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Bar News - February 4, 2005 Alethea Froburg: A Warm Heart in the Cold North Alethea Froburg's Alabama accent is as warm and lilting as a Berlin winter is harsh. In her large, neat office on Berlin's Main Street, Froburg provides a calm space for her clients to weather family storms such as divorce and custody battles. Froburg is this year's recipient of the L. Jonathan Ross Award for Outstanding Commitment to Legal Services for the Poor. It's not the first time she's been honored for her commitment to helping low-income clients. She is a multiple winner of the Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year award for Coös County. Froburg wasn't always sure she wanted to be a lawyer. But her interest in equality and human rights dates back to childhood. "My father was originally from Massachusetts, and his family was old time New England stock," she explains. "I was really taken with New England, the idea of Boston, the abolitionists." She felt out of place in the South. Those ideals were tested when Froburg was in college in the 1960s. As a member of the Congress of Racial Equality, she once had a pair of brass knuckles thrust in her face at a lunch-counter sit-in. Riding the bus home from the University of Missouri, she sat in "colored only" waiting rooms all the way through Mississippi. "It was kind of scary, but it was important," she recalls. "It was a very small role, I don't want to exaggerate anything, but it made a big impact on me." Froburg got a Master's degree in French, planning to become a professor. "Then while I was having babies, the world decided it didn't need to require foreign languages in colleges," she recalls. "People with PhDs in French were driving taxicabs!" She decided to go to law school instead. By then she and her husband had relocated to Littleton, where he was helping to start Northern New Hampshire Mental Health and Developmental Services. She earned a law degree in 1978 at the University of Maine Law School, and moved to Berlin to work at Bergeron and Hanson. Five years later she launched her solo practice. Froburg generally has two Pro Bono cases open at any given time. She's also been known to work on the installment plan: "Sometimes if I feel it strongly enough and they just can't come up with the money, or they can but it's going to be slow, I take payments of...not much." She pauses, then laughs. "I hate to spread the news about how little people sometimes pay me, you know, spread out over time. It's not going to be a good social security plan." Perhaps her worst payment scheme involved barter: "I was going to get a nice quilt from this person," she says wryly, "but the quilt never materialized." Froburg has embraced the small-town life of northern New Hampshire ("It's a different world up here," she says). But she's never gotten used to the cold. Though she's approaching a time in life when others take up hobbies like knitting, she's pursuing something a little edgier: scuba diving. Now, when the winters seem about six months too long, she escapes to tropical waters. "I said I really, really, really want to do this," she recalls. "I think it was about four or five years ago. I just did it and never looked back." Froburg has found that as a family lawyer, her pedagogical leanings come in handy. "I like working with people and trying to help them figure out how to solve their problems," she says, "teaching them things that they can use to solve their own problems, not just doing [their legal work] and sending them off." Still, she concedes it can be stressful taking part in some of the most difficult events in her clients' lives. "It is so involving," she says, "and I think this is probably true of medicine as well - I mean, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about my clients. They invade my whole life. It's not something you leave behind at the end of the day." |
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