Alphonso T. Clearwater

The public career of Judge Alphonso Trompbour Clearwater stretched back to the middle Seventies; it was one among many instances of the American people’s determination to keep on the bench jurists whose capacity was tried and proved. He was one of the men to whom fellow-citizens instinctively turn for counsel on large public experiments; yet he was so far removed from the qualities of a professional Dryasdust that he confessed half-deprecatingly, late in life, his incorrigible fondness for reading Horace, Virgil, Plutarch, Plato and Aristotle in hours of leisure.

Judge Clearwater was extremely urbane in manner, but trenchant and vigorous in speech. It is recalle[d] by his friends that, during his last twenty years, the Judge was afflicted with increasing deafness, that it was very marked during his eminent service in the Constitutional Convention, but that he obtained from it certain advantages not unlike those derived by Sir Joshua Reynolds from his famous ear-trumpet. He carried with him a portable audiphone and ear-piece. This he would adjust and place in front of him when he desired to hear. When, on the other hand, he did not care to listen, he would detach the connection, and nothing could then break in upon his personal meditations.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1934 Century Association Yearbook