Welcome Back, Haltom! by BILL HALTOM


sitcom starring Gabe Kaplan and a very young John Travolta. Kaplan played a wise-cracking teacher who


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returned to his high school alma mater in Brooklyn to teach remedial classes to a group of students who called themselves the “Sweathogs.” Travolta was the lead Sweathog. Kaplan had an affinity for the Sweathogs since he was once one himself. Well, earlier this year, I joined the cast of a non-televised


sit-com that could be called Welcome Back, Haltom! I returned to my alma mater, Frayser High, to put together and coach the school’s first-ever mock trial team. Tat’s right, I am now Coach Haltom. And I insist that


the next time you see me, you address me as “Coach.” I am very proud of the title. I returned to Frayser High after a brief forty-two-year


absence because I felt I needed to give something back to the place. You see, it was at Frayser High School where I learned to be a lawyer. Seriously. Te skills I use as a lawyer every day are not things I was taught in law school or even college. Tey’re skills I learned in the halls and classrooms of Frayser High School. At Frayser, I was not a Sweathog. I was something far


less cool. I was a member of the debate team. Te Frayser High debate team in the late 1960’s consisted of a bunch of nerds, several of whom (including me) wanted to grow up to be a lawyer. It wasn’t easy being a debate nerd at Frayser High forty


years ago. Frayser was a tough school, and you could easily get your butt whipped simply because you were a nerdy debater. And that is precisely the reason why everything I needed to know about being a lawyer, I learned at Frayser High School. My fellow nerds and I learned about the power of


persuasion, both in debate competitions and in the Frayser High campus. On weekends we competed in debate tournaments not


only in Memphis, but all across the State of Tennessee. We even took “road trips” for debate tournaments in Atlanta and Little Rock and Dallas. It was heady stuff for a boy from Frayser. And then on weekdays, we worked hard to persuade


some of our tough classmates not to whip our nerdy little fannies. It was a matter of survival, but in the process, we


ne of the most popular television shows of the polyester decade of the ‘70s was Welcome Back, Kotter, a


became pretty effective advocates. One of the things I learned in all this is the importance of


a self-deprecating sense of humor. When some of my tough classmates ridiculed me for being a nerdy debater, I did not retaliate. I joined them in laughing at me. The Frayser High debate team was coached by a


wonderful teacher, Mr. John Hester. He was not just my debate coach. He was also my AP English teacher. It was because of him that I grew up to be a lawyer and a writer (albeit not a very successful writer). And so last December, I decided it was time for me to


go back to high school. Something told me there might be a few kids out at Frayser who dreamed of being a lawyer. I was determined to find them and see if I could help them pursue that dream, just as Mr. Hester had done for me several decades ago.


I called my friend Marianne Walter, a wonderful


teacher at Frayser, and asked her if she could help me recruit a team. Marianne introduced me to an equally wonderful teacher named Molly Bryson, who was on the faculty at Frayser this year as part of Teach for America. Molly, a Cornell graduate, had competed in mock trial in both high school and college. Marianne and Molly helped me find those kids at


Frayser who dreamed of being a lawyer. Tere weren’t many of them. In fact, there were only seven, which was barely enough to have a mock trial team. (You have to have six; three lawyers and three witnesses.) But to me, these kids turned out to be the Magnificent Seven. Mock trial was a brave new world for these kids. But beginning in early December, I met with my magnificent Frayser seven once a week and introduced them to the wonderful world of trial lawyers. And I had a wonderful assistant coach, Edd Peyton. Public speaking is enough of a challenge for most


people. As one of my favorite comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, once said, “According to a public opinion survey, people’s greatest fear is speaking in public. Teir second greatest fear is death. Tat means at a funeral, most people would rather be the corpse then the person who has to give the eulogy.” But mock trial, like real trials, is about more than public speaking. My Magnificent Seven had learned to get on their feet and not only argue, but to question and cross-question witnesses, introduce evidence, and object to opposing mock trial lawyers. And they also had to learn rules of evidence such as hearsay and all of its exceptions! And these seven


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