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Off the bench, "Judge" Edgar Allan Jones
of ABC-TV's Traffic Court is
Dean of the U.C.L.A. law school
and Dad to a home "campus" of seven
Television — the lights, the cameras, and the "nerves" — held no terrors for the new candidate for ABC-TV's Traffic Court bench. Yet Edgar Allan Jones, youthful scholar and Dean of the U.C.LA. law school, demurred. "My life's work," he explains, "is the teaching of law, so the idea of a show seemed completely novel to me. What I came to realize was that a show of this sort affords a tremendous opportunity for just that — bringing the legal story home, and on an infinitely wider scale than the classroom." . . . Sophisticated about the technical end of TV, the only time the Dean recalls being at all conscious of lights and cameras, he wasn't even on the air. It was his audition. "In the situation we were doing, the defendant was this rather brassy young female with a lot of poor excuses and many references to 'cop' in the course of her story. What stuck in my mind from a quick look at the notes was that I should call her down for using such a term of disrespect. When she said 'cop' for the first time, I lowered the boom — about three pages too soon. Then, realizing what I'd done, I started ad-libbing like mad, till we got back to her situation. I guess," the 'Judge' adds, "making a mistake like that is what put me on the bench." ... In session Friday evenings at 6:30 P.M. EST, Traffic Court is public-service programming at its best. It may be "all a big act," but "Judge" Jones is well-convinced of the sense of the real that comes through on the show. Discussing the study of law with a group of senior engineering students, he discovered that three-fourths of them took the show for real courtroom drama. "In fact, I get kidded quite a bit on my own campus. The students call me 'Judge,' so I tell them I'll see them all in court." Though Edgar Jones' predecessor on the bench really was a judge, Jones maintains it isn't essential. "A legal education is pretty broad, and though my own specialty is labor law, I can feel at home in any branch." . . . Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-bred, the Traffic Court judge came West from the University of Virginia, and only recently had a chance to visit his old Eastern stamping grounds — as a participating scholar in an international "freedom" conference at Arden House of Columbia University. Claiming close ties, too, with Canada, Edgar explains that his mother, his wife and his first child were all born in Ontario. "The first time I saw Helen," he says, "she was fourteen and had a bobby cut." By the next summer, he'd vowed to marry her, but before he could make good on that, the war came and Edgar, just out of college, joined the Marines. . . . Married in '45, the Joneses now have seven children: Top rung is Linda, 12, followed by Anna, 10, Carol, 8, Terry, 7, Denis, 6, Bob, 4, and David, one. It takes the top three to match their dad's skill in Ping Pong, with all disagreements as to who wins going to "the Judge" for arbitration.
Case of "the reluctant judge vs. TV" was tried out of Traffic Court, in privacy of a scholar-teacher's study.
Typical Traffic defendant has lots of sass, but Judge learned in audition the right time to "lower the boom."
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