The Pittsburgh Press (January 26, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
TACOMA, Wash. – There are all kinds of records, but I’ve just talked with a man who certainly holds an odd one. He is a lawyer who has handled more cases than any other lawyer in the world.
His name is Oscar S. Galbreath. He is 95 years old. He was in active practice right up to a year and a half ago. Even now he has his license to practice for another year. He calls it his “dog license.”
“I’m going to keep right on till I die,” he says, “provided I’ve got sense enough left to apply for my license each year.”
Mr. Galbreath doesn’t know how many cases he has handled. He can’t even give an estimate. “I’m not very proud of it,” he says. But friends of his tried to figure up roughly for me, and they said a round figure of 75,000 wouldn’t be far wrong.
Mr. Galbreath’s career at the bar has been divided into three parts – 15 years in Nashville, Tenn.; 30 years in Durango, Colo., and 29 years in Tacoma. He has now been a lawyer for 74 years.
He hung out his first shingle in Nashville when he was 21. The suit of clothes in which he tried his first case was made from cotton that he himself had planted, picked and carded. His mother made the cloth and sewed it into a suit for him.
He started his wholesale filing of suits – which eventually resulted in his odd record – in those early days at Nashville. The county paid him $600 for collecting a $15 poll tax, whereupon he opened the sluice gates and poured thousands and thousands of poll-tax suits into the courts.
Then at 36 he went West, to Colorado. They say he made the change because he had gambled away all his money and wanted to start in a new place. From that day on he was a bitter fighter against gambling.
Never smoked, drank
Mr. Galbreath can quote large portions of the Bible from memory. When he lived at Durango, he established the Southern Methodist Church there. He never smoked nor drank. At Durango he had some historic fights with the saloon interests. He was county judge there in the ‘30s. Twice he was challenged to duels. Both times he accepted, but friends interceded and the duels never came off.
He was 66 when he moved from Durango to Tacoma – to start another career. It was here he put the finishing touches on his unique distinction of suing people along mass-production lines.
He worked for a collection agency – the National Association of Creditors. From 1912 until today they estimate he has handled more than 50,000 cases for this outfit. Why, for many years they were running 200 suits a week, and Lawyer Galbreath handled nearly all of them. When he’d go to the weekly sitting of a suburban court he’d have two suitcases of papers.
Oddly enough, Mr. Galbreath never made much money out of his colossal law practice. He worked on a straight retainer basis during these hectic years in the West. He is in comfortable circumstances, but not rich.
He has five children living, now well along in years. One of them is a millionaire.
Mr. Galbreath has made it a practice to go back to Tennessee once a year. He was there last fall.
Wished he’d been soldier
He lives in a ground-floor room of a residential hotel. When we went to see him he had one shoe off, and was toasting his foot before an electric heater, although the room itself must have been at 90. He was doctoring a corn.
His voice is high and frail. He isn’t sick, but the doctor comes to see him frequently. Like everybody else in America except me, he is taking vitamins. He listens constantly to an old-fashioned radio. Friends brought him a modern one, but he didn’t like it.
If Mr. Galbreath could live his life over, he would do one thing that he didn’t do – and that is get in the Civil War. He was 14 when the war broke out. He was a violent Confederate sympathizer.
Time and again he ran away to join the Southern armies, but his plans always went amiss. Finally his father put him in school to keep him from joining the South. And although that was 80 years ago, he has never got over it. He says the question “Why weren’t you in the war?” has embarrassed him all his life.
Mr. Galbreath has always been a determined Democrat. His first presidential vote was for Horace Greely (Republican), but he says he voted for Greeley on the same principle that made him use rye coffee sweetened with sorghum – he had to.
“Since that time,” he says, “if I have ever voted for anybody except a straight dyed-in-the-wool Democrat I’m not aware of it.”