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The Great Paper Chase

Straight From The Hart
By Joan Rowden Hart

The Paper Chase

How many of you remember The Paper Chase? No, I’m not talking about
the Oscar award winning 1973 movie starring Timothy Bottoms as a law
school student named James T. Hart. I’m talking about a paper chase
down Commercial Street in Lebanon about ten years earlier than that
featuring a lawyer who had a  secretary named Joan Hart.

It was a sunny Saturday morning in late spring when my boss, John F.
Low, opened the large windows in his second floor law office above
Dryer’s Shoe Store, to bring some fresh air into the office.

The windows were on hinges and swung outward and as such were not
equipped with screens. Directly below the waist high windows on the
inside of his office was a large ledge about 18 inches deep which
served as Mr. Low’s temporary storage for current cases consisting of
large legal size filing folders stuffed full of legal documents and
sheets torn from yellow legal pads with his unique and barely legible
handwriting.

You are probably getting ahead of me here and if so, you are right.
All it took was just one inadvertent push against one of those stacks,
and they all started tumbling down to the sidewalk below, loose papers
floating through the air, landing on the heads of unsuspecting Satuday
morning walkers and talkers visiting on the sidewalk below.

In those days everybody came to town on Saturday morning, not just to
shop but to catch up on gossip with family and friends, some standing
in front of the stores, some leaning against the parking meters, some
just people-watching from their cars if they were fortunate enough to
get a prized parking space in the middle block of Commercial between
Jefferson and Madison, where the “dime stores” like Mattingly’s, and
the aforementioned shoe store, and Bond Drug, and First National Bank,
all vied for the business of Saturday morning farmers and other people
who had to work through the week.

Mr. Low sent me down the stairs as fast as I could go where I had to
run up and down the sidewalk on both sides of the street, trying to
rescue as many of the papers as I could, while dodging the bumper to
bumper traffic on Commercial. Everybody out on the street instantly
became gawkers, or “rubber-necks” as we call them in the Ozarks,
trying to figure out what I was doing, running around in those high
heels I always wore back then, and where all the paper was coming
from.

I had lots of helpers immediately, kind people chasing and catching
papers and bringing them to me one by one. Can you imagine the
nightmare this would be in these days of privacy laws and regulations?

When I finally thought we had found and captured all we were going to
be able to find, I looked up and saw several file folders still on the
awning over the shoe store, with loose papers fanning out from them.

Mr. Low called down from the window and told me to run (and I knew he
meant literally) down to Palmer’s Furniture store to see if they could
give me one of the long rods they used to hold rolls of carpeting so
he could lean out the windows and push the file folders and stacks of
paper from off the awning down onto the sidewalk below. He couldn’t
reach them from the window without the rod and I certainly could not
reach them from the sidewalk.

And the sequel to the original Paper Chase began immediately as we
tried to gather up the last of the files and their fluttery windblown
contents.

I don’t remember how long it took me and all the Commercial Street
shoppers to gather everything up that we could find, but I remember
how tired I was afterward and so very glad I only had to work half a
day on Saturdays.

And I remember all the filing I had to do for weeks afterward, getting
paperwork together, finding missing pages, stapling them in order
and finally replacing them in the correct folder. Then I had to go
back through my shorthand notebooks to find letters we were still
missing and not on file at the courthouse and retype them for the
files.

Younger legal secretaries today could not begin to comprehend that
what we had in hand as “hard copies”, as we call them today, was all
we had. Old manual typewriters did not keep information on a disc or
a hard storage drive. The only storage we had other than paper files
was what Mr. Low and I had in our heads. Fortunately, my brain worked
uch better and faster in those days than it does now and he was one
of the most intelligent men I ever knew, so I guess between the two of
us we salvaged enough to keep his business going for another 20 years
or more.

I’ve never forgotten that Saturday, and I would love to hear from
anyone who worked on that block or who was shopping or driving
downtown that day and remembers the Great Commercial Street Paper
Chase.

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