MEMORIES °
Continuations
Sinder, cont. We both were full time attorneys (or for me, at least when employed) while truly serious players could spend
hours at the club, perhaps alone on a table just practicing one serve or hours just on one combination attack drill. During the decade starting about 2000 I had returned to N.J. and
persuaded him to return to the game. We then regularly played once a week at the New Jersey club (which I eventually ran) but I also played an additional two evenings during the week
whereas he said that sole weekly two or three hour period in the evening was the only time he devoted to it. Nevertheless, after about a half hour warmup, the quality of his game rose
dramatically as though he had been playing seriously several times a week. Had he played more frequently, I am sure he could have been in the top fifteen or twenty in the club and the
New Jersey club at that time, with a number of Asian trained players, was one of the strongest clubs in the country. He did keep fit by running (and perhaps lifting moderate weights) and
although he had a physical setback by complications of shingles, he continued to play well despite the discomfort.
Stuart also related to me his experience of September 11 when one of the planes flew past his window just before striking the trade towers, which were proximate to his office. For quite a
period after that, he was forced to take a ferry across the Hudson River until they reopened the subway stations at the foot of Manhattan.
_____
Xyz, cont. Abc . . . . . . .
° MORE °
Continuations
Comstock cont. WW1 comes into this. One consequence of Comstock's laws: "U.S. servicemen were the only members of the Allied forces sent overseas without condoms."
Margaret Sanger, birth controller, also comes into this. In 1915, she was prosecuted for distributing one of her books (one source says The Woman Rebel, another says Family Limitation) through the mail. That conviction was eventually overturned, but in 1932 a doctor
in one of her clinics arranged for diaphragms to be mailed to the clinic from Japan. The resulting lawsuit had the wonderful name, United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 F.2d 737 (2d Cir. 1936). The 2d Circuit unanimously upheld the clinic (as had the District Court), in an opinion written by Augustus Noble Hand, cousin of Learned, who joined in the ruling.
Our Comstock, Craig, incidentally, left us after the first year for a program at Stanford, but he retained his identification with us sufficiently to contribute a page to the 50th reunion book, where he says his favorite course was -- constitutional law.
_____
Smith-Shepard, cont.
[2] From: Jonathan Shepard Oct 17,2020 To: Mike Smith
Subject: Re: VISTA in NYC 1969
Hi. Were we in college (Princeton) together, too?
I started my training in August or so of 1968 in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. There was tear gas and National Guard with rifles and Daley’s thug cops and Dick Gregory
etc. VISTA said I was going to Detroit, but they had promised me ÇA, there were riots and wholesale burning in Detroit, so I refused. Then they called and said how about going for a masters
at NYU law and being based in the City for two years. Home I went. I was based with two tough black guys and two hippy type white California VISTA guys in an apartment around 105th just
east of Manhattan Avenue, a block where people killed each other. I dated a woman from Harlem, and one of my roommates wanted to kill me because as a black man he couldn’t tolerate
my dating a black woman. She told him no, you can’t kill him. The other guy in the apartment stabbed my would-be killer with an ice pick after I left and asked me to defend him. I declined.
I was based across from the Museum of Natural History on CPW around 70th. I did landlord tenant problems, which was hard in those days, given the control landlords had over the
courts, and I also represented the Welfare Rights Organization, which became pretty famous. More babies more welfare was their slogan.
Notwithstanding my commitment the day I turned 26, I told Norman Redlich, our supervisor and the former NYC Counsel, that I was leaving. In retribution all my NYU professors
gave me an F instead of incomplete or withdrew. I had to explain that to the Florida Bar and got a lecture on morality and commitment. The NYU Dean was right, but I said screw it, I did
what I had to do. I’m not proud of it but I’m ok with it. Norm Williams and Chuck Stark were in VISTA and finished their commitments, but I don’t know how long. Norm is younger than me.
I knew and know nothing of a VISTA upheaval. I’m not sure I was against the war then; I just knew that I didn’t want to get killed. It was an unfair and rigged game and I took advantage of it.
So, in short, I did legal work. I saw poverty, rodents, roaches (I could hear them click as they were on my bedroom wall at night), hate, despair. I’m sure you saw the same or worse.
My mother lived at Park and 76th. I’d take the bus across 110th and down Fifth and see the buildings with different eyes.! I got somewhat used to living like a poor person, yet I wasn’t.
My roommates were in a movie that would end only at death. I could walk out of the movie anytime I wanted to. It was a transformative year. I hope.
Best, Jonathan Shepard
[3] From: Mike Smith Oct 21, 2020 To: Jonathan Shepard
Wow. Sounds like your VISTA stint was every bit as tumultuous as mine, even without the internal bureaucratic/political infighting we saw.
We came into the program through a terrific (and mind-bending) training program in the South Bronx sponsored by a very radical outfit called Wel-Met (no idea what that name was supposed to represent). Mostly did welfare rights organizing (highlighted by a lengthy several-days sit-in at the Melrose Welfare Center in May of '68), and some tenant organizing. Succeeding generations of trainees tired of the frustration of getting nowhere with rent strikes, so decided to up the ante by picketing and demonstrating in Westchester County outside the private homes of the absentee landlords! That caught the attention of the incoming Nixon Administration and some LBJ holdovers who were trying to protect their jobs by firing all the radical training folks and cracking down on the activist VISTAs.
The whole thing was more than a little radicalizing for me (a now fully recovered former liberal Republican prior to VISTA and the turmoil of 1968-69), and an eye-opening education.
