A Century Of Vision -- `Old-Fashioned Liberal Populist' Lady Willie Forbus Retains Her Commitment To Social Justice At Age 100

Mail call is a busy time these days at Lady Willie Forbus' house. You get to be 100 years old, you risk getting congratulated just for being alive.

Forbus' history threatens to turn the trickle of congratulations into a deluge. One of the first women lawyers in Seattle; a pioneering woman member of the state Senate; guardian of an indefatigable liberalism in a conservative age.

On this sunny August day, the mail brings a letter from Gov. Booth Gardner and a letter from the dean of the University of Michigan law school. Forbus' daughter reads the mail, and Forbus hears the dean thank her for her devotion to "women's issues."

Forbus, wearing a bow blouse and a corona of silvery hair, leans forward and speaks with vehemence. "Not just women's issues," she says. "ALL issues."

Well, there is a little history here. More than 70 years ago, Forbus, who had just struggled and starved to put herself through law school, went to say goodbye to the dean's predecessor.

"Goodbye, Lady Willie," he said. "You will make a good stenographer for some lawyer someday."

Lady Willie Forbus turned 100 on Aug. 24. The week before, she stayed up to watch the Republican convention - she watched the whole Democratic convention, says her daughter, Alvara Deal, "and you couldn't drag her away from the Anita Hill thing." It was only a couple of years ago, after breaking a hip, that she finally acceded to live-in help in the Magnolia home she's owned since 1924. Shortly before that, she still mowed her own lawn.

Her daughter says she's reached a new century by eating "all that Southern food, laden with cholesterol." A closer stab at the truth might be that Lady Willie Forbus learned survival early, from her struggling parents and the harsh social order of Mississippi plantation life. Against the privation and prejudice Forbus has contended with, well, old age is nothing.

A few years ago a judge and old friend described her as "an old-fashioned liberal populist with a marvelous commitment to social justice, but without cynicism. No furrowed brow for Lady Willie."

Here is the story of a committed and resourceful woman:

MISSISSIPPI

"I was brought up to believe that you raised yourself out of your class. You move by your own efforts if you didn't have connections. By your own efforts you moved into a higher place." - Forbus in a 1983 interview with Karen Blair, now part of the University of Washington manuscripts collection.

Lady Willie Forbus was born in 1892 on a plantation along Mississippi's Yazoo River, a place she says had "90 mules and 90 black families living in yet greater poverty, and with NO schools for either white or black folks."

Her father, a plantation manager, was fired from his job at the end of the year if he didn't turn a profit for the plantation. He changed jobs a lot. Forbus' mother, a part-time music teacher, was 5 feet tall, had six kids in eight years and boiled their clothes in an iron pot in 100-degree heat. She determined that her children would do better.

To ensure that they got a good education, Forbus' mother sent all six kids to live in Laurel, a larger town 150 miles away. She assigned Forbus to do the cooking and caretaking. But she sent all the household money to Forbus' brother.

The three boys got scholarships to colleges all over the country; the three girls got nothing. Forbus got stenographer training and worked her way through the University of Mississippi. She developed an ear infection there but the university hospital wouldn't admit her because she was a woman. She became permanently deaf in one ear.

When she decided to become a lawyer, she studied the "top-10" list of law schools and applied to them. Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Cornell weren't admitting women in 1910. The University of Michigan accepted her.

It was an unfamiliar place, a land of frequent snows and strange dialects. "All Yankees sounded to me as if they were choking to death," she remembers. "They had a different voice from the slow moving voice of the South." She tried to squeeze the Southern out of her voice, but 80 years later a trace of softness remains.

She worked her way through law school as a stenographer, and wrote lawyers in cities all over the country about prospects for the only female graduate in that year's Michigan class. She got the most encouraging response from a criminal lawyer in Seattle. She saved all year to make the trip, eating one meal of bread, mashed potatoes and gravy a day.

"To this day," says Deal, "Mother won't eat mashed potatoes."

She sat up for three days and three nights on the train to Seattle because she couldn't afford a berth. Her last $20 was stolen at the Seattle YWCA. But then the tide began to turn for Lady Willie Forbus:

SEATTLE

"We'd have to stand in line for the judges to assign orders for us. You still have to do that. And when I was 7 and 8 months pregnant, I noticed that the lawyers would call to me and say `here Lady Willie - come over here and sit down.' And I knew right away that fellow's got a pregnant wife." - Lady Willie Forbus, 1983

Forbus had to work a year as a law clerk, then a requirement for any Washington lawyer hoping to pass the bar, which she took in 1918. She opened her practice in 1919. "I was not conscious of any reaction," to her position as the only woman lawyer in Seattle, she recalls. "I was treated by the judges as just another lawyer . . ." Forbus refused any special treatment by other lawyers, even in the line of lawyers standing in wait for their orders from the judge. "I asked no quarter and I gave no quarter," she says.

