Paul R. Meyer

Session One

Weinstein: Paul Meyer is an attorney, retired, in Portland. We are going to start, as they said in Alice in Wonderland, at the beginning. Paul, I would like you to start by having you tell me your age and were you raised in Portland? When did you arrive in Portland? Why did your family come here? Give me a general background.
MEYER: I was born on Easter Sunday of 1925 (that makes me 84 years old) in St. Louis, Missouri and lived there until I was 14. At the end of 1939 I moved to New York City when my dad moved part of his business there. I lived in New York from 1940 until 1952. During that 12 year period I was three years in high school, three years in the army in World War II, three years back home going to Columbia for my undergraduate degree (I graduated in 1949) and went to Yale Law School and graduated in 1952. [I taught legal research and writing at Yale Law during my senior year]. At that time I came out to a year post of teaching in Berkeley at the University of California Law School (Boalt Hall). And in deciding where on the west coast, [among] San Francisco, Seattle and Portland I might choose to settle (I don’t think Los Angeles was a factor), I settled on Portland for reasons we can discuss later. I came up here and started the [private] practice [of law] in 1953.

Weinstein: Let’s go back. We talked earlier about your family. Tell me about your parents, what their background was, any siblings, family members. Give me an idea of the kind of family that you grew up in.
MEYER: I was very fortunate. I had two college-educated parents. My mother [Adele Rosenfeld,] was born in Harlem in New York City. She was literally fourth generation in this country. Her maternal great-grandparents, Matthias and Ameilia Newhouse, came from Bavaria in the early to mid-1840s. [Matthias was a tailor and his daughters and granddaugters all became excellent seamstresses who sewer for “the 400,” New York’s wealthy German Jewish families (“Our Crowd”)]

My great-grandmother Babette Newhouse, their oldest daughter (they had two daughters), was born on Hester Street in New York City on June 16, 1848. My maternal great-grandfather, Max Bacharach, who married my great grandmother Babette, came from a little town called Sielegenstad, which is near Frankfort and Darmstadt in Hesse. He came over sometime in the mid-1850s when he was about 14. I got a lot of information from the town of Sielegenstad, that confirmed for me that Max’s parents, Abraham Bacharach III and Esther Baum Bacharach, and his older sister, Marianne, never came over to this country. In the Civil War he volunteered in 1864 in the 63rd (Fighting Irish) Division out of Brooklyn, New York. He was wounded by a spent bullet and lost the sight in one eye at Peterberg on March 24, 1965. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in early April. He got a pension for that and for severe arthritis from exposure to cold weather. The great source of information is that I was able to get a lengthy Veteran’s Administration file that goes back to 1865 and continues to 1934, because my great grandmother, born on Hester Street, didn’t die until 1934, after she moved to in St. Louis. So I knew her. I was nine years old when she died. I have memories of her.

Weinstein: Do you have that file?
MEYER: I have the whole file and I have written up a long story for my children and my nieces and nephews.

My mother’s father, Albert Wolf Rosenfeld, came to this country in 1881, directly from a little town called Hoffenheim, a few miles south of Heidelberg.

Weinstein: Why did they come? Were they fleeing or were they seeking?
MEYER: I don’t know. I only know that my great-great grandparents, the Newhouses, came from Bavaria because they are on the census rolls for 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. I have not yet been able to get their citizenship records nor immigration records to find out what specific year they came or from what town or village. There was considerable unrest in Germany culminating in some revolution activity in 1848 and there was a fair amount of liberal German immigration after 1848. The Newhouses came before then; [maybe they anticipated what would happen.]

My great grandfather, Max Bacharach, the Civil War veteran, came to this country in September 1858; so his leaving may have been as a result of some of this turmoil. Why he left alone as a young boy or 15 or 16 (his parents and sister stayed there [in Sielegenstadt]) I don’t know. Alan Bacharach, who now lives in Portland: his father came from Sielegenstad. Probably there is a family connection.

Weinstein: Have you contacted him?
MEYER: Oh yes, Alan and I know one another. My brother met him first and when they discussed the commonly shared name, he and I discovered the commonality of Sielegenstad in our backgrounds, even though Alan’s father and uncle lived in Seligenstadt until Hitler came to power.

My grandparents [Max and Babette Bacharach were married on March 17, 1866 by Dr. David Frank, the Rabbi of Congregation Shaare Rachmin at their home on Norfolk Street in lower Manhattan. (The congregation subsequently went out of existence and its books and records were destroyed. They] had five children, the older two (boys) came out to the west coast (San Francisco area) [before the turn of the century, one of whom, I believe, died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake]. My grandmother, Esther Bacharach, stayed in New York [with her younger sister and brother and married my grandfather from Hoffenheim, Albert Rosenfeld in the mid-1890s]. My mother, Adele Rosenfeld, was the oldest of four daughters born over the next ten years. She was born in Harlem at 160 W. 132nd street on December 29, 1897. She was very talented. She had a beautiful voice. She sang opera. She sang professionally in churches and synagogues. She went to Hunter High School and Hunter College graduating in June of 1919, after majoring in German and music. She met my father in March 1920 and they were married on June 2, 1920 at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City. It was a whirlwind romance.

Weinstein: So the fact that she went to college at that time is very unusual. Was there some strong influence from her parents?
MEYER: Well her mother, of course, had gone to high school in this country. I can’t say what motivated her particularly. I don’t think any of her three younger sisters finished college. They may have had some college and were well educated and cultured. But in her family my mother was exceptional. 

Weinstein: Tell us about your dad.
MEYER: Dad, [Abraham Moshin (later Meyer)] was born on Dec. 21, 1886, in the little town of Zaslav [now Izyaslav, which is about 180 miles west of Kiev in the Ukraine, a part then called the Republic of Volinsk]. Alice and I have visited there. So has Roger, my younger brother, who followed me to Portland. He came in 1957 about four years after I did. My father, Abe, lost his father, [Samuel Moshin], when he was about 12 years old. [He was the oldest of four boys and two girls (one girl died as a child in Russia)]. He had no formal education in Russia other than the cheder but he had to have been very bright because when his father died he was very angry with God and he started to smoke on Saturday. He couldn’t believe how God would take a father of five children and leave his poor mother stranded. The family had a flourmill business; so they were not in too bad of shape financially. My dad read Spinoza and shortly thereafter became an atheist, which he remained for the rest of his life. [ He was also involved in the Socialist movement. When the Cossacks came, he had to throw stamps he was selling to raise money into the outhouse and hide a gun in the hayloft.] He came to this country on July 10, 1906 [with his mother, Rose Boxerman Meyer (she was born in Tschan, now Teofipol), and his four surviving younger siblings, ending up with relatives in] St. Louis, Missouri. That is where they established themselves.

In 1908, only two years after he came to this country, he entered Washington University. In those days, when you registered you didn’t fill out the forms or go to the computer or even take a ballpoint pen. You sat before the registrar who pulled out his quill pen and filled out your answers to the questions. So when he asked my father, “What is your name?” He said, “Abie Meyer” because his name was Abraham Meyer. So he wrote down in big script “A.P. Meyer” and Dad saw it and said, “Oh no, not “A. P. Meyer, Abie Meyer.” So he said, “Well what is your middle name?” And Dad said, “I don’t have any.” He says, “Well you do now. It’s Paul. [He was a good man.]” So my name came from the registrar at Washington University.

[He studied at Washington University (in St. Louis) for two years. Then, the engineering school dean said, “You are too smart for this school. I’m going to get you a scholarship to Columbia,” which he did. He went back to Columbia in 1910 with $100 in his pockets and in 1913 (he did not come back to St. Louis during that period) he received a degree in Chemical Engineering. While at Columbia, he became a good friend of Wellington Koo, who later became the Chinese ambassador to the United States.

This remarkable accomplishment in just seven years meant that my father virtually “assimilated” in just his lifetime; something that it took many immigrants two and three generations to accomplish. My siblings and I were the beneficiaries of this accomplishment.]

Weinstein: Oh that is a wonderful story. You mentioned that he was an atheist by circumstance and then eventually by philosophy. Was your mother raised in a religious atmosphere?
MEYER: My mother, like most German Jews, was brought up in a Reform Jewish house. She was confirmed. She sang professionally, both in synagogues and in churches. She actually got her degree in German and music and taught music in the New York public schools. But since she got married literally a year after her graduation, she didn’t have much teaching time. [Although after my father died in 1951 and we gave up the kosher poultry business, which I will describe, she did return to do substitute teaching in the New York public schools for about 20 years.]

Weinstein: Do you remember much religious observance in your household?
MEYER: No, although my mother and father’s meeting is an interesting story. You might wonder how did someone living in St. Louis would meet someone living in New York. After graduating Columbia, my dad went back to St. Louis and started to practice engineering, employed by Swift & Co. in a plant in East St. Louis. There was a lot of antisemitism those days, particularly in the engineering profession but he did get a job with Swift & Co. and was there for a while. Swift & Co. had to decide whether to buy power from a new dam on the Mississippi River or to continue to manufacture power in its own coal- burning boilers. Dad had to figure out the efficiency of the system and compare the costs. He [finished this extensive] report, which only he could do, and the so-called “plant engineer,” who knew how to fix the pipes and this and that, took Dad’s name off the report, put his name on and sent it into Chicago. Then Swift wanted to send him to Argentina, I don’t remember what they wanted him to do. So he decided to leave Swift and to go into a small poultry and egg business operated by his mother and siblings. At that time the small businesses on the “street” had to sell to the “king of the street.” Most of the poultry was shipped live to New York for the kosher “fresh-killed” market there. […] So Dad said, “I’ve been to New York, what’s so big about that? Why do we have to sell to this guy? I’ll go back to New York and make our arrangements directly.” So he became very friendly with a man called Alvin Josephy, who had a very similar background to him. His mother and father had a poultry business. He had gone into it although he had an engineering degree from Cornell. So my dad and he became real good friends. Now, Alvin Josephy was married to Sophie Knopf, whose parents ran Knopf Publishing. And they happened to live in the same apartment house as my mother on Fort Washington Avenue near the George Washington Bridge. Well, Alvin of course had Dad up to his house for dinner. Mother, of course was there because my aunt used to baby-sit the Josephy children and Mom was a good friend of Sophie. That is how my dad met my mother, through the Josephys. [Incidentally, Alvin Josephy, Jr. was a noted historian of the west and the Indians (particularly Chief Joseph. Later in life he moved to the Wallowas and wrote a book, “A Walk to Oregon.” In the 1980s, before he moved to Oregon, he spoke to the Oregon Historic Society and we had him to brunch to reunite with my mother, who had moved to Oregon in 1977. We showed him my mother’s wedding photo with his mother Sophie as matron of honor. He remembered the photo from his mother’s collection!]

Weinstein: How did your dad get into the poultry business?
MEYER: When he decided that a career in engineering would be a dead end for a Jew, he decided to go into business with his mother and siblings. He had four siblings but they were all running this small, little poultry business. During the 1920s, the brother separated; each went his own way, but all remained in the poultry business. During the 1920s and 1930s, Dad was a big buddy of Carl Swanson. He knew Carl when Carl had a barn and two men working for him. They used to buddy around at poultry conventions.

Weinstein: This is Swanson of Swanson’s Food?
MEYER: Yes. In 1950, I went with my dad out to Omaha, Nebraska, the home of Swanson. We went over and saw Clark Swanson, Carl’s son, who showed us their balance sheet and so forth. It was right before they sold out to Campbell’s Soup. That was kind of an interesting part of history.

Weinstein: Coming back to the question of religious observance. In your household would you say that it was… how would you characterize it?
MEYER: I should explain that when my mother and dad got married and came to St. Louis they belonged to Congregation Shaare Emeth, which is where Rabbi Nodel went when he left Portland.

Weinstein: [interrupting] I want to stop and say for the record here that Rabbi Nodel was at Beth Israel in Portland prior to Rabbi Rose.
MEYER: And he married Alice and me.

Weinstein: Please continue.
MEYER: Well they belonged to Shaare Emeth for a while and I don’t know why they discontinued. However, when I was five and my older brother Alan, who was born in 1921, (I have a younger brother, Roger, born in 1932 [in Portland since 1957] and I was born in ’25. so there were three Meyer boys. When I was five my parents decided that we should have some Sunday school education. When my dad was at Columbia, had become acquainted with Felix Adler, who formed the Ethical Society in New York. [Adler was then teaching at Columbia – among his other activities with the Society.] Rabbi Stampfer in Portland at my mother’s memorial service [at the Robison Home], described Ethical Culture as the “left wing of Judaism.” I thought that was very interesting. And it was. Felix Adler had been trained as a Reform Rabbi. His father had been the Rabbi at Temple Emanuel on Fifth Avenue in New York. After studying in Germany for the rabbinate the young Felix Adler came home and gave his first sermon at Emanuel and apparently never referred to God. That caused a certain amount of consternation among the elders of the congregation. So, in 1876, he literally went from Fifth Avenue across Central Park to Central Park West where he established the Ethical Culture Society. Subsequently, there were societies in about seven or eight cities including St. Louis. I started Sunday school at the St. Louis Ethical Society.

Weinstein: Tell me something about it. Is the Ethical Society like Humanistic Jews?
MEYER: Very much so. I would say it is Humanistic Judaism without being restricted to Jews. If you analyze it, it is taking the ethical essence of Judaism without its sectarianism.

Weinstein: That would be very appealing to a lot of people.
MEYER: It was. I always remember, one of my Yale law school friends said to me, “Everybody knows that the Ethical Society is where the Jews go to escape Judaism.” And I said, “Well, if everybody knows it, and 90% of the members in New York are Jewish, that’s a hell of a stupid place to go to escape.” You could become a Christian Scientist, as some do, or a Presbyterian, as others have done, but you wouldn’t go to the Ethical Society if you were trying to escape being a “Jew.” St. Louis had a different dynamic: it was about half Jewish and half liberal Germans who lived in South St. Louis, which was heavily German. Alistair Cook once described Manchester and St. Louis as similar cities in which, in 1848, after the troubles and revolutions that were aborted, many liberal Germans would very frugally send one son to Manchester and one to St. Louis. He compared the cities. They both have great newspapers, the Manchester Guardian and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. They have good symphonies. They have a lot of cultural things growing out of the German and Jewish influences, which were extensive in both of those two cities.

Weinstein: Interesting comparison. Your experience, you said you went to what we would call, “Religious School” at the Ethical Society. Do you feel that you learned a lot? What was the influence on your outlook on life?
MEYER: It was very significant. To me, I learned more in the Ethical Sunday School and I liked it, I was more stimulated by it than I was by regular school. And I went to a pretty good public school in St. Louis. It was heavily Jewish. The students were very bright. For a public school it would be ideal. [For a year I went to Soldan High School, made famous by Tennessee Williams in “The Glass Menagerie.”]

I was very influenced by the Ethical Society. For example, in sixth grade we studied city planning. In eighth grade we studied comparative religion. In Kindergarten and first grade we were reading bible stories.

Weinstein: So these are things that today are considered basic for very exclusive private school educations.
MEYER: I suspect that may be true.

Weinstein: Yes, these are the kinds of things that educated parents want for their children and they are looking for this kind of thing at regular Day School situations. So you were getting this in addition to a very good public school education.
MEYER: Well it has further repercussions in my life in the sense that, when we moved to New York. My mother had been very active and was on the Board of the St. Louis Ethical. She was a political activist during the ‘30s: President of the American League Against War and Fascism, which became the American League for Peace and Democracy, which was, to some extent, a communist front organization. My mother was never involved with the Communist Party, but it had relevance to me, because my whole life, in terms of war and post-War politics, I had a reasonable sophistication about the Communists Party in liberal organizations. [And this had significant influence on my activities in the American Veterans Committee and ACLU after World War II.] Mother was very articulate, supporting boycotts against the Japanese when they invaded Manchuria and very involved in the Spanish Civil War on the part of the Loyalists. So I had a very strong political background and bent as a child. Who at age twelve in 1937, ‘38 was talking in eighth grade with one or two colleagues about what was going on in the Spanish Civil War? What the battles were being fought and who was winning and why?

Weinstein: So it stood you very, very well in your own intellectual pursuits and probably very important in the formulation of your philosophy of life and your career.
MEYER: No question. And my future activities and involvement, particularly (as we will discuss) in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Weinstein: Now, I would like to get on to outlining your general education beyond the schooling in St. Louis. You said you were about 14 when you moved to New York?
MEYER: Right. I had just had a year of high school when I moved to New York. In New York the Ethical Society has a very fine private school, which Felix Adler started in the late 19th century as a free kindergarten for working men’s children, maybe into some primary grades. They were taking kids in as early as three years of age. Now you have to understand that the Ethical Society, through Felix Adler and his friends, started the Visiting Nurses. They started the Neighborhood Associations and Neighborhood Houses in New York (Hudson Guild, Madison House, etc. They started Legal Aid. Its motto was “Through Deed Not Creed.” [The words above the podium in the NY Society are “Where men seek the highest is holy ground.”] You lead a good life by what you do, not by what you believe.

Weinstein: So they started those organizations?
MEYER: They started many of those organizations.

Weinstein: In New York or generally?
MEYER: In New York and nationally. Hull House in Chicago, started by Jane Addams was an outgrowth of that. [In Chicago, Jane Addams attended Unitarian church services or the Ethical Culture Society, where she served as “interim lecturer” (then the title for a position equivalent to clergy in Ethical Culture) for a brief time.] The Ethical movement never really ”took off,” but there are many small Societies throughout the country, more now than there ever were, but it is still not a large organization.

Weinstein: Well, I have to tell you that when you mention the Ethical Society, there is a certain taint to it because it was considered ultra-liberal and a little bit too far left for “regular people” to espouse themselves to. I am not speaking for myself, but it has that kind of … people raise their eyebrows. Now I’m not supposed to be talking on this but you said earlier that it was Jewish without being religious.
MEYER: Well, look at what happened to Reform Judaism. In my view, the peak of liberal Reform Judaism came in the mid-‘20s and ‘30s. If you look at the Hagaddas and prayer books and so forth, you can see this. My own perception and the reason I have not had any lack of comfort in returning to an affiliation with Congregation Beth Israel (which my wife induced me to join when our kids were ready to go to religious school, about 1963, and we have been members ever since), is that I can operate at an Ethical Culturist within it. [Incidentally, don’t equate Ethical Culture with atheism. Adler considered one’s belief or non-belief in God to be important, but not relevant to membership in Ethical Culture.] Even though I have seen the trend today of even the Reform religion becoming more traditional, I still, when I see the yarmulkes and the prayer shawls on the congregants at the synagogue, it makes me squirm a little bit. So, I would say that the Ethical Society did have some influence on Judaism and I think you can be an Ethical Culturist within the context of Judaism. That may be one of the reasons Ethical Culture hasn’t grown that much [– Jews can find the essence of Ethical Culture in Judaism].

Weinstein: I am fascinated by what you have told me and it is something that is very appealing. I personally am going to do some research. I am very interested in what you said.
MEYER: I was a January grade school graduate and Fieldston only had September graduations. The wealthy people who were sponsoring the Free Workingman’s School which I described and paying for it as a charitable thing said, “This school is better than where my kids are going. I want that opportunity for them.” So the school ultimately developed into a private school, but it always tried to keep a significant number of scholarships so that it would be open to a broader range of students. It became a heavily Jewish school, the first six grades located right down on Central Park West between 63rd and 64th. The Ethical Building was on 64th and Central Park and the school was at 63rd and Central Park West. In the 1920s, the Ethical opened a high school [and a duplicate kindergarten through sixth grade] in a section of Riverdale [in the western Bronx] called Fieldston, and the entire complex was called The Fieldston School. There is also the Riverdale School up there, which is a private school. I think Konstahm went there and another private school, Horace Mann. There were some other, similar schools. Ethical School retained a duplicate grades one through six downtown.

Weinstein: So it is an academic curriculum.
MEYER: Right. If you were to compare it, it is Catlin Gable on steroids. It is very similar to Catlin but in some respects it has a longer history and you will see lots of people… for example David Sarasohn of the Oregonian is a Fieldston graduate, David Fidanque, the executive director of ACLU in Oregon is a Fieldston graduate. My brother Roger and I are both Fieldston graduates. Also during that period, the Sunday School had a high school program called the Sunday Evening Clubs. You met in your grade level classes for discussion of all kinds of fascinating contemporary and intellectual topics. My teacher for all four years was Joseph Blau, Joe Blau, who was a high school teacher at the time. When I came back from the war and started at Columbia, whom did I meet at the campus but Joe Blau. He was a young teacher of philosophy at Columbia. He became my Contemporary Civilization instructor. Later, Joe Blau went on to become head of the entire Religion Department at Columbia. I became president of the Sunday Evening Clubs in my senior year, But here, in high school, I had a teacher who subsequently ended up as the chair of the religion department at Columbia University. He was then just a young man, [but it gives you some idea of the quality of this high school-age youth program at the Ethical Society].

Weinstein: And a friend.
MEYER: And a friend. He tried to fix me up with the daughter of a rabbi one time.

Weinstein: How do you think that would have worked?
MEYER: Well, I wouldn’t be out in Portland and we wouldn’t be having this interview. [laughs]

Weinstein: Well I’m glad it didn’t work. I’m going to stop this for a moment.

[Recording pauses]
Weinstein: Go ahead and tell us about when you graduated. When you were through at Fieldston you said you went into the Army.
MEYER: Well, I went into the Army. I probably should go back. Relevant to the story I am going to tell, is the reason we moved to New York. Sometime in the mid-‘30s, Birdseye [the name of a man] had just developed the technology for quick-frozen foods. My dad conceived the idea of packaging poultry that would be kosher-made and quick-frozen and therefore much more efficiently kept in storage – put up during the season when the poultry was available, particularly turkeys in the fall, when the turkey crops matured and then put away until needed for use. There was a market for it, but mostly in New York City. So basically, at the same time Birdseye is developing non-Kosher products , my dad is producing kosher frozen poultry. Kosher poultry has typically been called “fresh-killed.” The reason for that is that it had to be slaughtered and brought to the consumer who had to “kosher” it (which meant soaking it and salting it for a prescribed length of time, theoretically to draw the blood out) within 72 hours after it was killed. But if you did this “Koshering” in the plant, then once it was kosher, it was kosher forever. So that was one way of adapting the laws of Kashrut to our modern techniques. Now, poultry didn’t have to get into the hands of the consumer within 72 hours after it was killed. If you go back historically, the reason so many live chickens had to be shipped to New York was to meet that live chicken market in New York City because that was where they “fresh-killed” [for the large Jewish market and delivered to the butcher shops the same day]. In the rest of the country, they could just package non-kosher poultry and put it in cold storage or chill it or whatever but kosher poultry couldn’t be done that way.

In any event, our plant was in St. Louis and my dad packaged the poultry and, in the beginning [1936-39] got people in New York to distribute it. But unfortunately, they did not have my father’s business sense. Instead of selling the merchandise and building up sales, they would put it in cold storage and hold it until the market went up a few cents a pound. And if the market went up then they would sell it. As a result they sometimes kept it in cold storage too long and it would get freezer burn and the caterers and the hospitals and Grosingers and the Catskills people who all used the kosher poultry didn’t like it. It wasn’t good because of the freezer burn. So they sort of ruined the reputation of frozen Kosher poultry. My dad felt, ultimately that the only way to make a real success of the business would be to go to New York and take over the distribution. So that is when we moved to New York. Originally one of his brothers was going to be handling the plant in St. Louis and my mother and father (my mother went to work with my dad and that is when she became a very fine office manager and sales manager). They went around and were selling to all the big hospitals and caterers and Grosingers and New Concord, even down in Florida. Then what happened was that my dad and uncle were not hitting it off that well and my dad decided that he had to go back and take over the production as well. That is pertinent in the sense that I, after the war, for all the summers that I was both in college and law school (except for the summer of 1948, which I took off to go to Europe), I worked in St. Louis with my dad. I became very familiar with the production. I was down in there picking the feathers off the birds and supervising the plant and so on and so forth for many summers.

Weinstein: So what did you think of that?
MEYER: I was adept at business but I preferred to go into law. Now the one interesting thing I did there, which I think you would get a kick out of: I mentioned my mother’s political and other influences on me. So when I came back from the Army in the late ‘40s, I was very politically motivated. I will describe later my activities but one thing I was interested in was the NAACP. There was a Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) [directed by Bayard Rustin]. In 1946 or 47 (our plant was downtown and the Missouri Athletic Club, which was a nice place to stay was just literally a block and a half from the plant, right downtown. Stix, Baer and Fuller was one of the two major department stores in St. Louis. Famous-Barr, the other major department store in St. Louis, was owned by May and Company which later took over Meier & Frank

In any event, under the auspices of the FOR, we conducted what I believe were the first lunch counter demonstrations in the country. l Every noon, I would get dressed back up in my suit and tie, taking off my overalls which would be full of blood and feathers from the killing of the chickens. I went over to Stix, Baer and Fuller at noon, and conducted lunch counter “sit-ins.” We would sit alternatively at the lunch counter, a Black person, then an empty stool, then a white person, an empty stool, etc. We whites would not accept service unless they would also serve the blacks. If you read the history of the civil rights movement, they talk of the first lunch counter protests as having taken place in 1952, on the east coast, in Virginia or Georgia. Here, we were doing it in St. Louis in 1946 and we broke the color barrier: we got Stix, Baer and Fuller to start serving the blacks [the same as whites].

