"There's a vacuum out there in that neighborhood."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his colleague and neighbor Peter Keane. Listen here.]

Hi. I'm Peter Keane. I knew Steve in several respects, not the least of which was as a neighbor. Nancy and I lived a block from Steve for the last forty years, more than that,* and knew Rachel and Jean very well. In addition to the fact that I was one of those members of that little village called the Hall of Justice, back in the 1970s as a criminal defense attorney, where we had a number of very remarkable characters, characters like Bob Berman, who somebody knows around here, really brilliant people involved in some basic things, helping out the most vulnerable people in society. There was this one guy who was kind of like Yoda. Wandered through that. And that was Steve. He was the wise man of there. Everyone was talking about the fact that he had mentored so many people. When I was chief assistant public defender I can't remember how many times someone would have a question and it was "Well, why don't you run it by Steve Scherr." And how many times I did run it by Steve Scherr. People have talked about the experience with Steve of our being on the receiving end of our having weaker intellects than he did. I remember one time quite vividly when I used him as an expert witness, I can't recall the case at all, but I used him as an expert witness and in terms of talking to him and briefing about it, I never felt more inadequate in my life than him telling me that everything that I was doing was absolute nonsense. And it was true! It turned out, everything that he did tell me to do turned out to be correct. I had this feeling about this guy that he could peer into your very soul and tell you things that pissed you off at the time, really hurt you badly, but it would be something that you would benefit from enormously.

That we got. I can't match the stuff that Jim and the others from Webster Street all talked about. So let me give you the perspective of Steve as a neighbor. Nancy and I lived a block away from Steve out there on Cabrillo Street; I live on 15th, Steve lived over on 17th, for forty years or so. Rachel - one of the things that you really know about someone who has really accomplished something is in terms of what it is that has come about with their children. We first met Rachel when she was about ten or eleven, and she became the babysitter for our two daughters, Heather and Lauren. They absolutely to this day adore her. She became their role model, why they did everything, Lauren went to Lowell High School mainly because Rachel went to Lowell High School. Everything about Rachel, you can see she got from Steve even though she's very different from Steve, has a different side to her. The wedding that was talked about, the wonderful wedding of Dale and Rachel, my daughters were just tiny at the time but they were the flower girls. They had this wonderful time walking in front of Rachel and tossing petals up in the air. [Rachel: Into people's faces!] And into people's faces. They never had so much fun in their life. That memory is with them to this day. They are married and have kids of their own but that memory is with them to this day. They can't be here today, it's one of the great sadnesses for them, that they can't be here today.

We would know Steve and we would know Jean. In our neighborhood there is a school that has a thing called the Community Garden, and Jean had a community garden. Jean was an absolute passionate gardener, just like my wife Nancy. Jean had a plot up there in the community garden and she took care of it. We would see Jean all the time, Steve would go up and pick Jean up and walk back with her after she had done her gardening. There was Steve, maybe in the corduroy suit or maybe something perhaps equally rumpled, and Jean in her gardening outfit, and the two of them just as was talked about before, Rachel and Steve walking together and the balloon going up in the air, I'd watch, I don't know how many times I'd watch the two of them going down Cabrillo Street to their house, Steve having come from court, still in his lawyer's uniform, Jean in her grubbies and her boots and her gardening hat and her old rumpled outfit, and the two of them just with their heads together, communing like two beautiful souls, which they were. Just as was described by Rachel earlier. Very extraordinary type of man, and family, as with all these other things that we've talked about.

When Steve retired, many of you who went to lunch with him probably lost touch with him. I would see him virtually every day, because I would come out, I would be going off to work, and Steve would be walking by and he would be going up to the Academy of Sciences. That's where he hung out. He was up there doing his thing, I'm sure regaling anybody who had any kind of question about science. We would stop and we would talk. He missed Jean terribly, you could see that, he would go off to where she was interred and visit her.** I would ask about Rachel, he would ask about my daughters, and ask me what I was doing. And then he would wander off down to the Academy of Science.

Remarkable presence, this guy. There's a vacuum in all of us today. There's a vacuum out there in that neighborhood, out there in the Richmond District, in terms of Steve is not going to be taking that path along Cabrillo Street and heading off to the Academy of Science. There's a vacuum in my heart, and my wife's, and my daughters', and in all of us. An amazing character. I can't think of anyone who could fill that set of roles that we've laid out today. Just a remarkable guy. We're so lucky to have known him.

* My dad lived in the apartment on Cabrillo Street for only 34 years. Before that, my family lived in another apartment on 15th Avenue, also a block from the Keanes but in a different direction.

** Dad was probably heading to Mom's bench in Golden Gate Park.

"I was one of the hippies he sympathized with."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his old friend Larry Zimmerman, whom I knew as Zim. Listen here.]

