Transcript

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: This is the Justice Harry A. Blackmun Supreme Court Oral History Project.

My name is Harold Hongju Koh.

I'm a professor at Yale Law School, a former law clerk to Justice Blackmun and the interviewer for this project.

This is session number three which is being held on September 16, 1994, at the Federal Judicial Center, and it concerns the Justice's early years.

Mr. Justice, let's go back before you were born.

How did your family first get to the United States?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well that's a broad inquiry of course.

I know more about my mother's family and their arrival than I do about my father's.

But let me take up my father's first.

They were really old New England Yankee stock, and just within the past week a woman from a genealogical society sent down a raft of material.

I hadn't known she was working on it, which draws a line of descent right back to Miles... Captain Miles... Standish, strangely enough.

She did the same thing with Vice-President Quayle on a different direction.

So he's traced back to Miles Standish also.

But it brought back the fact that on my first Thanksgiving day in New England in 1925, my roommate, who was from Duxbury, Massachusetts, took me home for Thanksgiving and we visited Miles Standish's grave on that day, which amuses me now.

But I think it's probably a genuine tracing.

My father used to speak of connections in England and Liverpool several generations back.

But to the extent that I've worked on it, it has always been New England.

On his side of the family, there is a little French touch in there somewhere because he had two maiden aunts named LaFontaine and St. Pierre who moved from France to Ireland.

I have a feeling they were French Huguenots but I'm not sure about that.

On my mother's side, her father, whom I well remember of course with great affection, was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in what was then, I think, the Duchy of Nassau.

He came over here in his teens and was engulfed in the Civil War.

He served in the 117th Illinois infantry.

Came through it unscathed, and was naturalized in 1866, and lived on until 1925.

But as I say, I remember him with affection.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was his name?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: His name was Theodore Louis Reuter, R-E-U-T-E-R, which is a fairly common name as I understand it in Germany.

But he was a good guy, and I liked him a lot.

On my mother's, that is her maternal side, her maiden name was Huegely [pronounced hig-lee], they pronounced it, H-U-E-G-E-L-Y, which I think was a fractionated version of H-U, with an umlaut, G-L-I, little hill, in German.

Her father came out of a small Bavarian town named Hasslock near the Swiss border and, I'm told, came to this country to escape military conscription and landed in New Orleans, worked his way up the river as far as St. Louis and then went down river a bit and went up the Ohio and settled as a millhand, that is a flour millhand, in a little town called Mouscotah, M-O-U-S-C-O-T-A-H, I think, Illinois.

And then moved east another ten miles or so and built his own mill, because then, this was in the middle of the winter wheat country.

And he prospered in a small fashion.

But he to me was Vater, we called him Vater.

And every Sunday we kids had to go down, pay our respects to him and get a shiny nickel from Vater.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: In exchange for what?

Just as a gift?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Just as a gift, Sunday morning.

But he had a large family and I well remember them, I think there were seven siblings of which my grandmother was the oldest.

They were all living when I was a kid and I knew them very well.

And as they grew up and married, he built houses for them on a street called Mill Street in Nashville, Illinois.

So there were I think seven houses, four on one side of the street, three on the other all occupied by siblings.

It was a substantial family at the time.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: If I could go back to the Blackmuns.

Have you ever traced the spelling of the name "Blackmun"?

It seems quite unique.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, and as it goes back, it varies from generation to generation.

My father always said the correct spelling was M-U-N and that this was a Welsh variant of M-A-N.

I don't know how true that is, I never checked it out.

But his father, when he enlisted in the Civil War as a youngster, was told by the enlisting sergeant that he didn't know how to spell his name so the sergeant spelled it MA-N.

And to this day the Civil War records record him as Andrew Perkins Blackman, M-A-N, and his gravestone is that way.

But every now and then it would shift.

There were attempts to move it back to M-U-N.

It isn't very significant, but there it is.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: The sword that used to hang on your wall at the Supreme Court, whose sword was that?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, that sword was my father's.

He was in the Minnesota National Guard for over 25 years and that was his dress sword.

But with it, in the same frame, is a silver handled cane which belonged to my great-grandfather.