And yes, a fellow class of 1965-mate. There were a lot of us in the YLS class of '68, weren't there?
Best, Mike Smith.
[4] From: Jonathan Shepard Oct 21, 2020 To: Mike Smith
Subject: Re: VISTA in NYC 1969
We did the same kind of work. Welfare rights and landlord tenant. I would go to court with 20 or 30 residents of a building who would testify that they hadn’t had heat all winter. The courts
refused to take that testimony, saying that the only reliable testimony was a building inspector who put an actual thermometer on a radiator and held it there for a long period of time,
meaning several hours. I did finally get a landlord put in jail for a while, but it was my only victory. It was really upsetting. The things that I saw in buildings, water dripping out of ceilings and
with every drop a roach fell to the floor, so walking across the floor was crunchy crunchy critter time. As for welfare rights, Jeanette Washington, who was the head of the
welfare rights organization in the city, as I remember, kept urging everybody to have more babies, since welfare was based on the number of children that her mother had. It was difficult to
listen to. We then went on rent strikes with single room occupancies on the west side, where people bought buildings and then paid bums to piss and poop in the halls and scream at night,
All in an attempt to drive out the elderly who were there in single rooms with their electric heat plates used for cooking. In one case the landlord won and I wound up, if I didn’t already tell you,
with an anxiety attack in which I thought I was dying, with all these elderly people standing over me and saying too bad, he was such a nice young man. Plus I lived with two guys, again I
probably told you, one of whom said that he had murdered his sergeant and the other one had all sorts of wounds across his neck and wanted to kill me because, as I’m sure I wrote, I was
going out with a black woman. All of this certainly had an impact on me, which remains to this day.
Best, Jonathan
° YET MORE
Continuations/Expansions
This column also for expansions of pages which appear in the reunion book (send in yours).
Gross (p.36) cont. Mike's excellent page in the reunion book can be supplemented with a brief profile that appears at the end of an
analysis of a 2005 US Supreme Court decision which the NM bar published that year in a "special issue on Indian Law." "He joined DNA Legal Services, Navajo Nation, in 1968, helped
found and became first administrator of Ramah Navajo School Board in 1970, and served as the NARF consulting attorney for Indian education. Gross helped found Coalition of Indian
Controlled School Boards, served as counsel and assisted several Indian communities in getting their own schools. He was an assistant professor at Franklin Pierce Law Center, NH, and
since 1977 has been in practice in Santa Fe with emphasis on Indian law."
Hardy (p.95) cont. I submitted a page for the reunion book, but used it mainly in hopes of finding a funding source for my
NGO trying to propagate in China the preservation system we set up in all 50 states. I'd like now to explain more of how five decades passed, as did
all others who contributed to the reunion book. While at YLS, I heard from Tom Grey there was something called "public interest" law, and that's what I wanted. DC was the place to go, and I liked
DC, having summered there in 67 in the Legal Advisor's Office at State, renting a house in Georgetown with Rob Agus and others. After a two-year Fulbright in the UK, then several years
with a law firm, I ended up at The Nature Conservancy, then a very small organization none of my friends had heard of. There I quickly fell in with the Chief Scientist, Bob Jenkins (Harvard
PhD, biology), himself a fairly recent hire in a position created by a Ford Foundation grant. Bob knew the only way he could answer the "Is-this-worth-protecting?" questions being sent in
from all the states (and vastly different ecosystems) was by obtaining data -- and putting it into a data management system. I could not agree more.
We started with punch cards, but
computers were moving fast and soon it was acoustical modems used for remote time-sharing on an HP minicomputer -- and then the IBM PC AT (1984). Database software was even
more primitive, though around 1990 we discovered a multivalue system (using the PICK operating system) which
worked well. All that was on the technical side, and I enjoyed learning about that. But there were two other sides to this triangle. Another was developing the concepts and the methodology
to be used in the data system, concepts which could be used to aggregate data to discover and prove what was endangered and what was not -- and where exactly located (helpful if you
want to buy land to protect the species, as TNC did) and what degree of protection it should have. I enjoyed participating in and contributing to this "operations
procedures group." It was an idea-and-then-test environment.
The third side of the triangle was legal-political-administrative, and the key insight was that rather than try to build one
giant database in DC, it was far better, and more practical and effective, to create 50 databases, one in each state, all linked into a network which could share data because all would be
using the same methodology. "Is this worth protecting?" would be answered at the state level, where land use decisions are made.
This was the main side of the triangle for me. It required
salesmanship and traveling to state capitals and persuading some agency there to buy into the concept. I can confidently claim that I am the only PhD in philosophy who
can find his way to the bathroom at the Fish & Game agency in all 50 states. (I'd taken the grad exams for the PhD at Princeton before coming to YLS; finished my thesis and got
my degree 1976). Putting together a financial package for the contract between TNC and the state agency was greatly aided by federal matching
funds (for recreation planning!), and foundation grants helped also. An extension of all this, it might even be called a fourth side of the triangle, was administration and fulfillment of the
contract signed -- hiring staff, training them, supervising them (progress reports every two weeks, visiting them regularly* to see how things worked when actually applied) for a couple
of years, and then -- wonder of wonders -- spinning them off to permanent state employment, as a unit not only in a state agency but in a permanent 50-state network. (Jurisdictions outside
the 50 started wanting in, and getting in, but that's another story). Anyway, that's an overview of the professional side of the years after YLS.
*an ideal opportunity for nationwide birding; hence my bird book: 30 Birds.