Hi. My name is Larry Zimmerman. I met Steve when he first came to San Francisco, in 1965. At the time I was working for a company called Retail Credit Company, now known as Equifax. We were insurance investigators, essentially verifying backgrounds of people buying insurance or getting important jobs. In those days - this is before dictaphones, if you can believe that. We typed all our reports, and that's where I met Steve, we had essentially the same job. I have to agree that he is the smartest guy I ever met with. He was also really damn funny. Our manager felt it necessary every two weeks to have a Monday morning meeting, he would get up and without really anything to say he would bore us to death. One Monday evening, or afternoon, he called me in, and he was disappointed with me and Steve, he felt we were laughing up our sleeve at him. Well, ever after that, every Monday morning he gave a talk, and he wasn't looking at Steve, I'd look at Steve and he'd be [visually] laughing up his sleeve.

In 1966 I enrolled in San Francisco Law School. In the second semester, Steve enrolled. We took criminal law and property together. Lots of attorneys here, I'm not going to tell you anything you didn't know. We would get cases to study, the professor would assign cases, we had a textbook. Most of us would get 3x5 cards and write the facts of the case, the issue, the majority decision and the minority decision, and hope like hell he didn't call on us when we got there. We'd look in the textbook, we'd look at our 3x5 cheater cards. He would say "Zimmerman give me the facts of this case." And I'd give him the facts. And he'd ask another guy for the issue, and then we would discuss it. And when everybody was all done discussing, he'd look at Steve and he'd say, "Steve?" And Steve would be sitting there with his textbook closed on his desk, and he would tell us how it really was. And many times why the Supreme Court was wrong.

About this time we started skiing. Steve never skied before, Jean was a pretty good skier. We'd go up to Nevada and stay at a friend's house and ski. I remember one of the very first time Steve ever got on skis and went down a hill, we get on a lift and he's in the chair in front of me, and he turns around and says, "How do you get off of this thing?" I said, "Well you ski off!" He says "I don't know how to ski!" And for the rest of the week, he only knew one way to ski, the Olympics was on at that time, he'd get in that tucked position and he'd go down the mountain. He didn't know how to turn, he'd just get in that position, go on ahead, go up and through the woods and down out of sight, crash down at the bottom. It was on one of these ski trips that he married Jean; I was his best man and he got married at the Bucket of Blood out in Virginia City.*

I moved after that and he came to visit very very often. I remember the last time was, Alan was there, we went snowshoeing. He wasn't much good at that either. We were talking about, I was cooking dinner, and he said that he didn't cook. I said, "What do you mean, you don't cook?" He said, "I don't cook. I don't cook anything. I don't even make coffee." His routine was, he'd get up in the morning go out and get coffee. He said, "I make a sandwich sometimes." That was it. But he did like to eat. We did go out and eat a lot. We had a cocktail or two. We really grew up together in the sixties, and all that entails. You said he said that he wasn't a hippie, he was a hippie sympathizer? I was one of the guys he sympathized with. He was a good friend. I made a little movie a few weeks ago. The last thing I said in that little movie I made was, I always thought if I was stuck someplace - in the movie I said a snowbank in Alaska - and I had a way to call, he would have been the guy I called.

* Actually it was the Silver Queen Saloon; the Bucket of Blood was another saloon in the same town.

"Like all things, he embraced it with knowledge."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his friend and colleague Michael Gaines. Listen here.]

I really need to seize this opportunity. Harris talked about our dinners, and it was a regular ritual. They tended to be bacchanal. We would drink and we would eat. Our last one was in December of last year. Steve picked me up in his cab -- we wouldn't drive our cars, we would only go by cab. I said "How you doing?" and he said, "Well, to be very frank," and he would be very frank, "I've lost some weight." I said, "Well, couldn't hurt!" I meant that in the nicest way. But it did look like he had lost quite a bit of weight. He said, "I really don't eat very well right now." I said "Steve, that's not like you." He said, "But tonight, we're going to be okay, and we're going to have a wonderful evening. I've been looking forward to it." And indeed we picked up Harris, we went, and Steve ordered, he would always order the same thing, everything would always be the same, including the orange wrapped in prosciutto, I don't know why he enjoyed that so much, he would always have that. He did order tonight, he could barely eat it, he ate half a petite filet, I remember this. He had hiccups. And then he said, "But I did want a drink." I said, "Well of course!" We had already had our share, but one more is certainly good for the road. He ordered his vodka martini -- He would never say, they would say "What kind of vodka, sir?" and he would say, "Vodka. Please." Very self-deprecating that way. He toasted, and he said: "I have hiccups. But I just turned 75 and I want to toast my good health." And that was ironic, because little did we know at the time. He said he had scheduled an endoscopy. I called a few days later, and said "When is that scheduled?" and he said "Well, I kind of moved it up. I moved it up because I'm feeling a little bit, I'm scuffled a little bit since the last time we met," which was just two days ago. I said "Well that's probably wise." And then of course he was diagnosed. 

