by Robert Coram
After the cows were slaughtered, they were suspended from hooks and moved down a line of meat cutters. Day’s job was to cut out the heart, lungs, and liver. The production pace was such that he had to work quickly. Workers wore metal mesh gloves. Even so, many sliced their hands and fingers.
In the yards, the stench of urine and fecal matter from half-crazed animals was overpowering. And in the packinghouse the entire malodorous process — the blood and viscera, the hooves and offal that boiled day and night — was so powerful and so penetrating that it floated like a miasma over Sioux City. The smell of the packinghouses was the smell of Sioux City. Every evening Bud walked out the gate with the stench imbedded in his clothes, and he thought there was no more repulsive odor in the world.
One day he would find something almost as bad.
THE danger of Day’s work, the odor and the fatigue, the extra courses and long hours of study, stretched him to the limit. Not surprisingly, he did not enjoy college. Several of his Riverside friends dropped out. But Bud Day knew that an education could lift him out of Riverside.
In later years, Day would remember only two of his teachers. The first was a history professor who encouraged and structured his interest in the past. The second taught English literature and required her students to memorize poems and a dozen or so of Shakespeare’s sonnets. At the time, Day thought the assignments silly and time wasting, not knowing that decades later, recalling those poems and sonnets would do much toward maintaining his sanity.
Doris went to choir practice every Wednesday night and rode the streetcar home. It was a big step when her parents decided Day could drive her home — no dawdling permitted. Then the Sorensens allowed Bud to take Doris to movies downtown at the Orpheum Theater. They knew what time the movies ended and calculated within five minutes when Doris should be home.
But increasingly exhausted from work, bored with the inanities of college, and now enduring what he considered oppressive dating rules, Bud grew discouraged about his romance with Doris. Then one day her father said to him, “You come to church every Sunday. Why don’t you join our church?” Bud was confirmed as a Lutheran. Slowly and inexorably his life and the life of Doris Sorensen were becoming intertwined.
One day Doris’s mother asked her, “Do you love Bud?”
“I don’t know,” stammered Doris. She was in high school. Why was her mother talking to her about love?
“Well, if you don’t, break off this relationship right now because Bud is in love with you.”
Doris was stunned. “How do you know when you are in love?” she asked.
“You know. You just know. Bud loves you. I don’t want him hurt or you hurt.”
Less than a year later, in December 1946, Doris’s mother died. Doris thought often about what her mother had said and thus was not surprised when, one night at dinner, Bud looked at her across the table and said, “Doris, when are we going to get married?”
That was his way of proposing.
“Well, I want to wait until I am twenty,” she said.
That was her way of saying yes.
WHEN Doris graduated from high school, her father took her to Norway for five months to become more proficient in Norwegian and to learn more of her family history. Before she left, she and Bud made a pact. While she was gone they both would date other people. If they still felt strongly about each other when she returned, they would make plans to get married.
Doris and her father traveled the length and breadth of Norway, meeting the oldest and most distant members of the family. Doris heard of relatives who played crucial roles in the Resistance; of men who had been POWs and tortured by the Germans almost to the point of death. But, it was stressed, they had never betrayed the Resistance. Because the Norwegian resistance to the Germans had been so weak, there were few notable Norwegian patriots. Thus, the bravery of her own relatives assumed even more importance.
Doris sent Bud a letter giving him the time she and her father would return to Sioux City. When the two Sorensens stepped down from the train, Bud was waiting. Doris knew they would be married.
Doris’s father accepted this but issued more rules. If Doris went to college, she had to promise she would not get married until she graduated and worked for a while. Sonwald Sorensen did not want to send his daughter to college unless she intended to put her education to use in a practical fashion. Otherwise, it was a secretarial school.
Doris picked secretarial school.
By late 1947, Day lacked only the obligatory religion courses before he could graduate from Morningside. But he had enough hours to enter law school at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, which, in the pre–interstate highway days of the late 1940s, was forty-two miles north of Sioux City, so he dropped out of college and entered law school. Still feeling the pressure of the four-year time frame for the GI Bill, Bud took extra courses every quarter.
His early-morning ride to Vermillion was relieved by the fact that it was pheasant-hunting season. Every morning before daylight, Bud picked up his shotgun, an act that sent Curly into a frenzy of running and leaping, loaded the dog into his car, and drove up Highway 77. In Vermillion he parked near the white granite building that housed the law school. Curly followed him to class, claws clicking on the oak flooring. During class, Curly slept under Day’s chair. (Few students wanted to sit near Day because Curly often passed noxious gas con brio.) At the end of class, Day and Curly jumped back into his car and “road hunted” on the way home. Day drove slowly down 77, shotgun by his leg. When he saw a pheasant, he stopped and released Curly. The dog followed the bird into the tall grass, then flushed it, giving Bud a clear shot. Some days he came home with three or four pheasants for the table.
EVERY student, if he is fortunate, finds a professor who, in an intellectual sense, sets him on fire. For Bud Day that man was Marshall McKusick, dean of the law school. McKusick was the first true scholar the River Rat had ever met, and he would have a tremendous impact on Day’s life.
