From Opal Harkin's Instagram. The sentiments on the mortaboard are quite correct. FWIW, it's a little unusual to see mortorboard for a law school graduation, more typical is a certain sort of old style beret.
Earlier this week, I ran this post:
When I did so, I did it without commentary.
Didn't have the time to comment.
Opal Harkins (what a delightful old school name), has had an impressive rodeo career, and a pretty impressive academic one as well. Included in that academic career, she's just completed attending law school. That's what made me curious, as it's really unusual.
It would not, quite frankly, be easy to go to law school and be on a rodeo team, although one of the members of my law school class was a place kicker (or whatever the kicker on a football team is called) for one year on the UW football team, and one of the members of my father's dental school class was also a rodeo team member for his university, and a very accomplished one at that. The latter, I'd note, would be even more difficult than going to law school and being on a rodeo team.
So, it's possible.
Opal Harkins had a long association with rodeo, and did throughout her academic career. She was, for example, the National High School Rodeo Queen for 2016-17, which I only know due to this story. Oddly enough, she was sort of homeschooled, although through what I'd call remote schooling for high school students, which means she studied from home, but through an online program run through a Montana university, but had home school aspects. Indeed, when I read it I thought it was probably because she came from a remote ranch, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
The five Harkins siblings are memorable for their talents alone – but their unique names contribute to their trademark as well. The three oldest siblings are boys: Odis, Othniel and Ogden, followed by two girls: Ouana and Opal.
“The story is that in my mom’s family, their names all start with “Sh” and my dad’s brothers and sister all start with “J,” says Harkins. “Odis was named after my great-grandpa, and after that, they had to keep the tradition up and find
“O” names for all the rest of us.”
Like the rest of her siblings, Harkins was homeschooled until 7th grade, when she had the choice to attend public school, which she did for a year. “My parents decided to homeschool all of us so they could be in control of what we were being taught,” says Harkins. “They wanted to be the main influence in our life and didn’t want it to be teachers or other students.” They learned through a Christian curriculum, including taking Bible classes since they were young.
The homeschool flexibility worked perfectly for a family that loved to rodeo together.
“We had schedules when we were all homeschooled together, we would work ahead on cold days and then ride all day on warm ones,” she says.
Now, technically a junior in high school, Harkins is again homeschooling and also taking college courses through the Montana State University – Billings High School Connections program. When she graduates high school, she will also have an associate’s degree in English.
“Being homeschooled is the reason why I am where I am in college right now,” she says. “It taught me to be self-motivated, and being able to take high school classes when I was in 8th grade is the reason why I was able to start college my freshman year of high school.”
Following graduating from that, she went on to university and then on to law school, staying in rodeo the the entire time. She obtained a big following in her high school years, with one print commentary calling her "a natural doe-eyed beauty", something I wouldn't have expected to see in print following the 1940s.
There's a number of Harkins who are lawyers in Billings, and she's likely (well. . .is) the daughter of one of them. So she's basically following in her father's footsteps. I wonder, in fact, if she'll hang her shingle there.
There are a lot of negative things posted here about the practice of law, without a doubt, including some comments about how lawyers themselves, surrendering their professionalism to their wallets, and law schools, having churned out vast numbers of lawyers in the 60s and 70s, have caused the profession not to be that.
And those comments are deserved.
A former president of the Wyoming State Bar had a "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" campaign at one time. Well, that was before the UBE meant that a lot of those lawyers never darkened Wyoming's border. Plenty of "Wyoming lawyers" today are Colorado lawyers, or Utah lawyers, or Texas lawyers, and that's for the money.
What else would it be for?
But in fairness, law has and still does provide a means for a lot of rural people to make an in town living. And a lot depends on the type of law a person does. Litigation is one thing, estate planning quite another. Domestic relations, something else. As a child of a lawyer, perhaps she knows which direction she's headed. A lot of new law school grads really don't.
One of the things noted in the article was this:
One day, she’ll have a career that will allow her to continue rodeoing, she’ll be able to afford her own nice trailer and nice horses.
I'm inclined to say, don't bet on it. And don't bet on having the time to be able to enjoy, well, pretty much anything of that type. But maybe I'll be wrong, and indeed lots of lawyers I know manage to do just that. And that says something about matching a career to a personality, something there is very little effort to do, at least by my observation, for law students.
Well, anyhow, remarkable story.
