Tom Quaintance and Charles Quaintance

[00:03] TOM QUAINTANCE: Hi, I'm Tom Quaintance. I'm 54 years old. Today's date is Saturday, January 9, 2021, and I am in Norfolk, Virginia, calling in from Norfolk, Virginia. And I'm having a conversation today with Chad Quaintance, who's my dad. So, hey, dad.

[00:22] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Hey, Todd. So I'm calling in from Minneapolis.

[00:26] TOM QUAINTANCE: And what's your age?

[00:28] CHAD QUAINTANCE: I'm 81. Okay.

[00:29] TOM QUAINTANCE: Chad Quentin's 81, calling in from Minneapolis. My dad. So, dad, we've been talking for a while about the stories of your years in the Civil Rights Division. And I grew up with those stories, was born in 1966 in Selma. And I was doing some research before this conversation around the Mississippi burning case, which was, of course, a big one for you. And there was a struck yesterday just by the poster for that movie that said 1964, when America was at war with itself. And here we are on January 9, three days after a mob of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, where the Confederate flag was waved on the chamber floor and nooses were slung over mannequins and hung from makeshift gallows. So your stories from your days of the Civil Rights Division strike me, of course, as having extraordinary contemporary relevance. And I'll tell you, also this week, Miri, my oldest daughter, your second granddaughter, asked me a question about school. She said, daddy, I understand why I need to know reading and math, but what's so important about social studies? So I've got some questions for you about your history. And maybe when Mary listens to this, it might give her a sense of why we need to understand our shared history to build a better world. So starting. Starting with this. So how did a white kid from overwhelmingly white Legrand, Oregon, end up in the Civil Rights Division? What experiences did you have growing up that might have led you on that path?

[02:28] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Who really knows, of course, why you do any particular thing, but the things that stand out in my memory first is that my dad was driving me to see his dad over in Idaho. And we were driving through northeastern Oregon, and there was big barbed wire, triple layer barbed wire fence hanging over a big chain link fence. And my dad said, you know, that was for a Japanese internment camp. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I just was so shocked to think that we would round up citizens of the United States because they were Japanese ancestry and put them in these. These internment camps. So that I. That's my earliest memory of something having to do with civil rights. And then, I don't know, it was the same trip, but on the way Back from visiting my granddad, either that year or a couple years later, we stopped at a Dairy Queen, and my dad said, you see that Mexican kid over there? And, yeah. He says, they wouldn't serve it. And I said, what do you mean? They said they told him they don't serve Mexicans. And I thought, what is this? What? I don't. I don't get it. And then I think the third and maybe the first time I became an activist, if you will, is when I joined the Demolay, which was the Junior Masons of those. I don't even know if it still exists, but we had one black kid in our high school, and I didn't know him personally. He was two years younger than I. But we all voted for him to come into the group. But then we heard from our advisor that the international organization said no, that no black kids were invited. It was only white Protestant Christians. And so I thought, I can't be part of this. And I said, I'm resigning. And the guy said, but you took an oath of brotherhood. I said, well, that's why I'm resigning. So that's, I guess, the earliest memories I have that pointed me in that direction, that when it came time to do some kind of public service, that seemed natural. The Civil Rights Division. Seemed natural.

[04:53] TOM QUAINTANCE: Yeah. Yeah. The story of the Demolet, I heard that for the first time, I think, a year ago. I mean, that was one that I didn't. You know, the stories I heard growing up, that wasn't one of them, but, man, does that strike me. So you started with the Civil rights division in 1964. Right. So, John Doar. So just. So tell.

[05:19] CHAD QUAINTANCE: So tell us a little bit about.

[05:20] TOM QUAINTANCE: Your relationship with John Doar and who John Doar was. I mean, I remember John mostly as a kid at a wedding someplace, you know, popping up in all the wedding photos.

[05:33] CHAD QUAINTANCE: But you were big. You were in every picture at the wedding there in New Richmond, Wisconsin, where John grew up and where he practiced law. And he ran actually for Congress in 1968 or 19. Must be 58. 1958 or 60. I don't remember which. But as a Republican and lost. And then he decided, you know, I'm just bored of being a trial lawyer. He was a great trial lawyer, very successful. But he. He decided that he was going to go to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. And even though it was at the end of the, you know, was after the election of John F. Kennedy, and he knew that he probably wouldn't be able to stay there very Long, but he wanted to get involved in civil rights and, and he became this John Doar, even though that he was a Republican. Kennedy appointed him as the Assistant Attorney General for civil rights. So he's the person to whom I wrote. And he, you know, he called me up and asked me if I wanted to. Wanted to be part of the Civil Rights division. So that's what happened.

