I don’t know what happened You probably can guess, when it comes to technical stuff, I am still in the 1st grade, if not kindergarten. Something happened and I was lucky to keep what I had written. So back to Loyola:
….Ingrid Bergman as a nun in “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” So my impression. Priests and nuns were just nice, sweet and jolly persons. Not so.
Well, at the orientation, out comes Father Joseph Donovan S.J., a large burly man with a priest’s collar too tight around his massive neck. With his Boston accent, he welcomed us to his school where he was the Regent with a short cryptic speech and his Boston Irish accent as follows: “look to your right and then look to your left. Two of you will not be here to graduate.” Then he left the room.
Father Donovan was right. My class started at- if you add the night and day classes- 150 students. 46 of us made it. Get the idea? Loyola was no playground. It was tough and as Father Donovan related to one student who after his second year had a B grade point average, but on his final exam, he got two Ds and was placed on probation. Not kicked out because he still had a passing GPA, but he was told he had to bring all of his grades to Bs or he was OUT. This student was the son of one of the mayors of one of LA County’s cities. When the student complained how hard that would be to guarantee Bs on all of his subjects, Father replied “We serve horseradish with our ice cream in this school (you guessed it, I think the student did not make it.)
No matter. I received a great education at this Jesuit School and if I am any good as a lawyer I can thank Loyola, its professors and my classmates for a 1st class education.
Lew Watnick was brilliant. BTW, the other top students were Walter Leong, whose birth language was Chinese (Walter thought in Chinese, needed to translate to English, how about that for smarts?) and Tom Garcin (Tom was in the 101 Airborne in World War 2 where on a suicide patrol in the Snow in Europe the soldier in front of him was able knock off a few Germans and that soldier received The Medal of Honor. They were not expected to return from their scouting mission, but the front soldier saved all their lives.) Walter was the only one in my class that got recruited by a major firm. O’Melveney and Myers, a giant LA firm. The rest of us had to scrounge.
I digress now to tell you what I learned from Tom Garcin. I knew my subjects totally, property, criminal law, contracts and Torts in the first year . Did OK on the exams, got some As and Bs and Cs. I could not understand why not top grades. So, I asked Tom Garcin how he handled the exam questions which were as the Bar Exam as well as essay types of questions. We would get a fact situation on the exams and we were required to answer applying analysis and law with cases and law treatises by renowned legal authors as well as class lectures We could type our answers or write depending on one’s skills. I typed, horrible handwriting. Bottom line is Tom told me he never writes more than a page and one half. So for the next exam, I sucked it up and rather than a law review type of answer, I hit the issues, handled them and concluded. All within one and one half pages. Guess what? Nothing but top grades from there on. The lesson to be learned is the grader doe not want an esoteric dissertation, but wants to know if the student knows the issues and applies the correct analysis.How true, as when I taught Criminal Procedure at Western State Law School and wrote and graded test papers that is exactly what I was looking for from the student. Grading is hard and basically boring. I wanted to know does the student see the issues and if so, how was it handled.
What has all this have to do with Lew Watnick? Lew was not one of the veterans in my class. He was a young guy from Detroit and very smart. He had a job working for Sears and Roebucks after law school but contracted Polio, a terrible paralyzing disease which was not uncommon in those days. Well, he did recover but his vocal chords never came back. Being the tough guy he was, he taught himself to speak by some muscle method and gained understandable speech.
As I am sitting here, I can’t recall why I contacted him, but I think when I learned of his Polio condition I wanted to see how he was doing. By then, he found a job as a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles. We talked, he loved his work. After telling him my feelings about private practice, he suggested I apply to the DAs office. I did, took the exam came in number one of the applicants and eventually was hired as a Deputy DA and went to work for LADA’s Ernie Roll. ( I worked under four DAs, all different, and I will tell you about them, my DA colleagues, my cases and all kinds of interesting stuff.) But the above is enough for now.
Bye for today
Marshall Schulman
MarshallsKnowledge© 