February 2010
Judge of Character
By Steve Lange
His pencil drawings—mostly Civil War-era figures or Minnesota sports scenes—have been sold as magazine covers and commemorative posters.
He’ll probably be singing in another musical this summer. He’s working on a book (and maybe a play) about the “Chatfield boys” who fought in the Dakota and Civil Wars.
Oh, and he’s also an Olmsted County district court judge.
It’s a sunny 60-degree November Sunday—just a few hours before Favre’s rematch against the Pack—and 53-year-old Joe Chase, wearing a Vikings T-shirt (born and bred in Minnesota) under a Notre Dame windbreaker (schooled at South Bend), is puzzle fitting chunks of limestone into a wall in front of his Chatfield farmhouse.
The hand-stacked and mortarless wall is three feet high (not counting the two feet underground) by three feet wide and 100 feet long. It’s 12 years and anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 stones—it’s one of those things where you could easily be off by a power of ten—in the making.
The stones have been quarried from creek beds on the five-generation family farm and salvaged from the foundation of Joe’s great great granddad’s barn.
In the fenced-in field stand two horses, Memphis, a mare, and Buster, a buckskin gelding. Memphis was named for the Memphis Belle, a World War Two bomber. Buster got his name as a threat.
“Buster’s mom died 12 hours after giving birth,” Joe says. “The vet told Sara and I that if we couldn’t get the animal to eat quickly, it’d give up hope and die.” So they got a giant bottle and mixed up horse formula. Got up every three hours to bottle feed the animal over a number of cold spring nights.
It was during one difficult feeding, on one of those nights where they weren’t sure if the foal would make it, when Sara yelled “Drink this and live, Buster!” The foal lived, and Buster it was.
“I think the wall is going to end right with this stretch,” says Joe, standing in the hand-dug trench of the next section. “Sara doesn’t want me to start another side. She’s not sure her next husband will want to finish it.”
He’s kidding, of course. Joe and his wife, Sara, have been married for 30 years and have two sons—Gabriel Lincoln (22, with the middle name for the president) and Nathaniel Truman (17, with the middle name for the president) and a daughter, Rachel Mariah (19, with the middle name for a grandmother). Sara, from all indications, isn’t going anywhere. And neither is Joe.
“I’m a Chatfield kid,” he says. “Even when I have left for short periods, I always knew this is where I would end up. My life is rooted in these places.”
We’ve just come from one of those places, a walking tour of Potter Auditorium, the 1936 addition to the 1916 Chatfield School, just past the only stoplight in Fillmore County.
“A lot of us grew up on the stage of Potter Auditorium,” says Joe. “We performed high school plays on the stage, we played basketball there.”
Joe returned to the Potter stage in 2004 for a part in a musical—his first on-stage singing in 30 years. For the last two years, he’s directed the annual Chatfield Western Days Musical, produced by the Wits’ End Theatre.
Backers of the auditorium have pushed hard for bonding bill money to restore the classic WPA structure back to a state-of-the-art performance space. When the Minnesota House Bonding Committee visited the auditorium in late 2009, Joe, complete with kilt and Scottish accent, reprised his Andrew McLaren character from the musical Brigadoon.
“It’s a unique place, a historic New Deal-era venue that was itself built by a federal stimulus plan,” says Joe, “and now we’re hoping it can be rebuilt with what you might say is a stimulus plan here in the middle of this recession.”
After wandering the halls of the old elementary school, we ride through Chatfield in Joe’s red 1999 Camaro (possibly the only red Camaro in Fillmore County). We drive past Chatfield City Park (where, in 1861, soldiers from Chatfield Guards had trained for the Civil War—the same group of soldiers that are the subject of a book Joe is working on). We drive up the Old Territorial Road (where those Civil War troops marched out of town in 1861). We drive past St. Mary’s Catholic Church, that same church which, last spring, held the funeral for Joe’s dad Dick—a “farmer, boxer, World War Two vet, county commissioner, rural mail carrier, and great guy who did himself proud to graduate high school, a big deal in the mid-30’s.”
“That was a tough loss,” says Joe. “And Chatfield lost a little of its history, too.”
It’s “Judge Joseph Chase” where you’d see or hear it most, in the P-B or on radio or TV trial stories. But it’s “Joe” to everyone who knows him.
Joe knew he wanted to be a lawyer by eighth grade, discovered he was an artist in college, says that today his eighth grade dream turned out better than he ever could’ve hoped.
”When I was being confirmed—which I suppose was as an eighth grader at St. Mary’s—you take a confirmation name and I took the name Thomas, because of Thomas More, the famous ‘Man for all Seasons’ and Henry VIII’s lawyer,” says Joe, sitting on the sixth floor of the Government Center, in an office decorated with a reproduction Revolutionary War flag and a model of the U.S.S. United States, a 1797 frigate boat Joe built from a kit that was “a long time in the making.” The mandatory framed diplomas and calligraphied certifications—University of Notre Dame (1979), University of Minnesota Law School (1982), Phi Beta Kappa (1979), and others—hang on the walls.
“Thomas More is the patron saint of lawyers,” he says. “So already, by that age, I knew the law might be a good fit for me.”
It was. After graduating from Notre Dame and law school, Joe took one of those fresh-out-of-college jobs with a firm featuring a who’s who of Rochester attorneys—Downing, O’Brien, Ehrick, Wolf, Deaner, and Maus.
