Lawyers at Play

By Kurt Chandler

As one Wisconsin attorney explains, the essential work of any lawyer involves solving somebody else's problems. Even on the most gratifying cases, that responsibility can make for some awfully stressful days, as most lawyers will attest.

To ease the pressure-cooker demands, Wisconsin lawyers have found a curious assortment of things to do after the workday ends. Sometimes the off-hour pastime is a budding second career, sometimes it's a long-standing hobby, and sometimes it's just plain fun. Here, your peers define the frequently foreign concept of "Lawyers at Play."

Dennis Boyer, ghost story writer

He's got a story about a ghost that inhabits a cheese factory in New Glarus, one about spirits in an abandoned brewery in Potosi and another about a phantom herd of grazing cows, which appears now and then in a Richland County pasture.

Dennis Boyer writes ghost stories, not the Stephen King variety, but stories that he's collected as he's traveled the byways of Wisconsin. A lawyer since 1980 with the state office of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Boyer's traveling job has taken him into coffee shops and taverns in nearly every county in the state.

And he's heard the strangest things from the people he's met - stories about a phantom fisherman along Iowa County's Mill Creek and a half-pig, half-human creature in Adams County.

"I've been storing up these anecdotes for eight or 10 years," he says.

A few years ago, Boyer, a graduate of the West Virginia University Law School, took some time off to care for the firstborn of two sons while his wife, Donna Weikert, also a lawyer, worked for a teacher's union. As his son napped at home in their farmhouse near Dodgeville, Boyer began pulling together some of the anecdotes. The stories grew into two self-published books, Ghosts of Iowa County and Iowa County Folk Tales.

In his latest book, Driftless Spirits, published last year by Prairie Oak Press in Madison, Boyer relates 46 tales of the paranormal, using ghost stories as a device to examine folklore in southwestern Wisconsin.

Unlike urban horror stories in which ghosts are typically seen as threatening, rural phantoms are regarded almost like patron saints or guardian angels by local residents, says the 47-year-old author.

"In hearing these stories, I started to wonder if people were commenting on a passing way of life," he says.

Driftless Spirits includes stories about apparitions, including the tale of a World War Two-era trapper whose incorporeal form old-timers periodically see roaming the countryside - and Boyer's own farm.

Boyer, who says he "concedes to the possibilities" of the supernatural, admits to having seen something "out of place" one night among the gravestones of a cemetery near his home.

Boyer's childhood prepared him well for his storytelling. Born to a Pennsylvania Dutch family, his relatives were conscientious in handing down family oral histories dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Due out this fall from Prairie Oak Press is Boyer's Giants in the Land, a collection of Wisconsin tall tales in the tradition of Paul Bunyon or the Rhinelander Hodag.

"There's nothing in here that's even remotely plausible," he says. "These are fun stories told by people after they've had maybe too many Tom Collinses."

Boyer's work as a writer provides a creative outlet that his legal career does not.

"In my job [as AFSCME's government relations counsel], I tend to deal with fairly weighty stuff all the time." It's refreshing, he says, to sit down with folks, crack open a beer or two, and listen to them spin tall tales.

"I'm having far more fun than I ever imagined."

Rick Smith and Michael Reyes, jazzmen

Ask Rick Smith what he was doing before he went to law school and he pleads guilty to enjoying the freewheeling life of a hippie.

"I was living kind of free and easy," confesses Smith, 46. He traveled around the United States and lived in South America for a while, teaching English in Colombia.

"Law school was the turning point for me, in that it caused me to become serious and focus on the idea of a career."

Although he's practiced law since receiving his J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1981, Smith has remained true to a few of his hippie-day roots, particularly his love for music.

"Like a lot of kids in the '60s," he says, "I played a little guitar, and I always liked the saxophone."

Michael Reyes, meanwhile, has been a more studied musician. Raised in the Cleveland area, with family roots in Puerto Rico, Reyes studied music in college and played guitar for most of his life.

"I was always influenced by a lot of different musical styles," says Reyes, 36, "music from the Caribbean, rock 'n roll, rhythm and blues, flamenco, Latin jazz."

While also attending law school at U.W.-Madison, Reyes began producing concerts. When he moved to Milwaukee eight years ago, he started organizing musical workshops within the Hispanic community.

The devotion to music held by Smith and Reyes led them by chance to become jazz impresarios in Milwaukee.

Both had been invited to sit on an advisory committee to the Artist Series at the Pabst Theater. And through that committee, both were invited to join the board of directors for the Friends of WYMS, an FM radio station that broadcasts jazz six days a week.

To raise funds for the station, Smith and Reyes produced a CD of some of Milwaukee's most notable jazz players, musicians such as trumpet player Brian Lynch, pianist David Hazeltine and saxophonist Frank Morgan, a protegé of Charlie Parker. The WYMS Jazz Sampler went on sale in October 1996. (Copies can be purchased by contacting the station at (414) 475-8890. All proceeds go to the station.)

Recruiting the players, booking studio time, coordinating the recording sessions and designing the CD took a full year. "It was a marathon project," says Smith.

In 1996 Smith and Reyes coproduced a concert featuring the Gato Barbieri Quintet. Out of that grew Yemay Productions, a concert promotion company (named for the African goddess of water and rhythm), run by Smith, Reyes and attorney Scott Wales.