Weinstein: At that time in St. Louis was it considered the South? Was there…
MEYER: Well St. Louis was kind of funny. It was a border state. For example it always had integrated transportation, the buses. But the schools were segregated, neighborhoods were essentially segregated. The old Victorian house that I grew up in in St. Louis was in a neighborhood that Meet me in St. Louis (where the boy next door lived on Kensington Avenue) was set. We lived on Raymond Avenue, which actually was more like what they pictured in the movie than Kensington Avenue. It was a nice brick three story Victorian house built about 1910 or 1920. After we moved to New York at the end of 1939 we sold it and it became a boarding house. Two or three years later the blacks moved in to the neighborhood and by the 1950s it was virtually all black. It became almost a ghetto area. St. Louis changed a great deal over the years.

Weinstein: There is just so much. We are supposed to be focusing more on the Jewish Oregon experience but this is all so interesting and all of it, really contributed to your activities later on.
MEYER: So I was drafted into the Army in June, 1939 right after graduating from Fieldston. I did infantry basic training in California at Camp Roberts. Then I was in a program called the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which sent kids to college. I went to Montana State College at Bozeman. I have always viewed the program (and I read one book that confirmed it) that this program was a way of keeping college kids, or brighter kids back from the front lines right away. I went to Montana State in the late summer or early fall of ’43. But by March 1944, the demands for foot soldiers was so great, they closed the ASTP program all over the country. The invasion, D-Day, was June 6, 1944. When in March they closed ASTP down I was sent to the 70th Division (Oregon Division). at Camp Adair, which was literally halfway between Corvallis and Albany. The 70th Division was actually created on June 1, 1943 at Camp Adair. Its which those people living in Portland during the war will remember, was an in the shape of an Ax head on which was a smaller ax-head in red, Mt. Hood in white, and a pine in green, all inside the shape of the larger ax-head. The 70th was called the “Trailblazer” Division, literally named after the Oregon Trail occurring a hundred years earlier – 1843 – the hundredth anniversary of the Oregon Trail. The pine tree was from the 91st Division which provided the original cadre. With that skeletal cadre, they filled the division with new recruits, (who ironically came in the Army after I did),went through a basic training and during which time they filled up all the non-commissioned slots: the corporals and sergeants, all those positions below the platoon sergeants. Then, everybody who was still a private got shipped out to the Pacific as a replacement infantry and we college kids filled all the then vacant private slots. So even though we were college kids and better educated, we were at the bottom of the pack. All in all, it was a pretty bright outfit.

Weinstein: But you were saved from combat?
MEYER: We were saved for combat for a while. We trained at Camp Adair from March 1944 until that summer and then the entire division was shipped (at this point I guess they decided that we were going to Europe) to Ft. Leonard in Missouri and from there we went overseas. We left Boston on December 6, 1944 [on what had been the largest American liner before the war, the S.S. America, renamed the West Point] and landed in Marseilles. Just before Christmas and during Christmas we were on very old World War I “40 at 8” railroad cars [Forty men or eight horses] We rode up to Alsace-Lorraine. On New Year’s we were literally right on the Rhine River at the corner where the border of France and Germany comes over and meets the Rhine River, then turns south on the Rhine River–it is like an elbow. We were up in that very corner of that elbow on the Rhine River through New Year’s Day. Then they pulled us back from the Rhine in early January. Remember, the first Bulge was up in Belgium at Bastogne, about a hundred miles north, [starting about mid December. Bastogne was where General McAuliffe, surrounded by Germans, said “Nuts” to the demand he surrender. That battle was supposed to be Hitler’s last gasp and attempt to defeat the Allies]. Well, it was his second-to-last gasp. When the Germans were stopped in Belgium, Hitler personally decided to bring their experienced SS Mountain troops out of Finland (because Finland and Russia had made peace and the Germans were asked to leave Finland and bring them down for a second bulge. [1944-5 was the coldest winter in Europe in 50 years, the temperatures in January hovering about 0º Fahrenheit!]. Hitler and Himmler’s personal devised plan was to attack with these SS Mountain troops down through the Vosges Mountains through what they called the Saverne Gap. Their plan was to break through 100 miles south of the Bulge (from which many troops has been sent north to fight in the Bulge, then turn north to the North Sea and encircle the whole allied army that was stalled in the (Belgium) Bulge at that time. It was called Operation Nordwind (North Wind). This last gasp of the bulge (I was just given a book called The Last Battle of the Bulge about Nordwind) really was the last part of the Battle of the Bulge.

In any event, I was wounded in the Vosges Mountains on January 12, 1945 in my leg and buttock. I was sufficiently seriously wounded that I didn’t return to my unit until after VE day when we were part of the occupation in Germany, having spent four months in hospitals and rehabilitation in France and England .

Weinstein: Were you scared to death during all of this?
MEYER: Well, it is surprising. I always was very optimistic and hopeful. I guess you don’t think about it. You know that it is possible that you could be killed. In fact, my assistant ammunition carrier (I was a machine gunner) was killed the same night I was [wounded] when we marched up the top of this snow-cap hill, carrying a 60 pound machine gun, a 60 pound pack. Suddenly we were being bombarded by 88 artillery shells, one of Germany’s most feared weapons.
Weinstein: That is scary. Did you pray.
MEYER: It is scary. No I did not. When they say, “There are no atheists in a foxhole” that is untrue. There are atheists and we don’t look to God to protect us. We hope that we are lucky. We hope that it doesn’t fall here; it falls somewhere else. Or that if it does fall here that I will go some other direction.

Weinstein: OK that is an interesting comment and I had to ask and I’m glad that you answered it.
I could listen to all of this. I think that these are fascinating stories. But I really want to concentrate on Oregon and your career. I have a sense that we are going to have to meet again.
MEYER: I will mention one other thing about Oregon. I came up to Portland a couple of times. My one contact in Portland was Gerel Blauer whose mother’s brother married a second cousin of mine. At that time, the connection was made and I did visit Ethel and Albert Green and their two kids, Alan and Gerel up in their Council Crest home, taking the old street car up there. They were my first acquaintances in Portland.

Weinstein: That is a perfect lead-in to talking about your life in Oregon
MEYER: The only thing that would be briefly important would be the political aspect at Columbia and Yale Law School, which influenced a lot of what I subsequently did in Portland.

Weinstein: OK and I do want to ask you a question. You identified as a Jew, didn’t you?
MEYER: Very definitely.

Weinstein: So I need to know. This is a question I ask a lot of people. What was your experience as a Jew among the general population, both academically and also in the military?
MEYER: Academically in St. Louis, the schools I attended were all heavily Jewish although I have very specific and vivid recollections of coming home from a Soldan high school football game with a Jewish friend of mine, wearing our high-school beanie and being hassled and attacked by some older boys for being Jewish.

Weinstein: So it wasn’t a yarmulke, it was a school beanie?
MEYER: Yes, everybody from Soldan [a heavily Jewish school, I might add] was wearing one. It wasn’t a yarmulke. I knew what antisemitism was. I didn’t experience a lot of it. When you talk about the Army, also I didn’t experience a lot of it there. I experienced some. I had an assistant gunner, of all people – a nice, WASP from Los Angeles, a very handsome young man, well educated, in ASTP. Clearly he was headed to college. Before we went overseas, he says to me, “You are going to be yellow when we get into combat.” Well, the real irony was that he allegedly got trench foot or frozen feet and went back from the front lines and we never saw him again. I know he never saw a day of combat.

Weinstein: So he was telling you that you would be yellow because you are a Jew.
MEYER: He was telling me that I would be yellow because I was a Jew. But the interesting thing about that episode was that everybody else in the platoon and squad was basically on my side. They didn’t like what he did and said. I felt very comfortable.
Weinstein: You had grown up in a Jewish environment at home and academically, probably more so academically because you said your dad was an atheist so it wasn’t a strong, observant household.
MEYER: No, it wasn’t observant, but I think it was very ethically charged.

Weinstein: It is so interesting that you followed Judaism (in your own way) throughout your life. You identify as a Jew.
MEYER: Well that I always did as did both of my parents (although there is a fascinating sub-story about my mother’s siblings – all of them).

I will say just two things about college and law school. I became very active in the American Veteran’s Committee (AVC), which was the liberal veteran’s alternative to the American Legion and the Veteran’s of Foreign War. We were the largest organization on the Columbia Campus, over 500 members (this was University-wide, graduate schools as well as the college (which only had about 2400 students in total). AVC was absolutely torn between a caucus that had the Communists and Fellow Travelers, and an anti-Communist, ADA type caucus. I was in a middle group. You may remember the name Michael Straight? He was the publisher of the New Republic when Henry Wallace was editor. His sister Beatrice Straight was an actress. Michael Straight, it turned out (ironically of all things) had been a Communist years earlier. Nobody knew that until he wrote a book many years later. He started a caucus in AVC called Build AVC, which was non-Communist but not anti-Communist, a very fine line to draw. We tried to focus on what we wanted to do affirmatively and what we can agree upon doing, not kill the organization by fighting over the Communists. This became most relevant later, at Yale Law School when I began my direct involvement in civil liberties. In 1947, ‘48 I was president of the Columbia Chapter, which was then controlled by the Build AVC caucus. I went to all three of the national AVC conventions. At the final national convention in late 1948, the organization essentially broke up. The anti-Communists caucus won the national leadership and adopted a resolution that Communists couldn’t be members. The Columbia Build AVC delegates came back to Columbia (we controlled the Columbia chapter). We had a huge treasury of about $4,000 to $5,000. With a Bronx chapter, Columbia AVC put on a huge dance at Manhattan Center with Jimmy Dorsey’s band. I think every single woman in New York came down to meet a Columbia Veteran [laughs]. Prior to that dance, if the chapter had a hundred dollars in the treasury, we considered ourselves comfortable, as that was enough to cover our mailings for meetings and so forth. I won’t go into the details, but after that convention, we decided that we would have a new election and let people decide if they want to sign up for another year. Maybe 50 people signed up instead of 500. Then, while still in control, we gave away most of this cash: $500 to the ACLU, $500 to NAACP, $500 to this organization, $500 to some scholarship fund etc. We weren’t going to turn over this huge amount of money to some skeleton group that had no future. [I ended my AVC career December 31, 1948. While the organization lingered on for several more years, it was never a significant force as it had been during those exciting three years of 1946, 1947 and 1948].

In September 1949 I started Yale Law School. You remember Paul Robeson? He tried to sing at Peekskill and there was a riot; people got hurt. I was a first year student at Yale Law School and the first thing that I am confronted with politically is a meeting – a debate between Professors Fred Rodell and Tom Emerson on whether an organization formed in New Haven to protest civil liberty violations should be ADA, anti-Communist, no Communists admitted organization or a more open group. Fred Rodell argued for the ADA-type organization and Tom Emerson, who in 1948 became the Progressive Party candidate for Governor of Connecticut [running with Henry Wallace], argued the other side. Based on my AVC experiences, I got up and spoke and I must have said something significant, as I ended up getting elected to the first board of this new “New Haven Civil Liberties Council,” which board consisted largely of Yale law school faculty members, including Dean Harry Shulman. And I was only a first year student! The relevance to AVC is obvious. If I hadn’t had this sophisticated experience at Columbia and developed reasonably sophisticated political instincts about these issues, I never would have been elected and gotten such an early start in civil liberties.

Weinstein: And the practical experience.
MEYER: Right. So I am on this board for all three years I am at Yale Law School. But the organization kind of stale-mated for the first two years, with the Communists wanting to do one thing and the anti-Communists are wanting to do something else. Again, I am still in the middle. Finally I decided that the organization needed to get off the dime So, I got on the phone and called Roger Baldwin, the founder and then still Executive Director of the National ACLU in New York. I didn’t know Roger Baldwin but I knew who he was because my mother had been a member of the ACLU in the 1930s when they had 10,000 members nation-wide (it is an organization now that has millions). I had joined as soon as I got out of the army in the spring of 1946. In any event, I called Roger and explained the situation. In 1917, Roger Baldwin, a conscientious object (who served time in jail) started a War Resisters’ organization. In 1920 it evolved into the American Civil Liberties Union. From 1920 till about 1960 he was the Executive Director. So, in 1951, I contacted Roger Baldwin and explained how this was an organization which was not going to let the Communists run it. During the 1940s the ACLU had a not-perfectly good record on the issue of the Communists: it adopted a resolution that said that Communists should not serve on its governing bodies. It even kicked off its board a woman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was an avowed Communist. Years later, that resolution was abrogated, but of course it was eliminated at a time when it no longer was needed because Communists were no longer a threat. I’ve always said that the Communists were never a threat to the country; they were only a threat to liberal organizations, which and I can tell you they wanted either to rule or ruin. It was a philosophy that many well-motivated people who joined the Communist party in the 1930s and 1940s unfortunately had.

Weinstein: They were misguided.
MEYER: They were and they recognized it and finally when Hungary came (in 1956) and when the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia came. By then the Communist Party of the USA finally disintegrated.

Weinstein: Now this is the ‘50s. Isn’t that when Senator McCarthy was on his horse?
MEYER: Of course. That was the beginning of that, although McCarthy was truly terrible. So anyway, I get a hold of Roger Baldwin and said, “This group should be affiliated with the ACLU. They should be a Connecticut affiliate.” And the idea was passed both by the national ACLU and by the New Haven Civil Liberties Council. So I can take certain parental pride in the creation of the Connecticut affiliate of ACLU, in 1951-2.

This was, of course, very relevant to what I did in Portland when I came up here to practice law, because I was one of the founders here in Portland in December 1955 of the Oregon affiliate of ACLU. Based on my Connecticut experiences, when I came to Portland, Roger Baldwin subsequently appointed Allan Hart, an prominent attorney, Morrie Goldschmidt, Professor at Reed College [and Neil’s uncle] to be the three persons to officially decided how best to organize the Oregon ACLU affiliate.

Weinstein: You know what? I’m going to stop right there because it is as if we are writing a book and this is definitely not a chapter break but a Part 1, Part 2 break. The next time we meet we are going to talk about Oregon, Portland. I want to talk about the people that you associated with, the people that influenced you. The start of your practice, the focus of your practice.
MEYER: Well let me give you some things that you may want to take as an outline. I would like you to… let me give you a list of things.

Weinstein: OK. I’m going to stop now.
MEYER: Yes, sure.

[END OF PART 1]

Session Two

Weinstein: This is session two of what may be more than two sessions. There is a lot of interesting stuff here. Paul, we ended the last interview talking about your coming to Portland but you told me you want to clear up a couple of ideas from the first interview. Would you go into that for us first?
MEYER: There were two items, one I had sort of left on the table and the other one I remembered. I thought it would be rather interesting in terms of my Jewish background and questions that you had. I had told you about my dad having a degree in chemical engineering from Columbia in 1913. I hadn’t really reported that, when he came back to St. Louis he became very active with the Columbia Alumni Association and was, for many years, the secretary of that association. He had many colleagues, including the principal of the high school I went to who had gone to Teacher’s College, and others. But during those years, in the ‘20s and ‘30s, I think this was sometime probably in the early ‘30s, this St. Louis group actually awarded four scholarships a year to send St. Louis kids to Columbia. That is quite a large number of scholarships to award. One year the edict comes down from Columbia – Do not select any Jewish young men. Well, of course we all know they had quotas during the periods up to World War II. So they had among the candidates (and one of the strongest ones) a young Jewish high school graduate who was really quite top of the list as far as the group was concerned. Dad’s way of handling it was to excuse himself from the meeting and let the rest of the group struggle it out. It is interesting to me about the difference in the times. I am not sure, had I been in that situation, given my background, that I would have bowed out. I would have stood up to the issue. But my father was a very gentle man. He obviously felt, psychologically, that if he were not present the group might more likely come to a good decision. The decision they came to was to send the Jewish boy back. And he not only turned out to be an outstanding student, he ended up as editor of the Spectator newspaper at Columbia, which is a daily newspaper of some substance. Then he went on and had an interesting and productive career at the New York Times. I thought that was an interesting vignette. It also reminded me of what has happened in my lifetime in terms of antisemitism. I experienced antisemitism in the 1920s and ‘30s. My younger brother Roger did even as late as the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. Catholic groups, as he walked down the street, would call him “Christ killer” and so forth. I do have a funny story. One time Roger came home crying because he had been called “Christ Killer” and my other brother sat him on his lap and said, “Well Roger. Your mother is a Christ killer. Your father is a Christ killer. I’m a Christ killer and Paul is a Christ killer. So, we all are Christ killers.”

Weinstein: “Welcome to the family.”
MEYER: Welcome to the family. [laughs] Obviously my adult life was largely lived after World War II. Recently I was interviewed by a project for World War II veterans and I came across a letter that I had written to my parents as I was nearing the end of my European service. The war was ended. I had been wounded. I had spent six months in hospitals and I wrote them and said how I really felt that I was able to hold my head up high. Here I had been wounded. My life had been the negative of all the stereotypes of the scared, yellow, frightened Jewish soldiers and I felt that I didn’t have to make excuses to anybody and that, when you looked at the statistics of how few people in World War II actually were in combat. We may have had 16 million in the service (or whatever the figure was) but when you get down to people who literally were carrying guns and shooting enemies – were in the Air Force or in the Navy, it was a very small percentage.

[This letter was written about Oct. 30, 1945, after both VE and VJ days, when I was in Europe waiting to come home:
Roger wrote that Zacky [a very close high school friend of mine who had been in the Navy V-12 program in college throughout the war] expected to get out in January. It is certainly a lucky break. I don’t know that I’m not glad [sic. pardon the double negative] that I did what I did rather than having gone to V-12. Considering the satisfaction I have in knowing that I actually participated in the roughest part of the war, I can face any situation without apologies. There are often statements made to the effect that Jews have always found the easy way out and there are the usual jokes about the quartermaster and medical corps being called the “Jewish” infantry. I know that it is the usual prejudice that causes such statements, but having served in the combat infantry, of which only about 1 million in the country have done, I can pretty well face most people and not be ashamed of what I have done. It is a definite advantage to be able to feel such self-confidence. Naturally there were a lot of risks involved, but having come through with as little effects as I had I was extremely lucky.]

Weinstein: How do you account for that?
MEYER: Well, simply because the Army is a massive institution and you need all the support. For every soldier on the front line there has to be ten people bringing the supplies up, doing all of the backup for keeping the fighting troops.

Weinstein: I wonder if that holds true today for the wars that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
MEYER: Well there are certain statistical differences. For instance, one statistical difference is that in World War II, out of every four casualties, one died. In Iraq, out of every ten casualties one dies. That is simply because medical advances and access to medicine is so fast and so much improved that those who don’t get killed immediately have a far better chance of survival. Of course this is being translated into why we are having so much more of the trauma and the spillover. Out of 90% surviving today rather than the 75% of casualties who survived in WWII, you have 15% of today’s casualties who survive to become real problems to society.

Weinstein: One comment I want to make about your dad’s experience in St. Louis with the Jewish scholarship recipient. That also tells me something about your dad’s character – that he was an optimistic, forward looking… you said he was a gentle man. But the fact that he would excuse himself from the deliberations, to me shows that he had a faith in humanity.
MEYER: I don’t think there is any question and I think that, in the context of those times, what he did was the right thing. There are a lot of things about my adjustment as a native-born American, my security as a native-born American, that he did not have, even as accomplished an immigrant as he was. He never felt entirely comfortable. When I picketed at Columbia against raises in tuition – something which is resonating to this day (it was then going up from $250 to $300 a semester [laughs]) – we veterans were picketing because it was putting a hardship on people. And my picture was on the second page of the New York Post and my dad was concerned – it is the beginning of the McCarthy Period. Here, I am going to be a lawyer and these things could be used against me. Files could be built up. And of course there was, and I should tell you when we get to Portland about that. I don’t have that on the agenda but I will remember.

Weinstein: You also referred to a dinner that your father was at and his dinner partner was…
MEYER: Yes, that was. Dad was awarded, because of his many years of service (it was probably in the late 1930s), the Columbia Distinguished Alumni Award.

Weinstein: In St. Louis?
MEYER: Well, my understanding, and I don’t know from whom I heard this recently. It could have been Roger because occasionally he will pick up a piece of some family lore that I have never heard of. Or maybe I was listening to a tape of my mother. Apparently he was supposed to go back to New York to get the award but there were some people there and he was embarrassed and shy about it so he ended up going down to the University of Missouri to receive the award. I have the medal today. I still do. He came home and we said, “How was it? Who was there?” and he told us about it, “I was sitting next to this very interesting artist chap and we talked all evening.” We said, “Who was it?” and he said, “I forget his name.” Well, by elicitation we brought out that it was Thomas Hart Benton, who of course, did paint at the University of Missouri or at the State Capital of Missouri. He painted one of his well-known series of murals, I think it was about Lewis and Clark.

Weinstein: That is a great story.
MEYER: Oh, I did want to tell you one other story that I thought was interesting. I mentioned that when I came back from the Army I joined two organizations, the NAACP and the ACLU. My mother had been a member of the ACLU back in the 1930s when they had 10,000 members nation-wide; so I was familiar with the organization. I was familiar with Roger Baldwin, the founder. He had actually been a social worker in St. Louis in his younger days. I joined those organizations. I went on to Columbia and joined the American Veterans’ Committee, which I think I have described in detail for you. I was president of the Columbia chapter, which was the largest in New York. And Franklin Williams was a handsome, Black, Obama-type character (I may have described him for you). He was working for the NAACP. He was chair of the New York area of AVC; so technically I was under him on the New York committee. When we got involved in the politics and I was involved with Michael Straight in this centrist caucus that I described for you. Franklin Williams was the vice-presidential nominee under Michael Straight for the national offices. He did not get elected. I continued my friendship with him. He was a young, handsome man who had grown up in Queens. He was president of his high school class, an integrated school. He totally lived in an integrated society. He shared with me over beers and our stories of the war what it was like to be a black man in the army in those days. The first thing was marching into Fort Dix between the line of white soldiers who were yelling out, “Nigger, Nigger, Nigger.” It is a story in and of itself. He and I were very close. He was married and had two children. When I went out to teach at Berkeley, he was the west coast regional director of NAACP. He lived in Palo Alto and I lived in Berkeley and we saw a lot of one another. I had two students, one of whom was Frank Mankiewicz, who ended up as Robert Kennedy’s press secretary. The other one was Dan Luevano, who ended up as assistant secretary of the Army under Kennedy. They were both married. I introduced them to Frank Williams and we became very close as a group. We saw quite a bit of them. Toward the end of my year at Berkeley, Frank invites me to an NAACP conference at a conference site called Asilomar in the San Francisco area. I went out there and I am the only white person at this conference. There were two things that impressed me at that point. One is that here is NAACP, an organization at the core of the issues that I was interested in (trying to improve race relations and civil liberties – those being the passions of my life). NAACP had been started by a lot of white liberals and some Blacks. It was heavily led by Jewish and other white liberals. Being the only white person at this conference, I suddenly saw a dynamic about how it was at a point where the Blacks had to take over the leadership of their struggle. If they didn’t take it on it was not something that could be done by nice, white liberals, condescendingly deciding to help their brethren. That was important and I have always been a strong financial supporter to the extent that I have been able. But there was one other interesting thing about the conference in Asilomar that was fascinating to me in the history of civil liberties. That was their [the Blacks] deference to lawyers. I was a lawyer so I was “Lawyer Meyer.” And Frank was a lawyer; he was “Lawyer Williams.” The term lawyer was an honorific. Now why was that? Well at that point in time (we are talking about 1953) every advance in civil liberties had been made in the courts. They got rid of the all-white primary in Smith v. Allright. They got rid of restrictive covenants [Shelley v. Kraemer]. There were a whole series of cases in which blacks were granted civil liberties because of a court edict and of course the ultimate came in 1954 with Brown v. the Board of Education. But that was a fascinating moment in time and an eye-opener for me in terms of the blacks leading the Black Movement. That played out when I got to Portland, in things I will describe in terms of ACLU and the NAACP.

Weinstein: That is a nice story and a good segue into your experience in Portland when you came here. You described briefly the last time how you met with the Green family and had dinner with them and that got you interested in settling in Portland.
MEYER: Well it was really… It wasn’t a big thing. As I mentioned, Ethel Green’s brother was married to a second cousin of mine, a very close second cousin – one who has been out to Portland many years later (you may very well have met Pearl Osborne). What ended up bringing me to Portland was that in the summer of 1953 – I had planned to focus on looking for a job in San Francisco, Seattle, or Portland. During the winter, while I was teaching at Boalt Hall, Yale got a solicitation that Anderson, Miller, Nash and Yerke was looking for an associate. It was sent out to me by somebody at Yale (I was in touch with the employment office) and I made an appointment to come up here during Washington’s Birthday, a long weekend. At that point I stayed with Don Willner, who was a high school classmate of mine from New York. He had gone on to Harvard and Harvard Law School and he had come out here in 1951. This was 1953. That is an interesting story because he –

Weinstein: [interrupting] I wonder if you can identify who Don Willner was briefly. Put a tag on him.
MEYER: Well, Don Willner was a lawyer and came to Portland and was very eager to go into politics. He finally got elected to the House of Representatives. He ran several times and I was involved in helping him. He didn’t get elected. At that time there were sixteen representatives running at-large [in Multnomah County]. We didn’t have districts. When they finally broke down to districts, he established a law office in North Portland and got elected from North Portland. So he was in the legislature. He moved up to the state Senate and then he, at one point, ran (I think against Bob Duncan) [in the Democratic primary] for US Senator.

Weinstein: He was a Jewish man.
MEYER: He was Jewish although interesting (his family was much more identified with the Jewish community in New York than my family was), he married a Quaker woman, Pat I was at their wedding. So I stayed with them. Don was then officing with Justin Reinhardt. That was my introduction to Justin. Justin got on the phone and had me go over to see Gus Solomon. Now, everybody knows that Gus Solomon played a role, once he got on the court. He got on the court before 1951, maybe in 1949.

