50th Reunion
After June of 1939 and a summer surveying in the mountains near Marble, Colorado, with George Bain, I enrolled in the Harvard Law School I went there for lack of any other plans and because George Scott of 1939 was going and seemed to know what he was doing. After three years of hard work they presented me with the LL.B. degree.
Immediately: after graduating from law school I entered the Navy. In the summer of 1942, after some duty at Newport, Jean Kramer, Smith 1942, and I were married. Our honeymoon was spent as guests of the United States Naval Reserve at the Harvard Business School. Unprepared by anything in the courses taught at the business school, I spent the next four years as a supply officer, first on the U.S.S. Abner Read, a destroyer, then on the U.S.S. Tamalpais, an oil tanker carrying water, with a short interval on shore duty in Boston. Both ships operated in the Pacific Without inflicting much damage on the Japanese.
In 1946 I was extremely fortunate to be offered a judicial clerkship with Judge Peter Woodbury of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The year with him taught me that the law could be engrossing as well as difficult. Then came two years of practice with an old established firm in New Haven. I remember celebrating with Goon Guest the election of Harry Truman in an atmosphere of almost unrelieved Republicanism.
When a cow country law school in Missoula, Montana offered me a teaching job in 1949, I knew no more about what that might require of me than I had about the law in general when I entered law school ten years earlier. Something about teaching must have been compelling because I have been teaching law ever since. Jean and I arrived in Missoula with two small children in a battered Studebaker towing a homemade trailer containing the few worldly, goods we then possessed. For four years I taught a multitude of courses at the University of Montana, learning some law and on the side acquiring some skill as a dry fly fisherman. During one of those years we, by then including a third small child, returned to Cambridge for a graduate law degree.
The University of Colorado persuaded me to move to Boulder in 1953 by offering me a slightly higher wage than Montana could afford and we have 6een there ever since with the exception of one year teaching appointments at Stanford and the University of California at Davis and a summer at the University of Chicago. In the years since 1953 we have watched the children grow into intelligent and responsible adults, written some law books and taken full advantage of the opportunities for recreation offered by the American West. In 1970-71 the University very generously provided a year's leave with pay, and at this time without the children, we spent nine months traveling around the world. Five months of this time we spent in Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand. The stories about New Zealand trout fishing are quite true. In the spring of 1987 it seemed time to retire from the less attractive aspects of academic life and I did so. I hope to continue teaching and writing for at least a few years. The need for strenuous mental and physical effort seems still to be present.
