Category Archives: law school

Gender-bias revisited

Posted on February 16, 2024 | 3 comments

I’ve encountered gender-bias of varying degrees throughout my life.  I want to relate an example of gender-bias I encountered decades ago, during my first year of law school.  Looking back on it, I find it almost laughable. When you read this story, you may agree.

My story exemplifies gender-bias by a fellow law student. I was one of a small number of women law students in my class—we made up just over four percent of the total.  Although most of my male classmates treated me with respect, there were exceptions, and this classmate represents the worst of them.

To set the scene, I was an enthusiastic participant in the law school’s moot court program, the Ames Moot Court competition.  My participation ended in the middle of my second year of law school only because the program’s absurd “team” structure eliminated my team—not me. I did well enough to move on, but my team as a whole did not. I wasn’t happy about it because I truly enjoyed participating in Ames.

During our first year of law school, all students were required to take part in the Ames program.  Here‘s how it worked:  In the fall semester, students were randomly assigned to participate in a fictitious lawsuit and had to play the part of either the plaintiff’s attorney or the defendant’s attorney.  We were expected to research the most important issues, write a brief on behalf of our client, and then show up in person before a panel of three judges to argue our case.

In the fall semester, I was assigned to a thorny contracts issue, and I spent a lot of time doing research in the large law school library.  In this pre-internet era, I would read case law in the bound reporters on the shelves of the library.  I would then transcribe relevant case law onto index cards and yellow legal pads, planning to use helpful precedents in my argument. 

My opponent that fall was a wisecracking student from the Cleveland area.  He was apparently distraught that his opponent was a “girl.” I was told that he was overheard complaining that it worked to his disadvantage whether he won or lost.  His complaint went like this: “If you win, you’ve only beaten a girl.  And if you lose, you’ve lost to a girl!”  When I learned that this concept dominated his thinking, I was furious and even more determined to beat him if I could.

I did a lot of my research in the library at night, after dinner.  One night, I was transcribing a helpful precedent from a court that followed Anglo-American law.  It was just fine to use case law from any jurisdiction that followed Anglo-American law.  The court reporter I had come across was not in a jurisdiction in the U.S. or the U.K.  It was in Alberta, Canada, which followed Anglo-American law.  My opponent caught a glimpse of me and meandered over to where I was sitting.  He took a look at the court reporter I’d found and commented, “Scraping the bottom of the barrel, huh?”  I coolly answered him, pointing out that this court’s holding was perfectly acceptable, a great one supporting my case, and I planned to use it.  He smirked and wandered off. 

What was the outcome of our argument, held in November, just before Thanksgiving weekend?  We appeared in a small room at the law school to argue our case in front of a panel of three judges. The judges for each case varied.  Our panel was made up of three third-year students who had earned an excellent law-school record. 

How did I do?  I won more points on both the written brief and the oral argument, thereby defeating my opponent.  Too bad his father, a practicing lawyer in Cleveland, had made a special trip to witness our oral argument, probably assuming that his son would triumph over a “girl.” 

What happened next?  During the spring semester, I was required to pair up with my fall opponent, and together we opposed a pair of other students in a new case.  My Cleveland classmate suddenly had a brand-new attitude, quite happy to work with a “girl” to produce a winning brief.  Which we did.

I like to think that this triumph over gender-bias led to my classmate’s permanently rethinking his previous attitude.  I wonder whether it really did.  But it certainly left me even more determined to fight gender-bias—and win—for the rest of my life.

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Posted in gender equality, gender roles and stereotypes, gender-equity, law, law school, lawyers

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“The Battle of the Sexes”: An anniversary

Posted on November 13, 2023 | 1 comment

 

September 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of “The Battle of the Sexes,” the memorable tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

In November 2017, when a film based on this story appeared, I wrote about it.  https://susanjustwrites.com/2017/11/ .  Much of what I wrote still holds true, and an edited version appears below.  Thanks to Billie Jean King’s autobiographical memoir, All In, published in 2021, I can add a brief update.

Edited version of what I wrote in 2017

When Billie Jean King met Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973, I was miles away in San Diego.  I’d just finished teaching a class of law school students about Poverty Law, and I was blissfully pregnant with my first child.  I was watching the clock, trying to judge the time it would take to drive from the beautiful campus of the University of San Diego to our recently-rented apartment in seaside La Jolla.  Waiting at home was my handsome and super-smart husband (I’ll call him Marv), finished for the day with teaching math students at UCSD, the University of California at San Diego.  We were both Professors Alexander that year, and it was fun to answer our phone and hear a student ask for ‘Professor Alexander.’  My silly response:  ‘Which one?’

Marv had snacks and drinks ready to munch on and imbibe during the televised tennis match.  The drinks included nothing alcoholic for me.  Not because the medical profession had decided that alcohol harmed growing fetuses.  That came a few years later.  I avoided alcohol simply because I had no desire to drink while I was pregnant.  Was it instinct or just dumb luck?  When we later that year saw the film “Cinderella Liberty,” in which an often-drunk woman’s pregnancy ends in tragedy, it was clear that my choice to avoid alcohol was the right one.

I drove home from USD as fast as I could, arriving just in time to watch the much-hyped tennis match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.”  In the 2017 film about the match, Emma Stone captured the Billie Jean King role perfectly.  She portrayed not only King’s triumph over Riggs in that match but also her initial uncertainty over her decision to compete against him and her continuing struggle to ensure that women’s tennis be given equal status with men’s.

Steve Carell carried off his role as Bobby Riggs equally well, depicting the outrageous antics of the 55-year-old Riggs.  But the focus had to be on Billie Jean, the Wonder-Woman-like heroine of her day.  By accepting Riggs’s challenge, and then defeating him, she became the twentieth-century symbol of women’s strength and perseverance, advancing the cause of women in sports (and in American culture at large) as much as she advanced her own. 

Marv and I were two of the estimated 50 million Americans who watched the match on ABC television that night. Watching it with my adored husband, my hoped-for child growing inside me, I was ecstatic when Billie Jean defeated Riggs before 90 million viewers worldwide.

As my pregnancy advanced, complete strangers would ask me, “Do you want a boy or a girl?”  I liked to answer ‘a girl’ just to see the reaction on the faces of nosey parkers who clearly expected another response.  I was in fact hoping I would give birth to a healthy child of either sex, but I knew I’d treasure having a daughter.  When my darling daughter was born about seven months after the Battle of the Sexes, and when her equally wonderful sister arrived three years later, Marv and I were both on top of the world.

Maybe watching Billie Jean King in September 1973 sealed our fate.  We really wanted her to win that battle. Did the endorphins circulating inside me as we watched her triumph produce a feeling of euphoria?  Euphoria that later led us to produce two Wonder-Woman-like heroines of our own?  Maybe.

Tennis, anyone?

2023 update

Fifty years later, I’m in awe of what Billie Jean King has been able to achieve in the field of tennis and in our culture overall.  Throughout her career, she has faced all sorts of challenges.  Significantly, in the preface to her book, All In, she recounts the gender-bias she confronted as a child.  This was not only the gender-bias that permeated the overall culture that she and I both grew up with, but also the specific bias she dealt with in the tennis world. 

In my forthcoming book, I plan to quote King’s description of what she was up against.  “I didn’t start out with grievances against the world, but the world certainly seemed to have grievances against girls and women like me.”  As she writes, “Pursuing your goals as a girl or woman then often meant being pricked and dogged by slights… It made no sense to me.  Why would anyone set arbitrary limits on another human being? … Why were we constantly told, Can’t do this. Don’t do that. Temper your ambitions, lower your voice, stay in your place, act less competent than you are. Do as you’re told?  Why weren’t a female’s striving and individual differences seen as life-enriching, a source of pride, rather than a problem?” 

King points out that the famous Riggs tennis match “remains cast in the public imagination as the defining moment for me where everything coalesced and some fuse was lit.  But in truth, that drive had been smoldering in me since I was a child.”  What the match and “its fevered buildup proved was that millions of others were locked in the same tug-of-war over gender roles and equal opportunities.”  She adds, “I wanted to show that women deserve equality, and we can perform under pressure and entertain just as well as men.”

King has gone on to achieve exactly what she aimed to do:  Achieve equality for women in tennis, and push for equality in every other sphere of our lives. 

When we look back at the “Battle of the Sexes,” let’s place that event firmly within the context of the lives American women like King have lived, beginning with her childhood and continuing up until today.

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Posted in 1970s, American culture, American history, anniversaries, Battle of the Sexes film, Billie Jean King, blog, Bobby Riggs, California, daughters, films, gender equality, gender roles and stereotypes, gender-equity, law school, memories, movies, Pacific Beach, pregnancy, San Diego, tennis, UCSD, University of San Diego, women, women"s interests, Wonder Woman

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Julius Caesar in the U.K.

Posted on November 18, 2022 | 2 comments

In my last blog post (“Marlon, Tony, and Cyd,” https://susanjustwrites.com/2022/10/26/marlon-tony-and-cyd/), I noted Marlon Brando’s performance in the 1953 film version of Shakepeare’s Julius Caesar, a film that had a tremendous impact on a very young version of me.  As I recall, I saw it with classmates at my junior high school, which declared a special day at the movies for some reason.  I always wanted to see it performed live.