[06:53] TOM QUAINTANCE: So this is 1964. It's right before, I think you came in, right before this summer of freedom, you know, as the, with the, as we're trying to register black voters. And then right before the murders of Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner. Right, so the murders that were then filed as Mississippi Burning by the FBI. This is something I just learned because of the burnt out car that was discovered before those bodies were found. Right. So the Mississippi Burning case. But those matters, those murders happened in 64. The trial was later. Between those murders and the trial, you were doing work down in Alabama, primarily, so 1965, in Lowndes county, right after the Voting Rights Act. Tell me about your work down there.

[07:51] CHAD QUAINTANCE: In 1965. I had started to work, maybe even in 64. We moved to Selma, you know, in, in 65, because I was spending almost all the time in Selma. And so we were living there. And then I met Stokely Carmichael, who was the person with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who was assigned to Lowndes county, which is the county between Selma and Montgomery. And it's 80% black or 85, something like that. And the. When the Selma to Montgomery march, you know, where John Lewis was bashed by the state troopers crossing the bridge in Selma across the Alabama river, that, that led to the vote, you know, led ultimately to the march from Selma to Montgomery. And the Voting Rights act was passed in 65. And the first election that was happening under the Voting Rights act was the Democratic primary in May of 1966, May 3rd, which I happen to be able to remember the date because you were born May 1st on Sunday. And I was supposed to be in Lowndes county helping to get ready for that first big election. And I remember sitting in the waiting room while your mom was there in the hospital calling. You know, they were giving me these notes on what was happening and all the stuff I was supposed to be getting ready to, to go over there to. And I was in touch with Stokely Carmichael and all that kind of stuff. But then, you know, as soon as you were born, I ended up taking off right after that to go over to Lowndes county and Stokely Carmichael was telling me what the SNCC people were going to be doing, and I was telling him what the federal registrars were going to be doing. And so that election happened on May 3rd. And in Selma, the election was. A similar election was going on where the sheriff, Jim Clark, this big segregationist guy whose office was right across the street from mine, he was up for reelection and for re nomination as the Democratic candidate for sheriff. And that's another story, but I'm not sure. No, tell that.

[10:27] TOM QUAINTANCE: Tell that story in terms of the. So you've got the. Again, particularly, you know, is the pictures in the news with the women taking the ballots out of the. Off the congressional floor as that mob's coming in, you know, and the importance of. Of ballots and voting. And here we got some of the roots of it here in 1966. So tell about that story about Jim Clark.

[10:57] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Yeah. This is the first time that blacks had been permitted to register in any numbers at all in Dallas county, where Selma is located. And that election night, May 3rd, there were four black precincts where the votes were not yet in by midnight. And it was clear to the Democratic Party there in Selma that if those votes were counted, Jim Clark would no longer be sheriff. And so the Democratic Party impounded the ballot boxes that early in the morning on May 4th. And I remember that we, you know, John Doar was down in Selma then, and he and I drove over to Montgomery because the federal district judge was playing golf there. And we met him coming off the golf course and he signed an order to impound those four ballot boxes and have federal marshals take those into custody and get ready for a trial. And so that's what happened. And I ended up being part of the team that we sit with the sheriff's officers and federal people making sure that nothing happened to those ballots until the trial. I ended up being a minor witness in the trial just to show the chain of custody of those ballots. You know, I probably. I told you, I know that Jim Clark, whether you could see that case was going the other way, he'd always kind of. He and I got along in a sort of distant sort of way. But he. As I came out of the office that night of the trial and he. He was out there in the street and you could tell he'd been drinking. And he turned to me, says, Quaintance Quaintance I used to think you were a pretty nice guy, but now I just have one question for you. Are you a communist or are you a prevert? So I knew that he was ready To. He knew he had lost.

[13:09] TOM QUAINTANCE: Yeah.

[13:10] CHAD QUAINTANCE: At least he didn't. Didn't try to send any troops into the courthouse.

