From unwilling law student to city deputy prosecutor

Rodney Veary compares his life to “Forrest Gump” — a series of amazing episodes, a crazy mix of happenstance and dog luck, and a central character willing to go along to see what happens next.

Veary, a deputy prosecuting attorney for the city, is a gifted storyteller, the kind of guy you hope shows up at the party because you know he’ll hold court well into the night while everyone else just eats and laughs. Friends say he never runs out of stories.

But I have to tell you, trying to write his story is a challenge. Confining his tales of adventure to words on a page loses the magic of his voice and his face. You don’t get the perfect timing of his pauses or the emphasis of that b-baller right elbow that flies out to make sure the person next to him gets each punchline. He has so many stories, stories that have parentheticals and digressions, and I am supposed to be concise.

But I will try to tell one.

The story of how he went to law school is like “Forrest Gump” meets “My Cousin Vinny.”

… My Cousin Veary.

Veary’s parents divorced when he was a baby, and he was raised by his Chinese grandmother in the Kapahulu house he still calls home. He entered ‘Iolani School in kindergarten, and in high school, was friends with Mufi Hannemann, also a basketball player and two years his junior.

After graduating in 1970, Veary went to college in New Mexico, where he scraped by on food-stamp meals and majored in liberal arts.

He was home on break when he got his call to adventure. “There I was, at Holiday Mart — and me, when I go shopping, I just park the car, go in, buy one thing. I’m not looking at nothing else,” he said. “Then I go down aisle 3 and I hear, ‘Hello, Rodney!’”

It was Reginald Minn, Harvard grad and former ‘Iolani student body president, the son of Veary’s high school basketball coach Herbert Minn (who famously hectored Veary about his shooting skills, “You could not hit the side of a barn … you could not hit the Pacific Ocean …”)

Minn jumped on Veary like a zealous missionary. He needed a favor. He had a plan. Minn was a member of the ’76 class at the new University of Hawaii law school. He was trying to recruit more students so the state Legislature would continue funding for the fledgling law school, which, at the time, was housed in portable classrooms in the Manoa quarry.

“They were told to go out and beat the bushes and find kanakas to apply to law school,” Veary said. “They said, ‘We want to go in to the Legislature with a stack of applications this high of Hawaiian students who want to be attorneys but can’t afford to go to mainland law schools.’” Veary held his hand about a foot off the table to indicate the desired height of the stack. They needed a lot of recruiting.

Minn made his pitch right there in Holiday Mart. “‘Do me a favor,’ he says, ‘Go apply. Take the LSATs,’” Veary recalled. “So I did, but just as a favor for a friend. That’s it. Because I was not going law school.”

Some time later, after he had graduated, moved back to Hawaii and started working at Job Corps, his letter from the law school admissions came.

As he tells it, it was worse than a rejection letter. Not only did he not get in, he was too far down the waiting list to be taken seriously. The letter explained that there was a pre-admission program for students who needed help with fundamentals before entering the main program. He was too far down that waiting list as well.

“I took the paper and I threw it away,” Veary said. It didn’t bother him. He didn’t want to go to law school anyway.

But one day, the phone rang and it was the registrar from the law school. “Mr. Veary, how would you like to start law school on Monday?”

He answered, “No, thanks.”

And then, as Veary remembers, her tone changed.

“She says, ‘Mr. Veary! How can you be so selfish? Think of all the Hawaiian boys and girls who haven’t been born yet. You are taking away their chance to go to law school at home in Hawaii. There are 12 slots for the program. I only have 11 enrolled. Are you going to be selfish, Mr. Veary?’”

He thought quickly and came up with a solution to the registrar’s enrollment problem and his I-don’t-want-to-go-to-law-school problem.

“I told her, ‘You can use my name, but I’m not coming.’”

Job Corps, as Veary describes it, was “the greatest job in the history of Hawaii.” He was a counselor for troubled youth in the vocational training program. He went to work at four in the afternoon and finished his shift at midnight. “Get off work at 12, in time for last call at The Point After or last call at Chuck’s Hawaii Kai. Get up late the next morning, go Central Y to play basketball with the cops, go back work again at four.” He liked working with kids and loved the schedule.

But then a professor noticed he wasn’t showing up for class.

There was a paper due in Contracts class, and as the professor handed out the assignment, he looked at the one left in his hand. “Who is Rodney Veary?” he asked the class. After a pause, one student spoke up. “I know Rodney. I’ll take it to him.”

The classmate brought the assignment in an envelope and dropped it in the mailbox at Veary’s Kapahulu home.

“But I don’t check the mail,” Veary says. “Even now. That thing could have sat there for weeks.”

However, his old buddy, Reginald Minn, just happened to be staying at Veary’s house and just happened to look into the stuffed mailbox and just happened to see the envelope from the UH Law School.

“You better do this!” Minn told Veary.

Veary had not been to a single class. It took some convincing, but he ended up reading the packet and writing a response. Then he called the friend who had dropped off the envelope and asked him to take the paper back to the professor.

Days passed before the results: Veary got one of the highest grades in the class.

His friend was sent back to Veary’s Kapahulu house with a message from his would-be classmates:

“You may not want to go to law school, but we do. Can you write your next paper early?”

They wanted to read his arguments to help shape their own.

Toward the end of the semester, his classmates decided to do an intervention. They told him he needed to take the final. He still had not attended a single class. They invited him to join their study group. He told them he hadn’t even bought the book.

“I said the only way I could pass the test was if everything I needed to know could be written on a Zippy’s Napoleon napkin.” They took that as a challenge. I said, ‘OK, then, I’ll buy the donuts.’”

He got a B+ on the final, which led some students to petition for what they called the “Veary Rule” that tied a semester grade to attendance and not just test scores.

There are more stories of how he managed to graduate, how his attendance in law school became politically important because of his specific demographics, and how this man who never wanted to go to law school became one of the more successful and ingenious trial attorneys in Hawaii. The tales all connect back to that central theme, to that idea of a picaresque character who moves forward without plans, is brave enough to trust fate and who values grace under pressure.

When he was a brand-new attorney, a friend called to warn him about a huge case that had fallen into his inbox. The opposing lawyer was a notorious hotshot.

“She told me, ‘Rodney, he hasn’t lost a case in 12 years!’ And I told her, ‘Yeah? Me, too.’”

But that’s another story.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.