Years later, that finally happened.

In May 1972, my husband Marv and I took our long-delayed honeymoon. We’d married one year earlier in LA, but we weren’t able to take off more than a weekend (spent in beautiful Santa Barbara) until we arrived in Ann Arbor in the fall of 1971.  We found life in AA somewhat restricting, and we began to ponder trips outside of Michigan and my hometown of Chicago. 

Our first foray took us to the tropical paradise of Nassau on a bargain charter trip from the U. of M. that we thoroughly relished.  But we hungered for more.  We soon aimed at the fabled cities of London, Paris, Florence, and Rome, and decided to visit them in our upcoming three-week vacation/honeymoon.

We landed in our first city, London, in early May.  We reveled in the British history and literature that leaped out at us:  Touring Charles Dickens’s home; making the essential trip to the Tower of London; viewing the paintings at the National Gallery…. 

We were also theater buffs, and we made sure to get tickets for plays on the London stage.  I remember our first night in London.  Even though we sat in the first row of the theater where Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing appeared, Marv had such vicious jet lag that he fell asleep and missed The Whole Thing. We loved the musical version of Canterbury Tales (which never seemed to be offered in any US city we ever lived in) and we roared at Robert Morley’s antics in his hilarious comedy in the West End. 

But one thing was missing.  We weren’t able to get tickets at any theater offering the plays of William Shakespeare. Whatever may have been playing was sold out or otherwise unavailable.

We racked our brains trying to solve this problem.  Suddenly an idea popped into mine.  We’d briefly shopped in the famed Harrod’s department store, mostly to see the place, and I thought I’d seen an advert for its travel service.  So we made our way back to Harrod’s and, sure enough, we discovered that its travel service offered a bus tour that encompassed an overnight stay in Stratford-upon-Avon and included two tickets to the Shakespeare play being performed on the date we’d arrive.  Voila! 

We immediately signed up for the tour, which also would make brief stops in a few other places:  Oxford, Blenheim Palace, and a town called Leamington Spa.  The only hitch was that we had to cancel the rest of our stay in our Sloane Square hotel and scramble to find another spot when we returned to London.  But Shakespeare was worth it.

Early the next morning we took off on our bus tour.  We discovered that our tour included theater tickets for a performance of Julius Caesar.  Destiny?

Soon we arrived at our first stop:  Oxford and its world-recognized university.  After viewing the university from our bus, we briefly walked around the campus.  I recall strolling around Christ Church College and noting its elegant architecture. 

Whenever I watch “Inspector Morse” on PBS, the crime drama starring John Thaw as Oxford police detective Morse, I’m always reminded of our brief stop at Oxford. The prizewinning series was produced from 1987 to 2000 and occasionally still pops up on PBS-TV channels.  The setting for each episode is invariably Oxford and nearby locations. 

Christ Church College has even more recently loomed into public view. Decades after our visit, Christ Church College has become famous because a number of campus locations were used as settings in the Harry Potter films.

Next we headed for our most desired stop:  Stratford-upon-Avon.  We found ourselves booked at the city’s White Swan Inn.  This historic inn, first used as an inn as far back as 1560, struck us immediately as a classic example of Tudor architecture, with a half-timbered exterior typical of that era.  When we checked in, we discovered that its framework of wooden beams extended into our bedroom, creating a memorable place to lay our heads during our stay in Stratford.

At the hotel’s restaurant, we shared dinner with our fellow tour-mates.  One other American couple shared our last name, and we chatted happily with them and others.  But we hardly noticed the food because we were eagerly anticipating our evening at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, an eight-minute walk away.

Excitedly, we arrived at the theater and took our seats, located not far behind the first row.  The other Alexanders were seated a couple of rows behind us.  The program listed the cast and included only one semi-familiar name.  Corin Redgrave, presumably the son of notable British actor Michael Redgrave (and notable British actress Rachel Kempson) and brother of Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, would play the part of Octavius Caesar.

The play began!  Marv and I knew the plot well, having seen the 1954 film more than once.  We certainly had no problem watching the violent murder of Julius Caesar by Brutus and the others.  But during that scene, we could hear cries of anguish coming from the other Alexanders.  At intermission, they exited, loudly declaring how unhappy they were.

I was astonished by their reaction to a brilliant performance of one of Shakespeare’s classic plays.  What exactly did they expect?  Much of Shakespeare is loaded with acts of violence and death.  Were they expecting one of the comedies?  If so, I was torn between feeling sorry for them and laughing at their foolishness. They’d probably been excited about seeing Shakespeare in Stratford, and they’d shelled out some of their pricey tourist budget to be there.  But they were apparently not very knowledgeable about the Bard or they’d have had an inkling of what could be on the stage that night.

I lost further respect for our fellow theater-goers when I overheard a woman (with a pronounced British accent) mutter, “Corin Redgrave.  Isn’t she Vanessa’s sister?”  Marv and I were both aware of Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, two women who’d already played prominent film roles.  So even though we weren’t entirely sure who Corin Redgrave was, we could easily tell from the program that he played a male role, and he would therefore be Vanessa’s brother, not another sister.  We Americans seemed to know a lot more about the British theater than the locals did.

Although we didn’t recognize the names of any of the other actors at the time, I’ve been able to find (on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s website) the names of the members of the cast that night.  I discovered that we saw a number of outstanding British actors who later achieved great fame. They included Patrick Stewart (as Cassius), John Wood (as Brutus), Richard Johnson (as Mark Antony), Margaret Tyzack (as Portia), and Tim Pigott-Smith.  Further, the director that night was the much acclaimed Trevor Nunn.  No wonder we were thrilled to witness this extraordinary performance.

Marv and I stayed till the very end and reveled in the brilliant performances of these talented actors.  We’d happily achieved our goal of seeing Shakespeare in Stratford, performed by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and we’d seen a spectacular new version of Julius Caesar to boot.  Back at the White Swan Inn, we celebrated our thanks-to-Harrod’s coup with a romp in our very feathery English bed, Marv first showing off his manly strength by hanging from one of the overhead wooden beams.

By the way, the White Swan Inn has been renovated and still exists as a hostelry in Stratford, now dubbed the White Swan Hotel.

En route back to London, we made two more stops.  First, we visited historic Bleinheim Palace, where we toured the glorious interior.  The palace has been in the Churchill family since the 1770s (its history is fascinating), and Winston Churchill, who was born and often lived there, is buried just outside the palace grounds.  His grave is accessible to anyone. (You don’t need to visit Blenheim Palace first.)  Five years earlier, I briefly witnessed some of Churchill’s state funeral (the last state funeral before Queen Elizabeth II’s in September 2022) on a small black-and-white TV in the basement of Wyeth Hall during my first year as a student at Harvard Law School.  I was doing my laundry in an adjacent room and, when I glanced at the TV, I was suitably impressed by the pageantry on display in London in January 1965.

The tour’s final stop was a charming tea shop in a town called Leamington Spa. As our group gathered for tea, we learned the history of Leamington Spa, a beautiful but largely unknown town not far from our earlier stops.  (On a trip to countryside England with a friend in 2012, my friend and I met someone working in the Somerset area who confided that she was moving to take a new job in…Leamington Spa!  So, forty years after my visit to its tea shop, I surprisingly heard mention of it again.)

Marv and I returned to Stratford-upon-Avon with our daughters in 1995, in the middle of a jam-packed trip to the U.K. and France [please see “Down and Hot in Paris and London,” https://susanjustwrites.com/2014/11/%5D.  We stayed in nearby Cheltenham, visited other towns in the Cotswolds, and toured some sites in Stratford.  But we weren’t able to see a Shakespeare play together (I think the theatre was closed just then). 

So the time Marv and I were able to spend in Stratford in 1972, and our chance to see the Royal Shakespeare Company give a spectacular performance of Julius Caesar, gleam even more as a glittering memory, still burning brightly.

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Posted in Ann Arbor, Michigan, art museums, Charles Dickens, Cheltenham, Cotswolds, daughters, English literature, films, France, Harry Potter, Harvard, law school, literature, London, London theatres, memories, movies, Oxford, PBS, Queen Elizabeth II, Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, theater, travel

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PACIFIC BEACH: An unforgettable year (Part III)

Posted on April 11, 2022 | 1 comment

Something surprising happened in January.  Months before, I’d applied to work at the San Diego Legal Aid Society, but I’d never heard back.  Now I got a phone call asking me to come downtown for an interview. When I met with the program director, Steve H, I was visibly pregnant, but Steve liked my background working in Legal Services as a lawyer for low-income clients, and he decided to hire me part-time. 

I was thrilled.  I’d completed teaching Poverty Law at USD at the end of the fall term, reading final exams and papers and handing in my grades.  Starting a great new part-time job right now would work out perfectly.  Steve loved introducing me to everyone in the office, practically beaming because he, a steadfast liberal, had hired a pregnant woman.

I discovered that I could take a convenient bus downtown.  But when I met my officemates, one of them offered to give me a ride. Mike W, a single lawyer about my age, lived near me and picked me up on a corner close to my apartment. 