During his 17-year stint there, Joe was best known for his years of representing RPU in its service territory battle with People’s Co-op—a case that, by his own admission, “would bore laymen to tears and cause your readers to immediately cancel their subscriptions.”
Regardless, he was appointed to the bench by Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1999.
“This has been an ideal job for me,” he says. “From a fairly early age, I decided that probably my future lay in the use of language.”
And it’s his use of language—and depth of thought and speed of speech—that people talk about when they talk about Joe Chase.
“His mind and his mouth are extremely well coordinated,” says fellow Olmsted District Court Judge Kevin Lund. “It’s a coherent stream of consciousness that I’ve found amazing about him. It’s a gift.”
It’s not stereotypical car salesman speak. It’s not the soliloquy of someone wanting to hear themselves talk. Sure, it’s 250-plus words per minute—auctioneer speed, professional policy debater speed. It was hell-on-stenographers speed, back in the days before court reporters used digital-recording software programs.
But it’s the passion, the depth of thought, and the impression that he’s not preaching at you, but trying to bounce ideas off you. And the feeling that he probably can’t help it.
“I’ve been told as an attorney and a judge from time to time to slow down, and I can do it for about a minute,” Joe says. “But the next thing you know I’m right back to it.”
The only times we can slow him down is when we ask him about, well, himself. If you call him an artist, for example, he’ll say “I’m really a draftsman, and the degree to which I can extemporize is extremely limited.” Even though the pencil drawings you’re looking at are the covers he’s created for Bench & Bar magazine or commissioned, commemorative sports posters.
But get him talking about things he’s passionate about—Abraham Lincoln or the state of the judicial system or being an American—and, oh man.
Here’s an unedited example, straight from the audio tape, from when we asked him about the underfunding of the judicial system in Olmsted County and elsewhere: “Justice delayed is justice denied, and right now justice is being delayed in many of these cases for a year or more. Meanwhile, that case is hanging over their head, and if there’s an alleged victim, it’s hanging over the victim’s head. When we tell them trial dates these days in the courtroom we just see their jaw drop. No one expects to be told that this important thing in their life—either because they’ve been accused of a crime or because a crime has been done to them or so forth—is going to be a year before it reaches trial. It’s kind of scandalous to tell you the truth. We had six judges in Olmsted County in 1989. We have six judges in Olmsted County in 2009.”
That was 131 words. And 26 seconds.
It’s a Thursday morning in Courtroom Four, Judge Joseph Chase presiding. Thursday mornings in Courtroom Four consist of a collection of quick civil matters—name changes and marriage dissolutions, repos and unpaid rent. Landlords sit at the same table with tenants they’re trying to evict. Big-bank creditors call in on speaker phone to ask permission to repo some client’s car.
In between the legal talk and sometime life-changing decisions, Chase talks to plaintiffs and defendants in a conversational style that can catch some courtroom-goers—at least those expecting the gavel-banging judges from TV—offguard.
“I know I surprise some people by making a joke every now and then, or at least making what I think is a joke every now and then,” he says. “I like to put people at ease in what can be an uneasy situation. I like to let people in front of us know it’s important but usually not the end of the world.”
He asks a guy from Beirut about its former status as the “Paris of the East.” Explains to an about-to-be evicted tenant the importance of paying bills on time. Talks the landlord into giving the kid a second chance.
“For a person like me, this is the best job in the world,” he says. “I get to do this work that I love in a place that I love. I get to get up every morning and be a district judge in Olmsted County. For a kid that grew up here, took 4-H animals to the Olmsted County Fair, played football and ran track here, this is my home. I feel humbled and honored every day to be doing this aspect of the people’s work and I take that responsibility seriously and I enjoy it, too.”
Here it is, one last Chase story, unedited and transcribed straight from the tape:
“Every now and then you see something here in the courthouse that makes you go home and say ‘You can’t imagine what happened here today,” Joe says. “I won’t get this story exactly right but it went something like this: There was a lady who was before me on a divorce. She was an immigrant lady and I suspect a Somali lady but I can’t remember that exactly.
“She’s before the court and I’m going through the divorce petition and I see that she has like five kids. Five young kids. The husband is gone, she’s the sole support and I think she’s working at Shopko or something.
“I said to her ‘How are you getting along?’ and she said ‘Well, it’s tough but we get by.’ Here’s a tough lady in difficult circumstances working hard to create the American dream for herself and for her kids and it was just amazing. I think I said ‘You’re making minimum wage? This has got to be extremely difficult.’ And she just said ‘We get by. Thank you, but we get by.’
“There are three ladies waiting for a name change right after that. One was getting her name changed, I don’t know why, getting her maiden name back or something. She and her two witnesses were waiting there.
We did the name change, which takes all of about 30 seconds. But they had sat through this dissolution and they had heard this lady’s story. These ladies said ‘We’d like to go out and get some Christmas gifs for those kids, can you folks get them to her?’ So we say ‘Sure, we’ve got their address, we can do that.’ This happens at about 11 in the morning. They were back at about three in the afternoon with a pile of presents the size of this desk for those kids. And we got in touch with the lady and she came down and picked up the gifts for those kids. It was just the coolest pre-Christmas story you could possibly imagine, and we saw it acted out right here in this courthouse. We see people at their worst, but we see people at their best, too.”
That one’s just under 400 words, and just over a minute and a half.