[13:16] TOM QUAINTANCE: But man. Man. So you tell another story. I think this one was in Wilcox county about getting. Encountering some guys who'd been drinking and said, tell that story.

[13:29] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Oh, boy. I had sued the Wilk, you know, on behalf of the Justice Department. I sued the Wilcox County Board of Education for. It was. It was another. Similar to Lowndes County. 80, 90% black residents. And the black schools were just these dirt shacks, I mean, these wood shacks and with dirt roads and all that kind of stuff.

[13:52] TOM QUAINTANCE: Let me just break in to say, you know, in looking at this, you've got. You've got these counties that are 80, 90% black and in some cases 0. In some cases 10, 15% black. Registration. Right. I mean, you've got counties where there's zero black residents who have been allowed to register to vote. I mean, and that's the work you guys are doing down there. So that schools are in this terrible shape.

[14:26] CHAD QUAINTANCE: So I'm down there looking at documents and the superintendent of schools was so. Oh, boy, he was so mad at me. And he. So anyway, on one night that I was looking, he locks the door right at 5:00 and I go across the street to fill the tank with. You know, there was a gas station there and I was filling the tank. And his three guys were pretty drunk. One of them was real drunk. And he started in on me just saying all kinds of racist kind of stuff and what was going to happen to me? What kind of violence was going to happen to me and to our daughter? Anyway, I drove on home and the next day I came back down and the superintendent at noon shut the door down and said, you're out of here. We're back at 1:00. And so I decided to go across and get a haircut. And I walked into. That was right next to the gas station. And I walked in and there were three. There were three persons there in the. In the barber shop, a barber and a customer. And the other barber, who was the guy who had been on me the night before saying all this terrible stuff. And the guy who was finishing up with his customer left, and the customer left. And so it's just the two of us. And the other barber pulled the shade down and locked the door. So here we are in this. In this barber shop, and the guy is stropping his razor, you know, getting ready to putting on the stuff to shave me down here. And neither of us said a word until it was all over. And then he said, he said, I don't know about you, but I was really scared while I was doing this. And he says, and I'm really sorry about what I did last time.

[16:24] TOM QUAINTANCE: Yeah, wow. I mean, the kind of, I mean both the kind of gut churning, walking through the kind of hate and rage and everything else, but then those moments of, okay, well now here are two people, two human beings actually dealing with each other. And it's pretty extraordinary. Like, I admitted that and I just, you know, I think it's always harder to be hateful after some kind of connection. Right. Which is, I guess, you know, part of what I do. Right. So I'm a theater artist and try to get people to try to build empathy, try to get people to understand what somebody else's walking in somebody else's shoes would be. You know, the thing about the sort of gross threats against your daughter. You talked about moving down into Selma, but that wasn't the norm. Right? I mean, I mean, were you. Was it. I mean, how many lawyers lived down in the field, so to speak?

[17:38] CHAD QUAINTANCE: I was the first to do that.

[17:41] TOM QUAINTANCE: Yeah.

[17:41] CHAD QUAINTANCE: It seemed to me that if you were gonna tell people what to do, you ought to be willing to live there.

[17:50] TOM QUAINTANCE: And were there experiences either whether it was scary or positive in terms of living in a community? With me being born in 66, you know, when you moved down there, Mary was about two, two and a half. So what was the, what was that experience like?

[18:10] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Well, you know, as I look back on it, I didn't make any effort to live in the black part of town. We bought a house. We had a. There was one of my college friends. I didn't realize that he had come from Selma, but somebody figured out that, that I was in a museum. Anyway, I got connected with this with his parents who were very gracious. They were white people. One, the father was Jewish and the mother was not. And that was its own source of. I think that made her more sympathetic and made the whole family more welcoming to us. And they were. And besides, I knew their son. And so they were, they were very gracious. Native found an apartment or a house the forced to rent. But then the guy found out that I was with the civil rights division and he said, no civil rights lawyer going to be renting this house. And so we ended up the only way we were. We finally just bought this house. $15,000 or something like little teeny house. And I remember one time Mary was in a, a nursery school, preschool Thing. And I was driving her to work one day and this kid in the back said, you know, Mary's dad is a racist word end lover. And I, I stopped the car and I said, you know, I don't, I'm not going to try to control what you say at home, but you're not going to use that word in this car. But, you know, Mary was in that class where that's, that was the way she was perceived.

