Journey to the Edge of Texas Chapter 10

Range War

"CAN  YOU  TELL  US  YOUR  FULL  NAME?"
Petrou asked the next witness.
"Martha Liebrum."
"And what is your position with The Post right now?"
"I'm assistant managing editor. My duties include the features department."
"Were you at one time in charge of The Houston Post Sunday magazine?"
"Yes, I was. I was editor of the magazine that lasted from 1974 to 1988. The editor decides what's going into it, assigns stories to writers, edits some material that comes in, selects the presentation, design."
"Was it a good magazine?"
"We thought it was a wonderful magazine."
"Was it well written?"
"We won prizes."

DO     YOU     RECALL     ANY     CONTRIBUTIONS from Carl Leatherwood ... ?" "Yes."
"Were there a number of contributions from Carl?" "Yes. In one year he wrote a lot and a little in the year before that and the year after that."
"I'd like to show you some exhibits that we have entered into evidence here. Do you recognize this?"
"Yes, I do. It's a cover story that Carl wrote on going down the Rio Grande in Big Bend."
"Who took that picture?"
"Carl."
"What did you think of this picture?"
"Oh, it was beautiful. He took great photos."
"What did you think of the writing here?"
"I think it's very fine. It was very good."
"Okay. I want to show you another exhibit. Do you know what that is?"
"Yes. It's an article that we ran in the magazine called Texana. It was a standing column that appeared almost every week, and Texana was about travel in Teas. This happens to be about the Hill Country."
"Who wrote this article?"
"Carl."
"What did you think of this article?"
"It was fine, very fine."
"And do you recognize this article."
"Yes. It's another article of Carl's. It was published January 1986."
"The reason I'm asking you about it in particular is because—first of all, were you aware that at the time that Carl wrote some of these articles, he was experiencing some mental health conditions?"
"I don't know if I was aware or not to be honest."
"Did anything that he did whether he had mental health problems or not, did that affect his writing in any way?"
"No."
"I want to ask you if you were aware that just before this article was published that Carl was in the hospital for about a month?"
"I don't remember, honestly."
"Did you edit Mr. Leatherwood's stories?"
"Yes, I did."
"And did you heavily edit them? Were there—how much did you edit them?"
"Very little, very little. I mean, most feature stories require some editing. Even our best feature writers need some and he had some but not a lot."
"Were you also in charge of overall features at the time?"
"Uh-huh."
"This weekend section here, is that something that you would have been in charge of?"
"Yes."
"And is this considered a feature here?"
"Yes. It's a cover story on fall."
"Who wrote that cover story?"
"Carl did, in November '86."
"Did you recall telling Carl after you saw the story that this is lovely writing?"
"I'm sure I did."

  THE   POSTMAN   KNEW   IT.
"Oh, man, I've been waiting for this all summer," he said, high-stepping across the intersection of Sugar Hill and Tanglewood.
The Boys of October were in the Astrodome that day, but the letter carrier alluded to something else. He could have borrowed a quote used by Mets Manager Davey Johnson, and proclaimed, "This is as good as it gets."
Autumn was here, in Houston. The message was written on a cool breeze, carried by songbirds and later delivered with flair.

There are about 2,000 kinds of mushrooms (upper left) in the Big Thicket.  Nearby a wagon train rolls near Winnsboro in Northeast Texas. (upper right)
A boy and his dog hike (lower left) at Lost Maples State Natural Area in the Hill Country. Youngsters feed seagull on a cruise to see Whooping Cranes at Arkansas Wildlife Refuge. (lower right)

And this weekend may be the best of the season—the best of times to enjoy the outdoors in Texas. People from the Big Thicket to the Hill Country who keep watch on the trees have forecast a peak of color in fall foliage about now.
Not that that's all there is. Nature belies the cynics who, narrowly focused on the foliage, say we have no vibrant change of season, True, wild creatures must hustle less to prepare for winter in forests only spotted with brilliant color. The area is, however, the darling in fall of bird lovers and mushroom fanciers on a national scale. And the beaches have special appeal.
A statewide ramble in autumn can open up the biological wonder of Southeast Texas or a park in north Harris County that has built a display appropriate to a blissful Indian summer. Down on the middle coast a record number of whooping crane chicks are arriving. And out in the Hill Country are the makings of a traditional downhome trip through brightly painted woods.

THE PADDLE SHOT OUT of my hands and away from the canoe. Current widened the gap between the two as an autumn sun set on Village Creek about 100 miles east of Houston. I now coveted sage Wyatt Moore's past practice of carrying two paddles when hunting ducks on Caddo Lake in northeast Texas.
He did it mostly for "bushwhacking," what they called his method of duck hunting up there where the season drifts through a little earlier.
Bushwhacking meant he would see a duck, drop his paddle instantly, and go to pumping shot "I used to carry an extra paddle in the boat," Moore said, "and then if a duck jumped up, I could just forget about the paddle I was paddling with. Later, I would take the paddle in the boat and retrieve the one that fell off in the water."
Over in the Big Thicket, literally up a creek without a paddle, I looked at Chico, a Boston terrier who had propped his front paws on the port gunnel to stand watch. He had the answer to our predicament. So I dog paddled belly down on the stern to retrieve the paddle.
Village Creek runs through a biological crossroads of international merit, with plant species converging there from all directions. The tangle of vegetation has long been called the Big Thicket. Portions are in a national preserve, though most of this creek is not. At most bends in the creek white quartz sand invites a picnic or camping.
I paddled toward a sand bar draped with willows, toward a cypress-darkened slough that widens into a pond, toward remembrances of youth. A cypress swamp had existed behind the sand bar. The wind didn't penetrate the tangle there, and the mirrored surface of the water, where an ancient age seemed to hang as real as the Spanish moss, kindled awe.
As I reached my stamping ground, twilight was fading in the western sky, abbreviating the journey, but I embraced an autumnal reward. The crisp air quickened strokes, worked in conjunction with primeval craft and starlight to rejuvenate the soul.
Al Schotz, the director-naturalist of the Big Thicket Museum in Saratoga, stalked seasonal forest colors with me under a blue sky the next day. Transplanted from upstate New York where the trees put on a splashy show, he found amazing things here.
"During the fall, most of your mushrooms are out," he said. "There are about 2,000 different kinds of mushrooms in the Big Thicket. That's unbelievable. And that's not including molds; that's just including what people would picture a mushroom as being."
We encountered several species of amanita mushrooms, very poisonous fungi, capped in deep orange and white. "The amanitas are most beautiful," my guide said. "They come in almost every color of the rainbow." One half-foot giant deserved the moniker "Big Daddy."
"Because of the humidity and warmer climate, people can find mushrooms on New Year's Day," Schotz said. "They come in all sizes and shapes. One looks like a turkey's tail, and that's what we call our official Thanksgiving mushroom here in the Big Thicket. Anyone interested in mycology—this is the place to be."
He noted earlier that "people have more of a chance to see wildlife during this time of year because of the cool, and the animals are out and about getting prepared for the winter months." Our steamy summers keep most animals nocturnal then.
A squirrel had built a nest perhaps sixty feet up in the limbs of a tree. "Squirrels are beginning to store up acorns and pecans, and they put them in their special hiding places," he said. "And then they try to come back and find them. Fifty percent of the time they can't find their storage area." In our mild temperatures and without snow on the ground it doesn't matter so much.
Some creatures do start to slow down. "Snakes seek refuge at about 60 degrees," Schotz said. "Honeybees cease to fly under 54 degrees. When it is below 54, they stay at their hive and they rotate—the ones on the outside will go inside to get warm, and vice versa."
Also coloring the area were red-seeded magnolia cones, purple American beautyberries, goldenrod, dark purple sweet-gum leaves, an orange tint of. cypress, redheaded woodpeckers, yellow foliage on white ash and red on swamp maples. "What's different around Southeast Texas than say up in Michigan, where the leaves all change at once and are spectacular, is here one tree will change and then another, like a sequence, not all at one time," Schotz said.

