Theron G. Strong

Theron G. Strong had long been a familiar figure at the Century lunch-table and Saturday evening groups. His professional career stretched back to famous law cases in the New York courts, now almost forgotten, and a memory that never forgot an incident or anecdote, especially of the humorous sort, made him a mine of reminiscence on the oddities and pleasantries of the old-time New York bar. His “Landmarks of a Lawyer’s Lifetime” is a collection of those anecdotes such as has not often been put together, and the stories are not told for themselves alone, but to illustrate some point in the character of the legal luminary whom Strong would already have sketched. Perhaps the most completely American of them all, a story which Strong used to repeat with gusto, was his tale of that Irish-American New York lawyer, the once-famous Counsellor Nolan, of whom, in advance of a homicide trial, a certain priest, believing earnestly in the innocence of the man accused, had asked: “Counsellor, don’t you think you can get this young man acquitted?” To which the counsellor rejoined: “Well, father, these cases when they come before Recorder Smyth are hard to win; but I think that with your inflooence [sic] and a little perjury we shall be able to get him off.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1925 Century Association Yearbook