We had two gatherings at Steve's house. Steve was very up front about what was happening to him. Like all things, he embraced it with knowledge and research. He was talking to us, and talking to us would help. Then he went up to Seattle with Rachel. And one of the finest things that I've done is make that trip, with Ben and Doug and Jim. It's funny, I was in trial at the time in Martinez, of all places, and I asked the judge, I said, "I've got a problem. I'd like to take a day off and go up to Seattle to visit friend who's ailing." And she said, "Couldn't you do it on a Friday?" After all, you get Fridays off, and this was Wednesday. And I said, "Yes. I could. There's really no reason I couldn't do that, and I would, if that's what you want. But there's this group of guys that I'd like to go with. It would be easier for me if I could do that, and I think our friend would enjoy it more." We got there, Steve was having a good day, it was a good day. The first forty-five minutes we sat around and he explained to us his course of treatment, what he was going through, with his hands flying in the air as he does. And then we got to talk. Ben was asking questions - Ben is very ebullient. Jim was just stunned. We were quiet. Then we started to talk about cases, cases that we had done together. I told the story of our death penalty trial in Redwood City, we were representing a young man who was accused of killing a police officer from East Palo Alto. We were coming upon a penalty phase, and I had written out this penalty phase argument. I said "Steve, I always like to keep you in the loop, and I'd like you to listen." And this was at his house, and I read it to him, and about an hour and a half later he said, "Oh, don't do that." I said, "Okay, there seems to be a problem," and he said, "Let me modify it a little bit." I'm writing, writing, word for word, leaving nothing to chance, the whole thing was changed, turned on its ear, and we ended up saving the young man's life. It was great. When the argument was over, he looked at me and he said, "Michael, that's the best I've ever heard." [laughter]

We played tennis every Saturday at Washington High. Rachel and Matthew, my older son, we would go to the Lucky Penny on weekends, which is the Copper Penny now. Not great meals, but nonetheless that's what we did, because we were cheap and we loved to eat, we really did. 

One of the most remarkable weddings that I've ever been to in my life was in Portland, with Rachel and Dale, and of course we went up with Doug and Freya and Betsy. It's funny, because Steve was attending to the wedding party, as he should be. And Ben, my god, the events that we had - Steve would say "Are you guys enjoying yourselves?" and we would say "Yes we are, we're doing rather well!" [laughter] He had no idea what was going on but it is still one of the most wonderful life cycle events that I've ever been to. We had so much fun.*

And here's something else: This is - I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way. I had a time in my life when I thought I was going to be married. I thought I was going to get married, and I was committed to getting married. Apparently I proposed, apparently she said yes, plans had been made, venues, that kind of thing. Deep into it. I realized that at night I was waking up with anxiety, I was having dreams, Betsy I had gotten to know, she was a friend, but I had taken a shine to her from afar, already. I just felt like this relationship, I cannot, I can't do this. She was living out in the Richmond district at that time, not too far from Steve. I remember, I had my key, her key, and I was going to go do this thing. Terrifying. But I had to do it. I walked in I said "Listen. I don't want you to take this the wrong way. There is something that I need to, um, I need to cancel. Is that the right word? I need to put an end to this and I'm awfully sorry." She was very hurt. Often we're on the wrong side of these things. I didn't mean any harm. It was self-preservation. I must say that when I got out the door, even though I rained some terrible hurt on somebody, I did have wings on my heels. I felt better. And I said, wait a minute! Where am I going to go right now? Footloose and fancy free. And it was just one of those things, I said "I've got ten blocks and I know exactly where I'm going," and I went banging on Steve's door, and I said listen, I've just been through this thing. He said, "A scotch?" I knew exactly where he kept it, out it came, and the peanuts, always the peanuts. Steve did try to make a chess player of me, he would do that. I was just awful. He would always say, "Well you will recall, the last time we did this, and you will recall." It was just a night that I remember. I felt like I saved my life, and I shared it with a friend, someone that I knew was my neighbor for 42 years.

When I think about it, the first person that I know of that was a lawyer I met when I was twelve, that was Marty Lurie. And I think the second person was Steve Scherr, when I was out here. I felt like I'd known him forever. Again, this trip up to Seattle was one of the greatest things that I've ever done - things I'm most thankful for. And this has taken me aback. It really has. It's remarkable what a nice human being. I'll miss him.

* A dozen or so of my dad's friends came to Portland for our wedding, in 1993. It was also Ben Winslow's birthday, probably a significant birthday, and apparently they had a very good time. All of them refer to this the way Michael did here - mysteriously, and with an awe and a reverie that goes way beyond anything that could possibly be occasioned by the wedding itself. No one ever reveals the nature of the good time. And I am sure I do not want to know!