It was given to him I think by his children on his 75th birthday, or something like that.

So I'm glad to have it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How did the Blackmuns get to the Midwest?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, my grandparents on the Blackmun side were married in the midst of the Civil War, I think it was in April, 1864, when grandfather, who was on leave, went back to Mooers, New York and married his, well, my grandmother.

And after the war, I think they just decided, as so many other people did at the time, to homestead in the Middle West.

And they moved out from New York state into, oh, mid-central Minnesota, about sixty, seventy miles west of the Twin Cities in Stevens County at that time, near a little town called Hancock.

They had a farm out there, my grandfather did, and did pretty well.

They had a large family, I think nine, but they lost four children in the diphtheria epidemic of 1892.

That was too much for my grandfather, and I think he just abandoned the farm and moved into the cities.

The loss of four children at one time was pretty severe.

Of course in those days they didn't have any antibiotics or anything of that kind.

But the thought today of losing four youngsters is pretty devastating.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And his name was?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: His name was Andrew Perkins Blackmun.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How then did your parents meet one another?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, they both, one from Illinois, one from Minnesota, attended a small college, in Missouri called Central Wesleyan College in Warrenton, Missouri.

It no longer exists but there are still signs.

I've driven over there a few times and there are signs that

"These buildings once belonged to Central Wesleyan College. "

And.

that's where mother and dad met.

And I guess that was it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you have any idea what they studied or what their majors were?

'--

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, my father studied philosophy, always wanted me to be a philosopher in the first instance and secondly a lawyer if I couldn't undertake philosophy.

Mother studied music.

She was pretty good on the piano, but she had an immediate older sibling who apparently was very able at the piano and studied in Berlin under a German pianist named Carreno.

The two of them were due to take an Australian tour in 1907 when he contracted pneumonia and died within three days.

This is a loss my mother never got over and I'm named after him, his name is Harry.

And my inability to do very much at the piano, I think, was always a great disappointment for my mother.

Because he evidently was very good, he composed and played just as well.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --Did you get your musical training early as a boy?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, I didn't have much musical training.

Mother insisted on my taking piano lessons.

I labored through it, but I like music a little bit.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And how many children did your parents have?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: They had three.

I was the oldest and then three years later came a little boy who lived for about two days and they lost him.

And then I had a sister.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was he named?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: His name was Corwin Manning Blackmun, Jr. They named him after my father.

And then my sister came along, born in 1917, she was thus eight years younger than I.--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And her name was?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --Her first name was Theo, named after my mother who, in turn was named after her father who was named Theodore.

It's rather an unusual contraction, I suppose, but, strangely enough, there were several people named after my mother with the name Theo here and there.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was their religious background?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, they were, as far as I knew, they were German Methodists.

Which strikes me as a little strange because Bavaria, from where Vater came, was a distinct Catholic area.

And beyond that I don't know, but they were active in the Methodist church.

They weren't overly strict.

Mother was fairly strict in the sense that she didn't sew on Sundays, she didn't play cards on Sunday even though she liked to play cards.

But as far as the kids were concerned, we could go out and play all day Sunday.

We weren't restricted to the house to read the Bible or anything like that.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: But then you were actually born in Nashville, Illinois.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I was born in Nashville, Illinois.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How did that come about?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Which is mother's home.

Well, Nashville is the county seat of a county called Washington County and it's almost directly east of St. Louis, about fifty miles.

The Louisville and Nashville Railroad has a line through it running from St. Louis down to Louisville and Nashville.

But this was a place where Vater built his mill and I think I was the first to come along.

Mother and Dad I'm sure were living in a cold water flat in Minneapolis.

I have the old address on LaSalle Street.

But my father was a fruit buyer at the time.

He spent a lot of time traveling in the West in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho buying fruit for wholesalers in the Twin Cities area, and probably was on one of those trips and I think mother just--

decided she wasn't going to have me alone in Minneapolis.

So she went back to--

her home in Nashville and I was born there.

Happened to be I was born in the same room in the same house in which she was born.

And that house is still standing.

