"Change in all things is sweet." -- Aristotle

I was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1945. My father was a Virginia Methodist minister. My mother worked as a high school biology and chemistry teacher until she earned her master's degree in guidance counseling after which time she took to "advising" students. Just about every 4 years, our family moved to a different city or town where my father assumed a new pastorate. We lived in Hamilton, Covington, Highland Springs, Petersburg, Franklin, Front Royal, Virginia Beach, and finally West Point, where my father retired from the ministry, bought a retirement home on 5th Street and moved into it from the parsonage on Main Street. That was my parents' last residence together until my father's death in 1991.

All this moving about taught me to be flexible and adapt to change. Because I was a preacher's kid, friends weren't exactly plentiful so I learned early not to depend on others for my happiness or entertainment. I cultivated my innate sense of humor, sang in the church choir, and played flute and piccolo in the high school marching band. In 1963 when I graduated from Franklin High School, the women's liberation movement had not come to town so there were few career choices for women. In fact, my high school guidance teacher gave me exactly five--nurse, teacher, secretary, social worker, or housewife. It didn't occur to me to question her authority. In spite of my piano teacher's dream that I should audition for music conservatory, I chose to become a teacher and went to college. My freshman and sophomore years I attended Pfeiffer College in North Carolina, a Methodist church-related school, transferring to the University of Kentucky in my junior year where in 1967 I earned a B.A. in English with a minor in French and Education. While in undergraduate school, I became an Appalachian Volunteer along with several other students at U.K. On weekends, we'd all pile into an old Volkswagen bus and head to Kentucky's hills where for the first time I tasted real, homemade churned butter and listened to the live sounds of Appalachian folk music. There we provided outdoor games for the indigent children and helped them with their studies. I got to stoke the coal in the stove, the only heat in the one-room schoolhouse. During one summer between my sophomore and junior year, I lived in a commune off St. Charles Street in New Orleans with 18 other college students. We set up summer camp for the children in the projects, and I gave a few organ lessons to a little black boy who wanted to learn to play the organ. One of our members left us to participate in the Selma march in Alabama. She returned safely. The rest of us were too afraid to go.

Thinking I would devote my life to the teaching profession, I went on to earn my Master's Degree in English and Speech from Georgia State University, graduating magna cum laude in 1974. Although my piano teacher had groomed me for music conservatory having me memorize all the required pieces to audition, I had a childhood dream to become a writer, and in 1973, I was accepted as a contributing writer at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Breadloaf was founded by Robert Frost himself who once wrote, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" All of the contributors were assigned to one of the guest writers. I was assigned to Mark Strand, who went around the campus announcing to everyone that he was a ghost. I hadn't planned on having a conference with a ghost about my writing or about anything else so I just stayed in the recreational hall and played classical pieces I could remember from high school days on the grand piano. I loved being in the presence of writers who I knew had won the Pulitzer Prize and especially enjoyed sharing breakfast with them in the morning and hearing them read from their works-in-progress at night. I particularly hoped to meet Anne Sexton, the poet, who was scheduled to attend, but learned upon arrival from her friend Maxine Kumin that she had just been released from the hospital and would therefore not be coming. Back in Atlanta after the conference, I wrote Anne a letter in a southern dialect about how disappoined I was that she wasn't there. My phone rang one evening in September. On the other line a deep alto voice spoke, "Judith? This is Anne Sexton." I was ecstatic and amazed that she would call me. She apologized for not being able to be at the conference and said she really liked my writing. The very next month, I picked up the paper one day and read that Anne Sexton had taken her life. Many years later, Maxine Kumin would come to Richmond, Virginia where I eventually moved and read from her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry at the Richmond public library.

My first real job after college was as a proofreader in a family-owned printing business in Atlanta, Georgia. While waiting for a teaching position to become available in the Fulton County School System, I worked as a secretary in the Training Section for the National Communicable Disease Center where I increased my typing speed to over 100 wpm by typing training manuals all day on an old IBM typewriter. One day the head of the Section called me into his office. He said he wanted to explain to me why I would never make as much money as he did. "Why's that?" I asked. "Because you are a woman and you can have babies." I wondered how he knew I could have babies when I wasn't so sure of that myself.

Eventually, I became a high school English teacher in Atlanta where I taught for seven years, serving as faculty advisor to the yearbook and literary magazine and sponsor of talent and beauty pageants. In 1974 I married and my husband and I soon were expecting a little one. He was a travelling supervisor for an oil company and wanted to find a job that would allow him to be at home when our baby came. Philip Morris recruited him and moved us to Richmond, Virginia in the Spring of 1975. I was eight months pregnant. Our daughter Juanita was born in 1975. In third grade she came down with chicken pox that morphed into Reyes Syndrome. A team of medical doctors at MCV worked around the clock to save her life, but she was subsequently diagnosed with a learning disability.

I returned to work first as a college adjunct English Instructor at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College where I tutored a student from Japan and taught all the freshman courses, including the research paper. I was then hired to teach English at Highland Springs High School where over 40 years ago, my mother had taught biology and chemistry before becoming a guidance counselor. When some of the older faculty learned who I was, they said "We knew you when you were this high," demonstrating my height by lowering their hands to their hips.

