FRAMINGHAM, Mass. Morton “Mort” Spiksa, a lawyer who came to be known as the “Poet of Terms and Conditions,” died last night after a brief illness at Gino Cappelletti Memorial Hospital. He was seventy-eight.
“Mort really had a way with words,” said Norton Oswald, a retired plant manager at the General Motors assembly plant here before it closed. “Our vendors didn’t mind that we were the big guy who could crush them like a bug just to watch the juice ran out when they read his lyrical ‘T&C’s’.”
Mort Spiksa, about to exclude the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.
Spiksa had hoped to become a poet as an undergraduate but decided to study law after his father was diagnosed with terminal Osgood Schlatter’s Disease. “He realized he’d have to take care of mom,” said his sister Evelyn Spiksa Ryan. “I could barely support myself as a left-handed stenographer cruelly forced to work in a right-handed desk.”
In law school Spiksa was a slightly-above-average student who nonetheless demonstrated a perverse passion for commercial law, one of the less lucrative and more boring areas of the profession. “It appealed to his poetic side,” said Professor Galston Willier. “Nobody reads poetry, and nobody reads those terms and conditions in four-point type on commercial forms.”
Awkward!
Spiksa became living proof of Clarence Darrow’s belief that “inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet,” but he nonetheless struggled to forge an aesthetic identity apart from the mundane prose he wrote for purchase orders and invoices, such as his oft-repeated quatrain celebrating a number of common shipping terms that he surreptitiously slipped into a bill of lading:
F.O.B., C.I.F.,
Take away one and what is left?
C&F, F.A.S.,
One is more, the other less.
“There’s a simple sense of mystery to Mort’s verses, like William Blake’s,” says Newton Adair, III, Professor of Commercial Poetry at the University of Southern Iowa. “He could take a homely warehouse receipt and turn it into a thing of beauty–in triplicate, with white, pink and canary-colored copies.
“Behold the lonely loading dock, where we made off with Pots of Crock.”
His specialty was the so-called “Battle of the Forms,” when terms in documents presented by different parties conflicted and the parties’ agreement had to be determined by statutory rules of construction. In a case involving the rejection of a defective shipment of flanges and hasps, Spiksa’s poetry reached perhaps the apogee of his style, at once perfervid and peremptory:
These flanges and hasps,
are so defective it’s barely
worth shipping them back.
They make me gasp,
I mean that squarely,
I’m giving the whole lot the sack.
He is survived by his wife Ethel; a son, Mort Jr. of Mundelein, Illinois; a daughter, Traci of Hamtramck, Michigan; and his pet fork lift, Chucho. In lieu of flowers the family requests that donations be made to the Business Forms, Systems & Labels Hall of Fame.
Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Fauxbituaries: The Lighter Side of Death.”
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