Catherine Groll ’86 practices law by day and sings the blues by night.

“I think one feeds the other,” the Lansing, Mich., resident says of her two passions.

Both require discipline and practice. Both provide inspiration. “And I have gotten some amazing referrals to my legal practice because of my music,” she adds.

Groll, a personal injury lawyer who also is an adjunct faculty member at Cooley Law School in Lansing, sings “a lot of the old classics from blues women like Etta James and Ruthie Mae Brown” with a group called Rush Hour. The band plays at blues clubs in Lansing and around Michigan and just finished recording its first CD.

“It has evolved to the point that we now have an agent,” she says, sounding a little amazed.

It’s a long way, she muses, from her “wayward rock ’n’ roll days” as an NMSU student. Back then she sang and played tambourine with a band called Rook. The type of music? “Very bad rock ’n’ roll,” she says with a laugh. “That was back in the days of Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and Jefferson Starship.”

After playing at El Patio and other clubs in the area for a time, Groll dropped out of school for a year to travel with the band. “But I realized that we were not getting anywhere; it was a very hand-to-mouth existence,” she recalls. So she returned to school and got serious about her pre-law studies.

Groll, who grew up in Alamogordo, N.M., had been on her own since dropping out of high school at the age of 15. Her father’s death a few years earlier may have been a catalyst for her interest in the law and in fighting injustice. A staff sergeant stationed at Holloman Air Force Base, he died of cancer that had been misdiagnosed by military doctors, she says.

“I became obsessed with the law,” she says. “For my 18th birthday my mother gave me Black’s Law Dictionary. Everybody thought that was a little strange, but I loved it.”

She went to work for an attorney in Alamogordo who was an advocate for immigrants’ rights. He persuaded her to go back to school, so she obtained her GED and enrolled at NMSU – first in journalism, then in the pre-law program.

After her fling with rock ’n’ roll, she met and married Donald Schulze, a civil engineering student who called her “Fleebers” because he saw another F. Lee Bailey in her. They have since divorced but remain good friends, she says. “Now he designs golf courses in Palm Desert, Calif.”

With time out for touring with Rook, it took her six years to get her bachelor’s degree. She worked for a plaintiff’s lawyer in El Paso, then for a defense firm. “I wanted to make sure what kind of attorney I wanted to be and I quickly decided I wanted to be on the side of the people instead of the corporations,” she says.

She enrolled at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing because it was one of the few law schools at the time that offered an evening program “and I knew I would have to finance this myself.”

Now she teaches at Cooley, in addition to her full-time law practice and newfound success at singing the blues, and she credits her years at NMSU with putting her on the track to having it all.

“I really think my time at New Mexico State, and the environment that was there, got me back in the mode of learning again. The teachers I was exposed to really lit a fire under me that remains today.”