BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
of
Manly W. Mumford
1925 - 2003

I was born February 25, 1925 to Manly Stearns Mumford and Helen Whitman Mumford in Evanston, Illinois. Manly Stearns was born at Tescott, near Russell, Kansas, the son of Manly Jacob Mumford, a Methodist minister who preached in various small towns in Kansas and then later in central and northern Illinois. Helen Whitman was the daughter of Russell Whitman (born in Plymouth, Massachusetts and a descendant of various Pilgrims including Edward Winslow, second governor of the Plymouth Colony) and Alice Miller Whitman (granddaughter of Roswell B. Mason, Mayor of Chicago at the time of the Great Fire of 1871). My sister Alice was born January 5, 1928.

I was educated in the public schools of Evanston (Dewey, Haven, and Evanston Township High School). I entered Harvard College in September, 1942, and finished my freshman year as a civilian. Shortly before my 18th birthday, in February of 1943, I joined the U.S. Navy Reserve, and that summer was called to active duty as an apprentice seaman in the Navy's V-12 officer training program at Harvard. Here I continued my studies for a full year and in late summer of 1944 was transferred to the pre-midshipmen's school in Asbury Park, New Jersey. In the fall of that year I became a midshipman at Northwestern Midshipmen's School in Chicago. I graduated, commissioned as an Ensign, USNR, in January, 1945, and was sent to Naval Communications School at Harvard for three or four months, and then to Small Craft Training School in Miami, where I was when Japan surrendered to end World War II. From Miami I was assigned to Commander Destroyers Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and from there to Manila where I boarded the USS Weeden DE-797 (Lt. Cmdr. Charles F. Tillinghast in command) in November, 1945. While on liberty in Manila at that time I heard the first postwar performance of the Manila Symphony Orchestra under Herbert Zipper.

On being released to inactive duty with the Navy, I returned to Harvard, where I concentrated in economics. My professors included Roscoe Pound (Sociology of Law) and Samuel Eliot Morison (U.S. Naval History). By giving me credit for various courses taken in the Navy, Harvard was able to grant me an AB degree in June of 1947. During that school year I also rowed on the Junior Varsity 150-pound crew and participated in races at New London and on the Charles.River.

In the fall of 1947 I entered Northwestern Law School, from which I graduated with a JD degree in the Spring of 1950, having served on the staff of the Illinois Law Review that was then published by this school.

In the summer of 1949 my sister Alice graduated from Smith College and married Donald T. Soule, a friend from our naval training days and Harvard.

=====1950's=====


In the fall of 1950 I was employed by the Chicago the law firm of Chapman and Cutler and was admitted to practice law in Illinois. With this firm I specialized in the law of municipal finance until my retirement March 1, 1990. I became a partner in 1962. Clients included the Cities of Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; the Mississippi State Highway Department; San Antonio Electric and Gas System; Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority; and Dade and Orange Counties, Florida.

During the 1950's I joined the University Club of Chicago and started my annual subscriptions to the Thursday evening concerts of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I participated in Volunteers for Stevenson in the 1952 Stevenson - Eisenhower presidential election campaign. I also joined the Chicago Bar Association's Committee on Civil Rights, of which I served a year as chairman. I worked on freedom to travel, on fair employment practices legislation, and on legislation to restrict electronic eavesdropping, writing a bill that was later adopted, in modified form, by the Illinois General Assembly under the sponsorship of Representative Jeanne Hurley and her future husband, Paul Simon.

In 1956 a friend and I drove to Alaska; in 1957 I flew around the world, stopping in Japan, Thailand, India, and England; in 1958 some friends and I chartered a boat with crew and sailed around the Windward Islands.

I became part of a group of young bachelor lawyers who had gone to Harvard College or Law School or both and who held an annual lobster boil for many years as they stopped being bachelors and became fathers. The group included Malcolm Chandler, Richard Hart, Frederic Hickman, George Hooper, James Otis, and James Rhind.

I also joined and worked with an organization called the Committee on Illinois Government, established primarily by young people who had been in State government during Adlai Stevenson's term as governor. They included Dawn Clark, Abner Mikva, James Moran, Anthony Scariano, James Otis, Adlai Stevenson III, John Hunt, James Clement, and Paul Simon.

=====1960's=====


On July 1, 1961, I married Luigi Thorne Horne (University of Colorado, 1953, and Cornell University, 1959), an architect with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and daughter of William Dodge Horne and Frances Thorne Horne of Barrington, Illinois. Daughter Mary Shaw Mumford (changed to Shaw Mumford June 30, 1984) was born June 14, 1965, and son Manly Dodge Mumford (known as Dodge) was born July 7, 1968.

I served for a few years on the board of The Thresholds, a not-for-profit psychiatric rehabilitation agency.

I joined The Chicago Literary Club and The Cliff Dwellers

In 1964 Luigi and I bought 160 acres of cut-over timberland in Marathon County, Wisconsin, near the unincorporated village of Hogarty. This land is very beautiful and extends on both sides of the Eau Claire River. (See ). At first we slept in a tent there, later we had a concrete block garage built for shelter, later a house trailer was brought in, and in 1989 a prefabricated house was installed. Its electric system is powered by batteries that are charged by a solar panel.

I became active in the Section on Local Government Law of the American Bar Association.

As the State of Illinois was preparing to adopt a new constitution, I joined the Constitutional Revision Committee of the Chicago Bar Association and participated in its work to draft proposed articles and sections. In this work I wrote a draft of anti- discrimination section that was later adopted, in modified form, by the Bill of Rights Committee of the Constitutional Convention and became Section 17 of Article I of the Illinois Constitution of 1970.

Toward the end of this decade the United States Supreme Court decided the first of three cases (Cipriano v. City of Houma, 395 U.S. 701 (1969), Kolodzeijski v. City of Phoenix, 399 U.S. 204 (1970) and Hill v. Stone, 421 U.S. 289 (1975) in which it held that the right to vote in municipal bond elections could not constitutionally be restricted to taxpayers or property owners. I was admitted to practice before this Court in 1969 and wrote briefs amicus curiae that were submitted in the first and last of these cases, urging the Court not to adopt a rule that might invalidate bonds previously issued after being voted at such elections. In the Phoenix case I reviewed the briefs submitted by both sides to make sure that the issues were properly raised so that I might later approve bonds based on the Court's decision.

Throughout this decade the practice of advance refunding outstanding bond issues became widespread. This involved an issuer's selling new bonds and investing the proceeds in U.S. government bonds, sufficient, with interest, to pay the old bonds when called for redemption or paid at maturity. I worked on the first of these to become widely known, for the City of Phoenix, and on many others.

I was also prominent in connection with the practice of issuing industrial development bonds; these grew from issues of a few hundred thousand dollars of voted general obligation bonds to major issues of dozens of millions of dollars of unvoted revenue bonds for the purpose of building facilities to be leased by local governments to shareholder-owned corporations.

=====1970's=====


In 1969 and the early 1970's I found that until the States in which I approved bonds amended their laws or had supreme court decisions that validated "free-for-all" elections, I could not approve many bonds of local governments in those States. This gave me time to start writing law review articles, a practice that I kept up until after my retirement. I appeared on various seminars and panels sponsored by Bond Attorneys' Workshop, Executive Enterprises, Inc., Institute of Continuing Legal Education, American Bar Association, National Association of Bond Lawyers and Practicing Law Institute throughout this decade and thereafter.

I also participated in discussions with members of the staffs of the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of the Treasury on the subject of regulations to prevent abuses of advance refunding: as the government bonds in which the advance refunding bond proceeds were invested bore a higher yield than the new bonds, a substantial profit (called "arbitrage" by the Service) could be made unless regulations artificially restricted the yield of the investments. These regulations required calculations of yield that could practically be done only on a computer, and so I learned to use a computer at a time when I also had to learn to write the necessary programs to do the calculations. I appeared as a witness occasionally at hearings of the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives and hearings of the Internal Revenue Service on proposed legislation and regulations to restrict advance refunding bonds and industrial development bonds.

In this decade I served a year as president of each of The Chicago Literary Club and The Cliff Dwellers. During my presidency of the latter, a suit was brought by the National Organization of Women to require the Illinois Liquor Control Commission to revoke the liquor licenses of various downtown clubs, including The Cliff Dwellers, for failure to admit women to membership. The Cliff Dwellers' defense was that they didn't have a liquor license, but used the unit system by which members purportedly bought their liquor directly from licensed retail dealers who delivered it to the club. It was futile. I had long believed that women should be admitted to membership, but nevertheless had to defend a practice that was not changed until several years later. Ironically, one source of law the plaintiffs cited was Article I, Section 17, of the Illinois Constitution of 1970 forbidding sexual discrimination in the sale of property (i.e. liquor).

At the end of the decade, in 1979, I participated in the founding of the National Association of Bond Lawyers ("NABL"), and was the organization's first vice-president.

=====1980's=====


I continued to work with NABL and became its second president, serving in 1980-81. I also became chairman of the Section of Local Government Law of the American Bar Association for the 1982-83 year. In 1982 Congress adopted a law declaring that, with minor exceptions, interest on nearly all municipal bonds issued thereafter would be subject to federal income taxes unless the bonds were issued in registered or book entry form. The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board called a meeting of various industry groups to decide what to do. Don Howell, my successor as President of NABL asked me to represent this organization, and I, as then Chairman of the Section of Local Government Law of the ABA, appointed Bernie Friel (who was the first president of NABL) to represent the Section. We knew of several States whose laws permitted most types of traditional bonds to be issued only as coupon bonds, and the legislatures of those States would not be meeting for several months. During a few awkward moments before Dan Rostenkowski, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, I persuaded him to agree to an amendment to the effective date of the law to give the various States time to amend their laws.

