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Judge's opinion in emu dispute would seem to go beyond refute
Tuesday, March 06, 2001 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
As law, attorney Jeffrey Kramer figured Superior Court Judge Michael Eakin's latest opinion was suspect.
After all, it went against Kramer's client, a 63-year-old woman who claimed she was stiffed out of $48,000 by a now-defunct Washington County farm offering emus, economy-size ostriches, for breeding.
But as poetry, Kramer concedes, Eakin's opinion sang.
The opinion came down Friday. And five paragraphs came down as stanzas, carefully rhymed.
Stanza three, to wit:
"Appellant then filed a contract suit
but the verdict gave her claim the boot;
thus she was left with no resort
but this appeal to the Superior Court."
"I found it very enjoyable reading, for an adverse opinion," said Kramer, a Washington, Pa., attorney.
"The visual of birds just smacks of poetry," Eakin said yesterday from his office in Mechanicsburg, Cumberland County. "It did cry out for levity."
Eakin has put his reason to rhyme three times before, figuring some decisions warrant it. Last July, it was in the case of poodles Angel and Autumn, the former sent flying -- but not all the way to the afterlife -- by an errant motorist in Wilkinsburg. ("In this brace of miniature poodles, neither one wide nor tall/ one may have been named Autumn, but 'twas Angel took the fall.")
His next-to-last effort, two weeks ago, was a concurring opinion in a spat between two Limerick, Montgomery County, auto shops over similar names. For a dust-up in Limerick, a sonnet just wouldn't do.
" 'Limerick Auto' and 'Limerick Collision'
Are so close one may clearly envision
That the two were the same, So a limerick I frame,
And join in my colleagues' decision."
This time, Eakin's muse was the case of Washington resident Delores Liddle. In 1993, Liddle sank $48,000 from retirement savings into a pair of breeder emus from Denise Scholze, an emu rancher raising the birds on the Amity-area farm where Liddle worked as cook and housekeeper.
Emus are hapless, flightless birds that come with neither serviceable wings nor serviceable intellect. Those deficits weren't enough to dampen a craze that spread beyond the Southwest eight years ago, with investors buying birds to breed, convinced that America would queue up for low-fat emu burgers and high-priced emu leather.
America didn't.
As Eakin put it:
"The emu's a bird quite large and stately,
whose market potential was valued so greatly
that a decade ago, it was thought to be
the boom crop of the 21st century."
Four years ago, Scholze beat criminal charges filed by a Johnstown-area man who said she charged him $38,000 for a breeder pair, then delivered two females -- a mismatch that eluded everyone, since intelligence isn't the only domain where emus come up short.
Liddle says she, indeed, got a mixed set, Nicholas and Savannah.
But they produced no progeny, not even when Liddle packed them off to Louisiana to mate in warmer climes.
"Our appellant decided she ought to invest
in two breeding emus, but their conjugal nest
produced no chicks, so she tried to regain
her purchase money, but alas in vain.
Scholze maintained that, before the sale, she offered Liddle an exchange: a dozen $4,000 emu chicks for Nicholas and Savannah, if the pair failed to produce. Liddle declined, deciding to give love another chance.
That took Scholze off the hook, the court decided.
"The fault's the emus', not that of Liddle,
or Scholze, or the court placed in the middle.
Fruitless in Pennsylvania and Louisiana,
the blame's on Nicholas and Savannah."
Liddle said yesterday that she wound up giving her $48,000 emus away to pay their $9,000 boarding bill in Louisiana.
"I don't even think they were worth $9,000," she said.
Good opinion, Scholze's attorney, Samuel Pangburn of Washington, said yesterday.
And the poetry?
"Magnificent," said Pangburn, himself the author of 45 poems, some of them award-winners, since he tried his hand in 1997 at a Mother's Day verse. "I've been in this business a lot of years. Sometimes, we don't have fun anymore, but this one made me laugh."
As for Eakin, he's not sure how much longer his poetry career will go on. After all, he reminds, he's a candidate for the state Supreme Court. The justices there might not mix lyric and law so easily.
"But you never know," he said.
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