Aaron's birthday

Aaron's actual birthday is today, but he is not with us - he's at sleepaway camp! His birthday was last weekend, and at the last minute we moved it to a local park, because the weather was just too beautiful for anything else. He had friends from school, from the neighborhood, and from boychoir, which was a great mix.

 Leo had an actual potato gun. Are those so fun or what?

Here we are at cake time. It is always an adventure getting candles lit outside, but we pulled it off.

Aaron designed his cake to feature his current favorite item, which is a Greek/Trojan/Spartan style helmet. He loves everything to do with Greek mythology and draws these all the time. (I added the stars because the kids always want a piece of the fondant.) I was rather pleased with myself for managing to make gold fondant out of primary colors... would you know what colors to use? I had some gold candles to match, and I dusted it with edible gold glitter. Chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream frosting.

We ended the day with a family celebration over at the cousins', mostly on the lawn.

Jordan's birthday

The boys are at sleepaway camp for ten whole days including both of their birthdays, so we moved them up a couple weeks. Very much unlike last year, Jordan did not select a major theme or even any organized activity; he just had twelve friends over, and they hung out.

I was a little nervous about the lack of structure but everything was grand. No injuries, no arguments, and no destruction of property! Instead, there was pop fly frisbee in the backyard.

 This is where the frisbee went over the fence:

 And this is where they clambered around to retrieve it.

Another contingent of friends played band in the basement. Dale was particularly happy to offer Natalie the chance to try out his electric guitar (she's pretty good), and she was soon joined by her sister Shoshie on vocals, Nat on drums, Lily on keyboard, and Franklin on the bongos. It was a lot of fun down there even though it doesn't photograph well.

There was eating. I am prepared to offer preteens very big bowls of snacks and watch them disappear. This occurred.

There was cake. As is our tradition, Jordan designed the cake and I executed it, except that this year Jordan made the fondant swords. He was impressed by how tricky it was, and appreciative of the cake miracles I have wrought for him over the years.

Delicioius, too: Jordan wanted a lime cake (he cheerfully settled for lemon-lime) with green cream cheese frosting. One of his friends exclaimed, "It's like key lime cake!"

Only at the very end of the party did they collapse into phone land.

"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!

"Steve beat me about two thousand times more than I beat Steve."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his friend and chess partner Bob Berman. Listen here.]

My name is Bob Berman. I remember very well when my friendship with Steve really began. I started trying to earn a living down in the Hall of Justice in 1973 or 1974, and I became acquainted with Steve as just one of the wonderful cast of characters that worked down there. But we weren't especially friendly. In 1975 I took a job at the public defender's office, and one afternoon that year I was at my desk, which was just one of many desks in this large ugly room. And Steve walked in. He was obviously done with whatever he had to do that day and was just looking for someone to have a talk with. So we started talking and at one point he innocently said, "Do you play chess?" I said "Well, as a matter of fact I do."

That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Within a week we had started a routine, because everything with Steve ends up as a routine. On Wednesday nights I would go to Steve's apartment; he and Jean would normally have an early dinner; I'd show up after their dinner, and Steve and I would play chess. For hours. Probably for about four hours. And we would play a lot of games, because we would agree the week before what opening we were going to play. So we weren't just playing chess, we were of course learning: learning the openings and learning the variations. And this won't be surprising for me to tell you that Steve was a much better chess player than I was. I don't know if he had a superior intuitive grasp of the game, but he had two very important advantages. One, he was smarter than I was, and when you play chess, there's not a lot of luck involved, so if you are smarter than your opponent then you're going to do well. The other advantage, which was more amazing to me, is he had this incredible memory of chess games we had played - as the years went on, chess games we had played years ago, and positions we were in. Steve would never make the same mistake twice. I would fall into the same stupid opening traps over and over again -- "Oh, I'm in fried liver," you can imagine what being in fried liver is. We would be in the middle of a game, maybe twenty moves in, and I would make a move, and Steve would say, "No Bob, a couple of years ago you tried that move." And he never complained; that's all he'd say; but what he was saying was, "It didn't work two years ago, it's not going to work now."

I rarely -- and we played for forty years, played a lot in those early years, when I moved away from San Francisco we didn't play as often but we still played -- and I rarely beat Steve at chess. That's not to say I always lost; we played to a lot of draws. For Steve a draw I think was just a draw; for me it was a tremendous victory. But if I had to estimate how many times Steve beat me, as opposed to me beating Steve, I would say a conservative estimate is that Steve beat me at least two thousand times more than I beat Steve. And when you're playing a competitive game and you're losing two thousand times more often than your opponent, you have to be able to do this without letting it bother you. And it was okay, I kind of expected it, and for the first twenty years it didn't really bother me. And then twenty years ago Jane and I got together. And every day after I had played chess with Steve the night before, Jane would say, "Oh Bob, how did you do at chess last night?" Well except on those rare occasions when I actually did well, I would mumble, "I did fine." I hated that question.

