Fortunately for the biographer, when Kern received his degree and returned to Howard county, his friend Morrow left Howard for Ann Arbor and the correspondence was continued for a time. In a letter dated April 4th, 1869, he gives a “short sketch of his meanderings” after leaving Ann Arbor, returning by way of Toledo and Peru, and finding “Howard county literally capped with mud.” “Nobody,” he adds, “pretends to travel with a wagon—such would be impossible. I never saw such a stretch of muddy country in all my eventful career.” But “notwithstanding the mud,” he found things “rather lively,” with many of the young women of the neighborhood calling to inspect the new attorney in their midst. “I have as yet made no definite arrangements as to practicing,” he writes. “I am thinking of going in with Milton Bell or Clark N. Pollard”—this probably being written in a spirit of fun, as the two men mentioned were prominent members of the bar. In the next sentences he adds—“If I don’t go in with them I will go into a firm with John Worth Kern, LL. B.” He was not in the best of health at the time of his graduation, and he writes Morrow: “My health is no better than when I left. My cough doesn’t get much better. I have taken a whole bottle of medicine since I have been here.”
Hardly had he reached his home when his neighbors arranged for a speech from the neighborhood prodigy, and the young lawyer, having prepared it with a care becoming the importance of the occasion, went out into the woods near by, where he was practicing it with much vigor of gesticulation and expenditure of lung power when a neighborhood girl, passing the outskirts of the wood on her way to the house “with the two front doors,” saw him without recognizing either the man or the occasion. Rushing breathessly into the Kern home, she explained that she had encountered “a crazy man” in the woods making all sorts of unearthly noises.
“Oh, he’s not crazy,” said Sally Kern smiling, “that’s only John practicing his speech.”
A little later the shingle of “John W. Kern—Attorney at Law” was hung at Kokomo.
CHAPTER II
Kokomo Days—Lawyer and Citizen
I
AS we have seen it was Kern’s intention at one time to begin the practice of his profession in Iowa—a plan that was abandoned when the state went overwhelmingly for the “radical program.” Before leaving Ann Arbor we have noted his plan to establish an office at Tipton, Indiana. The process of reasoning which soon eliminated Tipton from consideration and led to his opening an office in the county seat of his native county about the first of May, 1869, when he fell seven months short of his twentieth birthday, is set forth in the following letter to Morrow, then at Ann Arbor:
“Since I came home I have done nothing and yet have been awfully busy too. I was at Tipton one day last week looking for a location. That is, I went there for the purpose of looking around. As soon as I got off the train and cast a glance up the principal street I persuaded myself that Tipton was no place for an LL. B. A stump puller or a mud dauber might do an extensive business there. I will open a law office in Kokomo in about ten days. My office will be in the Nixon block. I will go in partnership with John W. Kern, a young man of promise.
“Our folks are all going on a visit to the Old Dominion to be gone all summer. They will start in about a week from to-morrow, and I will be left a disconsolate orphan. In selecting Kokomo as a place wherein to practice I pondered long and well over the matter, and it was only from words of encouragement from a number of the substantial men of the county that I determined. I don’t expect to do much at first, but by a close attention to my business I expect in a few years to make my expenses. The people in this part of the country are all lively as crickets.... I only got my books day before yesterday—just two weeks on the road.... The work on the new court house has commenced again. It will be a magnificent edifice....”
The office was opened about the first of May with a complete new set of the Indiana Reports which his father had presented him with. “I still remember how his eyes sparkled,” writes Morrow, “when he told me that his father intended to give him a complete set of the reports.” Two months later he had less modest notions of his possibilities in his profession. He had participated in several cases and gained confidence, both in his ability to get business and his capacity to handle it. In a letter to Morrow, written early in June, he discloses the budding of social aspirations and for the first time mentions the girl who was soon to become his wife: