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BELFAST – Belfast lawyer Roger Blake has been practicing law in the courtrooms of Waldo County for nearly a half-century and has no intention of taking a breather.
“I enjoy it, and as long as my health holds out I intend to continue practicing,” the 75-year old Blake said recently. “I’m still doing it 8 to 5, five days a week. … I guess I’ll stay in as long as my clients want me. I really enjoy it. It’s stimulating.”
Blake first hung out his shingle in downtown Belfast in 1959, right after graduating from Portland University of Law, the forerunner to the University of Maine School of Law. He is Waldo County’s oldest practicing attorney.
As the dean of the Waldo County Bar, Blake can still be found in his office at the corner of High and Main Streets meeting clients and keeping tabs on the comings and goings in the city’s bustling downtown from his large sidewalk-level office window. He found a home in Belfast 45 years ago, and is thankful for that every day.
Blake was raised in Brownfield on the New Hampshire border. He left home after high school and headed to California to see the West. It wasn’t long before his draft board caught up with him and soon had him marching to the beat of a different drummer – the U.S. Army.
“I was in the islands,” Blake said as he recalled his years in service with chuckle. “Manhattan Island, Staten Island and Long Island. It wasn’t bad duty.”
After attending the University of Maine and law school, Blake checked his future prospects in a number of Maine communities before settling in Belfast. He said his love of hunting, fishing and Moosehead Lake initially pointed him toward Dover-Foxcroft, but when he learned a friend from law school had opened a practice there, he realized that two young lawyers in a small town was one too many.
Besides, he said, “The local lawyers in Belfast were most encouraging. They said, ‘We need you here, come and set up shop,’ and that’s exactly what I did. And I never regretted a minute of it.”
Blake was the youngster in a city with six established lawyers at the time. He said the city’s veteran attorneys took him under their wing and were very supportive. He described the late Clyde Chapman as “my mentor in part” and also spoke fondly of Lorimer Eaton, Gridley Tarbell and Richard Glass as others who helped him along the way.
“It was just as if they knew I was coming and they had agreed to welcome me with open arms,” he said. “I got the warmest welcome in Belfast.”
Besides assisting the new man in town, the established lawyers also urged him to run for county attorney, the precursor to today’s district attorney.
“Nobody else wanted it and the local bar insisted I take [it],” he recalled with a laugh.
Blake served four years in the post and was prosecutor of one of the most notorious murder cases in Belfast’s history.
On Sunday afternoon Jan. 16, 1965, a local 32-year old ruffian named Augustus “Gus” Heald was seen running from a Court Street apartment house moments after gunshots echoed though the neighborhood. When police investigated the commotion, they discovered Mariba Beard, 40, of Belfast suffocated in a bathtub and her sister, Edna Hamilton, 48, of Searsport, shot to death in the building’s dooryard.
Hamilton had discovered her sister’s body and was seen by witnesses as she ran from the house screaming “Oh, my God, he shot me. He’s killed May and she’s all stove to pieces up in the bathroom.” Two neighbors heard the shots and observed Heald, with gun in hand, running from the scene.
The killings rocked the state. Heald was arrested and charged with Hamilton’s murder. The autopsy of Beard’s death was inconclusive and no charges were filed. When the case went to trial that June, an all-male jury deliberated for seven hours before finding Heald guilty of a lesser charge of manslaughter.
“We had him for murder and he got manslaughter,” Blake said, shaking his head at the thought. “We had eyewitnesses.”
Blake returned to private practice a year later. He said he never regretted his days as a prosecutor but determined it was time to move on. He admitted, however, that taking up the case of lawbreakers was not his cup of tea. He focused on real estate matters and domestic situations and left the bad guys to others.
“I found I wasn’t very well-suited to serving the criminal defendant,” he said.
Blake has seen a lot of changes in the past 45 years, the most prominent being the greater availability of discovery (the pre-trial disclosure of facts by both parties in a case), the adoption of Alternative Dispute Resolution (mediation) requirements and the advent of the female attorney.
“When I started, there was not much in the way of discovery,” he said. “Many times you would be in court and not know what to expect. Now every case is well-known to both parties. Most disputes arise from poor or incomplete communications and the brand of justice has improved a thousandfold by the discovery process we observe today.”
Mediation and arbitration are required under today’s rules and have eliminated the need to take a dispute to court in many cases. Not only have the changes helped to streamline the process, they also have reduced the rancor, he said.
“Litigation should be really a last resort and only in the event mediation and arbitration fail,” he said. “Let’s face it, most disputes are not black and white. Litigation is win or lose; mediation treats the area of grays as well.”
As for the arrival on the scene of women lawyers, Blake said it was long overdue and had brought a refreshing change to the legal profession. He said his first encounter with a female attorney was at a bar association meeting in 1960 when the chairman of the event rose and said, “Gentlemen, watch your language because there’s a lady in the house today.”
Blake said he attends bar meetings now and finds that more than half the members are female. The same is true at law schools.
“I think it’s just great,” said Blake. “The law is the law, but women approach it in many cases more emotionally than do men and the law has a lot of emotion, especially when there are issues dealing with [the] interests of children. With men, sometimes a case develops into a personal feud between attorneys. Women do well in litigation. They handle case management better than men and I don’t think we should be surprised by that. They can keep a dispute in perspective.”
Throughout the 1960s, Blake maintained an individual practice. In 1971 he took on Paul Hazzard as a partner, and the offices of Blake and Hazzard have been a fixture in the downtown ever since.
Blake said he never grew up wanting to be a lawyer. None of his relatives were in the profession. He said he tried teaching high school after college but decided it was not what he wanted to do. He said he took a couple of aptitude tests, and it was suggested then that he consider trying the law.
“I pursued the law because I hadn’t found anything else to fulfill me. Quite truly I couldn’t have found a better profession if I looked for a century. Really, I can’t think of any other profession I’d rather be in,” said Blake. “I’m a small-town lawyer. People in small towns will always have problems, and with the complex society we live in, there is more and more need for people to go into my profession. I think it’s a great profession for a young man or lady to go into.”
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