He said Thursday that he decided, in seventh grade, that he wanted to practice law. Ramsey attributes the hard work on his father’s farm as the driving force leading him to go to college and find a better way to make a living. Pulling corn and suckering tobacco caused the young Ramsey to begin exploring his career options early on.

Ramsey said this week, “I’ve learned one thing over the past 50 years and that’s that a man cannot live on an island. You must have family and friends,” for support, he said, adding with a mischievous grin that he’d also learned, “that behind every successful man stands a father-in-law looking on in awe and disbelief.”

Recalling some of the highlights of his career, Ramsey spoke in a more sober tone of running for the North Carolina House of Representatives in 1962, largely because of school segregation. He wanted, he said, to ensure that all students had the same right to an education. He is proud, now, said Ramsey, that he was able to help Person County become the first in North Carolina to integrate schools and do it peacefully.

Ramsey spent 12 years in the Legislature, he said, serving the last two years as Speaker of the House. 

Much has changed over the past 50 years, Ramsey said, but he deals with “the same people, with the same problems at about the same age as 500 years ago.”

He said he does think that people of today are “probably more sophisticated and educated, but I swear I think the common sense is gone. My granddaddy couldn’t read or write,” he said, “but he had worked and saved his money. He had common sense and a vision.”

When Ramsey first began practicing law, District Court costs were $12.50. Today the figure has risen to $121, he said with a shake of his head.

The tools lawyers use now are vastly different from the old manual typewriter he used when he first opened his office. And his assistants no longer take notes using shorthand.

Recalling a few of the cases that stand out in his memory, Ramsey said, back in the 1960s he defended an “alcoholic tenant farmer” whose wife was found dead in bed next to the man. She had been hit in the head by a fire poker. There was no sign of forced entry. The man said he didn’t do it. The jury convicted the man of involuntary manslaughter. The Alamance County judge chastised the jury before giving the man a sentence of 20 years in jail.

Ramsey said the man told the judge, “Everybody likes you, but damned if you haven’t hurt yourself with me.”

Ramsey also recalls a case in which a girl got on the witness stand and said she’d been hit by a man so hard that she was knocked into the air and both her shoes came off.

Her father testified that he’d seen the whole thing and that it happened the way his daughter described it.

When asked how far he was from the incident, the father said he was standing exactly six feet and eight inches from his daughter when she was assaulted.

When asked how he knew the exact distance, the father replied, “I thought some fool would ask me so I measured it.”

He also remembered working with the late Sgt. Ernie Wood with the N. C. Highway Patrol, who provided many surprises over the years. At one trial, Wood testified that, while working on a license checkpoint, he saw a couple pull into a driveway and swap drivers before reaching the checkpoint. Ramsey, defending the accused, asked Wood if the trooper wore glasses. When Wood answered yes, Ramsey asked if Wood was wearing his glasses when he saw the car pull over. Woods said he was not.

“How far can you see without your glasses?” Ramsey asked.

Looking up at the courtroom ceiling, Wood replied, “I can see to the moon. How far is that?”
Ramsey simply stated, “No further questions.”

Laughing as he recalled the incident, Ramsey said this week, “What else could I do?”

With a chuckle, Ramsey concluded, “I don’t think I could have found anything in life that I could have enjoyed as much” as his long career in law.

He said he would tell young people today that a law degree “opens the door to many things” that don’t involve representing clients.

He said FBI agents must now have a law degree, and energy companies want their CEOs to be trained in law so that they can read contracts and “know what the government is doing.”

Ramsey received his juris doctor degree from the University of North Carolina School of Law after  obtaining his undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill.

While serving in the Marine Corps in Hawaii, he attended the University of Hawaii at night and was “three hours short of my master’s degree” when he left the Marines and returned to UNC.