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Health & Fitness

It's Never Been the Straight and Narrow

 I’ve been circulating my stories around for the past three years or so.  I just sort of spin them off as they come to me.  People ask me when did this one happen and when did that one  happen and often I’m not really sure.  So, this blog post is basically a little autobiography to attempt to at least get things into the right order.  This is sort of the Christmas tree time line you can hang the other stories from.  It helped me sort things out, maybe it will be of help to you.  

Thanks, `Ed

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In 1969, the State of California passed the Family Law Act which adopted the first “no-fault” divorce type proceedings in the U.S. During those days, I had gotten involved with the Legal Aid office in Santa Cruz County and they were trying to set up some method of dealing with the high number of no-fault divorces that they were required to process. While I had no formal computer training, I had been dabbling with electronics and computers for many years already. I saw how Legal Aid’s problem with the divorce paperwork might be resolved using a new mini-computer that IBM had just released, the System III. I developed the project to the point where the umbrella federal Legal Aid agency that funded the Santa Cruz office, saw the potential to take my system state-wide. They got me a grant to fund a limited, test operation in the Bay Area to determine the feasibility of a state-wide system for this no-fault divorce document production and case management operation.

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This was the very first attempt to computerize any legal procedure that anyone, at that time, knew of. Computers might be found in large law firm’s bookkeeping applications, but the use of computers in actual case-law was still in the twilight zone. If this would work, anyone associated with it would have a huge, great big feather in their cap.

I was fresh off the farms, having spent barely a couple of years in hip world of the Santa Cruz Mountains when I came up with this idea for Santa Cruz Legal Aid. I was 21 years old.

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After about six months of promoting and politicking, this proposal for state-wide divorce processing got funded. One of the basic requirements of the proposal was that the development of my system was that it take place under the watchful eye of the Regional Office of Federal Legal Services to make sure the project was properly managed (by me, a neophyte in such matters) and stayed on track. A Legal Services office in San Francisco was chosen as the home for the project which was only a city block from the Regional Office. In other words, I had to move to the big city, San Francisco, if I was to put my project together. Such a move was diametrically opposed to my background, my goals and my facilities. I’m a mountain guy. When the TV cameras pan around the huge sports stadiums, all I can think is that I don’t even like being in towns that hold that many people, let alone a single building.

I was working in SF when they were building TransAmerica

For a variety of reasons, practical and political, my project’s grant was to be administered by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), headquartered adjacent to the San Francisco Civic Center. CRLA was a hot bed of controversy, a federally funded legal office supporting left leaning political and social efforts. It was the law office that supported . . .

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