Mike W was a smart guy but totally unaware of how pregnancy worked.  Almost every time he gave me a ride, he fretted that I’d give birth in his car.  I had to keep reassuring him that first babies are never born that fast.  And of course mine wasn’t.

Working in the downtown office turned out to be a terrific experience.  I enjoyed my Legal Services work, interviewing clients and doing research at the downtown city library.  During lunchtime strolls, I was also able to explore downtown San Diego.  I discovered a great used book store and still own a vintage copy of Robert Burns’s poetry I found there. 

I also browsed at the big downtown department store, Walker Scott.  It reminded me of old-line department stores in other cities, like Chicago’s Marshall Field’s.  I remember the store was at that time promoting the forthcoming film, “The Great Gatsby,” featuring life-size photos of Robert Redford and Mia Farrow on full display.

One lunchtime, I entered Walker Scott feeling a bit tired, and I happily discovered a women’s lounge where I could put my feet up.  I returned there often.  One day I noticed a new mother nursing her baby, and I remember smiling and telling her how much I admired her.  At the time, I was busily reading up on how to nurse my own baby, and it was reassuring to see a new mother handling it so well.

Before I reluctantly went on leave from my job at Legal Aid (I’ll explain why below), the women in my office surprised me with a baby shower!  It was a true surprise because I never expected any of them to spend their precious time and money on me.  I think there was one other woman lawyer, whom I barely saw because she was so busy.  The other women were either administrative staff or secretaries, and most of them didn’t appear to have an extra dollar to spend this way.  It was a joyous event, and I treasured receiving gifts from these ultra-kind women.  A stuffed teddy bear from Mari became our baby’s first toy, landing in her bassinet as soon as she arrived home.  Another gift was a baby blanket, especially endearing because it had a noticeable flaw that identified it as a remainder purchased at a bargain store.  Buying even that was probably a stretch for my beautiful co-worker, and I loved her for it.

In March, I got some bad news.  A routine urine test revealed a high number for glucose.  I had to follow up with another, more serious, glucose test, requiring that I drink a revolting liquid.  The result was a shocker:  I was diagnosed with a complication of pregnancy, “gestational diabetes.”  

I didn’t even know that this complication existed.  It was NOT a complication described in my well-thumbed paperback copy of “Pregnancy and Childbirth,” written by the noted NYC ob-gyn Alan Guttmacher.  His book listed a whole lot of complications, but nowhere did Dr. G mention gestational diabetes.  (I do remember his advice for dealing with constipation:  Just relax on the toilet with a cigarette.  Oh, yes, his book gave that advice.  Luckily, I never needed to follow it.)

Dr. Blank sent me to a local specialist, an MD who was an expert on diabetes.  This man turned out to be a horrible practitioner of the medical profession. I had no problem with modifying my diet. That was no big deal.  But this MD also ordered that I begin having insulin shots once a day, and he arrogantly announced that I had to enter a hospital overnight to learn how to give myself injections.  Further, instead of trying to cheer me up, reassuring me that everything would go well, he warned me forebodingly:  “We’ve had some losses….”  What a miserable thing to say to a vulnerable pregnant patient.

My friends Lyn and Ted once again came to my rescue, dismissing the idea of my going to the hospital.  Instead, in their dining room, they taught me how to give myself insulin shots, using an orange as the substitute for my arm.  Former nurse Lyn told me that was how nurses learned to give shots.  I felt incredibly lucky to have Lyn on my side.

Marv lovingly took over giving me my needed shots.  But I was nevertheless depressed by the prospect of six more weeks of them.  Marv tried valiantly to make me feel better by reminding me of the biggest news story of the day:  Patty Hearst’s abduction in Berkeley six weeks earlier.  The shocking story had dominated local TV news.  “The time since then has gone fast, hasn’t it?” Marv asked me.  I had to admit that he was right.  Those six weeks had flown by.  I could survive six weeks of shots.

I had become and would always be a “high-risk primapara.”  Once I learned the meaning of “primapara,” a woman giving birth for the first time, I thought about writing a journal titled “Diary of a High-Risk Primapara.”  But I never got myself organized enough to do it.

Celebrating my birthday at the end of March became a wonderful break from our worries.  My nausea had lessened a great deal by that time, so Marv and I drove to Tijuana, where we had a scrumptious Mexican lunch and shopped at the outdoor vendors’ stalls.  Marv bought me a beautiful white crocheted shawl that I cherish to this day.  We then drove back to San Diego, where we devoured a delicious dinner at a fancy rooftop restaurant, Mister A’s.  (It’s still in business.)

Marv and I didn’t want to tempt the evil eye, so we put off shopping for baby clothes and furniture until just before my due date in early May.  But we anticipated needing a rocking chair for our new baby.  In a store near our apartment, we found a great Scandinavian-designed rocking chair, made with teak wood like the rest of our good furniture.  I later used it to rock my new baby, just as we planned.  I still own and treasure it.

In April, my diabetes diagnosis compelled me to take a leave of absence from my Legal Aid job.  The reason was borderline disgusting.  Please forgive me for describing it, and feel free to skip the following paragraph.

My doctors demanded that I collect my urine for 24 hours every day so it could be analyzed for a certain substance in it.  I was given giant glass jug-like bottles in which to save the urine, and I kept them in a bathtub in our apartment.  I was so dutiful in my collecting that whenever I left home, I would carry smaller bottles in which to collect smaller amounts, later adding them to the giant bottle. Usually accompanied by Marv, I would then drive to the UCSD hospital downtown to drop off the big bottles.  The whole process was exceedingly disheartening, but the final blow came when I began to lift a completely-filled bottle out of my bathtub, and the bottom fell out, spilling an entire day-long collection.  I sadly watched it all go down the drain.

At that point, I knew that I couldn’t keep up with both my job and all the medical demands on me, and it was the job that had to go.  My desire to give birth to a healthy baby overpowered everything else.  So I said goodbye to my Legal Aid office, assuring everyone that my leave was only temporary and that I planned to see all of them again after the birth of my baby.

Although my diagnosis of gestational diabetes was disheartening, and we couldn’t be certain of the outcome of my pregnancy, I felt pretty sure that the fetus growing inside me would put up a good fight.  This baby had to be strong.  It had survived all of my energetic dives into the hotel pool we’d shared with our friend Arlyn in Westwood.  (I’ve always believed that a weaker fetus might not have survived my vigorous diving.) 

The gap in my work-life balance was soon filled by another part-time job, one I could work on at home.  I’d already begun my leave of absence from my job at Legal Aid when I was recruited to bolster the Legal Writing program at USD law school.  I’d successfully completed teaching Poverty Law at USD at the end of the fall term, reading final exams and papers and handing in my grades.  Now a faculty member eagerly recruited me for this new job.  He brought me a big pile of student papers to review and grade by the end of the spring term.  I was happy to use my experience as a Legal Writing instructor at the University of Michigan Law School, a job I’d completed just before we left Ann Arbor for San Diego.  I dug into the USD student papers with relish, marking them up with my trusty red pen.  My hope, of course, was that my revisions and comments would help these students become better lawyers.

Meanwhile, Marv and I went back and forth, trying to choose a name for our hoped-for baby.  Picking a name for a boy was easy:  Marv’s and my father had both been named David.  But a girl’s name was much more challenging.  Almost every one that I liked Marv would veto.  While we continued to consider possible names, my friend Lyn gave me some useful advice:  Choose a name your baby will like.  She confided that she and Ted had named their son Ira Robert, but he was incessantly teased by other kids:  “I’m a rabbit, I’m a rabbit.”  They finally legally changed his name to Robert Ira.

                                                To be continued….

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Posted in breast-feeding, compllications of pregnancy, diabetes, law school, Legal Aid Society of San Diego, nurses, pregnancy, San Diego, UCSD, University of San Diego, Westwood

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Pacific Beach: An unforgettable year

Posted on March 31, 2022 | 2 comments

(Part I)

The other day, while strolling down Union Street, a charming shopping street in my neighborhood, I spotted a tall man of a certain age across the street.  I could see him well enough to notice his shirt, brightly boosting PACIFIC BEACH in large red capital letters.

I caught his eye and waved, calling out “Pacific Beach!”  He gallantly waved back, and I went on my way.

But when I returned home, I couldn’t forget his shirt, a colorful reminder of an unforgettable year, roughly spanning August to August a few decades ago, and it reawakened my memories of that remarkable year.

We landed in San Diego in early August after a cross-country road trip from Ann Arbor, Michigan.  My husband (I’ll call him Marv) had a visiting professorship lined up at the University of California in San Diego, and I’d lined up a professorship (as an adjunct) at the University of San Diego Law School.  They were totally different schools, one a branch of the University of California, the other a law school located on the beautiful campus of a Catholic university.  But those initials—UCSD and USD—were so darn close.  One of my alumni magazines got my school’s name wrong and published a blurb stating that I was teaching at UCSD’s law school.  The only problem:  UCSD didn’t have a law school.

UCSD’s campus was, and is, located on the fringes of La Jolla, a posh (then and now) suburban-style area that’s actually part of the city of San Diego—although it likes to pretend it’s a separate city.  Marv and I, ecstatic to have escaped our life in Ann Arbor, began our hunt for a place to live near Marv’s campus. He would be spending all day every day there, while my commitment to USD was far less.  In the fall semester, I taught only one class, Poverty Law, one afternoon a week.  Teaching it required substantial preparation, but I could do much of it at home.

