One in a series on local judges
by Glenn Tschimpke
Staff Writer
Sometimes it takes a man a few years to settle into the groove of life. In his youth, Duval County Court Judge Harold Arnold didn’t exactly explode out of the gate as Jacksonville’s next attorney extraordinaire. He spent his early years poking and prodding at different careers that steered him clear of law. Yet, at the end of the day, the answer was right under his nose.
“My father was a lawyer,” he said. “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, to be honest with you.”
Arnold’s father is prominent Jacksonville attorney Walter Arnold, long-time counsel to Gate Petroleum owner Herb Peyton and instrumental in many prominent local lawsuits.
Years before the younger Arnold settled on law, the Jacksonville native had aspirations of being a doctor. His intentions started nobly at Wofford College in South Carolina.
“I took a lot of biology and chemistry courses,” he said. “But they conflicted with my social agenda. I had the fraternity and I just didn’t put the time into them I probably needed to to major in those types of subjects. So I quickly switched to political science and graduated from there in 1968 with a B.A. degree.”
Without medical school to worry about, Arnold returned to Jacksonville to mull his next move. He passed time by working at the shipyards while the Vietnam War raged a half a world away. Arnold knew it was only a matter of time before it would be his turn to go. A ruptured appendix proved to be the break he was looking for.
“The surgeon who operated on me happened to be the commander of the 345th Evacuation Hospital at NAS,” he said. “You couldn’t get into the reserves in the National Guard during the height of the Vietnam War. They were pretty much full, to say the least. For some reason, we got to shooting the bull and he said they might have an opening for me.”
Arnold spent eight weeks in what he nostalgically describes as that “lovely hell hole called Fort Polk” in Louisiana for basic training in the Army. Ironically, Arnold became a medic stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Tex.
“That was where they flew all the burn victims in Vietnam,” he said. “It was not a very enjoyable part. Most of these people were burned beyond recognition. Vietnam was one of those wars where they started using the helicopters so they got these people out alive a lot quicker than they would have in other wars. These people would have died.
“We changed dressings and administered intravenous drugs to them just trying to keep them comfortable. It was horrendous. As far as I know, every one of the burn victims that were burned real bad ended up in Brooke Army Hospital.”
Arnold had a high school reunion at the hospital, although the circumstances weren’t exactly optimum.
“I was walking down the ward one day, and I go by ‘Bucky,’ my nickname, and I heard someone yelling out my name,” he said. “It was a friend of mine I went to high school with. He was in the Marines. He was in one of these personnel carriers that hit a mine. He happened to be on top of the personnel carrier. All the guys on the bottom were killed but he was blown out of the top of the thing like 20 feet in the air. It burned most of the digits of his fingers off and one of his ears had been burned off.”
After six months, the Army cut Arnold loose from active duty. He returned home with nothing real promising ahead of him except a possible career in law. His father had achieved success by it, so why not? A brief stint in the medical world assured him that his dreams of being a doctor were not misguided. Law school was starting to make more and mores sense.
“Really at that point in my life I just really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I don’t think I really wanted to go out and go work,” he chuckled. “If I went to law school, got out of law school and became a lawyer, then I had something there. You could do anything else with it. It was a good background for business or whatever else you want to do. At least it was a good basis for whatever type of business you want to get into to have a knowledge of the law.”
Arnold shipped off to Stetson Law School in St. Petersburg. He made it through a year and a half before his mind wandered and he dropped out.
“I just really didn’t get into it,” he conceded.
Instead, he caught on with Allstate Insurance. He spent another year and a half training in various divisions, settling in as an underwriter penning policies for agents in Miami. Life as an underwriter didn’t hold his attention. Maybe law school wasn’t so bad after all.
He joined a few fellow law school dropouts from his past and headed to Maryland to get his juris doctorate at the University of Baltimore, finishing in 1973.
After years of avoiding the inevitable, Arnold had gotten his law degree and was on track to follow in his father’s footsteps, but not without a few last whimpers of rebellion. After a brief stint with the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville, he gave a nod to his political science degree and headed to Tallahassee to work for State Comptroller Bud Dickinson.
“Unfortunately, Bud got indicted,” lamented Arnold. “That pretty much took care of the election and they don’t like to keep political appointments once the new guy comes in. He wants his own people.”
Arnold was not one of those people and promptly came back to Jacksonville to work in his father’s law firm.
“I was basically a gofer at that point,” he said. “Up to that point, I didn’t do much legal work. When I was in Tallahassee with the State Comptroller, it was more or less an administrative assistant for him.”
Father and son relationship aside, Arnold remembers his father as a hard-nosed lawyer who was open to any suggestion as long it was his.
“It was tough working for him, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “My father does things the way he does things and that’s the only way it gets done. He’s really very dedicated, very intelligent, very well prepared. I don’t know whether it’s the mentality of men that grew up during the Depression — they’re more focused, this is everything to them. My life is my kids and my family. For some reason, I know a lot of men that grew up with my dad that have the same mentality and that work ethic.”
Arnold eventually broke out on his own and finally settled into a groove. He teamed with William Dorsey and opened a private practice dealing in criminal defense, family law and personal injury. After one failed campaign for judge, he was appointed to the Duval County Court bench by Gov. Bob Martinez in 1988.
These days, he’s content to stay in County Court. Unlike his father who lives to work, the younger Arnold works to live. He enjoys watching his sons, Camp and Cole, play sports and grow up. He doesn’t envision life as a Circuit Court Judge quite as rosy.
“I have no desire to do juvenile and no desire to do family law,” he said. “You know, I can walk out of here every night and I don’t think about anything other than my family and what we’re going to do. Back when I was practicing law and I was single and didn’t have a family, the family law didn’t bother me. Once you have kids and you love them like you love a child and you see what they go through in these situations where their parents use them as pawns, I think I’d come out from behind this bench and want to strangle both of them.
“I don’t want to have to take that home with me. I don’t know any way you don’t. Maybe you can. Maybe you’re able to. But I’ve never been able to turn that kind of stuff off.”
At 56, he doesn’t see himself slowing down anytime soon. Not retire until he’s 70? It’s a real possibility. After all, he’s finally in his groove.