CAREER
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From: Curtis S.
Date: Saturday, June 7, 2008, 8:03 PM
Subject: Career
Reply to: 264271
ID: 261715

Maybe this is worth telling. My career as a lawyer came from a match book cover. A fair to poor student at VHHS, I worked at a factory for 9 years and never went to college. One day I saw a match book cover that advertised a correspondence school to become an attorney. It seemed like a pipe dream. After a year of home study, I enrolled in a nonaccredited night law school and also passed someting called the college equivalency exam and the baby bar. It still seemed like a pipe dream.

But 3 years later I passed the Calif bar exam. What a rush! I was the first Sisk in our line to even have graduated High School. Ten years in the Fresno Public Defenders office, handling homicides, including death penalty cases, established me as average with research and motions but with a flair for jury trials. (Mom and Dad had called it a gift for gab) After around 20 years in private practice I retired in 2000 after handling some very high profile cases including the Corcoran Prison cases dubbed by the press "the booty bandit" and the "Corcoran 8" or "gladiator days" We won them all to end my career. To be honest, I never felt like the equal of my attorney peers with their high class educations. I'm sure some of you have better career stories, but thats mine.

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