Ellis Boal for U of Michigan Regent

The Uhrick Red Sox, 1957 Summer Softball Peanut League Champions. Front row: Larry Struthers, Ellis (Teddy) Boal, Jerry Drost, Louie Poole, John Toumela, Billy Marme, Billy Fowle, Larry Marme. Back row: Herb Cumings, John Flynn, Coach Bill Marme.

Ellis Boal grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, spending summers in Charlevoix. He worked on the family sheep farm there, stacking hay and cleaning the barn.

He attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, excelling academically and athletically. He graduated in 1966, cum laude with high honors. He started graduate school in the math department of the University of Chicago on a four-year NSF fellowship, and left after a year.

Eventually in 1969 he started law school at the University of Michigan. He forced himself to attend a football game.

He was active in a variety of student activities, particularly the 1970 B.A.M. strike, one of the most successful in campus history. Over three hundred professors and teaching assistants cancelled classes and many departments were shut down. After eight days, the regents gave approval to the essential demands of increased minority aid, services, and staff, and agreed to work toward a goal of 10% African-American enrollment by 1973.

Disillusioned with an elite, suburban school, Boal left Michigan after a year, migrating to Detroit with 35 of the student SDS chapter to become revolutionary working-class organizers. Leaving the group within months, he continued to share its goals. He returned to law school at Wayne State in Detroit, changing his intended interest from criminal law to labor law. Wayne accepted his Michigan credits, and he graduated in December 1972.

He had a solo practice in the city for 25 years, specializing in labor, particularly in dissident labor in the UAW and Teamsters unions.

In 2000 he semi-retired and moved to Charlevoix, where his parents now lived. Boal's grandfather first bought land there in 1912. Boal and his father both grew up there in the summers.

Boal's career highlights include:

• Admissions to federal courts of appeal in Cincinnati, Boston, Chicago, and Washington DC, the US Supreme Court, and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians Tribal Court. Counsel of record in cases arising in Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Illinois, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico.

• Listing in Who's Who in America, 2008.

• Membership on the steering committee of This Is Our Town, the citizens group formed to stop Wal-Mart from coming to Charlevoix Township. Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world. In many small ways, and with many other people, Boal contributed diligently to the effort. The company was forced to gerrymander its own plan, to the point where it finally threw in the towel and quit in 2004. As Boal later wrote to the Charlevoix Courier and Petoskey News-Review, we won because everyone in town -- with all their different interests -- kept their eye on the ball. The ball was Wal-Mart. The story is an object-lesson of how county government working together should be run. Later Charlevoix Township voters approved a zoning amendment by 61%, for which Boal and other TIOT members lobbied, which will keep big box Wal-Mart-type stores out of the township forever.

• Boal was co-chair of the Up North Green Party in 2000-06. In 2000 voters elected Green candidate Joanne Beemon as drain commissioner, but she was stifled in her ability to do the job. The drain code requires that Beemon serve office hours of at least eight hours a week, but the county paid her only a dollar a year plus per diems. Nevertheless, she formulated storm water runoff regulations stricter than the county stormwater ordinance. She sent them to Wal-Mart on February 12, 2004. Two months later in a phone call to Beemon on April 6, 2004, Wal-Mart project manager Allen Oertel acknowledged that the company altered its plan based on information from Beemon that it did not previously know of. As described just above, later it ended the whole project.

• In 2003-04, seven members of Citizens to Save Healthcare -- including Boal -- went into the offices of Northern Michigan Hospital in Petoskey. They asked for the amount of money the hospital had diverted from legitimate health care into its fight against the Teamster nurses' union. The hospital stonewalled, even though the information would become public later. It told police to arrest the seven for trespass. All seven cases were dismissed, including four after jury selection. Boal was co-counsel.

• Boal wrote books on Teamster Legal Rights for members in 1978 and 1984, and currently maintains a regularly-updated online book for UAW members at ellisboal.com.

• Boal testified before the US Department of Labor's Dunlop Commission in Washington in 1994, and later wrote an article on the same subject in the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. He argued to preserve the federal law which guarantees independence of unions, then under attack from employers seeking to undermine them through "cooperation" plans. Data show that cooperation plans do little to improve productivity, and much to diminish labor morale. The law was ultimately preserved.