Congress passed other laws to eliminate the tax exemption of interest on various types of bonds they considered abusive, and these laws generally took effect on January 1 of the year following adoption. The threat of not being able to do it any more stimulated many municipalities to issue bonds they otherwise might not have, and one year I had three closings between Christmas and New Year's: two in New York and one in Atlanta. Dodge flew to Atlanta with a couple of shotguns at this time; he and I spent two or three days shooting quail at Callaway Gardens after the last closing.

My mother died on February 17, 1983, aged 88, and my father on August 11, 1984, aged 86.

In 1984 Luigi, Shaw, Dodge, and I chartered a canal barge with crew and sailed through the Champagne region of France. This and subsequent vacations throughout the rest of the decade, as well as the 1990's and into the 21st Century have been described in a series of accounts

Shaw left for college at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1983 and Dodge for Rochester Institute of Technology in 1986. After putting Dodge on the train, Luigi and I told the children that if they got into trouble they were to call each other, and left for three weeks in New Zealand.

In September, 1987, Luigi (who was working in the Department of Architecture of The Art Institute of Chicago) went to Paris to help install the Art Institute's visiting show of Chicago architecture in the newly opened Musee d'Orsay. I joined her for a few days in Brittany before we both went back to Paris for the celebration of the opening of the show. Luigi then went back to Chicago and I crossed the English Channel for a few days of shooting in the Norfolk Broads with some American friends including partner Dick Goss. While in Europe, I missed the annual meeting of the National Association of Bond Lawyers at which I was awarded the Association's Bernard P. Friel Award for Distinguished Service in Public Finance.

=====1990's=====


On March 1, 1990, I retired from the active practice of law, but retained an office with Chapman and Cutler for about a year. Then I established a new office in the Majestic Building, 22 West Monroe Street, a block and a half east. Here I continue activities that do not constitute the practice of law, although I did undertake to act as an expert witness in a couple of cases involving municipal bonds. At the request of Fred Kiel, the editor of The Bond Lawyer, I write a column called "Voice from the Past" for this quarterly publication of the National Association of Bond Lawyers. Copies of these columns can be found on line.

In 1991 I had cataract surgery on my right eye; in 1993 my gall bladder was removed.

Early in this decade I bought stock in the Chalone Winery (now the Chalone Wine Group), a publicly held small winery that provides splendid shareholder benefits, including reduced prices on wine, an annual shareholders' celebration at the winery east of Soledad, California, and trips (at each shareholder's own expense) to various wine producing areas of the world. Descriptions of such trips to Chile and Argentina, France, Portugal, Italy and Australia appear in the series of travel accounts mentioned above.

On February 5, 1994, our daughter Shaw married Peter Moore, son of Mrs. Judith Moore of Perrysburg, Ohio, at The Fortnightly of Chicago, and on June 5, 1994, Dodge married Sandra Goodrum, daughter of Kenneth and Helen Goodrum of Vienna, Virginia, at Airlee Virginia.

In 1995 and 1996 I headed a campaign to raise funds for The Cliff Dwellers to help pay the cost of the move from their former quarters atop Orchestra Hall to the new space on the top floor of 200 North Michigan Avenue.

On August 12, 1995, our first granddaughter, Winslow Judith Moore, was born; on July 23, 1996, our first grandson, Manly Mason Mumford (called Mason) was born shortly after Dodge graduated from George Mason University.

I wrote (and subsequently published) a paper, "The Old Family Fire," for The Chicago Literary Club about my great-great-grandfather, Roswell B. Mason, who was in charge of building the Illinois Central Railroad and was Mayor of Chicago at the time of the Great Fire of 1871.

I started (and continue) to be the webmaster both for The Chicago Literary Club and for The Cliff Dwellers.

=====2000's=====


On February 25, 2000, my sister Alice Mumford Soule died.

On March 7, 2000, Luigi and I granted a conservation easement on our 160 acres at Hogarty to North Central Conservancy Trust of Wausau, Wisconsin, to prevent future development, farming, mining, quarrying, and logging. I wrote a paper on this subject for The Chicago Literary Club.

On May 4, 2000, our second granddaughter, Aurora Helena Mumford, was born.

I started a family website at http://www.mumford.cx.

On June 30, 2001, Luigi and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary with a party at The Newberry Library, and had our photographic portrait taken by Peter Kiar; a portion of that photograph appears above.

THE END
(Until I have more to write about)

Manly W. Mumford was diagnosed with bladder cancer in January of 2002, and passed away on December 31, 2003. He is missed by many. - Dodge