[19:56] TOM QUAINTANCE: Right.

[19:58] CHAD QUAINTANCE: And.

[20:00] TOM QUAINTANCE: Wow.

[20:01] CHAD QUAINTANCE: And I know we had the, the woman who did some, some. She, we had a woman who did some cleaning at our house and she said ours was the only house where she was able to use the bathroom or able to drink out of the cups and the glasses in our kitchen and sit down at the kitchen table with us. Or, you know, and she and your mom became very good friends and they traded Christmas presents for as long as Louise Johnson lived. She would send us picado, if you remember.

[20:39] TOM QUAINTANCE: I do remember that. Yeah.

[20:41] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Yeah, that was, that was because of Louis Johnson. But there was, you know, there were plenty of, plenty of varied. Your mom is still friends with the next, you know, two doors down, this neighbor.

[20:59] TOM QUAINTANCE: And anyway, so, so, so now it's, I think it's 1967 is that trial, the Shoba trial, the Mississippi burning case. And let's talk about your involvement with it. Talk about the turning point of that trial and about that dramatic closing argument.

[21:24] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Okay, sure, I was, as you know, pretty young new lawyer, maybe three years out of law school, but John and I had developed a pretty good relationship. And so he, he asked me to sit in the courtroom and he was, he was going to second chair the trial. Another person was trying it and it was going to be like a three week trial or four week trial, something like that. And they started off with this, with this big map of the whole Neshoba county with all these locations on it, like the earthen dam where the bodies were ultimately found and where this car was stopped and that kind of stuff. And, and you could just tell that the jurors, 12 white jurors, some of them were nodding off and nothing was just going at all. And you could tell the defendants were all feeling pretty cocky and confident. And John turned to me and he handed me a note saying, get me Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan was one of the clan members who had become a, a witness for the government. And he was actually part of the killing team. You know, he was the track, you know. Well, anyway, that had those three civil rights workers out there in the woods and where they were Murdered. And so I went to get. I told the FBI that John Doar wants Jim Jordan. And, oh, Jordan just had a full scale panic attack. He was lying on the floor, just out. And he just. And I went to John. I left him a note saying that Jim Jordan is not going to be able to testify today. Meantime, the jurors are going, you know, just kind of start nodding off again. And the same guy is up there telling all about the map. And so John takes about two minutes and he sends me another note. He hands me a note saying, get me Delmar Dennis. So Delmar Dennis was the. Was the club, the grand club of the Klan. The club meant chaplain. And the Klan didn't realize that he was. Had become an FBI informant when he got upset about the violence that was involved in the Klan. And so anyway, I went out to the FBI, I said, john wants Delmar Dennis. And the guy looked, what do you mean? You know, he's not supposed to testify till next week. And I don't even know if he's in Meridian where the trial was taking place. And so I says, you want me to go tell John Doar you can't find Delmar does get Delmar Dennis in there? And sure enough, you know, he's. He's ready to go. So I give John a note saying Delmar Dennis is ready to go. And John, as the. As this witness is finally getting off the stand to telling all about this map. And the jurors are just kind of. And the defendants are kind of patting each other on the back and feeling good and confident and everything. And Sam Bowers, the imperial wizard of the Klan, was one of the defendants. And he was looking real, real happy. And then John stands up and he says, the government calls Del Mar Dennis. And, oh, I mean, you could just. There was electricity in the courtroom, and Sam Bowers just was looking like this. And all these lawyers are what. And the jurors are all wide awake. And so John gets him on the stand, and Del Mar Dennis tells about why he got into the Klan and why he became an informant. And then he says, you know, he became very close to Sam Bowers, the imperial leader, who was the guy who had ordered the execution of Michael Schwerner, who the people called the Jew, and who was a civil rights worker. And so anyway, the Delmar Dennis is saying that he's talking to Sam Bowers, and that Sam, about a week before the indictments of and arrests these members of the Klan. And it says, looks like the FBI is closing in on the Boys. And he says, you know, I'm really. It's too bad that the boys are going to have to go through this, but. But it's a good thing. And Del Mar is. What do you mean it's a good thing? He says, because history will now be able to record that for the first time, Christians carried out the execution of a Jew in America. And, oh, the jurors just were stunned. And it was just this moment that you could tell something was going to happen. And I don't know, you know, it could fast forward maybe to the trial. I don't know if you. I think that you wanted me to. The closing argument. But John made that case move quickly after he'd had Delmar Dennis on the stand. He knew that he had a good chance of getting some convictions. And he cut away. There were 18 witnesses. I mean, 18 defendants. He just. He narrowed it down to Sam Bowers and the six guys who were at the killing. He just. He said, you're going to forget these others. And then he asked me to. To draft a closing argument, and he said he wanted it to be based on Shakespeare's Richard iii, which is.

