Picking stories to hear from the life and times of retired attorney Rosemarie Hill is like wanting to greedily check out an armload of books from a library, even as you know you have to put a few back. “But which ones?” I wonder. “I want to hear them all.”
I’m weighing my choices while seated at a table at Canopy Coffee and Wine Bar in Lookout Mountain as Hill, 72, places an order at the counter.
There’s the story about Hill’s study dates with the late Michael Kennedy at the University of Virginia School of Law. (Yes, those Kennedys, and yes, there was a Michael. He was the sixth of Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children.) The one about the time she ran away from a Mennonite turkey farm to attend a high school prom also sounds, well, promising. Then there’s her teaser about the American soldier who adopted her from her German father – or so he said – only to abandon her.
I’m wrestling with these and other options when Hill returns with a coffee and a quiche. “I need protein,” she says, to which I reply, “Tell me about Michael.”
Kennedy’s meal ticket
Between studying for class and pitching for the All-Stars Law School softball team, Hill was a busy bee during her days as a student at the University of Virginia School of Law in the early ‘80s. But this didn’t stop her from her running off with Kennedy, her mock trial partner, to a hill overlooking a horse pasture to prepare for class.
“We’d sit down with our writing materials and the Wall Street Journal and read and get ready for the practical the next day,” Hill recalls. “And then, invariably, one of us would say, ‘Let’s grab lunch,’ and we’d go to lunch.”
Hill isn’t speaking with the bluster of someone who’s eager to drop names. Rather, she talks about Kennedy as though he was the everyday student with whom she partnered in class. That said, the irony of one of his quirks was not lost on her.
“Micheal never had money. He was a Kennedy, and he never carried cash. Well, I was a poor student, so I said, ‘Michael, I’m not paying for everything. Do you have a credit card?’ He didn’t know. So I said, ‘Who’s your bank?’ He told me his bank, and I drove up to the window and said, ‘He wants money.’ The teller asked, ‘Sir, do you have an account here?’ He said, ‘I think so.’ I said, ‘His name’s Michael Kennedy.’ She went, ‘Mr. Kennedy, you do have an account here,’ and I made him get cash to pay for lunch.”
While Hill would have liked to have held on to more of her money while she was classmates with Kennedy, she liked spending time with him, she says.
“He was hilarious and fun. He wasn’t married yet.”
“If you’d played your cards right, then you could have been a Kennedy,” I theorize.
“No, no, no,” she says. “That never would have happened. Trust me.”
Sensing Hill had said all she was willing to share about her friendship with Kennedy, I say, “So, tell me about prom.”
The great escape
Long before Hill ate lunch with Kennedy, she stood outside a house on a Mennonite turkey farm and stared wistfully down the mile-long dirt road that led to freedom.
Hill was 17 and wanted to attend her prom, but the Mennonite foster parents who’d cared for her and her sister since she was 8 said no. Although the family owned cars and used electricity, there was no television or radio on the Virginia homestead, and jewelry, certain clothes and dancing were forbidden. So, too, was attending a prom.
So, she ran away from home so she could dance with a boy, Hill says, shaking her head at the memory of her teenage folly.
“I slipped out through my bedroom window at night and crawled down a tank we used for supplemental heating. I then followed a nearby railroad track to a friend’s house. When I got there, I called my mom and said, ‘I’ve run away from home, but I’ll come back to get my clothes tomorrow.’”
Hill never returned to the farm to live, but she remained close to her foster parents, and to this day refers to them as “mom” and “dad.”
Which sparks a question: “What happened to your biological father and mother?” I ask.
“That’s where things get complicated,” Hill replies.
Unexpected twist
As Hill tackles her quiche, I assess what people generally know about her.
At the time of her retirement in 2021, Hill was a shareholder at Chambliss, Bahner & Stophel, where she’d served as senior counsel and chair of the firm’s Labor & Employment section. Her exit from the practice followed over 30 years of counseling and defending employers in a variety of sectors, being welcomed into the fellowship program of the American Bar Association in 2016, and Super Lawyers including her on its list of the top 50 female attorneys in the Midsouth in 2020.
