By Paul Janczewski
Legal News
Ward Chapman set a record that may never be broken. He served as corporation counsel for Genesee County for 33 years, the longest-serving corporation counsel in the county by a long shot, and perhaps for that position in all of Michigan.
And when you add Chapman’s time in the Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office, he has given 44 continuous years of service to his county. And he’s very proud of it.
“I think that persons in public service, whether elected to office, or employees in various offices, tend to put in more effort than the public realizes to get the job done,” Chapman said.
And it has become more difficult over the past few years, due to budgetary problems.
“I think it’s pretty satisfying to have been involved in public service,” he said.
“It was a good choice.”
But all good things must come to an end eventually. And Chapman’s run ended when he retired on December 31, 2011.
“They say that the law is a jealous mistress, and I found that to be so,” Chapman said in a recent interview. “It’s very demanding, and you reach a point where you realize there are some responsibilities you have to take care of and you’re just never getting to any of those things.”
Chapman, 77, was born in Flint, and his family moved around quite a bit when he was growing up. He said he probably lived in every quadrant of Flint, and Genesee County. His father, Samuel, was born and raised in Canada, and worked for years at Buick as a die welder. His mother, Lauretta, was a registered nurse, but stopped working to raise her family of four before returning to the profession after all the kids were grown.
But Pearl Harbor Day had a profound impact on the family, and in 1942 they sold their house and got rid of most of the possessions they could not load into the family car and moved to California, where his father found work at a plant building fighter planes.
“That illustrates how America turned on a dime after Pearl Harbor,” Chapman said.
The family moved back to Genesee County after about a year, but returned to California in 1946. They made their way back Flint again a year later.
While his father worked primarily at Buick, and his mother was a homemaker, the couple had several business ventures and worked together on those at times. Chapman, his brother and two sisters enjoyed growing up in Flint when it was considered a great small city in which to live.
“Growing up in Flint back then was very different,” he said. “We did not have the rampant crime problem, and there was a lot more community pride.”
Years ago, Flint had one of the highest per capita incomes, due to the auto industry, and the Flint Public Schools had a nationwide reputation for being progressive.
“There was just a feel about living in this community that it was a good place to live, and people felt good about it,” he said.
Chapman graduated from Flint Northern High School in 1952, and has warm memories of his high school days.
“Our parents believed in us, our teachers believed in us, and so we believed in ourselves, and because we believed in ourselves, we did well,” he said.
After two years at Flint Junior College, where Chapman was first in his class and graduated with an associate in arts degree, he moved on to the University of Michigan. He had interests in law, teaching, and journalism. In fact, Chapman worked summers and weekends for The Flint News Advertising for about four years, helping put himself through college.
After graduating in 1956 from U-M with a bachelor of arts degree in English, Chapman decided on a career in law.
“I was always interested in government and politics, so law seemed like a logical connection,” he said.
Teaching was still an interest, cultivated by having good teachers when he was in school, and Chapman still has a teaching certificate, obtained after he received his master of arts degree from U-M in 1959.
He graduated from the U-M Law School in 1960 after being an assistant editor of the Michigan Law Review, which gave him the chance to work with top firms. Chapman’s first job was with a prominent business law firm in Cleveland, where he learned about the corporate world, working on researching complicated legal issues, but left after three years, returning to Genesee County.
“It just didn’t seem to be a world I wanted to continue in,” Chapman said. “I just felt more comfortable coming back to my own community, and I continued to be interested in government, public service and politics.”
Chapman and several other local attorneys established a small private practice doing insurance defense work. But after about four years, he took a position in the Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office in 1967. He said his work with Democratic politics was taking a lot of his time when he was with the firm, “so I needed to get into public service full time, or dial down.”
In his 11 years there, Chapman worked his way up to chief assistant prosecuting attorney.
“I thought it was important work, and I thought I made a contribution, both as a trial attorney on major cases and as an administrator within the office,” he said.
But in 1978, the county’s corporation counsel position opened, and Chapman jumped at it.
“It represented a new feel and it represented a new opportunity with a different kind of responsibility and still be a county employee,” he said.
The corporation counsel is the chief legal counsel for the county, and advises the Board of Commissioners, works with all county elected and appointed officials, and all civil matters involving the county.
“You try to see that all of their official acts are done in a legally correct manner, and try to prevent legal problems from arising by planning ahead,” Chapman said. “It’s a very diverse responsibility.”
For the next three-plus decades, Chapman has done that work admirably.When he first started, Chapman said local units of government began seeing a heavy volume of civil liability litigation. For decades, it was uncommon for local governmental units to be sued for employment discrimination, wrongful termination or violations of civil rights. But federal and state laws changed over the years, “and that drastically changed the landscape,” Chapman said.
“I became corporation counsel when the whole thing was starting to grow into a heavy volume of litigation, requiring us to spend more time advising clients on how to avoid liability in these situations.”
But he enjoyed this job the best of any position he had held.
“There was a tremendous variety and many challenging legal issues, always something new,” he said. “Frequently, we had some things that were pretty complex and required a fairly thorough legal analysis to get through it the right way.”
Chapman said another change he has seen over the years is more intergovernmental arrangements. Some of those major projects included the city of Flint and Genesee County forming the Bishop International Airport Authority, the 911 Emergency Telephone Consortium, the Genesee District Library, the Flint Area Narcotics Group (FANG), the construction of the county jail, and the development of the McCree Courts and Human Services Center.
“People don’t realize how involved some of those projects are,” Chapman said.
It took two years to put the McCree package together, and the new county jail resulted from a class-action law suit after inmates sued in federal court over conditions at the old jail. Chapman said that suit was in court 11 years.
“So you can see how huge and involved some of these projects can be,” he said.
And Chapman predicted there will be many more intergovernmental projects in Michigan in the future.
Chapman said he did not miss his time in court on this job, compared to the large amount of time he spent arguing as an assistant prosecutor. Although he always told his assistants in corporation counsel they had to be “ready to go to court at a moment’s notice,” he also found corporation counsel work challenging and rewarding.
“So instead of missing trial work, or prosecution work, I had the satisfaction of new and different challenges.”
Over the years, Chapman has fed his teaching bug by being an adjunct instructor of law at the U-M Flint and as an instructor for the National College of District Attorneys, the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan and at the Flint Police Academy.
Retiring will allow him to spend more time with his wife of 32 years, Genesee County Circuit Court Judge Judith Fullerton. The two met when both worked in the Prosecutor’s Office. Chapman and Fullerton have a daughter, Sarah, and he has two daughters from his first marriage, Julie Zinger and Susan Chapman. Besides spending time with them and his four grandchildren, he and Fullerton enjoy travel—they have visited most of the 50 states, more than 30 foreign countries and all seven continents—as well as seeing plays and musicals. He also is, understandably, a big U-M football fan. Chapman said he was reluctant to retire.
“I told my oldest daughter to check with me in a year, and I’ll tell you if this was a good idea,” he said.
He misses the work, and the people, but tries to stay busy. Chapman also worries about the corporation counsel office, which lost two of four attorneys due to budgetary constraints.
But his daughter did not have to wait a year for his answer on the retirement question. Recently, Chapman took a position as special assistant attorney for Flint, working with the city’s emergency manager and the city attorney.
“I know that there are serious problems in Flint today,” he said. “But there are good people here, and there are assets to build on. I believe we can make solid progress in resolving our problems, but it will take a lot of hard work.”
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