The dean had a shock of white hair and looked like the movie version of a Supreme Court justice. He spent summers in Maine and was the most worldly man Day had ever met. McKusick spoke Latin fluently and sometimes in class jumped back and forth between English and Latin, an ability that awed Bud and made the classes sparkle. He also was a man of vision and principle. He horrified many when, in 1948, he allowed women into the law school. As dean, he decreed that his law school would not follow the lead of colleges and universities throughout America and expand just to take advantage of revenues through the GI Bill. The freshman class of the law school had always consisted of forty students; in order to give those students the best possible education, the freshman class would continue to have only forty students.
McKusick took a special interest in Day. During long chats in his office, the dean made Day believe that anything in life was possible. And he reinforced values that Day had learned from his father, ideas about principles and integrity and holding on to one’s integrity no matter the outside pressure.
IN the spring of 1948, Iowa gave its World War II veterans a onetime bonus of $300 to supplement their GI Bill. Day used the money to buy Doris an engagement ring. They would have to wait more than a year to get married, until Day’s mother began receiving a welfare check that would replace the money Bud was giving her every month.
DURING his first year of law school, Day worked Friday and Saturday nights at a bar called Pheasant Acres. School and work made for eighteen-hour days. But by going to summer school and taking a heavy course load, he would finish in two years. He also joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).
During the last quarter of law school, Day’s schedule finally got the best of him. After class and after work or after visiting Doris, he went to the law library in the courthouse and studied until 2 a.m. Then he staggered home. Because he had a 7:30 a.m. class, he had to get up at 5 a.m. “We have to get married,” he said to Doris. “I can’t see you in the evenings, then get up and
drive to Vermillion and go to class and then go to my job. This is not working out.”
By now Doris’s father had remarried and was happy to have Doris move out.
On Memorial Day weekend, May 28, 1949, about six weeks before Doris turned twenty and a little over two months before Bud was to graduate from law school, George Everette Day and Doris Merlene Sorensen were married in St. John Lutheran Church in Sioux City.
Theirs was to be an extraordinary marriage, a match in which both would be called upon to give more and to pay a higher price than most couples could ever imagine.
THE new couple spent their honeymoon at Nest Lake in southwest Minnesota. They had barely settled into their one-room cabin when there was a fearful racket out front and a host of voices shouting, “Radook!” It was the four ushers from the wedding. They had stolen a case of bourbon from the reception and were ready to party.
Frank Work, in his understated fashion, remembers that “Bud and Doris were real surprised to see us.”
Nevertheless, Day smiled and said, “Hey, guys. Good to see you. How long you staying?”
“All week,” said Frank Work. The four ushers had rented the adjacent cabin.
Day’s friends could not cook, so over the course of the next several days, they visited Bud and Doris for every meal. Doris could not cook either, so most meals were boiled eggs, sandwiches, and fish. Not only did the ushers eat every meal with Bud and Doris but they went bass fishing with them during the day and played cards with them every night. There was no bathroom in the cabin. An outhouse was fifty feet from the back door. And there was no privacy, as the bed was separated from the room by a curtain. So when Frank Work and the others visited, Doris had to sit with them.
Today when Doris tells the story, she laughs. But there is an edge to her laughter.
Upon the honeymooners’ return, Bud’s parents found a place for the newly married couple to live: Bell’s Motel at the corner of Riverside Boulevard and St. Paul Avenue. The motel was near the railroad tracks and only two blocks from Day’s old home on Riverside Boulevard. For two rooms and a bath, the rent was $50 per month. The front room was a combination living room–-dining room–kitchen and the back room was the bedroom. They had no checking account. Everything was paid in cash. Bud was earning about $110 per month. He set aside $50 for rent and $50 for car payments, and used the remaining $10 for meals and cigarettes. Doris was a secretary with the Western Adjustment Agency, where she made fifty cents an hour and worked five and a half days each week. Her check went for groceries, the $25-a-month payments on the refrigerator and stove, and streetcar tokens. The young couple set aside $5 each month so that on the twenty-eighth — their anniversary date — they could have a celebratory dinner, usually at the Gantz Steakhouse, where Day favored frog legs, a great delicacy in Sioux City. The budget was so tight that, once, Doris did not have $1.50 to pick up her dry cleaning. The clothes stayed at the cleaners more than a year.
To their new apartment, Bud brought a chair, a lamp, and a phonograph. Doris brought a typewriter, a bed, a cedar chest, a sewing machine, several rugs, and a lace tablecloth. They received a kitchen table and four chairs as a wedding gift. Two of the chairs were put together with an afghan draped over them to serve as a “love seat.”
The motel was about thirty feet from a railroad track, and several times daily the train from Sioux Falls to Omaha rumbled through, blowing its whistle and causing the building to tremble. Day had heard the train for years and was not bothered. But it took Doris months to get used to the noise.
