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Starcher honored for his commitment to social justice for all

A photograph of Larry Starcher, smiling and perhaps looking just a bit bemused, commanded a large screen in the Fitzsimmons Event Hall at WVU’s College of Law on Sunday afternoon.

Given the expression it depicted, it was almost as if the former attorney and Supreme Court justice was listening in on Phyllis Stewart-Brown’s recollection of how she first made his acquaintance 43 years ago.

Stewart-Brown was among the handful who spoke at his memorial service.

Starcher died on the day before Christmas this past year, after suffering from a lengthy illness. He was 80.

Stewart-Brown was a newly minted WVU graduate and Greenbrier County native who hadn’t been much of anywhere until she journeyed north for school in Morgantown.

Earlier, she had applied for a job in Mon Circuit Court, and Starcher’s office had called to set up an interview.

A luncheon interview.

In her world, judges always occupied the upper echelon of the social tier.

Which meant dressing for dinner – with a waiter and multiple eating-utensils to go with the multiple courses.

That’s what she was thinking about as she jotted down the time and place.

“It was at the Blue Ribbon Restaurant,” she said, pausing for a beat to let the laughter build among the people in the hall who knew the place.

“I pictured fine dining,” she said.

“And fine china.”

What she got was a fine burger and a bowl of soup beans to go with it. The Blue Ribbon, as it turned out, was a blue-ribbon diner, and Starcher’s favorite place to eat.

The judge was just-plain folks, she said.

He came up from an impoverished background in Roane County, where he was the first person in his family to graduate high school – much less attend college.

He worked his way through college and law school as a janitor and laborer. During summers away from the classroom, he did heavy construction with the crews putting up the Fort Martin power plant.

Starcher knew how to do the grit-under-your-fingernails stuff.

He could hang drywall and fix a busted water pipe.

He could pop the hood to coax a couple hundred more miles out of an old junker.

Under the economic circumstances of his upbringing, if it was broken – and you couldn’t fix it – you did without.

He decided he wanted to repair social ills, as well.

Starcher began his legal career as a staff attorney at the North Central West Virginia Legal Aid Society, a grassroots group of storefront lawyers headquartered in Morgantown – though light years away from the marquee law firms of High Street.

He later became director of the society, which took on welfare fights, asbestos claims, Black Lung contentions and Social Security disability issues.

Retired attorney and former Morgantown mayor Bill Byrne, who also went to work there after law school and his time in the Peace Corps, smiled like Starcher’s photograph as he remembered his life at Legal Aid.

The staff then – Byrne included, he said – consisted of a group of idealistic, “hippie lawyers,” who would often discuss matters of workplace hierarchy, and how such conventions couldn’t be more unnecessary, as they sat, all the while, cross-legged, in a circle on the floor.

Starcher was always absent from the circle, but the director’s drollery, humor and sarcasm abounded, Byrne said, as he commented on the earnest dialogue from his desk chair.

“One time Larry said, ‘Well, as you’re climbing down the social ladder, don’t step on my hands, because I’m climbing up.’”

Starcher’s point, Byrne said, was that he wanted everyone to be able to climb up respective ladders, secure in the knowledge that they would have a legal voice, no matter what.

He didn’t care about your skin color or your ZIP code, all the speakers said Sunday.

For instance, Stewart-Brown, who got hired after that interview at the Blue Ribbon, was the first Black president of the West Virginia Association of Probation Officers when she retired four decades later.

The judge wasn’t without critics, though, they said.

Sometimes, he wouldn’t recuse himself from a case when maybe he should have, they said.

Even so, they said, he was always motivated by the call to simply do the right thing.

Meanwhile, the verdict came in early on his family, his daughter Mollianne Starcher Hamilton said.

The jurist made every vacation, birthday and holiday gathering an adventure, and, if anyone at the kitchen table asked – and only if they asked, Mollianne said – only then would he offer counsel.

“My dad was my North Star.”

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