• Boal has helped organize anti-war activities locally, and debated our local Congressman Bart Stupak in guest commentaries on the subject.

• Boal's cases include:

  • Meyers Industries, in which the federal Labor Board held that the labor laws did not protect non-union truck driver Ken Prill in his discharge. Prill had refused to drive a tagged-out-of-service truck which had just caused an accident on the interstate in Tennessee. Driving it would have been unsafe and illegal. The Labor Board reasoned that Prill had acted courageously but alone, and the labor laws are only to protect workers who act in concert for mutual aid or protection. Boal took the case to the DC court of appeals in 1985 and 1987, and ultimately lost because the Labor Board wanted to use it to set a new precedent. Today, Meyers defines the rights of workers who are victimized for trying to bring about better working conditions. It is the most widely cited precedent on that subject in labor law. Along the way Boal managed to get Prill back to work at Meyers, and later sued it successfully when it defamed Prill.

  • In a case for a young and public-spirited Native American driver near Petoskey in 2005, he and his client tracked down and presented two bystander witnesses. District Court Judge Richard May listened, and found there was no cause for the officer to pull the vehicle over. The case was over, and his bond returned. The defendant's grateful step-father wrote a letter to the editor of the Petoskey newspaper.

  • Maceira v Pagán, in which then-Judge Stephen Breyer of the Boston court of appeals reversed a federal judge in Puerto Rico, and ordered a fired dissident Teamster steward reinstated to his post. The opinion was reprinted in full in a 1982 instructional casebook by law professors at Rutgers, Pennsylvania, and New York law schools. In a later opinion Breyer -- who is now on the Supreme Court -- awarded Boal enhanced fees for the excellence of his work, and the likelihood at the beginning of the case that there was little chance of success.

  • In 1994 one Anthony Lapiana sued Clayton Bernier, a member of Millwrights Local 1102. Bernier had attacked the leadership of his union at a meeting for its ties to Lapiana, saying he was part of organized crime. Lapiana said this was defamation. Boal entered an appearance and sent written questions, asked whether Lapiana was "a member of the Detroit crime family" and "linked in FBI files to organized crime families in Chicago and Detroit." He refused to answer. The judge dismissed his case. But Bernier's defense had cost him $6000 in fees. Boal counter-sued at the Labor Board. He argued that Bernier's statements were "concerted activity for mutual aid or protection" -- free speech under the labor laws. On the day of trial Lapiana settled and paid 100%. The cases were Automated Benefit Services and Lapiana v Bernier, Macomb County Circuit Case # 94-5664-NO; Automated Benefit Services and Lapiana, NLRB Case # 7-CA-38518.

  • In Charter Township of Ypsilanti v General Motors, General Motors said it would begin production of the Chevrolet Caprice at its Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti Township located in Washtenaw County. GM said the new car would generate jobs. It asked the township for 12-year 50% personal property tax abatements in 1984 and 1988. Then in 1991 the company announced it was moving the work to Texas. The township and the county sued for breach of promise. After trial the court ordered the company not to move the work. Residents were elated, but GM appealed. Acting both as local counsel and as a community organizer, Boal helped stitch together a coalition of 356 unions, community organizations, and individuals in ten states to file a brief on appeal as friends of the court. Ultimately the case lost. The Michigan court of appeals found GM never really made a promise. The company had only expressed "hopes and expectations." The ruling taught everyone a lesson. It motivated Boal's later participation in This Is Our Town, which kept Wal-Mart out of Charlevoix in 2004 without having to go to court.

Boal has other outside interests. He sings and plays with the Charlevoix Men's Glee Club, has completed computer programming and networking courses at NCMC, manages websites, and runs or skis 40 miles/week. In 2002 and 2004 he travelled with the National Lawyers Guild to the West Bank, and has written on expelled

Stewie and Susie Boal, about 1990.

Ellis was married in 1979 and divorced without children in 2004. His health is excellent. He will authorize viewing of medical records by responsible media.