While we apartment-hunted, we stayed in a small motel on La Jolla Boulevard, where the proprietor showed off the exquisite tropical flowers she cultivated.  And we discovered nearby Pacific Beach, which featured a delightful collection of small restaurants and shops.  An early favorite was Filippi’s, a great spot for pizza we returned to again and again.

Our apartment-hunt led to our leasing a place that seemed to be a pretty good fit.  But while we waited for the telephone installer to show up, the kitchen’s fridge emitted a loud din that filled the entire apartment.  We extracted ourselves from that lease and kept looking.

A couple of family friends who’d left Chicago were now living in a beautiful apartment development on La Jolla Boulevard, not far from Marv’s campus and downtown La Jolla but still close to Pacific Beach.  We loved everything about it, but our first attempt to rent there resulted in failure.  Our friends encouraged us to keep trying, and when we tried again, the universe smiled on us:  the perfect apartment was available!  Not only could we rent a cheerful two-bedroom apartment with a geranium-filled terrace, but the development also featured two swimming pools, a sauna, and a great outdoor parking space.  We moved in quickly and soon felt right at home.  Marv and I loved splashing in one of the pools and tried out the sauna as well.

At the pool one day, I met a charming new friend:  a newly-retired nurse (I’ll call her Lyn).  We’d chat while we splashed around together.  Later she introduced Marv and me to her husband, a semi-retired physician (I’ll call him Ted).  They went on to play an important part in our lives.

We also enjoyed spending time with our family friends, Chicago transplants Tammy and Norm.  They were fond of a nearby pub called Bully’s and enticed us to try it.  It turned out to be a great neighborhood spot where Marv and I liked to linger in one of its red vinyl booths, relishing a beer and a perfectly-grilled burger.  When Bully’s closed in 2008, it garnered a heap of online comments bemoaning the loss of a revered pub.

After our furniture arrived from Ann Arbor, Marv and I began watching the Watergate hearings on TV.  We’d earlier witnessed some of the most dramatic events during the hearings, which began before we left Ann Arbor. The testimony of John Dean and Alexander Butterfield was especially notable.  Soon we resumed watching the televised hearings in La Jolla.  Marv was busy getting to know his colleagues and preparing for the fall semester at UCSD, but I was able to watch a big chunk of the gripping hearings, which featured one Tricky Dick revelation after another.  

In Ann Arbor, we’d also learned that Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox was sworn in as a special Watergate prosecutor.  Although I’d never taken a course with Professor Cox when I was a law student at Harvard, I viewed him as a remarkably kind person, unlike many of the other, often arrogant, members of the faculty.  Walking through the tunnels that ran under the law school buildings (used by students and faculty to avoid Cambridge weather), I would sometimes encounter Professor Cox.  I firmly believe that he intentionally nodded, smiling, acknowledging me as one of the few women students at the time.  I would of course smile back, fervently wishing that I could be a student in one of his classes.

Later that year, now in La Jolla, Marv and I followed the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” that resulted in Cox’s outrageous “firing.”  Live TV news coverage made clear what was happening before our eyes. We weren’t shocked by anything the Nixon administration was doing or had done, but it was nevertheless absorbing to follow every despicable twist and turn.

Meanwhile, we were relishing our new life, feeling immensely lucky to be in an exciting city filled with colorful flowers and charming Spanish-style architecture, as well as glorious views of the ocean we could see all along the coastline.  We walked everywhere in the gorgeous sunshine, surrounded by the beauty of a city jam-packed with countless inspiring sites.  The contrast with Ann Arbor, where we’d faced long gray winters and hot humid summers in a city that was far too limited for us, was stunning.

We discovered the extraordinary beauty of Balboa Park, and we spent many hours exploring its museums, flower gardens, and other color-saturated spots.  We also relished shopping and eating at a variety of businesses on Garnet Street in Pacific Beach.  (La Jolla shopping was usually a bit too pricey for us.) 

I almost never did any cooking that summer.  But on one visit to a local supermarket, I came across a piece of meat that spoke to me:  a brisket of beef.  So, one afternoon, with great anticipation, I put the brisket in our oven and took off for the Fashion Valley Mall some distance away.  I figured I’d be back in plenty of time, but I spent too long searching for the perfect top to go with my new blue pantsuit.  You can probably guess what happened.  I got home much later than expected and…I burned the brisket.

I very much wanted to have my own desk in our new home, and one of our bedrooms had a corner with just enough room for one.  Strapped for funds, we found a slightly-damaged desk at a random garage sale.  We promptly bought it, soon matching it with a hideous dinette chair I bought at a bargain-priced store.

August ended with a terrific change of pace.  A wonderful law-school friend (I’ll call her Arlyn) traveled from NYC to visit us in La Jolla.  Marv and I happily showed her all around the city we already loved, including a trip to the famous San Diego Zoo (where I wore my new pantsuit with the Fashion-Valley-Mall top).  Arlyn slept in our second bedroom (usually used as Marv’s office) on a cot we purchased expressly for her visit.  She swore that it was comfortable.

The three of us then took off for LA, driving together to the city where Marv and I had met and married.  We stayed in a small hotel near our old haunts in Westwood, where I blissfully dove into the pool as many times as I could.  It was Arlyn’s first trip to LA, and we were delighted to show her many of our favorite spots.  Our great trip to LA ended when we dropped Arlyn off at the airport just before Marv and I drove back to La Jolla.

September was about to begin, and the whole month looms large in my memory.  

Just about the time I began teaching my class at USD, I began to feel nauseated.  Astoundingly nauseated.  And the nausea was relentless.  Nothing I did could make it stop.

Was I….?

I was.       

  To be continued….

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Posted in American history, Ann Arbor, Michigan, California, California coast, Cambridge, Mass., friends, La Jolla, law school, Los Angeles, LA, Nixon administration, San Diego, shopping, smiling, sunshine, teaching, TV news, UCSD, University of San Diego

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A Remarkable Friend

Posted on January 21, 2022 | 2 comments

This is a brief tribute to a remarkable friend, Karen Ferguson, who died last month.  You can read more about her life in the following obits:

New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/business/retirement/karen-ferguson-dead.html
Washington Post  https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2021/12/29/pension-rights-karen-ferguson-dies/

Why was Karen remarkable? As the Times noted, she was “a Nader Raider, one of a legion of young public-interest lawyers who flocked to Washington” in the 1970s to work for Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who was at that time a heroic figure on the American political scene.  She chose to devote herself to working on pension law, an “unglamorous-sounding subject” that was actually full of human drama, where she was able to champion workers’ rights and effect enormous changes to benefit their future.

I met Karen and became her lifelong friend when we were both students at Harvard Law School in the 1960s.  I had just moved into Wyeth Hall, the women’s dorm, during my first year, and the delightful Karen Willner was in her third year.  Karen’s warmth immediately enveloped me, a lowly 1L. Happily for me, we stayed in touch after she graduated.

While I was finishing my three years at HLS, Karen married John Ferguson, who decided to attend the University of Chicago Law School, and together they headed for Chicago.  Karen wrote to tell me that she’d begun working at a downtown Chicago law firm, where she was the first and only woman lawyer. 

During my third year of law school, I actually interviewed with that firm.  Disillusioned with the D.C. of Richard Nixon (my original destination), I was thinking about returning to Chicago, my home town.  Although I hoped to get a clerkship with a federal judge, I also interviewed with several Chicago law firms.  After chatting for a while, the recruiter for Karen’s firm told me outright, “We just hired our first woman, and we’re waiting to see how she works out before we hire another one.”  (This interview took place after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the recruiter was violating federal law when he said that.)  I’ve told this story many times, to the amazement of most listeners, and I like to add that I knew who that “first woman” was:  Karen.

When I returned to Chicago, I began working for U.S. District Judge Julius J. Hoffman [please see “Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman,” a ten-post series beginning at https://susanjustwrites.com/2020/11/13/hangin-with-judge-hoffman/].  With both of us living and working in Chicago, Karen and I enthusiastically resumed our friendship.  Because John was busy with his law school studies, Karen and I saw each other many times in downtown Chicago.  And one memorable evening, Karen, John, and I went together to see “The Yellow Submarine” at a downtown movie theater. 

I was sad when Karen and John departed for D.C. after he finished law school (and began his career as an NLRB attorney).  But their departure led to Karen’s groundbreaking new chapter in her life as a lawyer:  her launch into helping people by reforming pension law, with fairness as her first priority. 

We managed to stay in close touch during the many years that followed.  My memory-bank is filled with happy memories of our long friendship, including wonderful times spent together in both D.C. and Chicago.

I loved following Karen’s career, deeply enmeshed in working on pension-reform legislation, including the Retirement Equity Act of 1984, signed into law by President Reagan, and the Butch Lewis Act, signed into law last year by President Biden.  I reviewed her excellent book, Pensions in Crisis (original title: The Pension Book).  My glowing reviews appeared in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin on January 25, 1996, and the Chicago Tribune on May 13, 1996 (“Pension Problems Come Alive, Along with Practical Guidance”).

