Stephanie K. Seymour
October 6, 2006; April 24, 2007; February 27, 2008
Recommended Transcript of Interview with Stephanie K. Seymour (Oct. 6, 2006; Apr. 24, Citation 2007; Feb. 27, 2008), https://abawtp.law.stanford.edu/exhibits/show/stephanie-k-seymour.
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ABA Senior Lawyers Division
Women Trailblazers in the Law
ORAL HISTORY
of
STEPHANIE K. SEYMOUR
Interviewer: Nancy J. Siegel
Dates of Interviews:
October 6, 2006 April 24, 2007 February 27, 2008 2
3
4
5
6 ORAL HISTORY OF STEPHANIE K. SEYMOUR
7 TAKEN ON BEHALF OF WOMEN TRAIL BLAZERS IN THE LAW,
8 A PROJECT OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION,
9 COMMISSION ON WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION
10
11
12
13 CONDUCTED BY NANCY SIEGEL
14 ON OCTOBER 6, 2006
15 IN TULSA, OKLAHOMA
16
17
18
19 Transcribed by Tina Hale
20
21
22
23 Q. This is the first interview of the oral history of Stephanie K.
2 Seymour, which is being taken on behalf of Women Trail Blazers in the
3 Law, a project of the American Bar Association, Commission on Women in
4 the Profession. It is being conducted by Nancy Siegel on October 6, 2006.
5 Today is October 6th, 2006 and Stephanie Seymour and I are together
6 in her office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Would you please state your name,
7 Stephanie, and tell us when you were born and where?
8 A. Stephanie Kulp Seymour. I was born on October 16, 1940 in
9 Battle Creek, Michigan.
10 Q. And what was it like growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan?
11 A. Battle Creek is a small town. I think it had about 50,000 people at
12 the time. I went to public schools, walked to school, lived in a house in a
13 neighborhood where nobody locked their doors and I guess I had a pretty
14 normal childhood. I was one of four siblings, the second. I had an older
15 brother, Bruce, and a younger brother, John, and a younger sister, Susan.
16 We were all - all of us were born within six years of each other so I spent
17 my whole life growing up with my siblings.
18 Q. What did your parents do? Were they both professionals?
19 A. Neither of my parents went to college. My father was in the - I
20 should say, sort of the housing construction market, which he started at the
21 end of the war. He was - he had polio as a child, had a brace and was not in
22 the service. And at the end of the war, he started building houses. Not
23 personally building, but he contracted to build houses for returning veterans
-2- 1 and became a very successful businessman doing that. Notwithstanding he
2 didn't go to college, he was an extremely well-read person. My mother was
3 born of Italian immigrants in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Bessemer,
4 Michigan, an even smaller town of about 3,000, I think. She moved to Battle
5 Creek to go to nursing school at the hospital and she was a registered nurse.
6 Q. So she completed her work in nursing school and went on
7 professionally as a nurse for how long?
8 A. Yes. I don't remember.
9 Q. Did she work as a nurse throughout your youth?
10 A. No.
11 Q. No?
12 A. I'm not sure if she worked. I don't remember her working at all
13 as a nurse. She was a mom, a busy mom.
14 Q. With six kids?
15 A. No, only four.
16 Q. Four kids, but in six years?
17 A. Four kids in six years, yes.
18 Q. Okay. So what was your life like when you were in elementary
19 school? Do you remember the name of the school that you went to?
20 A. I will.
21 Q. Okay.
22 A. I was a shy, little girl and a very good - I was a goody two shoes.
23 Q. So things haven't changed much?
-3- A. I was a good student. A quiet, good student and I also enjoyed
2 school.
3 Q. When you were in grade school, do you have any remembrances
4 of any special teachers or people that had some important effect on you
5 during your very early school years?
6 A. Not particularly. I had teachers I was very fond of, but no one
7 stands out.
8 Q. And who was your greatest role model during that early time
9 period? Was it one of your family members or one of your teachers?
10 A. I'd say probably my dad because he was so interested in education
11 and interested in his children doing whatever they wanted to as they grew up.
12 He also - he was always very supportive of my schooling. And he also liked
13 to travel a lot so we - because of the seasonal nature of his business, and
14 because we had cold hard winters in Michigan, we would get in the car in the
15 wintertime and take trips. We spent a lot of time in Florida when I was
16 young. My parents would take us out of school and we would go to - I went
17 to elementary schools in the winters in St. Petersburg for a number of years
18 and then we subsequently took three-month car trips in the winter with the
19 four of us. I was home schooled before home schooling was popular. My
20 parents would - we would just take our books. We were all pretty good
21 students - but there were four of us - and we took these trips every winter
22 until I was in junior high school. One year we started in Florida and then we
23 went all the way up the East Coast, stopping all along the way at historical
-4- sites and museums. We went to Washington, D.C. We went to New York
2 City. We went to Boston and went up into Canada, came across Canada to
3 Montreal and Toronto and back to Michigan. Toronto is quite close to
4 Michigan. Another winter, we went to New Orleans where we spent a week
5 or so. We went across Texas, spending time at each place. We went to
6 California and spent about a month in Los Angeles. Then we went to San
7 Francisco, came across the country, went to the Grand Canyon, came back
8 home - all the time doing our school work on the way. So those were - I
9 was in every state except three by the time I went to college and that really, I
10 think, influenced my life.
11 Q. That was exactly my next question. In what ways do you feel that
12 travel with your family to all these different locations influenced your life or
13 encouraged you in some way to pursue an advanced education?
14 A. I - it was just - broadened my horizons, I guess. We spent a lot
15 of time meeting a lot of people on the road and staying in different cities. It
16 gave me a perspective of the country that I certainly wouldn't have had if I
17 had grown up and stayed all in one place the whole time. And then the
18 summer I graduated from high school when I was 1 7, before I went to
19 college, we took- my father wouldn't fly. He was, I guess, afraid of flying
20 - so we drove to New York, took the U.S.S. United States, which was then a
21 huge ocean liner, to Europe and spent three months. He bought a car, bought
22 a European Ford, which wasn't all that big, and we traveled for three months
23 all over Europe.
-5- Q. You were what age at this time?
2 A. I was 17. So I had a brother who was 18. He had finished his
3 first year in college. I had a younger brother who was - must have been
4 about 14 - and a sister who was about 12 at the time. We were all stuffed
5 into this little European Ford with all the luggage on top and we went to all
6 kinds of countries: England, France, Germany, Switzerland.
7 Q. Do you remember having any specific experiences that surprised
8 you or lead you to believe there were differences between the United States
9 and Europe?
10 A. Well, we spent the last month - it was in August and we spent the
11 last month in Paris, and - which was an incredibly interesting experience.
12 My parents were probably tired of by at that time and, because we were old
13 enough, they gave us money to eat dinner out every night. Most of the time,
14 we would just go off and find a place, the four of us. So we spent time in
15 little French bistro kind of restaurants communicating with a lot of people
16 who didn't speak English and ordering strange foods. I remember one time,
17 I ordered Rognon, having no idea what it was. It turned out to be kidneys.
18 So I learned about food and people and places. We went to places in
19 Germany that had been bombed out by the war, for example. I just had a lot
20 of interesting experiences, a lot of sibling experiences.
21 Q. Were these experiences positive?
22 A. Well, mostly, I guess, but you know, we spent a lot of time
23 squabbling over who had to sit in the middle of the back seat.
-6- I Q. And who usually won those arguments?
2 A. Well, we were supposed to rotate, but we would have arguments
3 over whose turn it actually was. I think as a result, I was fairly close with
4 my siblings.
5 Q. When you were with your family, were you able to express
6 yourself as you felt necessary?
7 A. Pretty much. It was - it was a survival necessity.
8 Q. Do you feel that spending so much time with your family during
9 your youth helped to make you a more confident adult?
IO A. Oh, I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did because we - and also
11 because we were out on our own in Paris and, yes, it clearly did.
12 Q. What was your perspective at 17 about how people in Europe
13 perceived Americans?
14 A. It was a great time to be in Europe. Everybody thought we were
15 wonderful. It was just a very open experience.
16 Q. Where did you attend high school?
17 A. Battle Creek Central High School.
18 Q. You began high school at what age?
19 A. I was young because I was born in October and so I was among -
20 and you could start school - you could start kindergarten if you were born
21 before November at that time. So I was among the youngest al ways in my
22 classes. When I graduated high school, I hadn't turned 18 yet until that
23 October. So I guess I started, what, I would have been 13 in ninth grade.
-7- 1 Q. Prior to high school, what school did you attend?
2 A. Junior -- it was called junior high school then.
3 Q. Do you remember anything about junior high?
4 A. Having to take things like home ec while the boys took things like
5 shop back in the days when we were clearly divided up more by sexes in
6 what we did.
7 Q. Did that bother you at the time?
8 A. No, I was - I knew how to knit, I knew how to sew, which I
9 learned from a neighbor of ours so, no, it really didn't.
10 Q. Did you ever have any desire to participate in any traditionally
11 boy activities at that time?
12 A. No, I never had any interest in going to shop. I was a cheerleader
13 in high school, so I was doing very traditional girl things.
14 Q. Do you have any recollection of your uniform for your
15 cheerleading days?
16 A. Battle Creek Bear Cats, blue and white and yellow.
17 Q. And did you enjoy cheerleading?
18 A. Yes. I had a great time.
19 Q. Did you engage in any kind of organized sporting activities during
20 those years?
21 A. There weren't any for girls back then.
22 Q. It was basically boys who played football and basketball?
23 A. Yes. I think we had - we had some swimming. I did some diving
-8- growing up, but it wasn't very organized.
2 Q. During your junior high and high school years, what did you
3 typically do after school? What were your extracurricular activities?
4 A. Oh, we had things like Latin Club and Math Club. I can't even
5 remember what we did. I read a lot of books. I always read a lot.
6 Q. You read, due to your father's fofluence?
7 A. Yes. My mother read a lot of books also.
8 Q. Did you prefer fiction or nonfiction?
9 A. Non - I mean, fiction, I'd say, other than school work.
IO Q. Any favorite books from those years?
11 A. Oh, I read all - the early years, I read all of the books that were
12 a series. Nancy Drew was one of them. There were horse books, THE
13 BLACK STALLION. I don't remember, I just read what was available to read.
14 Q. Who were your childhood heroes?
15 A. I don't know. I don't remember.
16 Q. In what role and at what point in your life did T. V. become part
17 of your day-to-day existence?
18 A. My father was a big gadget man so we probably had the first
19 microwave in town and the first television in town. So I remember watching
20 black and white T. V. It must have been in the 150s, probably early 150s. I
21 don't remember - whenever television came out. I remember Jackie Gleason
22 and Ed Sullivan and all of that early stuff, but we didn't have the broad
23 programming that we have now so I don't remember spending a lot of time
-9- 1 watching television. My mother thought we would all get electrocuted if we
2 sat too close.
3 Q. Did you have any early experiences that made you feel frustrated
4 about the difference in expectations for boys and girls?
5 A. I don't remember any because my father always had the same
6 expectation for his kids, whether it was my brothers or my sister and I - so I
7 got that attitude.
8 Q. Which was?
9 A. Which was I could do whatever I wanted to.
10 Q. Did you have any ideas early on about what you wanted to do with
11 your life and your career?
12 A. I wanted to go to college and I wanted to go to a good college. I
13 didn't want to go to college in Michigan. I wanted to go away to school -
14 and my father encouraged that, which is probably where I got it from and
15 also from traveling. And we had gone East to look at colleges, women's
16 colleges, because back then you couldn't get into Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
17 Amherst, Williams or Dartmouth, any of those schools. So I looked at - at
18 basically the seven sister schools at the encouragement of my dad. It was
19 al ways expected that I would go to college and that I'd probably go to as
20 good a place as I could get into.
21 Q. When did it first occur to you that you wanted to go to law
22 school?
23 A. I was a political science major and I had - my junior year, I had a
-10- Constitutional Law/Political Science course and I found it absolutely
2 fascinating and that's about the time I decided I wanted to go to law school.
3 I sort of had visions of going to work for the federal government in D.C.
4 That was my notion.
5 Q. What is your most significant memory of your life prior to college?
6 A. I can't remember any one significant thing. I think the biggest
7 impact on my life was traveling that we did as a family.
8 Q. How do you think that broadened your perspective?
9 A. It just made me see the world as a big place with lots going on in
IO it and it made me realize that I didn't want to spend my life in Battle Creek,
11 Michigan.
12 Q. Did you have any dreams about where you might end up?
13 A. Not really. I spent a lot of summers in - as part of my childhood
14 - in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We visited my grandparents every
15 summer, so that was even a smaller town. I have a huge - my mother is one
16 of eight children and I have thirty-two first cousins, the majority of whom
17 lived in Bessemer, Michigan. So I spent a lot of time with a lot of Italian
18 cousins growing up.
19 Q. Did you get together with your extended family often during your
20 youth?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. What type of activities did you engage in during family
23 gatherings?
-11- A. Climbed the bluffs in Bessemer and waded in Lake Superior and
2 just did the kind of things that kids do. Ate big Italian meals my
3 grandmother cooked.
4 Q. Did you have any family traditions?
5 A. Well, Christmas and Thanksgiving were always a big tradition in
6 our house and, as a result, still are in my own family. I think that's
7 basically it.
8 Q. Did you ever participate in - in preparing the meals or helping,
9 organize the activities for the family?
10 A. Everybody did. We didn't get an allowance. I earned an
11 allowance. I earned so much per week doing jobs, and we all participated.
12 So I spent my whole growing up helping out in the kitchen, including
13 cooking.
14 Q. At what age did you begin to receive money for chores?
15 A. Fairly early, I think. We were all expected to make our bed and
16 pick up our stuff and pick up our toys.
17 Q. What were the value for those services back then?
18 A. I have no memory, but it wasn't very much. But then for a nickel
19 you could buy a lot more than you could buy now. I can remember when I
20 was in high school that a hamburger, french fries and a Coke were 26 cents.
21 And we didn't have McDonald's. That was a long time ago.
22 Q. Tell us a little bit about your religious background. How were
23 you raised?
-12- 1 A. My mother was Catholic. My father was Agnostic. So I was
2 raised as a Catholic, but I had a healthy dose of cynicism, I guess, from my
3 father.
4 Q. Did you have family discussions about religion?
5 A. My mother was a pretty strong Catholic, but the conversations
6 didn't occur in her presence.
7 Q. Did you or your siblings discuss religion separately with your
8 father?
9 A. No, with all the kids. His - I guess I should talk a little bit about
10 his family. My grandfather, his father, was actually a lawyer and a judge so
11 I had - and my father didn't go to college because he broke his l.eg in the
12 ninth grade and spent a lot of time out of school and then just as he went
13 back, he got polio, which was a big thing back then, and I guess he was
14 quite sick for quite some time. He couldn't join the military, so during the
15 war, he ran around the country with a friend, putting on - putting together
16 entertainment for military bases. He was 3 7 when he married my mother and
17 I think she was in her 30s. My grandfather, which is probably why my father
18 was an Agnostic, my grandfather was a Socialist in his early days and
19 actually ran on a Socialist ticket in Battle Creek for City Council. I have
20 some old newspaper clippings. I didn't know this at the time, but I've
21 discovered recently because I have a sister-in-law who did a lot of genealogy
22 work, that my grandfather's father was a Fundamentalist minister from
23 Pennsylvania.
-13- 1 Q. So your family's religious beliefs ranged from Fundamentalism to
2 Socialism to Agnosticism?
3 A. Yes. it made for an interesting upbringing.
4 Q. Did your father encourage you to be an agnostic or to question
5 things in the same way or did he encourage you to come to your own
6 conclusions?
7 A. He always encouraged us - he was such a strong believer in
8 education, he always encouraged us to read about everything. But he was a
9 very strong FDR supporter and always interested in politics, so I grew up
10 with a healthy dose of discussing politics.
11 Q. Did you ever attempt to have any religious conversations with
12 your mother?
13 A. I don't remember. I just remember going to church and Sunday
14 school and learning all about Catholicism and going to Mass in Latin and,
15 you know, that was just part of growing up. I had lots of religious
16 conversations in college, but it was with friends.
17 Q. While you were growing up and while you were still living with
18 your parents, you were a practicing Catholic?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Did your dad participate in any religious rituals?
21 A. Fish on Friday. He would drive us to Sunday School sometimes.
22 Q. But he did not participate in the religious activities?
23 A. No.
-14- Q. Did you and your siblings discuss this?
2 A. Oh, I'm sure we did. I just don't have any specific recollection of
3 that.
4 Q. What was the prevailing religion in your community?
5 A. Protestant, primarily Protestant. There were a few Jewish people,
6 but not very many. I mean, it wa·s really a relatively small Michigan town
7 and there weren't all that many Catholics, primarily Protestants, and I went
8 to public school so ...
9 Q. Was there any diversity in your junior high or high school?
10 A. Yes, we had - I didn't grow up with segregation. I'm sure there
11 was some, but I was a cheerleader on a cheerleading squad that had a - there
12 was a black girl on my squad. The teams were all racially mixed. I dated
13 the quarterback of the football team who was white and he also played on the
14 basketball team and the baseball team. So I did a lot of stuff socializing
15 with the team and went to games. They were all integrated. In fact, the best
16 basketball player was a black fellow. And we had integrated school dances.
17 Q. Were you aware of what was going on in the rest of the country
18 with respect to segregation at the time?
19 A. I was very aware of that because my father was politically
20 interested and so we always talked about that.
21 Q. What was your father's perspective on that? Did he communicate
22 with his children about segregation?
23 A. That everybody was equal and that segregation was bad.
-15- Q. Do you remember watching or reading any of the news stories
2 about what was going on in other parts of the country?
3 A. Well, a lot of what went on was - came in the civil rights
4 movement later on, which was mostly in the '60s. So, yes, I was very much
5 aware of that.
6 Q. So it wasn't as much of a topic of conversation when you were in
7 your high school years because it was just commonly accepted?
8 A. You know, when you grow up in a small town, you're just familiar
9 with what you're familiar with and we didn't have - well, we had started
10 television. It just wasn't like now where you had constant news about things
11 going on in the country. So it was pretty much isolated.
12 Q. When you were traveling all over the country, did you have any
13 experiences that opened your eyes?
14 A. Oh, yes. We stayed in some really - it was shocking to me when
15 we traveled in the South, we stayed - there were all kinds of signs about
16 colored people not allowed there, and the bathrooms were all segregated. So
17 I was very aware of that when we traveled in the South.
18 Q. When - when you saw these kinds of signs in other areas of the
19 country, did you - did you react to that? Did you talk to your parents?
20 A. Yes, we all talked about it. It was very disturbing.
21 Q. Did you ever do anything about that?
22 A. No.
23 Q. No. That was part of the goody two shoe thing?
-16- A. Well, yes, it was just a part of - and it wasn't going on in my
2 town where I grew up so I just remember being shocked the first time we
3 started going to the South.
4 Q. Do you think that those early experiences and exposures to
5 segregation and racism had an effect on you long term?
6 A. Yes, I definitely think it did because I've always been a strong
7 proponent of integration and equality and I'm sure that impacted me.
8 Q. Did it ever occur to you that some of those same concepts about
9 segregation and prejudice might relate to how men and women were treated?
10 A. I don't remember thinking that. My awareness of that probably
11 became clearest when I was thinking about colleges and realized that there
12 were a number of really good colleges in this country that I was not - I
13 couldn't be admitted to because I was female.
14 Q. You started that search when you were in high school?
15 A. Yes, probably. I think we traveled around the summer after my
16 junior year in high school looking at colleges.
17 Q. Judging from what you have shared today, it sounds like your
18 youth was pretty idyllic?
, 19 A. It was very idyllic.
20 Q. What kind of games did you play as children?
21 A. Monopoly. I can remember raging Monopoly games that would go
22 on for days with my siblings. War, I remember the card game, War. We
23 played War, Hearts and just odds and ends, but Monopoly was the family
-17- 1 favorite.
2 Q. In spite of the fact that you had some technology in your home, in
3 the form of television, that was never the focus of your family life?
4 A. No.
5 Q. You always found other activities to engage in around the
6 neighborhood or board games?
7 A. Yes, kick the can, hide and seek, all those fun games. I spent a lot
8 of time when the weather was nice outside playing with the neighborhood
9 kids and just generally running around.
10 Q. Have you maintained friendships with any of the kids that you
11 grew up with?
12 A. From high school, not really. Not this long. I had a close friend
13 who moved to New York. Her father actually was superintendent of the
14 Battle Creek Public Schools. She moved away when - about probably junior
15 high, and I went to visit her. She lived in Syracuse. I went to visit her a
16 number of times. We stayed in touch through college and law school and
17 then we sort of - she called me a couple of years ago out of the blue, tracked
18 me down and we chatted. But, no, I basically - you know, we just scattered.
19 I went so far away to school and made friends in college and law school.
20 Q. Did all of your siblings end up going to college?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. And did most of them go beyond that?
23 A. Two of them did. My older brother is a lawyer. He went to the
-18- University of Michigan Law School. He stayed in Michigan and practiced.
2 He was with the General Counsel's office at Ford. My younger brother went
3 - eventually after a shaky start, he went to Georgetown and then got an MBA
4 at Harvard. But he was basically a very bright goof-off until he went in the
5 Army.
6 Q. At what age did you have your first bank account?
7 A. Pretty early because we were earning money. I was earning my
8 weekly allowance by doing stuff and we were encouraged to save.
9 Q. Were you a saver or a spender?
10 A. I was a saver and my family was - even though we took these
11 trips, we weren't - my family weren't big spenders.
12 Q. When you did spend your money, what kinds of things do you
13 remember buying?
14 A. Books and when I was in high school, clothes.
15 Q. What was all the rage in fashion when you were in high school?
16 A. Oh, good grief, poodle skirts, pedal pushers.
17 Q. And did you, Stephanie K. Seymour, wear poodle skirts and pedal
18 pushers?
19 A. Of course.
20 Q. I just wanted to get that admission on the record. What about
21 your boyfriends in high school, have you maintained friendships with them
22 over the years?
23 A. I only had one.
-19- 1 Q. What was his name?
2 A. Gordon Hjortis.
3 Q. And what happened to Gordon Hjortis?
4 A. He went to Michigan State - I think he played baseball for them,
5 graduated. I went off to college far away and we dated in the summers for a
6 couple of years and then I haven't seen him since.
7 Q. Before we move on to your college years, is there just anything
8 that, you know, stands out in your mind about high school that you thought
9 was particularly significant? Any teachers there that really you have a
10 strong recollection of?
11 A. Not by name, but I remember an English teacher who was terrific
12 and so we read all kinds of stuff. It was a pretty good high school. It was a
13 public high school, but it was back in the days when that's all there was, so
14 everybody went there. Well, there was a Catholic high school, but -
15 Q. How many kids were in your high school?
16 A. I think about 300 in my graduating class.
17 Q. Was there a diverse mix of students?
18 A. There was - there was diversity. I don't remember - I don't
19 remember Asians or Hispanics. I remember African American kids and I
20 don't know what the percentage was. Probably not more than 15 percent, but
21 as I said, I was - you know, I knew a lot of them pretty well because of my
22 involvement in sports.
23 Q. Did you ever participate in any musical theater or productions?
-20- A. No, not my personality.
2 Q. Did you enjoy going to the movies at all during that time?
3 A. Sure. My father was a big movie goer. We used to go to movies
4 all the time, which my mother loved. She never went because it gave her -
5 he would take the four kids Sunday afternoon and we would go to the movies
6 often because he enjoyed them and she enjoyed the peace and quiet.
7 Q. What was your favorite movie growing up?
8 A. Gads, I have no recollection.
9 Q. Tell us about the process you went through, and the experiences
10 that you had, in determining where you were going to go to college?
11 A. As I said, I didn't want to go in Michigan and I was encouraged to
12 go elsewhere, and I really only looked at Eastern schools. So I looked at
13 Radcliffe and Smith and Wellesley. I think those are the only ones I visited.
14 I can't remember if I applied to any others, but I loved Smith College, which
15 is in the western part of Massachusetts, when I visited it.
16 (Break for lunch.)
17 Q. (By Ms. Siegel) When we took a break, you were telling us about
18 your love for Smith College. Why did you feel that way?
19 A. It was beautiful. Those - it had a beautiful campus with a lot of
20 old New England style houses on it and it was just a beautiful place with a
21 fabulous educational program. Had a lake in the middle of campus, and I
22 stayed in a dorm on a visit and just really liked the girls who went there. So
23 by the time I finished my visit, that's where I wanted to go.
-21- 1 Q. What was the application process, do you remember any of that?
2 A. No.
3 Q. You obviously applied and were accepted?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. You began college when?
6 A. Fall of '58.
7 Q. What do you recall about starting college?
8 A. It was just very different because it was all girls for one thing.
9 Q. How did you get there? Did your parents drive you in the car?
10 A. My parents drove me there.
11 Q. Did you live in a dorm?
12 A. I lived in a dorm. You were assigned dorms and most of the
13 dorms actually were those old houses. But there was the quad, which was - I
14 don't remember when it was built, but it was a quadrangle of dorms. They
15 were four stories tall and I was assigned to one of those. I lived in Franklin
16 King House. They were houses because we - they were called houses
17 because it was traditional in, I think all of these colleges, that you would eat,
18 ~ you would have - you had food in your house and you had a house mother. I
19 don't remember how many girls were in the dorm. We were mixed up all
20 ages, freshman to senior. And it was just - it was a living experience all by
21 itself which I guess was another thing that made me like this kind of college
22 as opposed to a bigger university. So even though these were the newer,
23 more modern dorms, they were run very much like the old houses in that
-22- 1 they each were a unit and each had a house mother and you spent all of your
2 time there.
3 Q. I failed to ask this earlier, so just step back for a minute. When
4 you were growing up, did you always have family meals, dinner time?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. What did you discuss during those meals?
7 A. That's when we had our political discussions and our, you know,
8 topics, wide-ranging discussions.
9 Q. When you started college, did you continue that tradition with
10 some of your college friends?
11 A. Yes. I think the typical young women who went to the women's
12 colleges in those days were very, very good students, very bright girls, most
13 of them not shy and retiring and so there were always active conversations
14 about everything going on all the time, which I really liked.
15 Q. What was the topic of the day when you first started college?
16 A. I don't remember exactly, but it was - you know, we were
17 beginning to move into the Civil Rights Movement era and so just a lot of
18 conversations about all kinds of issues. And then I remember being -
19 feeling really kind of overwhelmed when I started classes because a lot of
20 the kids who went there had gone to private schools on the East Coast, so it
21 seemed very formidable to me, classes did at the beginning, because of a lot
22 of these young women had a different kind of training than I had had. But it
23 was my experience that by the end of the year, most of the public school kids
-23- 1 had caught up in terms of ability to compete. Classes were small and
2 professors were terrific and it was just an intellectually stimulating
3 experience all four years. But I just remember the freshman year being so
4 new and different for a kid from a small town and I - I think my classes -
5 classes there were about 600 each class, so there were 600 freshmen.
