ONLINE ONLY: Ken, Mr. Dixon, & the Million Story Sandwich

The sun hasn’t even crested on a cool morning in 1956, but 16-year-old Ken is already hurling newspapers out of the passenger window of his $75 dollar Chrysler. When he gets to the Dixon house he shifts his ’38 into park and walks up to the house before stopping next to the car parked in the driveway. For some reason – he’s not sure why – he tries lifting the latch-handled door, and for some reason – he’s not sure why – he grabs the golf clubs out of the back seat and puts them in his trunk.\nThe sun breaks the horizon that morning to the crisp “whack” of iron striking plastic. Ken has neatly arranged all of Mr. Dixon’s golf balls in a row, and sends every last one into the dawning Indiana skyline. When the balls are gone and the fun has ended, Ken takes the clubs to the local pawn shop and exchanges them for more money than he’s made that entire week delivering newspapers. \nBut when the sun sets that day in 1956 Ken sits in silent reflection behind the bars of the Jeffersonville jail. He would be released two weeks later on the condition that he go back to Mr. Dixon and apologize for stealing the clubs. Ken would do just that and he would be well received by the gentleman who served as one of the town’s local lawyers. And when Ken said goodbye that lawyer would hand him 50 cents and tell him to go ahead and get a haircut. \nHe wouldn’t know it sitting in the barber chair that day, but the next time Ken Nunn would stand before Mr. Dixon he’d be getting the haircut before the visit – not after. \nIn 1962 Ken took his wife Leah to see the newly released movie “To Kill a Mockingbird,” starring Gregory Peck and a young Robert Duval. When they went to the drive-in they would normally bring their own popcorn and Coke, but on this night they splurged. The Princess Theater was packed, so Ken and Leah took a seat in the third row of the balcony and envied those who’d come early enough to sit down front. One hundred and twenty-nine minutes later, Ken stood up from his seat knowing what he wanted to do with his life.\n“The blacks had always been my friends growing up, they were my next door neighbors,” he said. “When I saw Peck defend a black man accused of rape, and the whites were really down on him for that, I just really related to that.”\nThe next day Ken went to the IU School of Law and asked for an application.\nIt took a handsome actor in a southern-style courtroom, slow ceiling fans spinning overhead, but Ken had finally found what he’d been searching for since rejoining school at age 17. The first two years of Ken’s undergraduate study had been spent pursuing accounting but without any real passion or desire. Ken considered much of his schooling to that point frivolous, so when he finally set his sights on a law degree he felt something education had never granted him before – excitement.\n“I had to take him seriously,” Leah said. “We went to Lexington and applied there, and he was going to apply to others. He said, ‘We’ll go any place we have to go until I get in.’ I knew that wherever they took him I was going to go.”\nKen, Leah, and their two kids struggled through those law school years under the mantra, “If you didn’t have to do it, you didn’t do it.” In other words, the pantry was rarely stocked with chips or cookies. But Ken eventually graduated among the bottom few students in his class, but he’ll be the first person to say, “Not one person comes and asks what was your class ranking. All they are interested in is what can I do for them now?”\nThe working world welcomed Ken a lot like Law School did – he had made it there, albeit barely, but he’d have to earn his success. The first Nunn Law Office was a two room loft with a view of south Walnut Street in downtown Bloomington. One room featured a card table with a folding chair for the secretary and another for clients to wait in. Ken’s office had the other two folding chairs and a law dictionary – that’s it. The only thing that could pass as a decoration was a lonely piece of string – barely a few inches long – that hung from the ceiling along one of the walls in Ken’s office.\nThis whole story starts in a separate set of rooms in a separate part of Indiana. They comprised Ken’s first home, and one room had a stove that kept the house warm and the other had a bed where little Kenny could dream about bigger things. \nAt nine years old, Ken sat at home one day when a knock came on the door. His mother peeped out the window and saw a Jeffersonville Sherriff. Ken can vividly remember this story today.\nHe remembers his mother saying, “Kenny you do this. Tell them I’m not here.” \nSo he reached up to the door-knob, turned it, and greeted the large man in uniform. \n“Young man is your mother here,” the officer asked.\n“No.”\nMother’s conscience got the best of her and she stepped into the doorway to speak to the sheriff. The officer walked away a few minutes later and the Nunn family was left with court papers that gave them a week to get out of the house.\nA few days later they had found a new home, and Ken’s mother explained that he had to take a new route home from school because they didn’t live at the old house anymore. But sure enough, that afternoon Ken ended up right back at the old house and he walked around it astonished by the emptiness. He stepped inside and walked up to his bedroom door and whispered the last words he would say in that house.\n“You’ve been a good door and I’ll miss you.”\nWith that, Ken kissed the door goodbye and found his way to his new home – something he would soon grow accustomed to.\nUp until age 17 Ken’s childhood was marred by fights, failures, and flirts with a life of delinquency. Jeffersonville High School was lucky to see him three times in a week, and by the time Ken finished the only class he attended regularly – driver’s ed – he dropped out.