Her day job done, the next chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court pulled on a hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and boots, and headed across the family farm.
She was going to check on her herd of heifers after a brief but fierce autumn rainstorm that swept across Lee County, taking down tree limbs and drenching Virginia's westernmost outpost. But now, the dark clouds parted and the late-afternoon sun poked through to illuminate a scene of bucolic beauty exquisite enough to hang in a gallery.
It wasn't hard to see why Cynthia D. Kinser loves this place so much.
"This is relaxing after a day of reading briefs or writing opinions," Kinser said with a smile as she steered her all-terrain vehicle through the rolling fields stretching toward a backdrop of not-too-distant mountains.
Kinser, who turns 59 this month, will be sworn in as Virginia's first female chief justice Feb. 1. Kinser is soft-spoken, slight and at 5-foot-3 needed a small platform to stand on so she wouldn't look so short next to former Gov. George Allen at the 1997 news conference he called to announce her appointment to the court.
"That can be very deceptive when people first meet her," said H. Ronnie Montgomery, a Jonesville attorney who hired Kinser as a young lawyer and is now partners with her son, Adam. "She's tough as nails, really. She's no pushover in any way."
Growing up near the Wilderness Trail that Daniel Boone blazed to Cumberland Gap, Kinser has long demonstrated her own sort of pioneer attitude. As a child, she thought the study of Virginia history and government was "the neatest stuff I'd ever learned," and she decided early she wanted to be a lawyer. In a place where few young women aspired to the profession, it was a bold ambition for the daughter of an auctioneer and a home-economics teacher.
"People thought I was crazy," she recalled. "I remember a fellow coming and tuning our piano. I was in high school, and he was asking me what I was going to do, and [when she told him] he said, 'You can't do that.' I thought, 'I'll show you.' "
Kinser, elected by her fellow justices, will replace Chief Justice Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr. of Richmond, the court's first African-American chief justice, who has served two terms as chief justice and under court policy is not eligible to serve a third.
Kinser is well aware of the historical significance of being the first woman to hold the job, but she is just as proud to represent her often-forgotten corner of the state. A joke in Southwest Virginia is that people in Richmond think the state ends at the Interstate 81 exits to Bristol. In fact, Pennington Gap is 60 miles west of Bristol. The Kentucky border is less than 10 miles from the center of town.
Like much of Southwest Virginia, Lee County is rugged and fetching but, with a long economic tradition of mining coal and growing tobacco, it also can be a tough place to make a living. Lee is one of the state's poorer counties, with more than 23 percent of the population living in poverty, according to 2008 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
So having a local resident make good generates a significant source of pride in the community. "I'm one of them," Kinser said.
* * * * * Kinser has always lived in Lee County except for her college years and the five years she spent as a child in Roanoke. She married her high school sweetheart, Allen — a retired history teacher, principal and football coach — and they raised two children and have three grandchildren. They live on land that belonged to her grandparents, just down a narrow road from the house where she grew up and where her 85-year-old mother, Velda Fannon, still lives. Many of her neighbors are cousins. She regularly plays the pipe organ at First United Methodist, the church she has attended since childhood, and on occasion she drops by the Lee Nursing and Rehabilitation Center to play familiar hymns on the piano for the residents, including her mother-in-law, Mamie Kinser. A bridge on the road leading to the center is named for her late father-in-law, Henry A. Kinser.
"It gives you a sense of belonging," she said of her deep roots in the community. "I grew up knowing my grandparents. There's something to be said for that. Not everybody can do that — my daughter lives in California because her husband is a Navy pilot — but it was possible for us to do. We never really seriously thought about living anyplace else."
At Pennington High, Kinser played clarinet and performed as a majorette. Her parents farmed on the side, so she and her brother, Sid, helped with the cattle and the gardening, and she still likes planting and harvesting. Allen Kinser, who is as down-to-earth as his wife and also possesses a dry sense of humor, finds no pleasure in digging in the dirt, though he's glad to eat whatever his wife and son grow. "Get me to Food City," he said of a local grocery chain, "and I'm fine."
Her most influential activity might have been her involvement in the 4-H youth organization. She raised steers and researched nutrition, but also developed leadership and speaking skills. As a high school senior, she won a trip — and her first airplane ride — to a national 4-H conference in Chicago.
"That was in the day when you got dressed up to do things like that, and my mother made me wear a hat on the plane," she recalled with a laugh. "I put it in the suitcase coming back."
The 4-H motto — "To Make the Best Better" — serves as a mantra for her approach to life.
"I don't think people should ever become complacent," she said. "I don't think I'm ever complacent about anything."
