FROM COTTON FARM TO BAR PRESIDENCY

As Charles Sylvanus Rhyne, at 45 the youngest president in the 80-year history of the A.B.A., talks about Law Day, he loses the leisurely North Carolina cadence of his speech; his brown eyes glint behind plastic-rimmed glasses; he clenches his fist, and his knuckles turn white. Law Day is, essentially, the expression of his feeling for the law. And the law has all the deeper meaning to Lawyer Rhyne because he became a man of law the hard way.

Charlie Rhyne was born on a cotton farm in rolling Mecklenburg County, a few miles from Charlotte, son of "the most wonderful mother and father any child ever had." In the rare moments of relaxation allowed him by his breakneck schedule, he contentedly remembers his three-mile walk along dirt roads to the school where Miss Dewell Marshall taught eleven grades in one room; he remembers falling asleep during the hour-long Presbyterian sermons of Preacher Greer and Preacher Walker; he remembers the fish fries on the Catawba River and the swimming hole at Uncle Henry Rhyne's. He remembers, too, the time he played hooky with a pal named Mel McQuarry. When Charlie got home, his father was waiting with a razor strop. Next morning at school, the teacher started to give him a thrashing. Says Rhyne: "I argued as hard as I could that she shouldn't lick me because I'd already got my beating. I offered to pull down my pants to prove it, and she let me off. It was my first double jeopardy case."

Hard Cash. Charlie Rhyne's first view of the law in action came when he was eleven or twelve. "A man who was a member of one of the big families of the county had his throat slit from ear to ear by his wife, an outsider," says Rhyne. "The feeling in the community against the girl was extremely adverse. The attorney who defended her was an old string-tie lawyer named C. W. Tillett. I begged my father into letting me go to the trial one day. Tillett engaged in flamboyant arguments, told the jury how it was self-defense, and the girl was freed. The fact that this girl got justice in a place where people didn't like her made a tremendous impression on me."

Rhyne's chances of following after Lawyer Tillett were dim indeed: his family simply did not have enough money to send him to college. After his farm years of milking, plowing, picking cotton, bushy-haired Charlie Rhyne got a city job as a Western Union messenger boy in Charlotte. With $300 in savings in hand, he enrolled at Duke University. He had an early-morning newspaper route; he sold Bibles in West Virginia during the summer, and still ran out of money in his sophomore year and had to quit school. He hitchhiked West, dug storm sewers in Denver, earned some of his hardest-won dollars as a sparring partner in a local gymnasium until he was undone by a middleweight named Gentleman Ham Jenkins. After that he landed a job as a ranch hand in Wyoming's Jackson Hole country.

On to Washington. After another tour of digging sewers in Denver, Rhyne collected his savings and his wife Sue and headed back to Duke, where he completed his undergraduate course and entered law school (one classmate: a young Californian named Richard Nixon). He worked before school on a Durham Herald paper route, after school as a contractor's assistant, and in his spare time he got in a little work playing guard in scrub football games. But in an accident on his after-hours construction job, Rhyne mangled his right hand; the hand is still badly scarred, and the little finger is permanently stiff. Figuring that he could get a Government desk job requiring little use of the injured hand, he quit Duke, went to Washington with his wife, enrolled in the George Washington University Law School. Sue went to work as a clerk in The Hecht Co. department store, while Charlie worked first for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, then with a hard-drinking trial lawyer, "who demanded that I work all night when it was necessary, and it seemed like it was necessary a lot of the time."

Rhyne got his law degree from George Washington in 1937, remained in Washington and hung up his shingle. Among his first clients were several cities fighting the price-fixing edicts of the National Bituminous Coal Commission. Rhyne lost the case, but it put him deep in the fields of municipal and administrative law, where he has remained. Through his single-minded devotion to work--"I've told Charlie often," says an old friend, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Walter Bastian, "that he's going to be the richest dead man in the world if he doesn't stop working so hard" -Rhyne has come to be senior partner of a nine-lawyer firm that occupies an entire floor in a Washington office building. He is a recognized authority in the field of aviation law, has appeared many times before the U.S. Supreme Court, won a decision in the Phillips Petroleum case that oil and gas producers have been trying to reverse ever since with highly controversial natural-gas legislation.

Instrument for Peace. Along with his work and his rise in the practice of law, Rhyne worked and rose in the American Bar Association. When he joined the A.B.A. in 1938, it was dominated by an inner circle of Old Guardmen, most of them interested in the A.B.A. only as a legal spokesman for right-wing political conservatism. Charlie Rhyne became the leader of a group of Young Turks determined to convert the A.B.A. into an organization for working lawyers.

Perhaps the most significant of the rungs that Rhyne climbed to the top of the A.B.A. ladder was his chairmanship of the organization's International and Comparative Law Section. It had long been a hapless sort of debating society, of interest only to a few professorial types. Says Rhyne: "We tried to make it a lawyer's section instead of a professor's section." In the process, the boy from the North Carolina cotton farm became devoted to the idea that the rule of law as known in the U.S. could, in the most practical possible way, become a rule of law to bring peace to the world. And that idea has hallmarked the administration of Charles Rhyne as president of the American Bar Association.

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