observes: ". . . we are apt greatly to underrate the part which accident and good luck have really played in the shaping of our careers and in giving us such successes as we have had.'"I put the same question to Elihu Root on is ninetieth birthday and he was inclined to agree with Haldane. Yes, there are pitfalls, a great many of them, and the distinction between the right and the wrong is often very indistinct. Fortune, whether it be good or bad, plays a tremendous part in the shaping of our lives. From boyhood, hard work was, by economic necessity, my lot; and now that I look back over the years, I realize that that was about as fine a heritage as I could have been given. I think the fact that I was not born of wealthy parents had a tremendous bearing on my whole life. "My father and mother had lived down in Columbia County. They were married just about the time the migrations to the west began. They, too, decided to 'go west," which in the 1840's and 1850's meant western New York and Ohio. Of course, neither the railroads nor the Canal served this area at that time. In 1850 or '51 mother and father started overland by horse and wagon along with my older brother and sister, the wagon containing all their worldly goods. They had planned to cross the ice over the Hudson River late in February but a thaw prevented that. They were finally able to cross the river at Albany and made their way overland here to Binghamton. The population then was only five thousand. Today the city is almost twenty times that big. "They settled down on about forty-four acres of land covered with stumps at the time. They paid twenty-six or twenty-seven dollars an acre for it and today the same farm isn't worth much more as land. There's where we children were born, up on our hill farm. I was born in 1854. We grew up like most farm families in those days with plenty of work for all of us. Our wants were few and our pleasures were few. Taken all in all, we seemed to have just about as good a time as children do today.
Footnotes
Footnote 1:Estate of Alpha M. Sibley, Surrogate's Court, Broome County, New York, No. 1725. Footnote 2:Richard Burdon Haldane, An Autobiography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1929), page 376. |
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 The Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York |
On Monday, August 4, 1947, occurred a rare, if not unique, incident in the annals of the New York Bar. A ninety-three-year-old attorney, Israel T. Deyo, sixty-four years a practicing lawyer, with law offices located in the Security Mutual Building, Binghamton, offered for probate a will executed in his office ore than fifty-seven years before. All of the witnesses, and every individual names in the will, except the attorney-executor who probated it, had passed on. Upon receiving advice of the testatrix's death, this elder statesman of the Bar, found her will safely reposing in his office vault, where it had lain for nigh fifty-eight years. Surrogate Page of Broome County, New York, admitted the will to probate upon due proof identifying the signatures of the testatrix had witnesses.