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Fitting portrait for a first ladY Law students .unveil a tribute to Edith House By Barbara Laker Staff Writer
t was a bot summer evening in 1916 when Lucius House sat on bis front porch and told his only daughter he'd just read that a new bill bad passed allowing women to practice law in Georgi~. . . · .To 13-year-old Edith House, it was a calling. "I remember saying, 'That's what I'll be - a lawyer,' not knowing one darn thing about it," says Miss House. "But my father was kind of proud of it, and the first thing I knew, it was all over town that I was going to be a lawyer." Miss House set out to prove her announcement wasn't just a dream. Or a joke. She was co-valedictorian and one of the first two women to graduate from the University of Georgia Law School. Tbe year was 1925. Sbe practiced law for 38 years and became assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida and acting U.S. attorney for the district before retiring in 1963. . Now 20 years later, tbe school's Women Law Students' Association is honoring Miss House's accomplishments. Last year it launched an annual lecture series named after ber. This year it commissioned a portrait of her that will be unveiled Tuesday in the law school courtroom. The 56 portraits that now grace tbe halls are of men. Edith House will be a first once again. But to the 80-year-old Miss House, all this hoopla is rather puzzling. "I still don't quite understand why they should go to all this trouble over me," sbe said during a telephone interview from her apartment in Jacksonville Beach, Fla. · Miss House doesn't seem to realize she was ahead of her time. In ber day, single career women were practically unheard of, but sbe never married. Sbe entered one of tbe
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Edith House {right, back row), with Chi Omega sorority sisters in a 1925 photo nation's most traditional and male-dominated professions. And she devoted ber life to it. Yet sbe insists sbe was never a trailblazer. "I knew I was going to have to make a living doing something, and school teaching didn't appeal to me," she explains. "I never have figured I accomplished anything extraordinary - except I've stayed off welfare and I've stayed out of jail. Just the fact that I was a woman and practiced law at the time made a big splash, but I don't see why everyone should get so excited about that." Friends and former co-workers see it differently, however. When describing Miss House, they repeat the same words: brilliant, quiet, modest, self-sufficient and hard-working. 1'Sbe was an outstanding lawyer and a dedicated public servant, in my opinion," says Judge David W. Dyer, who appointed her acting U.S. attorney in 1963. "I .had great admiration for her. She was very thorough, dedicated to her work." See HOUSE, Page 5-B