'I just called to say thank you'

I got a phone call the other day from a total stranger. A really pleasant phone call.

"Hi, my name is Meldoy Tucker and I just called to thank you."

It turns out Melody saw a story I put together for the old "Legally Speaking" franchise more than eight years ago. It was about a woman  using the Washington State Rule 6 Law Clerk Program to become a lawyer without having to go to law school. It's not easy. You have to have a at least an undergraduate degree from a four-year school, work full-time as a law clerk, find a tutor or mentor who will act as a professor,  pass monthly exams and periodic reviews from a Bar Association committee and eventually take and pass the bar exam. And of course you have to do all this while still having a life.

Melody Tucker saw that story at a time when she was searching for a new career and trying to get into law school, hoping to be a lawyer someday. She told herself, "Hey, that looks interesting. I can do that." And she did. She convinced the Hawkes Law Firm in Shoreline to hire her as a clerk, found a mentor in veteran attorney Tom Sabin, put in thousands of hours of study over more than four years and after two tries passed the bar exam.

She was sworn in as an attorney in the this afternoon at 2:15, Snohomish County Courthouse, room C-201.

She cried. Her friends and relatives cried and cheered. And the woman who worked in radio, worked for the Seattle Mariners, spent years as the GM of the Everett Giants Baseball Club, was suddenly, finally, a lawyer.

And she'll be a good one, says the man who acted as law school professor for more than four years, Tom Sabin.

"She loves the law. She'll be a great lawyer because she likes people and she wants to help them. Those are two things you have to do this job," he said.

All because of a news story that goes back so far that when I check the tape I find my hair is brown and I'm wearing glasses and sporting a tie that hit the Goodwill racks half a decade ago.

"I have honestly waited seven or eight years to call you and say 'Hey, Allen Schauffler, thank you, because you changed my life with that story."

This was a news day that felt pretty good.