BEST AND BRIGHTEST

During my last year of seminary (1981-82) I typed half-time for a living at the U of Chicago Law School. The U of C is pretty much an elitist school, but the Law School is arguably the elitest and most formidable section of it. (They themselves could argue that well.) This evening I was reading a review by Cass Sunstein, one of the professors, who always arrived in the building so desperate to get to his computer and record what he’d thought in transit that his office looked as though a major crime had been committed and the room ransacked. It would have been easy to hide a good-sized body under the papers and books. Tonight the idea of Googling some of these people came to me. In those days we only had computer word-processors for professors, with a few that secretaries had to reserve in advance and use in a small sound-proof room with windows so the world could see we were not playing “Asteroids.” (The profs did.) Google is a game they would have relished even more.

Cass Sunstein, according to Google, is still there at U. of C. but his website won’t come up tonight. The review I was reading was of “Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It” by Sanford Levinson. Excellent review. But don’t ask Anton Scalia if he agrees with it. (Levinson argues for term limits on Supreme Court Justices.) I used to deliver his mail and sometimes rode the elevator beside him, fully aware that everyone knew he was destined for the Supreme Court. He tried not to be smug about it, with little success. That was, I’m shocked to realize, more than twenty-five years ago.

Two other Google results shocked me. The first was Monte Dube, who was nothing if not hip and bold: beard, longish hair, plaid shirt. My specific assignment was to type for the Bigelow Fellows, of which he was one. In those days we typed on a typewriter and used Whiteout or Corrasable paper. Dube and Berg, who was much more uptight, demanded that their letters never have any corrections, which one could detect by holding the letter up to the light. (There were two female “Fellows” and they pretty much did their own typing.) I could never pick Monte Dube out of a lineup now: baldish, clean-shaven. Is that a bespoke suit? He’s in law specializing in the health industry. I’d bet it IS tailored. And are those DIMPLES??

The other was Norval Morris, an Australian who was studying when and how the insanity plea should work. To give him something concrete to write about, he invented some “lost” stories by George Orwell, writing them in so convincing a manner that no one questioned their formidable style. One, I remember, was a man who shot his wife to death while dreaming of something else. It was the tropics and he was feverish... Truly, they were like novels until Morris turned to the legal argument and REALLY made your head spin with the issues he raised.

He insisted on cone coffee, which in those days one made in a big pyrex Chemex hourglass with a wooden collar, and I had a wrestling match to make it properly. (U of C lawyers were major coffee snobs and there was a little shop that sold cappacinos beyond anything I’ve ever had since. Foam to dream of.) Also, I could never quite get the knack of sitting in the modern chairs in his office and almost sprawled on the floor several times. I couldn’t decide whether he thought I was endearingly awkward or a great menacing cow.

The stories, which were convincingly “found” by one of Morris’ friends, raised quite a furor and I never could quite figure out whether this was a bad thing that would get the professor fired or whether it was a wonderful conspiracy that would become a legend. I guess he just liked ambiguity. I remember some important magazine calling to insist that I deliver him a message as soon as possible. He was playing tennis behind my lodgings, so I called him over to the fence and pushed the note through to him. He said, “You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you?” I was, but I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. The shock is that he’s gone now -- died two years ago.

Jim White had a double appointment with English and Law. His secretary was Sharon Mikulich, who had a huge crush on Sting and loved “Guns and Roses.” First I’d ever heard of them. (Sharon has 22 Google entries because of her work on behalf of labor and because of marathon traveling!) She considered me reliable, so if she needed help, I typed White’s manuscripts, which I loved to do because they were about rhetoric and always excellent. White and I had several conversations about Norman Maclean and he was the one who told me that Maclean seemed to be in mental trouble and that people were wondering about alcoholism. Of course, it was Alzheimers and Maclean knew it was, couldn’t quite figure out what to do about it. Can anyone?

But the funniest story was about Franklin E. Zimring, a California script-writers' kid who somehow blundered into this totally unsuitable context and was stressing out. His back kept going into spasm, people said it was psychosomatic (probably), he made a great fuss, I thought he really was being treated so badly that I wept, and somehow he decided that I’d fallen in love with him. (Who wouldn’t? Smart, handsome, connected, dyslexic -- and proud of it all.) I left Chicago at the end of the academic year. (I was a little short on my transcript to actually graduate, but they agreed to let me pick up the last class or so in Montana -- Chicago was clearly an unsuitable context for ME, too!) Zimring organized (or rather the head of the secretarial division organized at his request) a farewell luncheon with him, me and the head of the secretaries, a charming and gracious lady who also bought me a necklace at the Oriental Institute -- at Zimring’s request. It had the Code of Hammarabi on it. I thought it was a classy thing to do. I mean, what if I’d REALLY been in love with him?

Tonight Zimring’s page at the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, (his proper milieu) has a photo of him looking a bit like Jim Harrison. Maybe a little bit like a character from “Guys and Dolls.” He writes about kids and capital punishment, always defending the little guy. Well, maybe I’m still a little in love with him. He gets interviewed on NPR now and then.

You must understand that I came to this extraordinary collection of Big Brains straight from the doggy streets of Portland and had five years of experience with neighborhood animal cases. The person who appreciated this was the Viennese Hans Zeisel, who was a friend of Konrad Lorenz. I’d read Lorenz, so we could talk about him. Zeisel was also a director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which runs the Doomsday Clock and I remember that one day they advanced it closer to midnight. He was very upset, but I don’t remember what the specific cause was. It was as though in his mind it had stopped being a symbol, so that moving that hand was to him something actual and personal.

What I learned from all this was how little separation there is between ordinary folks and people of great privilege and honor. They were so far beyond me intellectually that I didn’t need to feel compared, even in terms of the youngsters. Sharon, who was a secretary then and remains a secretary, has probably had as much impact on the world as any of the professors. I sure hope that somewhere in there she got to meet Sting.