Early Legal Career and Service in World War II
Of his law practice in Manchester, Combs later noted: "I had too many kinfolks and friends in Manchester, and they all expected me to handle things as a favor ... Then they'd get their feelings hurt if I charged them. I was taking in a lot of cases, but not sending out many bills." In 1938, Combs accepted an offer from a law school classmate named LeRoy Combs (no relation) to join his father and uncle's law firm in Prestonsburg. Prestonsburg was closer to his wife's home in Knott County. Combs' son Tommy suffered from a form of mental retardation, the result of an injury sustained at birth. After moving to Prestonsburg, Combs started a class for individuals with mental retardation, in part so Tommy could attend the class.
On December 22, 1943, Combs enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army for service in World War II. He received his basic training at Fort Knox and participated in the Volunteer Officer Candidate Program, which would have allowed him to attend Officer Candidate School (OCS) immediately after basic training. Instead, he was briefly assigned to teach cartography at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland before completing OCS in Ann Arbor, Michigan, joining the Judge Advocate General's Corps, and attaining the rank of captain. On July 1, 1945, he was sent to the South Pacific. He served as chief of the War Crimes Investigating Department under General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippine Islands, conducting tribunals for Japanese war criminals. Upon his discharge in 1946, he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Military Merit Medal of the Philippines.
After the war, Combs returned to Prestonsburg, forming the law firm of Howard and Combs with J. Woodford Howard as his partner. He served as president of the Junior Bar Association of Kentucky in 1946 and 1947. Combs often represented coal companies in workers' compensation cases against Carl D. Perkins, later a U.S. Representative, who served as legal counsel for the mine workers.
Read more about this topic: Bert T. Combs
Famous quotes containing the words early, legal, career, service, world and/or war:
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”
—Public Service Announcement.
“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)