6 It was traditional to have a bicycle. Nobody had cars back then and it
7 was also traditional if you didn't have a lot of money to spend on a new
8 bicycle to buy one. Seniors leaving either left their bicycles there or sold
9 them to an outfit or group that then resold them. So I remember just buying
IO an old bicycle that I used on campus for four years. You either walked or we
11 would - the quad was at the far end of the campus, so I usually rode my bike
12 to get to classes.
13 Q. Did you have a car during college?
14 A. No, my parents never gave me a car.
15 Q. And so the first mode of transportation that you personally owned
16 was a bicycle?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. And did you ride that throughout your college years?
19 A. Uh-huh. Rode the same piece of junk throughout my four years.
20 We did spend a lot of time walking. You know, once you got to the main
21 part of the campus you parked your bike and walked to the classes.
22 Q. Were you required to pick out a major when you started college?
23 A. No, it was a liberal arts school. We had a broad range of
-24- 1 categories that we had to take classes in and you didn't really pick a major
2 until the end of your sophomore year.
3 Q. What were your favorite classes in the early years of college?
4 A. I loved the English courses. I loved the government courses. I
5 loved the history courses. I used to think I was pretty good in math until I
6 took calculus in college and then I decided that maybe I wasn't all that great
7 and I was not going to pursue any math career. I took a classics course,
8 classic literature. Just a lot of great - even the gym classes were interesting
9 and I was a coxswain on the crew team. I took sword fighting. You know,
10 what do you call it? I'm sure it had a fancier name than that - fencing. Just
11 all kinds of fun things.
12 Q. Did you have any coordinated activities with any of the male
13 universities?
14 A. Oh, yes. We had mixers off the bat and a lot of interchange with
15 the guys from Amherst, mostly Amherst and Yale. They would bus the boys
16 in for mixers and then, of course, we started dating. I dated guys at Amherst
17 - Yale and Amherst mostly, because they were close.
18 Q. How did dating fit into your day-to-day school?
19 A. It didn't, it fit into the weekends. We had strict rules about
20 everything and I don't remember what our curfew was on the weekend, but it
21 -I don't think it was past 11:00.
22 Q. Did you have any clothing restrictions that - when you were
23 attending college?
-25- 1 A. No.
2 Q. Uniforms?
3 A. No, we didn't wear uniforms.
4 Q. Was there sort of an outfit that was more or less your uniform?
5 A. Just preppy. That was back in the preppy days.
6 Q. Among your friends in college, what were their aspirations that
7 you recall?
8 A. My closest friend in college became a doctor and she was always
9 - she was from St. Louis, Christy Saller, and she always wanted to be a
10 doctor so she was taking all the science and math kinds of courses. But I
11 had friends interested in all kinds of things. I think a lot of them - a greater
12 percentage of women went to law school, med school, got advanced degrees.
13 I mean, some of them got married, but a lot of people there were interested
14 in going beyond college, going to graduate school.
15 Q. Tell us about the progression of your years, freshman through
16 senior year in college.
17 A. Well, I came home. I can tell you about my summer jobs.
18 Q. Did you have any jobs?
19 A. I didn't have jobs while I was in school, but I had jobs in the
20 summertime. I waitressed. My greatest job, however, was working for
21 Kellogg's. Battle Creek is a big cereal city. I worked for Kellogg's on the
22 midnight to 6:00 a.m. shift. The women had six-hour shifts and the men had
23 eight-hour shifts.
-26- Q. When was this?
2 A. This was in probably the summer of '59, probably that was the
3 first summer I did that. And it was a great job because I got $1.81 an hour
4 when the minimum wage was a $1. So it was a really big deal. It was crazy.
5 You worked midnight to 6:00, but - and we were only permitted to work ten
6 weeks because ·the Union didn't want these college kids. After you worked
7 there ten weeks, you had to join the Union and they didn't want college kids.
8 So it was a ten-week stint.
9 Q. Tell us about that experience at Kellogg's.
10 A. It was interesting to find out - well, I found out I didn't want that
11 kind of a life working on a shift, a factory. I worked a lot on the Raisin Bran
12 line.
13 Q. Do they really count the raisins?
14 A. No, but I ate a lot of raisins. In fact, I used to love raisins. For a
15 long time, I couldn't eat a raisin after that job. We weren't allowed to do the
16 big deal Unionjobs,which the full-time women did. There were definitely
17 women's jobs and men's jobs. But the women regularly packed - they
18 would stand at the end of the line and take the big boxes of cereal and pack
19 them into cartons. We rotated between sweeping up - half an hour of
20 sweeping up, keeping the floors clean or working up on the raisin hopper.
21 And so I would sit up there. The raisins came along a conveyor belt in a big
22 box, the honey-coated raisins, and the job of the person up there was to take
23 these off the conveyer belt or at the end of the conveyor and just dump them
-27- I into the raisin hopper, which then fed the raisins down into the boxes. I
2 would fill the raisin hopper, which is quite large and V-shaped. I would fill
3 it full, heaping full, and then I would sit on the floor and play solitaire until
4 I figured the last raisins were running out and then I would fill it up again.
5 So that was my exciting job.
6 Q. What did your co-workers think of that method of filling the
7 hopper with the raisins?
8 A. Oh, they thought it was great. And the one - my one interesting
9 experience was - there was a week when the Union employees were taking
IO vacations and they would have - my particular week, they would have the
11 college kids fill in. And so we got - I think there were four of us assigned to
12 - we had our own little room, which was kind of neat, and our own conveyor
13 belt and we actually got to pack the cartons. We were packing the small
14 sized boxes for restaurants, so you'd stand around the conveyor belt and put
15 in ten Raisin Bran boxes and ten Corn Flakes and ten Frosted Flakes, and
16 that kind of thing. We did that the first day, really just sort of fumbling
17 along figuring out what we were doing. We had a quota. By the end of the
18 first day, it got kind of boring. So the second day, I said, "Let's see how
19 fast we can fill our quota." And so we worked really fast because we had
20 control over it. It was a separate little area and we had control over the
21 timing of this whole thing. We worked really fast and filled our quota
22 actually a couple of hours early. So we sat on the floor and played cards
23 with my deck that I always had for solitaire purposes and a supervisor came
-28- 1 in and had a fit because the quota was set for people who had to work there
2 all the time. As our punishment, our quota got raised to 150 percent and we
3 had to work really hard the rest of the week.
4 Q. They didn't want you to make it any easier there - you had to fill
5 the time up correctly?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. What did that experience teach you?
8 A. It taught me to follow the rules at your place of employment and
9 not muddy up the waters. I think generally it basically taught me that I
10 didn't - I didn't want - I wanted to be a professional of some kind. I didn't
11 want to work in a factory, which I probably knew anyway, but that solidified
12 that.
13 Q. Was that the only summer that you worked at the cereal factory?
14 A. I think I worked there two summers.
15 Q. Did you have any other interesting experiences in your second
16 summer?
17 A. Not - no, not any that I can remember. I mean, it was just - you
18 know, you worked. We took our breaks.
19 Q. When you were in your early years of college, did you do any
20 traveling?
21 A. I'm sure we did. I just can't remember specifically. You mean in
22 the summertimes?
23 Q. Did you have time to travel on the weekends?
-29- 1 A. Oh, only to boys' schools.
2 Q. That was as far as you traveled?
3 A. Uh-huh.
4 Q. What was your philosophy on dating during those six years?
5 A. I suppose any 19-, 20-year-old, you know, woman's philosophy on
6 dating, it was fun.
7 Q. Did you have a boyfriend in college?
8 A. I had a couple of different boyfriends that I dated for a period of
9 time, but nobody serious.
10 Q. Did you go to school with any women whose objective was to find
11 someone to marry?
12 A. Oh, I'm sure.
13 Q. Did they talk about that?
14 A. Yeah. I mean, we all talked about all kinds of things, but, yes,
15 there were women. I don't know if they talked specifically about that, but
16 there were women who early on had serious relationships. Some of them got
17 married and dropped out; although not too many. And some of them married
18 at the end of their four years.
19 Q. Did it ever occur to you that you might marry during your college
20 years?
21 A. I never really thought about it because I never found anybody I
22 wanted to marry, but - certainly after I - in my junior year when I decided I
23 wanted to go to law school, I think the answer to that was probably no, I
-30- 1 wanted to go to law school. So ...
2 Q. You wanted to finish your schooling first?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. After you had the experience of applying to colleges and you had
5 your eyes opened about the fact that there were places that did not admit
6 women, did that change your attitude or the way you interacted with the
7 world?
8 A. Well, it certainly changed my attitude about - it was - I was
9 beginning to think things should be changed in terms of opportunities for
10 women because there just simply weren't the same opportunities,that the
11 guys had. So I didn't know when I applied to law schools what would
12 happen in terms of getting in. But as it turned out, the - there was beginning
13 to be a push on the law schools to admit women and so I didn't have any
14 trouble getting in, but there certainly weren't very many women applying.
15 That probably helped me, actually.
16 Q. Did any of your college classmates gain notoriety, positive or
17 negative, or become famous?
18 A. I don't - I'm sure, but I don't know. I can't remember.
19 Q. Tell us about your junior and senior years in college.
20 A. I probably matured a lot over that period of time and gained a lot
21 of confidence in myself, which - you know, I've thought back about that,
22 which I may possibly not have gotten if I had gone to a coed school because
23 I was at a place where women really were - you know, we ran the place.
-31- 1 We had some male professors, but other than that, we were all women in
2 class and so there was no kind of implicit pressure not to compete with guys
3 if we'd had guys in class. And so everybody was just very open and
4 outgoing and not worried about speaking out in class and I think that was
5 really helpful. It was helpful to me because, as I said, I was a shy kid
6 growing up and I lost a great deal of that shyness there.
7 Q. Did you go home every summer between your college years?
8 A. I did.
9 Q. Two summers you worked at the cereal plant?
10 A. I think the first summer, I - no, I think I waitressed the first
11 summer after my freshman year. And after my junior year, I was in the
12 honors program and had a thesis to write.
13 I went to New York City and worked in the New York Public Housing
14 Authority. I was writing - I can't even remember how I got the idea for this
15 thesis, but I had a Ford Foundation Grant to work there. I had a grant from
16 the Ford Foundation to do a thesis on public housing and so I was ensconced
17 in the New York Public Housing Authority in downtown - lower downtown
18 New York. I lived in Greenwich Village. That was a fun experience.
19 Q. What was the premise of your thesis?
20 A. I was doing a study of a housing project in Waterbury,
21 Connecticut that had basically folded. People didn't want to live there and I
22 was doing a study to sort of figure out why. So it must have been something
23 somebody wanted done. I'm sure I didn't think of that by myself because I
-32- 1 didn't know Waterbury, Connecticut from a hole in the wall before I started
2 going there.
3 Q. That had to be in about 1960?
4 A. It would have been the summer - I graduated in '62, so I guess it
5 would have been the summer of '61.
6 · Q. There was a lot going on in the country at that time?
7 A. Yes, there was, but New York - I mean, I'm sure my mother was
8 scared to death, but, you know, the world was my oyster at that time. I
9 lived in an apartment building and I had a couple of roommates from Smith.
10 We had a great time. I mean, I remember running all over New York in the
11 subway and not worrying about anything.
12 Q. What kind of things did you do when you were living in New
13 York?
14 A. Dated, went out, went to museums.
15 Q. Did you go to the theater?
16 A. Went to the theater. I had been to the theater before because when
17 we took a trip with my parents - it must have been junior high, I first did
18 that - because that was the last time I would take off all winter from school.
19 I remember going to the theater in New York then. I'd been to New York a
20 couple of times since then with my parents and had been to the theater. So,
21 yes, I just did all kinds of things and spent a lot of time working on my
22 thesis and spent a lot of time in Waterbury, Connecticut talking to people
23 about the housing project.
-33- Q. What did you learn from that experience in terms of finishing your
2 thesis? What did you learn from the work that you did?
3 A. It was an interesting place that they had built this - using federal
4 money - had built this public housing project up at the top of a hill in this
5 town and away from the grocery stores. Waterbury was a very ethnic place.
6 It had a lot of little communities of probably Italians and Polish people - just
7 a different combination of ethnic groups. The public housing place was built
8 for low income people. Nobody wanted to move in it because it would be
9 away from their own little ethnic community and their grocery stores. It was
10 up a really steep road and in the wintertime, it got very icy so you couldn't
11 even get cars up and down the road. I mean, there was just a whole - it was
12 debacle of a project and I guess it was probably the New York Public
13 Housing Authority that wanted this study done. So I just basically talked to
14 a lot of people and wrote my thesis on how stupid it was to put a public
15 housing project up on top of a hill away from the communities from which
16 they wanted to draw the people.
17 Q. What effect, if any, do you think that experience and that study
18 had on your political views?
19 A. My political views were pretty well formed before I went to
20 college, so it probably reinforced them.
21 Q. How did you perceive yourself politically before you went to
22 college?
23 A. A fairly liberal Democrat, but that was in the day when it was a
-34- 1 good thing to be a liberal Democrat. I remember being in college where we
2 had all kinds of political discussions all the time and I remember a young
3 woman who lived in my house who was a couple of years behind me and was
4 a member of the Young Republicans, or whatever it was called back in those
5 days, and she was pretty conservative. I remember feeling sorry for her,
6 thinking how far out of the main stream of political thought she was. I have
7 thought about that a number of times since, thinking she probably is right in
8 the middle of political thought these days and I'm out of the mainstream.
9 But back then, you know, I was living in Massachusetts and I grew up in
10 Michigan, which at the time was a pretty liberal place, very union oriented
11 and so most people thought like I did. Most of my classmates felt like I did.
12 So it was not like I was inventing the wheel in terms of politics.
13 Q. What impact did the women's movement have on your college
14 years, if any?