I can remember some happy summer days down there, and it seemed like a very large home to me, and the yard was very large because I had to cut it, and it seemed to me I never got done mowing and I had to start all over again.

But I look at it now, it isn't very large at all.

But that's how it came about and I'm sure that.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: But, did you live down there after you were born?

Your mother returned?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --Well, I think that as soon as Mother was able to; in those days, I think they kept a new mother under wraps for a few days.

I'm sure she came right back to Minneapolis.

And then Mother and Dad moved to St. Paul and I grew up in St. Paul.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now you've described your neighborhood growing up as kind of a blue-collar neighborhood.

What neighborhood was it?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: This was the east side of St. Paul, the farthest, the side farthest from Minneapolis actually, called Dayton's Bluff.

It was distinctly lower middle class, I would say, occupied largely by working people... they were good, solid people, but nearly all in modest circumstances.

It was a good place to grow up actually.

There were--

four of us about my age that became good friends.

One who was the oldest of the four of us always wanted to be a physician.

He knew it from the time he was born apparently, and he realized his dreams and was a pretty good cardiologist in the Twin Cities area.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was his name?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: His name was Briggs, John Francis Briggs.

I can remember his Irish mother saying,

"John, you really don't want to go to college and waste all that time becoming a physician. "

"Just go out and get a job. "

But he held on and I think his interest in medicine influenced me in that direction a good bit.

A second one was a fellow named Robert Damkroger who later got into insurance for the St. Paul Fire & Marine and did rather well.

And the third one was none other than Warren Earl Burger.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When did you first meet him?

Do you remember?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I suspect that about age five or six we were packed off to Sunday School by our respective mothers and that's where we first learned to know each other.

But that friendship endured for a long time.

We went to the same elementary school.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: That's Van Buren?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, it was called Van Buren.

I had to find out who Mr. Van Buren was, I discovered that.

It was a good elementary school.

But when we came to embark on high school years our paths diverged.

That year for the first time the St. Paul system put in the districting requirement.

I wanted to go to a downtown school that I liked where John Briggs had gone, as a matter of fact, a couple of years ahead of us because I thought it was the best high school in town, and I wangled away and got into it despite the new districting.

But Warren Burger went on to a high school that was on the east side.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Your high school was Mechanic Arts?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Mechanic Arts.

It was originally kind of a trade school.

It taught people in the trades and then they enlarged into a full time high school with a superb faculty.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you live near Warren Burger?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, yes, we were about six blocks apart I would say, and Briggs and I lived more or less across the street from each other.

And the other one, Bob, was closer to where Warren lived.

He lived in a little modest house on Conroy Street in St. Paul.

His mother in my estimation was a saint; she brought up a large family on little or nothing.

We didn't have much, but the Burgers had less than we did.

But it didn't seem to bother us.

We had a good time, I think, a happy childhood.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What kinds of things did you do for fun together?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, sports.

Softball primarily, but then we developed into tennis and played a lot of tennis together.

Warren Burger was always a little stronger than the rest of us, much to my annoyance.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was he like as a boy?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, much the way he was as a man actually, He liked to dominate things and, in a nice way, and make himself known.

But he was a good Pal, a good companion in every way.

No question about this.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: But when you went to different high schools, did you see each other very much?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, less than we had before, of course.

And then when the college years came on why I went east to school and I didn't see much of him then for a while except in the summertimes.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: But then you were, later, best man at his wedding, is that right?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I was indeed, yes.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And were you friendly with his wife at that point?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I had met her through him.

They were married in 1933, right in the depths of the depression we were coming out of.

And I well remember when they went off in a little car that he had, down the road, 1933, and there went my friend with his bride and that was a milestone of course.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now when did he move to Washington?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: He came down here in the Eisenhower administration.

Warren had always been active in politics in the sense of being interested in them.

He never himself ran for office.

I think he was, people were... tried... to persuade him to do so.

But he was influential, was a good friend of Harold Stassen and one of Stassen's primary supporters.

And I think in, when was it Eisenhower was first elected, '52, I think it was.

