LITMIR.BIZ

      It was a very proud day when I graduated from Osgoode Hall in 1953. Pictured with Yvonne and me are fellow student Charlie Groves and his family.

      Yvonne worked until I became a lawyer and then for a while after I graduated. But when I graduated I told her I wanted her to stop working and stay at home, like other lawyers’ wives. It wasn’t all that easy to persuade her, though. At that time, most lawyers were white, and we couldn’t be assured of a future. But she eventually stopped, and from 1953 to 1958 we lived with her mother. I didn’t like being there, but it wasn’t too stressful. My room was upstairs, and I spent a lot of time up there reading and working.

      My law school friend John Mills helped me to partly manage these awkward and inconvenient early marriage years of living with Yvonne’s parents. At one point, John and his wife, Helen, were moving into a newer apartment that included a fridge and stove. When I asked John what he was going to do with his fridge, he said he was selling it, so I told him I wanted to buy it. I think I gave him fifteen dollars. I got it back to Hamilton and tucked it in my mother-in-law’s basement. That made no sense to John. Why go to all the trouble to buy a fridge and haul it back to Hamilton if it’s just going to sit in a basement? I explained to him that Yvonne’s mother was all over me about getting us a place of our own and the nagging was driving me crazy. The fridge was buying me time, because it convinced her we were preparing to move. Never did use it, but I appreciated the break it gave me. It was fifteen dollars well spent.

      John understood the tension between me and Yvonne’s mother and sisters. I told him of one incident that still makes him chuckle to this day. I’ve always tried to dress well and look sharp, even when I was in law school and had limited means. One Friday I was walking up the street to their house in Hamilton after being away the week in Toronto, and up pipes her mother, “Well, here comes Mr. Hotshot right now.” Now that was uncalled for. John reminds me of that lovely moniker every now and then.

      I chose law as a career after deciding that self-employment made the most sense for a young black man with ambition. Denial of white-collar opportunities at the steel company and the dismissive offer of a job on the shop floor — there is nothing wrong with that work, if one so chooses, but it wasn’t what I had been trained or educated for — presented new decisions. The rejection actually strengthened my resolve to make education work for me. It turns out, coincidentally, that a similar rejection with racial undertones would lead another future partner of mine, Paul Tokiwa, to study law as well.

      Early in my first year at Osgoode Hall one of those momentous occasions in life occurred. One day my dad called me and said, “You’re now the proud father of a baby boy.” It was 1949, and Keith had been born. It was a magnificent day because I suddenly realized I was now a father and family man and had to work very hard. I took the bus back to Hamilton and went into the nursery to see my new son. Then I started to cry. Keith was a pretty good-looking baby, and let’s face it, most babies are pretty ugly. I suggested the name Lincoln MacCauley Alexander III, but my wife said no. She liked the name Keith. There was a player for the Calgary Stampeders at the time named Keith Spaith, and she liked the name.

      While I eventually graduated from Osgoode Hall, an incident in my last year left me convinced for a time that I would never get my diploma. Addressing 250 would-be lawyers, Dean Smalley Baker used the expression, “It was like looking for a nigger in a woodpile.” When I heard him say it, my head jerked to attention, as if someone had just slapped me across the face. Actually, my friend John Mills was sitting right beside me when Baker made that comment. You have to picture this. All of us soon-to-be lawyers were squeezed into this cramped room and, to make matters worse, we had those tiny old university desks that are connected together. John and I were literally shoulder to shoulder. It was an exercise in contortion for me just to get into the desk, let alone get comfortable enough to follow the instructors. But I had no trouble hearing Baker’s slur, and John said afterward that he could feel my shoulders tighten up when the dean made that comment.