Monroe Sweetland and Howard Morgan were the two leaders of the Democratic Party who were responsible for getting Truman to appoint Gus to the federal bench. There were no Democrats in the elected federal offices from Oregon in the 1940s. Monroe Sweetland, who was the head of the Democratic National Committee then and Howard Morgan, as State Chairman of the Democratic Party, had come in after the war and gradually built up the liberal Democratic Party. In Oregon in the 1940s, everybody was a Republican – liberals and conservatives. It was the only game in town. The liberals had their candidates and the conservatives had theirs. In the late ‘40s Wayne Morse was the candidate the liberals got into the Senate and Guy Cordon was the conservative Senator – the one against whom Dick Neuberger ran in 1954.

Gus was very interested in trying to break the antisemitism in the law firms in town. Of course, being that he was a Federal Judge who was Jewish, it politically behooved the law firms not to discriminate against them [Jews, as had been a regular practice to that time]. It might not do their clients that much good when they would appear. I am sure that Gus Solomon had something to do with calling King Miller, although I already had an introduction and appointment to come up to interview them and I had a very successful interview with them. But I’m sure it didn’t hurt that Gus Solomon probably spoke to them. I was with King, Miller for about five to six years. I enjoyed it very much. One of the reasons that I had a very enjoyable time was that I was able to work with Ralph King. Ralph King was an icon in the legal community. He had been a Yale Law School graduate himself, studied under William Howard Taft, who had been both President and a Supreme Chief Court Justice. I handled some very interesting and sophisticated cases. One case, for example, which would be of interest, was that we kept Southern Pacific from extending its Brooklyn yards. They were between Eastmoreland and Westmoreland. There are now two main lines that run through there, where it carries the main tracks. They wanted to add eight lines for the storage of trains. If you can imagine the residents of Eastmoreland and Westmoreland during the night hearing the clanking and the un-clanking and pushing of trains into a storage yard…. We were able to keep that out and I was very lucky because I not only wrote the trial brief, but Ralph King actually let me argue part of the case orally.

Weinstein: That must have been very exciting at the start of your career.
MEYER: It was exciting for a young lawyer, sure. That was an interesting case and there were some other interesting cases.

Weinstein: Is that firm were you met Ossie Georges?
MEYER: Yes. I met Ossie, and Ossie, interestingly enough, had had the same job I had had at Berkeley, a few years before.

I didn’t come right up and start work. I had taken the New York bar in the summer of 1952, got admitted to that and came out to California after Christmas vacation. I took the California bar in April, took the Oregon bar in July. I got admitted to all three bars in one year and did it legally, without fudging any residence requirements. Now many residency requirements, ironically, have been stricken down as improper but, nevertheless, they were in existence in those days. But because of my father’s death two years earlier and my having had such a horrible summer (I had had no vacation for two years) I wanted some time off. I told them I didn’t want to start work until September.

Weinstein: And they waited for you.
MEYER: They waited for me. My mother and Roger and I had a wonderful motor trip down to Mexico in the summer of 1953. That was the only vacation I had really had probably in about five years.

Weinstein: And very intense years.
MEYER: Very intense years. So I am up in Portland and I found a wonderful little house on Canyon Lane. It was a little house, sort of a second house. It was just marvelous, five minutes from downtown and out in the country, which is one of the reasons I actually ended up in Portland. All veterans wanted to live in a little house with a white picket fence and have a little plot of land to be able to go out in the sun. I never lived in a totally urban setting. I always lived in [single home ]residential areas all my life. In San Francisco, to do that you had to commute, from Palo Alto or Marin County or Berkeley. And that was a long commute. I knew I wanted to practice law in the center, where the action was going on. Here in Portland you could do that and be fifteen or twenty minutes away at max. I don’t know what could have happened in Seattle (I presume not as well as in Portland because the downtown in a little bit more isolated).

Weinstein: Well there were no freeways in the ‘50s.
MEYER: Yes, I guess I could have replicated it in Seattle. But at this point, the only people I knew in either city were the Greens. So to the extent that it had any influence it was that. But I would say that this seemed to be a good job. It seemed to be a good community. I knew the differences. For example, Seattle is a much more frontier community. And so is the state of Washington. When you think about the towns in Washington, they are all named after Indians, Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and Snoquamish, whatever. Oregon is more the settled, New England: we have Portland, Eugene, Salem…

Weinstein: Amity.
MEYER: We have always been, in the years when Washington was a Democratic state and Oregon was a Republican state, we nevertheless had certain civil liberties that they never had.

Weinstein: That is a wonderful, fascinating observation about the names of the cities. I grew up in Seattle so I am very familiar with those names.
MEYER: In any event, they had the Cantwell Committee, and when Gus Hall came out to speak he didn’t speak on any campus in Washington. He spoke on seven out of the eight campuses in Oregon, including public campuses.

Weinstein: Just identify Gus Hall for the record.
MEYER: Gus Hall was the secretary of the Communist Party. And after the war he was one of the few remaining acknowledged [Communists] during the period when it was anathema to be a Communist, when McCarthy was at his height.

Weinstein: So you made your decision on not just that basis.
MEYER: I would say that getting a job and feeling that I wasn’t going to better this opportunity some other place. I did, of course, meet Ossie and Evie [Georges]. They were gracious enough to store all my worldly possessions when I went to Mexico. So I came back and started practice. I was with them [King, Miller, Anderson, Nash & Yerke] about six years. I have some stories to tell about leaving and why I left.

Weinstein: Tell me about how you met Alice. Do you mind?
MEYER: No. I met Alice. I dated a friend of hers. The number of Jewish girls in Portland during the early 1950s who were not married was not large [laughs]. Alice was not included among them. She was married. Most of them who weren’t married did not come back to Portland after college. There was nothing here for a woman. They went to San Francisco or Washington, into the “Women’s professions.” They went into publishing or magazines or whatever. So I did meet Alice because this young woman (who is not living in Portland any longer but was a friend of Alice’s from high school in the Irvington area) took me as her date to a party that Alice and Sid Stark [her then husband] were giving when Fanny and David Turtledove had just built a new home on 6700 SE Stark.

Weinstein: And those were Alice’s parents.
MEYER: Yes. They were away and she had access to their house and had a wonderful spaghetti and salad dinner. I remember very vividly meeting Vic and Toinette Menashe at that time. Alice has a story of sitting behind me when I dated Toinette’s cousin at some earlier point. I must have dated a lot of Jewish girls [laughs]. She sat behind me at Holladay Bowl (which is a story I will tell) and she didn’t think terribly kindly of me because, having been on the board of Holladay Bowl, and having been very much involved in producing the shows there, I was talking quite extensively with my date about Holladay Bowl.

Weinstein: What is Holladay Bowl?
MEYER: Holladay Bowl was an outdoor, light opera company, which I will describe a little bit more logically later when we talk about the Symphonic Choir. It was something I got involved in right away. I have it listed here [in the outline] under “musical activities.”

I started to talk about the politics of Oregon. I mentioned Monroe Sweetland and Howard Morgan because Gus Solomon became judge because of their influence. They built up the Democratic Party. What the Democratic Party had been, during the ‘30s and ‘40s, were the “courthouse gangs”. The Multnomah County Commissioners were about as prestigious a Democrat as you could find and they were not that prestigious. Monroe and Howard wanted to bring a dynamic and liberal Democratic Party to Oregon and they did. The budding manifestation of it was in 1954. I had come here in September of 53. In 1954 was the election for US Senator. We have Edith Green running against Tom McCall. Homer Angel had for years been the Republican representative in Congress from Multnomah County! Here Multnomah County is Democratic over and through and through yet it is electing a Republican as its Representative in Congress. Homer Angel was a somewhat liberal Republican but still a Republican. So Tom McCall (I think he had been a Channel 8 reporter; I’m not certain if he was before but he probably was) ran against Edith Green. Dick Neuberger ran against Senator Cordon, the conservative Senator who was the [conservative] counterpart to [the liberal] Wayne Morse. I worked very hard. I joined the Young Democrats and was very involved in there. I ultimately became vice-president and president in about 1956. Now this is 1954 and I am part of Dick Neuberger’s “kitchen cabinet.” We are sitting up on Clifton Avenue, right up here about two doors in [from Vista] is the old Neuberger house. I was very close to Dick. Yet you think back. Politics is really a young person’s game. You always wonder at all these staffs – all these politicians with these twentyish people [on their staffs]. Well, having been a veteran when I came out, I was already 27 or 28. I wasn’t that young. But people like Mike Katz and myself and Jonathan Newman would sit up on the front porch and strategize with Dick Neuberger about how to conduct his campaign. Comes the election in November ad Edith Green gets elected. She beats Tom McCall, who was devastated by it. Dick Neuberger wins but we don’t know that he wins until about eleven or twelve the day after the election. Why? We used to say that the little old ladies in “tennie runners” who counted the paper ballots in North Portland were very laboriously going through each one and taking forever to count. He ended up winning by two thousand votes, which was one vote per precinct, and became Senator. I was very close to both Maureen and Dick. I continued to be active in the Young Democrats. In 1956-57, the Young Democrats ran the Adlai Stevenson campaign. In 1956 Adlai Stevenson did, in Oregon, completely reverse the results from 1952. In the rest of the country he had run closer to Eisenhower than he did in Oregon. In the rest of the country in 1956 Eisenhower increased his margin. In Oregon it decreased. I was very involved. In addition to being the president of the Young Democrats I was also alternate chair of the Washington County Democratic Central Committee. That was a fascinating experience. We had potluck dinners at granges and all places throughout Washington County where you had the “salt-of-the-earth.” People who were not highly educated; they were just good old “New Deal” Democrats who never forgot what Roosevelt did for the country and remained loyal to the Democratic Party. I always remember that my chair of that Democratic Central Committee was Chet Lowry, a wonderful old gentleman. When Stevenson came out to speak [in Washington County] he says, “Governor Stevenson, it is silly for me to introduce you to the people of Washington County. They all know who you are. Let me introduce you to the people of Washington County. Here is Elaine Weinstein and she does X, Y, and Z. And here is Bobby Jones and he does this.” It was the greatest introduction you ever heard – very lovely.

In 1956 Wayne Morse was up for reelection. Now you have to understand what happened. In 1954, when Neuberger broke through, the Democratic Party suddenly came of age. All of the work that Monroe Sweetland and Howard Morgan had been doing for six or eight years came to fruition. Wayne Morse obviously was very close to Neuberger, although they had their differences in later years. One had been a student of the other and they had been very close at the University of Oregon when Morse was Dean of the law school and Neuberger was editor of the paper down there. He was looking at the fact that all of the liberals in the Republican Party had changed their registration to Democrat. It is very much what you are seeing in Pennsylvania today, when Arlen Specter has decided to switch to the Democratic Party. Now Morse didn’t do it immediately. In 1955, the Senate was evenly divided and Morse became an Independent and helped switched the organization of the Senate to the Democratic Party, for which, of course, the Republicans were absolutely wild. He then, in 1956, decided that the only way that he could be reelected was to run as a Democrat, which he did. Eisenhower and the Republicans pulled out all stops and got the [former] governor, Douglas McKay, who was then Secretary of the Interior, to run against him. I was also very involved in Wayne Morse’s campaign. I was one of the few people who were on a committee that literally would go out at speak to groups when he couldn’t make it – that he trusted enough to be on his speakers’ committee. I went around the state in various places addressing groups.

Weinstein: Thinking of your connection with ACLU and your interest in politics and history, you were passionate about, it seems to me, doing the right thing. You were smart enough to be able to cover the bases for a man like Wayne Morse.
MEYER: Well, it was very flattering. What happened in ’56 was more select. Bob Holmes was elected as the first governor. We won in the fourth congressional district and we won in the second, Al Ullman. The first district was still held by a Republican. It was Wendell Wyatt’s predecessor, who was [A. Walter Norblad].

Weinstein: That time really changed politics in Oregon
MEYER: It did. I don’t remember if the legislature became Democratic at that time or not. It may have, gradually. But I will tell you, and I will wait until I talk about ACLU, because I served five terms as chair of the legislative committee of ACLU. I was down a lot at the legislature testifying. I can tell you of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the culture in Oregon was so much different than it has been today. We could go down to testify before a committee with a Republican chair. We would be treated with courtesy and respect. We would be listened to and if we had good ideas they would be accepted. It was not one of these closed shops, partisan…

Weinstein: So what happened, Paul?
MEYER: I will tell you that I think it has been primarily the shift in the Republican Party. I don’t think that the Democrats have ever demonstrated that kind of discourtesy. When the Democrats took over the legislature from Karen Minnis two or three years ago, I think there was a sea-change in the way people have been treated down there, just the average citizen.

I have one story. When I was on the Teachers’ Standards and Practices Commission (Alice and I were both on that commission; for many years we were the only ones who were both a wife and a husband serving on that commission, although we did not serve together – there are only two public positions on the 17 person commission. Alice was there with Julie Smith, Dunny Smith’s wife. And I was down in the late ‘90s to 2000s). That is another story we can get to later. I went over on behalf of the TSPC to testify on a bill on which they were having a three-hour hearing. It was a bill that had a lot of political contention. But the TSPC had some very specific, technical problems with it that it needed to point out to the committee. The committee was chaired a lawyer who knew me personally. The executive director of TSPC went over and signed up on the list of speakers early. My name was the first on the list. I was representing a state agency, a volunteer of a state agency that has a very significant matter to say about a pending bill. This guy is a lawyer from Bend who knows me personally, who chairs the committee. He is a Republican. It is a highly political bill, charged with all kinds of right wing mishegas. He is calling on the janitor. He is calling on everybody from Central Oregon who made it over there who is going to say what is good about his bill. I don’t remember the details. This is a three-hour thing and I am never getting called. And I was first on the list. But I am from Portland. And he knows who I am. He goes out for a toilet break about one hour before it is to stop and I go on out and approach him. I say, “You know, I really have something significant to say.” “Oh, don’t worry, Paul. You are going to get called.” He never did. The next morning I called him up. I told him what the problem was. “Oh my God, my God! I didn’t know that.” I said, “Well you never called me. The committee never got informed about it.” That to me is an example of how this partisanship has taken over and it is a lot of this right wing, fundamentalist, “people who are different are no-damn-good.” Alice just finished reading this book about The Family [by Jeff Sharlet]. You will have to look into it.

Weinstein: The Family?
MEYER: Well it is the “C Street” story, if you have heard about it these Christian people [who believe they owe their election and power to God, not to the people who elected them].

Weinstein: Oh yes.
MEYER: It goes back. And if you read the whole book, Mark Hatfield was part of it. This is pretty serious stuff. We have a theocratic underlying of our whole society, of government.

Weinstein: Well I can believe that.
MEYER: So I have gone a lot into politics, which I didn’t really have written down.

Weinstein: But it is very interesting. And locally, you were involved in the City Club. Go into that involvement.
MEYER: Well, I joined the City Club when I first got to town [in 1953; so I have been a member now for 56 years]. Got involved specifically. An interest in Portland city government formed. We had, as you know, a “Commission” form [of government]. In the early ‘30s, the City Club recommended that Portland adopt a “City Manager/Council” form. Nothing really happened to that. About 1956 or 58, somebody put on the ballot a measure to adopt a city manager for Portland. It was put on the ballot by initiative and it was defeated. At this point the City Club decided to appoint a “blue ribbon committee.” It was led by Francis Staten, who had been the president of KOIN Channel 6 in Portland, CBS, and was also a past-president of the City Club. He was a very prestigious guy in town. He chaired the committee. I was one of the youngsters on it – Bob Huntington and I. Bob was a lawyer at Stoll, Reeves. Bob and I were the young kids on the block. It was a very thorough report which came out and said we really need a Strong Mayor form of government. It kept an “At-large Council” rather than a district-elected council, which probably was dictated a little bit by a certain amount of snobbery; the better educated people lived on the West side and certain near-Eastern neighborhoods and therefore you didn’t want to limit your pool of potential council people – an issue which I am not sure is quite correct today but it seemed appropriate at the time. The City Club used to make reports at that time and never followed through. This time we got the City Club to agree, not that we would do anything actively, but that we would translate the City Club report into a ballot measure form. Literally, we would write the ballot measure that would change the form of government- all the amendments to the charter that would be required. I chaired that committee. It was a pretty heady task because I was, at this point, quite young. That report to the City Club came out in 1961. Our report came out in 1963 or 64. At that point the City Club stopped. Now the City Club might have proceeded differently today but that is another story.

In those days, I helped put together a coalition of the Young Democrats, the Young Republicans, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the League of Women Voters. We, with that coalition, got the petitions out, got the signatures, and it went on the ballot in 1966. It was badly defeated. We didn’t have the money back up for it. All of city hall and all of the political people connected with City Hall were opposed to it. They liked the status quo; they knew how to deal with it. It [was and] is a totally inefficient system. It is just the worst system. We do not have a [real] legislature because the council meets as a legislature but there are a bunch of executives that meet as to how to divide the pie. The coordination is totally lacking among bureaus. Over the years there have been some attempts to get a little bit more coordination. There have been attempts, for example, to have a Chief Administrative Officer but they don’t call him or her that. That person does not have any line authority over the bureaus that are assigned to the other commissioners. I have been able in subsequent City Club committees to trace down that the Water Bureau snafu was a direct result of not having a Strong Mayor. They had computer people in the mayor’s office who were more sophisticated than those in the Water Bureau. The people in the Water Bureau wanted to go change to this system which the people in the Mayor’s office thought was terrible – it was not proper nor proven- it was a big mistake. But they had no control because unfortunately the Commissioner of the Water Bureau (who happened to be one of the best Commissioners we have ever had, Mike Lindberg) backed his bureau. That is typically what you get. If you have staff and they recommend something, you back them! What would you do if you don’t have confidence in them? I guess you would get rid of them. So the millions and millions of dollars lost are directly [traceable to this separation of departments under no specific executive] it resonates later.

I also became Vice Chair of the Research Committee on the Board [of the City Club]. I was really, I suppose, on my way up the chairs. Then the issue over women came up. I was adamant at this point (I was quite involved in the ACLU – in fact [my brother] Roger even had a law suit challenging the tax exemption of the [tax exempt] Education Fund of the City Club). I think Herb Goodman was president of the club when this first came up. I estimate it in the mid to late ‘60s or early ‘70s. It comes up in a meeting and is debated as a constitutional amendment

Weinstein: The issue of admitting women?
MEYER: Right. Let me say that the constitution of the City Club said that it was “open to all men of blah, blah, blah.” So they debated whether to change that to “all persons.” I got up and argued on traditional discrimination grounds that this was over 50% of our population that we are excluding, the economic consequences, clubs are where people go and meet for business and do this and that, and the discriminatory effect is pretty awful. Most people were not talking in those terms. They were talking about, “well it’s more pleasant just to be with men. We have to get away.” And of all things, I am followed to the podium by probably the only black man in the City Club. He speaks about how we have to keep it all male.

Weinstein: That’s ironic.
MEYER: It passed [by a majority]. Alice’s father was a member of the City Club. He didn’t vote. He would have voted to keep it all male but out of respect to me he wasn’t going to vote against me so he didn’t vote. But it didn’t get a two-thirds majority; [so it failed as a constitutional amendment]. So I came to the board after the vote and I said, “You know, you are arrogating to yourself an improper authority. The United States Constitution says of the president that “he shall do this, and he shall do that” and nobody suggests that that is used in the specific but that it is generic. You don’t need to amend the constitution for a woman to be elected presidents. It says, “City Club is open to all men of good will.” When you deny admission and require the club to make a constitutional amendment you have interpreted the constitution as specific and not generic. Who gave you that authority? The body is the one that interprets the constitution. Here is what I am proposing: I will propose Lenore Althaus (whose daughter Helen was a lawyer in town), who was a pioneer woman. I will propose several women for membership. It will come before the board and the board will say, “We are uncertain.” These people are perfectly legitimate people but we don’t know about the constitution.“ We will present it to the board and you can say to accept or reject and rule that the constitution either permits them to be accepted because it is generic or doesn’t permit it because it is specific. If you rule the latter, I or somebody else will appeal the ruling of the Chair – it takes a majority vote [to sustain or overrule the chair.” [Instead of taking this advice] they went through four or five votes failing to get the change [in the Constitution]. The City Club membership dropped. I never resigned during this period although many people I know did. I just didn’t see any use in it. But I also really, until many years later, was not terribly happy with the City Club.

Weinstein: So it took a long time for the change to take effect.
MEYER: It almost ran it into the ground. Now it has come back and is pretty strong today. But why it wasted ten years of its existence I don’t know. And I blame people. I laid it out for them. Why they didn’t accept the idea, I don’t know. I don’t know why they didn’t leave it to a majority vote. It always had a majority. The City Club always had a majority that wanted to admit women. It would have been a simple and a legitimate way. That came out of my experiences in the ACLU, in which, of course, I became very experienced in parliamentary procedures.

Weinstein: I do want to go back. This has nothing to do with City Club and government. I would like to talk more about experiences you had with a man like Gus Solomon. What influences he may have had on you. How you may regard his conduct as a judge and an advocate for Jews. He was such a prominent, powerful figure. Would you talk about him?
MEYER: Gus and I had a funny, love-hate relationship that is a little hard to describe on the whole. I know he felt highly of me. Harry Stein mentions me in his book about Gus a few times. One of the big cases… In the sixties, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission was established. I should say, let me go back because I have the Longshoremen case here involved. But you have asked a different question and I am not going to avoid it.

I just want to tell you that I have described some of my political activities in the early ‘50s. Mind you, I am working for King, Miller and founding the ACLU in 1955, which we will come to. I am involved in the Democratic Party and King, Miller is not very hospitable to liberal Democrats in terms of the political philosophy of the time. I want to say, because I have said it before and it is true, the Stoll, Reeves firm, which at that time was Hart, Rockwood, Davies, and then transitioned to Davies, Stoll, and then George Reeves, who had been part of a different firm and come up from California, was with Ernie Bonyhadi and they merged into Hart, Rockwood, Davies and became Stoll, Reeves. Tom Stoll, who just died in his 90s was the Stoll. Anyway, that law firm, which was slightly larger than King Miller, was always better about letting its young lawyers be active [in politics, ACLU and other “controversial areas].

I have a funny story that occurred during the Wayne Morse campaign. The Republicans were livid about Morse, particularly because he was an apostate and left the party. They campaigned and they called out all the guns. They had Senator Mundt and three senators, who were among the most reactionary, come out to Oregon to campaign against Morse. They are quoted as saying, “Oregon doesn’t need a Prima Dona in the senate.” So wrote a short letter to the editor of the Oregonian, which was printed. It said,
“I see that Senators X, Y, and Z, don’t think that Oregon should have a Prima Dona in the senate. I suppose they would prefer if we just had a member of the chorus line.” [laughter]

That got printed and, believe it or not, I got flack back on that from the firm. Clients had complained. So I realized that, in the long run, this large firm was not really where I was going to be able to develop my own sense of [political and civic] independence. I’m sure I have convinced you that I had enough passion about things that I was not going to let economic interests of other people dictate what I wanted to do.

Weinstein: That parallels what you see happening today with the new networks being owned by special interest groups and being dictated to by those people and by advertising time.
MEYER: So at this point, it is about 1959 or 1960, I decided this was not where I wanted to stay and I started looking around. Conceivably, Gus Solomon had a role to play because at this point Norm Kobin was a single practitioner. Norman was a very interesting guy. He had gone to Northwestern College of Law. He had no college education before going to law school. He was born in 1914 and came out of Law School in the late ‘30s. He had not been in the service. He just did what a poor, Jewish lawyer did at the end of the Depression. He did some collection work and few other things. But Norm was an extremely sophisticated, intelligent man. He was bright. He had been born in New York. I think his family came out here when he was five. He was the oldest of three; he had two younger sisters. He went to high school here in Portland. He was officing with some other lawyers. He was officing with Leo Levenson, whom you may know. He officed with Sam Jacobson. Leo Levenson was the leading appellate lawyer in Oregon for many years. Other lawyers would bring their appeals to Leo. But they just officed together. I remember I was kind of eager. I had another job offer which I did not want to take. I was here about five or six years; I was a fairly experienced lawyer at this point. And this lawyer had several younger lawyers. So obviously, if I came in I was going to come in above lawyers who were there. I am just chatting with him, saying, “I would hope, if I came, that there would be some ways to mediate and mollify any concerns on the part of these younger people, who had been here one or two or maybe three years, that I am going to be coming in at a higher level.” “Oh, there’ll be no problem. Hang on just a minute.” He picks up the phone, “Send all these people in!” He sits them all down in the room and says, “Now Paul will be coming over here and he is an experienced lawyer and he is concerned that you might be offended or something.” [laughs]

Weinstein: He doesn’t sound very sophisticated.
MEYER: I thought, if this is the kind of person he is, I don’t want to work for him. But in the meantime, I learned through Gus or somebody that I should see Norm Kobin, but he was out of town trying a case. I was having a hell of a time getting together with him. We finally did. And about 1960 we got together. It was a very loose connection for a few months. We were a funny couple. I was a highly educated, coming from a large law firm. He is the salt-of-the-earth, down-to-earth, working his way up from no college to law school. We really were very compatible. From 1960 to 1985 the firm grew from just the two of us to about 15 lawyers. Then it broke up for reasons that I don’t think are necessary to describe. Younger people get a little bit itchy.

Weinstein: So the two names you mentioned were Jewish. During all of this, what was your relationship with Judaism? I see on the outline that you are going to talk about Beth Israel.
MEYER: My involvement gets back to Alice. I described how she had met me. Of course at this time she was married. Alice lost her husband in 1955. She had married in 1952.

