3
Angela: Where did you attend college?
Royce: The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Angela: Did you like the college?
Royce: Yes, and it was the only law school at that time, I was going to be a lawyer.
Angela: What made you decide to be a lawyer?
Royce: I don't know. You [have] heard this story or a story like this, but this is true. I always wanted to be a lawyer as a boy out in the country. I didn't know any lawyers. I had never been to a courthouse. I say I always wanted to be a lawyer---I was proud to be a lawyer, and the day I die I will still be a lawyer.
Angela: You never saw a courtroom before you decided to be a lawyer.
Royce: Well, they tell me, and I think I remember too, while plowing a mule or a horse on the farm, I'd make speeches. I would sometimes get up on a stomp and practice. Our family always took the newspapers and some magazines. I was a prolific reader, still am.
Angela: Did you get your knowledge of what a lawyer was by reading newspapers?
Royce: I got acquainted with lawyers. When I came here, they put me in the high sixth. Texas at that time were graduating from high school at eleventh grade. I was ahead of these Arkansas students, but they just put me in sixth grade because that's what my report card said---sixth grade. They skipped me, I made junior high seventh, eighth, and ninth in one year. I well remember two of the teachers taking part of their lunch time to help me catch up. I had real fine high school teachers. They were junior high teachers in those days. They said I was smart. But actually part of it was I was advanced over those who went here. And when I graduated I was fourth in the class of 29. That wasn't smart was it. What happened was a one room country school where my father bought this sixty acre farm had a nice house of it and we had natural gas. We were the only people who had natural gas in the neighborhood. My brother and I were enrolled in school there, the girls were too young. Well, this teacher left and didn't come back. On the next farm, there was two boys driving a buggy to Hope to school. And on the hill out here, where the Byers live, [was] Byers Nursery and that area. There was a family named "Duckett". Mr. Duckett runs the abstract company here now, and he's the grandson. Two of them were coming to school in Hope. One of two [were] from over on Springhill Road. I remember a lady that rode a horse. Well, my father just took a mule and put him on the buggy and we started to Hope. The family all finished in Hope. Lethel Gentry was in my class. Lethel's father was a lawyer. Later got to be a state senator and was the first municipal judge that Hope ever had. Well, we got to be real friends. I would spend the night with the Gentry's, the third house from the north end of Washington Street, so I got a little bit acquainted with lawyers
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