And they had battled the Eisenhower forces however, but as is often the case one becomes friends when one competes, and he was offered a position as his assistant attorney general at the time and came down and took it, in charge of the Civil Division.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you know if Chief Justice Burger actually suggested your name to President Nixon as a candidate or did that come from somebody else?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well he always intimates he did.

I have no way of knowing that but he wasn't the only one.

It was funny, when I was nominated on the Court of Appeals, oh there were at least twenty people who said, each of whom said, he was responsible for the thing.

The pattern repeated itself in 1970.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Mr. Justice, going back to your early childhood, what do you remember about your sister and how you interacted as children?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, of course, she was my little sister and I was charged with taking care of her a lot of times, which I resented here and there, but because eight years difference was a good bit, but she was a nice little person.

We got along well, I think, and she did well in her endeavors.

She wrote a good bit of poetry.

' And I lost her a year-and-a-half ago and I was sad about that.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What had she gone on to do after she left home?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, she married and continued in her, I think, literary career, fairly active in St. Paul poetry circles, and had a lot of friends there.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was her married name?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Gilchrist.

G-I-L-C-H-R-I-S-T.

Her husband died before she did.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did she go on to college?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, she's a graduate of Mcallister College in Saint Paul.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did she have children as well?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: She had two.

One son, Peter Michael [Gilchrist], who lives now in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.

He was in the computer business and got fed up with it and went east and bought a restaurant in Maine and apparently has done very well at it.

I think he has two or three of them up there now.

I've never visited there, but I'll have to do it sometime.

And he has a couple of children, one of whom is about to graduate from M.I.T. Then Betty's other child is a daughter [Cathy Gilchrist Gaudy] who lives in the Twin Cities area, and she has her hands full with three little ones.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What do you remember about World War I?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I can certainly remember a number of things about it.

I remember that everybody in those days had somewhere in his home a large map of the Western Front.

And nearly everybody had pins that would show the front, and if the French and Americans advanced a mile you'd move the pins up, or if they were pushed back you'd move them back.

It was a difficult, hard time.

The other day I mentioned April 6th as being a significant date.

Well, April 6th was when Congress declared war on Germany in World War I.--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember when you first heard about that?

Or what you were doing?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --No, I don't really.

I was eight years old.

I remember the service flags that people had in their windows with a blue star representing a soldier from that home and if there was a death the star was gold.

And some of them had several stars.

Gold stars were not uncommon either.

And then I well remember Armistice Day in 1918, November 11th.

There was a lot of racket in the sense that planes were flying around, they were bi-planes.

I wanted to go downtown during the celebration but my father wouldn't let me.

And he was probably right, it was probably a pretty heavy celebration at that time.

But that was the

"War to Make the World Safe for Democracy. "

And I think I can remember the 1916 campaign when Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the proposition that he kept us out of war at that point.

Of course, it wasn't very long after he was inaugurated the second time, which would be March 4th, in those days, 1917, and we were in the war within a month.

Of course what brought it about, I suppose, at least people use it as a stepping stone, was the unrestricted submarine warfare that Germany instituted at the time.

There was a lot of impatience with German people in the Twin Cities at that time.

I can remember crowds outside a German turnverein that people objected to.

Everybody with German parentage was suspect at that time.

But that's typical of every war.

The same thing in World War Two with the Japanese citizens of this country.

Yes, the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Mr. Justice, you are famous for your work habits.

Did you inherit them or did you learn them from your parents: getting up early, working late, keeping a very regular schedule?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, I don't know, maybe I was very frightened or scared if I didn't get in a lot of time, I'd fall flat on my face or something.

But I like to get up early because I felt I did better work in the mornings.

This was certainly true when I was in college majoring in mathematics.

I could think better mathematically in the morning than I could at night.

Then I worked outside a lot and there weren't many hours in the day, and I just had to get everything done, took me early and it took me late.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How long did your father continue the job as a fruit buyer or did he later change to a job that involved less traveling?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, it wasn't very long, I suppose, after I came along when his company, which was called Gamble, Robinson Company, put him in charge of a new outlet they had in St. Paul and he did that for a while and then got the idea that he might like to go into business for himself and tried that and didn't do very well.

My father never was, I don't mean to speak ill of him at all, but he never was a person who was able to make money.

