Oldster Unlaxed

In President Roosevelt's hands last week lay the power to fill 20 new Federal judgeships, one of the biggest single batches ever.*In the President's files were endorsements for 223 candidates for these vacancies --important political ammunition in an election year. And while the President studied his shots, more Federal Court vacancies came to hand, in the Third Circuit Court at Philadelphia. A rugged rock in the path of the New Deal steam roller was this Third Circuit Court. Four of its aged justices--Joseph Buffmgton, J. Whitaker Thompson, Victor B. Woolley, J. Warren Davis--had worked together for years in closest conservative harmony.

Last year, President Roosevelt was able to send New-Dealish Judge John Biggs Jr., 41, to join the "Four Old Men," as they impishly called themselves (TIME, March 15, 1937). Last week when three of the four ancients retired, their eldest, Judge Joseph Buffmgton, snowy-domed and bright-eyed at 82, drew himself up to make a speech.

"I suppose," he said, "this ought to be an occasion of some solemnity, but I can't feel it so. No one so far has paid any attention to Judge Davis, who is lamentably lame in one regard." He turned to the fourth ancient, Judge J. Warren Davis, 71, not retiring. "I refer to his robe, which for years has been the despair and humiliation of every one connected with this Court. It is a sad commentary on the administration of justice, and the concern over it has reached way down to his native State of North Carolina. Before we hand over the judgeship of this Court, I want him to take off that old robe!"

Protesting, but obedient, Youngster Davis divested himself. Standing in his shirtsleeves, he admitted that his robe, tattered and full of holes, had been borrowed from another judge a generation ago. Then Judge Buffington helped him into a fine new robe, sent by dressy old Judge Isaac Meekins of Elizabeth City, N. C.

Said grateful Judge Davis: "If it is Constitutional, I am going to file an order here and now drafting you [for emergency service under the judicial retirement act] ... as long as life lasts. . . ."

Elevator boys at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where he lives, reckon that as long as life lasts will be many a year for the Hon. Joseph Buffington. Though he no longer sleeps in summer in a pup tent on the Bellevue-Stratford's roof--as he did in his gay seventies--he still spurns an elevator to descend from his ninth-floor rooms to the street. Neighbors who used to complain about his bouncing a medicine ball against the wall, he now outwits by merely tossing it in the air. Under his bed he keeps a rowing machine, used daily. And every morning he stretches himself, "just like a cow or horse." He has survived three wives and still enjoys nightclubs. To young men he advises: "I never have known a man who regretted drinking too little." To old men: "Unlax!"

In the Republican National Convention of 1880, Joseph Buffington cast 36 consecutive votes for Ulysses S. Grant. In the 46 years since 1892, when President Harrison gave him a Federal judgeship, he has written (in longhand) more than 5,000 opinions, filling 243 volumes of the Federal Reporter, wearing out dozens of fountain pens.

He won national fame in 1896 when, as a Federal district judge in western Pennsylvania, he made a ruling (on calling witnesses) which made the I. C. C. workable. In 1915, on a special tribunal hearing an anti-trust case against U. S. Steel Corp.. he wrote an opinion finding for the corporation, refusing to dissolve it, touching off the War stockmarket boom --and making the reputation of a young Pittsburgh lawyer named David Aiken Reed (now out of public life after three Senate terms). "I haven't had a hard life," says Judge Buffington "--just sitting on the bench being educated by high-priced lawyers."

*The creating bill, passed last month, resurrected an uncontroversial section of last year's defeated Court Bill.

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