INVERSELY, THE CHANGE to a duller color in bird color heightens interest in an autumn phenomenon on the Texas coast of continental importance.
"The thing in animal life to naturalists down here that signifies fall more than anything else is the migration of birds," said Carmine Stahl of Mercer Arboretum and Botanic Gardens, and Jesse Jones Park and Nature Center, both in North Harris County. "The little woodland songbirds come through here and head on to the tropics. One of the world's largest concentrations of wintering waterfowl is out here on the prairies around Katy and Hockley, and in Jefferson and Chambers counties."
Through the course of the year you can usually see more species of birds within a hundred miles of Houston than anywhere else in the United States, he said. "It's one of the best birding places in the country."
Kay McCracken, a birder of note in Corpus Christi, pays tribute to what we can find in our own backyards. "Your area is really a bit more spectacular than ours in the fall—it has been lately, not always."
In Texas, one begins to see the broad-winged hawk migration over the Piney Woods in August and then around the coast, she said, and it funnels down through the point of Texas into Mexico. The birds number in the thousands. But autumn migrations aren't as concentrated in the bird world as those in the spring. "The birds aren't in any big hurry in the fall, and they take their time," she said. "They may linger in a spot that has food for four or five days. In the spring they refuel every time they stop and keep going to their breeding places."
Though the Houston area has its thrills, for birders like McCracken, the biggest attraction on the coast is near her home, in the Coastal Bend of the state. It is the wintering habitat of the only wild flock of whooping cranes.
The cranes start their 2,600-mile migration from western Canada for the area adjacent to Matagorda Island in September.
This year, the first whooper hit the Texas coast in mid-October and most will have arrived by the end of November. The population of the rare birds has swelled to an estimated 115 because of abundant water at the breeding grounds in Canada. It is the highest number in the flock since their survival became a conservation cause.
The cranes literally stand head and shoulders above other birds. Measuring fifty inches high, they are the tallest birds in North America. Wings span seven feet from black tip to black tip. The adults sport red faces, the youngsters rust heads.
"We had 96 leave last spring to go north," said Dave Blankinship, whooping crane biologist of the National Audubon Society. "They had a very good reproductive year."
One bird died of natural causes in the spring migration, but about twenty young birds were produced and lived to begin the journey southward. That's a record, too.
"Of course, there’s a good chance that some of those birds may get lost from one cause or another during migration," Blankinship said, "but we certainly are looking for well over 100. The increase in the young is primarily due to favorable weather conditions, water conditions on the breeding grounds."
At the time of our conversation, red tide was considered a serious potential threat to the whooping cranes.
"So far there hasn't been any concentrations of red tide up in the area where the cranes winter," Blankinship said. "We know that the organisms and their toxins are concentrated in shellfish like oysters and clams. Clams are a major food item of the whooping cranes.
"Fortunately, when the cranes first arrive here, they feed primarily on crabs, and it is not until later in the year that they really turn to clams as a greater part of their diet. In winter the water level drops and the dams become more available. But it's a situation where conceivably only one or two clams would be enough to cause a crane some real problems. They will eat a clam if they come across it."

A girl fishes at sunset near ferry landing at Galveston.

'TIS THE SEASON IN GALVESTON. A monarch butterfly flutters among the sun-drenched hibiscus blooms and palms outside the dining room at The San Luis Hotel. Strollers, both beachcombers and baby carriages, meander unscorched and uncrowded down the beach. Rooms cost less. There are those who fish under a harvest moon. Others dance on a skateboard or a wave or a paddlewheeler. A tour of the seawall in a little surrey is a pleasant thing, if attention to staying above the steep rocky shoulder is not diverted too long by wonderful bodies and sandcastles.
As do the songbirds and butterflies, the snowbirds come and migrate down the coast. Snowbird is not a good analogous term for the people visiting through the winter from the north. The real ones stay home and frolic in the snow.

A monarch butterfly alights on a hisbiscus blossom (above) also on the island.
(Below) Red berries on dogwood in the Big Thicket. 

Probably, the most brilliant leafy display accessible within weekend driving range from Houston can be found around the western Hill Country town of Utopia. The peak of bigtooth maple color will have probably passed by now, but another species vies with it in autumn dress, the Spanish oak on which the golden-cheeked warbler depends for caterpillars to feed its young in summer.
Bee Garrison, whose roots in the hills go back to early settlers, was anticipating "beautiful leaves" near her ranch and recommended sightseeing on roads running from Utopia to Garner State Park and from Leakey to Vanderpool, "a beautiful drive anytime." People coming over in late November and early December may not see any maples, but the oaks are "so pretty," she said. "The only thing that would ruin it would be if we get a lot of rain and a lot of wind."
Hunters also find wild turkeys and a lot of white-tailed deer for the Thanksgiving table in those hills. It is an old custom.      
"We served wild turkey for Thanksgiving when I was growing up," Garrison said. "We grew or found wild everything that we ate back then. Momma used to take venison and fry it up like chicken fried steak, put it down in fifty-five-gallon crocks, a layer of fried meat and a layer of melted lard, until she had the crocks full. Then you would still be having venison steaks long after the hunt. Sometimes they would kill a deer out of season to make jerky, to cure it in the heat of July and August. They would hang it in strips on a tin roof or on a clothesline."
Pecans are another bountiful harvest as smoke begins to rise from the hunters' campfires. Native and cultivated pecan trees grow on the northern edge of the Hill Country around San Saba. "At one time we were the leading state in the union in native pecans," said John Lipe, horticulturist for the Texas Agricultural Extension Service. "It is said there are 500 miles of waterways in San Saba County. All of the rivers have wide bottoms, and pecans grow native in the bottoms. The estimate is 90,000 acres of native pecans just in that one county alone."
Hal Borland, a naturalist of national eminence, and others within the state have written bizarre accounts of the pioneer harvests. "For many years only wild pecans came to market," Borland says. "The method of harvesting those wild ones now seems unbelievable. Nut-gatherers went through the woods, chose the largest, heaviest-bearing pecan trees, and when the nuts were ripe they cut down the trees. Then they put boys to work picking the nuts from the fallen giants. And that was the end of those pecan trees, forever."
When I first mentioned that story to Lipe, he could not believe it either. "Sounds like one of those Aggie jokes," he said. "Obviously, it's a lot easier to shake the pecans from the tree. To chop the tree down is a lot of work."

AN EARLIER PEOPLE returned home to north Harris County in autumn to apparently gather nuts in a more civilized way. The Akokisa Indians would live on clams and oysters in area saltwaters and then paddle their cypress dugout canoes back up Spring and Cypress Creeks to gather acorns and hickory nuts, hunt, and spend the winter.
The Akokisa traded hides with the Spanish and French from the beginning of European exploration in the 1500s. The tribe's population may have peaked at 3,000 but was decimated by diseases carried by the explorers. When Anglo settlers began trickling over from Louisiana in the 1820s, few of the natives remained.
"We have been developing a typical pioneer homesite of that period at the Jones park," Stahl said. "We have built a log cabin, a smokehouse, and other outbuildings—shed, corn crib, chicken house."
And the small group of Indians around then are not forgotten. A replica of their living quarters has been constructed. It is an oval hut of poles shingled with palmetto fronds which grow in the state from here to the Big Thicket, and in other isolated stands. "The fronds shed water very nicely," Stahl said. "Sometimes the Indians added furs for warmth in winter."
The park also contains the largest cypress and magnolia stands in Harris County along almost five miles of paved trails. Foliage color of the other trees may not measure up to the past because of "a bit of an unusual fall this year," Stahl noted. "One reason is that we had a long period of drought this summer ... that condition caused a great many trees that normally do color up for us to lose their leaves early."
But the dry spell followed by an extended period of rain also produced some forest color unusual for this time of year. Observed Stahl, "We have had more spring flowering trees blooming this fall than I can ever remember."

ONE HOUSTON PHOTOGRAPHER has chased autumn colors from East to West Texas. "It's flaky," said Blair Pittman, who has pursued the traditional image of fall with more determination than most, and found it. He stayed for two weeks waiting for it in the Guadalupe Mountains. Residents near the mountains on the New Mexico border kept saying that it wasn't right yet, and he had to get back to Houston. "We came back, and they called five days later to say, *Hey, it's perfect, it's perfect.' I caught a plane and flew back up there. And it was perfect."