Well, as the years went on, our lives changed, sometimes tragically, sometimes just in the way things change, but our friendship only grew. When Jean died, Steve and I would start going out to dinner on Wednesday nights; we'd go for an early dinner, and then we'd go back to his apartment and play a couple games of chess. We took turns choosing the restaurants. I could choose any restaurant I wanted, but Steve was a meat-and-potatoes man, he didn't want anything exotic or anything new. So my choice was somewhat limited. I chose a lot of Italian restaurants. When it was Steve's turn, he would usually choose the Pacific Cafe. I think he was very fond of their butter. And at some point, let's say just about the dinners, I still loved playing chess, but chess is a very quiet sport, you don't really talk to people. But at these dinners we would talk. And as you've heard from other people, Steve loved theater, and he loved movies; so do I, and we would talk about those things, we'd talk about books, and we'd talk about science, and the conversations were wonderful, I just had to be careful never to make an overgeneralization, or I would be suddenly attacked. But I learned that, and those dinners were really fun.

After a while we started going to plays together once in a while in San Francisco, and Berkeley, and that added to our friendship. And then a number of years ago, Steve started coming up to Ashland every year, with Jane and with me, and we'd go to seven, eight plays. The three of us we'd all have seats together, we'd go out to dinner a number of times during that week. That was a great experience and just added to our friendship. It seems like everything we did added to our friendship. And I'm going to miss Steve very much. He was a very important friend to me and a wonderful man.

But Jane, in answer to your question, how did I do at chess with Steve? ... I did great.

"You should not hate your adversary."

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

Hello everybody. I'm Harris Taback. The reason I was asked to speak here today, I'm speaking on behalf of the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association of Northern California. I am a former president of that organization, probably about four years ago I finished my two-year term. The organization started well over fifty years ago, and it started as, and continues to be, an organization that is a community of criminal defense lawyers. We would put on events, we would support each other, it was a place to have lunch, to hear a speaker, and to be part of a community. When I took over as president, I put on, over two years, probably ten or so events. Steve Scherr, who had been a buddy of mine now for a long time, long retired, came to every one of those events. He didn't miss one. He was the first guy to respond "I'll be there," send in his check. He just loved being part of the community.

But he wasn't just a part of it, and you all know this, but to family members and friends outside our community, you gotta know it's not enough to say that he was a great criminal defense lawyer, that he was magnificent at trial. I don't think there was a lawyer, let alone prosecutor or defense attorney, in the Hall of Justice, practicing at 850 Bryant Street, that was more respected by his peers; that was more respected by the judiciary. If you were having breakfast with Steve Scherr at the cafeteria at 850 Bryant, the guy couldn't swallow a bite of food without lawyers running up to him, with motions, showing him police reports, asking "What do you think? What do you think?" And he had time, he cared, to answer all of these questions.

The thing about Steve, and Jim pointed out, there was no ego involved. It wasn't like you were coming up to him and he just loved that kind of attention. But when you talked to Steve with your issue, it was equally important to know that you, also, could not have an ego. Because if you had an ego, it was going to get hurt. Honest. Brutal. There were times when I just wanted to give him my bar card, like what am I doing practicing law. He would ask questions, I would ask him for advice and he'd ask me these detailed questions, and I would say, "Well, who knows?" and he would look at me and he would say, "Well, I would hope your client's lawyer does!"

We would talk, we would talk it out. I was doing a trial in Lakeport, an attempted murder case where my client shot several rounds of a shotgun, several shells through a closed door and almost killed the individual on the other side of the door, and but for emergency surgery the person would have died. So we had a defense, a heat-of-passion defense. I had forensic psychiatric work done on the client. I was a much younger lawyer at the time. Steve agreed to have lunch with me before I drove up to begin the trial, and I thought it was going to be a quick lunch. So we sit down, and I start asking him some questions about my direct examination, which you would think is simple enough, to just ask a doctor some questions: "What did you do," and "What did you read," and "What are you considering," so different than cross. I started running some ideas by Steve, and that lunch turned out to be about three and a half hours, where Steve was like, "Okay. And no. And this is how you do it." We sat down and wrote the questions out, as Jim was talking about, question by question. I just can't tell you what it felt like to have that type of wisdom shared with you by a guy who could not have been more generous. And it worked; we beat the attempted murder charge; the direct examination that he prepped me for I think helped tremendously.