[27:00] TOM QUAINTANCE: I mean, of course, I love that story as a theater guy, but, like, so, Richard iii. So talk about that.

[27:10] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Yeah. So you had to be a Shakespeare guy, right?

[27:13] TOM QUAINTANCE: Exactly.

[27:16] CHAD QUAINTANCE: So. So anyway, he wants this. And, you know, and Richard iii, one of the key moments of the play is. Is the Richard iii, the guy who's going to become Richard iii, has murdered the king and the young princes. And Richard III comes into Lady Anne, the grieving widow and mother, and she's weeping and sobbing. And he says, lady, weep not. And she says, you know, say that I. You know, she says, my children are dead. My husband is dead. He says, say I slew them not. And she says, say they are not dead. So that's the. That's the way John wanted to build this argument to that moment of Richard iii. And he gave the Shakespearean argument that. I mean, those jurors were sitting there like they were at one of your presentations of a Shakespeare play, you know, just on the edges of their seats and fully paying attention. And when he. When he gets to that final line of the. Of his closing argument, he says, after he's told the story of Richard III and Lady Ann and all that, he says, for you to return a verdict of not guilty is to say they are not dead. And, oh, boy, those jurors, I mean, they. They convicted Sam Bowers and the guys who were there at the killing first time. I mean, nobody expected to hear in the heart of Mississippi that there's going to be an all white jury that would stand up and tell the truth. But that's exactly what happened.

[29:07] TOM QUAINTANCE: That's amazing. And so, you know, so I recently had a conversation with Mike Wiley, who, you know, playwright, wrote Parchment Hour songs and stories of the 61 Freedom Riders. Stokely Carmichael's a character in that. One of the other characters in that play, Joan Mulholland, who was a freedom writer, came and spoke on this panel and she talked about the work that was done in the 60s as tackling the legal elements of segregation and the legal side of the results of what the racist policies built. But of course not tackling doesn't solve racism itself. Right. So you've got, you've got some incredible victories through there. But then I'll tell you, one of the stories that stood out to me as a kid was a story of, and you've gone through all of these things where you're, you know, you're in the chair with the guy strapping the, the razor, you're, you're, you're stopped by the cops and you know, threatened in different, different circumstances. And you walk through all of that pretty, with pretty nonplussed, it seemed to me as a kid. But there was one story you told where you were staying in a hotel and they tried to charge you double occupancy. And can you tell that story?

[30:53] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Yeah, it's true that all these sort of physical threats didn't really faze me and I'm not sure why, but that's always been the case. I've not ever been really afraid of physical harm. But I was in South Carolina in February of 1968. Some kids that there are two black campuses in that town of Orangeburg and two black colleges. And some kids from those colleges had gone with a SNCC worker to integrate the bowling alley, try to integrate the bowling alley, and they had been turned down flat. And then there was all kinds of unrest on the campuses and some and the highway patrol ended up coming in to confront these people and ended up shooting into the crowd of students and killing two of the students and wounding another 28, shooting them in the back. And then just as they were trying to run away using buckshot rather than birdshot, you know, just stuff designed to kill. And Ramsey Clark, the attorney general, decided he wanted to, wanted to go ahead with this case even though it probably couldn't be won. And he sent me to do that. And I, I was just not an adequate Prosecutor I'd had. This was my first case that I'd ever tried as a. As a prosecutor. And I ended up. One day I woke up, couldn't see, and I, you know, that that was the start of my blindness was the. Was that the fear and anxiety of that actually is what kind of got that going. But then when the trial itself came and there were. There were newspaper reporters from around the world there, and the U.S. attorney wouldn't go into the courtroom with me. And I'm sitting there trying to prosecute these eight highway patrolmen who had fired into the crowd. And I just, I. I maybe didn't even realize how scared I was, but I would. I was staying in a motel room where there were two double beds. And I would start out the night on one side of one of the beds and I'd wake up all cold sweat. I'd move to the other side of that bed. Two hours later, I'd wake up just in a cold sweat. Then I moved to the other bed and I'd wake up two hours later in a cold sweat. Then I'd move to the fourth side of. Fourth half of the two beds. And as I finally. The case was over, which I of course, lost when we lost. But the clerk gave me a bill for double occupancy. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, but you use both beds. And I told him, you know, why? And they charged me only for single occupancy. But that was the most scared. As I look back on it, I realized that I was really scared. Well, scared of being inadequate, you know, scared of not being. Not being confident to do that kind of job, really.

