As Charles Sylvanus Rhyne, at 45 the youngest president in the 80-year history of the A.B.A., talks about Law Day, he loses the leisurely North Carolina cadence of his speech; his brown eyes glint behind plastic-rimmed glasses; he clenches his fist, and his knuckles turn white. Law Day is, essentially, the expression of his feeling for the law. And the law has all the deeper meaning to Lawyer Rhyne because he became a man of law the hard way.
Charlie Rhyne was born on a cotton farm in rolling Mecklenburg County, a few miles from Charlotte, son of "the most wonderful mother and father any child ever had." In the rare moments of relaxation allowed him by his breakneck schedule, he contentedly remembers his three-mile walk along dirt roads to the school where Miss Dewell Marshall taught eleven grades in one room; he remembers falling asleep during the hour-long Presbyterian sermons of Preacher Greer and Preacher Walker; he remembers the fish fries on the Catawba River and the swimming hole at Uncle Henry Rhyne's. He remembers, too, the time he played hooky with a pal named Mel McQuarry. When Charlie got home, his father was waiting with a razor strop. Next morning at school, the teacher started to give him a thrashing. Says Rhyne: "I argued as hard as I could that she shouldn't lick me because I'd already got my beating. I offered to pull down my pants to prove it, and she let me off. It was my first double jeopardy case."
Hard Cash. Charlie Rhyne's first view of the law in action came when he was eleven or twelve. "A man who was a member of one of the big families of the county had his throat slit from ear to ear by his wife, an outsider," says Rhyne. "The feeling in the community against the girl was extremely adverse. The attorney who defended her was an old string-tie lawyer named C. W. Tillett. I begged my father into letting me go to the trial one day. Tillett engaged in flamboyant arguments, told the jury how it was self-defense, and the girl was freed. The fact that this girl got justice in a place where people didn't like her made a tremendous impression on me."
Rhyne's chances of following after Lawyer Tillett were dim indeed: his family simply did not have enough money to send him to college. After his farm years of milking, plowing, picking cotton, bushy-haired Charlie Rhyne got a city job as a Western Union messenger boy in Charlotte. With $300 in savings in hand, he enrolled at Duke University. He had an early-morning newspaper route; he sold Bibles in West Virginia during the summer, and still ran out of money in his sophomore year and had to quit school. He hitchhiked West, dug storm sewers in Denver, earned some of his hardest-won dollars as a sparring partner in a local gymnasium until he was undone by a middleweight named Gentleman Ham Jenkins. After that he landed a job as a ranch hand in Wyoming's Jackson Hole country.