Howe III stands before the
bust of his father, Gedney
Howe Jr., in the courtyard
entryway of Charleston’s
Judicial Center.
Howe says. “People were always coming up
and thanking him for helping them, giving
him such positive reinforcement that it
seemed to me to be a pretty good way to
spend your day. I could see that my daddy
had a life well-spent, and that was what
really drew me and my brothers and sister
toward practicing law.” Indeed, all four
Howe offspring followed in Big Gedney’s
footsteps, although “Little Gedney,” the
second child and oldest son, was the only
to go into practice with his father, which he
did in 1973. “I was so fortunate that I got to
work with my daddy for seven years. It gave
me a jump-start; I got to do big cases right
away. Not because of me, but because of
him,” he says.
Howe earned his J.D. from the University
of South Carolina School of Law in 1973; his
legal education began much earlier. The
Howe children grew up listening to “Howe’s
Little Home Lectures,” as they dubbed their
father’s dinner-table chats. Conversations
that began typically with “How was your
day?” segued into case recap, then morphed
into eloquent musings on principles of law.
Long before he was a lawyer, Howe was
a “doctor,” thanks to his mother. “She was
a very substantial person in her own right,”
he says. “My mother had a clear sense of
right and wrong. When it came to how to
treat other people, there was no gray area.”
Marybelle Howe devoted her adult life to
civil rights causes, including outreach to
the farmworkers on the rural sea islands
outside downtown Charleston, where the
Howe family lived and the kids attended
public school. “I fought in the war on
poverty—I was a draftee,” Howe quips about
his volunteering, recalling how at age 14
he dispensed the worm shots (“I was the
‘doctor,’” he says) when his mother organized
a health clinic for the migrant farmers in the
early 1960s. “Things were so prejudiced back
then that the hospitals wouldn’t even send a
medical resident out there.”
Whether he was supporting his
mother’s outreach or selling peanuts at
Rivers High School wrestling matches
(“Ten cents a bag!” he’d cry. “Won’t
make you, won’t break you!”), Howe
demonstrated a strong work ethic early
on and hasn’t let up. As a former sheet
metal worker, then a bricklayer and plaster
craftsman-in-training during law school—
experience that he says comes in handy in
construction litigation cases—Howe knows
how to roll up his sleeves, put in sweat and
muscle, and pay attention to detail.