He either wasn't interested in it or, in part it was because he was pretty stubborn and never would compromise on things, and he often alienated people.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you have to go out and make money yourself?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When did you start?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, after I got back from college of course.

Right after the Depression, I had to help out.

But I can remember periods even before then when financially things were pretty hard in the house.

I can remember sitting in the kitchen of my mother with tears rolling down her face wondering where she was going to buy the next load of groceries I guess.

But we got through that period all right.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: You often write in your opinions about "the little people" and "the outsiders".

How do you think you developed that kind of affinity?

"Was it through this early period? "

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I suppose growing up as I did there on the east side of St. Paul the people I knew were people of not great influence politically or by wealth or otherwise.

They lived on the other side of town.

And naturally I probably had empathy for them.

It caused me to rethink some things when I got into practice, of course, because we represented major clients and people of not only wealth but influence and the like.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Who do you think were some of your heroes growing up?

You've described a "hero" as sort of a "beacon" for a person.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, unquestionably Abe Lincoln always was a hero to me.

I probably got a good bit of that from my two grandfathers, both of whom served in the Union Army and who thought a lot of him.

They were, both of them were, distinctly liberal Republicans in those days.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: The family was always Republican?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, not every member of it, but it was on the liberal side... none of this arch-conservative stuff, generally.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you still consider yourself a Republican now?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I don't know.

I certainly don't vote a straight ticket anywhere.

No, I, suppose well, it kind of depends.

Look what's happened in Minnesota in the last week.

Of course Minnesota always, when it's gone Republican, has, in the last forty or fifty years always been a liberal Republican state, not a conservative one.

I think one has to go back to Governor Theodore Christianson years in the teens, maybe, whenever it was he served, to find a really conservative Republican that was elected.

Minnesota was caught between Wisconsin progressivism on the one side with a LaFollette influence there and, if you will, the IWW and other influences in the Dakotas where the farmers were pretty well strapped and in great difficulty during the Depression particularly.

So it isn't unusual to have Minnesota politics as fairly liberal.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: You're contrasting this to the reelection of Arne Carlson this week.

I'm just--

trying to recall for the record what happened in Minnesota this week.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, he won the primary even though he wasn't nominated by his party for the primary.

He's backed into everything since he's been first elected Governor and has handled it rather adroitly.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Mr. Justice, what kinds of things did your parents enjoy doing when you were a young boy?

Did they like politics or music or what kinds of things happened around the house?

HAB; Well, my father was always interested in politics, he was never active really.

Mother liked movies, She loved to read.

Dad liked public speaking, was pretty good at it.

In what capacity?

Was he a member of civic organizations?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: What?

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: In what capacity would he give the public speeches?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, often church-related capacity, one way or another, but not politics as such.

He was a pretty good student.

He taught an adult class in our church and did very well.

He was very popular, had a large class.

That kind of thing he did excel in.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When did your dad pass away?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: He died in 1947, in February.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: So that was after you were back and already practicing.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

I was practicing in Minneapolis at the time.

Came about in a way rather suddenly and yet he had been ill for a long, long time off and on, intermittently ill.

Yes, I remember that very distinctly.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How did he die?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: He started bleeding internally and was taken to the hospital and died there after three days.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now did he have any... you said he wanted you to be a lawyer, a philosopher.

Is that what you wanted as a boy, in terms of your ultimate profession?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I was just a kid, and he kept grinding at me.

He definitely wanted to be a lawyer.

I have today in my shelves some of his law books, including his Blackstone volumes.

I think he would have been a pretty good lawyer, generally.

He was a scrapper, Dad was, but he was never a compromiser, that might have hurt him somewhat.

But he wasn't insistent.

In those days, people always said well, if you don't know what you want to do, study law because it won't hurt you any, it'll be good in whatever you go into, which would, I suppose, is true today.

But I drifted along for a while, and I was torn between medicine and the law and I kid myself, I jokingly say that I didn't decide to take up law until my senior year in law school.

