Time to talk to George

"Hiya, Soapy!" 4-year-old George shouted to the governor.

Williams walked over and patted him on the shoulder.

"Hiya, feller."

Brookover, 64, still has a knack for swimming with big fish. The longtime East Lansing attorney is representing J. Peter Lark in the imbroglio over the former Board of Water & Light general manager´s dismissal.

"He is involved in almost every highvisibility employment case in this area," declared another prominent Brookover client, political consultant and former Ingham County Commissioner Mark Grebner.

Brookover cultivates an aw-shucks attitude about his streak of high-profile cases.

"I don´t pick my clients. They pick me," he shrugged.

When a big fish is canned, Brookover usually represents the can-ee. In 2006, he represented Lansing Community College President Paula Cunningham when the Board of Trustees dismissed her from the job. When Chris Stuchell resigned as director of Lansing Housing Commission in 2009, he retained Brookover.

"I´m happy and proud to represent people who have had employment turmoil," Brookover said. He was quick to add that there´s been plenty of that in Michigan in the last 20 years or so.

Brookover´s lifelong interest in law, politics and history began with his father, Wilbur Brookover, mayor of East Lansing from 1971 to 1975 and a professor of social science at Michigan State University.

Old-school liberalism is a family tradition.

Wilbur Brookover, a staunch Democrat, testified against the harmful effects of school segregation as an expert witness in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.

"We watched the nightly news and read everything," Brookover said.

Brookover has a soft spot for the underdog. If he had his pick of any trial in history, he´d defend John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher who was put on trial for teaching evolution in public school. Famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, who represented Scopes, is one of Brookover´s heroes.

"I would have loved to represent almost any of Clarence Darrow´s clients — Leopold & Loeb, the Wobblies, the UAW back in the 1930s," he said.

But Brookover liked to go against the grain, even as a tyke. After the 1952 presidential election, when everyone in his family mourned the defeat of the Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson, George Brookover stubbornly liked Ike.

"After all, he was the president," Brookover said.

He´ll happily argue either side of an employment dispute. In 2007, he was retained by Ingham County Circuit Court Chief Judge William Colette in a frontpage-grabbing dispute with Judge Beverly Nettles-Nickerson, who was suspended from her job and accused her boss, Collette, of racism.

Brookover sympathizes with beleaguered business owners as well as beleaguered employees.

"This has been a very tough state to exist for private sector business in the last 20 years or so, whether it´s because of the politicization of everything, the ineffectiveness of state government, or other reasons," he said.

After graduating from East Lansing High School, Brookover studied labor and industrial relations at Cornell University, where he met his wife, Patricia. She was president of a sorority and he was working part time in the kitchen of the sorority house.

On the first day of school, Patricia brought the kitchen staff into the dining room in their white coats and ties and introduced them to the women. "Times were changing, but there was still quite a bit of formality on campus," Brookover said.

But Patricia didn´t want the women to put on airs. She told them to say "hello" if they were to meet any of the kitchen staff outside of the house.

"That was a mistake," Brookover said. The very next day, they found themselves sitting next to each other in class. "She was stuck," he said. "She had to talk to me."

Brookover played football for a year at Cornell, but dropped it as campus unrest and national turmoil over civil rights and Vietnam heated up.

"I just didn´t like it anymore," he said. "There were a lot of other things going on."

He pulled a low draft number but was saved from duty in Vietnam when President Richard Nixon ended the draft in 1973.

He went to law school at the University of Michigan. "I was not academically distinguished," he admitted. But he found some "pretty good mentors" when he clerked for Foster Smith law firm (then Foster Collins) in summer 1974. He joined the firm in 1974 and got a variety of experience in criminal, domestic and labor-employment cases.

At Brookover´s current firm, Brookover Carr & Shaberg in East Lansing, high-profile cases make up only a fraction of the workload. Brookover handles a wide range of bread-and-butter employment law disputes, including grievances and other work-related disputes at Michigan State University, along with contract law cases and other types of civil litigation.

To relax, Brookover heads down to his ancestral farm in Indiana, sits on the porch with a cigar and a glass of bourbon, and "watches the corn." He compared his time with a fine cigar to yoga, "if you´re doing it right."

He has no interest in public office, although he served on the East Lansing school board from 2003 to 2011.

Grebner has known Brookover for 20 years and has retained him as an attorney since the early 1990s.

"It shows how highly I regard him that I´m an attorney, and he handles all my legal work, which is a lot," Grebner said.

Brookover put any discussion of the Lark case off limits, but he said the high-profile cases aren´t all that different from his other work. "It´s just a variable that enters into people´s perceptions," he said. "If it´s a jury trial, you need to be aware of what the jurors have read or not read in the papers."

If Grebner had his way, Brookover might have found himself skirmishing with the BWL on two fronts by now. Last week, Grebner paid a visit to the Dye Water Conditioning Plant to see the 1930s murals by artists Charles Pollock and Frank Cassara. (By coincidence, a print of the Cassara mural depicting the destructive power of water is on the conference room wall at Brookover´s firm.)

The Dye plant is closed to the public except for special events or by appointment. Grebner didn´t expect the doors of Oz to budge for one petitioner. To his surprise, a staffer ushered him in and let him ogle the art to his heart´s content.

"I wanted to test them, to see if the building is really open to the public," Grebner said. "If I ran into problems, I would have talked to George."