15 A. I can't really remember when the women's movement started. It
16 really was - it didn't really get geared up until after that. The Civil Rights
17 Act wasn't passed until '64, while I was in law school. So the big push to
18 change - to change the laws with respect to sex discrimination was in the
19 very early stages then. I think Gloria - I can't remember when books were
20 written - Gloria Steinem, who graduated from Smith, was a big feminist and
21 she was probably starting on some of those. THE FEMININE MYSTIC and
22 some of those books were probably starting to be written. And, of course,
23 there were a lot of conversations among the - my classmates - about those
-35- 1 boy schools where we couldn't get in.
2 Q. What do you remember about those conversations?
3 A. I just remember general discussions about how unfair it was that -
4 you know, we thought we were at a pretty good school and we thought we
5 were certainly as smart as the guys who were at Yale and Harvard and
6 Princeton. In fact, we knew we were. We dated them. We were smarter
7 than some of them, a lot of them. And so from our perspective, there was
8 absolutely no reason why we couldn't do whatever we wanted to or have
9 whatever job we wanted to. It was just a question of how to get there.
10 Q. When you were growing up - and this is sort of a little off the
11 topic, but when you were traveling to Europe and - into your college years,
12 what was your experience with alcohol?
13 A. I didn't have alcohol - I didn't drink at all in high school. In fact,
14 not very many of my classmates did. I remember knowing the guys on the
15 sports team would go out and drink beer and whatever else they drank. But I
16 never did and I really had my first - my parents, when they had friends over,
17 would have a cocktail. But other than that, we weren't - I never had
18 anything. I think when I was - probably when I was in France, I probably
19 had - in fact I remember going to dinner and my father ordering wine and us
20 getting some. That was the first time I ever had any alcohol. Then when I
21 went to college, North Hampton, Massachusetts was really not a very big
22 town and there was not that much to do on the weekends if you weren't
23 going to a guy's school to have a party in a fraternity house. We didn't have
-36- 1 sororities so there wasn't any of that. We went to the local hangout, which
2 was called Rahars, as I recall, and I used to have gin and tonics. I do
3 remember having a professor - I think it was a political science professor -
4 who would have us over for dinner, have a group from the class over for
5 dinner. I remember having a martini at one of those. I was also a short
6 hitter. And at college, you know, they had alcohol at fraternity parties.
7 Q. It was not something that was a big focus?
8 A. Mostly kegs of beer and I hated beer then and still hate beer. So I
9 was not drinking a lot of beer.
10 Q. Was there any single experience that you had when you were in
11 college that you recall as an incredible motivator?
12 A. My whole college experience was an incredible motivator to me
13 because I really enjoyed learning and I had an interest in politics before I
14 went there. Majoring in government, I really learned a lot about how the
15 system works and as I said, I got interested in going to law school. Just
16 knowing that there were all of these smart women out there who were going
17 to go out in the world and not have the same opportunities as men, that
18 motivated me.
19 Q. When did you come to the conclusion or start to believe that your
20 job opportunities might be different?
21 A. Well, I think that they were beginning - I don't remember time
22 frames. I'm sure we talked about that and, as I said, I didn't know about
23 what my chances were of getting into law school because I knew that the
-37- places I was applying to were overwhelmingly male. So I just didn't have a
2 sense of that until I got in and got there. Then I think I really began to
3 realize that things were beginning to change because I found out after I got
4 there that they were really looking for women and not finding very many
5 who were interested in law school back then. That was pretty early.
6 Q. Did you believe that you and your friends were in a minority with
7 respect to what other women of the same age were doing at that time?
8 A. Yes, absolutely. I think it was because I was at a women's college
9 and we were so focused on the fact that we were doing what we thought were
10 great things in classes and that we were smart - I just think it focused us
11 differently.
12 Q. On the subject of attending an all female school, do you believe
13 that was helpful in focusing on school work? Did you spend time getting
14 dressed in the morning or did you roll out of bed and go straight to class?
15 A. We rolled out of bed, didn't worry about makeup, didn't worry
16 about hair, and didn't worry about how we looked except on the weekends,
17 and that was great.
18 Q. You feel like that made a difference in your experience?
19 A. Yes. I mean, there were no guys there. We were never dressing
20 for guys. We were never doing anything for guys during the week because
21 we had to - I mean, I guess we could have gone out if there was anybody
22 available, but there wasn't. Nobody dated anybody in town so - and if we
23 had gone out during the week, we would have to have been in by 10:30. So
-38- 1 we just - the week was all focused on the girls and girlfriends and doing
2 things on campus.
3 Q. Did you have time for anything other than attending classes and
4 studying during the week?
5 A. Oh, yes. We played cards and I knitted lots of sweaters.
6 Q. What kind of meals did you eat when you were living at the dorm?
7 A. We had great meals. We had a cook. Every house had a cook.
8 We had to help in the kitchen. We all had jobs. They weren't paying jobs,
9 but they were all part of living - it was like living in a house. You did
10 certain things you had to do and we took turns doing the dishes. There
11 wasn't anybody doing dishes but the girls who were living there, and setting
12 the tables. We rotated doing that, but we had regular breakfast, lunch and
13 dinner in the dorm. We always went back - there weren't places on campus
14 like there are now where you can get food - you went back to your dorm and
15 ate.
16 Q. So you had a central cafeteria?
17 A. No, each house had its own kitchen and cook. So we ate in our
18 houses at dining tables. We took turns serving.
19 Q. Did you ever interact with any of the other houses?
20 A. Yes. There would be various kinds of exchanges. There was also
21 a lot going on on campus. There were speakers and organized get-togethers
22 for this and that and the other. And there would be house - sometimes we
23 would trade places with another house and go over there and have dinner.
-39- 1 And once you had friends in other houses that you met through your classes,
2 you could always invite people to your house for dinner. So, yes, there was
3 a lot of interchange.
4 Q. What was your religious experience like, if any, during your
5 college years?
6 A. I went to church fairly regularly. My good friend, Christy, was
7 Catholic and so we went to a little church - I was back there fairly recently -
8 St. Mary's, which I wouldn't have remembered if I hadn't just seen it
9 recently. It was a beautiful little church so we walked to church on Sundays.
10 But then we started having conversations about - I took a comparative
11 religion course and -
12 Q. What grade?
13 A. Probably second year -
14 Q. Second year, meaning sophomore?
15 A. Yes. It was one of the broad, you know, we took a bunch of
16 different courses in different areas. And there was a girl in my house in my
17 class from Kansas City. Her name was Josie. I don't remember her last
18 name. She was a Unitarian. I had never heard what a Unitarian was until I
19 met her and she was extremely outspoken on all subjects, but in particular,
20 religion. So there were a lot of raging conversations. And there were Jewish
21 - I met Jewish kids because there were Jewish girls in my house. And so
22 there were a lot of conversations about religion, and that was the first time I
23 really tuned in to the fact there are a lot of religions in this world.
-40- 1 And after I took my comparative religion course and learned about
2 Judaism and Buddhism and Islam, then I became aware of the fact that there
3 are, and have been historically, great religions other than Christianity.
4 Certainly other than Catholicism. And since I was raised to be skeptical
5 about things by my father, I just began to question, you know, why is one
6 better than another or why should any of them think it's better than another.
7 And that's when I became - and I - and my friend, Christy, was doing about
8 the same. We were all involved in the same conversations about all of this.
9 So I would say probably after my second year in college, I quit going
10 regularly to church.
11 Q. When you say that you had a healthy skepticism, what - was there
12 any particular focus of the skepticism? Was it about God, was it about some
13 other aspect of the religion?
14 A. It was mostly- it wasn't really about God. It was mostly
15 questioning organized religion and why any one of them, and the one I was
16 raised in, thought - I mean, I was raised in Sunday School and church to
17 believe that Catholicism was the only true religion. And the skepticism went
18 to the fact that, you know, why? So it was just a mind-opening experience.
19 Q. How did the childhood discussions you had with your father about
20 religion influence your religious perspective in college?
21 A. I'm sure it affected my attitude. I mean, that's what gave me my
22 skepticism. I've always been sort of - I mean, I'm pretty gullible in a lot of
23 respects, but I also have a healthy belief in open communication about all
-41- 1 kinds of subjects, which I got from my dad. So once I got some education
2 on the subject in general of religions, world religions, I just started - it
3 made me think. All these groups in this - in the world and they all believe
4 their religion is the only true religion, there's something wrong with this
5 picture.
6 Q. How did you reconcile what is taught in the Catholic religion
7 about what kind of figure God is with your skeptical side?
8 A. When I was growing up, I didn't really think about that. I mean,
9 my Catholic education was not a questioning one. It was more a learning of
10 what the doctrine was and going to church and - and there weren't great
11 sermons in my Catholic church. It was all in Latin at the time, which I
12 actually kind of liked. I liked the ritual. I found it very calming to sit in
13 church and - but I didn't find it thought provoking at all. So - and since
14 there was this schism in my own family growing up and since my parents
15 didn't talk to each other in front of us about this subject, I'm not sure they
16 talked about it, period. My father was a nonbeliever and my mother was a
17 believer and she went to church and he didn't, but there weren't - I think it's
18 because they were so different, we just didn't - and it might have caused
19 uproar if we'd had conversations. We just didn't have them.
20 Q. What was your understanding about what your father did not
21 believe in and what your mother did believe in?
22 A. Well, my father, as I said, he really wasn't an Atheist. He was
23 Agnostic. He would just question. You know, question and he probably -
-42- 1 you know, I just don't remember specifically, but he probably first raised the
2 questions in my mind about why is Catholicism necessarily right and
3 something else is necessarily wrong, but we didn't - I don't remember a lot
4 of conversations about it.
5 Q. When is your first recollection of questioning the existence of
6 heaven and hell? Did you believe that to exist at some point in your life?
7 A. Oh, probably when I was younger, but by the time I got to high
8 school, I just didn't think in those terms. You know, I'm not sure most kids
9 do actually. I was growing up thinking about other things, going to church,
10 sitting there, going home and forgetting about it.
11 Q. Did you have spirited conversations with your friends at college
12 about religion?
13 A. Oh, yes.
14 Q. Were there any inhibitions or hesitancy to engage in those kind of
15 conversations with your friends?
16 A. Nope.
17 Q. Do you feel like that has changed over the years? That it's a more
18 sensitive subject now?
19 A. I think in this part of the world, it is. Maybe - I mean, lots of
20 parts of the world, but yes, I don't go out in a normal group of people and
21 raise religion.
22 Q. Did you make any decisions that you can remember about how if
23 you had kids, you would raise them from a religious perspective?
-43- A. Not until I had kids because I didn't really have to - I didn't have
2 to think about it. I mean, basically from the time I quit going to church my
3 sophomore year in college until I started going again after I was married and
4 had kids, I didn't think about it. Religion wasn't as big a focus of this
5 country during that period of time as it is now. In fact, it wasn't a big focus
6 at all. The Civil Rights Movement intervened.
7 Q. There had to have been rumblings about that even during the time
8 that you were in college?
9 A. What, civil rights?
10 Q. Yes.
11 A. Oh, yes. Yes, there were.
12 Q. How did that evidence itself in the area where you attended
13 school?
14 A. North Hampton, Massachusetts did not have a large minority
15 community that I recall. It had a blue collar community, in part, and I
16 remember picketing the local - with a group of Smith College girls -
17 picketing the local fancy hotel because it was nonunion. I grew up to be a
18 big union supporter - growing up in Michigan. So my father was always -
19 and that was a pretty big Democratic thing to be, especially in Michigan. So
20
21 Q. After your experience at the cereal factory, did you still have the
22 same strong feelings?
23 A. Well, I began having a little skepticism about that then, but I still
-44- 1 strongly believed that organized unions helped a lot of workers in this
2 country.
3 Q. Has your opinion about that changed overtime?
4 A. Well, like everything else, you learn a lot more about the real
5 world as you get older. And so I know that's not always - I mean, I've sat
6 on the Court on a lot of cases involving labor issues. It's not so clear-cut.
7 Q. What was your greatest passion in terms of an ideal during
8 college?
9 A. I'd say justice .. I've always been a big supporter of equality and
10 justice and offended by slights to anybody for a biased kind of reason.
11 That's just the way I was raised and that was always the way I thought.
12 Q. Are there specific experiences where you observed something that
13 was really unfair that molded your thinking?
14 A. Well, my trips to the South when I was young. I don't really
15 remember in college anything. We argued about so many things in college.
16 You know, conversations about all kinds of issues that I don't remember.
17 I'm sure that was the beginning of it. In fact, I know it was the beginning of
18 the Civil Rights Movement in the South and so there were a lot of
19 conversations about that. But it would just reinforce what I had thought
20 growing up.
21 Q. About right and wrong?
22 A. About right and wrong, about racism and how bad that was. And
23 as a Catholic, as an Italian Catholic, at the time, I experienced - and
-45- 1 certainly later as a female - I experienced some discrimination because
2 Catholicism isn't always accepted everywhere as even a correct part of
3 Christianity.
4 Q. Did that come as a surprise to you?
5 A. Of course.
6 Q. Do you remember when you first found out about that?
7 A. No, I don't remember specifics, but I remember finding that out
8 along the way.
9 Q. What was the most dramatic or worst experience you had when
10 you were in college?
11 A. Good grief, I would have to think about that. I haven't had many
12 bad experiences in life. I don't know if I had any by that time. And I tend
13 to forget about those anyway.
14 Q. What was the best experience you had when you were in college?
15 A. I don't know. College was generally a terrific experience and I've
16 just been a very fortunate person my whole life. It's been mostly positive so
17 I can't think of any one thing. I guess getting into law school was pretty
18 exciting.