OKAY," PETROU SAID, poised to ask Liebrum more questions. "Do you recall that at one time Carl asked you if he could be a full-time feature writer?"
"I don't honestly remember if he did."
"Is it possible he may have asked you?"
"He may have. We don't have very much turnover in the features department. So whenever there's an opening, a large number of people in the room usually ask. Feature jobs are considered to be good jobs."
"Could Carl have been a full-time feature writer?"
"I doubt it."
"Why is that?"
"Well, general feature writing is different. He has a specialty. His specialty was traveling in the state of Texas. He wrote really well about travel. He wrote nice features about people in the state of Texas, but that's not a job that we were funded for. A general feature writer has to report, interview, cover a wide variety of subjects from abortion to new clothes, I mean, there's just—it's very broad. He had a particular interest that he was good at, reporting at."
"All right, but for some of these features stories he did interview people, did he not?"
"Uh-huh, yes."
"He could go out and interview people; isn't that right?"
"He certainly could go out and interview the people he interviewed."
"And some of them you thought were wonderful pieces, right?"
"Right."
"Okay. Do you recall ever approaching Mr. Peter O'Sullivan, I think, at the time? Was he the editor in chief?"
"Yes."
"Do you recall approaching him on Carl's behalf and asking whether there could be a spot for Carl as a feature writer?"
"I don't believe that I ever did that. I don't remember that at all."
"If Carl has testified that you did that, would he be mistaken?"
"I believe he would be. I don't remember that at all. This is the first time I've heard that."
"Are there free-lance writers?"
"Yes."
"What's the situation today with being a free-lance writer? Can you get something published in The Post as a free-lance writer?"
"A very few articles are bought anymore, and it's true with all newspapers. We have a staff and we use staff material to fill up pages. We just don't need free-lancers as we once did."
"It's hard for someone to make a living being a free-lance writer?"
"I think it's hard anytime for anybody to free-lance as a writer."
"No matter how good their writing is?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. Do some writers sometimes write at home, at their computers at home?"
"Yes. But a full-time staff person would not work from his home."
"At this point you don't have any full-time staff people working at home, you say. But if somebody was disabled, and had some kind of health problem where he could work at home out of his own computer that did not require him to report to the office, could that person work out of his home?"
"Theoretically."
Bounds takes up the questioning.
"Did you ever have occasion to see Mr. Leatherwood bring his dog into the newsroom?"
"One day, yes."
"Was there a disruption?"
"Well, it was a spectacle I'd say. I guess we'd call it a disruption."
"You were asked a question about whether or not a person as a staff feature writer could work at home. You said that that was theoretically possible. Is that what you said?"
"Because people all have home computers now, we have had writers every so often say I'd like to work at home, you know, da-da-da, I need to keep the kids or whatever; and it works sometimes and then other times they have to be in the office."
"Do you think it would be reasonable or practical to have a staff writer full-time working from their home?"
"It's not desirable actually, because we think that the writers need to be there and they need to feed off each other. They give each other ideas. They discuss their stories. Operating in a vacuum is not the best way to do good feature stories."
"You said that in your opinion Mr. Leatherwood could not be a staff feature writer. Why is that?"
"As I said, he has a specialty and that's what he's demonstrated and that's what his interest is, that's what he's good at. We would not hire someone who did not have background with a lot of—showing a lot of range, and he does not show a lot of range."
"People with chronic illnesses, are they being accommodated at The Post?"
"We have new ones, you know. Now, with the computers, we have that carpal tunnel syndrome and that is a problem, yes. It's very accommodating."
"Currently?"
"Currently."
PETROU:  "WE  CALL  DR.  ARCHIE  BLACKBURN.
"Tell us basically what you do for a living?" "I'm a psychiatrist and am full-time at the VA Hospital and the medical school, Baylor."
"Are you also a medical doctor?"
"Yes."
"Do you know a patient by the name of Carl Leatherwood?"
"Yes, I do."
"When did Mr. Leatherwood become your patient?"
"I first saw him in December of 1988 and saw him until I went back to full-time in the Medical Center in June of'92."
"Do you recall where he was working when you first saw him?"
"He was working at The Post."
"Okay- Were you able from talking to Mr. Leatherwood to determine how important the job was to him?"
"Well, I did certainly learn that the job was very important to him, and my recollection is that he had been there for twenty-two years, and it was extremely important to him. I guess that I came to know that after he lost the job, which was perhaps six months after I had been seeing him, and his clinical condition, of course, worsened considerably at that point.
"From examining Mr. Leatherwood and reviewing his medical history, do you know if he ever deliberately stopped taking his medication?"
"I actually thought that he did that originally. That's, I guess, my suspiciousness as a clinician. But I came to understand rather confidently that that was not the case. That he would start having his episodes of manic symptomatology first, and then in the course of that sometimes would terminate his medication or just not be taking his medication."
"I want to turn your attention to the fall and winter of 1988 when Mr. Leatherwood first came to see you. Which hospital was he admitted to?"
"This was Memorial Southwest in Houston."
"In this hospitalization, did he come to the hospital voluntarily?"
"On this occasion, he did not."
"Did he later agree to stay in the hospital voluntarily?"
"He did."
"Were you able to stabilize his condition?"
"Yes, we were. We basically restarted the lithium that he had been on, and we also used a small amount of tranquilizing drug."
"Did you release him to go back to work, Dr. Blackburn?"
"Yes, I did. But his return to work was difficult for him in some respects. His mental state had cleared rather remarkably in a short period of time. But my recollection is that from my office contacts over that period of time, the difficulty for him was associated with the fact that he came to feel rather strongly that he was not going to be allowed to continue in his work, and he was given a new assignment. I don't know the nature of that in terms of details, but he perceived that it was unlikely that he was going to be able to continue to work even though he felt able to go to work."
"And how did this perception of a person with bipolar disorder that he may not be allowed to remain at the job that he's had for twenty-two years, how did that affect him?"
"Well, it was very stressful, very stressful. It had a significant impact on him."
"Do you recognize this exhibit?"
"Yes. This was a letter that I wrote to Mr. Leatherwood's employment. It was to Mr. Williamson who was the executive editor at The Post, and I was simply indicating that the patient was under my care
and had been in the hospital, and in my opinion he could return to work."
"Okay. I want to direct your attention to the second paragraph here where it says 'prior to hospitalization for at least one month, he was seriously disabled by his symptoms.' Does that mean that you felt for at least a month before he even entered the hospital he was having some problems?"
"That was my impression, yes. I would think it was unlikely that he was functioning normally during that period of time before."
"If there are some fellow workers and supervisors that did not know that he was experiencing mental health problems, could they believe that he just wasn't doing his work?"
"That could be true."
"Do you know if around June of 1989, a few months later after that letter, that Mr. Leatherwood was hospitalized again?"
"Yes."
"Okay. I want you to look at another exhibit, a hospital summary. This is for the date 6/19 through 6/24/89. Did he voluntarily come to the hospital this time?"
"My recollection is that this was a voluntary admission. His family and friends and colleagues had been noticing him going through changes and had coerced him into coming would be the right way to say it."
"After his hospital stay, was he stabilized again and was he able to go back to work?"
"My recommendation was to return to work as soon as possible."
"Here, what is Defendant's Exhibit No. 9?"
"This is a letter with my signature to Mr. Jim Janiga at The Houston Post, director of Human Resources. I explained to him that the patient had gone through a change in his mental state, not as severe as before, that he was hospitalized and I had adjusted his medications and that I felt he was ready to return to work."
"And you say there in the first sentence he experienced a hypo-manic mood shift? What does that mean?"
"Basically that is something less than manic. An episode is heightened mood, some symptoms but without significant compromise in the ability to carry on ordinary life activities."
"Is it your understanding that he was not allowed to return to work, and as a consequence of being fired, his condition worsened?"
"Yes. It was a major upheaval for him. The stress had an adverse affect."
"Okay. Did his condition reach a point, Dr. Blackburn, where you had to write letters and fill out forms to his long-range disability insurance company and to Social Security informing them about Mr. Leatherwood's worsened condition?"
"I did."
"In your opinion was there a time after he was fired when Carl Leatherwood was disabled from doing the kind of work that he did before he was fired?"
"That would have been my opinion some months of that particular year."
"When you determined that Carl's condition had gotten worse after he was fired, did you determine that he could be disabled forever, from ever working again?"
"I don't think I ever thought that."
"Could he recover from the firing and at some point in the future resume productive work?"
"Certainly."
"Is it possible for people who have mental health illnesses to work in jobs that are not as stressful as the jobs that they used to have?"
"Certainly. It's always better to work than not to work."
Judge Gibson: "We will resume with your testimony, Doctor, tomorrow morning. I hope you enjoy the afternoon off. The weather is with you."

Journey to the Edge of Texas, A Memoir by Carlton Leatherwood: Chapter 8: Going to Trial

Going to Trial

AFTER A QUARTER CENTURY OF EMPLOYMENT, I lost my job in the turmoil of manic depression. I fought desperately to return to the workplace, filing a health discrimination suit that would go to trial in 1993.
In this precedent to the Americans With Disabilities Act, one of my lawyers, a former investigative reporter in television named Steve Petrou, was trying his first case, endowed with idealistic zeal for this journalist.
A star witness for the defense had been a valued friend socially for years, but loyalty was tattered by my manic conduct in the newsroom and he had fired me.
Others among the mentally ill were rooting for me to strengthen their case with employers, less than wary of a possible determination that the employer might have been pushed beyond the limits of its patience by an ugly sickness.

