8AM, St. Louis County Court House.
My black raincoat shed the rain as I ran up four flights of stairs to the Court offices. I was a couple minutes ahead of our scheduled hearing with Judge Hylden. I joined a little knot of LDVers and looked over to see a little knot of School Board members huddled at the end of the hall. Our crowd seemed pretty jovial especially plaintiff Larry Burda. After a few minutes the taxpayer’s attorney Craig Hunter joined us. He apologized to all of us for not checking out the issue of Gary Glass’s also being represented by School District Counsel. No one seemed to be taking it as hard as Mr. Hunter. He spoke briefly with Gary Glass to explain that he would no longer represent him and or offer him advice. Shortly after this our attorney gravitated way from Gary who no longer had legal representation.
A short time later all the attorneys went into the Judge’s chambers. The thick documents presented to him were not the issue that he had anticipated. This morning was to be one in which the topic of discovery was to be worked out. They’ve got ours. We don’t have theirs.
We non lawyers cooled our heels in the hallway for half an hour and then when attorneys came out after their consultation with the Judge told us that we too would be invited in for a discussion with the Judge. When we finally made our way back to his Chambers we made quite a cavalcade. Four School Board members not counting odd man out Gary Glass and his wife Fayth as well as Dan (Robert Sershon) and I representing the five taxpayer plaintiffs. Larry Burda had to leave after an hour in the hallway. I held up the rear and opened doors for the laggards.
Judge Hylden welcomed us cordially and explained that there would be a follow up hearing at 8AM on Tuesday next. In the meantime a stenographer was present to record the closed door meeting. He asked us to introduce ourselves for the record and I then noticed that I’d left my notepad in the hallway and would be unable to take notes.
Note: I wrote this earlier today and had plans to make it part of a string of similarly titled posts. I’m revisiting his 15 hours later with a fuzzier recollection of our meeting than I’d like. If you read ahead however you will see a few things stuck in my head. Keep reading and you will bump into them.