But I was always a little concerned about whether I could do very well in basic sciences and the like although mathematics was fairly easy for me.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Was that your best subject as a student?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

I well remember when I was a freshman in college, they gathered us all together and President Lowell got up with his Phi Beta Kappa key flashing on his vest, advising us to make a decision as to what we would concentrate in, that's what they call it at Harvard, not major but concentrate in.

He said it doesn't make much difference what it is as long as it's a good subject.

For instance he said,

"I went on to law school but I majored in mathematics. "

I thought if that was good enough for Abbott Lawrence Lowell, it was good enough for me.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Some commentators have ascribed your well-known qualities of thoroughness and care and meticulousness to your mathematical background.

Do you think that's true?

Is there's anything to that?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, it may have an influence, I suppose.

I like to think I pay attention to detail.

I think that's important.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And is that something you learned from your parents or was that your own doing?

HAB: I think it was my own doing, studying math more than anything else.

HK: What do you remember about the Depression years?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: They were pretty tough years.

I remember particularly Black Friday in 1929.

I was in my first year in law school and was walking across Harvard Square and the newsboys were hawking their papers as they did in those days, "stock market crashes" and so forth.

I said to myself, well, it can't hurt me.

Because I was broke, I didn't have any money.

And how wrong I was.

But I remember that very distinctly.

Then of course, as the days went on, the following Tuesday was even worse.

Those were desperate days in '32, '33, but maybe from a purely personal point of view it was just as well I was in law school and fortunately I had a job or two and I was able to keep going.

But the world was collapsing.

People thought the world, not just this country, but it was pretty much of a worldwide depression.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Going back to your grade school days, do you remember the first time you read the Constitution?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, I don't.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember the first time you heard about the Supreme Court or any reactions you had to the Supreme Court as a.

boy?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I studied Civics, I had a pretty good Civics teacher.

I guess this was in the high school level.

That was a tribunal that stood at the top of the judicial system and was far off in Washington, didn't mean anything to me particularly.

I didn't have any close connection to the judiciary, I didn't know any judges when I was a kid.

Fortunately I stayed out of trouble and wasn't up before them.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you know any lawyers?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Not until I was about to go off to college.

Oh, I'd met a couple, but I didn't know them really.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: I know you're modest, but were you a top student in high school?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: In high school?

Well, close but not valedictorian or anything of that kind.

We had a class of about four hundred and fifty, and it was a good class, no question about this.

There were about ten of us clustered right at the top, oh, tenths of percentage points separating us and I was, I think, technically fourth.

There was a little fellow who was valedictorian and then a pair of twins next, a boy and a girl, and then I came.

It was a lot of fun, a good competition and the like.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you ever keep track of those people, do you know what happened to them?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I think they're all gone now.

I heard from them for a while, maybe six or eight years.

But it was a good class.

For me it was a splendid high school to go to because it was downtown, brought in a lot of kids who lived in that kind of circumstance and also brought in a large number of African-Americans because there was such an enclave on Rondo Street in St. Paul at the time, which was in that district, and they all came to Mechanic Arts.

So we had a very diverse student population which was very good for me.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you have a sense of the life of the African-American community?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: To a degree, yes, a little bit.

I had a couple of pretty close friends.

We discussed their problems and I discussed mine.

None of us had any money--

[Laughter]

, it was common in that respect, had to work outside a little bit.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How conscious were you of segregation in the South at that point and how that was operating?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, not very conscious I think, living up north.

On the other hand, the banners of the War between the States were still flying.

It was only fifty, sixty years after the Civil War and certainly my grandparents were living as was Warren Burger's grandfather who was in the Union forces and lost an arm in the war and used to come around to Van Buren School and talk to the various classes and tell us about the war and patriotism and his empty sleeve and this kind of thing.

It was rather impressive for the kids.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Were there any special teachers who really stuck in your mind?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I remember the ones in elementary school.

They were without exception very kind, very understanding, more so than we deserved, I think.

But at the high school level, yes, there were several that were influential.

Two English teachers whom I really didn't have much in class, one was named Elenora Deem, D, double-E, M, another one was named Copley, C-O-P-L-E-Y, and then a great Chemistry teacher named Griffin and a Physics teacher named McKee and a History teacher named Shedorski; all of whom I liked, all of whom I think influenced me a good bit.