THE   TRIAL,  a sizable undertaking in federal district court, was Carlton E. Leatherwood, Jr. (plaintiff) vs. The Houston Post Co. (defendant). Teams of lawyers would present the case to an eight-person jury in a proceeding presided over by the Honorable Hugh Gibson.
The small maverick Houston law firm of Coane and Associates had drawn up the suit, and my parents helped foot the cost. I do not know the thousands of dollars spent because these parties were always quiet about finances. But I do know that after four years of preparation, lengthened by illnesses on my part, we went to federal court on the strength of a Texas statute.
The case made it on the Galveston docket a few days before Thanksgiving in 1993, and my family settled in a hotel built on a pier jutting into die Gulf of Mexico.
Court was called into session.
A jury of five men and three women was seated.
"The attorneys will be given an opportunity to make an opening statement," Judge Gibson told the jury. "The purpose of the statement is to set forth from each of their standpoints what the issues in this case are, and to provide evidence that they expect will develop in support of their positions."
"Now for the plaintiff, Mr. Steven Petrou." Petrou strode forward. "Thank you, Your Honor," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen, this case is about a gentleman who for twenty-two years devoted himself to one newspaper, The Houston Post. But the evidence will show that when that newspaper changed ownership, it disowned this loyal journalist and cut him loose simply because he was ill.
"It is a privilege for me today to represent Carlton Leatherwood, Jr. Some of you may have seen his bylines in The Houston Post, because in addition to being an editor, which was his main job, he was also a writer. He wrote features for the Sunday magazine of The Post on subjects ranging from the environment to museums to the Rio Grande River. He also wrote travel stories, going all the way to Italy to cover some resorts, and you'll find out he wrote more than two dozen editorials.
"Mr. Leatherwood was fired from The Houston Port in July, 1989. He's coming to you now, a jury of his peers, because he believes he was wrongfully terminated.
"In Texas, an employer, you'll find out, can fire an employee for almost any reason. This is known as an 'employment at will state.' But the legislature and Congress, they have passed laws that say you cannot fire employees for some reasons. You cannot fire employees just because of their race. You can't fire an employee just because of their sex. You can't fire an employee because you feel they're too old. You can't fire because of their national origin. And they have said you cannot fire an employee because of their disability if that employee can reasonably be accommodated. We're going to prove to you, ladies and gentlemen, that Mr. Leatherwood was fired because of a disability, a health disability, and specifically a mental health disability.
"When I say mental health, I hope this doesn't frighten you or conjure up negative images in you, because some of the experts who will testify in this trial will tell you some very well-known people such as actress Patty Duke and golfer Bert Yancy have experienced the very same mental health illness as Carl Leatherwood, and those people have been able to lead productive lives. In fact, Patty Duke was in an NEC movie just two weeks ago called 'A Matter of Justice.'
"You will hear evidence that Carl Leatherwood has battled this illness for many, many years, and he's always been able to get treatment and return to work until July 1989. And before I tell you The Post forced Carl Leatherwood to prematurely end his career, I'll tell you a little more about how it began.
"Mr. Leatherwood was born in a small town in West Texas, and he moved with his family around, followed the oil patch until they reached Beaumont. He was a high school journalist, and then he became a college journalist. You'll find out he won awards as a writer in high school and in college. And by the mid-1960s, he found himself here in Galveston as an editor for the Galveston Daily News. You'll learn that he was an idealistic journalist who believed that his work allowed him to serve the public by better informing them of the world around them.
"He was lured away from the Galveston Daily News and went to The Houston Post in 1967. He started out as a copy editor for The Post. Later he worked on the wire desk where he gathered international, national and local stories, and later he worked on the business desk. As I mentioned earlier, he also throughout his tenure there contributed articles for magazine features and editorials.
"Before Media News and Dean Singleton took over this paper, it was owned for a few years by a Canadian group. And for many years before that, it was owned by the Hobby family, Oveta Gulp Hobby. The evidence will be that the previous owners accommodated Carl's illness and rewarded his loyalty with pay raises and praise. You will learn that the old management cared about the welfare of their employees long before there were any laws that protected workers from losing their jobs because of their disability. But you'll find out that the new owners were good at reporting our laws—about our laws against disability discrimination. They were good at reporting but not following them.
"The Texas Commission of Human Rights act was passed to prevent employers from discriminating against employees who are disabled and who have handicaps. Mr. Leatherwood is here asking you, a jury of his peers, to listen to all the evidence and at the end to give him the justice that he was denied."

FOR THE DEFENSE, the court calls Ms. Cherry Bounds." "Ladies and gentlemen, good morning,'' Bounds said as she took Petrou's place before the jury.
"The issue in this case regards handicapped discrimination. As you might have surmised, The Houston Post has a difference of opinion than Mr. Leatherwood does as to whether or not we discriminated against him because of his disability. We don't believe we discriminated against him because of his disability.
"We believe the evidence will show you that Mr. Leatherwood was with us for over twenty years, and that during that twenty-year period, the possession and control of The Houston Post changed three different times. But the philosophy was still the same, and the philosophy, unfortunately, was of business to make money. And whether or not those changes in management brought about a more businesslike and professional atmosphere than had been experienced under Mrs. Hobby's leadership, so be it.
"The bottom line is The Post is in business for several reasons, the number one being to make money, but most importantly they're in business to put out a newspaper. They have an obligation to the public, to you and me, to put that paper out in the most efficient, most effective, and most correct manner.
"Car! Leatherwood was a copy editor. He started with The Post as a copy editor in the 1960s. For a period of time his position changed, and you'll hear testimony that his position became a general wire editor. After he was having some problems, his supervisors decided, and they will testify, that it was in the best interest of Carl and the newspaper to move him from that general wire editor position to a business wire editor position. There were reasons for that. The bottom line is they were accommodating Carl's mental health, and they were always accommodating the needs of The Post. They needed someone they could rely on to do that job.
"Carl continued to have episodes, and his illness continued to get worse. The employees, his coworkers, his supervisors did everything they could as individuals. Yes, The Post is a company, but the company is made up of individual people. Those people know Carl. You'll see them testify. You'll hear them talk about Carl, and you'll hear them say that they like Carl. They enjoyed being around Carl most of the time, but the bottom line is those people, those individuals including Carl, had a higher obligation to their employer, The Post, and that was to see that that newspaper that we get on our front porches every day gets out and gets out accurately.
"A point was reached with Carl where he could not be trusted. One of the greatest attributes of a person as a copy editor or any kind of editing position at a newspaper, and specifically The Houston Port, they will testify, is your confidence in their ability to do their job. The Post 's position is that Carl's ability to do the job finally reached a point that they could no longer accommodate. In the last year or so, he couldn't do the job most of time.
"Thank you."
"Is the plaintiff ready to proceed?" Gibson inquired.
"Yes, Your Honor, we are," Petrou answered.
"Who will be your first witness? the judge asked.
"Mr. Leatherwood."
I was sworn in and Petrou began the questioning:
"Did you do some writing while you were at The Houston Post?"
"Yes, I did."
"What kind of writing did you do?"
"I wrote magazine articles, twenty-two magazine articles in about three years.
"Did you also write travel articles?"
"I wrote three prominent travel articles during that time."
"Did you also write editorials?"
"I wrote 20 editorials prior to that."
"Mr. Leatherwood, let me just get an understanding of what you understood your job to be at The Houston Post. What did your job consist of?"
"I was a—for 20 years, I was a general wire editor and then a business wire editor. And I was given the freedom to write and photograph during that time."
"Did you express an interest to a management person that you wanted to be a full-time writer?"
Yes. Martha Liebrum, editor of the magazine, knew of my devout interest in writing, thought I would be best traveling about Texas obtaining stories on people, and she tried to accomplish this fact with Peter O'Sullivan, editor-in-chief at the time the Canadians owned the paper."
"In your own life, was writing an important part of your job at The Port?"
Bounds objected, "He's leading the witness."
"Overrule the objection," the judge said.
"It was an important part, if I may say, for avoiding stress on the job," I said. "For some of these people I know that have been in a job for ten or fifteen years, there is burnout and there is stress, and stress is an ugly component of my illness. And so this relieved that stress, and that was the reason I sought a job other than editing the past twenty years."
Petrou continued his line of questioning. "Did you get some compliments from management on your writing?" he asked.
"Martha, who is one the executives now, said two words that I appreciated very much. They were on a story two newspaper pages long and with pictures partially shot in Galveston. She said: 'Lovely writing.'"
Petrou turned toward the judge. "May I approach the bench, Your Honor?"
"All right."
"Couldn't we look at some samples?" Petrou asked. "I'll not go into the whole thing, just some flavor. This man did more than just edit at The Post."
"What year are we talking about?"
"Some were written in 1986, '87. 1 think the position is he testified that he saw part of his job as writing. He asked to be a permanent writer, and that's the issue of accommodation."
"If you would select a few sample items. I'll consider admitting them."
"There's a sample, Your Honor. It shows his photography and feature writing."
"Was he a photographer also?"
"Yes, he was a photographer also, Your Honor. Then this one here, then two editorials that he wrote."
"That's enough. I'll tell you why I'm going to admit it, if you cannot guess. He claims that his skills included his ability to write. And the issue is, was he discharged because of incompetence or not. The thing of it is that the jury must take into consideration all of his skills in making the determination as to whether they can reasonably accommodate whatever disability he claims he has, and I think it does have that relevancy."
Petrou resumed questioning the plaintiff.
"What is the name of this article, Mr. Leatherwood?"