Karen’s never-failing efforts to establish a secure and adequate retirement system, on top of expanded Social Security, are still under discussion on Capitol Hill. 

I also loved learning about the wonderful family she and John created, including her son, Andrew Ferguson, a lawyer, writer, and law professor at American University, and his wife and children.  My review and discussion of Andrew’s important book, Why Jury Duty Matters, appeared on this blog in April 2013. [Please see https://susanjustwrites.com/2013/04/03/does-jury-duty-matter/%5D

One more thing:  When I wrote my first novel, A Quicker Blood (published in 2009), I named my protagonist, a young woman lawyer, “Karen.”  I later brought her back as the protagonist in my third novel, Red Diana (published in 2018).  Was I thinking of my friend Karen when I chose that name?  I was. And all of the current nonsense focused on the name “Karen” infuriates me.  Although there may be a few women with that name who have acted inappropriately toward others, it’s totally unwarranted to pigeonhole all Karens that way.  Just think of Karen Ferguson and all that she’s done to make the lives of hard-working Americans more secure.  That’s in addition to her being a delightful human being, beloved by everyone who knew her.

In short, I was supremely lucky to know Karen Ferguson and to call her my friend for over five decades.  I’ve lost—indeed, we’ve all lost–one of the very best people on Planet Earth.

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Posted in 1960s, 1970s,, pensions, pension law, fairness, workers' rights, women lawyers, A Quicker Blood novel, Chicago, Harvard, law, law school, lawyers, memories, Nixon administration, novels, Red Diana novel, Ronald Reagan, Washington DC

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Dancing With Abandon on Chicago TV

Posted on October 28, 2021 | 6 comments

He was a good-looking bespectacled teenager with a full head of shiny brown hair.  I’ll call him Lowell M.  He helped out after school at Atlas Drugs, the corner drugstore near the small apartment where I lived with my widowed mother and older sister during my high school years.

I grew to hate that cramped apartment and would often plead with my mother to move somewhere else, but she never would.  I eventually escaped when I went off to live on the campus of the great university 300 miles away that enabled me to make my escape by giving me what’s now called a “free ride.”

Back to Lowell M.:  When I exited from the crowded Peterson Avenue bus I took home from high school every day, Lowell was usually working at the front counter of Atlas Drugs, just across Washtenaw Avenue from the bus stop’s drop-off corner.  While the drugstore’s owner-pharmacist was busy dispensing meds in the back of the store, Lowell would dispense the kind of clever pleasantries expected of us, two of the best and brightest our high school had to offer.  He was in the class ahead of mine, and we happily chatted about school and a whole host of other topics while I would select a package of Wrigley chewing gum or some blonde bobby pins (which didn’t really match my bright red hair) or whatever else had brought me into Atlas Drugs that day.

Lowell must have taken a liking to me because one afternoon, out of the blue, he asked me to accompany him to Chicago TV’s “Bandstand.”  This was shockingly, astoundingly, incredibly fantastic, and I could barely believe it.  Somehow Lowell had secured two tickets to Chicago’s version of “American Bandstand,” an after-school TV show broadcast on WGN-TV.  I haven’t been able to track down anything about that show on the internet, so I don’t think it stayed on the air for very long.  But I’ve stored some vivid memories of it in my nearly overflowing memory-bank.

It was the late-’50s, and my mother had switched from reading the Chicago Tribune to the Chicago Sun-Times after my father died and we left our temporary home in LA to return to Chicago.  (I’ll save the story of that move for another day.)  But my father had been a faithful reader of the Tribune before he died, and I can still see the Tribune’s front page, proclaiming that it was the “World’s Greatest Newspaper.”  Its far-right-wing publisher, tycoon Col. Robert R. McCormick, came up with that phrase, and its initials—WGN—became the call letters of the Tribune’s radio station and later its TV channel.

During the semester I’d spent in LA, I watched its local TV’s version of “American Bandstand” when I’d get home from school.  Hosting high school kids from all over LA to dance on TV, it featured the exciting new pop music that was emerging all over the country. 

Now I was about to attend a TV program just like that one.

Why did Lowell ask me to join him?  I was never really sure.  Maybe, just seeing me at the drug store that day, he asked me on a whim.  But no matter.  I accepted Lowell’s invitation with alacrity and rushed home to tell my sister and mother about my upcoming appearance on local TV.  Dancing to the latest pop music, no less.

My sister kindly (and somewhat uncharacteristically) offered to lend me her smashing new top, a black-and-cream-colored number with tiny horizontal stripes (much more flattering than wide ones).  She was always more interested in fashion trends than I was, and for once I was grateful that she was.

Somehow Lowell and I met up at the appropriate time and made our way downtown to the Tribune buildings located on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago.  We probably took the Peterson bus and transferred to the bus that ran along Michigan Avenue, but to be truthful, my memory’s a bit foggy on that score.  Eventually we entered the radio-TV broadcasting building, built ten years after the Tribune Tower itself, and we entered one of the 14 new studios added in 1950, probably one of the four designated for TV.

Ushered into the large studio, filled with other teenagers from all over “Chicagoland” (a term invented by the Tribune), we soon were dancing to the musical hits of the day.  My still-enduring favorites include “Earth Angel” by the Penguins, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley, “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes, and “Sh-boom” by the Crew Cuts.

TV cameras whirled around the studio, capturing Lowell and me in our own version of “Saturday Night Fever,” two decades before that film appeared.

I recall having a fabulous time, dancing with abandon to my musical favorites, and I thought that Lowell did, too.  But I was disappointed when Lowell never asked me to do anything else with him, like go to a movie (a favored pastime of my friends and me).  So it’s possible that he may not have had the truly memorable time I had. 

Did I continue to see Lowell behind the counter of Atlas Drugs?  Maybe.  At least for a while.  But my guess is that he eventually moved on to other after-school jobs that were more in keeping with his burgeoning interest in the business world.

As he approached graduation a year before I did, Lowell began dating a friend of mine who was in his graduating class, and the two of them later married.  Lowell went on to college, earned an MBA, and built a successful business career. 

I went in a different direction.  Fascinated by the world of politics, I pursued two degrees in political science and landed finally in law school, aiming for the kind of career I wanted to follow as a lawyer and a writer.

But the memories of my exhilarating afternoon at Chicago’s version of “American Bandstand” have stayed firmly lodged in my memory-bank.  I will be forever grateful to Lowell M, who—perhaps on a whim—opened the door to those dazzling memories so many years ago.

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Posted in 1950s, 1950s televsion, American culture, Chicago, clothes, clothing, Daddy, family, fashion, fathers, friends, high school, law school, Los Angeles, LA, memories, Mom, mothers, pharmacist, politics, rock and roll music, teenage years, television

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Another love story

Posted on May 26, 2021 | 3 comments

Part II

Watching “Love Story” again, 50 years later, I found it terribly disappointing.

The film was an enormous hit at the box office, earning $130 million—the equivalent of $1 billion today.

It was a box-office phenomenon, a tearjerker that offered its audience a classic love story filled with amorous scenes and, ultimately, tragedy.

But….

Fifty years later, I found the two leads far less appealing than I remembered.  Ryan O’Neal, who plays highly-privileged Oliver Barrett IV, and Ali MacGraw, who plays Jenny, a super-smart girl from the wrong side of the tracks, encounter each other on the Harvard campus as undergrads.  After some sparring, they quickly fall into each other’s arms.  But I didn’t find either them or their relationship overwhelmingly endearing.

Ali MacGraw’s character, Jenny, strikes me now as borderline obnoxious.  She’s constantly smirking, overly impressed with her brain-power and witty repartee. 

Even Oliver, who falls madly in love with her, calls her “the supreme Radcliffe smart-ass” and a “conceited Radcliffe bitch.”  (As you probably know, Radcliffe was the women’s college affiliated with Harvard before Harvard College itself admitted women.)

Jenny would repeatedly retaliate, ridiculing Oliver by calling him “preppie,” a term used at the time by non-privileged students in an attempt to diminish the puffed-up opinion that privileged prep-school graduates had of themselves.

Jenny may have been Hollywood’s version of a sharp young college woman of her time, but 50 years later, I view her character as unrelatable and hard to take.

I received my own degrees at a rigorous college, a demanding grad school, and a world-renowned law school.  My classmates included some of the smartest women I’ve ever known.  But I don’t recall ever encountering any bright young women who exemplified the kind of “smart-ass” behavior Jenny displays.  If they existed, they clearly stayed out of my world.

The film has other flaws.  In one scene, filmed near a doorway to Langdell Hall (the still-imposing law school building that houses its vast law library), Jenny bicycles to where Oliver is perched and proceeds to make him a peanut butter sandwich while he is so engrossed in his recognizably red Little Brown casebook that he barely notices her presence. This scene is ludicrous.  Law students are traditionally super-focused on their studies.  Well, at least some of them are.  But Oliver’s ignoring a beloved spouse who’s gone out of her way to please him in this way is offensive and totally contrary to the “loving” tone in the rest of the film.  In short, ludicrous.