And Miss Deem and Miss Copley were the ones who suggested that I might consider applying for a scholarship to Harvard.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Had you ever known anyone who had gone to Harvard?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: There was a fellow from our high school who had gone out the year before on a Minnesota Harvard Club Scholarship, and I knew him, but he didn't do well at Harvard and I think dropped out.

I remember the principal who later became a good friend of mine, he was an old German Prussian actually with flaming white hair and a distinct accent.

He did to me what he shouldn't have done, he said,

"Harry [imitating accent], you're probably going to Harvard, now don't flunk out. "

"If you flunk out, we'll never get another student into Harvard. "

And I thought, in later years, what a thing to tell me.

It just added to the burden of going east in a new culture and all the rest.

But he was so desperate about it and as I say, we became good friends afterward.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you apply to other colleges?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I had applied and been admitted to the University of Minnesota, there was no problem there, really, and that's where I expected to go.

It was rather a surprise.

I was working that summer as I had the summer before on a dude ranch in Wyoming.

How I got that job is a long story, but anyway.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Is it worth telling?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --No, not really.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Was it through a family friend?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

I ran the ranch store.

The dude ranch was 35 miles from the nearest town, so we had to have a place for the dudes, the people that came and stayed there for a while and enjoyed Western life, to buy the things they needed.

This was fun, I opened up at seven in the morning and then closed about one o'clock in the afternoon, and they gave me a horse, and I rode with the dudes the rest of the time and got so that I could ride acceptably well, I suppose.

I show some photographs to my current law clerks all the time.

They're amazed to see me on a horse and chaps and all the rest.

But those two teachers particularly put me in touch with the scholarship committee of the Harvard Club of Minnesota, consisting of four lawyers, two from St. Paul and two from Minneapolis.

I well remember them.

One was from Minneapolis, his name was Carl De Laittre, who's son also went to Harvard in my class, whom I knew fairly well; kind of a cold, successful lawyer over there.

And then Bergman Richards who was a warm, successful lawyer over there.

And W.W. Cutler of St. Paul who was kind of an old-fashioned lawyer, whose son also was in my class at Harvard.

Then a little fellow named E.B. Young, who was just maybe five feet high and when he sat in the swivel chair his feet didn't reach the floor, but he was the kindest person I think I ever ran into.

I remember walking into his office and he said,

"So you want 'to go to Harvard? "

I said,

"Who said that? "

"I don't know anything about Harvard. "

"I was just told to come and see you. "

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was the tuition at Harvard?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Tuition at that time was three hundred dollars.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And so the scholarship was for the full amount?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, the scholarship that was finally offered, it was three hundred bucks, they'd cover tuition.

But I was working on the dude ranch out in Wyoming and a telegram came in stating that I'd been awarded this scholarship, please advise within four days whether you would accept it.

I didn't know what to do.

I didn't have any money except what I was earning.

Tuition was fine, but I knew I had to eat and do some other things.

Among the dudes out there was a family named.

Garfield and Mr. Garfield was the son of the assassinated president.

But his wife, Mrs. Garfield, was kind of a friend to me.

She, I guess, was kind of interested a little bit, and when she stopped in the store I told her about this and she said, "You must go" !

Well, I said,

"But you're not Harvard, the Garfields are Yale from start to finish. "

And she said,

"Oh, yes, yes, but you must go to Harvard. "

She kept, almost nagging me, for a while.

I think she influenced me in my decision.

When that telegram came in, I thought I'd better get back, so I left earlier than I normally would have and went back to "case the joint" and see what could be worked out.

I remember talking to my father one day, he was shaving, and I was sitting there talking about it and said,

"Aren't you pleased that the scholarship has come along? "

He said,

"Yes, I'm pleased but that doesn't answer everything. "

And I know he was worried about how to get me through, what his obligations of support were and so forth.

But I finally determined more or less on my own that I'd go and did on the twentieth day of September, 1925, I'll never forget it.

We went out by train at that time.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Well, we're coming to the end of the tape so maybe we can pick up here in a few moments.