Hill also has a decadeslong history of board service in Chattanooga that includes turns with Partnership for Families, Children and Adults, Ballet Tennessee, Girls Inc., Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy and Signal Centers, where she’s currently president.
Impressed by Hill’s esteemed legal career and stellar community work, Women of Distinction of Greater Chattanooga named her a 2023 Woman of Distinction in October.
Hill has made excellent use of her time off the clock, too. Her adventures include hang-gliding in Hawaii, ziplining across the jungle of Kauai and exploring volcanic calderas on the Big Island with her husband, Ross.
But as an American soldier offered to adopt Hill from her German father in 1956, all of this was but one of many possible futures that lie before her.
Hill was born in Germany to German parents in 1951. After her mother divorced her father and married an American soldier who brought her to the U.S. in 1956, Hill spent a few years living on Army bases and joining her parents in welcoming babies to the family.
However, she was not able to be a kid, she says.
“I took care of my siblings because my stepfather was always at work and my mom was in and out of hospital. I’d take the bus from [Fort Story, Virginia] to a grocery store in Virginia Beach. Having those kinds of responsibilities as a child is stressful.”
Hill’s mother was eventually committed to either a hospital or an institution. She doesn’t recall which, and she was never able to ask her mother because she never saw her again. After Hill’s stepfather delivered her and her three siblings to the Department of Human Services, she never saw him again, either.
Hill recounts this series of events with the same casual tone she used while describing her study sessions with Kennedy. These are the facts of her life, and she’s simply presenting them as she devours her quiche.
While Hill seems to be at peace with these experiences today, they were traumatic at the time, she says.
“We were unadoptable because you had to have your parents’ permission to be adopted, and nobody knew where either of them were, so my brothers went to one foster home and my sister and I went to the farm,” she says.
Hill’s new family was very protective, so she went from riding a bus to a grocery store off-base to being forbidden to ride her bike to the end of the dirt road. She also had a list of chores as long as both of her arms placed end to end.
“At first, I was like, ‘What the heck?’ But then I came to think, ‘This is nice.’ I was working my butt off, but I was safe and I was able to be a kid, which was good for me. My new family was wonderful to me.”
Living in a nurturing environment didn’t stop Hill from running away from home, however, and it didn’t stop her from marrying her prom date at the age of 18. This time, Hill rolls her eyes as she discusses her long bout with teenage folly.
“Before we married, I had to appear before a federal judge to be emancipated as a 17-year-old and separated from the Division of Human Services. But there was a problem: I was an immigrant. My stepfather had said he’d adopted me, but he hadn’t, and all this time, we’d thought I was a citizen.”
This twist in Hill’s story surprises me, and she says it does most people who hear it. “Were you in danger of being returned to Germany?” I ask.
“I don’t believe I was,” Hill continues. “But I did have to be naturalized at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They became accusatory because my [biological] mother had fallen off the map, which was hard. I was scared but also full of myself, so I was probably a brat.”
The INS might not have appreciated Hill’s brattish side, but there’s a chance the attorney who helped her get into law school did.
Working 9-5
Long before Hill was a leading female attorney in the Midsouth, someone suggested she learn shorthand. When she tells people that today, they claim the suggestion was sexist, but Hill says it was good advice at the time.
“It was 1969, I was a foster kid, and I couldn’t afford college,” she shrugs. “I can still do Gregg shorthand.”
Several years later, this skill helped Hill to land a job as a secretary at a Virginia law firm. She was divorced by then (“He had issues,” she says with her characteristic bluntness), a college graduate and standing on her own.
Whether that would have been Hill’s life’s work were it not for the attorney who needled her about her station in life will remain unknown.
“A lawyer would come into my office when he was in town and ask, ‘Are you still a secretary?’ That aggravated the fire out of me, but it also made me go, ‘Well, yeah.’ I was never ashamed of being a secretary, and I was damn good at it, but I finally said, ‘Get me into law school, and I’ll be a lawyer.’”
The man wrote Hill a glowing letter of recommendation and she was in. After she graduated from UVA Law School in 1984, she followed a friend to Chattanooga, where she secured a position with Witt, Gaither & Whitaker.