19 Q. Tell us about the process of starting to apply for law school. You
20 said that you made the decision you were interested in going to law school
21 based on a class that you took in your junior year.
22 A. Right, in my junior year. And this particular political science
23 professor I thought was terrific really encouraged that. And then I went to
-46- 1 New York City that summer and had a great time. So I applied to law
2 schools, whatever the time was, in my senior year. I only applied to three:
3 Harvard, Yale, and the University of Michigan and I got into all of them. I
4 picked Harvard just because I think my father thought it was the best place
5 in the whole country to go and that's where I should go. He wanted me to go
6 to Radcliffe, actually, to college and I didn't like it as well as I liked Smith.
7 So I picked Harvard. Had no idea what I was getting into.
8 Q. What did you do the summer after you graduated from Smith?
9 A. I don't remember. I may have worked at the cereal factory. I
10 worked as a secretary so I might have done that. I think I did that. I worked
11 for an outfit called Manpower in Battle Creek that shipped you off to various
12 places. I'm· pretty sure that's what I did that summer.
13 Q. What were those experiences like?
14 A. Oh, they were interesting. I learned a lot about people. I
15 remember working for a guy, a man, who had me doing letters for him and I
16 corrected his grammar one time. He handwrote out his stuff and I corrected
17 his grammar when I typed it up. He gave it back to me and had it changed
18 back to the way he had done it originally. So I learned a little bit about
19 keeping my place in those kinds of situations.
20 Q. Did you feel resentment about that?
21 A. No, I thought it was funny.
22 Q. You thought it was funny? Do you have any other recollections
23 about being a secretary?
-47- 1 A. I worked at a lot of different places. I learned how to drink coffee
2 that summer. No, I don't remember a lot about that. I didn't - I wasn't in
3 one place very long, so I sort of hopped around.
4 Q. Did you ever have a job that you resented?
5 A. No, because none of those jobs I had then were - they were all
6 temporary. Just to make a little bit of money.
7 Q. By the time you finished college, how was your savings account?
8 A. I don't remember. Probably not huge.
9 Q. How did you prepare yourself after that last year of college?
10 A. For law school?
11 Q. For law school.
12 A. I didn't.
13 Q. What was your college graduation like? What do you remember
14 about that?
15 A. College graduation was great. It's always a really nice graduation
16 ceremony they have at Smith. You wear white, carry roses, and wear your
17 black robe and cap. There was a baccalaureate ceremony and graduation. I
18 don't remember who my graduation speaker was.
19 Q. Do you remember any of the speakers over the years?
20 A. No.
21 Q. No. So what - what did you do? You didn't do anything specific
22 to prepare for law school?
23 A. No.
-48- 1 Q. Well, what did you think you were getting into?
2 A. Just going on to school and, you know, I didn't really know. And
3 when I got there, I discovered I really didn't know because it was such a
4 totally different experience than college had been. But I felt totally
5 prepared. I mean, I had a terrific education and had done a lot of writing and
6 I felt perfectly confident that I could do fine in law school. I was just an
7 uppity college graduate at that point.
8 Q. When you first arrived at Harvard and recognized that this school
9 was no longer just women, how did you deal with that?
10 A. No longer just women was the understatement of the century. In
11 the first place, before I went there, I had no idea it was the biggest law
12 school in the country. There were 500 - about 580 students in my first year
13 class at Harvard, twenty-three of whom were women. Needless to say, we
14 stuck out like a sore thumb. And they had dorms for guys. There weren't
15 any dorms for women. So we were put in a graduate school dorm close to
16 the law school - I was in that dorm with the women in my class. We were
17 divided up into four sections, so classes were huge and you stayed with the
18 same section for all of your classes. I had five solid courses - kids now get
19 all kinds of picks - I had five basic law school classes. They were a year
20 long, so I had the same professor and the same classmates in my section for
21 an entire year.
22 And one of my early experiences was, the Dean at the time was Erwin
23 Griswold, who - I don't know how old he was. He seemed ancient, but he
-49- 1 probably wasn't all that old. He was probably in his - might have been 60,
2 might have been even in his '50s - he invited all of the women law students,
3 freshman women, to his house for dinner, only the women. Of course, none
4 of us knew what that was about so we went to his house for dinner.
5 Afterwards, we all sat around on his living room floor and we had to go
6 around the room and he asked each of us why we were there in law school.
7 So we all said what .... Some people, actually it was Judy Hope, wrote a
8 book later about that, her experience. She was in the class ahead of me and
9 talked about this. She asked him, Dean Griswald, subsequently why he did
10 that. He thought he was doing us all a big favor by singling us out, thought
11 he was going to make us feel special, but he was such an odd, gruff
12 personality that if that's what he was planning on doing, I don't think any of
13 us got that message. The message we got was, you know, here we are this
14 singled-out group of - a small group of women in this big group of men and
15 the Dean is sitting us on his floor and making us explain what we were doing
16 there. And I had a lot of male classmates who bluntly asked me what I
17 thought I was doing taking the place of a guy. It was a very different
18 experience - to go from my warm womb-like college experience to Harvard
19 Law School, which was full of very competitive males who wondered - not
20 only wondered what I was doing there, but thought I probably shouldn't be
21 there. That was the way it was the first year.
22 Q. How did you respond to those kind of inquiries?
23 A. I responded that I had done well in college and earned my way
-50- 1 into Harvard Law School and that's where I belonged. Thank you very
2 much.
3 Q. Who were some of the other women attending law school with
4 you?
5 A. Liddy Hanford was her name then. She is now known as
6 Elizabeth Hanford Dole, Senator from North Carolina, wife of Bob Dole,
7 Senator. She was a couple of years - she was probably three years older
8 than I was and she had been a librarian at the Law School, which is how she
9 had gotten interested in going to law school. I think she had gotten a - I
10 can't remember what they call it, but it was - she went to graduate school to
11 become a teacher. So maybe she was even four years older than I was. She
12 was in my class. Elizabeth Holtzman was in my class. She was
13 subsequently elected to Congress from New York and was on the Watergate
14 Committee. She was also the District Attorney, I think, in New York for a
15 period of time. There was a woman who became a law professor at the
16 University of Georgia. There was a real interesting collection of females,
17 mostly from East Coast schools. Many of them had gone to women's
18 colleges, but needless to say, we had lots of conversations because we were
19 all living - I don't think Liddy Dole was there, she had an apartment
20 someplace - but the rest of us were in this dorm situation together. We had
21 an eating plan and we ate our meals in the cafeteria at the Law School with
22 all of these guys, so I went from very supportive women to competitive,
23 aggressive, not so supportive guys, which was pretty much my freshman year
-51- 1 expenence.
2 That changed, once I got to know people. I ended up marrying the
3 guy I sat next to in contracts class after the first year. That's a whole
4 different story.
5 Q. Your first official contract?
6 A. Yes. By and large, I enjoyed my law school classes. You know,
7 the intellectual process and it was such a different learning experience to go
8 from learning broad liberal artsy kinds of things to taking contracts class,
9 constitutional law, and property and torts.
10 Q. What were your favorite classes in law school?
11 A. Oh, I love constitutional law, but I had a lot of favorite classes. I
12 found most things pretty interesting.
13 Q. Was there any case that you learned about during your law school
14 years that really affected your thinking?
15 A. Oh, probably, a lot of cases. Brown v. Board of Education, all the
16 First Amendment cases on Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and
17 individual rights. I've always been a big believer in civil rights and civil
18 liberties and so all of that was like being in a candy store and getting to pick
19 great things. I mean, I had courses like corporations, which wasn't exactly
20 my favorite, but all kinds of things I liked.
21 Q. Any professors who stand out from your law school experience?
22 A. There were lots of professors who stood out. I had a professor
23 named Clark Bice in my contracts class who was very outgoing and funny
-52- 1 and fun - but tough. What was the movie, Paper Chase. He was supposed
2 to be one of the law school professors who was the professor that was
3 patterned after. He was really tough, but he was also a very likable kind of
4 guy, so he was a student favorite.
5 Q. What was the most dramatic experience you had in law school,
6 with one of your professors?
7 A. I don't remember specifically. There were professors who rarely
8 called on the women. I mean, that was very overt and obvious that there
9 were professors there who thought we shouldn't be there. I can't think of
10 any particular one because there was more than one. So probably the most
11 dramatic thing for me was when I really ran up against what I thought was
12 overt sexism from classmates and professors who thought I didn't belong
13 there simply because I was female.
14 Q. It sounds, just from what you said, like your reaction to that was
15 one of strength?
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. And where do you think that core strength and - and ability to
18 respond to that came from?
19 A. Growing up, from my father. From, you know, the way I was
20 raised to think, that I wasn't treated any differently from my brothers
21 growing up and that's - I think that's pretty clearly where it came from.
22 Q. How did you deal with your first taste of aggression toward you as
23 an individual?
-53- 1 A. I was taken aback when it first started happening, but then I just -
2 I sort of brushed it off. I mean, I never sat around worrying about it. It was
3 a pretty strong group of females, the twenty-three that were there, so - and
4 there were women in the other classes - I think we had gotten progressively
5 a bigger group of women. I believe they had twenty-one the year before.
6 Harvard didn't start taking women until, I think, 1952 and I started there in
7 '62. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been there and she tells some of these same
8 kinds of stories, including dinner with the Dean, the same Dean.
9 So it was - it was an evolving process for me, from being taken aback
10 to basically thinking, you know, I had every right to be there. I did pretty
11 well in law school. We were put on moot court teams right away. As
12 freshmen, that was one of the things we did. We were divided up into teams
13 and we started having cases against each other and I al ways did pretty-well
14 at that. I came out of college with a lot of confidence in my abilities and
15 that served me in good stead.
16 Q. Did you participate in any organized sporting activities during law
17 school?
18 A. No. We had gym, sporting things in college, but I didn't do any
19 of them for a any long period of time. I don't remember there being any
20 sporting opportunities in law school. I don't even think the guys did. I
21 mean, some of them may have been throwing a football around, but we
22 didn't have many of those types of guys at Harvard Law School.
23 Q. Did you have time for any extracurricular activities in law school?
-54- 1 A. Sure, dating. I mean, one thing about it, it was a fertile field for
2 dating.
3 Q. Did you find that to be a distraction or was that never a competitor
4 for study time?
5 A. No, it was never really a competitor for study time, and law
6 school was a lot of work. I found fr was hard. A lot of hard work the first
7 year, and we had practice exams at the end of our first semester, which
8 teaching assistants graded. So our whole grade in law school the first year
9 for each one of the five courses was the final exam at the end of the year.
10 Q. Wow, that's a lot of pressure?
11 A. That was a lot of pressure, but everybody was in the same boat so
12 - well, that's not true. They weren't all in the same boat because I took one
13 or two of those exams in a building called Austin Hall that had no women's
14 bathrooms in it.
15 Q. Well, how did you deal with that?
16 A. I ran across to the building next door. So I guess the pressure was
17 greater on women than it was on men.
18 Q. Any kind of organized rebellion or complaining done by the
19 women in your class about any particular issues?
20 A. Oh, I'm sure we had conversations all that time about what it was
21 like to be there. We didn't really think that much about jobs because there
22 really weren't any opportunities, any organized opportunities, to have a
23 law-related job after your first year. So it was only second year that we
-55- I started facing the fact that the job opportunities for women were not the
2 same as for guys.
3 Q. What did you do that first summer after law school?
4 A. Got married.
5 Q. So you got married during law school?
6 A. I got married during law school and married the guy from Tulsa,
7 Oklahoma who sat next to me in contracts class.
8 Q. That was a lucky day for a Tulsa guy?
9 A. Andy Bartlett. Yeah. That was a lucky day for Tulsa, Oklahoma.
10 And I remember the first time I ever came out for a visit, which was
11 probably spring break, I had visions of - and I had been through Oklahoma
12 on one trip where we went west when I was in junior high because I
13 remember we came back on Route 66. I remember thinking before we came
14 out here, I had visions of Grapes of Wrath in my head. So when I got to
15 Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was really fairly surprised and excited to find out how
16 pretty it is here. We were married in August and we went back to law
17 school.
18 Q. What did your parents say about the fact that you were getting
19 married while you were still attending law school?
20 A. I don't remember them objecting. I mean, it was not a bad thing
21 to get married. It was a good thing to get married and so -
22 Q. So how-
23 A. And I was going back to law school. My father paid for my entire
-56- 1 education. He made quite a bit of money and so he - I never had to earn
2 money to go to college. I was really lucky.
3 Q. Well, during that freshman year when you were working so hard
4 on your studies and trying to get through your first year of law school, how
5 did you incorporate time to get to know somebody that you ultimately agreed
6 to marry?
7 A. Well, because I was sitting next to him in contracts class, for
8 starters, and the guy on the other side of me in contracts class is now a
9 professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He told me subsequently
10 he was always annoyed because I was always talking to the guy on the other
11 side instead of him. And Andy and I were on the same moot court team.
12 They divided you up in small clubs, moot court clubs, and we were on the
13 same one. He had gone to college at Dartmouth, so we had a lot in common
14 because I had dated a guy at Dartmouth at one point. You had weekends and
15 even though you had a lot of studying to do, you had to have breaks. So we
16 started dating and ended up getting married.
17 Q. What made you decide that marriage after the first year of law
18 school was a good idea?
19 A. I don't know. I fell in love and it seemed like a good idea. It
20 didn't seem like a bad idea and I got to move out of the dorm and live in an
21 apartment.
22 Q. Did any of your classmates do that as well?
23 A. One of my classmates had a boyfriend who was at Columbia Law
-57- 1 School and she left after the first year. She got married. I think she finished
2 there. One of my classmates married a fellow classmate, I don't remember if
3 it was after her first year or second year. They were both on Law Review.
