Up to my ass in lawyers: Aunt Zoe

Zoe S. Wyatt was my mother's mother's sister, but she was known to me simply as Aunt Zoe. Great Aunt Zoe was a self-contained woman who passed in 1982 at the age of 102. She lived alone on a farm outside Redkey, Indiana, East of Muncie, for most of her life until she moved to a Westminster retirement home at the age of 92. She was the last survivor of her five sisters and one brother, Russell, whom the five sisters always called "baby."

She was remarkable. I didn't see it when she was alive, but she was surely remarkable as I now clearly understand. There was a Mr. Wyatt at one time, briefly, who went "over there" in WWI and who didn't come back.

Before World War I, Aunt Zoe worked as a law clerk in the Navy Department in Washington to help pay her way through law school. She graduated from the National University of Law in Washington. She maintained law offices in Washington D. C. for years, and always one in Redkey. Her father had made the bricks for the one-room school house she attended as a child and she taught in as an adult.  She later used that same school house for a law office.

Zoe was the first woman elected prosecuting attorney in Indiana. The first of her two terms in office began in 1933. In the 1940's she staged an unsuccessful campaign for the Indiana Governorship on the old Prohibitionist Party ticket.

I just thought of her as a cheerful old woman who liked to grow roses.

UPI obituary March 1, 1982

1. My mother's mother's sister was a lawyer;
2. My father was a lawyer;
3. My father's brother was a lawyer;
4. My father's father was a lawyer;
5. My father's mother's brother was a lawyer;
6. My brother is a lawyer, and;
7. My brother's son is a lawyer.

I think that's all of them.
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Tom Fox, J. D.
Southern Specialty Law Publishing Company
Louisville, Kentucky

A division of Accountable Kentucky Incorporated
a Kentucky Non-profit corporation
AccountableKY.org

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This is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer.