Remembering Jim Bell

“A woman’s hair is her crowning glory,” my late partner Jim Bell told me once. I forget how the subject came up, but Jim was quite an admirer of women. I got to know him fairly well between 1977 and his death in 1988, when we both practiced in the same south-central Pennsylvania law firm. In the old-fashioned sense of courtliness, chivalry and manners, he may well be one of the few true gentlemen I’ve ever known. Jim himself had a pretty good head of hair on him. By the time I knew him, it had gone mostly gray, but, by George, there was plenty of it. He had one of those pencil-line moustaches, too – the kind that the cinematic leading men of the Thirties and the villains of the Forties always wore. If he wanted to, he could look quite evil at times, which only goes to show you that things are not always what they seem. Vincent Price comes to mind. Jim made a nice living dealing in arcane matters of estates, trusts, taxes and all that stuff that requires you to parse sentences at least 3,500 words long. He’d roll into the office at a gentlemanly hour of 10:30 or 11:00 and take up station in front of his daily pile of paperwork. Sherry, his secretary, knew the drill: she’d bring him his lunch promptly at noon – six Ritz crackers with peanut butter and a cup of hot tea – and he’d do his voodoo until six o’clock. Polio had cut Jim’s legs out from under him when he was eighteen, a Wesleyan College athlete with the world spread out before him. He and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both sought healing at Warm Springs, Georgia; I believe they actually met there once – maybe more than once. For Jim and for FDR, polio meant life in a wheelchair, wearing leg braces and relying on the kindness of others to help make his way in the world. In that wheelchair, Jim went through Yale Law School, passed the Bar and came home to practice his chosen profession. I spent several years wheeling Jim at the end of the day from the office out to his car – always an Oldsmobile Toronado – and getting him seated at the hand controls, while little old Danny Kehoe, the strong-smelling local Colorful Leprechaun, stowed the wheelchair in the trunk. Jim had some pretty hairy (mis)adventures in those Toronados of his. Take, for example, the winter night when he skidded on a patch of ice on a dark stretch of road on his way home from the office. The car went up an embankment, flipped completely over and landed on all four wheels. The engine was running, the headlights were on, and Jim was still securely strapped in place. Just one little problem: the windshield had popped out. Well, home wasn’t all that far from there, so he just drove on, pulled into his garage, and announced his arrival as usual, but perhaps through chattering teeth. There are other stories in the same vein, one involving an unfortunate collision with an elderly pedestrian who shortly afterward died as a result; but suffice it to say he himself survived his driving years. What got him in the end was something else altogether, and he was too young when it happened. But I digress. As I was saying, Jim was an inveterate admirer of women. According to the legend as it was passed down to me, when it appeared he’d be unable to sire an heir of his own body, he and his wife adopted a son. I must tell you that Mrs. Bell is the distaff version of Jim, an elegant lady, a worthy consort and helpmate to her husband while he was alive. One year later, she gave birth to a baby boy. Needless to say, Jim received a bit of good-natured heckling from his colleagues. “A dead bird never fell out of its cage,” was his only rejoinder.