Weinstein: And what was his name?
MEYER: Sid Sherman. Helen Cohen is her sister-in-law. Minnie was the mother, Nathan was his father. Anyway, she married Sid knowing that he had a terminal illness. He did die two years later, probably sooner than they may have expected. Before she married, she spent about six months with Harry [Turtledove, her brother] in London when he was living there. Harry then married Pat, who had been the private secretary to Ambassador Louis Douglas in the United Kingdom. Pat, ironically had lived in an apartment house right across from the USO hotel that I had frequented during the war when I would come up to London. Then, when Sid died in 1955, Alice went to France, to Malmaison, which is outside of Paris, where Harry and Pat were living and where [their daughter] Anne Michele Turtledove Jaffee was born. She spent another six months in Paris with Harry. In the earlier visit, she and Harry had gone all over Europe together. Apparently he had an old Plymouth automobile and they took it over from England to the continent [on an airplane, no less].

Where did we meet? On June 26, 1957 (Alice is now back in Portland), Evie and Ossie Georges had us over to play bridge. On November 2nd we were engaged. On March 16, 1958 we were married. I have to tell you a funny story. In 1955 or ‘56 I was involved in ACLU. We had invited Norman Thomas to speak at our annual banquet. I introduced him. Fanny and David Turtledove are in the audience. He turns to her and says, “Now there is a nice, young man for Alice.” [laughter] So you see, I was picked out. I didn’t have any choice.

Weinstein: And it was ever thus.
MEYER: I was just going to suggest sort of finishing up the City Club.

Weinstein: Do that, and then we’ll have a break. And then we’ll schedule a third session.
MEYER: Good, I just wanted to finish this and get it out of the way. I had just talked about the “women” issue and how that cooled my ardor and why I really never did a lot more with the City Club at that time. Another part of that was that my ACLU involvement started to increase dramatically. I was one of the founders [in Oregon] in 1955, I’m on the local board and very active until the late 1970s. In 1971 I get elected to the National Board from Oregon and for three or four years I am the representative to the National Board from Oregon. The National Board has about 80 people, roughly one from each affiliate. There are about 50 affiliates and then about 30 people are elected at-large. The constituency for voting for the at-large representatives is made up of the boards of all of the affiliates plus the national board. These 30 people are elected from all over the country. They were largely prestigious people, editors of publishing companies, people who they wanted to enrich the board’s experience. Over the years it also became a place where those affiliate board representatives who were making particularly significant contributions and felt that the local rep needs to change; they need rotation. But we can’t afford to lose this person. I was, at the end of three years [as the Oregon representative], elected to the Executive Committee of the National. There are 80 people on the board, ten people on the Executive Committee. It [the Executive Committee] is what micromanages the organization. I became important to the organization, interestingly (I think I was pretty important on policy issues, and I can describe some of those later). in terms of fiscal management and responsibility. I had been involved in a business. I had my own law firm which grew up to maybe 30 employees and had profit-sharing plans and this and that, but ACLU nationally, financially had a lot of difficulties. I was very concerned about financial reporting and how the board was able to manage with efficient evidence. I really dropped local activities during that period of time, until about 1995 when I got off the National Board. I would like to talk about that board. I was then kicked upstairs to the National Advisory Committee, which consists of “letterhead” people. I’m not that much of a letterhead person, but it consisted of people who have given a long-time service to the union or are important in the ACLU. It is a nice, prestigious, honorary position. Kenneth Clark was chair of it. Ramsey Clark has been chair of that committee. The first chair, incidentally, of the ACLU National Advisory Committee was E.B. McNaughton, of Portland, Oregon. When he was simultaneously editor of the Oregonian, the president of the First National Bank, the president of Reed College, what is lesser known about him was that he was the National Chair of the ACLU National Advisory Committee. I have a wonderful story about him that I will tell you later.

Weinstein: Isn’t there an award?
MEYER: The E.B. McNaughton Award is named after him. He was on our initial advisory committee. I am, very fortunately, one of the recipients of that award.

Weinstein: Rightfully so. Like you say, they were in a financial mess and you brought the experience and the education to help them get…
MEYER: Well, I will describe a little bit about the financial reporting because I brought that type of discipline to the Friends of Chamber Music and I did it to Portland Baroque Orchestra more recently, which is a later story.

Weinstein: It is a pattern, though, with creative, liberal thinking groups. They are not always good at fiscal management because they have so many other ideas. So you really, really were an asset to all of those groups because you had the background.
MEYER: Well I hope so.
I’m just going to finish up with the City Club:
I later got on a few ballot measure committees. The City Club always reviews ballot measures. Some of them were significant. The most significant undertaking recently was undertaking membership on the Portland Development Committee that studied the Portland Development Committee. That report came out about six or seven years ago and made quite a hit. It was lauded by the newspaper editorials at the Oregonian. It had an impact. Not all the impact was necessarily good, but much of it was good. The report is considered a major report. I ended up, with another, younger man who had come out here to teach at Reed College; we each wrote about half of the report. Now this is about a hundred-page report; it is a pretty thorough report. The interesting thing is our [variously authored] materials are somewhat scattered throughout and integrated, but we both write so similarly that you really can’t tell when one began and the other picked up.

Weinstein: What is his name?
MEYER: David Mandell. So this was quite an interesting and effective thing and has led to more things. The next thing I did was with Bob Ball, when he came out with his proposed charter amendment for “Strong Mayor” [form of government for Portland], I was absolutely astonished. Where did this guy come from, out of nowhere? Here I had been involved in 1966 with this. When I met Bob he had never heard of us. He had never heard of the previous ballot measure. He hadn’t even looked at it. So much time had passed. Here he came up with a fairly decent proposal. And I swallowed all the pride of, “Well, he didn’t ask me!” [laughs] Having felt such an absolute part of that whole effort, and I said, “This is good and we should support it.” I was on a committee of nine people at the City Club that reported on that ballot measure. We didn’t have a very effective chairperson and we had had a lot of testimony. You hear from a lot of people and we were finally getting together where we were going to begin our internal discussions. Now the way you would normally do that is you would say, “Let’s go around the room and let everyone express your thinking and what you have gotten out of this and where you might be headed.” He didn’t do that at all. He said, “Well, we have heard all the evidence. I think we should take a straw vote.” It was so wrong. It is like a jury taking a vote first thing when they go in, “Do we convict or not convict,” before you have had any discussion of what the evidence was or what it might mean or anything about it. Suddenly the vote is six to three against the measure, I being one of the dissenters. It was really downhill from there.
[Phone rings – recording is paused]

We went into writing a report and we knew there would be a majority and a minority position. Rather than get into arguments, the chair appointed somebody to write up the general part of it. City Club reports are supposed to have a discussion of the facts and then the conclusion and recommendations. It gets a little stilted. Now, when you write the reports about what the facts are, it depends upon what facts you select. Depending upon what your conclusion is going to be. The young woman assigned to writing the report comes up with some stuff and it is just wrong and it is not inclusive. On our small committee, I am writing furiously materials that ought to be in the report. I said, “This is what we heard testimony about and it was undisputed.” Gradually, as the report started to get put together, it became instead of nine to three, it became eight to four and then seven to five and six to six. Finally, we were the majority. It ended up about six to three the other way [in favor of the Ball measure]. Now when they got to the City Club vote itself, it was very badly handled. This is something that never happens ordinarily, but it did. Somebody had leaked it to the opposition, which was very highly organized so that when it came before the floor of the Club for a vote, it [the meeting] was totally packed. All of the “antis” had been solicited to come out and everybody from Bud Clark and the rest of the old City Hall gang. There was not anyone that has ever been affiliated with the local city government who thinks it [the Commission Form of government] isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Unfortunately many of these people, their job as City Councilman or Commissioner is the best job they will ever have. Why? Because if they didn’t politically get it they would never have a job with that responsibility. They do not have the qualifications for it. They maybe have qualifications to sit on a council and adopt policy in a democratic fashion. But to run organizations and adopt policy, they are not equipped [to do both] and if you look at the whole history of people running city government in Portland you will find very few people who are qualified to run organizations and businesses as large as those. And it is a pity. It has been a wasteful government and it will continue to be wasteful and we don’t know the difference.

Weinstein: So you were trying to effect a change and it

[END OF PART 2]

Session Three

Weinstein: OK Paul, there were some things you wanted to clear up relating to the first two interviews. I am going to ask you to do that.
MEYER: It occurred to me that I had neglected in talking about politics, to mention the role of the Young Democrats in 1956. Before that election, we registered 10,000 new voters in North Portland. That is a lot of people in any age, but in those days it was a lot. That was the year that Wayne Morse ran for the first time as a Democrat and was elected as a Democrat. That election was also marked by an interesting episode of the Republican Party in its effort to challenge voters who might be Democrats. They got the Portland banks (believe it or not, the banks shouldn’t have participated in contributing to political campaigns) to send out scores of letters, first class, to registered Democratic voters with the envelope instruction the post office, “Do not forward but return to sender if not deliverable at this address.” The banks turned over the returned envelopes to Republican poll watchers to challenge everybody who showed up for whom they had one of these returned envelopes. Most of these challenges proved to be totally frivolous and false. Prior to the election date, we established a Democratic Lawyers’ Committee to be at a central office downtown and respond to calls anytime somebody was being challenged and was being hassled and had no good reason not to vote. We would send a lawyer out to that precinct. There wasn’t a single one we didn’t resolve in favor of the voter. That Lawyers Committee of Young Democrats contained a lot of young Jewish lawyers. Jack Beatty (a non Jew who later became a Circuit Judge} was the chair. Young Jewish lawyers including Sid Lezak, Phil Levin, Ernie Bonyhadi, Jonathan Newman, Ossie Georges and I were included. There were also non-Jews like John Buttler (a former partner of Jonathan and also later a Court of Appeals Judge), Verne Newcomb and Bordon Beck. We were the core of the liberal lawyers’ community.

An interesting comment that I should describe: After World War II, there were a fairly large number of people from the east and the mid-west, particularly those who had gone to Ivy League schools, who came out and settled in Portland. That would include Don Willner, who went to Harvard Law School, Ernie Bonyhadi and Ossie Georges (although Ernie and Ossie were Portlanders, they had gone to Columbia Law School after Reed College). Verne Newcomb went to Berkeley for undergraduate and then Columbia Law School. John Buttler went to Dartmouth and Columbia Law School. Jack Beatty went to Columbia Law School, although I think he was a Portland native as well. Jonathan Newman and I went to Yale Law School, as did Phil Levin. Phil Levin was a brilliant young lawyer. He came to Portland about 1951 and was elected to the Board of Governors of the Oregon State Bar Association and was about to be in his final (third) year on the Board. In that final year, the four third year incumbents are the pool from whom the President for the forthcoming year is selected. Eugene Oppenheimer may have been the only previous Jewish President of the bar. Someone asked Phil, “Well, what are your chances, as a Jew, of being elected the President of the State Bar Association?” He said, “Well, there are four of us. That means I have a twenty-five percent chance.” [laughs] That was Phil Levin humor. Unfortunately, Phil had a cancer condition and he literally died at a retreat for the Bar before the election, so we do not know whether he might have been the President of the State Bar.

Borden Beck, who grew up in Prineville and went to Harvard and Harvard Law School. While growing up he was a good friend of the McCall family and, indeed, Tom McCall’s father was responsible for sending Borden back to Harvard. Through Borden we met Dorothy Lawson McCall and Alice and I stayed overnight at the ranch under the Rim Rock and heard Dorothy orally tell us the story of her subsequently published book, “Ranch Under the Rim rock.”

This group of young liberal lawyers was very involved in enriching the community in terms of civil liberties and civil rights. The legal committee that we established for the Democratic Party not only did the job I just described, but also literally drafted proposed registration laws that opened the process of registering for voting in a way that it had never been before. The Democratic legislature in 1958 adopted most of the proposed reforms. The statute has probably been amended many times since then, but it was a very great liberalization in opening the polls to making it easier for people to register, or if you moved during the 30 days before an election, you could go to the polling place in your new place of residence and automatically reregister vote right then and there.

Weinstein: So they took a lot of the restrictions away.
MEYER: Right. Then the other thing that I was involved in, particularly with Mike Katz, was the Young Democrats of Portland (and also of Oregon), an organization which in the mid 1950s, with Mike and then me as Presidents, grew of over 500 members. Mike Katz was part of this group of liberal young people (he came our from Chicago – having gone to the University of Wisconsin and trained as an economist). He worked for Bonneville for many years and he was a Public Utility Commissioner with Charlie Davis for many years. In 1960, Mike and I were very interested in trying to get Adlai Stevenson nominated for President for a third time. That was the year, of course, that Hubert Humphrey and John Kennedy were fighting it out in the primaries. Adlai Stevenson, of course, had been the candidate in ’52 and ’56. He had decided not to run in ’60. But we thought he should. Oregon has a statute where the Secretary of State puts on the preferential primary ballot in May, the names of those people who are considered “credible” candidates. He would have put Stevenson’s name on the ballot, because clearly he was a credible candidate. But if that “credible” candidate filed and affidavit that under no circumstances would he run, that would be the end of it. We who supported him did not want him to have to file that affidavit; thereby keeping his options open. The way around this dilemma was to collect a thousand signatures. If you had a thousand signatures his name was going to go on the ballot regardless. So that would obviate his need to file an affidavit. There is a funny story around this. At that time Dick Neuberger was still living (this had to be early 1960, as Dick died suddenly that March). On behalf of Adlai, Dick pleaded with Mike and me not to file the petition (we already had far more than the 1000 needed signatures), and Adlai was going to file the affidavit. So he scheduled a meeting for Mike and me with Adlai Stevenson at the Multnomah Hotel. Alice went with Mike and me. She never forgot the fact that, after the great man went to bathroom, he came out and forgot to zip his zipper up! [laughter]). In any event, Adlai persuaded us he really did not want to run again; so we didn’t file our affidavit and he filed his. I probably still have our petitions sitting in my basement.

Weinstein: Tell us why Neuberger didn’t want your affidavit filed.
MEYER: Well he was respecting Stevenson’s great desire not to run. Dick Neuberger died right before his filing for reelection so our meeting with Adlai must have been early in the year of 1960. Neuberger died just before the March filing for reelection. That is when Maurine stepped in and filed in his stead. We had a lot of dealings with Maurine during that spring as well. And she was elected that fall. While the Oregon law permitted the Governor to appoint a replacement, it required that he appoint someone of the same party as the deceased Senator. The governor appointed (retired Supreme Court Justice Paul Lusk – a conservative Democrat – for this temporary appointment because he didn’t want to appoint a someone who would be a candidate for the full six year position and get a leg up as an incumbent. [Similar to the appointment of Paul Kirk in September 2009 to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant seat until the special elected in January 2010.]

To finish up with that, I did participate with many other campaigns right on up to Jeff Merkley’s election in 2008. I was one of the first supporters of Merkley. Actually Alice and I had an early fundraiser for Jeff in 2007. In my fundraising pitch, I stressed that the real goal for the election of Jeff to replace Gordon Smith was to get a 60 vote, “filibuster-proof” Senate. That was long before that idea became the mantra for the 2008 election of Democrats nationwide.

I also want to mention about the City Club and my prior participation in studies and ballot measures relating to the form of Portland’s city government. When Mayor Potter formed his Charter Review Commission, I asked to be appointed to it based upon my previous City Club charter amendment activities and the follow-up ballot initiative measure in the 1960s. He appointed me and I think I was instrumental in helping to guide the commission to its conclusion that we needed a Strong Mayor, with Administrative Officer/Council form of government if Portland were really to improve. I helped the city attorney draft the proposed “Strong Mayor/Council charter amendment. The measure lost at the ballot box because the Portland business establishment is so keen on preserving the system (as are all the current commissions who don’t won’t to lose their “managerial” positions) that we may never achieve an efficient city government. I am not going to go into details. You can read the reports of the City Club and anything else to see why the current system is a disaster, but that is neither here nor there.

Weinstein: You touched briefly on it last time.
MEYER: I did. The other last thing that I would mention is my involvement in creating a Columbia Alumni Association in Portland. When I came to Portland in 1953, there wasn’t any active alumni group although there was a fairly significant group of alumni. We established, under Pierre Kolisch’s chairmanship, an active local association, responsible for recruiting applicants from Oregon high schools and interviewing those who applied. One of my greatest coups was recruiting Myer Stampfer for Columbia. I interviewed him and I raved about him to the admission office. They told me that nobody could be that good. It turned out that he was. [laughs] So in this activity, I reflected my father’s deep involvement in recruiting for Columbia during the 1920s and 1930s.

Weinstein: And just for the record, Myer is the son of Rabbi and Goldie Stampfer.
MEYER: Yes he is. And that was very rewarding.

We did have a huge “Columbia in Oregon” gathering up at Timberline Lodge one April, where Columbia’s President, Provost, the Deans of the College, the School of Journalism Medical School, and many other big shots along with local alumni. The whole weekend was so socked in we never once saw the peak of Mount Hood even once. That was really a shame.

We also would have prominent Columbia scholars come to Portland, many of whom we arranged to speak at City Club. One of the memorable ones was my wonderful Humanities Professor, Moses Hades – a towering Greek and Latin scholar – spoke to the City Club on “The Greek Way.” You could have heard a pin drop during his talk – and none of the old men (women had not yet been admitted) fell asleep, which was frequent at many meetings.

After many years, Pierre and the rest of us by then “older” alumni decided it was time to pass the torch. We had a big party at our house for the then Dean of the College and the younger generation took over.

Weinstein: Didn’t one of your daughters go there?
MEYER: Yes, my youngest daughter (Andrea) was in the first class to admit women at Columbia. She was there for two years and, for reasons that would be too long for this interview, finished her A.B. at Oberlin. Also, my older daughter Sarah got her Masters in Arts Administration at Columbia. My older brother Alan got both his Masters and PhD in Sociology at Columbia; so my father started quite a family tradition!

Weinstein: I would like to go on to your involvement with Jewish activities, not that the two sectors are mutually exclusive. Tell us about your involvement at Beth Israel, issues that you were especially involved with there. Just start talking.
MEYER: I have given you an extensive background of my religious upbringing and my Jewish identification throughout. Obviously when I married Alice, we always joked about it being an intermarriage [laughs]. When our kids grew, when David got to be five and Alice felt that the kids should have religious education, I didn’t have any objection to our joining Temple and we did. That would have been 1963. I then served five years on the Temple board, 1967 – 1972 Phil Reiter was the first President under whom I served. Phil was succeeded by Henry Blauer and Tommy Georges. I was privy to sitting through the Tommy and May’s Romance.

Weinstein: Oh! You saw them making goo-goo eyes at each other.
MEYER: Right. That was a very nice part.

Weinstein: That is Tom and May (Director, Berenson) Georges.
MEYER: After a year or so, but I was elected Secretary of the Board. Joy Alkalay was the then employee of Temple who physically took the minutes of meetings. She submitted them to me for editing and review. At that time, all the women were referred to by their married names, i.e. “Mrs. Jerome Holzman” instead of

Weinstein: Lena
MEYER: Remember, for many years I being immersed in the ACLU at the time and in issues of Women’s Liberation. I told the Board “these women are not simply appendages of their husbands; they are on the board in their own right.” So you should be listed as “Elaine Weinstein;” not “Mrs. Sandy Weinstein.” I simply made that change in the minutes; so all women were listed and referred to by their own, not their husbands’ names. Also, when sending in contributions to various Temple funds we insisted on having our names listed as “Alice and Paul Meyer,” not the customary “Mrs. and Mr. Paul R. Meyer.” That took a little while to encourage others to change, but I don’t think today that anybody uses “Mr. and Mrs.” They use both their names. It took a while. Ironically, Lean Holzman, who in later years became an extremely liberated woman when she became an artist, sat at the meeting when I first announced my policy for the minutes, saying, “I prefer to be called ‘Mrs. Jerome Holzman.’ I am so proud of my deceased husband.” I said, “Well, I’m sorry. From now on, you are going to be Lena Holzman in the minutes, regardless of what you want.

Weinstein: It was a symbol of a generation.
MEYER: No question. But it needed a push. All changes need pushes. As my father used to say, “We are creatures of habit.”

Other issues in which I think my more ecumenical viewpoint came into play were on issues of intermarriage and on the acceptance of the non-Jewish spouse into the congregation. When I was on the board, if a Jewish member died and had a non-Jewish spouse, that spouse could not remain a member of Temple. I believe, I am not absolutely sure, but I believe we were able to change that policy and permit the surviving spouse to remain a member of the congregation, whether they had been converted or not.

Weinstein: That is so archaic.
MEYER: Well yes. But we are talking about the ‘60s and early ‘70s. It wasn’t very long ago. I thought many of those views were archaic. I remember we had board retreats and I would argue vociferously about the importance of bringing non-Jewish spouses into the fold. At that time, as you recall, there was (and there still is some today) a strong opinion that “you have got to disown the Jew if he or she marries outside the faith. You have to push them away.” I claimed that was counterproductive because with children of mixed couples, even if the non-Jewish spouse doesn’t convert, the likelihood of these children becoming Jewish is at least reasonable. Look at our statistics. The statistics of intermarriage were getting higher and higher. I was saying, we can’t afford not to. I had a very specific example of my own brother, Roger, who although he has always identified as a Jew personally, he has had two wives, neither of whom was Jewish. His first wife was very willing, indeed eager for their children to be brought up in Temple. I remember Adolph Landau recruited my brother to join Temple and he did. And Mary Meyer, Roger’s first wife (who is no longer living) actually became very active in Temple, but she never became Jewish. She had a wonderful tradition of Quakerism and Unitarianism in her background and her grandfather and been a personal physician to Teddy Roosevelt. She came from a very prestigious family. She was delighted to belong to Congregation Beth Israel and participate. I remember that she never felt really welcomed there, which was too bad. After a couple of years Roger and she dropped their membership and their children, as a result, really never developed any strong Jewish identity.

Weinstein: But it didn’t work for them. There is an example of them literally being driven away.
MEYER: Yes, we are talking now about the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I was elected to the ACLU national board in 1971. I said I didn’t want to run for the third two-year term because I was going to really be very involved with ACLU. At that time Tommy Georges was about to become president. He said, Paul, “I need you to stay.” This was the time Rabbi Rose was under indictment for failing to file tax returns. During that period I was the “civil libertarian” lawyer on the board, defending it against those who wanted Manny immediately to be fired, insisting to those members that there needed to be an opportunity for due process. So at this point, Tom literally pleaded with me and I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll run for the term (because it was a two-year term) but I am going to resign at the end of one year, because hopefully by that time the trial will be resolved.” And it was. Of course, Chief Judge Gus Solomon recused himself from the matter. Incidentally, Sid Lezak, who was, of course, US Attorney, having been appointed by Kennedy in 1960. Sid, although he was not affiliated, was Jewish and very obviously identified as a Jew. He, too, recused himself from any participation in that prosecution. Obviously, Gus Solomon, as a member of the congregation, had to recuse himself. So Judge Belloni took over. Judge Belloni was very close to Gus Solomon and I really think he wanted to make sure that nothing untoward might happen to Gus’ Rabbi. At some point the indictment got thrown out by Judge Belloni. It was primarily because it was considered to be politically motivated. Manny had been very outspoken against the Viet Nam war. When they indicted him there were statements in the file about how they wanted to make an example of “prestigious” people in the community so that people would be scared. So, long-story-short, I did stay the year. The matter was resolved and I was no longer involved on the board when any remaining issues after the trial might have been resolved. [Remember, it was not to prejudice Rose’s right to a trial that the board had deferred any action relating to his conduct. I had no participation in that.

Another thing, in terms of this whole business about how you treat intermarriages and welcome them into the community: my strong positions predated when Alexander Schindler became the head of the Reform Movement toward the late ‘70s, about five or six years later. At that time, he and the other leaders of Reform Judaism, adopted the outreach policies which I think are pretty much effective today. I more or less was a precursor of that kind of that liberalized attitude, both in Portland and nationally.

Weinstein: It’s ironic because it is a good thing this outreach took place, because the statistics have only risen as far as intermarriage since that time; so without the outreach, who knows how much worse the statistics would have been.
MEYER: My daughter Sarah, who is now the CEO of a reasonably large-sized Jewish charitable foundation in New York City, has been delving into “Jewish Renewal.” She is privy to and has met all of the leading people in the country that are studying this issue in great detail, in a much more sophisticated way than I ever did or had occasion or ability to.

Weinstein: That would be a fascinating topic for a symposium or some kind of gathering for people to discuss – the whole issue of “Jewish Renewal.” It is so prominent in our community here in Portland as evidenced by the . . .

Weinstein: I’ll just finish my thought about the whole issue of Jewish Renewal and that that would really be a wonderful subject on which to have an event here in Portland.
MEYER: It would indeed. If anybody does it, let me know and I’ll see what Sarah can do to help.

There is another event I might mention. The Reform Movement (Union of Reform Congregations) holds an annual National convention. One year I was a delegate. Beth Israel was one of the “honorable” congregations in the Union that all its financial support was in form of dues upon which National was financed by a 10% “tax.” Beth Israel did not have special High Holiday appeals. It did not charge separate admissions for its Religious School (I don’t know what they do today). The dues structure was ten percent of dues. But many really well-to-do congregations from throughout the country that were paying minuscule dues to the Union nationally because a great deal of their money came from special High Holiday appeals and other “fundraising events,” keeping their dues structure, on which “taxes” were based, very low. One of the items at this convention was to adopt new rules which would apply a much more equitable way of assessing national dues.