\n“My mother let me write my own excuses so that was easy,” he said. “I didn’t have to leave the house and fake going to school; I would just say I wasn’t feeling good and sleep until noon.”\nBut a year later an accident landed Ken at a new school with a new outlook on life. As an older kid with a car, his friends asked him for a ride to school one day. Ken asked, “What school?” And they said, “High School.” Ken agreed and he entered the doors of Clarksville High School the next day. \nIt was here that Ken would help an honor student named Leah dissect a frog in biology class, and she would help him write his notebook in return. It was here that the principle would warn Leah’s parents about the new boy she was hanging around with: he would either bring her down or she would make him a better person. It was here that Ken would only miss three days of school in three years.\n“Had I stayed in Jeffersonville and not met my wife, I probably would have been a high school drop out,” Ken said.\nShortly before graduating Ken and Leah were stopped at a traffic light when the truck behind them collapsed the back bumper of Ken’s Chrysler. The next day they waited for the insurance man to leave church where they met in the parking lot. Ken said he didn’t have any insurance, but the accident was the other guy’s fault and hopefully something could be done. Fresh after visiting with the Lord, the insurance man looked the car up and down, and then looked Ken up and down before saying, “Sorry, we’re not going to pay you.”\nKen was slowly developing a theory of justice.\n“You look at the old westerns and old cowboy shows, and the bad guy was invariably a lawyer,” Ken said. “He’s the guy that is always trying to steal the ranch because there is oil underneath it. So the poor, little lady keeps having cattle stolen from her, and she can’t make the payments. So the lawyer keeps saying ‘I’ll buy it from you’ – conniving, no good. That was my perception of lawyers for many, many years.” \nYears later, back in one of the four folding chairs, Ken sat with a yellow notepad in his lap as a poor, little lady took a seat across from him. She needed help in her divorce case, something Ken had never handled before but he was in no place to be turning down clients.\n“I have no idea why she stayed,” he said. “She shouldn’t have.” \nThis would be the theme for a while with Ken. A client would enter his office, having just been turned down by 11 other lawyers in town, and Ken would take the case. Why? “I didn’t have anything else to do.” \nBut before long Ken would have some Gregory Peck moments of his own. Take, for instance, the black IU student on trial for stealing billfolds from dorm rooms.\nThe prosecution had two sets of witnesses and that was all they needed. There was the student that claimed to have seen the defendant in his room scrounging through pants pockets, and the police officers who arrested the defendant. In front of an all white jury in 1969, it was an open-and-shut case.\nBut Ken started destructing the symbolic wall that stands between any defense lawyer and a verdict of not guilty. He first impeached the two police officers as one claimed to have seen the defendant take roughly 25 steps out from the door, throw the billfold into the bushes, and then have the handcuffs slapped around his wrists. The other officer testified that they had met him at the dormitory door. As for the eyewitness, that required a little more craft.\n“Have you ever been in trouble with the police,” Ken remembers asking the witness.\n“None at all.”\nKen had done some digging and gathered verbal confirmation that the witness had received a littering ticket in New Jersey. But he grabbed a small stack of papers just for effect.\n“You just said you didn’t have anything at all, but what about your event in New Jersey,” Ken recollects.\n“Oh, oh well yes. I got that, but it was just littering.”\nKen went back to his desk, grabbed another small stack of insignificant papers and asked, “Is that all sir? Is there something else you want to tell the jury now?”\n“Well… yea… There was that incident in Mexico.”\nCredibility gone. Case won. Ken received several letters from lawyers around the state after that verdict came back “not guilty,” all of them congratulating the new guy in town. \nKen sits behind a wooden table and reaches for the pitcher of water to pour himself a glass in hopes of quenching his bone-dry throat. His rattling hand clanks ice cube after ice cube against the side of the pitcher and into the bottom of his glass. He doesn’t want to take a sip because his hands are shaking too hard. That’s because his chair, his table, and his glass of water are all resting inside the Indiana Supreme Court and Mr. Dixon just filed into the room wearing a black robe. He’s known as Judge Dixon now.\nEach man remembers the other, and each man knows that the other remembers. But when the final gavel pounds, Ken has won the case and he is actually glad that he stands before Mr. Dixon again.\n“In some ways I am proud that our paths crossed,” he says. “And the way they did because maybe he felt like I did learn my lesson. Maybe he felt like I wanted to change my ways, which I did.”\nNowadays Ken can sit in a leather chair that doesn’t fold flat with plush carpet under his feet and a giant office over his head, and tell you that he’s never felt rich. Not because he doesn’t acknowledge his success, but because he hasn’t forgotten his past. You can sit in front of him and say that your car is about to be repossessed, and he can shoot right back, “Well, I can relate … I’ve had my car repossessed too.” \nAnd you better believe that he can tell the story.