Just last week I was sitting in Café Carolina at Cameron Village in Raleigh and in walked Jackie Murdock. He is a little older than he was when he was an All ACC first team basketball guard in 1957 for Wake Forest, but he still looks the same. The face has not changed. He played only one year in Winston-Salem…the first year the school was there and graduated with the first class on what was then the new campus.

 

                I was a kid when he played and was connected at the hip to Wake Forest, even on the old campus in the town of Wake Forest where we played in Gore Gymnasium in front of a sell-out crowd of about 2,000. But that was a golden time. I remember Jackie hurling down the court for a fast break layup, and I remember in his senior year when he set the NCAA record for consecutive free throws at 39.

 

                Then there was 1966 when for one year he was the head basketball coach at Wake Forest, taking over from Bones McKinney. The basketball situation was a mess, and one day, after the season was over, he was invited to meet with Dr. Tribble, the school president and was told the school wanted to go in a different direction and would not be hiring Jackie as a permanent coach. Jackie looked at Dr. Tribble, accepted his decision and told him he had hoped he could help the school turn things around, much as Dr. Tribble had had to do. And then he got up and walked out.

 

                Jackie never looked back and had a successful career in Raleigh with the North Carolina Department of Transportation as the Secondary Roads Officer. But even though he is now a little older, and he probably can’t run down the court quite as fast, he still remembers playing and wanting to beat Carolina. He once said as a student that every Wake Forest freshman learns when he or she first comes to school that that is the great goal.

 

                And sometimes he did. But then on this day, Jackie left the restaurant with his friend Grey Poole to play golf. Grey played basketball at Carolina. But just for an instant, time stopped and memories went back to when Murdock, Dickie Hemric, Lefty Davis and Ernie Wiggins were just about the best thing around. Jackie Murdock still is.

                I first met Bernie Segal in the winter of 1978 in Washington, D.C. at an oral argument involving Jeffrey MacDonald before the United Supreme Court. Since the early days of 1970, not long after first being accused by the United States Army of murder, he had been at MacDonald’s side, winning the Article 32 Hearing in the summer of 1970 that initially cleared MacDonald. Then, there came the Federal Grand Jury deliberations in the late summer, fall and winter of 1974, culminating in an Indictment for three counts of murder in February, 1975. Finally there were four years of appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and ultimately the Supreme Court.

 

                Then, there was the summer of 1979. That is when all hell broke loose, and for seven weeks, beginning in mid July, there was a packed federal courtroom every day while something close to a war took place between Jeffrey MacDonald, Bernie Segal and Wade Smith and the federal government, represented largely by Brian Murtagh, a Justice Department lawyer, on loan from Washington, and myself.

 

                Through it all, there was Bernie Segal, absolutely larger than life.  He was smart, diligent, tenacious, taking no prisoners, and fully confident in the rightness of his cause. He never quit, and he had trouble leaving witnesses alone without hours of questioning. Indeed, Judge Franklin Dupree, the presiding federal judge, said at a local luncheon for the Wake County Bar that summer, that “Bernie Segal was the only lawyer he knew who could cross examine a witness for three days in an uncontested divorce case.”

 

                Bernie’s client did not win that summer. Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted on all counts of murder and is still in federal prison in Maryland. But Bernie’s legal career went beyond that one case. He was a law professor for years at Golden State University in San Francisco and, I am sure, taught hundreds of law students how to better practice law on behalf of their clients.

 

                I had neither spoken with or seen Bernie in years. But I remember him well. He was a passionate advocate for his client. And to me personally, he was fair.