The Dixie Dude Ranch has been the scene of some happy days dating back to the early 40's.  In those days, many cadets from the Lackland and Randolph Air Force Bases visited and are remembered for their wild horseback riding. Today, however, insurance requirements say guests must ride single file behind a wrangler.

"The Dudes of Dixie."
"Tell us a little bit about it."
"It's about the first dude ranch in that part of Texas, Central Texas."
"Who was this lady whose picture you have here in the article?"

Rose Crowell, owner of the Dixie Dude Ranch

"Rose Crowell."
"Who was Ms. Crowell?"
"She was the owner. She was the daughter of the owner who founded it in 1939, and she helped her father."
"Did you interview her for the article?"
"Yes, I did."
"And when was this article published?"
"1986."
"Did you take all the pictures for this article?"
"Yes, I did."

I WELL   REMEMBER rounding up ranches in the Hill Country, not Central Texas as I had testified. It's a time to paddle forward, to take a reflective break from the courtroom. Rose "Billie" Crowell, owner of one of the oldest guest ranches in Texas, sat down in the dining room of the Dixie Dude Ranch to tell about the time the dinner bell rang in midafternoon and horses came running, mounted with Air Force cadets on weekend passes from training bases at nearby San Antonio. The day was Dec. 7, 1941. Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor.
"We had around forty military people here, men mostly," she said. "We had twenty-eight horses at that time, and we would let the boys ride back in the hills. We would try to keep them from killing themselves, but some of them rode like they were flying a plane."
She laughs at the memory. "They were all alerted to report back in the event something happened. Somebody called me over the party line and told me that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. So do you see that big old dinner bell? That was off of a locomotive. We went immediately and rang it. Horses and riders came in here from every direction.
"In no time at all the cadets were in their uniforms and checked out—handed me their money and were on their way back to Lackland and Randolph Air Force bases. During the war we heard from many of those people. Every once in a while we would get a letter back saying address unknown or deceased. Those were sad days, and lots of happy days, too, during the war."
Crowell rose and removed a small framed picture of a young officer from the wall. She spoke softly, pensively. The former guest in uniform had been killed in a plane crash. A cadet in another picture, however, had recently returned to the ranch as a much older man, and she had visited his home in Florida.
As Crowell noted the visits with other guests in their homes from Houston to England and the hundreds of Christmas cards exchanged, I began to understand the real attraction of dude ranches. They are extended families. If you don't have a relative or friend to visit in the Hill Country, they are the next best thing. Crowell agreed and laughed again. "Some of the people that we have had are better than relatives," she said.
"We have one family who has come here every year for forty-six years," she said. "One lady that was a baby in the Galveston flood [1900] has come twice a year all these years. She has grandchildren coming. We have some that have great grandchildren coming."
The Dixie Dude near Bandera opened to the public with a barbecue for about one-hundred neighbors and friends on July 3, 1937, before electricity arrived in that rural district. Crowell's father, William Wallace Whitley, had bought and worked the land since 1901. His daughter was born on it in 1904.
Today, horses graze serenely beneath the oaks in evening. Insurance requirements no longer permit the carefree horseriding the cadets enjoyed, and guests ride horses single file behind a wrangler.  On thirty miles of trails visitors may spot wild turkeys, redbarked trees called Texas madrones, and sotol. Sotol, more plentiful further west, was once fed to cattle during severe droughts.
"We've always had a jukebox," Crowell said. "A boy broke into one by the pool one night. There were seven of us around that table playing cards, and the children were down at the pool. The father of the boy was a psychiatrist out of Houston. The doctor jumped up right away, put his cards down, and made a beeline for the pool. Another father said, 'I think I'll go down and see how a psychiatrist can handle the situation.'
"The boy came back as a grown man not long ago and said, 'Boy, I was mean, wasn't I?'"
It happens in the best of families.

A SILVER PEUGOET TRAILED DUST under a brilliant autumn sun as the driver headed down a caliche ranch road in the Hill Country. The rough road tamed the speed of his exquisite machine to little more than a horse trot.
If he wanted to savor the Old West, he had no complaint. He was looking at it in his rear-view mirror. In the 1800s push of civilization through Texas to the Pacific, dust was a constant reminder of the rugged and uncomfortable conditions. Men kicked it up as they walked the streets of frontier towns. Their horses and wagons, and the wind, churned it into clouds. And it came to rest in layers on clothes and store goods.
A breed of driver different from the Peugoet pilot had swirled the dust of this ranchland with the hooves of cattle a century ago. And as I too churned up earth's powder, I was happy to find another element of realism in the successful conclusion of a search for a touch of the West in Texas. During that hunt for a treasured past I had heard others ask, "Where can I visit a working ranch?" The answer was the YO Ranch.

And after my first visit, its hospitality expanded to a hotel, the YO Ranch Hilton in Kerrville, thirty-five miles to the east. The hotel's grand opening in 1984 brought together some 2,500 celebrants including western movie and television actors.

Actor Ben Johnson rides at the front of the grand opening parade.

Dust had figured in the finishing touches at the hotel. An argument ensued over the authenticity of the dusty, aged display cases moved into the gift shop. The shop clerk fussed over the situation, said she didn't want that much realism in the place, and won out.
Such concessions to the modern way, however, have not subdued the western flavor of the luxuriously appointed hotel or the diversified working ranch, which also welcomes overnight guests. Five chandeliers, made of more than 350 Chisolm Trail era branding irons, light a massive lobby filled with mounted moose, deer, and bear of class. Leather and longhorn hides cover hand-carved sofas and chairs, some placed near a fireplace. A red metal roof covers the native limestone walls of the sprawling 200-room hotel. At the ranch you may sleep in restored nineteenth-century cabins, which served such needs as stagecoach stop and schoolhouse.

The YO Ranch Hilton's Dining Room features exotic game on the menu

The Charles Schreiner family, owner of the YO Ranch, threw a four-day party for the opening of their new venture. During the event Charlie Three, the patriarch of the Schreiners, led an eight-mile parade of horsemen, longhorns, and wagons.

Given the opportunity to act the boastful Texan, he shunned the role. "It's beautiful," he replied with restrained pride when asked what he thought of his hotel.

Across the lobby, the youngest of Charlie Three's four sons talked about his dad's diversification of the YO. "Yeah, he started the long-horns [on a comeback off a government refuge] about 1964," Louis said. "Now there are about 10,000 registered Longhorns in the United States. But then nobody had 'em. They were unwanted."
I asked the breed's purpose.
"They are for the commercial breeder," Louis said. "Calving ease is a desirable characteristic. When a lot of our breeds have their first calves, the rancher has to stay up night and day with them—almost be there to give birth like a doctor would. Longhorns, you just turn them out. We sell our bulls to people to use on their first-calf heifers (Angus, Hereford, etc.). The breeders also want to get a certain percentage of longhorn in their herd to get that characteristic hardiness and fertility.''
The Longhorn was the first Old West animal I sighted on the YO Ranch. About 900 of the breed (cows, bulls, and calves) roamed its 50,000 acres. Former Texas Ranger Charles Schreiner began the ranch with longhorns over a century ago, in 1880. "The Texas long-horn made more history than any other breed of cattle the civilized world has known," folklorist J. Frank Dobie wrote in The Longhorns. "As an animal in the realm of natural history, he was the peer of bison or grizzly bear. As a social factor, his influence on men was extraordinary. An economic agent in determining the character and occupation of a territory continental in its vastness, he moved elementally with drought, grass, blizzards out of the Arctic and the wind from the south. However supplanted or however disparaged by evolving standards and generations, he will remain the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded."

An estimated ten million head moved up the trails of Texas between 1866 and 1890. Capt. Schreiner, himself, drove more than 150,000 to Kansas on the Chisholm Trail. The cattle brought the state financial recovery from the Civil War far ahead of other Confederate states. And it was the Longhorn herd and the addition of exotic game that also brought the YO Ranch recovery from a devastating drought in the 1950s. Diversification through a Hilton hotel franchise was but another gallop away from the hardship of natural disaster. Conrad Hilton, incidentally, started his chain in Texas, at Cisco.
The Elm Water Hole was the coziest place to get a drink at the Kerrville hotel. Blackbuck antelope and axis deer hides covered stools at the antique bar. The Sam Houston dining room served up those ranch-grown animals at dinner.