The movie also became famous for its often quoted line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  The absurdity of that line struck me back in 1970 and has stayed with me ever since.  I’ve never understood why it garnered so much attention.  Don’t we all say “I’m sorry” when we’ve done something hurtful?  Especially to someone we love?

Interviewed by Ben Mankiewicz in March 2021 (on CBS Sunday Morning), both Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal (still vibrant and still in touch with each other) confessed that they never understood the line either.  “What does it mean?” Mankiewicz asked.  MacGraw’s response:  “I don’t know.” 

One more thing about that famous line:  If you watch the hilarious 1972 screwball comedy “What’s Up, Doc?” you’ll probably get a kick out of a scene at the very end.  Barbra Streisand cleverly mocks the “Love means never…” line while traveling on a plane with her co-star (and “Love Story” lead) Ryan O’Neal.

Another line in the film, this one spoken by Oliver’s father, struck me as remarkable as I listened to it 50 years after the film first appeared.  When his father, played by veteran actor Ray Milland, learns that Oliver has been admitted to Harvard Law School, he tells Oliver that he’ll probably be “the first Barrett on the Supreme Court.”  Just think about this line.  Who could have predicted in 1970 that someone named Barrett would actually be appointed to the Supreme Court in 2020? (My opinion of that appointment?  No comment.)

One more thing about Jenny:  Yes, women used to give up great opportunities in order to marry Mr. Right, and many probably still do. But I was heartily disappointed that Jenny so casually gave up a scholarship to study music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger so she could stay in Cambridge while Oliver finished his law degree.

What’s worse, instead of insisting that she seize that opportunity, Oliver selfishly thought of himself first, begging her not to leave him.  Jenny winds up teaching at a children’s school instead of pursuing her undeniable musical talent.

I like to think that today (at least before the pandemic changed things) a smart young Jenny would tell Oliver, “I’m sorry, darling, but I really don’t want to give up this fabulous opportunity.  Why don’t you meet me in Paris?  Or wait for me here in Cambridge for a year or two?  We can then pick up where we left off.” 

But I’m probably being unfair to most of the young women of that era.  I’m certainly aware that the prevailing culture in 1970 did not encourage that sort of decision.

When I decided to marry Marv in 1971 and leave my job at UCLA to move with him to Ann Arbor, Michigan, I wasn’t giving up anything like Paris and Nadia Boulanger.  For one thing, I had had a perilous experience in LA with a major earthquake and its aftershocks.  [Please see my post, “I Felt the Earth Move under My Feet,” July 17, 2019.]  I was also aware of other negative features of life in LA.

And shortly after Marv asked me to marry him, we set off on an eight-day road trip from LA to San Francisco, via Route 1, along the spectacular California coast.  Spending every minute of those eight days together convinced me that Marv and I were truly meant to be together. (On one memorable occasion, while dining at The French Poodle restaurant in Carmel, Marv insisted that the server let me, not him, taste our wine before accepting it for our dinner. In 1971, this was absolutely stunning.) 

So I decided, on balance, that moving with Marv to Ann Arbor would mean moving to a tranquil, leafy-green, and non-shaky place where I could live with the man I adored.  The man who clearly adored me, too.

I was certain that I would find interesting and meaningful work to do, and I did.  

Both of us hoped to return to California after a few years in Ann Arbor, where Marv was a tenured member of the University of Michigan math faculty.  (He’d been at UCLA in a special one-year program and had to return to Ann Arbor in 1971.) 

But when that didn’t work out, and we jointly decided to leave Ann Arbor, we settled elsewhere—happily–because it meant that we could stay together.

I’ve made many unwise choices during my life.  The list is a long one.  But choosing to marry Marv, leave LA, and live with him for the rest of our gloriously happy married life was not one of them. 

The unwise choices were my own, and loving Marv was never the reason why I made any of them. 

On the contrary, life with Marv was in many ways the magical life I envisioned when we shared dinner for the first time at Le Cellier in Santa Monica in October 1970.

It was, in the end, and forever, another love story.

Postscript:  If Marv were still here, we’d be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this month.

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Posted in Ann Arbor, Michigan, anniversaries, California, California coast, Cambridge, Mass., dining, earthquakes, films, Harvard, Hollywood, law school, lawyers, Los Angeles, LA, love, mathematicians, memories, movie stars, music, Paris, peanut butter, restaurants, Sylmar Quake, U.S. Supreme Court, UCLA, wedding anniversaries, West Coast, Westwood, Westwood Village

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Another love story

Posted on May 24, 2021 | 3 comments

December 2020 marked 50 years since the release of the film “Love Story” in December 1970.  This film played a role in the burgeoning romance between me and the astonishing man who became my husband a few months later.  I’ll call him Marv.

Part I

We waited in a long line outside the theater in chilly Westwood.  The air was nothing like the frigid nighttime air that would have enveloped us in Chicago, or Boston, or Cleveland. But we were in LA, and for LA it was a chilly December night.

We didn’t mind waiting. We were too enthralled with each other, with Westwood, and with the prospect of seeing “Love Story” on the big screen. 

I’d met Marv two months earlier at the Chancellor’s Reception on the UCLA campus. The reception was intended for faculty only, but the director of my legal-services support program at the law school was a member of the faculty, and he circulated his invitation to all of us working in the program.

I’d moved from Chicago in late August and was eager to meet new people in LA. The reception was taking place on a Sunday afternoon in October, and I decided to show up.  I purposely wore my incredibly fetching black sleeveless miniskirt dress with bright red pockets and made my way to the campus under a radiant California sun.

I looked around.  I didn’t know anyone there—I’d been in LA for only six weeks.  I wandered over to the “cookie table” and was pondering which cookies to sample when a woman approached me.  “Are you by yourself because you want to be, or would you like to meet some other people?” she asked.

I immediately responded that I’d like to meet other people, and she led me to a group of four men. She began by introducing her husband, a bearded middle-aged math professor, who was accompanied by three much younger men. As I glanced at the younger men, I instantly recognized one of them–a good-looking guy I’d seen around my apartment building near the campus.

The professor explained that these young men were there because they were new math faculty, and he asked me why I was there. I told him I was working at the law school.  He then asked where I’d gone to law school. When I said Harvard, he turned to the good-looking guy and said, “Marv went to Harvard, too.”

Thus began my bond with Marv.  We had Harvard in common.

I’d noticed Marv around our building but, as it turned out, he’d never noticed me. I’d seen him—alone—diving into the building’s small pool, and I’d seen him walking back and forth along a pathway that connected our apartment building (near the corner of Kelton and Gayley) to the campus.  Sometimes he’d been smoking a pipe as he walked.

I sometimes wondered: How could he help noticing an adorable redhead like me?  But I later decided it was just fine that he never noticed me because that meant he wasn’t noticing any other young women either.

Even later, I figured out why he’d been totally unaware of me.  Whenever he was by himself–in this case, walking to and from campus by himself–he was thinking about math.  Marv was a brilliant mathematician who almost never stopped thinking about math.

When we began talking at the Chancellor’s Reception, Marv discovered what I already knew—we lived in the same apartment building.  He smiled a lot and let me know that he wanted to see me sometime.

Did I give him my phone number?  I must have because a day or two later he called and asked me to go to dinner.

We agreed that I would meet him at his apartment and make our dinner plans there.  So on Saturday night I walked a short distance from my apartment to his apartment on the same floor. 

Marv and I had both searched for a studio apartment in Westwood at the same time. At the end of my search, I decided that I preferred the building on Kelton.  Hoping to rent a relatively inexpensive studio there, I returned and learned that the last studio had just been rented.  It turned out that the renter was Marv. 

So, because someone (namely Marv) had just rented the last available studio in that building, I had to decide whether to rent a one-bedroom I could barely afford.  It was a stretch for me, financially.  But I decided to go ahead and rent it. 

Destiny? 

When he answered his door, Marv welcomed me and handed me a copy of a paperback book, “101 Nights in California.”  We sat together on his sofa, looking through the book’s list of restaurants, along with their menus.  “You pick wherever you want to go,” he said.

My jaw nearly dropped.  It was 1970, and it was almost unimaginable that a man would say that to a brand new date, allowing her to choose the restaurant where they’d dine that night.  I knew immediately that Marv just might be the right man for me.  He was certainly unlike anyone I’d ever dated before.

I’d already dated some pretty good guys.  But when men met me during my years at law school, or later learned that I was a lawyer, only the few who were immensely secure chose to date me.  Others fell by the wayside.

Marv was completely secure and non-threatened by someone like me.  He actually relished having a smart woman in his life.  And that never changed.

That evening, I chose a French restaurant in Santa Monica called Le Cellier.  How was our dinner there?  In short, it was magical.  We not only had a splendid French meal, but we also used our time together to learn a lot about each other.  My hunch that Marv was possibly the perfect man for me was proving to be correct.

We proceeded to have one promising date after another.  Dinner at Mario’s, a small Italian restaurant in Westwood.  A Halloween party at a colleague’s home in Pacific Palisades.  Viewing the startling film “Joe,” starring Peter Boyle.  (We later ran into Boyle when we ate at a health-food restaurant in LA.)

By December we were hovering on the precipice of falling in love.  We’d heard the buzz about “Love Story,” and both of us were eager to see it.  So there we were, waiting in a long line of moviegoers at the Westwood Village Theater that chilly night.

