Alva Long, Made Legal Mark As Freewheeling Crusader
As one friend tells it, Alva Long once sat quietly and watched as a court reporter dutifully recorded a witness's answer during pre-trial questioning.
At one point during the answer, Mr. Long disagreed, and was convinced the witness was lying. Dressed in a fluorescent jacket and bright pants, Mr. Long jumped up and swatted the court reporter's equipment across the room.
"Your job is to take down the truth, and that was a lie," the ponytailed attorney shouted.
It was but one incident over Mr. Long's decades-long career in private law practice in Auburn, but it embodied the spirit of his storied crusades.
Alva Long died Saturday at his home. He was 68.
Mr. Long, the freewheeling attorney who wore a peace symbol on his lapel and kept his office walls free of diplomas, earned a reputation early for challenging the legal establishment.
"I'm truly sorry he's gone," said Jim Turner, a Bellevue attorney and classmate of Mr. Long at the University of Washington Law School in the early 1950s.
"We need more people like that in our society to keep us awake."
He crusaded in the 1960s to either enforce or scrap the state's blue laws. He challenged his own Elks Club on the legality of long-held gaming nights. And he fought a parking ticket all the way to the state Supreme Court.
In every battle, the West Seattle native, and son of Juvenile Court Judge William Long, was known for his creative flair and his willingness to throw himself into the mix to test the meaning of a law.
But Mr. Long's selection of causes - which included trying to lose money at the Longacres racetrack (he won a bundle, actually) and parking all over town in poorly marked handicapped spaces - were not as random and spontaneous as his character suggested.
"My purpose is to fight a double standard and to seek the uniform enforcement of law as it is on the books," Mr. Long told a reporter during his campaign to get the state to either enforce its 1909 blue laws, or abandon them.
"I do not believe in selective enforcement of laws," said Mr. Long, who once headed the Auburn Committee for the Universal Applicability of Laws.
While the theme ran throughout Mr. Long's career, he spent much of his time in recent decades working with clients who'd run into the law while drinking and driving.
A self-described alcoholic who took his last drink in the early 1970s, Mr. Long worked with clients to find a solution that would go beyond beating the rap.
"He really thought it could be used to help the plight of individuals," said Jeff Tolman, a Poulsbo, Kitsap County, attorney who knew Mr. Long for more than 15 years.
"Alva did it, like that old commercial, one client at a time," Tolman recalled. "He looked at each person as somebody he might be able to help."
But he also worked at a higher level, elected in 1990 to the Board of Governors of the Washington State Bar Association. During his three-year term as one of the leaders of the organization that represents thousands of working attorneys from across the state, Mr. Long continued to challenge the time-honored traditions of the legal community.
He declared that "tradition sucks," and sought to keep the group's expensive annual conferences in-state. He fought a membership-fee increase.
"No matter if you disagreed with him 1,000 percent" you had to respect him, said Lem Howell, a Seattle attorney who served on the Board of Governors with Mr. Long.
During an interview in 1979, the man who spent his life needling Washington's legal community envisioned his own funeral. The funeral would be by invitation only, Mr. Long supposed. There would be a taped speech. "Everyone would file by the open casket, where they would see a framed picture of a middle finger pointing in the air," he imagined then. "Alongside would be an urn of my ashes and a sign that would read, `This really burns me up.' "
Services for Mr. Long are being arranged by Price-Helton Funeral Home in Auburn.