4 They got married and she's now a professor at Harvard Law School. I can't
5 think of any other ones who got married.
6 Q. By the way, did you have any female professors during law
7 school?
8 A. Of course not.
9 Q. I suspected that.
10 A. I don't think there were any female professors - well, I think there
11 was one at Chicago, but other than that, there might have been some at some
12 of the state schools, but I don't know. When I graduated from law school,
13 three percent of the lawyers in the country, graduates graduating that year,
14 were women. So there just weren't very many of us out there.
15 Q. What is the story of how Mr. Bartlett proposed to you?
16 A. He was a very romantic kind of guy. He first hit on me by
17 walking me back from some place. He gave me a chestnut that he had
18 picked up somewhere, which I thought was a very endearing sort of thing to
19 do and I had it for a long time. I don't know. He was a real Oklahoma
20 Dartmouth guy. Of course, it was an all-men school and he was just a very
21 charming guy who smoozed me. It was fun.
22 Q. Was he a progressive thinker?
23 A. Yes.
-58- 1 Q. Did he share your skepticism about religion?
2 A. All I remember, he told me that his mother was horrified he was
3 marrying a Catholic, but he didn't - wasn't a really religious guy. I think he
4 had been raised Presbyterian or something like that.
5 Q. What was his family like in this community?
6 A. He had - he's the oldest of four. He had a younger brother and
7 two sisters. And his father was in the oil-related business somehow, I think.
8 Not - they didn't have a ton of money, but they were comfortable. His
9 mother was extremely nice and we had a very nice relationship the whole
10 time we were married. So they were very welcoming.
11 Q. Where did the marriage take place?
12 A. In Battle Creek, in an Episcopal Church because Andy and I had
13 met a fellow in Boston who was an Episcopal minister from Beirut, Lebanon.
14 We imported him and he married us in this little Episcopal church in Battle
15 Creek.
16 Q. Because the Catholic church wouldn't permit him to do that?
17 A. Well, I wasn't going to the Catholic church at that point. So ...
18 Q. So you never told us the story about what the - what the proposal
19 was. You only told us about the chestnut.
20 A. He came out and asked my father for my hand in a good old
21 fashioned way and I don't remember when I actually got proposed to. How
22 is that!
23 Q. I think that's a politically correct and safe response.
-59- 1 A. I really don't remember when we decided to get married. I mean,
2 once we started dating, we only dated each other. So it was probably
3 halfway through the year and then we dated up a storm.
4 Q. How did you plan the wedding?
5 A. I was home that summer and -
6 Q. Was it at the end of the summer?
7 A. Yes. It was in August.
8 Q. And what are your recollections about it?
9 A. It was a very nice wedding and we went to Lake Michigan for a
10 honeymoon, and then we went back to law school and started classes.
11 Q. How did being married affect your law school experience?
12 A. It probably enhanced it greatly because I was living in an
13 apartment and we didn't have all the same classes together, but we had -
14 second year because we were picking classes - well, I'm not sure we were
15 actually together in any class, but we were doing moot court. We continued
16 moot court successfully and we were doing that together. We had a lot of
17 fun friends and it was just - it was nice. It was nice being married. It was
18 outside - it was sort of out of the_ main stream of things because there
19 weren't that many married students.
20 Q. Did your professors treat you any differently?
21 A. I remember running into Professor Bice, who'd been our contracts
22 professor, when we got back and he cracked a big smile and he said, "Oh, I
23 hear you consummated a contract over the summer."
-60- 1 Q. He was proud of himself?
2 A. Uh-huh.
3 Q. Did you keep your maiden name when you got married?
4 A. I didn't keep my maiden name. In fact, I - when I went to - I
5 kept my Michigan driver's license because I wasn't really living in
6 Oklahoma and I didn't want to take a driver's test in Massachusetts. I didn't
7 have a car anyway. So I went to change my driver's license in Michigan and
8 I wanted to change it to - I wanted to use my maiden name - it never entered
9 my mind to keep my maiden name - but I wanted my maiden name as my
10 middle name. So I wanted it to be Stephanie Kulp Bartlett. They wouldn't
11 let me. They said I had to use my given middle name, which was Irene and
12 which I despised.
13 Q. With good reason.
14 A. And I couldn't understand that. I thought, you know, why do they
15 care. But they absolutely did, so I had to ditch my maiden name on my first
16 official occasion, and I don't remember what my marriage license said. I
17 would have to go back and look, but I remember being really annoyed
18 because I thought, guys don't have to deal with that. That was the first of
19 many instances of treating women differently that I ran into over the years.
20 Q. Did you ever engage in any kind of organized political activities?
21 Whether it was picketing or other things, but I wonder if being married
22 might have affected your desire to do that?
23 A. I don't know if it did or didn't. He was a Democrat and we had
-61- 1 pretty much the same political views.
2 Q. Did you ever burn a bra?
3 A. Never burned my bra, never burned a flag. One experience I had
4 the summer after my second year, it was traditional for law students to get
5 summer jobs in law firms after their second year. And Andy had the offer of
6 a job, a nonlegal job with Reading and Bates Offshore Drilling Company, as
7 sort of a rising business person. He had worked for them and I guess he
8 worked for them the summer after his freshman year before we were
9 married. They had said they might be sending him to the Houston office
10 instead of the Tulsa office the summer after our second year.
11 Firms were coming to Harvard Law School to interview students
12 about summer jobs. Baker and Botts had a representative there from
13 Houston, a big Houston law firm, and they had a general group meeting the
14 night before if you wanted to come and ask questions about the firm. So I
15 went to that. And then if you wanted an interview, they set them up there on
16 the spot for the next day. So I went to this meeting and listened to this
17 partner talk about the firm. And I went up to him afterwards and I said -
18 now, remember, this was 1963 before the Civil Rights Act was passed - I
19 went up to him afterwards and I said, because I knew the firm didn't have
20 any women, I said, "Does Baker Botts have any problem hiring women?"
21 And he thought for a second and he said, "No, Baker Botts doesn't, but I
22 do." I said, "Oh, well, I guess I won't sign up for an interview," which I
23 didn't.
-62- Q. You did not question him about it?
2 A. I didn't have any doubt that I wasn't going to change his mind. I
3 mean, he was very positive. Ended up we were in Tulsa that summer and I
4 went to work for a firm here, Lupardis, Holiman, Huffman, and Arrington.
5 John Arrington, who had gone to Harvard, wrote Andy a letter and said they
6 were interested in hiring him for the summer, because Andy was from Tulsa.
7 Q. Wrote your husband a letter asking to hire you?
8 A. Asking Andy if he was interested in a summer job. They probably
9 wrote him because there weren't that many Harvard Law School students
10 from Oklahoma.
11 Q. Right.
12 A. Certainly not from Tulsa. Andy wrote back and he said, "No, I
13 already have a job but I have this wife." So that's how I got my first legal
14 job.
15 Q. This was during law school?
16 A. This was during law school.
17 Q. What was it like working for Huffman and Arrington?
18 A. It was great. It was fine. I didn't - Jim Kincaid was there at the
19 time. Fred Dorwart was there. No, he came afterwards, but Sam Daniel was
20 there. I mean, it was an interesting place. And I didn't have anybody there
21 who didn't accept me. I worked there that summer writing memos. I worked
22 mostly for John Arrington - no, I worked for Jim Kincaid, too, as I recall.
23 Q. Jim Kincaid would have been at about the same level?
-63- 1 A. Jim is three or four years older than I am.
2 Q. So he was out of law school?
3 A. He was out of law school. He had been to Harvard, too. He and
4 John Arrington both had been to Harvard. So I had - you know, other than
5 the fact that it was probably the hottest place I ever lived in my whole life
6 and we had a car that wasn't air conditioned, it was a great experience. It
7 was a great job. They liked my work. I liked my work. I liked doing the
8 work and so I had a very positive experience.
9 Q. Did you establish any relationships that you've maintained to this
10 day?
11 A. In that summer?
12 Q. Yes.
13 A. Well, I went back and worked there after law school. So, yes, the
14 answer is yes. I became good friends with Jim Kincaid and John Arrington
15 and - although, I haven't seen John much. And when I worked there after
16 law school - well, I worked someplace else first, Boston - but Fred Dorwart
17 came. He was a year behind me in law school because he had been in the
18 Naval Academy, even though he's a couple of years older. So he was there
19 and he's been a lifelong friend. It was a great little firm.
20 Q. What did you think was different about the community in Tulsa as
21 opposed to where you had been attending school?
22 A. Oh, my gosh, it was a big shock. A nice shock to find out how
23 pretty it was here, but I came - moved here from Cambridge, Massachusetts,
-64- 1 probably one of the most liberal cities in the country, to Tulsa, Oklahoma,
2 which could not be described in the same fashion. And there was no liquor
3 by the drink here. I worked for a year in Boston in 1966 - so we're talking
4 1967. There was no liquor by the drink, so as a result, there weren't very
5 many restaurants, very many good restaurants. You couldn't buy the New
6 York Times, which I had been getting on a daily basis in Cambridge,
7 Massachusetts. It was just a totally different place.
8 Q. What did you think at that time about making your life here?
9 A. I have always been very flexible about - I guess it comes from my
10 travels. I think I could live anywhere, but it was just - when I first came, it
11 was just a big shock, the change. But it dido 't take long. I was in a firm
12 with some really interesting people who had interesting spouses and I made
13 friends and widened my circle of acquaintances and then became very
14 comfortable here. And, of course, the City's changed over the years in a lot
15 of respects. I can now get the New York Times delivered to my house and
16 there are lots of good restaurants. But it was a real - it was just a very
17 different community than I was used to living in.
18 Q. Had any of the other spouses obtained an advanced degree?
19 A. Yes. Actually, there was a guy named Bob Jackson who had gone
20 to Yale Law School. He was a friend of Andy's from high school. His wife
21 had gone to Yale Law School, so we all took the bar together. And, you
22 know, there was a university here and a law school, and I just began to meet
23 people who were fun and interesting and thought more like I did.
-65- 1 Q. What were some of the activities that you and Andy liked to enjoy
2 during your early years of marriage?
3 A. We liked to travel. The summer after we graduated from law
4 school, we took off. We had a car. We took off for probably two and a half
5 months and drove from Tulsa north to Colorado, went to Wyoming, went to
6 - we camped - to Montana, Canada, to Jackson Hole in Wyoming and went
7 up to Banff an~ Lake Louise in Canada. And we traveled all across the
8 western part of Canada, went to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, and then
9 all the way down the West Coast. We went to Oregon and Washington and
10 California. I thought it was fabulous. It was an extension of my childhood.
11 We had a great time and I don't know if Andy had done all that much
12 traveling, I don't think so, before he hooked up with me, but he was all in
13 favor of it. We enjoyed traveling. We both enjoyed reading, movies,
14 hanging out with friends. We played bridge. We skied. Went on some
15 skiing trips. We boated on the lakes around here, just -
16 Q. Were any of the trips that you took with Andy as glorious as the
17 trips that you took with your family?
18 A. Yes. I mean, that one trip we - the trip we took in the
19 summertime, I loved that. I had never camped before, but we stayed in a
20 motel every weekend so we could have a real bed and a warmer shower. It
21 was fabulous.
22 Q. The motel being the one that you drive up to?
23 A. Yes. Those kind. But, you know, I was seeing parts of the
-66- country I hadn't seen before, Canada, all of that across Canada. I love to
2 travel and I love to travel by car and I like going places so, you know, that
3 was terrific.
4 Q. Did you have any set plan or were you just roaming from place to
5 place?
6 A. No, we were just - I mean, we planned to do this sort of loop, but
7 we didn't know how long it would take. But, no, we were just going places.
8 Q. What were your dreams and aspirations at that point? Did you
9 talk about what your expectations were?
10 A. I planned on working for a law firm. I enjoyed the practicing that
11 I had done in the summertimes and I went back - I came back to work for
12 Lupardis, Holiman, Huffman, and Arrington. Well, I should tell you that
13 right after law school, we stayed in Boston for a year. Andy went to Harvard
14 Business School at the end of law school and I worked for a Boston firm,
15 Goodwin, Proctor and Hoar. ~t was an old-line Boston firm and it was fun.
16 Q. What-just out of curiosity, what was the ratio of women in that
17 firm?
18 A. Very small.
19 Q. Even there?
20 A. Yes, there - because there weren't very many women. Did I say
21 three percent graduating lawyers the year I graduated were females. So there
22 weren't very many women to go to these law firms. We were a small, but
23 hardy bunch. By then I had really learned to live in a man's world, which I
-67- had to do.
2 Q. What does that mean?
3 A. That means I was - had gotten very comfortable spending my
4 entire day with all males in law school - virtually all males at law school,
5 male professors, male classmates - and in the firm I worked for. Of course,
6 there were female secretaries. I think there were even a couple male
7 secretaries.
8 Q. How did your daily routine change when you started to go to
9 school with men?
10 A. My daily routine, oh, well, I started wearing makeup to class
11 because, you know, I was out in the real world and - and I wore makeup on
12 the weekends at Smith when I went out on dates, so it was just the way of
13 the world. And law school wasn't as casual as college had been in terms of
14 dress. So ...
15 Q. Was there any kind of dress requirement there?
16 A. No. No.
17 Q. Did men wear ties and jackets to school or -
18 A. I think at the beginning sort of, but by - after everybody got
19 comfortable, people wore sweaters and slacks, but it wasn't a blue jeans kind
20 of place.
21 Q. Were the women that were attending law school permitted to wear
22 slacks?
23 A. I don't think we had any requirement one way or another, but it
-68- 1 was - I think we wore mostly skirts.
