My name is Ben Winslow, and I worked with Jim and Steve for many many years. When I first met Steve forty years ago, Doug Schmidt brought him to our office and said, this guy wants to rent an office from us. This skinny guy, curly hair, horn-rimmed glasses. He had one corduroy suit that was wrinkled, we all had one suit in those days, many of them like Steve's, and Steve moved in. Webster Street is like a big family. It's an old house: Steve had an office in one of the bedrooms, Jim was in another bedroom, Doug Schmidt was in the dining room, I was in the front room, and this went on for thirty or forty years.
Steve was a mathematician and liked physics, so the other day I was thinking, what could I do mathematical. So I thought well if I had lunch with Steve twice a week for forty years, how many lunches would that be, and I know it's more than twice a week but if I claim more than that Steve if he were here would question my methodology and want to know how I got to two times or three times or four times a week. But it's something like four thousand lunches. And I don't know if you remember that Billy Crystal play "Seven Hundred Sundays" where he talked about the number of Sundays he spent with his father while he was alive; well Jim and I and Doug had four thousand lunches with Steve. That's four thousand discussions, four thousand arguments, four thousand "How do you get that?" We used to say it was like eating lunch with Socrates.
He had this rigorous intellectual thing that he did with you. Even like Josh who's here today, Josh sits in Steve's room now, if you had a trial or something you would go in and talk to Steve about it and you'd be in there for an hour and a half. You'd go in thinking you had a great case and you'd leave thinking you were going to get killed and never get the evidence in and you might as well give up. But by the time you got to trial you'd be glad you went through that because it'd be a rigorous thing, you'd have to support your ideas and your thoughts, it would make you better.
So four thousand lunches. It reminded me, Steve was always fighting his weight. In the early days he was skinny, and then he got heavier and heavier and he wanted to lose some weight. Jim was talking about the pictures in his desk, he had another morning ritual He walked in every morning, he had a paper towel, and he centered it on his desk, and then he placed two glazed donuts on the paper. Pulled out the coffee, took off the top, and then he would eat the two glazed donuts and drink the coffee. I've always been a fit guy and I would walk through and say "Steve, it's going to be hard to lose weight with those two glazed donuts." And after about three months he said, "Maybe I'll cut down to one." And later he did lose a lot of weight.
We had a million conversations with Steve and what I remember most about Steve is that he was a big believer in certain things, and one of the things that he always talked about, he believed everybody's right to practice their religion, but he believed in the separation of church and state. He was a big supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. A great Woody Allen quote, Steve liked Woody Allen a lot, Woody Allen said, "To you I am an atheist; to God I am the loyal opposition." Steve was the loyal opposition.
He loved to travel. The whole office when Maura got married we all went to Peru, she set up this great trip and we all went to Peru, Jean and Steve went to Peru, told me I think it was one of the great trips of his life. It was a lot of fun - went to Macchu Picchu, the valley of the Incas, had a great, great time. I know his trips with the family to Africa, when he took the grandchildren, he loved those trips, he would plan them out meticulously. Steve was very anal and liked orderly things, and I'm exactly like Steve, so we got along really well. We both line up our money by denominations, all facing the same way, and we took a lot of guff over the years for that. The only thing we didn't do was put it by serial number, that would really be sick.
Steve was a Deadhead, he loved the Grateful Dead. When you work with somebody for forty years, I remember when Rachel was young one weekend he came in one Friday, I said "what's up for the weekend," and he said "Oh, Rachel is going to go somebody's house tonight and kick back with Jack." I said, "Kick back with Jack? Steve, what do you think that means?" He said, "She probably has a friend named Jack." I said "No, they're going to drink a lot of Jack Daniels." He goes "Oh my God!" Rachel, remember this story? [Me out in the audience: "I was so grounded."] Yeah, I busted you.
When Rachel was going to go to high school, Steve got really involved in whether she should go to Washington or Lowell. He was very interested in her education and a very loving and caring father as Jim has already described. He investigated everything, and Rachel went on and did great.
Steve is a mentor to many people. I can't tell you the number of young people who came through the office, talk to him about cases, he always had time for people. They probably spent about three times as long in there as they thought they were going to be in there, but he was very happy to do that. Steve also, as was alluded to earlier, I don't think a lot of people know this about him but you know Steve spent two years in the military. He was very proud of his army service. Rachel tells me he had a great service at the National Cemetery where he's buried, had a bugler, they fired a volley, I think he would have been very proud of that, he was very proud of his service. But at the same time, Steve was patriotic, but when he didn't agree with something, he didn't agree with it. I think that's, a very loyal American but he would state his opinion in a great way.
The final thing I just wanted to say is that Rachel called Jim and I when Steve wasn't doing well and Jim, myself, Michael Gaines and Doug Schmidt went up to visit Steve, we flew up for the day and stayed and then came back, and I think Tito and Steve Eckdish had been up there for many days before. I've always been Steve's lawyer, so when this all happened to Steve and was very sudden, Steve did a lot of talking with me and made a lot of plans and I went to see him. I think when you go through life you learn certain lessons from people, you know when you're a kid you want to play sports, you see somebody play baseball and that's how you want to play baseball. When you're a young lawyer you go watch a trial to see somebody be good in trial that's how you know how to do a trial. When I saw Steve go through this, and how he did with the grace and dignity and class that he did it with, I thought to myself, I just hope that I will be half the person that he was the way he went through all this. How he did it, and how he was concerned about everybody, how they were doing, how they were feeling, how Rachel was doing, and his grandchildren. It's pretty amazing to watch how elegant he was about it and dignified. It was an amazing thing for me, I learned a lot just watching him.
Steve probably didn't believe in heaven. But if he goes there, and maybe he has, he's probably sitting there with Socrates right now having an argument.
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