A Tribute to William S. Geimer

A Tribute to William S. Geimer Meredith Susan Palmer* * Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Admissions, Washington and Lee University School of Law, J.D., 1985, Washington and Lee University. Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.1 Bill Geimer is not a man of material things. But somehow, in the material things that he chose to have around him - the mementos, the odd souvenirs, the offerings from students, clients, friends - I find the story of the man, the teacher, and the lawyer Bill Geimer is to me. In my mind's eye, I see Bill's office here at Washington and Lee as I first saw it, as a hesitant first-year law student approaching the sanctum sanctorum of a faculty member. There is a desktop name plate, regular Army issue, decorated with grenades or something equally militaristic and intimidating. But next to that is a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, with his stirring words evoking hope for justice and freedom on earth. And next to that, a membership certificate for the Lawyer's Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, and a drawing of Quijote, lance raised to a windmill. How could this be? While reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable is the everyday task of the law student, no trick of logic could make these disparate pieces fit; one simply had to get to know the man. That one could do so as a law student is itself part of what defines Bill Geimer. The student who came to know Bill heard a story of a kid from the rural south, off to a small state university to play basketball but who, like countless kids before him, spent a bit more time playing than studying. Come Graduation Day, with no game plan, he joined Uncle Sam's family. A grounding in tanks, guns, and tactics preceded duty with the military police, but something else happened during those years. Assigned to assist with an investigation, he finds an aptitude for the law, an appreciation of justice, and a burning sense of the unfairness of justice denied. The young man who returned from service to go on to a distinguished career as a law student at the University of North Carolina was a man with a game plan, and a mission. It was no surprise that Bill's mission as a lawyer was not in the office towers of Atlanta or the corporate boardrooms of Wall Street, but among the plain folks of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and later in the community of migrant farm labor working and living hard under the hot Carolina sun. I see another memento, this time in Bill's home. It's an odd piece of, well, let's call it folk art. Crudely carved, frankly ugly. Taste is a delicate thing, so one observes diplomatically that it is an "interesting" object. There's a story, of course, a story of a client for whom Bill had worked, putting together the paperwork to get a fledgling arts-and-crafts shop off the ground. This client, like many Bill served, claimed not to have the cash to pay. But, the client said, he could give Bill this valuable piece of work. Barter being a fundamentally more honest exchange and thus appealing to Bill, the transaction was concluded. Not until Bill brought his sculpture home did he discover the price tag stuck to the underside, for something substantially less than the agreed-upon fee. He kept the awkward thing, price tag intact, I think as a reminder of his own fallibility, of the ingenuity of the ordinary man, and of the need to forget neither. Another memento, in some ways the most important to this former student, is a large, faded, well-handled poster on the professor's office door. A young man in Carolina Blue goes up for a shot, stretching for the basket, with seconds left on the clock. Anyone who knows Bill Geimer knows that he is devoted to Carolina basketball. In fact, Bill may have spent so much time watching the Tar Heels play that he began to confuse teaching with coaching. As a former student of Bill's, I'm not sure that was a bad thing.

Abstracts from the NIHR INVOLVE Conference 2017

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