The scenic route to the YO Ranch passes the prestigious summer camps on the headwaters of the Guadalupe River. Surface water, however, is another luxury the 100-square-mile YO doesn't possess. Its more than 10,000 animals depend on windmills. One stands sentinel at the entrance. Thirty-two species of exotic game share the spread, but on a winter visit I told foreman Ed Howell I wanted more to see an old-line working ranch. He woke me early the next morning so I could see him run head after head of cattle through a chute. He trapped them momentarily to doctor their ears.
The exotic animals stimulate income from hunting and photography. Tours of their habitat go with ranch visits. Blackbuck antelope, giraffes, zebras, and axis deer are among the imports roaming the hills, which an African chief once compared to his homeland. But the exotics may sometimes produce an incongruous sight for the Texan. I saw an ostrich chase an armadillo one trip. Louis Schreiner said the drought got so bad in the '50s his dad shipped his cattle to Montana. "He tried to figure out some way to supplement income and came up with exotic game. We had started commercial hunting of white-tailed deer, but that's only six weeks out of the year. So we brought these exotics in, turned them loose, and began hunting them five years later. Now we've got thousands."
The shadow of western superstar John Wayne literally hung over the grand opening celebration of the YO Ranch Hilton. So many of the film stars there remembered their work with him. And then I drove to the Cowboy Artists of America Museum in Kerrville where I found his bronze statue under a spotlight.
The museum houses the work of professional artists who focus on the cowboy and related subjects. In the galleries around a courtyard you may find the paintings and sculptures of such artists as John Clymer, who produced some eighty covers for the old Saturday Evening Post, and Mehl Lawson, who got a degree in animal husbandry and for fifteen years bought, sold, trained, rode, and showed horses. CAA artists follow in the footsteps of Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell whose art, like film, helped secure a romantic thirst for the West.
And with reason. "Of the twenty-nine eventful decades since the Mayflower ... only one American period produced a unique, enduring symbol of universal recognition ... America's Everyman is ... the cowboy," wrote Southwest author Don Dedera.
Griffiths C. Games, director of the museum, said, "One of its main purposes is to get the art where the public can enjoy it. We had a lot of people say, 'where has this art been? I didn't even know it existed.'"
The Cowboy Artists of America association settled on locating its museum in Texas because of support, meaning money, and in Kerrville because of local interest. The locale, of course, has a heritage of many of the elements in western art.
The building was the last public one bearing direct influence by Texas architect O'Neil Ford, credited with setting forth the principles of southwestern regional style. The ten-acre site crossed by limestone ledges and shaded by oaks and cedars is representative of the Hill Country.
Hand-carved oak doors open into the gallery. The ceiling, a series of brick domes, was constructed by craftsmen from Guanajusto and San Miguel de Ajente, Mexico, using rare and ancient skills. The floor was made of mesquite, a very dense wood found in the area as well as other parts of Texas.
Fritz White, a sculptor from Loveland, Colorado, was teaching a class when I visited. The students came from five states. "The CAA artists have all been very successful," Carnes said, "and they wanted to put something back in with young, serious art students. So in setting this museum up, they insisted as part of the agreement that they teach these classes at no charge. They come here at their own expense."
The museum also is accumulating the records on everything ever done by CAA members. "We want to make this for scholars, dealers, and collectors to research and authenticate art," Carnes said. "Heretofore, there has been that time lag. An artist dies and maybe it is thirty years later before somebody says, hey, he was pretty good, and starts accumulating all this data. In the meantime, phonies show up and people get hurt. They are getting hurt surprisingly enough with forged contemporary art.
"About a year ago a woman in Dallas called a friend of the museum and said, 'I just got the neatest Melvin Warren print you ever saw for $10.' The other woman said, 'There aren't any Melvin Warren prints for $10.' The caller said, 'I got one.' Come to find out it came from a flea market in Garland. And the guy had stacks of them. They were all done in Hong Kong." With records at the museum people can authenticate a work.
"The real United States starts west of the Mississippi," Carnes said. "Everything east emulated Europe. What was west of the Mississippi, the things unique to this country, stands us separate and apart from the rest of the world."
The cowboy was a part of the distinctive cattle industry and the fur trade. A statue of a bucking cowboy on the Capitol grounds in Austin refers to Texas as his native home. Dobie backs this up, saying the cowboy was cradled in South Texas, the product of the coming together of the Anglo-American, the herd-owning Spanish caballero, the Spanish vaquero—a mounted worker with cows—and the open range.
In the roundup of ranches, I encountered an anachronism of sound at the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park where I paid a visit to the working LBJ Ranch of the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Taped remarks of Johnson welcomed visitors to the Hill Country as a tour bus crossed the Pedernales River and passed his one-room school and his grave on the way to the home and fields where he entertained international dignitaries. His widow still lived there. Some 200 head of Hereford cattle roamed the premises.
After the tour I took a short walk to Sauer-Beckman Farmstead for a portrayal of life in the early 1900s. "We raise our own pigs and our own beef," John Matthews, who served as our living history guide, said in a gentle bass voice.
"Yes, sir, we have a smokehouse," Matthews said. "I grew up like this. My folks put up their own meat. In the spring, when the weather starts getting warm, we take a lot of the meat and pack it in lard. I can show you right here. We take the bacon and ham out of the smokehouse, trim it, slice it, and put it in jars and pour lard over it. The lard just keeps the air away from it."
Vegetables from a garden are put up, too, and stored on shelves in a long cabin. I saw cabbage, tomatoes, pole beans, blackeyed peas, and carrots. And canning includes wild grape jelly from an abundance of mustang grapes in this area. The food is prepared on a wood stove in the kitchen of a stone house for park personnel. "The long part is getting the fire going," said guide Denise Abendschein. "Once the stove gets hot enough, it's not bad cooking."
The John Sauers reared their ten children in the house. They built the log cabin first, about 1869, and progressively added the stone house and an attached Victorian one. Today, there are more sounds of the past—a crowing rooster and a creaking windmill.

I MOVE THAT THIS  EXHIBIT be admitted," Petrou said, awakening me to further questioning. "Mr. Leather-wood, did you also write editorials?" "Yes, I did." "I want to show you what's been premarked as Exhibit 7-G."
"It is an editorial that was considered the best of the day's. At the top of the page it's entitled 'A System Failed.'"
"And what was this editorial about?"
"It was about the way we as a community in Houston treated mental illness and the people that had it."
"Can you read us the first two paragraphs of that editorial, please?"
"In the shadow of downtown, behind the supermarket, the hungry scavenge what the store doesn't want to sell. And as they claim food for themselves, they break bread with the birds, strewing pieces along a parking lot fence. It is a compassionate city.
"Sometimes, however, compassion here rests behind fences, as it did when Eddie Lee Johnson lost his life in an ugly Christmas story. You may remember. Police gunned down the mentally ill young man in self-defense during the 1981 holiday season. This tragic tale is resurrected now because some details deserve reexamination and because it should not die without forging in heart and soul the will to strengthen this community."
"Okay. Mr. Leatherwood, did anybody approve these editorials?"
"Oveta Gulp Hobby and George Fuerman, the editorial page editor, approved them for publication."
"Just remind the jury, who was Oveta Gulp Hobby again?"
"She was the chairman of the board of The Houston Post [Company]."
"Now let's move on to your illness. Did you call anyone at The Post and ask about your job while you were hospitalized in December 1988?"
"I called Ernie Williamson."
"And what was his response when you asked him about your job?"
"Objection, Your Honor," Bounds spoke up, "This is hearsay."
"What's the exception to the rule?" Gibson asked.
"Admission by a party opponent, Your Honor," Petrou answered.
"Proceed."
I continued: "He said, what are you going to do, and I said, well, I need to work another month or two. I had made the statement when I was manic on the night of the 3rd of December that The Post was racist and therefore I was resigning."
"Did you mean that?"
"I not only didn't mean it, it had never entered my thoughts in the previous twenty-two years or twenty-one years, and Ernie certainly had not been approached on it or anybody else in management. And so I thought, still weak that, well, maybe I did resign myself. I later approached Ernie and I said, what am I being terminated for? And he says, the effects of illness."
"I want to go back and talk about the type of treatment you received by the different owners of The Post as a result of your health condition.
"First of all, do you still suffer from manic depressive illness or bipolar disorder?"
"Yes, I do."
"In the twenty-two years that you worked for The Post, how often did you have to be hospitalized because of your manic depressive condition?"
"Eight episodes."
"After your treatment and after you were stabilized during those eight episodes between 1976 and December of 1988, seven episodes—after each of those seven episodes between 1976 and 1988, were you able to go back and do the work that you did before you were hospitalized?"
"Yes, I was."
"Did you know a writer at The Post by the name of DJ. Wilson?"
"Yes, I did."
"What did Mr. Wilson cover?"
"He covered the medical beat."
"Did you ever talk to Mr. Wilson about your condition or your behavior?"
"Yes. I apologized for sending him a crazy message. He said, well, it was no crazier than what others at The Post had sent him."
"Your mental illness began in '76. In that year you got a raise; isn't that correct?"
"Yes."
"So from 1976 when you were first diagnosed as mentally ill to 1989 when you were terminated, you still kept getting raises all this time; is that correct?"
"That is correct."
"Did your salary more than double from 1976 when you were first diagnosed until you were terminated?"
"Yes, it did."
Bounds took over the questioning of me on the stand: "The reason that you were at The Post in the eight hours daily was to edit copy and write headlines and write cutlines for pictures; isn't that correct?"
"Correct."
"So you weren't employed as a column writer or an editorial writer, were you?"
"No."
"If you did that, it was done on your own time; is that correct?"
"Right."
"Your responsibilities as a business wire editor were to sit and review the wire, the stories coming over the various wires; isn't that correct?"
"Right."
"And it was your judgment and decision to choose which of those stories might be of interest or should go in The Post; isn't that correct?"
"Right."
"Have you been hospitalized since this June 1989 episode, when you were terminated?"
"Yes, I have."
"You were in fact hospitalized in October of 1989, were you not?"
Petrou: "Objection, Your Honor. At this point I would like to approach the bench."
"All right."
"Okay, Your Honor. I object on the basis that this is irrelevant. It's going into—"
"Why is it irrelevant?"
"After his termination—I think it's going to be prejudicial."
"This is a continuation of an ongoing condition that started back in 1976. If that's your objection, it's overruled. Let's proceed."
Bounds continues: "Mr. Leatherwood, you were in fact hospitalized in October of 1989 as well, were you not?"
"Yes."
"You were hospitalized again in December of 1991, weren't you?"
"Right."
"And again in May 1992?"
"Right."
"And again in December of 1992?"
"December of '92?"
"Yes, sir."
"I don't think so."
"We'll look at some records. You were again hospitalized from April through June of 1993; isn't that correct?"
"Right."
"And you were hospitalized again in October of 1993, were you not?"
"Right."
"Was the 1988 hospitalization voluntary?"
"No, it wasn't."
"It was an involuntary commitment to the hospital, wasn't it?"
"Right."
"Was that the first time that you've ever been involuntarily committed to the hospital?"
"Yes, it was."
"Do you know when that particular episode began in 1988?"
"I know when there were hints of it, and that was in late September with paranoia."
"So in fact that particular episode began in September and lasted through almost the end of December? Would that be correct?"
"Right."
"And I believe that when you were in the midst of these episodes, your behavior is irrational?"
"Yes."
"Since that episode in 1988, have you been involuntarily committed to the hospital?"
"Yes, several times."
Judge: "We're going to recess for the day."

