| Sources |
- [S74] Atchley Funeral Home Records, Volume IV, 1987-1999, Larry D. Fox, (Smoky Mountain Historical Society), 2 Mar 1994.
Betty Mae Manis Carr obituary
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 8 May 2011.
Family Practice: Daughter follows mother in law career
by GAIL CRUTCHFIELD
Heather, left, and Becky McCoy have worked together as attorneys for more than five years, but worked in the same office for many years before that. Heather and her sister Naomi used to help run errands for the attorneys their mother worked for as a paralegal, before she decided to be an attorney herself.
A portrait of Heather and Becky McCoy sits in their law book-filled office on Grace Avenue in Sevierville. The front yard of the office is full of wildflowers. Gardening is Becky’s hobby.
Heather McCoy followed in her mother’s footsteps and became an attorney, but those footsteps made by Becky McCoy were still relatively fresh when her daughter began her journey.
Becky McCoy was 40 when she decided to return to school, first to be a paralegal and then to get her law degree. Heather McCoy, one of her two living children — a third died at 3 months old — was in high school when Becky started college and a student at UT when her mother graduated law school.
“We would have lunch together at UT,” Becky said of the time both she and her daughter were students at the Knoxville university.
Becky has been a practicing attorney since 1995, but working in the business since 1980.
“I got into it totally by accident because I was a good typist,” she said.
“And somebody was out for vacation for a week and they called me to help out, and then at the end of the week they said, can you help us out again next week? So, I eventually I thought I was too old to go to college, but I fell in love with the work, so I went to paralegal school.
“I worked as a receptionist, secretary, then paralegal,” she said. At that point she decided maybe she wasn’t too old to go to college.
“I decided it didn’t matter how old you are.”
Seeing her mother tackle college as an adult was inspiring, Heather said.
“I think at the time she told us that she wanted to show us that we could do it,” she said. “My mother is the first college graduate in our family.”
“My parents were willing to send two of my siblings to college,” Becky said. “They both went one semester and dropped out. But I asked to go to beauty school — why I don’t know, I can’t even fi x my own hair — and they wouldn’t do it. I guess they didn’t think I was serious enough.”
Her excellent typing skills in high school — “To my knowledge, my record (about 146 wpm) hasn’t been broken,” she said of her time in Mrs. Carpenter’s class at Seymour High School — led her to the job as a secretary in a law office and down the path to become an attorney herself. Before then, she didn’t even give a thought to being an attorney. Not Heather, however. She said she knew as early as fourth grade that she wanted to be an attorney. A person who likes to keep things, she said she still has a piece of paper from that year of elementary school that indicates her future aspirations.
That started when she and her younger sister Naomi would go to work with their mother.
“Every summer, when she would work at different law offi ces, we would do the courthouse errands and we got to know everybody over there,” Heather said. “And we would take stuff to other attorneys’ offi ces.”
Her mom wasn’t really too surprised that her daughter wanted to be an attorney.
“People look at her and until they know her, they don’t realize it, but she will stand toe-to-toe with anybody,”
Becky said. “And she was a defiant child, but not in a bad way. She just had her own mind and she walked her own way. I tried not to interfere with that except when it was absolutely necessary.”
Becky started law school the same time that Heather started her undergraduate career at 19.
Balancing law school with responsibilities at home and work resulted in very little sleep, Becky said.
“I set up basically a law office in the house and went ahead and bought reporters and things like that, so I could go ahead and do work from home for other attorneys.”
But she also worked out of her car.
“They used to laugh at my car at law school because I had an offi ce set up in there,” she said. “Between classes I could go out to my car, work, make calls.”
“And she had one of those gigantic cell phones with the bag,” Heather said. “It was a really big phone.”
“Remember that laundry basket I carried around in my car, with toothpaste and stuff like that?” Becky asked her daughter. “I had everything I needed in my car.”
Becky said she thinks it was good for her daughters to see how hard it could be to balance home, work and school.
“I wanted them to see how difficult it was if you wait until you have all those other responsibilities,” she said. “And I wanted them to be able to achieve that earlier, and be able to enjoy it more.”
Becky put her all into getting her law degree, so much that she passed out from dehydration on the day she took her final exam. She even asked her professor if she could fi nish taking the test in the bathroom where another student found her, but he insisted she go the hospital instead.
Heather received her license to practice law in 2005, 10 years after her mother. She worked in her mother’s office while going to school, where she received the practical experience college courses can’t cover.
Both women said it’s not diffi cult working together. Heather credits her mother for that, because she urged her daughters to be their own person and fi nd their own strengths.
“She’s not a smothering person who tries to make you be a mini-her,” she said. “I’m different than her in a lot of ways, and she likes that.”
They help each other when needed, whether the other asks for it or not.
Heather handles the criminal cases, while both practice family law.
“Sometimes we work together on cases,” Becky said. “We always bounce things off of each other. For example, Heather might just be sitting in the courtroom … and she’ll pass me a note and say you need to say this. And sometimes, when we’re together, she’ll start to say something, and I’m going like this,” she added, gesturing
with her arm to indicate holding off from speaking up. “So we give each other cues like that, and usually when we do, it’s a good move.”
That’s not to say they don’t have the occasional confl ict or disagreement.
“When I’m not in court I tend to dress way, way down,” Becky said.
“Heather tries to keep me in line on that. She’ll say, ‘You look fine today except for those shoes.’”
But that doesn’t cause hurt feelings. “It works really well for us because we have mutual respect for each other,
and we can say things that need to be said without offending each other,” Heather said.
“In a lot of ways it’s an advantage because there’s complete trust,” Becky said. “When we do have criticism for each other, the one thing that we never doubt is that I know that she loves me, she’s not trying to hurt me.
“She knows I love her. She knows I’m not jealous or trying to hurt her. So we don’t doubt the reasons for offering the criticism. I think we instantly listen to it.”
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