The plot of “Love Story” wasn’t totally unknown to me.  I’d already read Erich Segal’s story shortly before I’d moved to LA from Chicago.  I was casually leafing through a magazine when I came across the story.

It grabbed me right away.  It was set, after all, in Cambridge, and its leading characters were students at Harvard.  I’d spent three years there getting my law degree, and I’d finished just a few years earlier.

The story was sappy and had a terribly sad ending.  But I relished the Harvard setting, and I couldn’t wait to see the film based on it.  When Marv learned a little bit about it, he wanted to see it too.

We soon found ourselves inside the theater, every seat filled with excited patrons like us, and began watching Hollywood’s “Love Story,” our eyes glued to the screen.

What did we think of the movie that night?  I truthfully don’t remember, and Marv is no longer here to recall it with me.  So I recently decided to re-watch the film—twice–to reflect on it and what it may have meant to us at the time.

In 1970, enamored with my companion, I most likely loved the film and its countless depictions of student life at Harvard.  Marv had graduated from the college in 1963, and I’d finished at the law school in 1967, so we’d attended Harvard at about the same time as author Segal (Harvard class of ‘58, Ph.D. ‘65). 

The two lead actors, Ryan O’Neal (playing Oliver) and Ali MacGraw (playing Jenny), were also contemporaries of ours who could have been Harvard students at about the same time.  Let’s add Tommy Lee Jones, whose first film role is one of Oliver’s roommates.  He was himself a Harvard grad, class of ‘69.  (Segal reportedly based Oliver on two of his friends:  Harvard roommates Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore.)  By the way, Tommy’s name in the credits is Tom Lee Jones.

Marv and I certainly relished the scenes set in a variety of Harvard locations, including the hockey arena where Oliver stars on the school’s hockey team and where I had skated (badly) with a date from the business school. In another scene, the two leads ecstatically make snow angels on the snow-covered campus. 

And I loved watching Oliver searching for Jenny in the Music Building, a building located very close to the law school, where I occasionally escaped from my studies by listening to old 78 LP records in a soundproof booth.

Overall, Marv and I probably found most of the film a lightweight take on life as a Harvard student (although darker days followed as the story moved toward its tragic end).  I’m sure we were also moved by the haunting music composed by Francis Lai, an unquestionably brilliant addition to the film that earned its only Oscar (out of seven nominations). 

Seeing “Love Story” together that chilly night must have been wonderful. 

But watching the film again, 50 years later?  I have to be honest:  I found it disappointing.

                                       To be continued

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Posted in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cambridge, Mass., Chicago, films, French restaurants, Harvard, law, law school, marriage, mathematicians, movie stars, music, Oscar awards, peanut butter, reading fiction, romance, Santa Monica, Sylmar Quake, UCLA, Westwood, Westwood Village

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Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman

Posted on May 4, 2021 | 2 comments

POST #10

This is the tenth and final post in a series recalling what it was like to serve as Judge Julius Hoffman’s law clerk.  It will encompass the following:

  1. Concluding remarks on the “Chicago 7” trial
  2. My final contacts with Judge Hoffman, 1970-1983
  3. My life, post-clerkship (in brief)

Concluding remarks on the “Chicago 7” trial

What happened in the appellate court?

            After reading several rulings by the appellate court, I’ve come away with this:  There was plenty of blame to go around.

            At the end of the trial in February 1970, the jury found five of the defendants guilty of the statutory crime with which they were charged:  the intent to incite a riot.  These criminal convictions were reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which sent the case back to the district court for trial.  A new trial never took place because the Justice Department apparently chose not to bring new charges against these defendants.

            In addition to the criminal convictions, Judge Hoffman convicted all seven defendants and two of their lawyers of contempt of court for their behavior during the trial.  Most but not all of the contempt convictions were also overturned by the appellate court.

            The appellate court issued a lengthy and detailed opinion reviewing the defendants’ criminal convictions. In that opinion, the court concluded that the Anti-Riot Act was not unconstitutional.  It also discussed the evidence presented during the trial, as well as the conduct of the prosecutors, the defendants, and the judge.  If you’d like to read the appellate court’s opinion, you can find it online:  United States v. Dellinger, 472 F.2d 340 (7th Cir. 1972).

            In a later ruling, in 1974, the appellate court focused on the contempt convictions issued by Judge Hoffman. (These were, as I noted above, separate from the criminal convictions.)  In this ruling, the appellate court acknowledged that three of the defendants (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and David Dellinger) were guilty of serious misbehavior and “overwhelming misconduct,” including the wearing of judicial robes in court.  It also upheld the contempt conviction of attorney William Kunstler, noting that his bitterness and anger on at least one occasion “constituted a vicious personal attack on the judge,” delaying and disrupting the trial.

            When the appellate court reversed the defendants’ criminal convictions, it commented on the defense’s arguments attacking Judge Hoffman’s conduct during the trial.  The court noted Hoffman’s “deprecatory and often antagonistic attitude toward the defense” and his comments that were “often touched with sarcasm.”  The appellate court stated:  “Taken individually any one was not very significant and might be disregarded as a harmless attempt at humor.  But cumulatively, they must have telegraphed to the jury the judge’s contempt for the defense.” 

            The appellate court’s comments might well have applied to other criminal prosecutions that took place in Hoffman’s courtroom.  The judge often made similarly “harmless attempts at humor” that were attacked by defendants on appeal.  But in most of the other criminal prosecutions over which he presided, the trials were far shorter and the defendants and the charges against them were far less newsworthy.  In addition, Hoffman’s comments were never broadcast by the media to the same extent.  For these reasons, Hoffman had formerly escaped the kind of criticism that was aimed at him during this much more newsworthy trial.

            We should also note the appellate court’s focus on the conduct of the trial by the government prosecutors.  The court criticized them harshly. These lawyers, representing the Nixon administration, took advantage of Hoffman’s general bias in favor of the government, encouraging him to rule in favor of the prosecution–as was his wont–regardless of the merits of its position. In its 1972 ruling (cited above), the court stated that the prosecutors’ remarks “fell below the standards applicable to a representative of the United States.”  Doesn’t that say a lot?  I think it does.  The court pointed out some examples, such as prosecutors’ calling the defendants “evil,” “obscene liars,” “violent anarchists,” and “predators.”

            At the same time, it’s only fair to add that it was clear from the beginning that these particular defendants chose not to play the game the way defendants are supposed to.  They were determined to upset the courtroom at every opportunity.  A lot of the blame for the fiasco that followed must therefore fall on their shoulders as well. 

            My conclusion, when all is said and done?  The government never should have brought the indictment in the first place.  It was ill-conceived, and although the statute under which it was brought was later held by the Seventh Circuit to be constitutional, it was a highly dubious piece of legislation, spawned by the turmoil and the upheavals of its time.  If the Nixon administration had not pursued the indictment, this whole sorry chapter in U.S. legal history would never have been written.

            In the end, Hoffman’s reputation was besmirched as almost no other federal judge’s reputation has been, before or since.  The Sorkin film has revived interest in the trial, and in that film, Hoffman is portrayed as the arch-villain of the piece.   But in retrospect, I believe that this portrayal is not entirely justified.  With all of his faults, Hoffman was not an evil or cruel man.  I think he saw his role as that of a presiding judge compelled to impose order during a frenetic and chaotic trial, a trial unlike any he had ever encountered.

A side note on judicial findings of contempt

            During my high school years, I was a devoted fan of the TV series “Perry Mason.”  Every episode concluded with a courtroom scene, and I watched with fascination to see how admirable defense lawyer Perry and his opposing counsel, along with Perry’s clients and any witnesses, conducted themselves in the courtroom.  The judge’s rulings also interested me.  D.A. Hamilton Burger’s repeated objections that certain testimony was “incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial” lodged in my mind, and when I took a course in Evidence during law school, I recalled many of the judges’ rulings.  Classmates who were questioned by Professor Chadbourn sometimes couldn’t come up with an answer, and I often thought to myself, “Didn’t you ever watch ‘Perry Mason’?  If you had, you’d probably know the answer.”  (I did.)

            “Perry Mason” reruns now appear on late-night TV in San Francisco, and I occasionally watch one.  In a recent episode dating from the 1950s (“The Case of the Purple Woman”), someone in the courtroom (not a lawyer) shouted out an objection in the middle of witness testimony.  The judge first issued a $25 fine for contempt.  But when this individual repeated his misbehavior, loudly protesting the $25 fine, the judge (who looked remarkably like Judge Hoffman) sentenced him to 24 hours in county jail for contempt.  It was great fun to come across an episode of “Perry Mason” featuring a conviction for contempt issued by an irascible judge like Hoffman.

My final contacts with Judge Hoffman, 1970-1983

            After observing the trial twice, and each time feeling uncomfortable, I cut off my relationship with Judge Hoffman almost completely. I was working as a lawyer in Chicago, and I was embarrassed that the judge I had clerked for had become the subject of so much criticism.

            But when I decided to leave Chicago and move to California in August 1970, six months after the end of the trial, it seemed only right to phone the judge to tell him I was moving and to say goodbye.  And so I did.

