I recently sat down with The Honorable Wilbur Edwards (ret.) of the Massachusetts Housing Court. Judge Edwards talked about his early childhood overseas, his parent’s commitment to public service, his own path to public service, and how he now gets meaning from his volunteer activities.
As a child in the 1950s, Judge Edwards grew up in two worlds. He was the son of an Army officer who had spent World War II in an elite unit disarming explosive ordnance. As a child in a military family, Judge Edwards lived on various military bases and on one of the largest NATO military bases in Germany.
While the U.S. Army was still integrating at that time, Judge Edwards’s family lived in diverse communities where he met military families from all over the world (“you lived with people, regardless of their race or ethnicity, right next door”). Back in the United States, Judge Edwards lived with him family in a town called Coraopolis in Western Pennsylvania. While the schools in Coraopolis were also integrated, housing in Coraopolis was segregated.
To read the rest of my profile in the ABA’s Voice of Experience, click here.