Journey to the Edge of Texas Chapter 9

Expert Testimony

"WE HAVE A WITNESS," Steve Petrou announced, "that is being called out of order this morning."
"Call the witness," Judge Gibson said.
"We call Kuyk Logan."
Petrou turns to his witness.
"Did you at one time work for The Houston Post?"
"Yes."
"And when did you start at The Post?"
"In July of 1969 and was there until the day it was sold on December 1, 1983."
"And who hired you, Mr. Logan, to work at The Post?"
"The Hobby family."
"What position did you last hold at the paper?"
"In May of 1976,1 was promoted to managing editor, and I stayed as managing editor until I left the paper in December of '83."

Now,   I'D   LIKE  TO  TURN  your attention to the plaintiff in this case, Mr. Carl Leatherwood. Have you come to know Mr. Leatherwood?" "Yes."
"Did you ever supervise Mr. Leatherwood's work?" "Yes. I was in charge of the whole shooting match. Everything. All reporters, all the editors."
"Were you all working pretty closely together in that newsroom?" "Very close."
"If somebody made a big disturbance, would you be able to notice it?" "Yes."
"Can you tell us—describe the performance of Carl Leatherwood as an editor?"
Raymond Kalmans, attorney for the defense, objects to the line of questioning, saying, "The witness testified he left in December of 1983. Mr. Leatherwood was terminated six years later in 1988."
The court: "I understand. The jury can keep that in mind. Proceed with your question."
Petrou continues: "Tell me about the Carl Leatherwood that you knew while you were the supervisor. What kind of a job did he do?"
"Carl was an extremely accurate, thorough, and dependable editor."
"Did he always do his job?"
"Yes."
"From your experience as a newspaper man, which job is under greater deadline pressure, a feature writer or a wire editor?"
"A wire editor. Because a wire editor is responsible for making decisions on the international and world news that goes into the paper, and this is a decision that sometimes is made just right up to deadline time. There's a tremendous amount of tension and pressure."
"While you were managing editor, did you ever switch employees from one position to another position?"
"Oh, yes, yes."
"As a person in the management of The Houston Post under the Hobby family, what was your approach to working with staff members who had health problems?"
"The Hobbys were a benevolent family and if somebody was sick, their main concern was that they get well and get back to work. We had a loose policy of a sick policy. If somebody was sick, they could be off until they got well."
"Did Mrs. Hobby personally approve some of the raises?"
"Every raise."
"Thank you, Mr. Logan," Gibson said. "The witness is excused. You will resume now with Mr. Leatherwood's testimony."

BOUNDS   ADDRESSED   THE   WITNESS. "Didn't you show up at The Post one day with your dog to report to work?"
  "Yes, I did."
"Is spending money a problem?"
"Spending sprees, yes. It is with me and with a lot of manic depressives."
"In fact, each time you have an episode of this manic nature, you spend most, if not all, of your money, don't you?"
"No, ma'am. Not each time."
"How much money did you spend during your manic episode in the fall of 1988?"
"I don't know because I was using credit cards and I had redecorated my living quarters on those credit cards. Several thousand dollars."
"Could you be a little more specific about what exactly you did?"
"Paint, carpet, flooring."
"For your whole apartment?"
"Yeah."
"And you put that all on credit cards?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Leatherwood, I've handed you what's been marked as Exhibit No. 3. Would you read the cover of that and tell the jury what it is that we're going to be looking at?"
"Medical records on Carlton E. Leatherwood, Jr."
"From whom?"
"From Adriana Nuncio, custodian of medical records for Dr. Archie Blackburn."
"Did you resist the constables when they tried to take you to the hospital in 1988?"
"In my home, I resisted. I did not perpetrate violence. I resisted the constables because I didn't think they could come into my private home and get me. My watch has a little piece on it that they can't fix and my hand came up and cut my lip. It's not a head injury. It is a cut lip."
"Okay. I apologize for the confusion. So we're in agreement then that you did offer resistance to the constables."
"To a degree because I had called 911 to ask if they could come into my home and get me, and I was waiting on the results of that call."
"Would you look down on page 77 where it's underlined 'physical examination.' Would you read that paragraph, please?"
"Patient had resisted the constables who brought him to the hospital. He was initially angry and puzzled. He accepted continued use of lithium carbonate, 1200 milligrams per day, as had been his custom over recent months. Court commitment initially recommended on grounds of likelihood of deterioration to dangerousness if not treated."
"Would you now flip to page 57 in that same record?"
"The date of admission is November 16, 1989."
"This was less than a year after the other report. Down under physical exam, would you read those sentences, please?"
"The initial assessment was remarkable only for superficial abrasion on the forehead. Persisting combativeness requiring restraints and limited the extent of the initial assessment."
"Thank you, Mr. Leatherwood.
"These reports from the doctor regarding your admissions in 1988 specifically, then again in 1989, do tend to indicate a tendency towards violence, don't they?"
"I don't read it as perpetration of violence."
Petrou had a final two questions.
"Is allowing you to be a full-time writer part of the accommodations that you are seeking from The Post for your disability?"
"Yes."
"And how would allowing you to be a full-time writer have accommodated your mental condition?"
"It would have been a less stressful position than wire editor, one, because there are not as many deadlines and, two, a change of pace, change from a burnout situation, can be less stressful."
Petrou: "The plaintiff calls Rebecca Bibens. Ms. Bibens, what was your job when you started out at The Post?"
"I was a copy editor, but I have worked in several positions during my eight and a half years at The Post. A lot of the time I was a rim editor, which means you just read the stories and write the headlines. Occasionally I would do a little bit of layout. Sometimes I would be a slot person. That's the person who reads the stories after the rimmers edit the stories. You're checking other people's stuff. Sometimes I would work a little bit in the back shop where they put the pages together and just try to make sure everything fits and looks right.
"Did copy editors sometimes make mistakes?"
"Yes."
"What kind of mistakes would they make?"
"Well, grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes. It's not always that they made mistakes, it's that sometimes they didn't catch the mistakes. That was, you know, our job, but when you read so much, you can always, you know, read over something and miss something."
"Did you sometimes edit business copy?"
"Sometimes, yes."
"And when you edited business copy, did you come to know the plaintiff in this case, Mr. Carl Leatherwood, here?"
"Yes."
"When you edited business copy, about how close were you to Mr. Leatherwood?"
"Well, it varied. Sometimes I would be right next to him, and then sometimes I would be a few people away."
"When you were sitting near Carl, were you able to observe him working?"
"Yes."
"How was his conduct on the job?"
"He was always fine I thought."
"From your observation, was Mr. Leatherwood serious about his work?"
"Yes."
"From your observation, did Mr. Leatherwood meet his deadlines?"
"As far as I know, yes."
"Did Carl Leatherwood seem to care about the quality of his work?"
"Yes."
"Were there occasions when as slot editor you had to review Carl's work?"
"Yes."
"When you reviewed his work, did he make a lot more mistakes than other editors?"
"No, I would not say he made more mistakes than other people."
"Did Carl ever disrupt you from doing your work?"
"No."
"Did he ever cause chaos in the newsroom?"
"Not when I was there, no."
Kalmans came forward for the defense.
"Ms. Bibens, were you working at The Post on the day that Mr. Leatherwood brought his dog up into the newsroom?"
"No."
"And isn't it true that Mr. Leatherwood frequently had—didn't— forgot how to work the computer?"
"I don't know."
"Now, didn't he move around a lot? He wasn't just seated at his desk, was he?"
"You mean like did he get out of his seat a lot?"
"Yes."
"Not that I know of."

