It was a tale of two addresses for Jean Friend, the longtime circuit clerk of Monongalia County who died Aug. 14 in Morgantown at the age of 95.
Two addresses, with two specific dates, and two common concerns — attached, as they were — by a time bridge then spanning 56 years.
The first address is the Monongalia County Courthouse at 243 High Street, and the date was April 5, 1959.
Friend, who had been working as a legal secretary for an attorney on High Street — Morgantown’s main drag had plenty of them then, and still does — had just assumed a full-time job in the circuit clerk’s office.
Before, she was splitting her work week: Part-time, in the attorney’s office and part-time in the circuit clerk’s office, filling in for a worker who had just had a baby.
Eventually she signed on exclusively at the courthouse in the office that did the legal work of record for Mon.
That April morning 65 years ago was her first day as a full-timer.
To call it a no-frills operation would be like saying that Perry Mason, the TV attorney of the day who never lost a case, sure knew how to nail a closing argument.
Two manual typewriters.
Two deputies.
Three rooms and one judge.
And no copy machines.
Xerox had come out that year with its nifty, easy-to-use 914 model, but that innovation had yet to make it to Morgantown.
One had to make do.
Copying the past
The second address is the gleaming Monongalia County Justice Center, just a couple of blocks down at 175 High Street, and the date was Sept. 15, 2015.
That was the day the legal complex, with its chrome, carpeting, recessed lights, walls of glass and desktop after desktop of impressive technology, was being introduced to the public.
Friend, who was by then West Virginia’s longest-serving circuit clerk, was in the command of a whole suite of offices there.
Offices with their computers tapped into records of cases and processes from across the state and across the nation, all accessible by a couple of keyboard strokes.
Heck, one look at all of that through 1959 eyes would have made Perry Mason himself swear before a judge that he was surely asleep and dreaming his own science fiction movie.
The only thing missing?
Copy machines. Again.
They still hadn’t made the move from the courthouse.
And Friend was grousing — good-naturedly, but at the same time, not — about the whole thing.
Even as high-tech as things had gotten, things were still done in hard copy.
Duplicates and triplicates, even, were required.
Never mind the new digs, the veteran administrator said.
Until the copiers were in the office, the office couldn’t fully function, even if it could still do its work.
That she would remind people of the importance her office’s mission, even on that celebratory day, showed why she had been there for so long.
A new public servant, asks not
As said, she joined the office as deputy clerk in 1959 and won her first election as circuit clerk in 1962.
Friend retired at the end of 2022, capping a 63-year career in public life.
Like a lot of women of her generation, her call to public service was galvanized by John Kennedy’s campaign swing through the Mountain State in 1960.
Her political life, however, was defined before that.
Friend’s beautician mom, who always knew who was running, and what issues they were running on, worked the polls every Election Day.
Her daughter grew up steeped in the stuff.
Friend was active in the Young Democrats organization when the smiling JFK, a cultured Bostonian and hero of World War II with a glamorous wife, barnstormed the state on his way to the White House.
That was when every stop and every impromptu press conference at seemingly every coal tipple and school cafeteria, put the state with its ancient hills and hollows in klieg-light glare of the Big Time.
And there he was, in Morgantown.
“When Sen. Kennedy ran, it felt like all of us in our party came together to help him,” she remembered in an interview a few years ago.
“He was younger and had more charisma and an exciting wife,” she continued. “They really inspired the young people of Morgantown.”
Kennedy’s “Ask not” ethos became a “Why not?” challenge for her and the circuit clerk’s office.
The circuit clerk with the encyclopedic memory (she had a filing cabinet-recall of case numbers in her head) loved boiling the complexities of her office down to what it was really about.
“This is the office where everything that is intended to be heard by a judge or jury is filed,” she said.
“Everything begins here.”
An interesting family
For her, everything began and ended, in many ways, in the circuit clerk’s office.
There was loss.
She buried her husband, Harold “Abe” Friend, and her two sons, Randy and Richard.
But there was travel and there were nieces and nephews — and great-nieces and great-nephews, plus the great-greats of the litter — to dote and fuss over.
And forget that “crazy cat lady” business, also.
Every stray that sauntered up to her abode had a friend in Friend, just because it was the nurturing thing to do.
There were the tasty meals she cooked for the people in her office and the times she would counsel a young lawyer, fresh from the WVU College of Law and the bar exam, on how to really present a case beyond moot court hypotheticals.
Friend, who was cremated, had no funeral or memorial service, in accordance with her wishes. She was to be buried at Fletcher Cemetery, in Cheat Neck.
You can do a favor for her, if you prefer, by making a donation in her memory to WV Caring at 3433 University Avenue — the organization provides hospice and counseling for people battling progressive illness.
She was able to work all those years in the circuit clerk’s office, copy machines or no, she said, because, well, it wasn’t work.
Not really.
“It’s just very interesting to me,” she said, shortly after her re-election in 2016.
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