Chris Mills:  

Life I practice labor and employment law, representing mamagement, in a firm that has multiple offices across the country. With my second wife, I have an 18-year old son who's a freshman at Cornell. We live in Chatham NJ. After high school, I went "back East" to college, at Washington & Lee University in Virginia. Debate continued to be my main activity, as it had in high school. In fact, I probably selected W&L in part because the debate coach there told me "you'll start as a freshman." And I did, eventually winning the Mid-Atlantic qualifying tournament for the National College Debate Tournament my junior year. Never got to go to the big tournament, however, as my debate partner was killed the next day while tubing on a creek near school. W&L was an all-male college at the time and the slogan was that students worked hard and played hard. It was about 50% right for me, as I wasn't at all social until senior year. But all the study yielded results. Phi Beta Kappa junior year and eventually graduated magna cum laude in 1969 with both a BS in Commerce and a BA in American History. I'd always wanted to be an attorney and W&L is very supportive with its students in getting them into good graduate schools; so I had choices and eventually went off to Yale Law School in the fall of 1969. Showing just about where my head was at back then, I'd never even heard of Woodstock until I met some of my Yale classmates who had just come from attending it. I entered law school knowing that I had a 4-year military commitment ahead of me as a Navy JAG lawyer. I had been awarded a Rotary Foundation Fellowship to study in France but didn't flunk my physical or get creative with an appeal or being reclassified, and so I would have been drafted in short order. I had applied for and been accepted into a Navy program that gave you a direct commission and required service as a JAG lawyer for 4 years. So after Yale, where my major activities and interests were again focused on debate-like appellate argument contests, I trundled off to Newport RI for Naval Justice School in the fall of 1972, just in time to hold a wake with another kindred spirit who happened to be a fellow Nixon-hater, over the results of the 72 elections. From Newport, the Navy sent me to Washington DC, where I wrote appellate briefs relating to appeals of the most serious of the courts martial involving Navy and Marine Corps personnel (well, mostly Marines) for a couple of years and then moved over to an assignment where I actually did get to work for the Judge Advocate General himself. It was nothing like the TV show! The Navy/Uncle Sam funded more law school work at Georgetown - I went at night and got an LL.M. degree in labor law in 1975. I found my life's calling by way of getting into an argument over labor law policy with another JAG lawyer whose father was a regional Vice President for the Steelworkers Union. After leaving the Navy in 1976, I started out with a large Baltimore law firm, living close by in Annapolis and learning, courtesy of my first wife, that I really liked making a boat sail. That firm was the wrong place for me at the time, and a chance interview landed me in an unexpected place -- an in-house slot at one of the Bell System Operating Telephone Companies, C&P Telephone in DC. I loved it. We did all our own litigation, hiring no outside counsel. I commuted an hour into the city but didn't mind it. But it was not to last. [THIS SELF-ABSORBED NARRATIVE IS CONTINUED IN THE "WORK" SECTION. I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THERE WAS A CHARACTER LIMIT ON THESE SECTIONS.] College [SEE THE "LIFE" SECTION FIRST, WHICH CONTAINS A NARRATIVE THAT THEN CONTINUES INTO THE "WORK" SECTION.] I attended Washington & Lee University starting in the Fall of 1965. It was an all-male school, which is what I thought I wanted at the time. Given my level of social skills at the time, it was probably a good thing that I was parked at a place like that. Studies were my focus, not social life. I think I used to say in my senior year, when I finally took a car back to school, that I'd had 6 real dates in my first 3 years. Competitive inter-collegiate debate was my "thing." I actually selected W&L in part because my visit to the school came on the heels of an appearance at the National High School Championships during the summer of 1964, and the debate coach promised me that I'd have a chance to "start" if I came there. So 13 or so weeks ever year, we'd pile into the coach's Peugeot to drive to some debate tournament, leaving on Wednesday afternoon and returning on Sunday. Eventually, after what seemed at the time llike too few victories along the way, my partner and I won the Mid-Atlantic Qualifying tournament for the National Collegiate Debate Torunament in the Spring of 1968. The next day, while he was off celebrating tubing on a creek near school, he was killed when he hit his head on a submerged rock and drowned. So no national debate tournament. Academics were always a personal focus, and the grades just seemed to come. I found tha...Expand for more