THE NEXT WITNESS , who had just rushed into the courtroom wearing a white medical coat, was called. Petrou went to work.
"Good afternoon, Dr. [Robert] Hirschfeld. And what do you do for a living?"
"I am the professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas here in Galveston. It's about a thousand-bed university hospital. In effect, it's the oldest university medical center west of the Mississippi." "And you also teach psychiatry?"
"I teach psychiatry there. I provide psychiatric practice to patients, provide service, and also we train people to become psychiatrists and medical students."
"And how long have you been teaching psychiatry?"
"I would guess twenty years, something like that."
"Do you have an area of specialty in the field of psychiatry?"
"Depression, depressive illnesses, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders."
"Is part of that area manic depressive illness?"
"Well, that's really an old term, manic depressive illness. The more modern term is bipolar illness in which patients have episodes both of highs, which we call mania, and lows, which are episodes of depression."
"Are you on a national committee regarding bipolar disorders?"
"Yes. I've been very concerned about the rights of patients with psychiatric illnesses and have served as a consultant to several organizations that advocate for the rights of patients and destigmatization. One of them is a group called the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association. It's a group of about 35,000 members in the United States, patients and family members of patients, and I'm privileged to serve as the chair of their scientific advisory board."
"Dr. Hirschfeld, can you tell us what is bipolar disorder or what used to be called manic depressive illness?"
"Certainly. It is a medical illness in which people have episodes of highs, that is, where they often feel on top of the world. They feel that there's nothing that they can't do. Sometimes they think of themselves as being very important. They tend to have a real lot of energy. They have much less need for sleep. A lot of times we sleep less than we would like to, but when people are actually manic, they have less need for sleep. They can sleep only three hours a night. They just have a real lot of energy.
"And they often do things that later turn out to be very embarrassing or devastating to themselves and their family. They spend a lot of money. They may go out and be very promiscuous when they're not at all promiscuous kind of people. They may do things that are very risky. They certainly may go out and abuse substances, drink too much, and things like that. So that's what happens when they get high.
"Then they're completely opposite with the lows or the depressions in which they feel like they're at the bottom of the barrel. They feel that they're just as low as they can be. They feel terrible. Their self-esteem is poor. They have no energy instead of having all this energy. They can't concentrate. They lose their appetite. They lose their interest in things. And it's really striking to see the difference.
"And that's very different from the kind of experience that most of us have when we're disappointed. And we've all had times when something hasn't worked out for us or we've lost our job or a love relationship hasn't worked out, when we feel pretty badly for a few days. But this is unremitting and you just can't move and some people who are very severely depressed don't even get out of bed. They just don't have the energy to do that.
"Are there some patients who are more manic than they are depressed?"
"Almost all combinations that you can imagine."
"And when these people act in this embarrassing manner that you describe, do they know at the time what they're doing?"
"They usually don't and one of the problems that we have as clinicians is to try to catch the episode early to get the patient's cooperation. Because usually when they get it full blown, the patient has no realization that they're doing something wrong or wild or reckless and are not cooperative."
"Can employers be involved?"
"One of the things I try to do when I work with a patient with bipolar illness is to get as many people involved as possible."
"You mentioned spending sprees. Tell us a little more about that. Why do some people who are in mania go into these spending sprees?"
"It's part of the illness. They just think that there's nothing they can't do and nothing that they can't have and so they will buy expensive cars, they will buy jewelry, they will take airplane trips around the world. I mean, it can sound very entertaining and sometimes even can be funny until it all comes—you end up having to pay the piper, and people's life savings have been squandered in a week.
"It can happen that quick?"
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes."
"When people are in mania, they sometimes do lose touch with reality; isn't that true?"
Kalmans: "Objection, Your Honor. He's leading."
Petrou: "Your Honor, what's your ruling?"
The court: "What's your question?"
Petrou: "Do some people lose touch with reality?"
The court: "Overrule the objection. This is an expert."
Petrou: "Yes, go ahead, Dr. Hirschfeld."
"In the more severe forms of bipolar illness, people can become what we call psychotic, which means they do lose touch with reality and they may hallucinate or see things that aren't there, hear voices, believe things that are clearly not true. Not everybody who has bipolar will do that."
"Do some manic patients become irritable?"
"Irritability is very characteristic. And often if someone who is manic is frustrated, if you tell him or her they can't do this or that, they will become frustrated and very irritable and may become quite combative."
"Do some of the people who have mania become disabled from working for periods of time?"
"Bipolar illness tends to be episodic, and people can function at very normal—many people can function at very normal levels between episodes. There are some people who become chronically ill or
chronically depressed and can't work at all, but a significant portion of people do very well, especially if they're maintained on maintenance medication between episodes.
"I forgot to ask you at the very beginning when you were introducing this kind of mental illness about how many people in the United States suffer from this general illness that was called mania or depression?"
"One percent of the population has bipolar disorder, or in the range of 2 million people."
"How can this illness be controlled?"
"Well, the wonder drug is lithium carbonate. There have in the last ten years now been a number of other medications that are also very useful in the treatment of bipolar illness.
"When patients with bipolar illness get depressed, there are a number of antidepressive medications such as Prozac, which has received a lot of press. Also it's very important for patients with bipolar illness to get psychotherapy and psychological management, because as you can imagine, the kinds of things that occur when they're manic really need—can have devastating effects on families, relationships, and jobs. So dealing with that in psychotherapy is very important."
"Okay. Are there times when people with bipolar disease become disabled despite taking medication?"
"There are people who do not respond to one treatment and they may respond to another treatment and they may end up not responding to any treatment."
"Can workers who are disabled by bipolar illness or disorder be stabilized and return to their jobs?"
"Often they can. There are certainly people who are unable to work or are completely disabled. Between 80 and 90 percent of the people can do very well. It's that last 10 to 20 percent where the variability is—and this is quite rough, but I would expect that perhaps 5 percent of patients with bipolar illness would be completely disabled. But I would say the majority of the patients can lead productive and satisfying lives.
"I want to read to you a quote by Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch artist, and tell me what it means in today's terms."
Kalmans: "Objection, Your Honor. This doesn't have any bearing on this case."
The court: "Can you come up here? Can't you just ask him questions that go to his expertise? We don't have to worry about quoting van Gogh."
Petrou changed tack:
"How do you compare someone who has mental illness such as
bipolar disease with someone who has a physical illness such as heart disease?"
"I don't make the distinction. Both types of illnesses have genetic aspects, biological aspects, psychological aspects, and behavioral aspects."
Kalmans: "Your Honor, we would object to the narrative. There's no pending question at this time."
The court: "Overrule the objection. Proceed."
"Please go on with your explanation," Petrou said.
"For example, with hypertension, high blood pressure, you can reduce your blood pressure by behavioral ways, changing life-style. So no one would say that hypertension is not a physical illness and that you can do a lot to treat it in a psychological way."
"Can people who have bipolar disease be accommodated in similar ways that people who have these other physical diseases such as heart conditions?"
Kalmans: "Your Honor, we would object. There's no evidence that this doctor has any knowledge of this particular work place environment, and we would object to this question."
The court: "Overrule the objection."
"The question was: Can people who have bipolar disease be accommodated perhaps like people who have other physical diseases?"
"Well, my understanding is that this currently is something that would be covered in the Americans With Disabilities Act. Now, maybe that's not specifically answering the question that you asked, but certainly people with psychiatric illnesses including bipolar illness can be very productive and can perform responsible jobs."
"Dr. Hirschfeld, can the termination of employment cause the condition of a person with bipolar disorder to deteriorate?"
"Sure. Any very significant distressing event can have a negative affect on any health condition, certainly including a psychiatric one."
"Do you have an opinion as to what employees can do to help people with bipolar disorder lead a productive life?"
I think that it's important to treat people with any illness as normally as possible, but to be sensitive, with someone who has bipolar illness, to the early signs of an impending episode and to try to warn the person, the family, and perhaps the employer as things begin to deteriorate. I think that's how you would be most helpful.
Petrou: "I appreciate your answers, Doctor. I have no further questions."