2 Q. How did your first year of law school and your second year of law
3 school differ?
4 A. First year was so different. I mean, it was - I really found it a
5 different form of studying and the classes were all conducted in the Socratic
6 method. So it was a constant calling on you to respond in class; although,
7 our sections were so huge, individually you didn't get called on that much.
8 But it was a different learning experience. It was learning how to think
9 analytically - that was the whole key. It wasn't so much trying to keep
10 principles of law in your head as looking at a problem and trying to figure
11 out the answer in the context of what you had learned in class. So while I
12 liked what I was learning because it was interesting, and I just liked to learn,
13 it was not as satisfying in the same sense as reading a great piece of
14 literature, for example, because it was just different. You were learning for
15 a different purpose, I guess, but I found the conversations with my
16 classmates to be very intellectual in a lot of respects and interesting, and I
17 had very smart classmates. So ...
18 Q. Did your relationship with your classmates, your male classmates,
19 change over time?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Did you become more accepted?
22 A. Yes. At the beginning with - with the ones I became friendly
23 with, sure, but there were still a lot of - a lot of guys there who were so
-69- 1 competitive. I didn't really like that sort of general attitude, sort of dog-eat-
2 dog kind of thing.
3 I was in a study group, which was very friendly. We shared
4 information about everything. A lot of guys didn't do that. So it's not - I
5 felt very comfortable at Smith all the time - I didn't always feel like that at
6 law school because it was more like a business. I had classmates that I was
7 friendly with and socialized with - did fun things with, and that was all
8 great. And then there was this whole big group of people who were mostly
9 strangers who were - it was like going to a big office and so it wasn't the
10 same kind of atmosphere as college was.
11 Q. Did the courses change from your first year to your second year?
12 Were they more difficult?
13 A. Easier, because at the end of that whole incredible first year
14 experience, as I said, your whole grade depended on how you did at one
15 four-hour exam at the end of the year. Then you started getting to pick what
16 you wanted to take and the classes were smaller. So I would say it was a
17 really different experience after the first year. Plus everybody was more
18 comfortable. And I knew I wasn't going to flunk out, not that I was really
19 worried about that, but you didn't know if you should be or shouldn't be
20 because without any grades the whole year, there was no way to tell.
21 Q. What was the attrition rate at Harvard during those first few
22 years?
23 A. There was some, but it wasn't huge. Most people who got in were
-70- 1 capable of doing the work. I think there were people who sorted of freaked
2 out at the whole concept and just quit. People who decided they really
3 didn't want to be lawyers or go through this experience, which was pretty
4 hard, but I don't know what the final graduation rate was, but I think it was
5 probably 550.
6 Q. So you didn't lose many?
7 A. We didn't lose many.
8 Q. Any scandals during law school?
9 A. Scandals, oh, gosh, I don't know.
10 Q. That doesn't have to be defined by today's standards. Scandals
11 for the time?
12 A. One of my female classmates committed suicide, but it wasn't
13 until after she graduated. I can't remember any scandals. It might have
14 been fun if there had been some, but -
15 Q. What was the most exciting event that happened during all of your
16 law school?
17 A. Getting married.
18 Q. Still today in hindsight you think that?
19 A. Well, no, not to that guy, but that's a whole different story.
20 Q. All right. We' 11 forget that.
21 A. That was a pretty big deal, you know, but -
22 Q. Were any of your other siblings married at the time that you got
23 married?
-71- A. Yes, my brother. My older brother.
2 Q. Did you participate in that?
3 A. I did.
4 Q. When did he get married?
5 A. They got married at the end of their senior year in college and he
6 was a year ahead of me, so I guess I would have been a senior in high school
7 - no, I would have been a junior in college.
8 Q. By the time you got married, did they have children?
9 A. Idon'tthinkso.
10 Q. Did any of your other siblings get married during the time that
11 you were in law school?
12 A. No.
13 Q. Were your parents supportive of you getting married?
14 A. They were not - they weren't unsupportive. I mean, as far as my
15 father was concerned, as long as I was going to stay in law school, he didn't
16 care if I got married.
17 Q. That was his main concern?
18 A. As long as I was - he was concerned about me being happy and I
19 was in love.
20 Q. Tell us about the rest of your law school experience. You had -
21 A. It was basically positive. Andy and I did moot court all the way
22 through and were on the - we got in the finals of the moot court competition,
23 which had been - I guess that was probably another one of the more exciting
-72- 1 things. We had an argument before a panel with one Supreme Court Justice,
2 Justice Potter Stewart was on the panel, and we won. The prize was
3 something like $500 for the group and we spent it going to Washington to
4 see the real Supreme Court argument in the case that we had had for our
5 moot court. They always gave a pending Supreme Court case for the moot
6 court finals at Harvard. The competition was just in our school, but it was a
7 very significant part of law school. Not everybody stayed in the competition
8 throughout the whole scenario. You could do it just the first year and quit.
9 It was the fall of my senior year that we won the moot court
IO competition. We had teams of eight. I was the main brief writer. I was not
11 one of the oralists. There were two oralists and I was in charge of getting
12 the brief put together. I spent probably a week without seeing the light of
13 day, typing up this thing that we wrote. We spent our prize money taking
14 the train to Washington and that was fun and exciting. That was a great
15 experience and I enjoyed that. I especially liked winning.
16 And the winning team gets their names on a plaque in the Harvard
17 Law Library, and the winners of the moot court team are all there. The
18 plaque with eight names on it always had a first initial and last name, and
19 there had never been a woman on a winning moot court team. So I went to
20 the Dean, Dean Griswald, who had us all to dinner the first year, and I said,
21 "Nobody is ever going to know that a woman won this competition unless
22 you put our first names on there." And he said, "Okay." So my plaque had
23 Stephanie Bartlett, it was Bartlett then, on it and it's still hanging in the
-73- 1 Harvard Law School Library.
2 Q. Well, that's exciting. I didn't know that.
3 A. Small step for womankind.
4 Q. What was the case that you guys argued, do you remember?
5 A. I think I - the only case I remember was one involving seat belt
6 wearing. I can't remember if that was the final one or not. It was somebody
7 - it was a tort case, an accident and that couldn't have been the final. That
8 wouldn't have been a Supreme Court case. I would have to go back and dig
9 out the final one. This one I remember was contributory negligence for not
10 wearing your seat belt. This is back at the time when we were just started
11 getting seat belts and there was no law requiring that you wear seat belts. So
12 that was the big issue.
13 Q. Do you remember which side you argued?
14 A. I was on the side where it was contributory negligence, arguing
15 contributory negligence.
16 Q. So you were· arguing against your own personal philosophy?
17 A. No, my philosophy is you wear a seat belt. So it should be
18 contributory negligence if you don't, right?
19 Q. I figured you would be going for the civil liberty's side.
20 A. It's not a civil liberty issue.
21 Q. Looking back, was there anything that occurred in the last couple
22 of years of law school that influenced your future?
23 A. Well, let's see. President Kennedy got shot.
-74- Q. How did that affect you?
2 A. Very traumatic. It was an incredibly traumatic time in this
3 country. We were in shock. I mean, everybody in law school was in shock.
4 That was my second year, I think. I know I was married at the time, so it
5 had to have been - I know it wasn't my third year. It was my second year.
6 The other interesting traumatic event was when we had the big
7 blackout on the East Coast and all the lights went out from New York City to
8 Boston and we had no electricity for two days at least, I think. So we had no
9 lights in the law school or in our apartment and the refrigerator didn't work,
10 the stove didn't work, the subways didn't work -
11 Q. Whathappened?
12 A. - The cars couldn't go anywhere.
13 Q. What did you do?
14 A. We had a candle light party, as I recall.
15 Q. Did they stop school, suspend school?
16 A. Yes. I mean, it was just dark in there. We couldn't see anything.
17 I really learned how interconnected we are in this country. The beginning of
18 learning that.
19 Q. Well, tell us more about that.
20 A. Well, when the whole East Coast is in the dark because of a power
21 failure that affected this whole grid, suddenly it was a pretty stark realty to
22 think how really, A, how interconnected we are and, B, how vulnerable we
23 are to something that could impact so many people in just a short period of
-75- 1 time, something that seems so simple. I remember everybody talking about
2 how really stunning that was.
3 Q. It seems there's been a change over time in our belief about how
4 safe our country is and it sounds like when you were growing up, that was
5 never a concern?
6 A. That's right.
7 Q. Was there ever in a time prior to graduating from law school
8 where you started to be concerned about your own safety?
9 A. No. I gue·ss when I lived in New York City and I was told you
10 didn't run around in the dark by yourself. But, you know, I was young, I
11 didn't pay that much attention to that - we sort of ran around in groups of
12 two females. We went all over the city, including at night. So I didn't have
13 the sense of feeling unsafe.
14 I remember going back there when I was in law school and I don't
15 know what - I can't remember what triggered this change, but going back to
16 New York City at one point in time and going into the subway and there was
17 a policeman on every car. Something awful must have happened on the
18 subway and I don't remember what it was, but I remember being really
19 surprised at how things had changed from the time that I had been there in
20 college.
21 Q. Have you ever thought back and analyzed the changes that
22 occurred in our country with respect to safety over that period of time?
23 A. Yes, I've thought about that a lot, especially since I've been on
-76- 1 the Court and have seen - sat on so many criminal cases and drug cases. It's
2 changed a lot just in terms of culture and safety on the streets and in your
3 home. I mean, I would never leave my house unlocked anymore.
4 Q. How do you gauge the true differences between what your
5 perspective was and what realty was when you were growing up?
6 A. I'm sure there was a difference between my perspective and realty
7 because I lived in a smaller town. I didn't live in New York City and I
8 didn't come from an impoverished community where things were probably
9 different. So some of that was just learning about what's going on in the
10 world. But I don't think that - I know crime wasn't as widespread as it is
11 now and maybe there are more people, but it's also easier to get guns. It's
12 easier to get around. We're all mobile. You know, everybody has a car so
13 it's a lot easier to rob a bank if you've got a car that you can get away in.
14 When I was growing up, very few people had cars, certainly in the town that
15 I lived in. So in that respect, our whole society has changed.
16 Q. You know what, that makes me think about what your first car
17 was?
18 A. My first what?
19 Q. When did you get your first car and what was it?
20 A. When I had a job in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I didn't have a car in
21 Boston, even though I worked there a year. When I came to work in Tulsa, I
22 bought a car. Actually, I don't think - that's not when I bought my first car.
23 Q. I can't believe that you waited until you were married and in the
-77- 1 middle of law school before you bought a car.
2 A. Actually, it was later than that. Because when we came back here,
3 Andy had a car and we shared. So it wasn't until after I was divorced and
4 came back here as a single mom that I bought my own car. And that was a
5 Ford Mustang.
6 Q. Year?
7 A. Oh, good grief. Year, that would have been 1971 maybe.
8 Q. Color?
9 A. Red.
10 Q. Of course. Well, I think we should stop there and we'll go - move
11 into the next phase of your life and talk about your divorce first off next
12 time.
13 (Conclusion of first session.)
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
-78- 1
2
3
4
5
6 ORAL HISTORY OF STEPHANIE K. SEYMOUR
7 TAKEN ON BEHALF OF WOMEN TRAIL BLAZERS IN THE LAW,
8 A PROJECT OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION,
9 COMMISSION ON WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION
10
11
12
13 CONDUCTED BY NANCY SIEGEL
14 ON APRIL 24, 2007
15 IN TULSA, OKLAHOMA
16
17
18
19 Transcribed by Tina Hale
20
21
22
23 1 MS. SIEGEL: This is the second interview of the oral history of
2 Stephanie K. Seymour, which is being taken on behalf of Women Trail
3 Blazers in the Law, a project of the American Bar Association, Commission
4 on Women in the Profession.
5 It is being conducted by Nancy Siegel on April 24th, 2007.
6 QUESTIONS BY MS. SIEGEL:
7 Q. As I just stated, today is April 24th, 2007 and Stephanie Seymour
8 and I are together in her office in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
9 Stephanie, when we left off, we were in about 1966. Does that sound
10 right to you?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. And you, as I understand it, were in the process of returning to
13 Tulsa?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Would you tell us a little bit about that?
16 A. I moved back to Tulsa after my husband finished a year of
17 Harvard Business School in Boston and I went to work for the Holliman
18 firm, the firm I had worked for in the summertime.
19 Q. Were there other people that you worked with in the summertime
20 that came to work with the firm as well?
21 A. I was the only summer associate. It was a very small firm.
22 Q. How many people were in the firm?
23 A. I don't remember exactly. Fewer than ten.
-2- Q. And were you the only female?
2 A. Of course, there weren't very many of us in town.
3 Q. And actually that would be a good question. How many female
4 attorneys were there in town when you first came to practice?
5 A. I don't really remember in '66. I left for a time, as we'll get to,
6 and came back in '71. And I recall then that there were - I only remember
7 five women. One of them was Margaret Lamb, who was a state district court
8 judge. One of them was Phyllis Zimmerman, who practiced with her
9 husband. One of them was the law librarian at the University of Tulsa and
10 then there were two older women, Norma Wheaton and Jewel Russell Mann.
11 To the best of my memory, those were the only women here who were
12 practicing.
13 Q. Were any of those women that you just identified trial lawyers?
14 A. Yes, I think that Norma Wheaton and Jewel Russell Mann did
15 some trial work.
16 Q. When you came to the Holliman law firm, what was your title and
17 what responsibilities were you charged with?
18 A. I was an associate and I did research.
19 Q. Did you work for any particular attorney?
20 A. I worked for John Arrington, who hired me, and I worked for Jim
21 Kincaid who was a fairly new attorney then with the firm. I also did some
22 general research for some of the other people.