After two years at Highland Springs High School, I became disillusioned with the teaching profession and sought an alternative career. After administering a series of aptitude and IQ tests, a psychologist presented me with exactly five new and startling career choices: pharmacist, medical research scientist, business, owner, manager, lawyer. I quickly eliminated the first choice by watching my local pharmacist stand behind a counter and count pills while holding a telephone to his ear. My high school biology teacher had pretty well preempted the second choice when she placed a live frog in a cylinder and turned it on full blast to demonstrate the power of centrifugal force. I tried starting my own business but soon discovered I could not stand the clutter of inventory, recalling my mother's guest room walls completely lined with Southern Living magazines. I once asked my Mother why she kept so many. "Well, I might need to look up a recipe sometime," was her only explanation. I don't think any guest ever got to stay in the guest room. Then I remembered the psychologist's words to me in our final session, "You have a mind like my husband's."

"What does he do?"

"He's a lawyer. You should go to law school." The psychologist suggested I work in her husband's law firm to see if I'd like it. Her husband was Leroy Brown, Commissioner of Accounts for Richmond's Division II Manchester Court on the Southside of the City. Coming from the chalky and cacophonous public school classroom of clanging bells and loud, disruptive teens, I found the quiet, clean, carpeted law office where adults spoke in soft, polite tones a serious shock. Mr. Brown had me read the Code sections that applied to his work as Commissioner. Soon thereafter, I enrolled in paralegal school, earning my certificate as a legal assistant in 1982, and graduating magna cum laude. I was just like most students in the class--I worked fulltime during the day and went to school at night. A kind Christian woman and her husband kept our daughter after school hours so that I could work and study in peace. They became godparents to Juanita.

In 1980 I was a divorced, single parent of an LD child who needed nightly tutoring, yet I considered law school and applied. While waiting to hear from the law school, my attorney offered me the opportunity to read law under her supervision. This alternative path to becoming a lawyer is still recognized in Virginia, but it is financially difficult. The Virginia State Bar did not allow me to earn any income from my supervising attorney so I had to work parttime in other law firms to support myself while studying for the bar. At the women's bar meetings I attended, I met several other women who had also been teachers. I studied with my supervising attorney for the next two years, taking all the same first and second year courses required of law school students. I studied Torts, Contracts, Partnerships and Corporations, Evidence, Real Property, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Constitutional Law. I read the casebooks and hornbooks, and my supervising attorney quizzed me periodically on each subject to make sure I was retaining and understanding what I was reading. When I announced to her that I wanted to become a child advocate, she replied in disbelief, "Child Advocate? Children don't have any rights! You won't make any money! You won't have any clients!" During my law reader years, I had joined the Richmond Multidisciplinary Team and lobbied members of the General Assembly to reform child sexual abuse laws. I am not particularly active in civic affairs, but I did volunteer for two years at the Bon Air Correctional Center for women where other than her parole officer, I was the sole visitor to a female incarcerated there since age 14. The counselors told me that nearly 90 percent of the female innates had been sexually abused by a family member or friend of the family. While volunteering there, I attended a support group for the women and listened to their stories.

At the end of my second year, I took the bar review course offered at T. C. Williams School of Law but chose my daughter's educational needs over completing my law studies. As a single parent, I could not do both, and it was more important for me to be a mother to my daughter than to be a lawyer. Her elementary school principal had refused to provide any special education classes for her. Because of my law background and experience in the teaching profession, I was able to sue the school system without coming apart at the seams. The hearing officer ruled that Juanita fit the federal definition of a child with a learning disability and was therefore entitled to receive special education services. When Juanita started middle school, she was mainstreamed but placed in some special education classes. I continued to tutor her at night and meet regularly with her teachers and plan her IEPs ("Individualized Educational Plan") throughout her middle and high school years. She graduated from Huguenot High School in 1993 and went on to earn a B.S. Degree in Finance as a Dean's List student at Hampton University. Today she is a successful senior auditor with a Wall Street Firm and works with seven other auditors under her supervision. I know I made the right decision.

In my legal career, I have worked as the office manager and educational law paralegal for an attorney who represented special needs children in due process hearings. He schooled me in educational law so that I could be an adult ally for my LD child advocating successfully to ensure she would receive an education appropriate to her unique learning needs. I have served as a corporate paralegal in a firm that has since disbanded. Two plaintiff's attorneys hired me as their sole medical law/products liability paralegal. Under their instruction, I learned how to interivew injuried parties to obtain information needed to file lawsuits, draft pleadings, organize voluminous scientific treatises and medical records, and haul boxes of documents to and from court. In 1986, Sylvia Clute, the attorney with whom I had read law and who had become my mentor, was elected president of the Virginia Women Attorneys' Association and asked if I'd serve as the association's executive director. For the next two years, I managed all the association's activities assisting the women attorneys with their CLE seminars, conferences, membership records and publications. I attended their board meetings and retreats and sat in on hearings at the General Assembly. It was the most exciting time in my career.

I'm in my 7th year as a legal assistant in the Richmond Office of LeClair Ryan, A Professional Corporation, where I serve on several legal assistant committees, helping to plan professional development seminars and diversity activities. I am also a copy writer for The L. A. Adventure, the legal assistants' quarterly newsletter. I am having a great time enjoying the last years of my working life before I retire.