Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

A: Yes, I remember a fellow by the name of Gupton, Wiley Gupton, who was a
senior representative when I was a freshman representative and . . . no,
Wiley Gupton was a junior representative. It was a fellow by the name of
Luther Glanton who was a senior representative when I was a freshman representative.
He went on from there to Drake University to the Law school and
he is now a judge out in Des Moines, Iowa.
There was something about the people that served on the student council that
showed them to be people of some maturity and some capability and some
analytical kinds of approaches to life, with their feet on the ground, and it
was a nice kind of a spot to be in.
Q: Did any of them come to Illinois? Any one that served on the council,
other than you?
A: I don't remember anyone. Yes, I guess--yes, they did. I think Billy Jones
served on that council and Billy Jones is now a judge down in East St. Louis.
He was from East St. Louis. He was one of the others that served on the
council that I can recall.
Q: You mentioned when you changed from your business administrative interest
to law that there was a fellow student that partially influenced you in this.
Who was that?
A: No, my freshman roommate was a fellow whose name is Waldorf Astoria Johnson
who comes from Quincy, Florida. When he came there as a freshman, it was his
desire to become a lawyer. I had not really given much thought to being a
lawyer because I wanted to be an insurance actuary. But, as I took the courses
of the freshman and sophomore year with the overview of business administration,
I realized that accounting, particularly, was something that took sort of an
introverted kind of a personality. Particularly after I got into debating in
the sophomore year, I felt that, you know, I was more outgoing and gregarious
than introspective and that I might like something where you dealt with people.
That's when I started sort of thinking about going to the law school instead.
ti
Q: Did this change the courses that you . . .
A: Did not change my itinerary. I went ahead and graduated in business administration,
but . . . *
Q: Were there any courses that you took because you knew you were headed
toward law that you wouldn't have taken otherwise?
A: Well, I'm not sure. Of course, we took insurance, we took finance, we
took--1 did take logic, which probably was one I might not have taken if I had
not been thinking about the law. I took statistics, of course, which wag part
of the other curriculum anyway, and I took tests and measurements which was
about the same thing as the statistics. So, it was pretty much the same, but
I guess I probably took a couple of political science courses instead of lone.