Day’s friends continued with the running shivaree, coming to the motel several nights each week, standing outside shouting, “Radook!” and blowing horns. One evening about six months later, Day opened the door and walked outside. He was smiling. But his eyes were as cold as arctic ice when he said in a calm voice, “I think it is about time this ended.” And it did. Right then.
When Christmas came, Bud and Doris could afford only one string of lights for their first Christmas tree. They had no washing machine, so Bud’s mother washed their clothes. Television had not come to Sioux City and they did not have a radio and could not afford a telephone, so they spent hours every evening talking. They spent time with her father and his new wife and with Bud’s parents. The long conversations strengthened the bond between Bud and Doris, and for the remainder of their lives, they savored long evening discussions.
They lived in the motel for eight months before moving to the top floor of a Victorian house on South Palmetto, a street marked with enormous oaks and elms. The apartment was a few blocks from Morningside College, and except for his stint in the Marine Corps, this was the first time Bud Day lived outside Riverside. Their apartment windows included stained glass, and sometimes they felt as if they were living in a church.
THE day before he graduated from law school, Bud took Curly in the front door of the school and out the back door. Afterward he told people Curly was the smartest dog in Siouxland. “That dog has been through law school,” he said.
Day then returned to Morningside to pick up the fifteen hours of religion courses he needed to graduate. He received his degree in January 1950.
He and Frank Work borrowed $3,000 — a lot of money at the time — and bought the Fidelity Detective and Collection Agency in Sioux City, a somewhat shady operation that they intended to make legitimate. Day used his membership in the South Dakota Bar to file a few proceedings in collection matters, but he did not have a law practice. Soon the detective agency was making a profit and growing. Day, like his father, was a staunch Democrat and became president of the Sioux City chapter of Young Democrats. He was beginning to make his presence felt in the community.
Then came an incident that is important because of what it reveals both about Day’s sense of duty and about his ability to subjugate friendship to what he considers higher concepts. Years later, after he was released from prison in North Vietnam, he would rise above the brotherhood of the POWs to prosecute fellow officers whom he believed to have shirked their duties. And still later, when he was an old man and engaged in the great legal battle of his life, a colleague would observe his lonely fight and say, “Bud Day, by his very nature, is incapable of allowing injustice to go unchallenged.”
Late one night, Day and Work were conducting what detectives call “a domestic surveillance.” The target was a bartender whose wife suspected he was too friendly with female customers. As Day and Work watched the bartender through a window, Day looked around and noticed that across the street, the door of a clothing store was ajar. He told Work to call the police.
Day should have simply kept his eye on the door of the clothing store and waited for the cops. That would have been the prudent thing to do. But instead Day did what police officers say is one of the most dangerous tasks in law enforcement: he entered a darkened building where a criminal was inside, plying his trade.
“He walked in and never batted an eye,” Work says. “He had more guts than brains.”
One of the highest compliments that one police officer can bestow on another is to say, “He is always the first one through the door.” This means not only that the officer is brave but that he does not shirk his duty.
Day stepped inside and pulled the .32-caliber pistol he carried. As his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, he noticed an area closed off with a sheet of canvas — a good place for a burglar to hide. Day approached and in the faint light from the street saw a bulge in the canvas. The burglar had seen Day and was lying in wait. Day ordered the man out. When the burglar stepped from behind the canvas, he had a .45-caliber pistol in his hand. “Drop the gun,” Day ordered.
His tone and his confidence made the burglar do just that.
Bud marched the man out of the store and waited for the police to arrive. But Work was having a hard time convincing the police to come to Day’s assistance. The police knew Work and thought this was a hoax. It was more than an hour before an officer arrived. During that time, the burglar, who not o
nly was from Riverside but was the brother of one of Day’s schoolmates, kept saying, “How about turning me loose?” Riverside people, he stressed, stick together.
But to Bud Day, duty was a higher concept than friendship.
“No. You’re going to jail.”
The police arrived and took the burglar into custody. Then they found the burglar’s heavily armed partner waiting in a nearby car. The car was loaded with goods taken from the clothing store. Both burglars had prior convictions and were considered dangerous men.
Work still remembers the respect in the eyes of the police when they realized what Day had done.
IN April 1950, backed by a college degree, a law degree, and two years of ROTC courses, Day wrote the Marine Corps asking that his records be cleared of his “nonrecurrent violation” — the court-martial for stealing a jeep — so he could apply for a reserve commission. The Marine Corps refused and he appealed. Before a decision was rendered, the Iowa Army National Guard offered Day a commission. He accepted.
In May 1950, Day filed an application to take the Iowa bar exam. His application was returned with a note saying that because of his misdemeanor conviction — firing a shotgun in the city limits — he would not be allowed to take the exam. And he could not practice in Iowa until he passed the bar.
Today he makes light of not being allowed to take the Iowa bar exam by saying, “I couldn’t have cared less.” He says he could have appealed and prevailed. He says that America was about to go to war in Korea, that he had a commission and knew he would spend his career in the military. Being a Sioux City lawyer just wasn’t that important.