Based on my public speaking and debating experience, I was designated to make the stem-winder speech on the floor of the convention which sealed the deal. The reforms were passed and from then on there was much more equality in the taxation of the congregations to support the national office. The story had a very interesting afterlife. About six or seven years later Skokie occurred and the ACLU defended the right of the Nazis to march there. There was a huge article in the Reform Judaism magazine blasting ACLU for its position in Skokie. I wrote a thoughtful, responsive piece and sent it to the editor, who had been at the national convention in which I had played a significant role in helping national equalize its dues structure. He wrote back and said he didn’t really think that they could publish it. I called or wrote him back and said, “Remember, I am the guy who saved your organization’s soul by getting that policy through that made fair assessments possible. I think you owe me one.” He wrote back and said, “Yes I do.” He printed the article in the Reform Magazine.

Weinstein: How satisfying for you.
MEYER: It was very satisfying. [laughs] Kind of interesting, “calling in my chits.”

Weinstein: I wonder, Paul, would you touch on the Skokie issue?
MEYER: Yes, sure. I will. I was on the ACLU national board and I will describe that very difficult time. It was clear ACLU policy that you defended the peoples’ right to express beliefs, even bad beliefs. Now, having said that, I think it should be understood that what free speech in this country might mean is still predicated upon the history and nature of our country. We have a country in which free speech has worked. The crazies (and we are experiencing them now in the health care debate disrupting town hall meetings – it is a very frightening thing, but it does not work in the long-run. It never has worked. I always said, if the Nazis came to a point of coming close to taking power I would get out my machine gun and … free speech to hell. Fortunately, however, America has been able to afford the luxury of mostly uninhibited free speech. This is not about what Europe should do on their laws prohibiting antisemitic speech, making it illegal. They have a history and a culture that might justify different laws. We have been able to afford a very luxurious reading of the First Amendment.

I will relate one item that took place at the ACLU national board, where people come up to me to say that I had them in tears by my defense of free speech. Several years after the position that ACLU took on Skokie, the Klu Klux Klan wanted to meet on a public school ground after hours, not relating to school, for some kind of demonstration in a Alabama. The Alabama affiliate did not want to defend KKK’s right to meet on public property and National felt it was so important to step in and override the Alabama affiliate – something that was not usually done. There was a debate. At this point, ACLU was actively implementing affirmative action, bringing more people of color into leadership positions and some of the Alabama board members were black. I argued that despite the pain that the Black community in this nation has gone through with the years of suffering, lynchings of Blacks were measured in the tens of thousands; that didn’t come near to comparing to the six million Jews destroyed in the Holocaust. I said that, if we can tolerate the despicable Nazis speaking in front of the Jews who lost six million, we ought to be able to let the Klu Klux Klan speak in the face of similar pain on the part of the Black community. And we did. We successfully defended its right to speak at the public school (after hours, of course).

Now, getting back to Skokie. The ACLU had a little rough patch in the ‘70s. Sometimes it has been attributed to a loss of membership because of Jewish members dropping off after Skokie. That is not the full story. It wasn’t so much Jews dropping membership because of Skokie as the fact that during the ‘70s fundraising had been on an on-going “up” level, just automatically, and it was too easy. Every year they raised more money than the year before. Accordingly, ACLU neglected its fundraising and their membership recruitment techniques, as a result of which we failed to recruit sufficient new membership to offset the normal loss of members. That contributed, as much if not more than Skokie, to the loss of membership at that time.

The other immediate repercussion, and it does relate to Beth Israel, was that on the High Holidays that year, I am sitting in the services. Now here I’ve been secretary of the congregation, I was the lawyer who defended Rabbi Rose during the time of his trial and I am one of the only ten people in the entire nation sitting on the Executive Committee of the National Board of the ACLU (and they are not all Jews). I am sure I am the only one of those ten sitting at a High Holiday service. And Rabbi Rose gives a blistering sermon against the ACLU! He blamed ACLU not only for Skokie, but also for all of the lack of discipline and everything that is wrong in our society. My kids were absolutely stunned. I mean, of all times and places to give that sermon, particularly in the circumstances of having someone so prominent in ACLU as a member of Temple Beth Israel. There were a number of younger ACLU lawyers, including El Rosenthal and Jeff Mutnick who were also highly offended by the sermon. I do believe that this sermon had a great deal to do with the foundation of Havurah Shalom, as many of these younger ACLU members – many lawyers – left Beth Israel as a result of this really nasty sermon.

Weinstein: I know that the Rosenthals were Temple members and did leave. I had thought it was over another issue but that is possible.
MEYER: It could have been a combination of issues. It might have been over other issues of which I know nothing. I do know that they were as offended by that sermon as I was, and as my kids were.

Weinstein: I know I was there but I don’t remember specifically. I think I too would have been offended.
MEYER: Well it was a mess there, but we move on. I still know Manny very well and we share a lot of views in common.

Weinstein: What about other involvements. I know from our outline that you mention Cedar Sinai but I also would like to get to the Peace Now movement. I do not think people understand that movement. It is not talked about that often and not given a lot of coverage.
MEYER: Well, sometime in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, Rabbi Stampfer came back from Israel, from one of his many visits (he has a son that lives there). Ironically, he had a debate with Manny Rose, in an auditorium, on whether there should be a two-state solution in Israel. Josh had decided that it was necessary that there be a two-state solution. Now this is nearly 18 years after the ’72 war and nothing is settled between the Israel and the Palestinians. Israel continues to control all of the land.

At that time there was a group (in Portland and probably throughout the U.S.) called “Jews for Greater Israel,” or something like that. They were very passionate people. I remember one woman who showed up everywhere. “Greater Israel meant the Jews exercising sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. over: all the land that once belonged to historic Israel needed to be recovered and restored to modern Israel. That, of course, begs the question, “What do you do with the Palestinians?” And if you have just one country and the Palestinians by birthrate or otherwise become the majority, how do you retain a democracy and a Jewish state? You don’t. Either you retain the democracy and or you make Arabs second-class citizens. So what Rabbi Stampfer saw at the time was that the Palestinians needed their own state. And there ought to be a way of developing that. “Peace Now” became the organization through which the two-state solution was proposed. So Rabbi, together with a few of us, formed the Portland branch of “Peace Now” and I became its first President. I don’t know how long the organization continued but I was President for a few years. We were treated very disrespectfully in the conventional Jewish community. I remember that we wanted to hold a community-wide public debate, sponsored by the Community Relations Committee, and we wanted to speak directly with the board of the Jewish Federation to explain what we thought the critical issues were for our community and for Israel. Well, we were given a brief opportunity to speak to the Community Relations Committee (mostly younger people) but we weren’t permitted speak to the Board itself. When we did appear before the CRC, Rabbi Rose showed up at this meeting and called us “naïve.” [laughs] It is interesting because I am suspect that today Manny Rose probably strongly favors the two-state solution. I have no reason to doubt that he has come to that position.

I was always amazed when Rabin became Prime Minister and embraced the peace process. There was a very interesting dialog in the Jewish community before Rabin became Prime Minister of Israel and Likud was in charge. It was reflected by the position taken by Norman Podhoretz, my college classmate, with whom I sat and studied humanities under Moses Hadas at Columbia. He became the publisher and editor of Commentary. His position was that one not living in Israel can’t criticize the government of Israel. The Israelis have to decide what they want and it is not up to Americans to tell Israel what they should do. Well my position was, “I am an American. Nobody is going to tell me what I should tell my government nor what I should say when I think some other government is bad. Besides, what I tell my government its policy should be indicates whether we are approving or disapproving the policy of Israel.” As today I don’t approve the continuing settlements.

Back then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Likud was in power, that (the Podhoretz position) was the position of the local Federation: “You just don’t wash your dirty linen in public.” I was very amused when Rabin came to power and there was a lot of talk and progress toward a two-state solution. Then Norman Podhoretz wrote an editorial, “I can no longer keep quiet. I have got to criticize the government in Israel because this is outrageous!” So as long as the government of Israel was consistent with his conservative philosophy, an American couldn’t and shouldn’t criticize Israel; that was outside the pale. However, if the Israeli government did what you didn’t want [i.e. pursue peace and a two-state solution] then, of course, one (even an American) had an obligation to criticize the Israeli government.

Weinstein: The abuse of power and position to influence people is scary.
MEYER: I remember being at a bar mitzvah at the Mittleman Center when the news came in of Rabin’s assassination. There were some of the leaders of the Jewish community there who were hit pretty hard by it. I think there has been a different dimension to the debate. I don’t recall Peace Now, as being active recently in Portland, but it remains active in Israel

Weinstein: I think that the Portland people that were affiliated and associated with the movement were considered very, very far left – extremists. They were regarded that way. It turned a lot of more conservative movers and shakers off. You just don’t see much mentioned about Peace Now.
MEYER: Yes, Federation back then, when it started in Portland, tried to paint it as extreme. It is still in existence in Israel and perhaps in parts of the U.S. I suppose that you could say it’s position has become the official policy of the United States government. It even was under Bush, except I think Bush secretly didn’t care to pursue it; that is the only difference. I gather George Mitchell made some comments, or someone did recently, being pretty rough about Netanyahu. But that is all pending and on-going.

Weinstein: Let’s talk about the local Jewish agencies and organizations. Begin with Cedar Sinai.
MEYER: I got involved in Cedar Sinai, although I have always been interested in it [My mother, Adele R. Meyer died there in 1990 and my mother-in-law Fanny Turtledove spend her last 17 years there, dying in 1995], because my good friend Vic Menashe asked me to come on the board. It was an interesting experience. I served six years on the board and could have served another three, but declined. I was a Vice-president one year; if you have been an officer you can stay on for a third two-year term. I did a number of things while I was on the board that I think made some significant impact. I worked with Harvey Klevit on the “Quality of Care” committee and I think we made some notable improvements. We could never make enough improvements in food but we made some real progress there, as well.

Weinstein: No.
MEYER: But we did. We set up some procedures that enabled there to be more feedback from the residents and better arrangements for monitoring food quality, which was good.

The other thing I did, I am concerned about form as well as substance and sometimes form helps substance. I rewrote all the by-laws – a complete redraft of the by-laws. Interesting enough, usually, as a lawyer, when I prepared corporate by-laws, for “profit” as well as non-profits corporations, I made them simple and as broad and general as possible to leave as much flexibility in the day to day operations to the board as is permissible. But what I was observing with Cedar Sinai was that there were a lot of committees and other groups that didn’t function very effectively because there were no reasonably established procedures. For example, committee meetings would be held with no agenda, much less one circulated in advance so committee members could come prepared. There were no formal procedures. Appropriate minutes were not always kept. There were lots of things about normal procedure that were overlooked. So we wrote these By-laws (I think they are still in effect) which was a handbook for trustees – a procedure book: If you have a committee it must have a Vice-chair. Because what happened if the chair was out of town, frequently the committee meeting would be cancelled. In my view, that is very disruptive of process. To have a committee that cannot meet because the chair is absent is not efficient. The chair is a presider, not a dictator. There are a lot of points about democratic procedures that I tried to write into the By-laws like a handbook. I hope it has worked. I think it may have had some effect.

I also organized and supervised some significant restructuring of legal structures; so that if Cedar Sinai ever went bankrupt, the real property (i.e. the facilities themselves) would be separate and remain in the hands of the Jewish community. I won’t go into detail because it was complex. It was basically to secure the real assets in perpetuity. One interesting historic footnote is that Alice’s grandfather is one of the original board of incorporators of the Old Men’s Hebrew Home, the predecessor to the Robison Home. So I felt that I was helping to fulfill our (Alice’s) family legacy. I should mention also, apropos of Temple Beth Israel, that Alice’s father had served on its board. So that was filling the continuity of generations.

Weinstein: L’dor v’dor.
MEYER: Right.

Weinstein: So during the time that you were actively involved at Cedar Sinai, was that during the construction of the Rose Schnitzer Manor? That was really a critical time; I know Alice was involved also.
MEYER: Yes, right. I did play a role, a legal role, pro bono, in resolving some significant disputes among Cedar Sinai, its architect and its contractor. It involved a lawsuit. There was a lien that had been filed and I got Carl Neil to be the active lawyer (I was there behind the scenes) and I directed and conducted the mediations which successfully settled the matter without litigation.

Weinstein: Well these are issues and things and activities and actions are mostly behind the scenes (and as you say, pro bono (which in itself is a mitzvah). People are not aware of how complicated and time-intensive these projects are. What you have just explained is an example of how your jumping in and helping made a huge difference to the organization.
MEYER: Well I’d like to hope that it did. I am sure the leaders at Cedar Sinai probably consider that I made some difference.

Weinstein: What is the New Israel Fund?
MEYER: The New Israel Fund is a liberal, pro-civil liberties, national organization of considerable significance. It channels moneys in Israel toward things advancement of civil liberties, including seeking equity for Arab-Israelis. A recent example was trying to get some equity in Israel’s marriage laws. You know in Israel today, the Orthodox control marriage.

Weinstein: You mean they still have to get a get?
MEYER: Well I don’t know what you need to do but it can be very difficult for some people to get married. This was an issue, for example, for some Russian immigrants. There was some question over their Jewishness and whether they could get married. I know that they are very interested in peace and other things of that nature. Until very recently, the New Israel Executive Director in Israel was Eliezer Yaari, a retired Air Force General, and quite a significant fighter. He came to Portland to visit for the NIF. There is no chapter in Portland and they wanted establish some organization in various cities. So with June Rogel, a national leader of NIF, who has become a good friend of mine as a result, I agreed to be the chair of a “coordinating committee,” to be available if they had speakers or anybody who would come to Portland. Eliezer did come out and I was able to arrange a meeting for him with a number of people from the Jewish Community Foundation. There are a number of people in Portland who are contributors to the New Israel Fund.

Weinstein: So I would assume that there would be some people from the Reform community.
MEYER: Actually there are supporters from several of the congregations. I have never wanted Federation to contribute my money to Israel; so my contributions to Israel over the years have always been restricted to local needs. I give to the New Israel Fund for what I want to contribute to Israel, because I think that it will be better directed to those things that I want accomplished there.

Weinstein: Many people are acting on that philosophy now. More so than in previous years. Tell us about the Institute for Judaic Studies.
MEYER: While Alice and I belonged to Temple all these years, Manny has been reasonably liberal on a lot of issues; so I share a lot with Manny. The fact that there have been some episodes where we have had disagreements is probably a minority of the time.

Ironically, everybody knows what Josh Stampfer has done in this community: creating a whole host of organizations, such as Camp Solomon Schechter, the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center (Alice was on the first board of that), the Oregon Jewish Museum (Alice was on its first board was and served as its first President) and the Institute for Judaic Studies. I was on that board for several years. I think Josh would have liked me to have stayed on, but I didn’t really have the time.

I was most involved with what Josh created at Lewis and Clark Law School: an annual legal conference. For the first one, I secured a classmate of mine from Yale Law School, Ephraim Margolin, a terrific leading lawyer in San Francisco, California. He was born in Israel. At seventeen he was secretary to Begin in the Irgun. He is the most gentle person you have ever seen. You can’t imagine him – such a gentle soul – belonging to the Irgun. He was a very dear friend of Alice’s as well. And he was a real “Jewish” scholar. His presentation was very well received. Then, some years later, Rabbi decided he would like to dedicate these conferences to the memory of Jonathan Newman, who had been a judge in our Court of Appeals. Jonathan had been a dear friend of mine. His brother was in my class at Fieldston. Jonathan was a year behind me in high school. I knew his father, Rabbi Louis I. Newman [Rabbi of Rodelph Shalom, in New York City very well and was a frequent guest in their home. Unfortunately, all three of the Newman sons have died. [The youngest, Daniel, was an artist who lived many years in Paris.]

One time back in the early 1960s, Jonathan [who served with distinction on the Portland School Board before he was appointed to the Bench] called me at home and said, “Can you and Alice come down here to the Multnomah Hotel? There is somebody you have got to meet.” Alice and I went down and there, in a small room with no more than five or six of us present, we had a long visit with Martin Luther King, a young minister, then totally unknown.

Weinstein: Oh, he hadn’t achieved his…
MEYER: Nothing. He was around and Jonathan was smitten with him. I don’t know what the connection was. Jonathan, I think, may have been on the School Board at the time. He had some prominence; so he had a connection.

So, the Institute for Jewish Studies created the Jonathan Newman Memorial Law program – at Lewis and Clark Law School. For the first program, I was able to bring out Jack Greenberg, who had been Thurgood Marshall’s second-in-command at the NAACP and at that time was dean of Columbia College (which was a strange career choice at that point). I also brought up from the Bay area Joe Groden, who had been a Supreme Court Justice down in California and who had been a student of mine at Yale Law School. During the year I spent teaching law in Berkeley, he and his wife were very gracious to me. Her father was then head of the Jewish Federation in the East Bay area.

Weinstein: You have touched so many lives and causes. That doesn’t happen by accident. It is a curiosity and a passion that you have. I am really struck. You are not a name-dropper but you are mentioning names of people that have such historic significance in so many causes and activities. If we were to make an index of these interviews with you, there would have to be a separate index just of the names of influential, important people whose lives you have connected with.
MEYER: You are very gracious to say so. I appreciate it. I never thought of it in those terms until I was chatting with a young man who had been the Research Director of the City Club and then later, for a short time, its Executive Director. I was just mentioning a few things that seemed to be pertinent and he said, “My, you have led an interesting life!”

Weinstein: Interesting, but there is an order to everything. The outlines that you have given me. You think that way. You mentioned the word “process” in connection with committee meetings but that order is what keeps a democracy going too. That is just a thought that struck me. We will go on. I don’t mean to digress.
MEYER: There is one other item on this agenda that I should mention. You know the American Jewish Committee has taken hold in Portland with Emily Georges Gottfried as its Executive Director. And it is staffed. There are two major Jewish social activist organizations nationally. One is the American Jewish Committee and the other the American Jewish Congress. In terms of being politically the more socially active, Congress was more to my liking in the early years (we are talking about the ‘50s), because Congress had a more active social action component with a Law and Social Action Commission. Congress, under Rabbi Stephen Wise, was basically Zionist, whereas Committee, while not quite the Council for Judaism – the extreme anti-Zionist wing of the German Reform Movement – it was not as committed as Congress to the state of Israel. Gus Solomon tried to establish a Congress chapter here in the 1960s. I remember a funny story. We had a big picnic as an organizing event and Gus kept asking, “Who is going to bring the pickles?” [laughter]

Weinstein: Nice Jewish boy.
MEYER: So, in any event, Alice and I were both active in Congress for a short period. For some reason, it never really took hold in the way in which, subsequently, Committee did.

About five or ten years ago, there was a large effort to merge the two organizations nationally, which I think ought to have been done. But, as is typical in these things, the sense of history of each of the two organizations unfortunately got in the way. I remember I had some significant correspondence with a Congress staff person in Seattle, the closest Congress chapter in the Northwest, bemoaning and regretting the fact that that merger had not gone through. He tried to persuade me that there were some good reasons. To me, however, they were not good enough. The two organizations today really parallel and in many respects, duplicate one another.

Weinstein: It is redundant.
MEYER: It is redundant to have the two separate sets of…

Weinstein: And it is confusing to the public and I think that dilutes the efficiency of both organizations. I asked you about the Jewish Congress because I don’t hear anything about it now.
MEYER: No. There is one funny story I will tell on myself. When I graduated from law school, before I decided to come out west, one place I thought to apply for a job was to the American Jewish Congress Commission on Law and Social Action, the directed by Will Maslow, who recently died at 100 years of age in 2007. I didn’t get a job and was always puzzled, because I really had great credentials for the job. By then I already had considerable background with ACLU at Yale Law School, where I was one of the original organizers . I had a good record both in college and law school. While I was not on Law Review at Yale, I was one of the directors of the Moot Court Program, which was a responsible and prestigious position. So, when I read Will Maslow’s obituary in 2007, I discovered why I had not been hired. Maslow prided himself that he never hired anyone who had not been on Law Review. [laughs] So I felt a little bit better that I was not hired, not because I wasn’t qualified, but because this guy had the stupid idea that you had to be on Law Review to be any good.

Weinstein: Think of all the people who never were on Law Review who might have made a difference in a lot of things.
MEYER: There was one other story. There was a firm in New York, Greenbaum, Wolf and Ernst which dealt primarily in intellectual property. Now Ernst was a General Counsel in ACLU and Wolf was a big macher in the Ethical Society. My mother knew him. I later was a colleague on the ACLU national board of Harry Pilpel of that office,. I applied there for a job. [They didn’t hire me (they made a big mistake, because I am was a good manager – Once in Portland I started a law firm which I built up from two to about 15 lawyers which I managed effectively. We had one of the lowest overhead for any law firm in town and yet we had a the largest library of any small firm).]

Ten or fifteen years ago, Greenbaum, Wolf and Ernst vanished. It disintegrates from lack of good management. So I thought, “You know, had I been there….” [laughs] I don’t know. You speculate in life. You see where you didn’t get something that you might have wanted, or thought you wanted.

Weinstein: You mentioned the ACLU and, of course, that has been a theme and thread throughout all of these interviews. I would like to take our remaining time and talk about the ACLU and specific cases that…
MEYER: Excuse me, let me interrupt for just a moment. We have on the back page here a reference to Ahavath Achim and they really are more tied into what we have been dealing with in the Jewish community. Maybe we should talk a little bit about the fascinating Ahavath Achim case.

Weinstein: Yes, do that. Thank you.
MEYER: Ahavath Achim has been the long-time, small Sephardic synagogue in Portland. In was located, if I recall correctly, at SW 3rd and Sherman in Old South Portland. It had been designed by Harry Herzog (a member of Temple Beth Israel who worked with Herman Brookman on Beth Israel’s current synagogue) and was finally built in 1930. In 1961, as part of Portland’s first Urban Renewal area (called South Auditorium), the little jewel of a synagogue was condemned by the City. (Having written the report for the City Club on the Portland Development Commission, if I had brought the report I could give you all the dates of the whole Urban Renewal) But the first project was the South Auditorium site, which virtually wiped out almost all of the old Jewish/Italian/Greek neighborhoods of South Portland.) I am sure that in your archives at the Oregon Jewish Museum are many recollections by people of South Portland.

This little synagogue was a small, square building that had a round dome. It was a beautiful little gem sitting on a 5000 square foot lot on the corner of 3rd and Sherman. In The leaders of the Congregation – two Sam Menashes, Ralph Funes and others, came to Norm Kobin with whom I was then in partnership – Kobin and Meyer, which we formed in 1960. The city made the Congregation a very small offer for the property. Now the synagogue was in pretty good condition for a 30 year old building. It had a recently installed new heating system. The only part of the building that was not up to par, you might say, was the downstairs, which for many years had had a dirt floor. Shortly before the condemnation, however, they had put in a concrete floor and a new kitchen. So that “social hall” was up-to-date and contemporary.

Now the law with respect to condemnation in the city of Portland is, as you may know, mostly based on “comparable sales.” If you have a house, how do you appraise it? Well, assume it is a three bedroom, two bathroom house with so many square feet and right down the street a similar house with three bedrooms and two and half baths sold last week for X number of dollars. The appraise would say, “Well, your house has a better front yard, but it does not have the extra half bathroom.” By making these micro adjustments with respect to several properties that are “comparable” and have recently been bought and sold by willing buyer and willing sellers, you say the fair value of the subject house is so-and-so.

However, when it comes to a church or a school (while in recent history in certain cities where whites had moved out and blacks had moved in you literally had some occasion to have “comparable” sales of churches or synagogues), by and large, there is sufficient data upon which to base “comparable sales.” [A recent sale of a church took place recently when the First Unitarian Church on 12th here bought a little church that was to its south, between it and where Dick Brownstein’s office is on S.W. Main and 13th (it used to be Temple Beth Israel’s Sunday School, which Alice attended as a little girl. So occasionally there are some sales, but there were not applicable at the time to Ahavath Achim.

So, absent “comparable sales” the rule with churches and synagogues is to determine value by showing the cost of reproduction today (how much would it cost to build it today?) less depreciation (how much has it depreciated from being new?). We all know what depreciation is. Things depreciate over time. Well, I came up with a couple of theories. First of all, we found the contractor who had actually built the church in 1930 (Teeples and Thatcher ultimately became a very good client of our firm). We had the original plans. They did a complete take-off and came up that it was going to cost $130,000 to reproduce that building today as it stood. Now that is for the building.

The land underneath it, the 5000 square feet, you value by the “comparable sales” method, as there are sales of vacant land with which to compare the “subject” property. That is easy to do. Other lots have sold and you know what the square foot price is. So basically it is a combination of whatever the land is worth plus the building’s cost of reproduction less its depreciation. So we had the cost of reproduction, with no questions. There wasn’t any argument with the city about that. So what is the argument about? The argument is about depreciation. We had an appraiser, who was not a giant in the community. The city had engaged Ralph Walstrom (of Holbrook and Walstrom, the Cadillac of Portland appraisers). They said, “Well this was built in 1930 and this is 1960. The building is all out of date.” “Out of date, you say? How old is St. Peters? Is it “out of date?” Indeed, how can you dare sit on a witness stand as an expert witness and tell a religious group that the form of its synagogue, or the benches on which the congregants sit, are obsolete? Who are you to tell them how to practice their religion? Is kneeling on a little bench in a Catholic church obsolete because you wouldn’t do it anymore with your sore knees?” [laughs] That was the argument that we went into court with before Judge Crawford.

