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.
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