by Justice William W. Bedsworth

My Grandpa Bedsworth was a man of very modest means who allowed himself few extravagances. One was the Sunday New York Times. What made it an extravagance was that he was an uneducated man and read very little of the newspaper.

Instead he would pull out the crossword puzzle, sit down with a huge dictionary that looked like it pre-dated Gutenberg, and spend the day wrestling with the arcane clues provided by that challenge.

He completed way more than his share. It took most of the day but those were among the happiest hours of his hard-scrabble life.¹

I often say my grandfather was a casket maker. That’s how my dad became a casket maker.

But that isn’t really accurate. Grandpa was an entrepreneur. He looked around after World War II and realized he had three sons who all had the same job history: field hand (picking cotton) and soldier. While not an unusual résumé, this was not one calculated for advancement, and, like fathers everywhere, he wanted more for his boys than he had.

He also realized he had little he could teach them. He was smart and he was personable (if you were looking for Floyd Bedsworth, you had only to follow the sound of the laughter), but his only “skill” was some basic furniture-making he’d picked up somewhere along a life of temporary employments.

That wasn’t much, but it engaged his entrepreneurial instincts. While not a great carpenter, he could put together a basic, well-constructed box. As a boy doing odd jobs for a carpenter, he had seen the man make a casket. He had realized that was basically just a box, and he could make a box.

Granted, he couldn’t make the fancy caskets the rich folk bought, but there were a whole lot more poor folk dying than rich folk. You could turn out basic caskets in volume and make a living at it. He’d found a niche.

So my grandfather and his three sons became casket makers. All three boys had shipped out of Long Beach and San Diego in winter during the war and had decided, “If that’s winter in southern California, that’s where I want to live.” That’s how I grew up the son of a casket maker in Gardena.

And I grew up listening to my grandfather and my mother discuss the NYT crossword. Those discussions always included jokes. Grandpa was a terrific story-teller, and Mom was the world’s best audience.

His favorite joke was one about a farmer who needed money and had to sell his mule to get it.² He spread the word that he had a mule for sale and one of the other farmers came to look at it.

After inspecting the mule, the prospective buyer expressed skepticism. “Nice enough mule,” he said, “but why you got him hobbled like this? Why’ve you got his front legs tied together?”

“Oh,” said the farmer, “he’s just a little rambunctious; lotta energy ‘cause he’s so healthy.”

“Hmmmm,” said the prospective buyer, “and why does he have this strange look in his eyes? He looks like he’s focused way off.”

“Nah, that’s just the way he looks. His eyesight’s perfect.”

“Wait a minute,” rejoined the prospective buyer, “this mule is blind, isn’t he? He looks that way and you got him hobbled because he’s blind!”

“No, no, he ain’t blind. His eyesight’s perfect.”

“Yeah? Then untie him, let me see him run.”

They argued about this³ until finally the farmer realized he wasn’t going to be able to sell the mule without letting the prospective buyer see him run. He removed the loop from the mule’s fetlocks and the prospective buyer whacked the mule’s hindquarters.

The mule galloped across the field. Full tilt boogie. Right into a tree. Went down like he’d been pole-axed.

“I knew it! I knew it! That mule’s blind!”

“No, no,” said the farmer. “He ain’t blind. He just don’t give a damn.”

That joke became shorthand in my family. Whenever we heard of someone doing something cruel or heartless, something that hurt someone unnecessarily, one of us would shake our head and say, “He ain’t blind . . . ,” and another would finish the punchline, “ . . . he just don’t give a damn.”

It also showed up in the closing arguments of a couple of vehicular manslaughter cases and one driving under the influence with injury case I prosecuted. ⁴

I mention all this now as background for the fact that I DO give a damn. I am, by nature, a rule follower. I spent fifteen years as a prosecutor because (1) I loved being part of a team, and (2) the whole job description, in its entirety, was “Follow the rules.”⁵

And the rules for judges don’t allow comment on “pending or impending”⁶ cases. So I often found a case I thought would make a good column but couldn’t use it because it was “pending or impending.” Some of those I put away for use when I was confident that restriction had run its course—after trial and appeal.

And then, of course, I forgot them.

Going through my old files this morning, I found some. The first was from Louisiana, where a man walked into a convenience store, slapped a twenty on the counter and asked for change. When the clerk opened the register, the man pulled a gun and demanded all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided: a five and nine ones. The robber grabbed the cash and fled the store, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. Query: Is it a robbery if someone points a gun at you and gives you six dollars?

Then there was the Florida man who burst into a bank wearing a ski mask and shouted. “Freeze, Mother-Stickers, this is a F**k-Up.” I’ve been reading this all morning; I can’t stop laughing. And, of course, that was the reaction in the bank. After stunned silence, there were titters, then giggles, then the whole place just broke up laughing.

The gunman ran away. The bank put up a plaque on the wall. It says, “Freeze, Mother-Stickers, this is a F**k-Up.”

But my favorite is still a case I worked on when I was a deputy DA. It was a convenience store robbery, I think in Orange. As a woman walked out of the store with her two children, a coupla thugs walked up to her and started talking about how cute her kids were and how awful it would be if anything happened to them, gradually building up to a demand for cash. She resisted and they started pushing and shoving the kids until she burst into tears and gave them her wallet. Then they demanded her credit cards and checkbook. All this was watched by the clerk inside the store, who immediately called 9-1-1.

He was still talking to the 9-1-1 operator when the crooks took their loot, hopped in their car, and drove off. The clerk gave the license number to the 9-1-1 operator and Orange P.D. had the thugs in custody, probably before the victim had put everything back into her purse.

They drove the arrestees back to the scene of the crime, and as they drove into the parking lot, Robber A (Tweedledum) said to Robber B (Tweedledumber), “Oh sh*t. It’s the bitch we ripped off.” To which Tweedledumber responded, “Ah f**k, you’re right.”

We had that statement on tape, ⁷ which was good because they’d ditched the checkbook and credit cards, and the victim had been so frightened she was unable to identify her assailants. So we had a case where the victim could not identify the robbers, but the robbers had identified the victim.

For a rule follower who loves a good story, the district attorney’s office was a gold mine. Grandpa would have loved it.

BEDS NOTES

1. Eventually, he and my mother—a woman with a bachelor’s in microbiology at a time when few women went to college at all, much less studied science—worked out a deal whereby they split the cost and Mom got the rest of the paper.
2. Grandpa’s probably the only man I’ve ever known who once actually owned a mule. He was a “drummer,” a traveling salesman, for a while as a young man. That mule carried him and his merchandise through the hill country outside Chattanooga, where he met Grandma.
3. Grandpa’s stories didn’t have a word limit; when he told this one, the argument was fully described and went on for a full minute, with more colorful back-and-forth than I can now reproduce.
4. I wasn’t a litigator long but there are people who remember my trials.
5. I’ve said this in a published decision. People v. Force, 39 Cal. App. 5th 506, 508 (2019): “That’s it. When you get right down to it, that’s the whole job of the trial prosecutor: Provide a fair trial.”
6. Now there’s a phrase only a lawyer could devise.
7. Wish I could remember the name of the cop who turned on a tape recorder in the front seat of the patrol unit.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.