Hill cut her teeth on assigned cases in criminal court and then spent a decade defending beverage companies throughout the southeast from antitrust violations. It wasn’t romantic work, she says, but she did get to see other cities.
“We’d get a subpoena from the federal government demanding all of the documents for the last 25 years that involved pricing, and we’d travel to the plants and rifle through their basements and attics.”
Collusion was indeed taking place in the industry, Hill recalls.
“There was a place in West Virginia where the Coke, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper bottlers, along with another bottler, all met once a week at the Holiday Inn to set their prices. There was proof of this because one of the older fellas who thought he was being accused of not working hard enough kept notes of everything.”
Hill joined Chambliss in 2006 and eventually transitioned out of antitrust work and into the firm’s labor and employment section. After she retired in 2021, she immersed herself in volunteerism and occasionally consulted for Chambliss, but other than that, she was freer than a 17-year-old turkey farm escapee.
Until a former mentor said, “Not so fast.”
Grand jury foreperson
When Hill was still wet behind the ears at Witt Gaither, she fell under the tutelage of litigator Hugh Moore, whom she liked for his many interests outside the law. To her benefit, Moore was there when she needed him to be, which was most of the time.
“Anytime I said, ‘Hugh, can you help me understand something?’ or, ‘Hugh, can you answer a question for me?’ he was there.”
Hill continued to work with Moore after they reunited at Chambliss and was aware of his tenure as a Hamilton County grand jury foreperson. Still, when Criminal Court Judge Barry called Hill after Moore stepped down and asked, “Are you really retired?” she said yes.
Until she came to believe Moore told Steelman to “call Rosemarie.”
Hill perks up when she says this. During long stretches of our time at Canopy Coffee and Wine Bar, Hill has doled out the facts of her life like she was delivering the evening news. She’s been consistently lively and engaging, and often funny, but also outwardly pragmatic.
This is how Hill approached her practice, too, she says.
“I don’t get wrapped around the axle, probably because of my upbringing,” she explains. “I tend to think things are easy to overcome.”
But as Hill says she eventually agreed to succeed Moore as foreperson, she smiles and straightens her back – just as she did when she spoke about driving Kennedy to the bank, living with her Mennonite family, and sassing the attorney who needled her about being a secretary. She likes her new job, I think.
“We meet every other Monday and Tuesday. One of the DAs is usually there to answer [questions of procedure], and police officers come in and ask us to indict someone they arrested. After they go through the facts, we can ask them questions, and then we decide if there’s enough evidence to send the case to trial.
“It’s not beyond a reasonable doubt like a trial would be, it’s reasonable suspicion, or reasonable belief. Our decision has to be unanimous, which isn’t always easy, and we sometimes fuss at each other, but I love the process because I didn’t understand it before.”
Hill and her jurors have heard horrible cases, some of which have involved children, she says as her shoulders drop. Whenever the grand jury deliberates such as case, she encourages her fellow jurors to think about the police officers and what they face every day, she adds.
“I have a lot of sympathy for law enforcement. I don’t think our system is perfect, but I do think it’s the best in the world.”
Hill spends a few minutes circling around a trickle of remaining stories. She mentions finding and meeting her biological father in the early ‘90s, adopting a daughter, Sheena Bryan, when the girl was 10, and marrying Ross 12 years ago, but she doesn’t delve into details.
Sensing the library needs to close, I leave the rest of Hill’s stories on the shelves where she keeps them and we say goodbye.
One for the road
A few weeks later, I meet Hill again at the home she shares with her husband and a handful of pets in Lookout Mountain to take photographs of her. After I’m done, she hands me a printout of a paragraph that was a part of her firm biography at Chambliss.
The bio reveals an interesting tidbit about what Hill was doing in 1977.
“When Rosemarie was in her early twenties, she became the first woman to work on an oil rig at Rangely Oil Field in Colorado,” reads the blurb. “After that, she returned east and began to contemplate law school.”
“Very cool,” I say. “I bet there’s more to this story.” I immediately feel like a gushing geek at a book signing.
“Yeah, I guess,” Hill says. “You can keep that. I printed it for you.”