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A former judge, soldier and Fort Wayne gentleman died Sunday after a short illness.
Senior Allen Superior Court Judge Vern E. Sheldon, who retired in 1998, was known by friends and colleagues as a smart and patient person both in and out of the courtroom.
“He was very intelligent man. I admired his mind. He remembered everything,” Judge Fran Gull said. “As a judge, he handled really complicated civil matters that I was always overwhelmed by. He was always very patient, particularly with those of us not as gifted as he.”
Sheldon, who was 77 and leaves behind his wife of more than 50 years and two daughters, was appointed to the bench in 1985 and elected in 1990. He was re-elected without opposition in 1996.
Sheldon worked in the court’s civil division. Judge David J. Avery, who’s now a civil division judge, practiced law in front of Sheldon. He said Monday that Sheldon was fair, gracious and exercised good judgment.
“He was patient in the way that he would allow an attorney to get out all their arguments in a case as opposed to making a quick judgment on how he though the case might be determined,” Avery said. “If he had such an opinion, he would keep it to himself until the appropriate time to give a decision and, therefore, didn’t cut short the attorneys who would be making their arguments.”
Magistrate Robert Schmoll and Gull both described Sheldon as a friendly person and a gentleman.
“He was a very kind and gentle man and a gentleman,” Gull said. “We kind of joked that we were two of the few left that smoked, and he would smoke in his office and I would smoke in mine. When he took senior status, he didn’t have an office. I said, ‘You can still smoke in my office.’ We’d chat about family, vacations and our golf game. Very rarely did we talk about work.”
Sheldon, who graduated from Central High School in 1949, attended Franklin College where he graduated cum laude in 1953. He received his law degree from Indiana University in Bloomington in 1956.
While in law school, he both published articles and served as editor-in-chief of the Indiana Law Journal.
After college, he worked for a Lafayette law firm until serving as a 1st lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General Corps of the U.S. Army in 1957. He served with distinction for three years as the post judge advocate of the Pine Bluff Arsenal Troop.
When he returned, he worked as a trial lawyer for the firm now known as Rothberg, Logan and Warsco LLP for 25 years.
During his time on the bench, he served as chief judge from 1989 to 1991.
dwaugh@jg.net