In a 1985 profile for the Bar Bulletin, King County Superior Court Judge Anne Ellington noted that "during her years of practice, with a few exceptions, Lady Willie represented individuals, not institutions or corporations." She remained a sole practioner: She acknowledged to Ellington that "I don't take orders well; I didn't want to have to compromise."

Throughout her career, Lady Willie Forbus took on "anything that represented property rights or personal rights" - business dealings, probate, divorces. Samples of correspondence from her clients through the years:

-- A woman who discovered she had married a man serving a five-year suspended sentence for "an act which he pleaded guilty to but was absolutely innocent of" nevertheless wanted to know if she could get an annulment.

-- A black man struck by a white man's car wanted justice "even if I am a colored man and the man who struck me is a Southern white man." He accepted the prosecution's offer of payment of $10 in exchange for dropping the case.

-- In the depths of the Depression, a group of men wrote that they needed a government loan to start a company that dug and sold peat moss.

-- An invalid woman wrote of her husband, whom she ardently desired to divorce: "He has always been a very peculiar man. No friends and no associates. Cares nothing about outdoor sports, don't care to read, don't like little children, flowers, birds or anything."

In the early '20s, Forbus took on the Seattle Police Department over their denial of a widow's pension. She told Ellington that if she'd been older and "had any sense," she would never have gone up against the department and the prosecuting attorney at the time. But she showed that an officer whose death had been ruled a suicide had been shot by guns of two different calibers: The case was taken from the prosecuting attorney's office and given to a grand jury, which ruled the death was murder.

Forbus ran for prosecuting attorney in 1922. She lost, but the race and an ever-lengthening list of civic activities made a name for the young lawyer, essential in an era when lawyers were not allowed to advertise.

One local commentator on public affairs took special note of her activities: Alvaro Shoemaker, an editorial writer for the Post-Intelligencer. He and Forbus married in 1921. Forbus said in the 1983 interview that Shoemaker was never intimidated by her: "Oh, it (her career) didn't bother him at all. He was a very broadminded newspaper man, and a cynic like most newspaper men are today." Forbus retained her surname.

They divorced in 1936, but Deal says "they remained on friendly terms. She missed him for his intellect - our dinner conversations were really something. They were divorced but they were really never divorced from each other." Shoemaker died in 1948.

Forbus had two children and took two weeks out of work for the birth of each one. In those days, an in-home housekeeper could be had for $25 a month; she kept her childen in the evenings and from noon on Saturday until Monday morning, though she told Blair that the children went to bed at 6 each evening, winter and summer.

"She was very stern," Deal recalls. "I think she didn't want her girls in any kind of trouble that would reflect on the fact that she was a working woman . . ." but later on, "she trusted us. She was stern enough that we weren't going to get out of line anyway."

"We were proud of her," Deal said. Though they led a life different from their friends, the two girls just assumed that was the way life was.

"As soon as I left my office I lived an entirely different life," Forbus said in 1983. "I was right here. Right with the children all the time. "

THE DEPRESSION

"My own business has gone to nothing. Clients are unable to pay, and though I keep open the office, and am able to pay my rent and meet the expense of running the office, I am not making enough to contribute anything toward the family . . ."

Letter from Forbus to her sister Juanita; 1932.

Forbus' run for prosecuting attorney was the beginning of a 20-year quest for public office. She ran twice for a King County judgeship; she attempted to get appointments to the civil service. At every turn she was frustrated: "I want to thank you again for the telegram and letter you sent to Gov. Martin in my behalf," she wrote U.S. Sen. C.C. Dill of Washington state. "I am afraid his advisers have little regard for the judicial qualifications of women, as Loren Grinstead very frankly stated that if the Governor appointed a woman it would be over his head and under his protest."

She developed a shrewd sense of survival and, during the Depression, was frequently the one her family turned to for help. One brother, a Yakima farmer, needed help negotiating a delay in payment of a government loan. Another brother, thrown out of work by the Depression, sought her help in getting a government job.

Forbus wrote her friends in Washington on her brother's behalf, but warned him not to expect much since he wasn't a constituent. "It has been my experience that these politicians render their assistance when they can get a definite and shortly maturing return," she wrote.

As the Depression worsened, she wrote that she often didn't have two dollars left over at the end of the month. But the family hung on: "She held us together," Deal says. "She kept us in the house we grew up in."

The worsening state of the nation sent her out on the hustings, campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt. "I covered the whole state, speaking on street corners for Roosevelt in pig tracks," Forbus' term for country crossroad towns."I spoke out at the Main street corner of a little town to whoever would pass by," she recalls. "Before you knew it my voice would carry and people would come to hear what I was saying."

She estimates that she barnstormed more than 200 small towns. She had a flair for rhetoric - she called Clare Boothe Luce, an enemy of the New Deal, "a female mad dog, without leash, abroad in the land."

