Illness Forces Attorney, 83, to Bid Farewell to Courts

His gait has slowed over the years but his mind remains keen. Nonetheless, Harrison Dunham is changing his status from oldest practicing attorney in Ventura County to its newest retiree.

Illness has forced the 83-year-old Ventura resident to abandon the courtroom, where he has spent more than half a century representing people accused of crimes.

Informed a few weeks ago that he has terminal cancer, Dunham realized that his career had come to a sudden end.

“This came as such a shock to me because I didn’t know I had any problem,” he said in a telephone interview from his home.

Dunham has been a fixture in Ventura County courtrooms for 28 years, recruited here from Los Angeles County to help train deputy public defenders. When he retired from the county at age 70, he helped found Conflict Defense Associates, a group of private attorneys who represent indigent criminal defendants when the public defender’s office cannot.

In recent years his courtroom work has been confined to brief matters such as bail reviews and arraignments. He is, however, a veteran of more than 40 murder trials, including 14 death penalty cases.

CDA head James M. Farley, who was trained by Dunham years ago and later became his boss, said working with the man “is like having a mountain of wisdom and a sense of goodness around.”

“He taught me more in a couple of months than law school ever thought of,” Farley said. “I love the man dearly.”

Dunham is quick to point out that his life has consisted of much more than law.

After graduating near the top of his class at Harvard Law School 59 years ago, Dunham was being groomed for a career in politics when his mentor, a senator from New Mexico, died in a plane crash.

Dunham turned to law after that and represented a former Chicago mobster who had built a modern cannery near Fresno. The client promised to give Dunham the cannery if the attorney could get him out of jail, and when Dunham delivered so did the former mobster.

Dunham made a fortune running the cannery during World War II, when the government couldn’t get enough canned goods to feed the troops fighting in Europe. The business was expanded to include frozen foods but went bust when the government took over all frozen-food storage facilities in the West to provide for troops in the Pacific.

Rich no more, Dunham went back to Los Angeles and became corporate counsel for The Times. In 1950, when The Times opened Los Angeles’ second television station, KTTV, Dunham was named general manager.

When the station was sold a few years later, Dunham returned to the practice of law and never left it.

“I’ve had a wonderful life--I’ve done all kinds of things,” Dunham said. “It was the most interesting life anybody could have ever had.”

In honor of his career, a round-table roast will be held for Dunham from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday at the El Torito restaurant on Seaward Avenue in Ventura. The cost is $5.

No reservation is necessary.