Montana, His Way Roots, guts and determination help Cliff Edwards make his mark.

The father stood outside his oldest son’s room. The boy had been holed up for hours, feeling sorry for himself. Clifford couldn’t run and play like the other kids. Perthes’ disease had left his leg a withered stick that was two inches too short. He had worn a brace and been on crutches since he was five. The doctor said he would never be able to run or play sports. To top things off, kids at school had caught wind that Clifford’s first name was Alvin, just like the cartoon character. Clifford would whack away at them with his crutches, but the Chipmunk jokes kept coming.

Clifford could be a pretty upbeat kid, but he was wearing down. So his dad, Bill, a Denton banker/rancher, came in and said, “You get that goddamn look off your face. There’s a whole lot of people who have real problems, and you don’t have a thing that’s going to bother you except you are going to have to rehab that leg, and it’ll come back, and at least you will be able to walk, and a lot of people can’t. Now you pick yourself up and you get back at it.”

It was tough talk, and Bill walked out before his son could see what that speech cost him. The boy’s eyes got moist. But he got out of bed.

Edwards volunteers to teach the summer Advanced Trial Advocacy course at UM.

It’s early and raining when A. Clifford Edwards, 53, arrives at the Missoula airport. He’s got on his black cowboy hat and Wranglers, and he greets me and UM photographer Todd Goodrich with bone-crushing handshakes and a deep voice with a slight Western twang. We’re joining him for a flying tour of his Montana businesses. Before takeoff he strides back to his car — no limping — to get some rubber over-boots from the trunk. He stows these aboard his new Cessna Citation V, the flagship of his charter airline service. He recently bought the luxurious eight-seater from the Porsche family of Europe. “You always need over-boots, no matter what the vehicle,” he says with a grin.

Edwards is a homegrown success story — a Montana Renaissance man — equally at home in big-city courtrooms and manure-filled pastures. (He jokes that sometimes there’s not much difference.) One of the state’s top civil trial lawyers, he owns the Billings law firm of Edwards, Frickle, Halverson & Anner-Hughes. He also owns the Edwards Angus Ranch near Denton — 80,000 acres and growing — and the Billings-based Edwards Jet Center, which operates about fifty charter aircraft and includes a Kalispell branch office. His businesses employ 125 Montanans.

He has two children — Chris, twenty-six, and John, twenty-two — both of whom study communications at UM. John is the starting quarterback for the Grizzlies football team. Both sons are leaning toward law school.

Meeting Edwards is a kick. He laughs a lot, tells jokes and cusses like a ranch hand. He’s a great storyteller — an ability that pays big dividends in the courtroom — and his stories produce stories that beget stories. He’s hard to keep on track during an interview because he’s so quick-witted and so many things interest him. And he isn’t afraid to discuss the things in life that have affected him deeply.

A third-generation Montanan, Edwards has deep roots in the Judith Basin country of central Montana. In fact, he credits much of his success to his family-oriented, rural upbringing in the tiny town of Denton. To Edwards, family is everything, especially when life throws a curveball.

Clifford’s leg got stronger day by day. One of his dad’s handyman friends had converted the boy’s old Schwinn into a stationary exercise bike. Plywood pressed against the back tire provided resistence, and Clifford burned through the boards. By the time he was twelve he’d lost his leg brace, but another, greater calamity struck his family. His two-year-old sister, Sheila, drowned in the creek behind the barn. His dad had been in the corral feeding heifers. Clifford and his brother had been playing basketball. Nobody had heard anything, and they were shocked because the girl never went anywhere without them.

Clifford’s mother had trouble coping with the tragedy. For a year she would break down and cry at nearly every family meal. Finally, her husband said, “Margaret, life is for the living, and we can’t do a damn thing about the fact that our little girl is dead, and it sure doesn’t do the rest of us who are alive any good to be living like this.”

Clifford never forgot what his father said — life is for the living. It helped him find the strength to move on when his straight-talking father passed away in 1988, and when more loss struck in the future. It taught him to live every day like it was his last.

By the time Edwards was in high school, he was a football running back, a track athlete and a bareback bronc rider. His parents sent a newspaper clipping about his setting a school record in the 100-yard dash to the doctor who said he’d never run again.

His mother was a schoolteacher, so Edwards says there was never any doubt about his going to college. He did his undergraduate studies at Carroll College in Helena, where he was a running back for the Fighting Saints and met a great circle of friends, all of whom have gone on to become successful. One of those was Marc Racicot, later a popular, two-term Montana governor. Edwards says Racicot helped him ask his future wife, Denise, on their first date.

“I had to have Marc pretend to be me and call her dorm because I didn’t have the courage to ask her out,” Edwards says. “She was so beautiful, and she was homecoming queen that fall.”

John, Cliff and Christopher Edwards

Edwards married Denise the summer before he started law school at UM, and she used her job as a third-grade teacher to help put him through school. Edwards, who later in life would give the law school its largest donation ever, said he didn’t enjoy his UM schooling.

“I hated it,” he says. “I was a C student. It was a necessary evil so I could get out. But I knew I wanted to be a courtroom lawyer, and I wanted to represent people.” Despite his “appalling lack of interest in academics,” Edwards must have showed some potential, because he remembers one of his professors calling him in one day during his second year and saying, “I’m sending you to Billings to work for [the law firm of] Timer Moses this summer. The firm has given me authority to hire the toughest son of a bitch in the class who’s going to be the best trial lawyer. That’s you.”

