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THOMAS FINAN MUDD
February 23, 1940
Admitted to the Maryland Bar June 24, 1965
Law Practice 1965 - |
The first U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam in 1965 swelling to 190,000 strong by year-end. In 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson was President and Hubert H. Humphrey was Vice President of the United States; Martin Luther King and 2,600 others were arrested in Selma, Alabama; the U.S. population was 194,302,963; the cost of a first-class stamp was $.05; the Sound of Music premiered; Michigan State and Alabama shared the National Collegiate Athletic Association Football Championship; Winston Churchill, Nat King Cole, T. S. Elliot and Adali Stevenson all passed away.
In 1965, the population of Charles County, Maryland was 40,125 and on June 24, 1965 in Annapolis, Maryland, Thomas Finan Mudd signed his name to page 133 of the Maryland Court of Appeals' Test Book certifying to his admission to the practice of law before all courts in the State of Maryland.
Thomas F. Mudd was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in La Plata, Maryland where he completed his primary and secondary education at Sacred Heart and Archbishop Neale Schools. After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1961 from the University of Notre Dame, Mr. Mudd enrolled in the University of Maryland School of Law and was awarded a Bachelor of Law Degree on February 1, 1965. Upon concluding a clerkship for the late Honorable Joseph R. Byrnes in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, Mr. Mudd entered the practice of law in La Plata with the partnership of Mudd & Mudd Attorneys ushering in the third generation of Mudd lawyers to the law practice commenced by his grandfather in 1907.
Typical of rural practitioners, Thomas Mudd's early career ran the gamut of a general law practice case load, later settling into concentrations in business law, real estate transactions, land use, estate planning and settlement and with an occasional venture into business and real estate litigation.
Continuously active in the civic and social arenas of his native Southern Maryland, Mr. Mudd coached, umpired and refereed in community youth baseball and basketball leagues, served as President and member of Archbishop Neal School's Parents Council, as a member of the Board of St. Mary's Ryken High School, as President and Board Member of the Hawthorne Country Club and as a member of the Parish Council for Sacred Heart Church. He is a member of the Knights of Columbus, served on the Boards of the Charles County Department of Social Services, Chamber of Commerce, and Economic Development Commission, as a Board Member of the Charles County Association of Handicapped and Retarded Children (HARC) and as a founding Director of Spring Dell Center, Inc.
Professionally, he is a member of the Bar of the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City and is a member of the Bar Associations of Charles County and the State of Maryland; he served as President of the Charles County Bar Association, as a member of the Board of Governors' of the Maryland State Bar Association, as Chairman of the Real Property Section of the Maryland State Bar Association, a member of the Association's First Response Committee, the Judicial Nominating Commission and the District Advisory Board for Public Defenders.
In 1990, Mr. Mudd and nine business acquaintances founded County First Bank, a community bank now serving the Southern Maryland counties of Charles, St. Mary's and Calvert with six branches. He is a current director of the bank.
In 1985 with a plan to relocate the offices of Mudd, Mudd & Fitzgerald, P.A., Thomas F. Mudd, his wife Judith, law partner Stephen P. Fitzgerald and his wife Linda purchased the circa 1894 former residence property of the late U.S. Congressman Sydney E. Mudd (a distant relative) on St. Mary's Avenue in La Plata.
The Sydney E. Mudd residence was in poor condition when purchased by the Mudds and Fitzgeralds but in 1986 was restored to its original prominence and retro-fitted to serve the needs of the firm's attorneys, including among others, Mary T. Rice, now Charles County Bar Association Librarian, Thomas G. La Hood, now a Roman Catholic Priest, the Honorable Richard A. Cooper, now a Judge of the Charles County District Court, Robert M. Burke, now a solo practitioner and Patrick B. Murphy, now corporate counsel.
Although difficult to select "the one most memorable matter" from the hundreds handled in his career, Mudd counts his court appointed representation of an indigent criminal defendant charged with "boot-legging" in the top ten of fond memories. Included in the items of evidence introduced at trial by the State was a shoe which the "Revenuers" contended the Defendant "ran out of" while escaping the scene of the illegal still. Long before modern rules of discovery would have permitted pre-trial examination of the evidence, Mr. Mudd was left to rely on his client's representation that he was not at the scene of the still and that he wore "a size 10 shoe." Reluctantly, he called his client to the witness stand; in a scene reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson trial, the "size 7" shoe introduced into evidence by the State, fit his client's size 10 foot like a glove. The boot-legger's conviction was reported in La Plata's Times Crescent Newspaper under the by-line "Shoe Fits Cinderella in Moonshine Fairytale." The defendant received a sentence concurrent with a Federal Court sentence arising out of the same incident.
Tom and Judy Mudd continue to reside in their family home of thirty-three years where they raised their six children, all of whom are married and who regularly contribute to a stable of grandchildren now totaling 11 and ¾ .
Mr. Mudd's forty-two years of lawyering are second only in his firm's history to his grandfather's forty-three. He expects to establish a new record while keeping a wary eye on his workaholic brother, John, who is likewise dedicated to resetting the "Bar."