The second argument I made, which was a far out, was that if the Congregation had to built today, it would need 15,000 square feet (not the 5.000 square feet of its current property) because it would need off-street parking. It was at that time what is called a “non-conforming use,” built before the off-street parking requirement and therefore the Congregation didn’t have to go out and buy 10,000 more square feet for parking; it could just continue to use street parking. So I argued, “To replace the current 5000 square foot lot, the Congregation would have to buy a 15,000 square foot lot; so its current “non-conforming” lot is really worth the same as a 15,000 square foot conforming lot, which is what the Congregation will have to purchase to build a new replacement home.

Well Judge Crawford didn’t buy that last argument, but he bought our first argument on depreciation. He said it was still worth every penny of the $130,000 that it would cost to reproduce. There is no depreciation. The furnace system and the new kitchen downstairs were all brand new. That can’t depreciate and I’m not going to depreciate the synagogue sanctuary itself. That is not for me to do. So we came out smelling like a rose. And, of course, in a condemnation, if the condemnee gets more than the City offered before trial, the City pays the Congregation’s attorneys fees as well. So the congregation gets the full benefit of the award as the attorneys’ fees are paid for by the city.

Weinstein: So it didn’t cost the congregation anything.
MEYER: Nothing. To get that wonderful defense! [laughs]

Weinstein: You know it is fascinating.
MEYER: But that was just Phase One.

Weinstein: Oh, go ahead.
MEYER: [laughs] That was just the beginning. That was the easy part. Next came the move and the second lawsuit and recovery all over again!

[END OF PART 3]

Session Four

Weinstein: This is the fourth interview with Paul Meyer. Paul, I am going to ask you to follow the outline that you have prepared.
MEYER: I briefly touched on my legal background and I talked about coming to Portland and Gus Solomon’s role and so forth, but I thought that I should briefly describe my legal background and practice. I did teach law at Yale. I taught some legal writing and research when I was a senior there. Then I had a one-year position at the University of California Law School (Boalt Hall) at Berkeley.

Weinstein: What year was that?
MEYER: That was ’52-’53. That is what brought me out to the west coast. I really have covered that. I know that a number of my Yale Law School professors thought that I was going to go into teaching. I do have a funny story: Sometime while I was practicing at King, Miller I got a call from Orlando Hollis, the Dean of the University of Oregon Law School. He said, “I want you to come down here and teach!”

Weinstein: At Boalt?
MEYER: No. At the University of University of Oregon Law School at Eugene. I was just about 28 or 29, I was still single and I didn’t envision myself buried down in Eugene. It was hard enough to meet women here in Portland [laughter]. So I declined but it was interesting that people thought I should go into teaching.

In the calendar year 1953, for a number of geographical and calendar reasons, I was literally admitted to the bars of New York, California, and Oregon all in one year. I did it legally, without any violation of what then were unconstitutionally imposed residency requirements. But it did catch some people up who tried to slip into a couple of bar admissions without proper residency. I had done it correctly. In any event, I practiced with King, Miller from ’53 to ’59. During that period I was one of the only lawyers who could still work with Ralph King, who was the senior lawyer of the firm and a one of the great trial lawyers in Oregon. I think I mentioned before that he was a very difficult man and very few new young lawyers could get along with him. He used to chew up associates like crazy, but he and I got along well. We were compatible. He liked my work and I enjoyed working with him. I really learned a great deal from him, including trying some significant cases, including, for example, keeping the Southern Pacific Railroad from extending eight storage and switching tracks being build south from Brooklyn yard into the strip between McLaughlin Boulevard and Eastmoreland, in addition to the two main lines already (and still) there.

Weinstein: Was he difficult in the sense that he was combative?
MEYER: He was a combative lawyer, yes. He was an excellent lawyer. But he was sort of a curmudgeon and he was a perfectionist. And some people didn’t want to write as well as he wanted people to write, or didn’t do this or that. For me it was a great experience because I was really the last associate who worked closely with him; he was on the cusp of retirement when I left the firm. I think I have already discussed some of the reasons I felt that working in that firm wouldn’t be suitable for me in the long run and I left King Miller and formed my partnership with Norm Kobin.

Kobin & Meyer was an unusual firm. People ask me, “What was my practice?” and I say, “I was the last of the generalists.” I was a trial lawyer, I was an appellate lawyer and I was an office lawyer. I did the whole range of law. It was still a time (in the early 1960s) when you could take on a matter and research it sufficiently that you could know as much as the “experts.” I have about 60 published opinions (in both the federal and state appellate courts) of cases in which I not only handled the appeals, but also handled the trials (many before juries) as well. People don’t do that anymore. I represented clients in hundreds of trials. You don’t appeal every trial that you take. But having 60 reported (published) appellate decisions is a lot even for a lawyer specializing in appeals.

Weinstein: So generally now a trial lawyer will refer a case to an appellate lawyer.
MEYER: Yes, that is what happens in the firms. Everything has become specialized. There is a trial department, there is an appeals department, there is a corporate department, there is a wills and trust department, etc.

I did estate planning, I prepared wills, and I probated estates. I did anti-trust work. I did divorce work. There wasn’t anything I didn’t do. I used to form corporations, merge them, and dissolve them. I even prepared profit-sharing plans. I did that until the law became so complex that we referred clients to other resources. I had about fifteen corporate plans that I created. I even once created a corporate pension (defined benefit) plan from scratch.

As the result of a lawyer with whom Norm officed dying at a very young age, Norm Kobin picked up some construction clients. Norm had these contractor clients and after I joined him we expanded that client base and became the first “construction law” firm in Oregon. We represented many of the leading contractors (both heavy and building) and subcontractors and then ended up also representing surety (bonding) companies. We established a lot of precedent in the law relating to construction and building: quantum meruit, wrongful termination, and adherence to specifications (representing residents of Grant Tower [on S.W First Avenue]), etc. I had cases involving Homeowners’ Associations, in which I forced developers to meet their original promises to their consumers. I know you would appreciate that because of your experiences. Today, every large law firm has its own “construction law” department.

Weinstein: Well, with the advent of so many condominium developments.
MEYER: Norm and I were the first lawyer members of the Associated General Contractors. In fact, I am still an honorary member.

Unfortunately Kobin and Meyer broke up in the mid-eighties. After that, for ten years, I practiced on my own located in my brother Roger’s firm (Meyer & Wyse). It was a very good arrangement (for both me and his firm) because I was able to use his associates and some of his partners too, to help me. During the years I officed with his firm, I was their biggest “client.”

Arbitration started in the construction industry back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. When it first started to become used as an alternative to court trials to resolve construction disputes, I gave lectures for the American Arbitration Association on “How to be an Arbitrator” and “How to Arbitrate”, what techniques should be used. So prior to and in my retirement I have done a fair amount of arbitration and later, s it developed, mediation. I had to take a thirty-hour course to qualify as a mediator. Mediation is a much more recently developed method of “alternative dispute resolution,” but is increasingly being used in lieu of arbitration.

Weinstein: Tell me the difference between mediation and arbitration.
MEYER: In arbitration, the arbitrator is basically a judge who decides the case. Generally there is no appeal from arbitration except on very limited ground: for example, corruption of the arbitrator, or “manifest disregard of the law”, which is pretty difficult hurdle to surmount; it is not simply an error in law. An arbitrator can make a mistake in the law, but unless the arbitrator essentially says, “To hell with the law. I know that the law says I can’t do this but I am going to do it anyway,” the arbitrator cannot be reversed on appeal. It would be pretty stupid for an arbitrator to go that far!

Mediation, on the other hand, is simply bringing people together in a room (or in separate rooms) and using diplomacy to try to get them to agree on a settlement. There is nothing compulsory about it. If the parties do not agree, there is no successful mediation and the mediation is concluded and the parties must then litigate, arbitrate, settle or drop their claims.

To this day I still do some arbitration for the AAA and for what used to be called NASDQ, the National Association of Securities Dealers, which is now called FINRA, The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. In fact, this Friday I am chairing by telephone the pre-conference of a very large case. If it will ever get to trial I don’t know.

Weinstein: So this is an arbitration case.
MEYER: This is arbitration. Now I have had, for the NASDQ (what is now FINRA) a very interesting case that involved the liability of a Clearinghouse broker for the wrongful acts of one of their small “Initiating” broker (who deals with the client). I won’t go into the details. but I had a very interesting panel: A vice-president of the big national advertising firms was the other public member. The third arbitrator was a broker, an “industry” panelist. I wrote a 40-page, single-spaced decision. This case had tremendous impact because it established a precedent, although, technically, arbitration decisions in NASDQ or FINRA are not binding precedents on other panels in subsequent cases. However, they can be persuasive to other panels. This case was picked up by Gretchen Morgenstern of the New York Times. She touted it. I realized recently that she had been involved in that area for some period of time. It has also been picked up by all of the security services and publications; it is a landmark case. That was very interesting.
I have done a lot of mediation and arbitration on construction matters, as you might imagine. I have also been involved in some interesting environmental cases. I had one of the first environmental cases in Oregon, Carter v. Portland General Electric, which involved a bunch of environmentalists (stockholders in PGE) trying to stop PGE from building the three dams on the Deschutes River, the Round Butte, and two other dams. They wanted to use the proxy shareholder voting method to try to get a shareholder vote on building these dams. Long story short, we lost the case. That was an interesting one. It was pro-bono.

In another interesting pro-bono series of cases I represented the Forest Park Neighborhood Association (which included the area in which we lived – for 37 years – on Skyline Crest) in opposing the development of Forest Park Estates. I litigated three separate cases, two of which went to the Oregon Supreme Court and the third to the Oregon Land Use Appeals Board. All were handled pro-bono. We didn’t win ultimately, but I think we delayed the project for about twenty years, during which time the ultimate development became totally different from that which was initially proposed. [laughs] During the course of that, I had to depose Neil Goldschmidt when he was mayor of Portland because he was, at that time (as I describe it) in his “Imperialist Phase.” Ironically, even though this area involved was inside the city, it was outside the Urban Growth Boundary. The city took the position that if it was in the city it was automatically included in the Urban Growth Boundary. About ten years or fifteen years later, the Supreme Court ruled, “No,” simply because property is inside city limits doesn’t mean it is automatically in the Urban Growth Boundary. Interpretations of laws change, even after the fact.

Then I had another interesting case –something of an environmental bro-bono case, for Catlin Gable School. As you know, Catlin Gable is located immediately to the east of St. Vincent Hospital. Some traffic engineer in Washington County decided that he wanted to punch a road between Catlin Gable and the hospital, to open up the area to the north of those institutions through to Barnes Road. I had to file a lawsuit to try to stop it. The kinds of things that you find out when you take depositions and pursue discover are amazing. In discovery, I found that the Planning Department and most everybody else in the Washington County bureaucracy opposed the project. The only one who favored it was this traffic engineer in the traffic department. How it suddenly got activated, I don’t know. But once I was able to expose these discrepancies in the Washington County bureaus, the project was stopped. There is no road there now. So that was a fun thing to do.

Weinstein: I see here where you have listed the Forest Park Estates. In parenthesis is the name Neuberger.
MEYER: Well, Maurine Neuberger, who lived at that time on Cornell Road, right below the tunnel, was the named plaintiff on our appeals to the Oregon Supreme Court. So the case bears the title, “Neuberger v. the City of Portland.” Maurine was my client. She was also a very close friend, as I have previously related.

You previously asked about the case of the Ahavath Achim, the Sephardic synagogue and we discussed that in detail in our previous interview (tape #3). We also represented another synagogue located somewhere on the east side in a residential area. I remember conducting a jury trial for them, but for the life of me I don’t remember the exact nature of the case.

Weinstein: It seems to me it was a more traditional synagogue.
MEYER: It must have been an Orthodox. [transcriber’s note: I think they are referring to Tifereth Israel, which was located on NE 15th Avenue near Alberta.]

Weinstein: It was an Orthodox, long-standing congregation.
MEYER: It was close in, not far out. I don’t remember whether it was a zoning issue, a condemnation, or not. I did have some interesting condemnation cases.

Weinstein: I believe that that congregation no longer exists.
MEYER: I don’t think so. It either doesn’t exist or it merged.

Weinstein: Maybe we can find out for the record.
[telephone rings; recording is paused.

Weinstein: OK, let’s go on.
MEYER: When I retired from the practice of law I continued to offer my services as a mediator and
arbitrator – and I do to this day. I also looked for other opportunities to serve our state and

Before telling this part, I digress to years ago – back in the days when we helped to elect Bob Holmes as the first Democratic Governor in many years. Holmes continued to appoint Republicans to Boards and Commissions, which was a terrible political waste. At the time I was involved at the state level of the Democratic Party and initiated getting Holmes and the Party together because the party activists were furious that he was not appointing Democrats to vacancies in state boards and commissions when they arose. I saw an opportunity at the time to be on a national Uniform Law Commission and hoped, as a strong supporter of Holmes to be appointed to this prestigious commission. Even though I was a young lawyer, I had significant credentials for the post. Nevertheless, Holmes instead reappointed an old-line, conservative Republican lawyer.

Weinstein: Why do you suppose he did that?
MEYER: He just didn’t know any better. I don’t know. He just wasn’t sophisticated about building up the party and thought maybe he would ingratiate himself with the establishment, instead of building up a new Democratic establishment. In any event later, when Kitzhaber was governor, I applied for a Commission and a young man, actually Eve Rosenfeld’s great nephew, Darryl Overbeck’s son, called me and urged me (he was involved in putting people on Boards and Commissions) to accept appointment to the Teachers, Standards, and Practices Commission (TSPC). That was a coincidence, because Alice had served a term on TSPC when Barbara Roberts was governor. We became the first husband and wife each to serve on TSPC, although not at the same time.

Of the 17-member commission, 15 are educational professionals, administrators, teachers or school board members, and two are “public” members. Alice and I were, separately, one of the two public members. Of course, with my legal background, I brought in some interesting perspectives to the Commission. I was particularly effective with two things during the six years I spent on the Commission. First, I rationalized its disciplinary procedure. I was chair of the Discipline Committee, which tried cases. I had a number of cases where teachers were tried for violations of professional ethics. Secondly, I became the primary advocate for requiring teachers to have continuing education.

[telephone rings; recording is paused]

MEYER: That is an interesting story. You cannot imagine the resistance I ran into among the Teachers’ Union. There was a young man on the Commission who was the Superintendent of the Hood River School District. He and I became very good friends. Between the two of us we were able literally to shame the commission into adopting a Continuing Education program. As a lawyer, of course, I had been familiar with Continuing Education requirements for lawyers – to take course for about 45 hours of education every three years and certify it. I designed and wrote the initial TSPC program which the Commission then adopted. I am sure, over the years, the program may have been modified and changed. But we did it in a very sophisticated and user-friendly way – one that would entice teachers into wanting to participate.

Weinstein: Do you mean to tell me that up until that point there were no CE requirements for teachers?
MEYER: There were no continuing education requirements for teachers. This was sometime in the late ’90s. I was on the Commission for two three-year terms, from 1995 to 2001.

Weinstein: That is amazing to me. It does show the strength and power of the unions that could block that.
MEYER: Yes. Now I have always been a strong supporter of unions, but sometimes they don’t think through the benefits of something, which they didn’t in this case. So that takes care of my TSPC work and I am ready to tackle the whole field of Civil Liberties and Civil Rights.

Weinstein: Well have at it. I am very anxious to hear about this.
MEYER: I mentioned that when I came back from the Army, the first two organizations I joined in 1946 were ACLU and the NAACP. One should keep in mind that the NAACP had been started in 1909 by sixty (60) people, including Oswald Garrison Villard, and Mary White Ovington, descendents of abolitionists, and a whole bunch of other people, including a large numbers of Jews. Do you know how many Blacks there were on the original board – the original sixty? Only seven!

Weinstein: That is an amazing statistic.
MEYER: 53 Whites, seven Blacks started the NAACP. I think I did tell you the story of an NAACP Conference at Asilomar, south of San Francisco in 1953. I was the only white person there. Gradually over the years, although many white liberals continued to be important in the leadership of NAACP, both nationally and locally, I began to sense that the white liberals were less appropriate to lead the organization. We could support the organization. but to make progress, the leadership had to be taken over by Blacks. Now that became relevant here in Portland. While I was a member here, I never felt it appropriate to become significantly active in the local chapter nor to seek leadership. The ACLU was a different matter. I have told how I was involved in the initial New Haven Civil Liberties Council and arranged its affiliation with ACLU by directly calling Roger Baldwin, its Executive Director and founder.

Weinstein: And your mother had been a member.
MEYER: She had been a member back in the ‘30s.

Now, Gus Solomon had been very active as a lawyer for the ACLU during the ’30s and early ‘40s. Alan Hart went to Yale Law School, graduating sometime in the 1930s. He was the son of Charlie Hart, of Hart, Rockwood & Davies law firm, now known as Stoel Rives. Alan never went into Stoel Rives; he practiced with C. Girard (Jebby) Davidson and then with Lindsay, Hart. He was always very liberal. He too had been an ACLU cooperating lawyer back in the 1930s, before there was an affiliate. I don’t want to say that there was never an ACLU presence in Oregon, but it was never an organized affiliate; ACLUs presence was through these few lawyers. That was true all over the country. The only places that ACLU existed originally as an organization were New York, the National ACLU, and in the Bay area, the west coast ACLU which was a totally separate, unaffiliated organization, although it used the name ACLU, by consent, I suppose.

That raises an interesting story. In 1966, I was at one of the first ACLU National Biennial Conferences in Stony Brook, N.Y. The Biennial Conference was established in the early 1960s as a lay-leadership group with representatives from all the recognized affiliates. An issue was then raised about combining the Bay Area ACLU structurally with the National ACLU in New York City. By this time, there were several affiliates all over the country from various states, including Oregon, but we were all affiliated with the New York National office. The Oregon affiliate was started in December of 1955 (I will discuss that in a minute). But at this conference I was sitting across from Ernie Besig, who was the founder and for many years Executive Director of the separate Bay Area ACLU. [By this time there was also an affiliated Southern California affiliate located in Los Angeles. The issue on the table was how to achieve integration between the National and the Bay Area organizations. I remember I got up and I said, “Well, we’ll achieve it because we will vote to have it.” Ernie Besig, sitting across form me, turned three shades of purple. [laughs] After that “vote,” a committee was appointed this “independent” Bay Area ACLU became the Northern California affiliate of the National organization. However, that didn’t happen until the late ‘60s. We have no “rogue” affiliates any longer!

In 1955, some of us in Portland thought that we should have an Oregon affiliate and we contacted Roger Baldwin. He was delighted, so he appointed Alan Hart, whom I have mentioned, Maure Goldschmidt, who was a professor at Reed College (and Neil Goldschmidt’s uncle, by the way) and me as a committee of three to decide about the formation: when, how and where to form an Oregon affiliate. There already was an affiliate in Washington State. There were two in California: Southern California and then, of course the Bay area, which was independent until the late 1960s, as described above. We called some preliminary meetings and by December had formally launched the affiliate. I must tell you that some of those activities did involve getting me and all the others then involved reported to the F.B.I; so I had a nice F.B.I file on me and my political activities.

Weinstein: What an honor!
MEYER: It was an honor. The records were, surprisingly, very accurate. There was a woman who was an informant. She would come to the meetings would report to the F.B.I. and they would make the file up on all the individuals she could identify. The FBI file correctly described me as a lawyer at King, Miller and all the activities in which I was then engaged. It was very accurate. It said where I had gone to law school and everything else! I was also in the Red File maintained by the Portland Police Bureau. Years later, the Police Bureau gave a complete copy of the “Red File” to Stevie Remington at ACLU. I had a copy at one time, but don’t know if I still have it. Stevie said it was the greatest clipping service she ever had. It clipped everything that the ACLU and everybody in town were doing politically.

In any event, we formed the organization. Jud [Judah] Bierman (Professor at Portland State) was elected the first President. Dick Nahstoll (we used to call him our “show Republican”) was a lawyer with Lindsey, Hart, Nahstoll was Vice-President. Jonathan Newman, also a lawyer and later Court of Appeals Judge (the son of Rabbi Lewis I. Newman of Congregation Rodelf Sholem in New York City) was Secretary and Mike Katz was Treasurer. Now that means three out of four of the original top officers were Jewish. You can see that ACLU was always heavily infused with Jews. It is not controlled by Jews, but there are a large number of Jews in the organization and among its leadership all over the country. Of course, over the years it grew from 10,000 in the 1930s to several million today; so obviously the base has grown dramatically. Back in the beginning, I prepared and filed the incorporation papers and wrote the by-laws for both the ACLU of Oregon and the ACLU Foundation of Oregon, and secured the latter’s tax exemption.

In the 1950s and early ‘60s, for at least five Legislative sessions over a period of ten years, I chaired ACLU’s Legislative Committee. During the legislative sessions, I received in the mail every bill and every amendment introduced in both houses of the Legislature.

Weinstein: From the Legislature in Salem.
MEYER: When it was in session in Salem. I had to read each of them to see whether there were any civil liberties issue raised (either good or bad). If there were, I would find a lawyer or a non-lawyer familiar with the field, send the bill to him or her, send a letter to the chair of the Legislative Committee to which the bill was assigned, saying, “So-and-so was appointed by ACLU and if you have a hearing we would like to be notified. We would like to testify on the bill.”

Weinstein: You did all of this pro-bono? This underscores the dedication to public service that you have shown throughout your career. That is very generous. It is very time consuming.
MEYER: Well it is time consuming but it is also a lot of fun. I have had a lot of fun in my pro-bono activities. I was a high-energy individual. Fortunately, my practice was prosperous enough to sustain me well and give me the facilities of an office and a secretary to be able to dictate letters and get them out. I also managed our law firm for 25 years when Kobin and Meyer grew from two to 15 lawyers. Of course that means hiring and supervising other staff: secretaries, receptionist, and so forth. So we had a total of about 30 employees, including lawyers, and I was the manager during all that period. It was also nice that. as the senior managing partner, no one questioned my right to spend the time and resources I did on these extra-curricular activities. Indeed, all of the lawyers in the firm were very proud of the volunteer contributions which all our lawyers were free to and did make for our community.

People ask about the Legislature. It was so nice to have a legislature, even when Republicans controlled it, which was courteous to the citizens who came to testify before. I particularly remember with fondness George Layman from Yamhill County, who was the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee. He was most gracious to people coming down to Salem to testify: liberals, conservatives, whatever. The legislators actually listened to you. If you made sense, they paid attention. I remember one time I was down there testifying on the other side from Tom McCall on the issue of cameras in the courtroom. Ironically ACLU, which now favors cameras in the courtroom, then opposed it because the technology was not sufficiently advanced and cameras were distracting. I remember Tom set up a camera to show how “quiet” it was and it was went, “click, click, click” [laughter]. We won that fight.

I also remember, after Roger Baldwin retired in about 1960.

Weinstein: And he was the head?
MEYER: (Roger was the Executive Director of ACLU from its founding in1920 to 1960) Patrick Murphy Malin, a prominent Quaker, succeeded Roger as National Executive Director. Patrick came out to Portland in the early 1960s, probably 1961, as the Legislature was in session. I escorted him down to Salem when the legislature was in session and we had a luncheon at the Marriot Hotel. George Layman, the chair of and all the Republicans and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee came to this luncheon to hear Malin speak. These were fun days. Democrats and Republicans were reasonably respectful of one another in those days

I don’t know if I mentioned this funny story, I probably did. But very early in the life of our ACLU Oregon affiliate (about 1956 or 1957) the major speaker at our annual banquet was Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate for President (perennial – he ran every four years during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s). Coincidentally, I heard Norman Thomas as early as the late 1930s at the Ethical Society in St. Louis, when he came out to lecture when I was twelve or thirteen years old. It fell upon me to introduce him at this annual dinner meeting. I think I have told this story before: David and Fanny Turtledove were in the audience. [Alice was in Europe visiting her brother Harry Turtledove after she was widowed after being married for two years. David said to Fanny, “Now there is a nice young man for Alice.” [laughs]

When the Oregon Legislature considered the first Fair Housing Act in Oregon, which interestingly, was featured in the recent exhibit on discrimination in Portland and Oregon at OJM, ACLU had a committee involved in drafting this legislation. NAACP also had a committee drafting legislation. Our bills were not the same; I think ours was better written: we had quite a committee, Jonathan Newman, John Buttler ( like Jonathan also later a Court of Appeals Judge) and I. This was some pretty high-powered legal talent working on it. But we recognized that the NAACP’s approach was one that the Black community preferred to our approach. So we gave in. We supported their version and took their version to strengthen and perfect it. That is an example of being sensitive to Blacks taking the leadership role in NAACP. We could not, as the white liberal bastion at the time [ACLU didn’t have a lot of Black members at that time. We have always had difficulty recruiting Black members, though we make continuous effort to do so and recently have had more success] trying to advance our version over the NAACP version. So we were very helpful in getting passed their version, which we helped perfect.

Weinstein: Without being too paternalistic about it. I always have thought that the Urban League was controlled more by white people than Black people.
MEYER: That may be true. I was never involved that much with the Urban League. [It was more “establishment” and less political than NAACP.]

There is one incident apropos of the Black community: Sometime in the early ‘60s Alice and I got a phone call from Jonathan Newman, “You have got to come down to the Multnomah Hotel right away. At 10:00 this morning. There is somebody you have got to meet.” (I think I told you this) We went down and it was Martin Luther King. He is a Reverend who, of course, no one at the time had ever heard of. There were only five or six of us in the room and we chatted about how to progress and advance civil rights. That was a fascinating [and in hindsight] an historic experience.