            During our phone call, I didn’t mention the trial, but after an awkward silence, he did.  “I still don’t understand what happened,” he told me.  He sounded almost mystified.  Uncertain about what had happened.  Baffled by all of the criticism hurled at him, without understanding why–or perhaps, without wanting to understand why.

            Despite his many flaws, this admission by the judge led me to feel sorry for him. Looking back, I think that when he agreed to preside over this trial, he never contemplated what might actually happen.  He somewhat ingenuously found himself dealing with a group of hostile defendants who were intent, from the outset, on disrupting his previously well-ordered courtroom. 

            Thinking about his admission to me during that phone call has–50 years later–left me wondering:  What actually happened to him, outside the courtroom, during the trial?  Did he witness protests in the streets surrounding the courthouse?  Did his wife try to bolster him at the end of every day in court?  And what happened inside the courthouse?  Did any of his fellow judges come to his aid?  Did any of them offer him support or advice?  Did he welcome their advice, if it was offered? 

            I don’t know the answers to these questions.  I’ve never tried to find out, and I don’t plan to try now.  But I suspect that the judge was left out there by himself, trapped in his appalling situation, twisting in the wind.  His colleagues and his law clerks, probably grateful to have themselves been spared what happened to him, may have failed to give him the kind of support he needed to help him get through the whole awful mess.

            When I think about the two years I spent as Hoffman’s law clerk, I recall some uncomfortable and unhappy times, some of which I’ve set forth earlier in this series.  But I can also recall some truly pleasant times.  He treated his clerks and office staff to holiday lunches, as well as farewell lunches for a secretary or law clerk leaving his chambers, at the Empire Room in the Palmer House hotel and the posh Standard Club.  He would also give us year-end bonuses paid out of his own pocket.  And, as I noted earlier, while I worked for him, he always treated me and my co-clerks with respect.

            My life changed dramatically at the end of the summer of 1970.  I moved to California, met the man I fell in love with and married, and did not return to Chicago with my husband and delightful one-year-old until 1975.  Instead of returning to working full time, I sought out part-time work in a variety of law-related jobs, and I only seldom ventured to downtown Chicago.

            But in 1980, my co-clerk Susan Getzendanner became the first woman judge on the Northern District of Illinois bench.  I was thrilled for her, and I was happy to congratulate her and wish her well.  My friendship with Susan led to two final contacts with Judge Hoffman.

            After Susan’s appointment, the judge cheerfully called me at home one day.  He told me he was about to speak about Susan at a celebratory gathering and asked whether I could tell him a funny story about her, gleaned from the year we worked together.  I came up with a silly story for him.  But before he hung up, he asked me when I would be returning to work as a lawyer.  I was busy with two young daughters, ages 6 and 3, and trying to stay viable in the legal profession by working at part-time law-related jobs.  When I told him I wasn’t sure when I would go back to working as a full-time lawyer, he emphatically responded something like this:  “Well, you should come back sometime soon.  We need good lawyers like you!”

            I replicated this dialogue in my mystery novel, Jealous Mistress, which I began writing in 1985 and finally published in 2011.  Alison Ross, the protagonist (who loosely resembles me), gets a call from the judge she clerked for.  A reporter had called to ask him about his former clerk Alison, who had garnered local attention by solving a recent murder. The judge asks Alison, “When are you going to go back to the law?  You were a real crackerjack when you worked for me.”  Alison tells him that she’s been busy at home with her kids, but the judge insists, “We need more good lawyers like you.”  Thanks, Judge Hoffman, for inspiring the dialogue I later used in my novel.

            Susan Getzendanner also wangled an invitation for me to attend a high-profile luncheon held in honor of the judge, sponsored (at least in part) by his alma mater, Northwestern University Law School.  It took place at a snazzy private club on Michigan Avenue, the Tavern Club, where I ran into a bunch of lawyers and law professors I knew, as well as a few of Hoffman’s former law clerks.  There had been a huge student protest at the law school during the trial, and a plaque (noting his donation to fund a room at the school) had been torn off the wall outside the room.  Some faculty members had also expressed scathing criticism

            The judge was not surprisingly offended by what happened, and the rumor was that Hoffman had dropped NU from his will.  By sponsoring this lavish luncheon held in his honor, NU made a huge effort to get back in his good graces, but I later heard that the effort did not bear fruit and Hoffman died without leaving anything to NU law.  (I don’t know whether that’s in fact true.  When I later taught at NU Law, I never asked any other member of the faculty whether it was.)

            During the luncheon, the judge smilingly walked over to me.  He seemed terribly pleased to see me and greeted me by kissing me on the lips. This was somewhat startling, but I forgave his brashness.  Probably because he was about 85 at the time.

            After the NU luncheon, I lost touch with the judge once again.  I sadly learned of his death in an unexpected way.  My family was traveling to the East Coast that summer.  My husband, whom I’ll call Marv, was a celebrated mathematician, and he was invited to speak at a math conference held at Yale.  The four of us memorably stayed in a stifling dormitory on the Old Campus. (We’d been assured that it was air-conditioned. They lied.) 

            After leaving New Haven, we drove to Cambridge, and Marv thought it would be fun to have lunch at his old Harvard College haunt, Elsie’s sandwich shop.

            As I perched on a stool at one of Elsie’s tables, I spied a copy of The New York Times left behind by another customer.  I picked it up and began leafing through it.  My heart stopped when I came across an article buried on an inside page:  a lengthy obituary for Judge Hoffman, who had died on July 1, 1983, while I was traveling.

            Was there a funeral?  If so, who attended?  I never looked into it, and I choose not to do so now.  But I hope there was some sort of memorial service that praised the many good things Hoffman did, instead of focusing on the notoriety he had earned as a result of the trial.

            As for me, I’ll be forever grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to begin my legal career as his law clerk.  The two years I spent as his clerk provided me with a solid foundation for my career.  I learned how the courts worked.  How lawyers did or did not craft persuasive arguments that could sway a court.  How judges did or did not conduct their courtrooms in a fair and unbiased fashion. And how litigants themselves could influence the outcome in a given case.

            In that benighted era, when most judges selected their clerks from among male law graduates and only male graduates, eschewing the opportunity to choose highly capable women, Judge Hoffman had the sense and good judgment to choose women like me.     

My life post-Hoffman (in brief) 

            When I finished my clerkship in the summer of 1969, I chose not to enter the private practice of law.  Instead, I applied for and won a fellowship in a program that helped lawyers learn how to represent poor people and placed them in programs where they could use those skills (the Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship Program}. 

            I became a “Reggie” with the Appellate and Test Case Division of the Chicago Legal Aid Bureau, where I was soon immersed in a lawsuit, Doe v. Scott.  My co-counsel and I filed this lawsuit, which challenged the constitutionality of Illinois’s restrictive abortion law, on February 20, 1970.  In August 1970, at the end of my first year as a Reggie, I transferred my fellowship to a program at UCLA Law School that focused on legal issues related to health problems of the poor.  During my year there, I continued to work on Doe v. Scott.  (I plan to write much more about my involvement in this lawsuit.  I hope to finish in the next year or two.) 

            Six weeks after moving to Westwood to work at UCLA, I met Marv, and my life changed again.  I’ll say more about that in my next blog post, “Another Love Story.”

Postscript

            Would Judge Hoffman be viewed differently today?  Should he be?  I titled this series “Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman,” implying that he could be described as a “hanging judge.”  But in retrospect, I now think he was a much more complex human being than I used to think, and this implication is probably unfair.

            During the five decades since Judge Hoffman presided over the trial of the “Chicago 7,” we’ve witnessed the rise of sharp-tongued “Judge Judy,” who has starred on one of the hottest shows on daytime television, winning high ratings in 25 seasons from 1996 to 2021.  The title of her 1996 book gives us a clue to her judicial demeanor:  “Don’t Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining.”  Her great success might lead one to assume that the American public now admires an acerbic judge (who has also been called abrasive, discourteous, and insulting) and prefers her to one who displays what’s usually called “judicial temperament.” 

            What can we say about the public’s fascination with an acerbic judge like Judge Judy?  Does that fascination lead us to view a judge like Hoffman differently today? 

            I don’t think the public views these two judges in the same way.  One was (at least until the trial of the “Chicago 7”) a generally respected federal judge who presided over a great many important cases in his courtroom.  The other is a judge who is closer to a comedian than a respected jurist. 

            As a member of the legal profession, I think that “Judge Julius”—often lacking in fairness and judicial temperament–was not the kind of judge we need.  He wasn’t the villain the Sorkin film makes him out to be.  But he could have, consistently, throughout his tenure as a judge, been less abrasive and less biased in favor of the government.

            Although “Judge Judy” may be an amusing figure in the world of entertainment, she’s also not the kind of judge we need. 

           In short, lawyers and litigants in the real world, confronting serious legal issues, deserve serious judges who invariably display judicial temperament and avoid, as much as they possibly can, acting in an abrasive and biased way.

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Posted in 1960s, California, Cambridge, Mass., criminal defense lawyers, gender-equity, Harvard, Illinois, law, law school, lawyers, mathematicians, novels, parents, prosecutors, respect, TV late-night, U.S. federal courts, UCLA, Westwood, writing

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