Today marks our sixty year anniversary. 60 years ago, just a short time after we met, Maxine and I were married at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. I had just entered the LA DA’s Office. The Office was kind: “You are to be back on the job on the Monday following your wedding on Saturday.” That gave me the whole weekend to get to San Francisco, get married on Saturday, drive down the coast, and stop the first night at Rickey’s, a fancy motel on Highway 101 in Palo Alto. I get the key to the room, pick up my bride, carry her over the threshold, enter the room and there is a couple sitting there watching TV! Turns out the guy went to high school with me, so we started chatting and then his wife looked at Maxine, saw the rice embedded on her hat and veil and uttered, “you were just married – oh you poor thing!” What a way to assure to my lady that things would be good on the first night! Got a key to another room, and next day off to the Highland’s for Sunday night’s stop, followed by a drive back to LA, just in time to go to work on Monday. That’s the way it was in the 50s, no “Mollycoddling.” Well, we did pretty good together, respecting each other. One of, if not the most important thing, in our relationship is neither demanded from the other constant personal attention, and we have complete support for one and the other. I do not think I would have my later success without Max’s patience and backing for the long hours criminal trial lawyers have to put in.
I have, from an early age, always had some kind of a job, even when in college and law school. The different types of jobs helped frame any ability I may have as a trial lawyer. My life was pretty good up to my 9th year. Both my mother and father were raised in Minneapolis. Both were graduates of the University of Minnesota, and my father went on to medical school, where he was an outstanding student and interned at the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. My mother developed a hearing problem as a young wife, so they decided to move to California, hoping the warm climate would help. My father opened an office in LA at the intersection of Santa Monica Blvd and Laurel Canyon which was about the end of the inhabited city at that time. He became very successful and his practice boomed. He then moved to the Taft Building at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, a famous location with the famous Brown Derby Restaurant, a restaurant hosting famous Hollywood Stars, producers, Studio chiefs and the rest of the Hollywood crowd. Dr. Leo, as he became known, was the doctor of these famous people, like Jack Warner, one of the Warner Brothers, head of the film studio of the same name. Dr. Leo got this clientele because he was a very good if not great doctor. Those days, doctors gave a heck of a better service to their patients than today. His stature grew in the profession and he was on the board of Hollywood Presbyterian and Cedars of Lebanon Hospitals He was also the ring doctor at the American Legion fight arena. As his reputation grew, so did his income. This in the 30s, the height of the Great Depression, when America was in very bad financial shape and unemployment was rampant.
My brother, Leonard, was born in 1922, one year after my parents came to California, and I was born 5 years later in 1927. My parents moved to a very nice house on Detroit Ave between Beverly Blvd and 3rd Street. They were so well-off, they had a live-in maid, a Cadillac car and a Ford model A with a rumble seat, and my father had a driver. Things were good.
I was not close to my brother, as the 5 year difference in ages probably put me in the little pest category. As opposed to me, Leonard was, like my father, a brilliant student. Again, as opposed to me, my parents had to go to the various schools and ask the principals to stop skipping him. As it was, at the age of fourteen, Leonard was a senior at Fairfax High School.
At the age of nine, my good life was shattered. Leonard, while returning from a party, was crossing Beverly Blvd at night and was struck by an oncoming car and killed.
My memory was that evening when the news reached my parents, I recall my mother’s wailing, screaming, sobbing, and I was carted off to my Aunt Bertha, my father’s sister, who had moved to California with Uncle Art Friedman, a dentist, where I stayed for a week or two, then picked up by my mother, taken to Union Depot, and we boarded a train to Minneapolis so she could be comforted by her father and numerous cousins who resided there.
Everything went downhill from there
The sad tale is necessary so the reader can follow what occurred after my brother’s death, My parents’ divorce, My father’s financial and professional fall and eventual rehabilitation and my growth and my highs and lows.
Enough for one day.
Marshall
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