I'm not the only lawyer that would come up here and tell stories about how he mentored them. I am kind of convinced that in thirty-five years of practicing the guy never picked up a check in San Francisco at lunch. Because we were always paying him essentially for his meal.

So the question becomes that I have, is, what does he leave us with? How do we process this loss? I'll tell you, Michael Gaines and I would have dinners with Steve Scherr at Alfred's Steak House, probably four times a year for many many years now. We know Steve's love of literature, we would talk books, Michael and Steve would talk books I've never heard of. I'd sit and listen to these book reports that these guys were doing. Movies. Music. We've heard of his love for the Dead, and Baez, Steve loved Bob Dylan as well, and he could talk about all those subjects for hours with great knowledge. But this was the guy who once taught me the greatest lesson. My takeaway from Steve and my relationship with him. He was taking me to a Warriors game in the 90s, picked me up, driving to the Oakland Coliseum, and we're talking about this trial that we had coming up, we had co-defendants. And at a certain point you know, this young lawyer, I was coming from a much more radicalized position than Steve, sort of the Abbie Hoffman school of thought. And I'd say to Steve, "I hate prosecutors. I hate 'em." And he looked at me like I was out of my mind, like, "What are you talking about? What do you mean, you hate prosecutors?" I said, "Well how could anybody, how could you charge someone with a crime and stand up there and try to put them in jail, anyone who can do that, you know." And he gives me this civics lesson. About how people need to do that! There needs to be a social system in place, there are people that have to take on a job of being a prosecutor. That doesn't mean they're a bad person. You should not hate your adversary.

And that lesson in civility is something that came to me the other night, preparing for a hearing on Friday. To stay civil, as I was tossing and turning. Not to go in and wrestle. You're the face of your client, you gotta be the face of reason. Take the higher moral ground. And I won't forget the lesson of civility: but I also won't forget his dedication to what he spent his adult life doing, which is standing up for those of us who are weak, those of us who have been accused by the power of the state, demanding that justice be served, that the proceeding be fair, that the defense be competent. I'll tell you, one of his clients is here today. She doesn't know many of you. But I ran into her years ago at a concert, and we started chatting it up, and she said what do you do, and I said, "I'm a defense lawyer in San Francisco." She goes "Really! Do you know Jim Collins and Steve Scherr?" I go "Indeed I do." She says, "Well let me tell you something. Those two guys saved my life." Now I have permission, I asked her if it was okay to talk about this, and she said of course. She was a doctor who was charged with murder for how the prosecution thought she handled a child making end-of-life decisions. She said that Jim and Steve could not have been kinder, could not have been more sympathetic, and could not have been there more for her. And of course the two of them put together, a brilliant, brilliant defense. She was not charged; she was allowed to continue practicing, she was able to go on with her life. But she's not forgotten what Steve Scherr has done for her. Jim always would say that Steve is the brains, and that Steve was [laughter]. But Steve would say, Steve always would say that that is not true. That Jim is by far among the smartest guys in the room, don't ever forget that.

Steve's fight for justice, for fairness, for the underdog... I'm figuring as I'm going to close my remarks, how do I tie it together with his love of literature, film, and music. And I thought of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which is an amazing novel, it was turned into an amazing film, and Woody Guthrie, one of Bob Dylan's heroes, wrote an amazing song, The Ballad of Tom Joad. Now Tom Joad was radicalized by the Dust Bowl, and his family's treatment by the powers that be. They were forced to California, where they did not find any welcoming hand, and justice was hard to come by. Tom Joad wound up killing a deputy who had killed Tom Joad's friend, Preacher Casey, who was standing up for the working man, standing up for those among us who needed help and protection. And after Tom Joad killed that deputy he knew his time with his family in this world was over. Tom Joad was leaving his family for good, as he had to skedaddle out of town to beat the deputies on his heels. But he had to say goodbye. Before he left, he went that night to the camp, and he found his mother sleeping, and he went to kiss her gently on the head, to say goodbye. And Woody Guthrie wrote these words, and this is what I'm going to leave you with.

Tom Joad run back where his mother was asleep
He woke her up out of bed
And he kissed goodbye to the mother that he loved
And he said what Preacher Casey said, Tom Joad,
He said what Preacher Casey said.

Everybody might just be one big soul
Well it looks that way to me.
Everywhere that we love, in the day or night,
That's where I'm going to be, Ma.
That's where I'm going to be.

Wherever little children are hungry and crying,
Wherever people ain't free;
Wherever men are fightin' for their rights
That's where I'm going to be, Ma,
That's where I'm going to be.

So I say to all of you, in all those troubles, in all the cases we will continue to do and defend our clients, where people are fighting; just look, and that's where Steve Scherr will be.