Rights of Way : Ron Talmo’s Trips Show Him the Land of the Law

The Declaration of Independence gets all the attention. When its bicentennial came up, they threw parties all over the country and broadcast a “Bicentennial Minute” every night on TV.

Now it’s the Bill of Rights’ bicentennial year, and how much have you heard about that?

But in Orange County there is at least one eccentric monument to the Bill of Rights: the RV parked behind Ron Talmo’s house.

It has carried him coast to coast, seeking out places that have provoked some of the most important U.S. Supreme Court cases in our history. These places may be as grand as a university or as lowly as a porno bookshop, but they are Talmo’s Jerusalem, Mecca and Rome.

For constitutional law is Talmo’s profession, avocation and recreation. He practices it, privately now, but for many years as legal defense director for the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He teaches it at Western State University College of Law, which recently appointed him acting dean of its new Irvine campus. And he loves just talking about it and showing his snapshots of trips to odd and surprising places inspired by Supreme Court records.

“This,” he said, turning to a snapshot of a somewhat shabby coffee shop in Birmingham, Ala., “this is Ollie’s Barbecue. In the ‘60s, the blacks were allowed to eat at a takeout window but not inside. So there was a lawsuit, and (the blacks) won; it was a great civil rights victory (Katzenbach v. McClung, 1964).

“I went there and ate lunch. This is more than 20 years later, but everybody who worked at the place was black, and everybody who ate at the place was white. So this great civil rights victory meant nothing to this restaurant, but nationwide, this is the case that upheld the federal power to reach these private acts of segregation. It’s a huge federal-power case, maybe our biggest.

“And, oh God, was the food good. And you know what?” he said, grinning broadly. “It was real yuppie too. Young, clean-cut, conservative, lots of suspenders.” He chuckles at the irony.

To Talmo, 40 and “unashamedly liberal,” this was a well-spent vacation, but he admits it’s difficult to explain why. You have to understand his passion for constitutional law--”con law,” as he calls it.

“I knew in law school that I was going to do con law,” he said. “I studied to be a Catholic priest my first two years in college, but once I decided not to be a priest, it seemed to me the obvious thing to do with the beliefs I had was to become an attorney. My interest was academic, but my background was wanting to do things for other people.

“That’s the grandiose, philosophical reason. The more practical reason is, con law cases are exciting. You’re the only one in the courthouse with a case like that. There are 9,000 lawyers here in Orange County, but there can’t be more than 10 of us doing civil rights work. So you’re able to set yourself aside from even the rest of the lawyers.”

In May, 1985, Talmo, the con-law lawyer, and his wife found themselves in Upstate New York on a two-week vacation whose purpose was to hit as many racetracks and casinos as possible.

Waiting for the first race at the Finger Lakes Race Track, Talmo spotted an elegant old courthouse in the town, Canandaigua, N.Y., and popped in for a look. “It had pictures of these people all over the walls, all these justices and statesmen and all that, and one of them was a woman.”

It turned out to be Susan B. Anthony, the women’s suffrage leader, who had been convicted there for registering to vote. “That was the courtroom where she was actually tried!” Talmo said. “Well, I was jazzed about the whole idea. This maintenance worker said, ‘If you’re interested, the transcripts of the trial are at the local historical society two blocks away.’ ” They were so engrossing that Talmo missed the first race.

“She was convicted, but she wasn’t imprisoned or fined. If you weren’t imprisoned or fined, you couldn’t appeal. A newspaper at the time reported that the judge did not fine her because he didn’t want his decision reviewed.”

On the way home, an idea hatched. “There must be hundreds of the places in the United States that are historically important for legal reasons that people walk by every single day and just don’t know about,” he said. “Since I taught constitutional law, it went from there.”

So in 1986, Talmo scanned Supreme Court records for significant places, bought a 23-foot motor home and hit the road in May for five weeks.

He turns to a snapshot of himself in Memphis, Tenn., standing by a street sign reading North Drive. The street is all-white on one block, all black on the next, and the whites had persuaded the city to erect a barricade at the dividing line. To Talmo’s surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the action (Memphis v. Greene, 1981).

“Prior to seeing this place, I’d always taught it as the place where a huge barricade separated this white neighborhood from this black neighborhood. I always taught that there must have been a damned good lawyer who argued this case and convinced that federal judge that these two neighborhoods should be separated.

“Well, in reality,” he said, beginning to chuckle, “all they did is put in a 3 1/2-inch curb, and you can still drive an emergency vehicle over it, probably at full speed. One is an obviously upper-middle class neighborhood, and the other is obviously upper-low class. They were distinct neighborhoods, and the street had no business going through in the first place. It didn’t take much to win this case.”

In Jackson, Miss., the opposite was true, he said. A federal judge had ordered the city to desegregate all its municipal facilities, which it did, but with one exception: It closed its municipal swimming pools. The evidence later convinced the Supreme Court that the closure was for economic, not segregation, purposes (Palmer v. Thompson, 1971).

Talmo visited Jackson and found that 23 years after the pools had been closed and filled in, they still were prominent features in their parks.

“In Battlefield Park, Jackson’s main park, they left the original dressing rooms there. ‘No Running’ and ‘No Ducking’ are still painted on them. The pool is filled in with dirt, but the pavement around the pool is still there. You can still see it’s a swimming pool.

At another park, the diving board was taken down and laid on its side by the pool.

“It’s been lying there for more 20 years. It’s pretty obvious why all this has been left as is. It’s a memorial. It says: “This is the place where people went swimming until the federal court ordered desegregation.’ It seems to me the only reason it’s left is as a reminder that blacks don’t swim with whites in Jackson, Miss.

“And what was predicted is exactly what happened. All the private clubs have swimming pools, so in the summer, all the white kids get to swim. And blacks don’t.”

Talmo said his trips have also had an effect on his personal opinions, which he describes as “libertarian on some points, but unashamedly liberal on most.”

“I never thought it was correct for Jerry Falwell to use his power as a minister to achieve his right-wing, Moral Majority goals. However, when I went to all these places where all the desegregation cases happened in the South, there’s always a black church there. And the meetings to rally the plaintiffs and get financial support, all of those meetings happened at those churches.

“So the point is, because I disagreed with the content of what Falwell was saying, I never thought it was right to use his followers in that way. Yet the whole history of the civil rights movement in the U.S.A. is the Southern church. So it changed my views about Falwell’s use of the church, or about any of these ministers using the church.” Talmo’s journeys in his legalmobile spanned three springs, 1986, ’87 and ‘88, and are not likely to continue, he says. His new job as dean cut deeply into his traveling time. The legalmobile is up for sale. He now plans to travel to places closer to home.

“U.S. Supreme Court cases are a big part of U.S. history--and the lawyers who participate in them. But we don’t view them historically. We view their impact, but we don’t view the event as historical.”

The best example of that, he said, is the first site he visited--Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., where in 1957 President Eisenhower called out troops to force integration. The Supreme Court had previously ordered school desegregation, but the governor of Arkansas was claiming that his state was exempt.

The ensuing Supreme Court decision “was the only case separately hand-signed by all nine justices (Cooper v. Aaron, 1958). What the case actually says is, when the U.S. Supreme Court makes a decision on constitutional law, the decision itself becomes part of the U.S. Constitution. And that’s pretty heavy.

“Those lawyers aren’t going to be around much longer. Thurgood Marshall was one of them, for example. The school board lawyer’s file is stored at Bekins. I think it’s Smithsonian quality, and it’s at Bekins. It is every bit Americana as anything else in the Smithsonian.

“Stuff like that, it’s important,” he said. “I think it should be saved.”