"Jazz is vital," Smith declares. "I'm real interested in young players who are playing vital, new jazz."

Reyes, through Yemay and other ventures, has been successful in bringing a diverse blend of musical acts to the area, including a concert titled the Thunder Drums Tour - two percussion virtuosos from Cuba who performed early this year only in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Milwaukee.

"I find music to be almost therapeutic," says Reyes, who lives in Glendale with his wife, Rosemary, also a lawyer. "I find inspiration through music, from the various genres. I've fortunately been able to work my schedule around so I can get involved with other activities."

"There are some lawyers who just work all the time, they're consumed by their work," says Smith, who lives with his wife, Valerie Ko-Smith, and their two daughters in Wauwatosa. "Of course, if you ask my wife, she would probably say I am consumed by my interest in jazz."

Indeed he is. When he's not promoting concerts or producing CDs, Smith is learning to play the alto sax.

Mary Triggiano-Hunt, snowmobile racer

As if the life of an attorney isn't fast-paced enough, Mary Triggiano-Hunt finds it necessary to race snowmobiles - often in excess of 100 miles per hour.

By weekday, she's the managing attorney of Legal Action of Wisconsin's Milwaukee office, providing free legal service to low-income clients.

But by weekend, when the snow flies, she and her husband are off to the plains of northern Minnesota, setting speed records across the surfaces of frozen lakes.Triggiano-Hunt credits (or perhaps blames) her husband for her thrill-seeking off-hour pastime. In the late 1970s, before the two met, Ken Hunt designed and raced snowmobiles for Polaris in Roseau, Minn. After relocating to Wisconsin, he went to work for John Deere in Horicon and continued to race. Triggiano-Hunt became a member of his pit crew.

Eventually, he coaxed her into joining him on the circuit. "Three years ago he put me on a sled and I started racing," she says. "It became part of our lives."

She began doing "speed runs," racing down a quarter-mile drag strip. And before long, the two of them were on the Polaris A-team, setting records.

"We started kickin' butt," says the 34-year-old Triggiano-Hunt, who lives in Oconomowoc. In 1995 she set a world record. "I went about 114 mph in a quarter mile. That's about 8 seconds down the track."

"It's exhilarating, but it ends real quick because it's such a short track. So you want to do it again."

In the last four years, the husband-wife team has won 45 first-place and 24 second-place finishes, including six world records through the National Snowmobile Speed Run Association. In 1995 Triggiano-Hunt was named NSSR Rookie of the Year.

Born and raised in Racine, Triggiano-Hunt graduated from law school at the U.W.-Madison in 1988. She went to work in 1994 at Legal Action, a federally funded agency that assists low-income clients in civil cases, mostly involving public benefits, housing issues and family law.

"I really saw that there was a need out there for people without money who needed our assistance. Attorneys sometimes have the key to the solutions to people's problems. The underprivileged often don't have means, wherewithal or resources."

Gliding across an icy lake on a snowmobile releases her from the stress of a job she truly enjoys.

"Even going 114 mph, though, is not as exhilarating as being able to help clients and knowing that you've done something for those clients that may help them turn their lives around."

And what does she do for thrills in the summer, after the snow has long melted away? "I ride a Harley," she says.

Of course.

Amy Sanborn, equestrienne

The sport of dressage is performed, not played. A uniformed rider mounts a horse inside a 20x60-meter arena bordered by a short, white, wooden fence. The rider salutes the judge, and for eight long minutes, leads the horse through a series of as many as 30 choreographed maneuvers, commanding the animal through slight movements of her hands and legs.

When it's done right, dressage is detailed, precise, elegant - a four-legged equivalent to figure skating or gymnastics. When it's done right, horse and rider become one.

Amy Sanborn has been doing it right for nearly 20 years; so right, in fact, that she has won several state championships and now competes at the national and international rank. Ten years ago, she was chosen to spend a summer of training at France's national equitation school.

"I've been around horses since I was two," says Sanborn, whose mother raises horses on a 120-acre farm near Verona, southwest of Madison. "I'm not overly confident in the law, but riding and training horses is one area I feel extremely confident in."

A graduate of Cornell Law School in Ithaca, N.Y., Sanborn, 33, divides her time between the farm and her law office in Madison. But her legal practice is transitory. Two years ago, she formed Silent Partner Legal Services, a freelancing, lawyer's "temp service." She markets herself to small firms as a practitioner-for-hire, employed on a temporary basis to practice general law when a firm is short-handed or has a scheduling conflict, for example.

Practicing law, riding horses and caring for her two sons - ages 10 months and two-and-a-half years - thoroughly fills her days. Yet Sanborn also finds time to teach high-impact aerobics and kick-boxing at a Madison health club.

"That's just for fun," she laughs, "and it complements the riding. You need to be strong, you need muscle control to communicate with the horse in a subtle way."

Dressage is her true passion. To support her sport, she also trains and breeds horses, and coaches young riders.

"I'm probably not going to get rich and famous practicing law," she decides. Rather, her lifelong dream is to compete at the level of an Olympian.

"My goal isn't necessarily to be on an Olympic team," she says, "but I really want to be of that caliber and make the list of candidates."

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