Dean W. R. Vance of Minneapolis: In expressing to you my very great enjoyment from the day that I have spent in Cedar Rapids in attendance upon this Bar Association, I cannot refrain from saying that the long and rather tiresome trip from Minneapolis, taken at a time when I was particularly busy, is one hundred times repaid by the privilege of hearing—I should say seeing—before me the heroic figure of Bob Johnson. I am glad to indulge the hope that the report of this meeting will put in indelible print that rare recital, one of the most vivid word pictures that I have ever been privileged in my life to hear.
It was not only instinct with life and beauty, but with feeling; and as I looked at that wonderful portrait of a real hero I could see behind it, with my own eyes, the portrait of another hero, the figure of the lawyer who stood by his client through thick and thin; a lawyer who through adversity and ill success, without hope of reward, stuck fast by his client, and when finally at the end of the long litigation he came out victorious for his client, he generously said that he owed him nothing.
When I place beside the portrait of this hero lawyer of the generation that is passing off the stage, the picture of some of the miserable creatures that I know of in Minneapolis, who comb the country over for unhappy victims that have lost legs or arms, and try the cases to a jury, taking one-half of the pitiful blood money, leaving the other half to the fellow that furnished the arm or leg, I am a little afraid that the lawyer of today, at least in some places, is not measuring up to the lofty figure of those great old lawyers that, I am sorry to say, seem to be passing from off the stage.
I say to you: All glory to such a lawyer as Charles E. Wheeler. I am proud to have heard him. I am proud to have sat in the same room with him. And when I get a printed report of the story, I am going to read it to my boy, and if he grows up to be a lawyer, I want him to know something of the man who lived for his client.