Timer Moses got Edwards into the courtroom, allowing him to try cases in the police and justice of the peace courts, and it was as if Cliff had found a second home. He began developing a conversational courtroom style that plays well with juries. The attorneys in Moses’s firm liked what they saw and hired Edwards right out of law school.

Edwards gravitated toward civil law as he worked in various law firms. “I really love representing average Montanans against big out-of-state corporations,” he says. “I love representing small Montana businesses that are the victims of large insurance companies and large corporations, and I do it with enthusiasm. Hell, it’s sport.”

Edwards never works from notes in the courtroom; he just thinks about the case and argues it. “To me it’s a very natural thing,” he says. “I never take a case I don’t believe in.”

He tackles cases on a contingency basis, meaning his firm doesn’t get paid unless it wins a judgment for the client. The firm puts up all the front money to pursue the case and eats the expense of a loss. “The contingent fee is the poor man’s ticket to the courtroom,” Edwards says.

Despite his legal skills, there was a learning curve, and Edwards lost all the big cases he tried in the early ’80s. He says he turned a corner in 1983 when he narrowly lost a design case against General Motors. He represented four oil-field workers who were hurt in an accident in a vehicle with motor mounts that would rot and fail, which made the engine stick at full acceleration. One worker was left paralyzed from the neck down. However, the workers were drunk at the time of the accident, and Edwards couldn’t overcome that prejudice.

“General Motors poured beer all over the courtroom for three weeks,” he says. “Drunk, drunk, drunk. It was a crushing defeat, but it didn’t shake my confidence because I knew we were right.”

Thereafter he and his partners settled a lot of cases. (Edwards says ninety-seven percent of cases never go to trial.) Then in the ’90s, after starting his own law firm, Edwards tried more than ten cases with verdicts in his clients’ favor of $1 million or more. In one 1999 case, when Burlington Northern was found guilty of dumping hazardous material in a standard landfill, he landed a $15 million judgment.

Edwards relishes the fact that he, a small-town boy from Denton, often matches wits with Harvard- and Yale-educated attorneys and walks away with wins. He loves the competition and dares them to underestimate him. “In business and life, you will win and you will lose,” he says, “and when you lose, get up quicker than the son of a bitch that just knocked you down. Keep coming back until they get sick of you. That’s how you’ll eventually prevail: Just keep coming.”

It’s the 2000 football season, and UM is playing Cal-State Northridge in California. With two minutes to play, backup quarterback John Edwards steps in for the injured starter and throws the winning touchdown pass. John raises his hands in triumph and then points up at his family and friends in the stands. Griz fans go nuts cheering, but John’s father steps back and turns away from the scene.

The tears start because the mother of John and Chris isn’t around for that moment. Denise Edwards died in 1999 after a tough, sixty-day struggle with cancer. Cliff was with her in the hospital, watching her fight until the end. At her funeral Cliff remembers Racicot saying, “If there’s anyone here looking for fair, this is a very poor place to be today. Because it isn’t fair, but it’s what happens.”

The hurt continues, especially when something good happens that Denise would have loved to see. She lived for her family. It’s at those moments that Cliff needs his family, to help him cowboy up and keep going. To help him remember that life is for the living.

Edwards’ success as a trial lawyer has allowed him to branch into other business ventures. Since 1988, for instance, he has been growing the family spread near Denton into the Edwards Angus Ranch, one of the top purebred Black Angus operations in Montana, and thus the United States.

Managed by Edwards’ cousin Dwight Barber, the ranch runs 2,000 head of cattle over thousands of acres between Denton and Stanford and a stretch north of Winnett. The operation is high-tech: Embryos are flushed from top-notch cows and implanted in surrogate mothers, enhancing the overall genetics of the herd. Computer chips contained in pouches attached to cow tails tell when the females are in estrus, and a centerpiece of the operation is the “embryo barn.” Sales of semen from Edwards bulls have brought in millions.

Edwards says the ranch is a labor of love that offers an escape from the courtroom and an opportunity to get back to his Judith Basin roots. He has bought out ten ranches to grow his operation, and he and Barber plan further expansion. They enjoy improving the properties they buy — seeding farmland to pasture, planting shelter belts and providing stretches for wildlife habitat. The foundation has been laid for a sales barn that will accommodate 350 people, and Edwards soon will break ground on a family lodge overlooking a four-acre pond on property his grandfather, A.C. Edwards, owned more than a half century ago. The site has a spectacular view of “Old Baldy” in the Little Belt Mountains and Edwards’ favorite Judith Basin landmark, Square Butte.

Edwards’ third career involves growing his Edwards Jet Center of Montana, an airline charter service. In 2001 he bought jet centers in Billings and Kalispell, and he is continuing to expand to make the business more competitive. A longtime charter-service user, he got into the business because “I felt like I was making payments and not getting any ownership.” He also believes a good charter service will help connect Montana to the nation and the world, spurring economic development.

Edwards says Montana has been good to him and his family. He bristles at the notion that the state lacks opportunity and that people have to leave Montana to make a decent living.

“I take great pride in being a Montanan, and I know you can get absolutely the finest education right here,” he says, “and I absolutely refute the idea that there are no opportunities here. People need to look around, get their butts out of bed, learn from people and read things. If you’re not afraid to make mistakes and don’t let the reversals get you down, there is opportunity all around us. It’s here. The only question is, Do you want to grab it?”

Cary Shimek, news editor for University Relations, was proud to survive the interview that produced this story, since it involved flying over a good part of Montana while he coped with a flu virus.