* * * * *
Having grown up in a small town, she wanted to attend a big university, so she spent her freshman year at the University of Georgia before transferring to the University of Tennessee, which was only 100 miles from home and where her future husband was a student. She majored in political science and graduated with honors, and then attended the University of Virginia School of Law, where she also graduated with honors.
She clerked a year for U.S. District Judge Glen M. Williams in Abingdon — where her co-clerk was a law school classmate and future governor, George Allen — and then returned to Pennington Gap, where in 1978 she was the only female trial attorney in Lee County and one of only two west of Roanoke. She worked briefly with Montgomery and then set up her own practice before being elected Lee commonwealth's attorney, the first woman to hold that job.
She generally ignored comments she heard about her gender.
"I always figured I'm an attorney, and I've got as much right to be here as anybody else," she said. But occasionally she would have to assert herself with an "I'm-not-your-honey" kind of retort.
When she ran for re-election, she lost to the same opponent she had defeated the first time, R. Larry Lewis, now a general district judge in the county. It was her last excursion into politics.
She focused on her private practice until 1990, when she was chosen as U.S. magistrate judge for the Western District of Virginia, setting the stage for an appointment to the Virginia Supreme Court she never saw coming.
She hadn't given it much thought until U.S. District Judge Samuel G. Wilson in Roanoke called and encouraged her to put her name up for consideration for the 1997 opening Allen would be filling after the General Assembly had deadlocked on a replacement for the retiring Roscoe B. Stephenson Jr.
"I've seen her career from day one, and I knew all along she had great talent," Wilson said recently. "She has this keen intellect … and she has an engaging way about her. She's able to work with just about anybody."
Wilson described Kinser as "impervious to black-robe fever" — a phrase used to describe judicial arrogance — and well-grounded.
"She keeps it all in perspective," he said. "That's really the hallmark of a good appellate judge."
* * * * *
Kinser was torn about seeking a job that would be an interim appointment and subject to approval by the legislature. Her uncertainty went away at the dinner table one evening when her son said, "Mom, sometimes opportunities just come along once in a lifetime, and you just need to take a chance."
She had no expectations when she offered her name for consideration. She and Allen had kept in touch over the years but were not close friends. She was gratefully surprised when he made her the state's third female justice.
She is considered among the court's most conservative members, particularly in criminal cases, according to Virginia Lawyers Weekly. That's not unexpected, as the conservative Allen chose her, and Kinser had run her only two political races as a Republican. (She also had campaigned for her late father, Morris Fannon, in his failed bid as a Republican candidate for the House of Delegates, although that was in the 1950s and she was just a child asking people to "vote for my daddy.")
Yet, Wilson said, she exhibits "no hint of anything that resembles partisanship," and Frank Kilgore, a lawyer in St. Paul who has known her since the early 1980s, said she is "very discreet" about her politics.
"In many court decisions, she seems to have taken the more pragmatic view," said Kilgore, a longtime champion of Southwest Virginia who describes himself as "a rabid independent."
In discussing her approach on the bench, Kinser said she never wants to forget that judicial decisions "affect the lives of people."
"But I can't bend what a statute says," she said. "I'm very careful to follow the law even when it reaches a result that maybe in my heart I feel like the other side should be winning."
* * * * *
As chief justice, Kinser will spend more time in Richmond but will maintain chambers in Pennington Gap. Her duties will increase as she takes on more administrative responsibilities, serving as the head of the state's judicial system and working directly with the General Assembly.
Those who know her describe Kinser as fair, hardworking and extremely organized in whatever she does. But there is a distinct difference between the black-robed Kinser asking cordial but pointed questions of attorneys appearing before the court and the blue-jeaned Kinser puttering around the land she holds so dear.
Longtime friend Josephine Roddenberry suggested there are "two Cynthias."
"There's the courtroom Cynthia, the striving perfectionist," said Roddenberry, who grew up in the next town over, Jonesville, and has been friends with Kinser since the late 1970s. "Then there's Cynthia the mother, grandmother and friend — soft, loving and tender. Lots of people don't know that side of her, because that's not the side she projects."
But Roddenberry knows it well. She and Kinser found themselves in the same hospital room after each delivered her first child in 1978. Their children are friends, they attend the same church, where they play musical duets, and they have taken family vacations together, including a cross-country trip in the late 1980s in a van filled with parents and children.
When Roddenberry's first husband, Steven Rowlett, was killed in a plane crash in 1991, Kinser was among those who helped Roddenberry through the unspeakably difficult period.
"Cynthia was with me through all of that," Roddenberry said. "She's a very loyal friend."
wlohmann@timesdispatch.com
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