C.E.S. Wood

Recalling the elder Erskine Wood brought to mind his father, Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944), also known as C.E.S. Wood or just plain Colonel Wood. A West Point graduate, poet, friend of Mark Twain, iconoclast, and social rebel, Colonel Wood became a lawyer in Portland, where he socialized and struggled until 1918, when he earned a million-dollar legal fee for brokering a timber deal for the investment house of Lazard Freres — this was in 1918 dollars, and there was no income tax.

Colonel Wood had his own eccentricities; at a dinner party he hosted, the guests had just sat down at the table when a cow dashed through the dining room, followed by a servant waving a large knife. Colonel Wood stood up and intoned, “Dinner will be slightly delayed.”

When he received the fee he set up trusts for his wife and children and moved to California to live with his girlfriend, the poet Sarah Bard Field, whom he later married. Very late in his life he learned that his son-in-law, one of the trustees, had mismanaged two of the trusts. When he was ninety, he and other family members sued the son-in-law over the trusts. The cases came to the Oregon Supreme Court, which in companion opinions issued in 1946 (Wood v. Honeyman, 178 Or. 484 and 178 Or. 572) paid Colonel Wood high praise, describing him rightly as “an outstanding member of the Oregon bar until 1918” and then quoting extensively from his letters and deposition testimony. After quoting from one letter dated July 26, 1940, the court’s opinion says, “This letter is a remarkable tribute to the capacity of a man past ninety years of age to think with clarity, to express himself in kindliness and to recall vividly what had transpired a score of years ago.”

The opinion is most remarkable to me for one omission: the author doesn’t mention that Colonel Wood died on January 22, 1944, in the middle of the case. Colonel Wood’s personality was evidently so strong that two years after his death, the supreme court wasn’t quite ready to accept the fact that he was gone.