Major B. Harding: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

• Author: Blankenship, Gary

A teacher, scholar, and veteran trim judge will lead Florida's courts into the new millennium.

Stephen Grimes, at the July 1 investiture of Chief Justice Major B. Harding, told the stow of a Latvian judicial delegation that recently visited Florida's highest court. As the visitors were leaving, the former chief justice recalled, one turned to Grimes and asked, "I understand why you have a chief justice -- but why do you have a justice major?"

That the anecdote was shared during a formal court ceremony, with officials from the highest levels of government in attendance, tells quite a bit about Major Best Harding, who now leads Florida's court system. He is known for his easy-going manner, a low-key style friends say reflects his humility, and also for his sense of humor. (For the curious, Major is a long-standing name on his mother's side of the family, and his maternal grandfather was named Major Best.)

But the Latvian visitor got the title wrong. It would be, perhaps, more accurate to refer to Harding as a justice-teacher, both by inclination and example. Teaching, whether it be taking inner-city youths camping as part of a special program, as the first dean of the Florida Judicial College or for decades in Sunday school classes, has been a theme of Harding's long professional and personal careers. The professional sector has included stints as a military lawyer, prosecutor, private practitioner, juvenile court judge, highly regarded circuit court judge and Supreme Court justice.

"I think that teaching is one of his gifts," said Harding's wife, Jane. "He teaches Sunday school, and he always enjoys it when the justices teach in public schools during Constitution Week each year. He was the first dean of the Judicial College, and then came back in 1984 and was dean up until his first year on the Supreme Court."

"He was helpful to me and other young judges over there when we were struggling to learn how to be circuit judges," recalled former state senator and former fellow Fourth Circuit Judge Mattox Hair. "He was a great teacher. I used to go sit in his courtroom and watch. He was pretty firm and rigid, but never really harsh; always respectful of the lawyer and the clients."

Another example: Harding has made continuing and expanding court education programs about the legal system one of the priorities of his administration.

Major Best Harding was born on October 13, 1935, in Charlotte, N.C., the youngest of the three sons of William T. Harding, Jr., and Alice Best Harding. "I don't know if I was an accident or an afterthought," the chief justice jokes, noting he came six and seven years after his brothers. His father ran a sales and consulting engineering firm, specializing in steam heat and hot water. "His motto was `We keep others in hot water,'" Harding recalled. He attended public schools in Charlotte through high school, recalling, with brevity, that his main interest was "lunch." Well, not exactly. "In junior high school for two years I struggled to learn how to play the bass fiddle, but upon going to senior high school, I left that endeavor behind me," he said. He also began cultivating tennis, a life-long passion, on city courts near his home.

After High School, Harding considered several universities but chose Wake Forest, which was the most personal and positive in its contacts. "Also, I think that there was a divine plan for me to meet my wife, who came as a student the following year," he added.

In college, Harding joined the ROTC as well as the Sigma Chi and Phi Delta Phi legal fraternities. He was a member of the Scabbard and Blade Honorary Military Fraternity. He thought he might want to be a doctor, but was dissuaded by the math and science courses required.

It was in his junior year he began to worry about his career, and Harding consulted his father's boyhood Raleigh neighbor, who happened to be a law school dean. He returned to Wake Forest and entered a program that allowed him to begin taking law courses during his senior year.

In the meantime, he had met Jane. It happened the day before classes started for his sophomore and her freshman year at Wake. (At that time Wake Forest was actually in the small town of Wake Forest, near Raleigh. Between his junior and senior years, it moved to its present location in-Winston-Salem.) The two were attending a picnic sponsored by the Westminster Fellowship, an organization for non-Baptist, non-Catholic Wake students.

As Jane Harding recalls, eyes twinkling, "I met him while he was hugging another girl." It turned out it was a high school classmate who recognized Harding and came up to give him a hug, but as Mrs. Harding said, "I still tease him about it."

It wasn't the girl in his arms who made the impression on the future chief justice, though. He recalled going to Jane's dorm the next day, and "I said, `I would like to see Jane Lewis,' and they said, `We have three Jane Lewises.' So I said, `I would like to see the short, dark-haired one,' and they said, `We have two of those.' And they weren't going to parade them for me." Attacking it like a legal problem, Harding went to do some researching, waiting for a friend who knew Jane. The friend finally showed up to let the young man know the Jane he was interested in was from Florida. "So I went back to the dorm and said, `I want the Jane Lewis from Florida,' and they said, `We have only one of those.'"

They were married in December of 1958 while Harding was a senior in law school and Jane was working as a teacher. Harding said, "I took my final exams for the first semester of my senior year that January and made my best grades ever. All my law professors asked Jane why she hadn't gotten me to the altar earlier."

Harding had left the ROTC after his first two years in college, but returned during law school, knowing that he would be called to active service after graduation and that by being in ROTC he would be assigned to the Judge Advocate General's office. It turned out to be a fortunate move in many ways.

There was a delay of several months before Harding was taken into the Army. He had passed the North Carolina bar in 1959, but filled the time by helping out at the law practice of Jane's father, David Justin Lewis, and brother, Giles Lewis (now a retired Fourth Circuit judge), in Jacksonville. He used the opportunity to pass the Florida bar exam in 1960. Their first child, Major, Jr., was born in Jacksonville in February 1960.

As for his Army service, it pointed the future justice toward his preferred field of law. "I had thought I would do some sort of business or trust law; I think the idea of trial work was rather intimidating while I was in law school," the future chief justice said. "Yet when I got out of law school and went into the Army, I realized that was an area I really loved. I could not imagine not being in court."

Harding was assigned to Ft. Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. In the JAG office, he handled mostly general courts martial, usually representing the defense. Both Harding and his wife have fond memories of his two years in the Army. Jane recalled they met future Florida Attorney General and now Third District Court of...