[34:18] TOM QUAINTANCE: I mean, when I was growing up, though, that story was about, you know, the fear. I mean, I didn't separate it from physical fear. It was a fear of the circumstances. And the fact that you told me that they didn't want you impugning the testimony of the FBI agents who were.

[34:37] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Oh yeah, you know, Klein needs the deputy Attorney general. By that time I was. John Mitchell was the attorney general and Kleinies was his deputy attorney General. He called me up and said there were. It turned out we had a full investigation, if you can imagine. Which means you interview every witness and have a statement either signed by or person not re agreeing to sign, but you'd have a report of every witness. And I was going to talk to some people from the fire department and they said, you know, why don't you talk to the FBI? I said, well, I mean, I've got their report and they said, no, no, talk to the FBI agents who were there. And there were three FBI agents who were there on the scene who, you know, had not told me. I mean, I knew them all. And so then, anyway, I was one of those who said that the shots had come from. There was a bullet hole in the railroad station. And we had an FBI expert who said that that could only have come from the other campus. It could not have come from the crowd of students that were shot into. And this guy though, got up there and was telling the jurors that the bullet had come from, that he heard shot from the students. And he claimed that he looked at the bullet hole and that's where it came from. And I, you know, and Kleindien said that I couldn't cross examine him or do anything to impugn his blah, blah, blah. And I said, you know, I'm trying this case.

[36:23] TOM QUAINTANCE: So, you know, so now and you know, here, 2021 after 2020, the massive black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the not just George Floyd killing, but, you know, go back and you know, I painted direct line to that, you know, that this is a case that you're not supposed to win that case, you know, and, and the being put out there in a way that is, yeah, we don't want to win this one, which is a terrible feeling, you know, and, but I just, yeah, I'll just say that. So, you know, I end up as a theater artist. I direct Shakespeare and produce plays with civil rights era. And is there anything that you want to ask me or tell me now we're coming to the end of this interview and I'll turn the tables on you there. Is there anything that you want to ask or tell me?

[37:38] CHAD QUAINTANCE: Oh, I think you are so great, Tom. And I think you were born to do theater. And I think that this thing that you and Mike Wiley have, this wonderful. I mean, that thrills me when you put on the Parchment Hour the first time down there and that I was there, Fayetteville, North Carolina, with you doing that and Mike in the audience. Oh, that was such a thrill. And to see, you know, to see those pictures of the. And to have the guy that had interviewed Stokely Carmichael for his biography was there at the time, being able to talk with him and to think, you know, I feel good that something like this could happen and then that you've done it again and again. You did it with Joan Mulholland and you did it during this Covid time that you've been able to do it. Again, so to speak.

[38:40] TOM QUAINTANCE: Well, it's a story that I, of course, you know, the stories of songs and stories of the 61 Freedom Riders is the. Is the subtitle of that play. The songs and stories of the civil rights is something that I grew up with with you, dad. And, you know, when I was spelling out the storycorps tell us about yourself form, I said something like, I'm an artist, a husband, a father, and a proud son of a civil rights lawyer. And I. I just love you dearly. And I can't begin to tell you how much you mean to me and the entire family. And it's really. I'm really glad we got to sit down and tell these stories.

[39:27] CHAD QUAINTANCE: I am, too, if I could kiss your time through the air. But, you know, there we go.

[39:33] TOM QUAINTANCE: All right.

[39:34] CHAD QUAINTANCE: I love you, dad. Love you. Tomorrow.