She campaigned for equal pay for men and women in the same job; she worked for regulation of child labor. At the same time, the proper Southerner in the tailored suits joined such establishment organizations as the Washington Athletic Club and the Daughters of the Confederacy.

By 1937, Forbus was a fully middle-aged woman of 45. Her brother Wiley, head of the pathology department at Duke University, wrote her with resignation that "none of us are young anymore."

THE WAR

"Up to this time women have been asked to sit by a wailing wall and knit. . . . There are thousands of women in Seattle alone who neither wail nor knit. They want to go into active service. Women should be trained to handle transportation systems, to run factories, to work with tools, to police and patrol noncombat areas. In short, women should be drafted and assigned to duty." - A Forbus letter to the Post-Intelligencer, 11 days after Pearl Harbor

The '40s saw both Forbus' realization of her political aspirations and her defeat by a Red-baiting opponent. Elected to the state Senate in 1942, she served a three-session term, chairing the Senate Judiciary committee.

She successfully passed legislation eliminating the practice of labeling out-of-wedlock children as illegitimate on their birth certificates. She supported improved workmen's compensation, unemployment insurance, a graduated income tax and equal pay for equal work, a position strenuously opposed by the powerful aircraft manufacturers and shipyard owners, the chief employers of Washington women in wartime.

Her equal pay for equal work stance earned her the support of a group in Ballard so liberal that they got Forbus in trouble. The genteel legislator in the cats' eyeglasses was called a communist by some of the area's more powerful business people.

In 1983, she recalled that "I was called a communist . . . they controlled about 18 precincts, and of course, the word got around in the Republican party that they couldn't do anything in those precincts because this little group of ultra radicals controlled the precinct. And so they called me a communist. I was called a communist by the head of one of the lumber companies right in public. . . . I'm sure it contributed to the defeat . . ."

Her opponent, Harold Kimball, publisher of the Ballard News and Magnolia Times, trumpeted in his ads that "year by year the ever expanding tyranny of red Fascism has swallowed up country after country. . . . powerful forces are at work here in our country, which, if successful, will deny us the privileges of self government. . . . here, we can still defeat these forces with the ballot box. But only if you vote!"

Deal: "she just happened to get it because she was a liberal. They (the Ballard group) attached themselves to her for a while. She was completely her own person. She needed those working class votes - she wasn't going to get a vote in Magnolia."

CITIZEN FORBUS

"Just across the road from the cemetery was a group of some half-dozen four-mule teams breaking up cotton land for the spring planting. During the entire ceremony those teams kept driving and driving on - so symbolical of Papa's entire life that surely he would have asked for nothing more had he planned it for himself." - Lady Willie Forbus on her father's funeral, in a 1935 letter to her brother Sample.

During the second half of the century, Forbus turned her considerable energies to other matters. She was president of the Magnolia Community Club, president of the board of directors of Florence Crittenden Club, active in the American Civil Liberties Union and Board of Lawyers Alliance Against Nuclear Arms. She was the Democratic precinct committeewoman for the Magnolia district.

Once her children were grown she became an ardent traveler, visiting South America, Mongolia, China and the former Soviet Union. Deal says Forbus could not get enough of the broadened perspective travel provides on the way people live. Like her mother, Deal traveled the world with her husband, an oil geologist; another daughter, Dale Forbus Fleury Hogle, taught foreign languages in high school. Both women live in Magnolia, not far from their mother, who now has five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

She practiced law until 1984. Deal: "Some of her law cases came down to caring for the people, from writing a will to seeing someone was fixed in a nursing home."

Today Forbus spends a lot of time on her sun porch with a view into her back yard. A third of her back yard is owned by the Seattle Parks Department: On that sunny August day, she observed that when Seattle gets another million people, the slope of rhododendrons and forest probably will be gone. "But not in my lifetime," she said.

On principle, Forbus always resisted the term "woman lawyer," or "woman" anything, for that matter. Once, asked to give a speech on "Business women in democracy," she complied, but the audience might have gotten more than they bargained for.

"Business women in a democracy, indeed!" Forbus intoned. "Why do we set ourselves apart? Why not all women? I go even further than that. Why are we talking about women at all as a thing apart in a democracy? What, after all, does sex have to do with democracy?"

And so, heading into her second century, she faced a dilemma. A group of woman lawyers wanted to hold a reception for her."Now I am facing a situation that is very embarrassing to me," she said.

"It's against my principles," said Forbus, "but I can't turn them down. It would be more embarrassing if I did."

Booth Gardner wrote Forbus that day that "to live 100 years is truly a grand gift." Forbus listened to her daughter read the words, then settled back into her chair.

"He can call it a grand gift if he wants to,"she said, looking straight ahead. "I just think I live from day to day and do the best I can."