I mentioned the Legislative Committee [of the ACLU], but simultaneously I was also always on the Lawyers Committee, from 1955 to about 1995. Up until about two years ago Oregon ACLU was unique among all affiliates of our size and larger: we were the only significant affiliate that did not have a legal director; instead, we had a legal committee to decide what cases to undertake and all cases we took were then handled by volunteer –pro bono (ACLU) lawyers. Many affiliates have not only Staff Counsel, but many have several Assistant Staff Counsel. They do much of their litigation directly in-house. Finally, about two years ago, the Oregon ACLU hired its first paid Legal Director. We still have a Lawyers Committee with a very successful intake program. The Lawyers Committee meets either weekly or bi-weekly. It reviews the requests. It decides what cases to take. It finds the lawyers to take them on. I have divided by subject matter those cases I handled or in which I was directly involved. First, take separation of church and state, which has always been a subject of considerable concern and interest to me. One of the first significant cases that Oregon ACLU took on was the Dyckmann case. I was not the lawyer on that. Leo Pfeiffer, who was involved in the National ACLU and was also an American Jewish Congress lawyer for its Law and Social Action Commission, came out and argued the case in the Oregon Supreme Court for ACLU. The Dyckmann case had to do with the state funding textbooks for parochial school students and we considered this a separation of church and state issue. You have to understand that the U.S. Constitution First Amendment, which includes the separation of church and state clause, had been construed not to prohibit states from paying for parochial school transportation or textbooks. The Oregon Constitution is stricter with respect to separation. It says, “No public funds will be used for any church or religious activity.” So we prevailed in that case. It was a significant initial victory in the Supreme Court for the Oregon ACLU.

Weinstein: And it has been an issue in recent years. During the George W. Bush administration the issue came up about withholding social services that would be funded by the federal government through parochial schools.
MEYER: Or through organizations that limit the people they hire to a particular religion and who permit these activities to encourage sectarian activities or proselyzation. I was interested because of the whole business about the C Street, known as ”The Family.” I don’t know if you are familiar with the book by Jeff Sharlat that just came out in paperback, but it has made everybody aware of this organization. They were the ones who precipitated Ronald Reagan’s adopting National Prayer Day. Prior to Eisenhower, our country never had a Prayer Day. For the government to involve itself in how you practice religion? Well, they tried to do the same thing in Portland, introduced by Ivancie, who was then Mayor. I had to go before city council on behalf of ACLU and oppose it. We then had to file suit to declare the practice unconstitutional and prevailed, the court holding that Ivancie’s Prayer Day ordinance was unconstitutional.

Weinstein: And that was Frank Ivancie, who was the Mayor of Portland.
MEYER: I also had a case (and when I am talking about these cases, these are all pro-bono cases because the ACLU of Oregon does not permit its volunteer attorneys to keep attorney fees, even when they are awarded. If an ACLU cooperating attorney gets an attorney fee awarded because a statute permits it in a particular case, it goes back to the ACLU Foundation to fund legal costs incurred in handling all ACLU cases . Over the early years, 1960s and 1970s, when it was a lot of money, I generated at least $50,000 of attorney’s fees for the ACLU). I had a case that I brought against the State of Oregon for funding parochial higher education. I was successful in that one, stopping the use of funds for higher sectarian religious education.

Weinstein: What was the issue?
MEYER: Using state funds to support parochial higher education. I don’t remember the name of the school anymore. These are in the archives of the ACLU, I know.

More recently I was involved in two cases. One was a lot of fun – Newport Church of the Nazarene v. Hensley. It wasn’t decided until 2002. This was a case where the minister of a church got fired and subsequently filed for unemployment compensation, which was denied, because ministers of churches were exempted under Oregon law from receiving unemployment compensation. The federal law permitted states, in adopting unemployment compensation laws, which is funded about 90% by the federal government and 10% by the states, to exempt employees of a church. Well, there was a case in the Oregon Supreme Court that declared this Oregon statute unconstitutional under the Oregon Constitution. I don’t want to get to complex about it, but the federal law didn’t say that states must exempt employees of a church. What the Supreme Court of Oregon asked was, “what about the functional equivalent of a church which is not a ‘church’?” This Oregon law favors established churches above similar religious groups. The Oregon State Legislature then amended the statute in Oregon to say that Oregon would exempt employees of churches only when Congress says we must, not may, essentially acknowledging that, because of the Oregon Supreme Court decision, Oregon wouldn’t do so until them. However, Congress has not amended the federal law in this regard. Nevertheless, the Oregon unemployment agency went ahead and adopted a rule exempting all ministers (whether or not of a church), even thought the Oregon Supreme Court had held it unconstitutional under Oregon’s Constitution. The Employment Department did exactly what the Supreme Court of Oregon said that it couldn’t do.

So I brought this lawsuit and said, “You have been violating the decision of the Oregon Supreme Court.” The then Attorney General, my good friend Hardy Myers, representing this agency, instead of telling it, “Hey guys, you are not doing the right thing,” let his Assistant Attorney General, working directly for the agency without any direction from Hardy, decide to defend his agency’s action by suggesting that the Federal Secretary of Labor had approved this regulation, because nobody objected when the State regulation had been submitted to a Seattle Labor Department office. Well, I did a Freedom of Information search and discovered that nobody in the Federal Government had approved anything. I wrote a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Labor and said, “These people (in Oregon) are in violation of FICA, the Federal Unemployment Insurance law. I was really angry. It wasn’t just the Church of the Nazarene (represented pro-bono by a right wing legal foundation) sponsoring this specious argument I was fighting, I had to fight Oregon’s Assistant Attorney General, who simply was allowing his agency to run afoul of the Oregon Supreme Court. [laughs] Then the U.S. Secretary of Labor’s letter came to the State of Oregon, “You are in violation of FICA. You have 30 days to correct it.” FICA mandates must cover everyone who is not exempt. And Oregon wasn’t covering everyone it needed to when it exempted only some ministers (those employed by churches). They were exempting others who they weren’t permitted to exempt. So, once it received the letter from the U.S. Secretary of Labor, the Oregon Employment Department did a volte-face and conceded the case.

The other separation of church and state case was one my daughter Andrea was the primary lawyer and I worked with her – the Remington Powell case. Remington was a seven or eight-year old student in the Portland Public Schools when the Boy Scouts came into his “captive” lunchroom (the children were required to be there) and held a recruiting session, which the teacher administered. They snapped a bracelet on Remington’s wrist that only his parent could cut off when he went home that afternoon. And Remington said to his mother, “This sounds like fun; I would like to be a Boy Scout.” And Nancy Powell, his mother says, “You can’t join; we are atheists and they don’t allow atheists.” I won’t go into it the details, but we ultimately lost the case, which I think was a total travesty by the Oregon Court of Appeals. It based it on a construction of a separation of church and state case – the Skinner Butte (Eugene) Cross Case. In that case many years ago, the then Oregon Supreme Court decided in favor of leaving a privately erected Latin Cross remain on public property as a “war memorial: by using an interpretation of the separation of church and state doctrine that applied the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, not the Oregon State Constitution. The rationale behind that case had in the meantime been totally wiped out by subsequent Supreme Court cases authored by Hans Linde interpreting the Oregon Constitution as being different than the U.S. Constitutional provisions relating to separation of church and state. The judge in the Remington Powell case cited the Skinner Butte case as if it were binding precedent. Not only was it not appropriate precedent, but when the same issue of the Skinner Butte case came before the federal courts, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled the cross on Skinner Butte was unconstitutional even under the Federal Constitution. This Oregon Supreme Court decision in this Skinner Butte case was totally discredited; yet in 2002 the current Court of Appeals went ahead and upheld the lower court as if that old Oregon Supreme Court case on Skinner Butte was still good precedent! It was a terrible case.

Weinstein: Public opinion and influence continues today in so many other issues.
MEYER: Now of course the separation of church and state is only one aspect of the First Amendment. I was also very involved in many aspects of the free speech clause. I got involved in a many censorship and obscenity cases.

The first once I had was literally a municipal court case back in the early 1960s when Portland still had a Municipal Court. We had a client who had a little magazine and cigar store on the waterfront next to the Morrison bridge. He had some magazines which a policeman brought. The next thing the store proprietor is indicted for selling obscene literature. I went down to the municipal court and put on a defense. At that time we had judges in the municipal court who were really not the brightest stars in the firmament. But the Presiding Judge threw the case out!

Next was “The Lovers” Case. The Guild Theater showed the movie, The Lovers, which had a scene with a naked couple in the bathtub. You couldn’t see much more; they were covered by water, but that caused an action to be brought to censor them and punish them. Ginna Deinam, who was for a very short time the first paid Executive Director of Oregon ACLU, has a husband who taught film at Portland State, I remember. He testified as an expert that the film was artistic and not obscene. Nancy Allen was the director of the Guild Theater who was being tried.

Weinstein: Nancy Allen. I know because her husband was Mark Allen, who ran the theater group here.
MEYER: We filed an amicus brief and on appeal, we prevailed and Nancy Allen was acquitted. Then I had a bunch of other run-ins with Frank Ivancie.

Weinstein: Good [laughs]
MEYER: One was the park curfew. The City put curfews on parks. I filed a lawsuit and got them declared unconstitutional. Then Ivancie proposed a second ordinance to institute curfews. I remember Charlie Davis (the Chair of ACLU – he was also Treasurer of ESI, a large electronic manufacturer in the Portland metropolitan area and subsequently Chair of the Oregon Public Utility Commission) and I went to the City Hall to testify on the new ordinance. Now understand, Frank Ivancie and I knew one another in Young Democrats but we were never that fond of one another. I lived at that time on Skyline Crest which is outside the city of Portland in unincorporated Multnomah County. But my office was in Portland. Every time I testified before the City Council in the days Ivancie was on it, he would always ask me, “Where do you live?” and I would say, “Well Commissioner (or Mayor) Ivancie, I live in Multnomah County outside of the city, but my office is in the city and I pay more taxes to the city of Portland than you do.” That was my usual response. [laughter]

But this time Frank Ivancie says, “Well Mr. Meyer” (and he was then the Commissioner of Parks), “Tell me, what expertise do you have in the field of parks?” I replied, “Well, Commissioner Ivancie, I don’t pretend to have any expertise in the issue of parks, but having taken your previous ordinance into court and having proved that it was unconstitutional, I do have some expertise in constitutional law and your proposed new ordinance in my opinion is also unconstitutional!”

Weinstein: Oh he couldn’t deal with that, I’m sure.
MEYER: The huge audience erupted in laughter and cheers. That was great fun. There was another issue of parks that was the subject of a picture in a recent OJM exhibit. It showed three kids picketing the Vietnam War in the Park Blocks. I was involved in that. The City wanted to keep the kids out of the Park Blocks on the unspoken grounds that, “Well, this is where the rich people live.” At that time there were pretty nice apartments up there. “We want to confine these kinds of protest to Lonsdale Square (between 3rd and 4th Avenues and Salmon and Main Streets downtown).” When the issue came before the City Council Marion Rushing, who was our first woman City Attorney, succeeding Alexander Brown, attended City Council meetings to give the Council legal advice. Marion was good lawyer, but she confused in her mind the role of a lawyer advising a client and the role of her client, the City Council, which made policy. She thought her job was not only to tell them what the law was, but also to tell them what policy to adopt. The then governing authority on free speech in parts was a U.S. Supreme Court case called Neomotko v. Maryland, which had clearly established the principle that parks are public forums, in which First Amendment activities cannot be unduly restricted. You can have time and place regulations (i.e. require permits for a parade, or you can set aside a part of a park for a baseball game and while it is going on you can keep people from marching through it. But generally speaking, if there is open space, you cannot stop Free Speech in its various forms.

Felix Frankfurter. a Jewish Justice on the Supreme Court, who had gone from a liberal in his early days when he was a Harvard law professor to a prissy conservative when on the Supreme Court, wrote a concurring opinion in Neomotko. By concurring, he necessarily agreed with the majority decision that Neomotko was entitled to Free Speech, but he had a different view from the majority of what the power of a city could be. He enumerated all the criteria that the city might consider in determining whether to permit Free Speech in a park: Where it is located (i.e. in a residential or commercial area, and other criteria). His views, expressed in a concurring and not binding decision, was what we call “dictum.” It represented merely his personal opinion and had no binding authority. His dicta were obviously inconsistent with the rationale of the majority; otherwise he wouldn’t have written a separate opinion.

Nevertheless, Marion Rushing tells the City Council that they may use the long list of Frankfurter’s criteria in fashioning an ordinance for the City. She went further and suggested to the Council that it totally restrict the Park Blocks to “more cultivated activities” and let the rabble rousers (i.e. those exercising free speech) go down to Lonsdale School to speak where the bums hang out. They can speak to the bums. So we got that declared unconstitutional and, therefore, the Reed kids (pictured at the OJM exhibit) were permitted to march in the Park Blocks!

I had another interesting censorship case for Reed kids. There was something in one of the Reed Quest newspapers that the local U.S. Postmaster deemed obscene and, as some copies were mailed, considered he had jurisdiction to punish the Quest and withdraw its mailing privileges as a newspaper. I was able to quash that.

Then I later got more heavily into the field of pornography. I had a number of cases. After appearing amicus in the Lover’s case and handling the Municipal Court case I mentioned, the next obscenity case was the Watson Case. Watson was a simple family man operating a filling station (essentially a truck stop) in Chemult, Oregon. The district attorney of Klamath Falls, on his way from Klamath Falls to Salem to argue at the Oregon Supreme Court, stopped for gas at Watson’s station and notices a book for sale called Lust Pad. He bought the book and, after arguing his case in the Supreme Court, went back to Klamath Falls and indicted Watson for selling obscene literature. At the first trial, Watson was defended by a Klamath Falls lawyer, who although he was generally a good lawyer, decided not to fight the case on Free Speech grounds. Instead he tried the case by saying that the chain of custody of the book had not been sufficiently established, so the jury couldn’t be sure that is the book at trial was the same book he bought from Watson. Now you can imagine, in front of a jury, that is no argument. “How do we know it’s the book?” Everybody knows it’s the book. So he was convicted. He didn’t have money for an appeal so he came to the ACLU. I, together with Carl Neil, handled his appeal and we wrote the brief. We got a four to three decision in our favor from the Supreme Court, but instead of saying the book is not obscene, the majority said, “Well, the district attorney testified as an expert witness as to community standards. However, in view of the fact that he acknowledged he had never read a book since he his sophomore year at Willamette College, he can’t be an expert.” So they sent it back for retrial.

So I had to go back to Klamath Falls and spend a week of my life, pro bono to retry the case. On the was down to Klamath Falls by bus, I was joined by Joe Heins, a professor of English at the University of Oregon, who was my expert witness.

There is a funny story about reading the book in court. The prosecution had done it in the first trial. They did it again; I objected to it, but the court said they could. It took two days to read it. On the first appeal, the D.A. had insisted that the book be transcribed (typed by the court reporter) in full as part of the record, which cost a lot of money in those days, as it took up about two hundred pages to type the complete book. Because they lost the appeal, the county ultimately had to pay for this unnecessarily wasteful transcript. But we had to pay for it initially.

On retrial, as soon as they started reading the book in full to the jury, over my objections that the only thing obscene is reading sexually explicit passages out loud in public, the court reporter put his writing machine aside and folded his arms. I went into chambers and objected to the judge. The judge said, “No, he doesn’t need to write it down.” I said, “Well, what if he doesn’t read it correctly?” The judge said then I should object – and my objection would then go on the record. So we returned to court and the young district attorney who is reading it started out, “It was a cold and blustery day in Green Witch Village.” “Objection, Your Honor! It is Greenwich Village.” [laughter]

One of the interesting things about that case is that I went across the street from the Courthouse to the County library and asked the chief librarian to come over and testify that the County Library carried Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That book depicts anal sex graphically. Of course my expert was able to testify to that. Lust Pad didn’t have anything close to that in its descriptions of sex; it was just a trashy, but funny novel. We finished the case after four days of trial. [Incidentally, this Klamath County librarian came up to me several years later when I addressed the Oregon Library Association of Oregon’s annual convention in Eugene on censorship. She came up to me and tugged on my arm. “Do you remember me? I am your librarian from Klamath Falls; I testified for you.” I said, “Yes I do.”]

So, after the trial was completed and submitted to the jury, Joe Heins and I went out for dinner. About two hours later, when we got to the bus depot, just before we boarded the bus to return home, we received a telephone call: the jury found Watson “NOT GUILTY.”

The follow-up is a wonderful story One of the people on the jury was a prominent businessman. His family ran and owned the Klamath Cold Storage and Ice. He was also a prominent Presbyterian lay leader. So on voir dire (when you question the juror individually), after establishing that he was a prominent Presbyterian I said, “Have you ever read Bonhoffer?” (the German philosopher, quite anti-Nazi, who was killed by Hitler). And he said, “Yes.” So I figured, “The guy is literate. He’ll be perfect for the jury. So I didn’t ask any more questions of him. Well, not only was he perfect for the jury, he ended up as its foreman. To top it off, shortly after this trial, he became the first president of an ACLU chapter in Klamath Falls!

Weinstein: Oh how wonderful. And you had some influence in that. You exposed his liberal bent.
MEYER: Then the next series of obscenity cases was the Childs case. Four downtown cigar store operators, including an employee from Rich’s Cigar Store, were arrested for selling paperback books of a similar type, all involving lesbian relationships. One of them “Lesbian Roommates” was sold by Harold Childs who operated a small cigar store in the old Dekum Building at S.W. 3rd and Washington. The Deputy Sherriff bought two books from each of the four cigar store operators or employees. So there were eight books involved. You couldn’t really tell one book from the others as to essential substance; they were all the same model, just like “romance” novels typically follow a pattern. There would be a prototype story; they just change the names, locations and specific story lines.

So we went to trial before Charlie Crookham and a jury of 12. The jury was out for three days and three nights. In those consolidated cases, Crookham did not allow the D.A. to read all eight books out loud to the jury. Of course, that would have taken two weeks. I made the argument, the books were not obscene but reading intimate sexual descriptions in public, in my opinion, is obscene. You don’t impose these explicit descriptions of sex upon people who don’t choose to hear it; there is an obscenity about that. So the jury was out three days and three nights. They acquitted three defendants on four books; they were a “hung” jury on three books. But they convicted Mr. Childs on one or the two books he had “sold” to the Deputy Sherriff. Mr. Childs had the little cigar store in the old Dekum building on the corner of S.W. Third and Washington. Childs had a fourteen-year old daughter; now, after the trial, he is a convicted felon.

So I appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court. I won’t go into details except the Supreme Court lied about what the record said and affirmed his conviction. Don’t let anyone tell you can accurately learn about a case by reading the court’s written opinion. Half of the time judges, who want to come to a predetermined decision simply lie about the record. They just say, It said “this,” when, in fact, it said “that.” They did exactly that in this case. My response then, when he was convicted in the Oregon Supreme Court, was to petition to the Supreme Court of the United States. However, it denied certiorari, i.e. they didn’t take the case.

So, I went into the Oregon Federal District Court on habeas corpus and I was in front of Judge Solomon. He had, as a new young clerk at that time, a young man whose name you now see in the papers all the time. He teaches at NYU and is a big guru in legal ethics: Steve Gillers. When he came out to Gus’ memorial service, Steve told the story, “One of the first things that happened to me when I became a clerk is Gus says, ‘I’ve got a book here; you have got to read it. Paul Meyer brought this case in court.’” In any event, Gus threw the conviction out on the ground that the book simply was not obscene. The district attorney appealed it to the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit reinstated the conviction saying, “Yes it is obscene.” I appealed once again to the U.S. Supreme Court. This time the U.S. Supreme Court took the case. I didn’t have a chance to argue the case because the court, without argument, the Court “per Curium” reversed the Ninth Circuit’s holding that Lust Pad was obscene, reinstating Gus Solomon’s District Court Decision. The U.S. Supreme Court found the book was not obscene. After all this time, Mr. Childs, this wonderful, charming man with now a 15, 16, 17 year old daughter, is finally acquitted; he doesn’t have a felony record on his career. Every Christmas, for as long as he lived, he showed up with a bottle of J&B scotch. When I no longer got a bottle of J&B scotch for Christmas, I knew that Mr. Childs had died.

Weinstein: How gratifying after all that time.
MEYER: Now another case was Maizels. Now Sol Maizels operated the theater over on Powell and 17th, I believe it’s called the Apollo Theater.

Weinstein: On Milwaukie. It was called… I can’t remember.
MEYER: Well we know which theater. And he was running some pornographic-type movies. I don’t remember which movie it was; maybe it was Behind the Green Door or Deep Throat. At this point, George Van Hoomissen, my very good friend, is District Attorney and Jake Tanzer is his assistant D.A. Jake went to the theater and, without any court order or other notice to Maizels, seized the film, removed it from the theater and brought it to the D.A.’s office and prosecutes it for obscenity. I went into court and complained that he couldn’t permissibly seize First Amendment material without first obtaining a warrant from a court. I won that in the Circuit Court (before a conservative Judge – Alan Davis – but a Judge who followed the law) . Again, the Supreme Court of Oregon ruled the other way – against us. Once again I had to go into the Oregon Federal District Court and get the film released. This time the District Judge was affirmed on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Now you talk about all of these court actions – filing cases, trials and appeals; they’re all pro-bono.

Weinstein: It’s a lot of work.
MEYER: It is a lot of work. I used to kid Jake Tanzer, who is a very good friend of mine, even to this day: “Jake, you just let George Van Hoomissen use you as his litmus paper. You would go in and smell the movie. If your nose turned red it was obscene, if it was blue it was OK.” [laughter]

I also took on a lot of the long hair and facial hair cases (both in state and federal courts) at the time beards and moustaches first began to reappear in the 1970s. One I took to the Oregon Court of Appeals and lost. It was on behalf of a bus driver, Brooks v. TriMet; literally, TriMet didn’t permit its bus drivers to grow a moustache. Can you believe that? And then I had kids in high school, boys who wanted to let their hair grow long. They were willing to put on nets during shop or any other class where the school officials claimed long hair would cause a hazard. I said, “They let girls wear long hair when they do these activities, why let the boys do the same?” Won several of these in federal court.

I had another interesting case in commercial Free Speech for Consumer Guide (not to be confused with Consumer Reports). Consumer Guide was a magazine that both rated products and then went on to tell readers where they could buy a discounted product. A small neighborhood merchant in Portland who carried a particular model of refrigerator listed for a discount at another store, went to the attorney general and said, “This violates a law,” and the Oregon Attorney General brought an administrative procedure against Consumer Guide, demanding it bring before it all kinds of proprietary and other information as part of its procedure to prevent this publication from continuing. (Note: CG is published in Chicago and has no office in Portland; so the demand was extremely burdensome.)

Weinstein: For telling people?
MEYER: For telling people where they could get a product inexpensively. I went into Federal District Court to stop this procedure as a violation of the First Amendment. In federal court there is a doctrine called “abstention,” which means that a federal court will defer to the state court first to decide a federal issue before the federal court intervenes. We were in front of Federal Court Judge James Burns and he says to the State’s AG, in effect, “How in the heck can you do this? This is pure violation of the First Amendment? But I’ll let you go into state court and let’s see what they have to say about it first. But I will retain jurisdiction.” That is exactly what I wanted him to do. Well, what would any state court do on a federal question when the federal court has already clearly opined that his procedure was unconstitutional? “I’m not going to rule on it; I will let the state court rule first, but if it rules wrong, you can bring it right back here!” [laughs] That was an interesting case.

I haven’t really addressed my going on the ACLU National Board. I was on the Oregon ACLU board from the inception of our affiliate in 1955 until about 1977. I continued active locally right on up through the current time in a variety of capacities. But I remained on the local board until about 1977, even though I was also first elected to the National Board in 1971, as the Oregon affiliate representative. [Note: The ACLU National Board consists of one representative from each affiliate, about 50 delegates, and 30 elected “at large” by an electorate consisting of the National Board and all affiliate boards throughout the country.] As an affiliate representative, it was, of course, my duty to come back and report to the local board, as its representative. Going on the National Board involved five weekends a year in New York City. Then, back in Portland, I also had another six or so Saturday meetings a year for the local board.

The national offices of the ACLU in New York City, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere essentially are “managed” in detail by a ten-person Executive Committee, which is elected annually by the 80-person National Board. In 1974, I was the only “affiliate representative” on the National Board member to be elected to the Executive Committee, the other nine being nationally elected “at large” members.

Now the executive committee not only met the five weekends each year (the day before each board meeting). but also met in NYC five additional weekends between board meetings, as well. So that meant ten weekends each year in New York! Great for theater but hard on your family! When it was a Board and Executive Committee meeting, it meant going to NYC on Thursdays and coming home Sundays. If it were an Executive Committee meeting only, it meant going Friday and coming home Sunday. It was a large commitment of time, energy and resources.

On the board I was considered an economic conservative (strangely enough): because I was very interested in fiscal responsibility, making sure we learned to live within our means. When I first got on the Board, literally, the only financial information we received was a certified CPA report for the quarter that ended about two or three months before we received the report! How does one manage anything, much less a large national organization, with such untimely information? You didn’t know what was going on in time to change horses, if one has to. You were three to six months behind the fact. I won’t go into the details, but I worked on a format for taking the budget from last year and the budget from this year and breaking them down month by month. While expenditures are fairly level from month to month, contribution income is not: you get big donations in December and you have many dry months. So, if your income is $1.2 million a year, you can’t count on receiving $100,000 a month. It doesn’t go that way. But your expenses are pretty level throughout the year.

I made them come up with a system of getting the budget each month year-to-date and historically looking so they could estimate what income would come in January, February, March, April, etc. and then compare with actual to-date. Then you generate the plus or minus of each item’s actual over or above the amount budgeted. Then one can tell: Where were we over budget and where were we under?

