Judge William L. Forbes: Five Decades Later, He Paid Dearly For Youthful Summers in Shipyards

Bill Forbes, an undergraduate at Bridgewater College in western Virginia, needed a job in the summer of 1949.

The son of a streetcar driver, he had grown up in rough-and-tumble South Norfolk, where his early years had been inauspicious.

He dropped out of South Norfolk High School in 1945 to join the Army. By the time he took the wheel of a Jeep in Germany, the war had ended. He eventually returned to Hampton Roads, enrolled at Maury High and finally, at age 20, got his diploma.

Now, as a college student, he was still adrift.

During two summer breaks he worked in shipyards lining the Elizabeth River.

As a rigger's helper, Forbes toiled in the bellies of ships under repair. The work was hot and filthy. In 1949, during one of those sultry shifts, he made a life-altering decision: He would go to law school.

At William and Mary's Marshall-Wythe School of Law in Williamsburg, he became known as "The Sandwich Man,'' selling his handmade hoagies by the hundreds to fraternities on campus to help fund his studies.

Forbes graduated from law school at 27, passed the Virginia State Bar, and in 1954 began practicing law with Bernard Glasser, whose office was in Norfolk's Berkley section.

Life was good for Bill Forbes. Glasser noted that his new hire was bright, capable, handsome. He had a future in law, maybe even politics. On Aug. 28, Forbes married his college sweetheart, Vanette Francis "Nancy'' Schultz.

On Nov. 13, the newlyweds attended a bar mitzvah for Bernard Glasser's eldest son, Richard, a precocious boy who aspired to a career in law or medicine and played clarinet in the Blair Junior High School band. Nancy Forbes was one of many people who hugged Richard's mother, Rose, that day at Beth El Temple.

Neither woman had an inkling that, 46 years later, they would share another hug under somber circumstances.

Building a career

Bernard Glasser had pegged Bill Forbes perfectly.

After leaving Glasser's practice in 1956, Forbes rose quickly through the legal ranks: city attorney, then commonwealth's attorney, for the old city of South Norfolk. In 1963, he became the first city attorney for the newly formed city of Chesapeake.

Young families arrived in the sprawling new city in growing numbers. By 1975, General District Court judges each heard about 200 cases a day. The legislature responded by creating more judgeships.

On July 1, 1975, William Lee Forbes donned a black robe and became the city's newest judge.

Early on, he was known for his dry sense of humor. One day a defendant demanded a lie-detector test. Forbes leaned forward from the bench and intoned, "Young man, I am the lie detector.''

In 1980, Forbes was sworn in as a judge in Circuit Court.

By then, a Forbes family tradition had begun. Every fall the family would drive to Williamsburg and take their accustomed seats on the 50-yard line to watch William and Mary football games. Alumni would hail the fellow who had sold hoagies on campus years earlier.

"Ray, rah, Sandwich Man!'' they'd yell.

Forbes and his wife had moved into a comfortable brick ranch in Wilson Heights, within walking distance of the courthouse. There, they raised their daughter Beth, born in 1959.

In the 1980s, Richard Glasser and his two brothers joined their father in his Norfolk law practice. Forbes maintained a collegial relationship with Richard Glasser, the son of the man who had given Forbes his start.

Forbes knew Richard Glasser had acquired a national reputation representing victims of asbestos disease. Glasser filed lawsuits by the hundreds in Norfolk federal court and Portsmouth Circuit Court, but none in Chesapeake.

So Forbes never presided over any of Glasser's cases. And he had no reason, as the 1990s began, to believe that he and his family one day would need the services of Richard Glasser, asbestos lawyer.

A somber prognosis

When Forbes retired from the bench in 1995, Nancy Forbes knew the idle life would not suit the once-peripatetic South Norfolk boy.

Bill Forbes golfed and took long walks in the evening. He happily accepted assignments as a substitute judge and relished returning to the courthouse where he had heard cases for two decades.

One fall day in 1997, Forbes noticed a pain in his left shoulder. He suspected arthritis.

A doctor found a spinal spur, and it was surgically removed. But the pain persisted.

He then visited a thoracic surgeon, who told Forbes he did not like what he saw on the X-rays. In May 1998, Forbes underwent surgery again.

He was not suffering from arthritis at all, the doctor told him.

The diagnosis was mesothelioma of the left pleura, a disease neither Forbes nor his wife, a registered nurse, had heard of.

And the prognosis was grim.

Mesothelioma, the Forbeses learned, was cancer of the lining, or pleura, of the lung. The cancer almost always kills, and quickly, the doctors told them.

Then there was another shock. The only known cause of mesothelioma is asbestos exposure, the doctors said. They wanted to know when and where the judge had inhaled the poisonous fiber.

Forbes recalled two summers he spent as a shipyard laborer as a college student nearly five decades earlier. Unbeknownst to the workers, the shipyards had been breeding grounds for asbestos disease.

The doctors told him that mesothelioma has one of the longest latency periods of any disease, taking as long as 50 years to strike.

At home, Bill Forbes still took walks in the evening, sometimes alone. An intensely private man, he had not shared the devastating news with anyone except his family. During one neighborhood stroll, he told his friend and neighbor Durwood Curling, who had just retired as executive director of the Southeastern Public Service Authority.

If the doctors were right, Forbes told Curling, he had only months to live.

A decades-old mystery

Beth Forbes St. John embarked on a mission to save her father from the mysterious disease that had intruded on her family's comfortable life. If there was a magic bullet, she would find it.

St. John, Chesapeake's deputy court services director, stayed at the library until closing time and spent hours on the Internet in a quest for treatments and remedies.

She learned of experimental research in the Czech Republic and Australia, of a clinic for mesothelioma victims in the Bahamas. She wrote letters to and e-mailed physicians and researchers around the world.

She insisted that her father adopt a regimen of herbal teas, fresh fruits and vegetables, seaweed, grains and vitamins. She supplemented his diet with such exotic substances as powdered shark cartilage and garlic tablets laced with selenium.

During the last week of October, Bill Forbes lay in a bed at Chesapeake General Hospital, weakened by pneumonia. Former Judge Russell I. Townsend Jr., an old courthouse colleague, was visiting. Beth's husband, Mike, was there. Townsend kiddingly told Forbes they were going to dress him in a black robe and wheel him into court. They were short a judge, Townsend said.

Everyone shared a good laugh.

But the bonds of friends and family were not enough to help Bill Forbes through this crisis. He died on Nov. 1, 1998, at age 71.

A year and a half later, in the spring of 2000, Nancy Forbes visited Richard Glasser's law office in downtown Norfolk. Rose Glasser was there that day. The two women shared pleasantries and a hug, just as on that joyous day in 1954.

But on this occasion, there was grim business to transact.

Nancy Forbes and Richard Glasser began the task of unraveling a decades-old mystery: What companies manufactured the products that killed her husband?

*** POSTED MAY 11, 2001 ***