“The project began with a series of dinner meetings hosted by leaders of the bar at which efforts were concentrated on recalling some of the more hilarious misadventures of the professions eminent, and not-so-eminent, practitioners - tales, for example, of hunting trip misadventures and court-room collisions. As meeting followed meeting, the same stories kept resurfacing in varying guises. Like the one about the leading barrister who doubled as a pig farmer and occasionally brought a pig to market in the back seat of his car. Once, at an Eighth Avenue traffic light the pig escaped and the barrister’s appearance in court was both delayed and significantly disarranged by his long and frustrating chase after the absconding porker. And then there was the saga of the judge’s hunting dog that was left unattended in the judge’s office over a long weekend with outrageous consequences, both to the dog and the office furnishings...

The reminiscences of the profession’s senior citizenry gradually altered the focus of the oral history project, from lawyer interrelationships to the influence southern Alberta lawyers have exerted on the growth of Calgary and Alberta. It was a Calgary lawyer, for example, who almost single-handedly converted Eighth Avenue Calgary from a crude strip of frame shacks into a commercial rialto of brick and sandstone. It was a group of Calgary lawyers who launched the first successful oil company. Later on, Calgary lawyers and a Calgary judge devised the first comprehensive plan to regulate the production and distribution of crude oil and natural gas. It was in a Calgary police court where the first skirmish was fought in the national crusade for equal rights for women. And, it was in the Calgary court house where the conscription crisis of 1918 brought the military authority into near-violent confrontation with the civil authority.”