Weinstein: Yes, analyzing it.
MEYER: Analyzing it. If we could get this analysis within ten days after the end of each month, we would see right up to date how we were doing and be able immediately to make adjustments. Obviously, the executive director could also adjust expenditures quickly, where needed. I finally got that financial system installed at National. It becomes relevant because I got similar systems installed locally on both by the Friends of Chamber Music and the Portland Baroque Orchestra. This fiscal responsibility (I don’t like the term “conservative”) was a kind of a hallmark for my service on the National Board and I think that my having served 18 years (nine consecutive two-year terms on the Executive Committee) was largely because people on the National Board who elected me saw me as somebody who was making sure the shop was well-run.

Weinstein: You were bringing an order to things rather than just speculation.
MEYER: Once I was elected at-large, I had a national electorate. I had to be concerned politically to run and be elected by getting votes, not only from other National Board Members, but also from the boards of all the affiliates throughout the country, including, of course, Oregon’s board. Let me talk about some of the significant things which occurred on the ACLU National Board during my 23 years on it.

MEYER: One of the first things issues I faced on the National Board in December 1971 went back to my role at the ACLU Biennial Conference in 1970, the year before I was elected to the Board. At that time I found myself debating my old Yale Law school professor, Tom Emerson, who had a developed his own theory of the First Amendment and proposed replacing the then current “Clear and Present Danger” theory with his new theory. At the Biennial, no one was prepared to defend “clear and present danger.” The guy who had written the paper defending it did not attend the Biennial. I ended up leading the debate against Tom Emerson whose new theory of sought to distinguish “speech” from “action.” At that Biennial I lost by three votes out of about 250 votes total. By that close vote, Emerson’s theory of the First Amendment would automatically become official ACLU policy, unless rejected by the board within 18 months of the Biennial and the Board’s rejection would then have to be upheld by a referendum of all affiliate boards throughout the country.

At my first meeting of the National Board in December 1971, the issue of this whether to reject the Emerson First Amendment theory was on the agenda – just making the 18-month deadline for rejection. I led the National Board debate on that, as I had led the debate at the Biennial. Unlike the Biennial, the board accepted my arguments and rejected the Emerson “expression/action” test by a two to one vote, thereby retaining “clear and present danger” as ACLU’s test for free speech – a position it maintains to this day.

Weinstein: Tell us about clear and present danger.
MEYER: “Clear and present danger” is a theory that, if I get up at a meeting and say, “You know, it would be nice if we had a revolution in this country and we should have one. We did in 1776 and look at all the good that came out of it” and we have an intellectual discussion about the matter, that is not a “clear and present danger” that this revolution will take place. If you are holding a gun and aiming at somebody and I say to you, “Shoot, Shoot, Shoot!” That is the kind of thing you should be able to stop me from doing – because my speech may trigger a “clear and present” danger that actual harm – which we can prohibit (i.e. shooting someone) will reasonably and probably take place because of the speech. I gave one interesting example, which sealed my case at the National Board. When in 1960, Mario Savio spoke in front of Sather Gate at Cal Berkeley and said, “Let’s go down and take People’s Park” (several miles away in Berkeley) and about two or three hours later there was, in fact, a riot at the park, the question was raised whether Savio’s speech was punishable. Savio got expelled from the Cal and went into the Federal Court to challenge his expulsion. In refusing to reinstate Savio on Free Speech grounds, the Federal Court, using Tom Emerson’s dichotomy between political speech and unprotected “action,” held Savio’s speech was not protected Free Speech; rather it was “action” and therefore unprotected by the constitution.

Savio also was tried in Berkeley’s Municipal Court for “disorderly conduct,” but was acquitted, because applying the “clear and present danger” test held that what he said two or three hours earlier could not have been the precipitating factor (both clear and present) in the riot at the park. Too many intervening things occurred. That example dramatically showed the difference between Tom Emerson’s speech/action dichotomy and “clear and present” danger. There has never been another attempt to have Tom Emerson’s theory adopted.

My most fascinating experience on the National Board occurred in September, 1973. When we start a board meeting, the first thing we do is adopt the agenda for our two-day meeting – it goes all day Saturday and Sunday until about 2:00 p.m. A motion was made to set aside the proposed agenda entirely and, instead, consider adopting a resolution to ask for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. To put you in context, The House of Representatives didn’t impeach Nixon until June of 1974. In September 1973, the House Judiciary Committee had even started hearings. Impeachment was not really on the radar screen in the country. The Board did agree to devote the whole meeting, if necessary, to that issue.

So, with a National Board of 80 people, how does the President keep order and how can all of 80 people get in line to speak? Well, we sat at a big U-shaped table in a large room (then at the Princeton Club on 43rd Street in NYC). The President (and staff and recorders) sit at the top of the U and the members sit on both sides of each side of the U, all with a good view of one another and of the President. One raises his/her hand to be recognized and there is somebody on the dais, on behalf of the chair, writing names down in the order hands are raised. And when there are a lot of people in line, speakers are typically subject to a three-minute rule or even a two-minute rule. It is marvelous how being required to express oneself in that limited time that can really discipline one’s thoughts. It takes a lot of skill to express your ideas shortly and concisely and not repeat what somebody else has already said.
I raised my hand to say something, but by the time eight or ten speakers later, my turn came, I had totally changed what I had wanted to say, after listening to the previous speakers and their arguments. So my contribution was that I had been convinced by the previous speakers that we needed to call for impeachment, but that we had to be very careful, as a Civil Liberties organization, not to appear political and to base our position exclusively on a demonstration of Nixon’s serious violations of civil liberties. I am sure that it wasn’t because I said so, but, nevertheless, when we did draft our resolution (a committee of four or five people left the room to draft a proposed resolution) and the perfected resolution was adopted, virtually unanimously, it was, indeed, an indictment of Nixon for all of his civil liberties violations. If you compare that ACLU resolution (adopted in September 1973) with the House of Representative’s Second Article of Impeachment adopted by the House Judiciary Committee and then subsequently by the House of Representatives, you will see that Congress used the ACLU resolution virtually verbatim to frame its Second Article of Impeachment. I have always thought that this is one of the most remarkable things that I was able to participate in. ACLU was the first national organization to come out for impeachment. Shortly after we did, the AFLCIO did. Then it mushroomed.

After that September meeting, I came back to Portland and spoke at the Unitarian Church- at a hastily ACLU called public meeting. A typical first response to impeachment at that time was: this is something that this has not happened since Andrew Johnson, as to which historical event most of us learned to believe, “Thank God the Senate acquitted Johnson.” It was deemed a highly partisan political maneuver.

Shortly thereafter, I went down to Monmouth, to the State college down there. They had a huge event: you can’t imagine; their whole stadium was filled. They got a couple of nudniks from the state Republican Party to come and speak. So I presented my case, intellectually, logically and, I think, effectively. And these guys said, “Oh well, Nixon’s got a couple of these bad apples who are advising him and ….” It was a rout. The audience was overwhelmingly supportive of my argument.

Weinstein: The audience must have just laughed.
MEYER: Yes they did laugh.

I also was intimately involved in drafting the ALCU policy which had a lot of influence in the evolving judicial outlook and laws in our country concerning involuntary incarceration of the mentally ill. Our proposed principle was that you should not be able to incarcerate people involuntarily for so-called mental illness, unless it is first shown that they are an imminent danger to themselves or others. I drafted that language initially. Subsequently, that became the pretty standard law throughout our nation.

Weinstein: It is interesting and it is still controversial. It can be abused or ignored.
MEYER: I have already mentioned getting our financial house in order. I served on the National Board for 23 years and I was on the executive committee for 18 years. When I didn’t go back on the Executive Committee, they elected me a National Vice-President of ACLU. That was essentially an honorary position, although Nadine Stroessen, then National President, did give some substantive tasks to her Vice-Presidents. Being on the Executive Committee was far more important than being a Vice-President, which was primarily an honorary position.

When I went off the board in about 1995, I was elected by the National Board to the National Advisory Council, which is also a nice honorary position, but it has enabled me automatically to go to all Biennial Conferences as a voting delegate, which I have done, thus keeping in touch with the National to this day. Recently I served on the seven-person Biennial Conference Committee that planned the 2007 Biennial Conference in Seattle. Last year I was reappointed to be on the Committee for the 2009 Biennial schedule for June 2009 in St. Louis. I was looking forward to returning to my hometown, but unfortunately, financial conditions intervened in late 2008, the 2009 Biennial was cancelled.

Speaking of St. Louis, I should mention one other thing. I was on the Oregon Board for many years when we didn’t have an office. I kept plugging the idea that we had to open an office, that we needed to get a space where the Board and others could get access to our records in a central location. Oregon’s ACLU’s second president (after Jud Bierman) was Ray Balcolm, who was then minister of the First Methodist Church (now located on S.W. 18th and Jefferson).

Weinstein: First United Methodist
MEYER: Right. The problem was that he had all the ACLU affiliate files in his home basement. They weren’t accessible to anybody. As a minister, Ray was most appropriately concerned not to have his ACLU responsibilities intrude on his daytime job. So it was frustrating for everyone. It wasn’t until Charlie Davis took over (who was an executive from ESI) and had the time and energy really to “grow” the organization, that we could start to address how the organization needed to grow and develop. Before Charlie took over, at of the affiliate board meetings in 1965, Ray Balcolm came into the meeting, threw some papers on the table and said, “They are having a conference in St. Louis on development; anybody want to go?” I said, “well that is my home town. I haven’t been back there for umpteen years. Yes, I’d like to go.” Actually, as the Board member most interested in our opening our office and ultimately hiring staff, I was the logical person anyway – but I was the only one to volunteer. So I went back as our delegate. It was held at Washington University, where my dad had started his college career three years after arriving in America. The conference was an eye-opener. I realized that we absolutely had to have an office and a staff. So I came back and I sold the Oregon affiliate board on our need to do that. I previously had plugged for an office, but this time I had more clout, as it was consistent with how National wanted affiliates to grow and develop. We arranged to have leaders from Seattle come down to Portland and meet with us. (At that time the Washington ACLU was light-years ahead of Oregon in organization; it is a larger state and has far more money available to it.) We had a meeting at Reed one weekend and we hammered out agreement on all the reasons we needed to open an office and hire staff. That is when we hired Ginna Deinam as our first director. Subsequently we were able to expand.

I previously mentioned the Strong Mayor campaign in 1966: Stevie Remington was President of the League of Women Voters and she and I had worked together on that. I inducted her onto the local ACLU board. She had been a teacher. She subsequently became our first paid Legislative Director. So we had Ginna Deinam running the office and Stevie Remington testifying in Salem. We no sooner had gotten through one or two years of having two on staff when we ran into a fiscal crisis. Something then happened that deserves to be recognized: Ginna Deinam knew that we would let Stevie go if we couldn’t afford two people, as she was the senior person on staff. So she came to the board and said, “I know this is what you would do, but let me say to you that Stevie can do so much more for this organization than I can. So, I will step down so that you can make Stevie the Executive Director.” She deserves to have her name on an honor roll. I don’t know if Ginna is still living.

Weinstein: What a wonderful gesture. I remember Stevie Remington and she was just a dynamo.
MEYER: Oh, she was the greatest thing. Unfortunately she later had some dementia and passed away.

Weinstein: Well she also was a chain smoker. I’m sure that didn’t help any.
MEYER: Now I want to finish up. Can we move on to the cultural things?

Weinstein: Please. I do want to add just one more thing, though, about the ACLU experience and involvement. It is like a circle. Your mother was involved in the ‘30s. You became involved and then moved higher and higher in the organization and then, to get to go to St. Louis in the position that you had, it is a wonderful story of … it is a circle.
MEYER: And then Andrea [Paul’s daughter] is currently and has been for several years the Legislative Director/Counsel of the Oregon ACLU.

Weinstein: It is a wonderful story.
MEYER: It is. I am very proud of her.

Now, first of all, I spoke of my mother being musical very talented, as a professional singer with a beautiful contralto voice with excellent pianistic skills. Well, I got bitten as a child: When I was five years old I started listening to our RCA Victor records of Beethoven’s Fifth and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphonies, and of opera arias. And because my mother sang I listened. I am one of the few people alive today who can say I heard the first broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera on New Year’s Eve 1931. It was Hansel and Gretel. I remember Deems Taylor was the narrator and he commented, while we were listening to the opera, “Oh, the children are pushing the witch into the oven!” He was telling the radio audience what was going on the stage, as if we had to hear this description of the action superimposed over the music and singing. It was an interesting beginning to the broadcasting of opera, but this “voice-over” didn’t last. I guess people just wanted to hear the music and words without further adornment.

Well, I listened to the Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcasts throughout the ‘30s and the ‘40s. Even while in the Army I would find a radio, when I was here in this country, whenever I could. During the ‘30s and ‘40s we also listened to the Sunday afternoon broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. Remember, in those days, records were terribly expensive. My twelfth birthday present was a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony; it was five shellac records that cost two dollars each. That was ten dollars! That was a fortune. So we didn’t have too many records. So one listened on Sunday to the New York Philharmonic, if one wanted to hear symphonic music at all. There were no “good music” stations at that time (except perhaps WQXR in New York City). I remember when the Philharmonic broadcast was interrupted on December 7, 1941, because of Pearl Harbor. In any event, I brought that background of a love of classical music all my life.

When we moved to New York City at the end of 1939, I went to Music and Art High School in the spring of 1940 and studied voice. I didn’t really pursue it as an individual singer, but I later sang in the chorus at Fieldston High School and Columbia College. I sang in a group at Berkeley when I taught there. When I came up to Portland in 1953 I joined the Portland Symphonic Choir. My friend Borden Beck brought me on its board. At the time, the Symphonic Choir was operating “Holladay Bowl,” producing summer operettas that were in the space near what is now the Lloyd Center that they had dug to build a hotel, which never got built because of the Depression. I got into a lot of the management of these summer programs for several summers during the 1950s. I brought in Manny Raske, who was a CPA in town, who helped very much in the fiscal aspects of the operations. Unless you are running eight weeks of summer, open-air opera in Portland, you have no idea how bad the weather can get in Portland in the summer! You think of it as being idyllic but we consistently had to worry about rain.

I think I told you the funny story of Alice sitting behind me at a performance at the Holladay Bowl one time when I was on a date with Toinette Menashe’s cousin. [laughs] Apparently, she knew who I was, but it was before I knew her.

Anyway, on behalf of the Symphonic Choir board, I went to see Ted Bloomfield, who from 1955 to 1959 was the conductor of Portland Symphony (now the Oregon Symphony). I talked him into using the Symphonic Choir to perform choral works with the Symphony. The first program we did was Beethoven’s Ninth. We then did a number of other concerts, Bach’s B Minor Mass, Mahler’s Second Symphony etc. Bloomfield left Portland a few years later, but he subsequently retired back to the Oregon Coast and died in the 1990s. However, the relationship between the Symphonic Choir and Oregon Symphony continued through all the subsequent conductors and persists to this day.

There is another interesting story: I had negotiated with the Symphony to obtain some discounted group tickets for Choir members and their friends. The seats were way up in the “Seventh Heaven” of the old Civic auditorium. [I remember that old auditorium because I saw a production of Friml’s “Student Prince” when I was here in the Army in 1943. That was my first time in Portland.] So, we had this block of seats in the “Seventh Heaven”: way up in the very rear of the second balcony. Not many members of the Symphonic Choir had that much interest in subscriptions to the symphony; so the tickets were used primarily by all my friends, the Bonyhadis, the Gittelsohns, the Georges, the Newmans, the Becks – you name them. All of our friends were up there. After each concert we used to go out to the eat – what was the restaurant on 23rd and Burnside?

Weinstein: Tiele’s
MEYER: Henry Tiele’s! Alice would have her German pancake and Ilo Bonyhadi her Charlotte Russe. When I finally quit the Symphonic Choir, I continued to sing in a group called the “Bach Group.” It was formed by a woman, Gladys Austin, whose son came to Portland to teach at the medical school. She had sung Bach chorales in Philadelphia with a man named Henry S. Drinker, a famous lawyer noted for legal ethics. He had a wonderful music room with an organ and once a month on a Sunday, people came over, “sight read” through Bach cantatas with the organist and a conductor.

When Gladys came to Portland, she started a similar Bach group here. She used the large West Hills homes of all her Portland “grand dame” friends. The group would rent chairs and brought in a catered dinner. The group had excellent singers, most of whom could sight-read the music. We read through one Bach Cantata after another. We only did one public performance that I recall, of Bach’s Magnificat. Normally, we didn’t sing for the public. We would sing for an hour and a half, stop for our catered dinner and then sing for another hour after dinner. It was great

Weinstein: What was this woman’s name?
MEYER: Gladys Austin. She left town because her son moved to San Francisco.
Now I told you about my love affair with opera and I remember going to see Ariel Rubstein mount a production of La Traviata. He used to import stars, but the rest of the cast was all local amateurs. For this Traviata, he imported Jan Pierce to sing Alfredo. For Violetta, he had this young redhead from San Francisco: “Bubbles.”

Weinstein: Oh, Beverly Sills.
MEYER: Yes, one of her first public appearances, before anybody knew who she was. The really funny thing was to watch Jan Pierce on stage, basically conducting the chorus in Act I because Rubstein had lost it.

You may remember Dorothea Lynch. I don’t know if that name means anything to you. Portland had one of the only municipal opera companies in this country. The Portland Park Bureau engaged a conductor to come out and do one opera each summer in Washington Park. Well, they had to have a conductor, so what do they do with this person the rest of the year? Dorethea formed the Portland Opera Association to produce operas throughout the year, just in order to keep the conductor hired for the summer Park program in Portland. The opera productions throughout the year were all amateur, except for the conductor. We had some very interesting people as conductors. Henry Holt, for example, was here before he went up to conduct the Seattle Symphony. We performed the operas in various high school auditoriums. We had some pretty good singers; one or two people went on to the Met, I remember. We had a wonderful baritone from Spokane, Washington. I can’t remember his name. We had some local talent: one of the sopranos had been a Rose Festival princess. In any event, I was on the Board of the Portland Opera. I incorporated them in the early 1964; I obtained their tax exemptions, all as I had done that for ACLU. Gradually the opera was increasingly professionalized over a period of time. I remember After Henry Holt, Herbert Weiskoff came in as conductor and, poor man, fell dead at the end of a performance. He was out taking a curtain call and he dropped dead. He was succeeded by Stephan Minde – who still remains in Portland. I negotiated the Opera’s first labor contract. Gradually, as the Portland Opera became more established, an interesting phenomenon occurred, probably typical of cultural non-profits: Many of the original board members were Jewish, as you might suspect, knowing the cultural history of our country and community. Gradually, they were eased out, as the opera became increasingly “establishment” and the “real” Portland establishment took over; the number of Jews on the Board dramatically dropped. If you look today at the board of the Symphony or the Opera, you will see a few Jewish names, but they are very well to do Jews. They are not the poor guys, dedicated to symphony or opera and who may be competent to help run an organization but they can’t contribute or raise large amounts of money. I don’t quarrel with that need you have to have money and that is what happens once an organization becomes successful.

Now let’s talk about the Friends of Chamber Music. That was started at Reed College in 1938 or 1939 by Professor Rex Aragon and his wife, Gertrude. Sometime during the 1950s, the Budapest String Quartet performed a four-concert week long complete Beethoven String Quartet Cycle in the old Lincoln Hall (before it was refurbished). I attended the full cycle. Of course, I have always loved all kinds of music, but that got me really hooked on chamber music. At that time, my very dear friend Peter Hurst, who was a doctor at Kaiser Permanente (his wife Lannie is still living today). [Peter, incidentally, as a student at Washington University, lived on Raymond Avenue, the same little three-block long street that I grew up on in St. Louis. Of course it was all boarding houses then but he lived there. Quite a coincidence!]

In any event, Peter brought me onto the board of Friends of Chamber Music and here again, I incorporated the group. I got their tax exemption. Believe it or not, it was just an unincorporated association until that time. Members of the board were all personally liable for anything that happened. I remained on the board until the mid 1990s. In the 1960s I became the first “lay” President in quite some time. When I came on the Board, Nina Lowry was president. She was also working at a very “cushy” job at Portland State, where she had all the time necessary during her day job to spend whatever time she needed to for the Friends of Chamber Music, including picking up artists and setting up the hall for concerts, recruiting ushers, ticket takers, etc. Essentially she was acting as an executive director. Nobody who was working a demanding day job would be able to do that. One needed to have the kind of job that Nina did. I told the board, “If we are to have truly lay leadership, we need to hire an executive director.” So at that point we were able to budget sufficient funds to pay Nina a modest salary to become “staff” at which point I was elected the first “lay President” in a long time. We were able then to develop a very democratic membership organization. Leanne McCall succeeded me as President and a young lawyer named Tom Lehr succeeded her. Betty Perkins, Betty Cramer then, also served as President – and did for a long time.

The Board worked hard to build up the organization and increase its subscribers. We would spend evenings in my law office and use our telephone bank to raise money and solicit members and subscribers. Many of the people you see listed as sponsors of Friends of Chamber Music today are people we recruited back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I was on the board until the ‘90s when they had adopted term limits. But very graciously, this last spring, when Alice and I went out to an annual meeting open to the members, the current President said, “Paul, you were one of our first presidents and we have a tradition that we make an honorary board member out of anyone who was a President.” So I am now back on the board as an honorary member, which makes me very pleased.

Weinstein: I want to ask you a question because of all of the things that you have mentioned and described to us throughout this whole series of interviews you are involved in such a wide variety of activities, with a very wide variety of people in different careers, with different backgrounds and different achievements. A lot of your activities have been focused in the general community, not specifically in the Jewish community, and yet, most everything you have described to us has an underlying Jewish component. An association with Judaism, whether it deals with justice, or the arts, with science or with so many things that traditionally Jews have been involved in. Could you talk a little bit about that Jewish thread?
MEYER: Well I think that is true and I suppose that may have to do with my essential upbringing and background in the Ethical Society (“The Left Wing of Judaism” as Rabbi Stampfer describes it). That is very true and I guess I have always had a great sense of comfort in considering myself a Jew, I have served on the Board of Temple and of the Robison Home (Cedar Sinai Park) and as officers of both. While Alice have many very close non-Jewish friends, most of our friends have been Jewish. However, we tend to be ecumenical in respect to our social circles.

Weinstein: That is a good example for other people.
MEYER: I just want to mention one other thing. At some point, when I was off the board of Friends of Chamber Music, Bill Failing recruited me to join the Board of the Portland Baroque Orchestra, which I did. At the time, the organization was a mess, fiscally. I was on the Board for a couple of years and finally resigned. That was one time I resigned because I felt that they were not doing things well enough. They did hire an new Executive and I was able to get that new Executive, who succeeded Bill Failing, to adopt my form of budgeting analysis and fiscal reporting. When I first went to a board meeting, we got a financial statement of assets and liabilities for this month and last month. You go figure. You had to subtract last month’s total from this month’s to see how much more or less money you had in the bank. There was no income and expense statement. They finally adopted my actual monthly income and expense –compared to budget – statement format, which they are still using today. Today they have a really top rate Executive Director as well as a Financial Director. Today, Portland Baroque has a terrific Executive Director and Development Director and the organization is extremely competently run and is in good financial health. I believe I contributed significantly
to that result.

One other thing – and I will end up with this. At one of Portland Baroque Orchestra’s annual fund-raising auctions, Alice purchased the right for me to conduct the Portland Baroque Orchestra in a movement of a Beethoven symphony. It turned out it to be Beethoven’s Fourth. I spoke to Monica Huggett, the wonderful world famous violinist and Director of the orchestra. She said, “Oh Paul, learn the whole symphony. Maybe you will conduct the whole thing.” Now PBO gives three consecutive performances of each of its concerts. I would only conduct at one of these three. This was my 75th birthday present from Alice. Well, I literally studied the score and worked for six months. I acquired eight to ten recordings of this symphony, learning all the different versions and the way that the different conductors interpreted this symphony. I ended up finding John Eliot Gardner’ recording being the one I liked the best. Listening to the recordings and I rehearsed and learned to read the whole score. I think there was a small revolution among the orchestra member about an outsider doing more than one movement. So Monica was overruled and I did not conduct the entire symphony – although I was prepared!

The first movement is about twelve minutes long; it is a pretty complex movement with quite a few repetitions. It was really fascinating for me: here I am. primarily a singer who is used to sight-reading a single musical line. I’ve never before had to read a score in which one line of music covers an entire page top to bottom. There is a technique to learn how to watch the melody as it shifts from one instrumental line to another and to see all the different parts at the same time. It’s not easy, but it was a marvelous experience. The concert at which I conducted was at Reed College and coincided with my 75th birthday. Alice invited all of our friends to a party after the concert – which included all the orchestra members. Nadja Lily made wonderful pastries. I’m sorry you weren’t there.

Weinstein: Oh it just sounds wonderful.
MEYER: It was one of the highlights of my life. I have the recording. Bill Failing was gracious enough to make a recording of it for me.

Weinstein: Paul, I can’t thank you enough. This has been enlightening, inspiring, exciting and great fun.
MEYER: Well thank you. And thank you for letting me help organize it. I didn’t really know how to tackle all of this material and try to make sense of it.

Weinstein: The outlines that you prepared worked beautifully to keep everything flowing. And I am glad, because, after all, this is for the Oregon Jewish Museum, that we were able to incorporate an underlying Jewish thread to all of your experiences.
MEYER: I think that there is no question that Judaism’s underlying principles and ethics were part of my parents and part of me. When you look at ACLU, which of course has been the passion of my life, it has essentially been Jewishly driven. When you consider all of the issues involved.