23 Q. What kind of areas did you practice as an associate?
-3- 1 A. Oh, a little of this and a little of that. They represented the gas
2 company, so primarily I did work in conjunction with that and they
3 represented a bus company, MK&O, as I recall, probably a railroad or two,
4 mostly defense kind of work.
5 Q. Did you ever have an occasion to appear in court?
6 A. Periodically. Not by myself, though. I would tagalong with
7 whatever lawyer I was working for at the time.
8 Q. Let's digress for a moment and talk a little bit about what your
9 ideas were about how to present yourself in court as a female lawyer?
10 A. Of course I didn't have a clue because I had never had a trial
11 practice course, so I basically didn't know what I was doing, but I just
12 showed up and smiled.
13 Q. Do you have any specific recollection of the type of clothing that
14 you chose to wear at that time?
15 A. Oh, very conservative suit, not slacks, but suit-type clothing.
16 Q. Were there any court rules that prevented you from wearing slacks
17 in the court?
18 A. No, there weren't enough women to make a rule about, so there
19 were no rules at that time.
20 Q. Did you ever have occasion to appear in any courts in the rural
21 areas of Oklahoma?
22 A. Yes, because of the nature of the work. I remember one time
23 when I was very pregnant with my first child going with Jim Kincaid off to
-4- 1 some small courthouse in rural Oklahoma, I don't remember where. He was
2 marching in carrying his briefcase and I was following right behind him.
3 The bailiff had one of those swinging gates between where the audience sits
4 and where the members of the Bar go before the court. The bailiff threw his
5 arm across the swinging door area right after Jim Kincaid went by and said,
6 "You can't go in there. That's only for lawyers."
7 Q. And your response?
8 A. "I am a lawyer." And I'm sure he was totally dumbfounded at that
9 very prospect.
10 Q. Did he then open the gate?
11 A. He then opened the gate.
12 Q. When did you become pregnant with your first child?
13 A. I don't remember exactly when, but he was born in the summer of
14 1967,Ithink. Yes.
15 Q. When you returned to Tulsa, which is about a year earlier than
16 that, what was your husband doing?
17 A. He had graduated from law school and had been a year at
18 business school. He wasn't practicing law. He was working for Reading and
19 Bates Offshore Drilling Company, a company that he had started working for
20 in the summers during law school, but I think actually even before he went
21 to law school.
22 Q. Who was the primary bread winner?
23 A. We probably both made about the same back then and I can
-5- 1 remember what that was. My first paying job as a lawyer was $7,000 a year
2 and that was -
3 Q. My how times have changed.
4 A. - top dollar in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
5 Q. So Bart was born in 1967?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. In June, is that right?
8 A. A month early. I was still working.
9 Q. Why was he born a month early?
10 A. I have no idea.
11 Q. That's just what he decided?
12 A. The doctor had no idea. I was going to quit work the end of that
13 week. The secretaries took me out to dinner. I remember we ate Chinese
14 food and I went home and. woke up in the middle of the night in labor. So I
15 called the next day. I called John Arrington and said, "Guess what, I'm not
16 coming in today."
17 Q. When you say you were going to quit, were you taking a hiatus or
18 were you actually going to leave the practice for a while?
19 A. No, I was actually going to quit because by that time Reading and
20 Bates had decided to send my husband, Andy, to their Houston office and
21 that was going to happen in the fall. So I knew I was quitting my job in
22 Tulsa, Oklahoma.
23 Q. So a couple of months after you had Bart, you were moving?
-6- 1 A. We were moving.
2 Q. And you moved to Houston?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. Did you go to work when you were in Houston or was it just that
5 your husband started out and you were raising the baby?
6 A. He started out and this was my first child and I really had no clue
7 what impact that was going to make on my life. And I had already decided
8 that I didn't want to work full-time, so I had done no exploration at all about
9 jobs in Houston. And you may recall, I had that one experience in law
10 school with a partner of Baker and Botts when I went to the general
11 interview and he told me that he didn't hire women. So my hopes were not
12 high. But in August or early September, I was in Michigan visiting my
13 parents and I got a call out of the blue from a partner at Baker and Botts,
14 who had been a Princeton roommate, a college roommate of John Arrington,
15 my mentor in Tulsa. And this fellow called me and said that John had called
16 him and told him they should hire me. John didn't bother to tell me, so I
17 was very surprised. I said, "Well, I do want to go back to work, but I only
18 want to work three days a week." And there was this long pause and he said,
19 "I had the firm all talked into considering hiring a woman." But, he said
20 "They'll never hire anybody part time." And I said, "Well, thank you very
21 much," and that was the end of the conversation. And then we moved, I
22 think in late September. In October, the Baker and Botts partner called me
23 back up and said they were desperate, of course, because somebody had left
-7- their labor law department. I had some labor law experience, actually from
2 Arrington, and he wanted to know if I would consider coming to work for the
3 labor law department. And I said, "Yes, three days a week." And he said he
4 thought they would consider that, so would I come in for an interview. It
5 was November when I went in for an interview and I was interviewed not by
6 somebody from the labor law department, but by a managing partner. He
7 was an older fellow who had great trouble looking me in the eye. He was
8 sitting across the desk and he spent his whole time twirling the cord on a
9 venetian blind instead, and sort of staring off sideways while he asked me
10 questions about, you know, child care and all of that business, the kind of
11 things they asked back then. He told me the labor law partner said he's
12 willing to hire somebody three days a week so this is what we'll pay you.
13 And I said, "I'm not going to work for that. I'm not going to work for a
14 penny less than three-fifths of what you're paying your new associates." I
15 had a friend from law school, a classmate, who worked there, so I knew in
16 advance what that figure was because I'm good at doing my research ahead
17 of time. He hemmed and hawed and he said, "Okay. We'll pay you that."
18 And then he said, "Can you start next week?" I said, "No, I can't start next
19 week. My parents are coming for a month at Christmas. I can't start until
20 January 1." Oh, he twiddled the cord some more, and he said okay. So that
21 was our agreement and he made it very plain that it was a big experiment,
22 that there were no commitments, which was fine with me since we didn't
23 expect to be in Houston forever anyway. But when I went to work in
-8- 1 January, I was pregnant with my second child. It was a big surprise and I
2 had to decide whether I was going to tell the firm that I was pregnant. I
3 decided since we had no commitments to each other really, I was simply
4 going to start work, which I did.
5 Q. So were you the first female hired by the Baker and Botts Law
6 Firm?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. And how many lawyers do you suppose they have today?
9 A. Oh, I have no idea. They had about a hundred then, I think, which
10 was a huge law firm at that time. They've got multiple hundreds today.
11 Q. So not only were you the first female lawyer at one of the largest
12 firms in the country, but you were also the first part-time lawyer in that
13 group; is that right?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. That's a lot of firsts. And how did it work out?
16 A. It worked out fine. The labor law department was very small. It
17 only had one partner. He and I got along well and I enjoyed the work,
18 working three days. And it was pretty easy to do three days a week in the
19 labor law department. A lot of that was research. Some of it was going to
20 arbitrations with union people. Remember, I'm pregnant again. I remember
21 going to one arbitration and we walk in the door and this union guy - they
22 weren't represented by a lawyer - it was a union guy and he took one look at
23 me and he started sputtering. And the arbitrator said, "What's the matter."
-9- 1 He said, "I just don't think I can talk with her in the room." I guess because
2 his language was usually so foul and because he didn't want to swear in a
3 front of a pregnant lady, he was having trouble figuring out how he was
4 going to argue his case.
5 Q. Well, do you believe that he would not have had a problem had
6 you not been pregnant?
7 A. I have no idea.
8 Q. So you think it could just be related to the pregnancy, but it could
9 be both?
10 A. It could be both.
11 Q. That's funny.
12 A. Then I finally had to tell the firm that I was pregnant. I didn't tell
13 them until I was bursting out of my clothes and I went to in tell the partner
14 in the labor law department.
15 Q. Whose name was?
16 A. Oh, gosh, John Abercrombie, I believe. I went in to tell him that I
17 was going to give birth in August and he burst out laughing. And he said, "I
18 can hardly wait to go tell old" - I can't remember his name, the managing
19 partner I had the interview with - "that our lady labor lawyer is going into
20 labor in August," and he went cackling off down the hall.
21 Q. What was the course of your employment with Baker and Botts?
22 A. I worked until probably a week before Bria was born on August 3,
23 1968, and she was two weeks early. Then I took off a year because I had
-10- 1 two babies essentially thirteen months apart and that was a pretty astounding
2 experience, needless to say. About a year later, it was in August, I got a call
3 from the partner in the labor law department who asked me if I would come
4 back to work. And I said, "Three days a week?" And he said, "Sure." And
5 I said, "Do I get a raise?" And he said, "Sure." So I went back to work.
6 I remember at one point somewhere in working for them, they had a
7 formal black tie dinner dance and I was asked to dance by the partner who
8 had come to Harva-rd and interviewed me during my second year about a
9 summer job, the one who said they would never hire a woman. I told him
10 the story of our conversation. He claimed not to remember and he said, "I
11 never would have said that." But by this time, it was after the 1964 Civil
12 Rights Act had passed prohibiting discrimination against women and they
13 were much more concerned about what they had said to whom.
14 Q. What impact do you believe that the Civil Rights Act and the
15 passage of that act had on your law practice?
16 A. I suspect that was probably the only reason they hired me.
17 Q. Was that ever discussed in the firm?
18 A. No. I mean, I'm sure, but not with me.
19 Q. What kind of diversity was within the Baker and Botts firm at that
20 time other than having one female?
21 A. I don't remember any.
22 Q. It was all white men?
23 A. Yes.
-11- 1 Q. What did you do with respect to child care when you were
2 working three days a week?
3 A. I hired a person to come to my house who took care of my first
4 baby, and then my two babies.
5 Q. How did you feel about having someone helping you in the initial
6 stages of the baby's life?
7 A. I felt great because Bart was six months old before I went to work,
8 and then the two of them were - Bria was a year and he was two and a half
9 when I went back to work the second time. The child care worked out great.
10 I had a wonderful woman who came and took care of the kids and kept my
11 house in shape at the same time and did the laundry. So it worked out fine.
12 Q. Did your husband, Andy,_ have any objections or concerns about
13 you not being a full-time mother?
14 A. No. No. I mean, after all, he married a law student, so he bought
15 into the package when he got me and we both wanted to have children, so
16 that was not a question.
17 Q. How long did you continue to work at Baker and Botts?
18 A. I was only there from September to December the second time
19 because Andy's company transferred him to Singapore.
20 Q. That was an enormous move for you?
21 A. That was an enormous move.
22 Q. How did you feel about moving out of the country?
23 A. I felt fine because I had traveled abroad and I just had this attitude
-12- 1 - because I had never been to Southeast Asia, I had an attitude that I could
2 live anywhere. But it was a bit of a shock when I got over there and - well,
3 in good ways and bad ways. We spent Christmas in Hong Kong on the way
4 over, stayed there two days, I think, because it was a long trip. You couldn't
5 get there in one day and when I got to Singapore I had expected it to be
6 fairly backward. I didn't have any real concept and I was pleasantly
7 surprised to find out that the houses were very nice, the countryside was
8 beautiful, that orchids grew in the backyard. I had a full time staff. Andy
9 had a company car. We had a driver. We had a gardener. We had a cook. I
10 hired a baby amah. I couldn't get a job, so I was a full time mom with a
11 huge staff and two little kids.
12 Q. It sounds like the cost of living in Singapore was substantially
13 better than in the United States?
14 A. It was incredibly better.
15 Q. What do you think accounts for the difference at that time?
16 A. Oh, our economy was very strong. It was - well, it's economy
17 was growing. It was still, you know, basically a third world country.
18 Singapore is an island city state, sort of all by itself, and it was thriving and
19 there were supermarkets. I remember being able to get frozen Sara Lee
20 coffee cake in the supermarket. That's not to say that I could get a lot of
21 other things that were that familiar, but it was just a great place to live.
22 There weren't that many stores where you could buy the kind of clothes I
23 wanted, but there were little shops you could go to that had Vogue magazine,
-13- you could point to a picture and pick out material and they would make you
2 whatever was in the magazine, and it cost next to nothing. So it was a pretty
3 idyllic kind of living circumstances except for the fact that I looked for a job
4 and I had a British law firm - there were no American firms - I had a British
5 law firm that agreed to hired me and I couldn't get a work permit from the
6 Singapore government. They said I would be replacing a Singaporean. And
7 I couldn't take classes at the University because they said I would be
8 replacing a Singaporean. So I found out what it was like to be discriminated
9 against for reasons other than my sex.
10 Q. What effect, if any, do you think that living or growing up in
11 another country in the early years had on the kids?
12 A. Very little because they were so small. I lived - I was only there
13 for a year and so Bria was one and a half and Bart was two and a half. They
14 were there for a year at that early stage and there was an American
15 community. I didn't join the American club. I joined the British club just to
16 be contrary. But they were all English-speaking people and Chinese children
17 at that time in Singapore were all learning English, so it was just a little
18 American community - those were the people we socialized with. Those
19 were the kids, the people the kids played with. They went to a preschool
20 which was composed of all American children, so I'm sure they barely
21 noticed except for the fact that the people who worked in the house were
22 Chinese.
23 Q. Did they - did the kids learn to speak the second language?
-14- 1 A. No. They didn't need to.
2 Q. So they were raised right from the beginning to speak English and
3 only English?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Did you learn to speak another language while you were there?
6 A. A word or two, but not much. Again, because I _didn't have to.
7 You know, we went to restaurants and the people spoke English and it was -
8 it was easy, easy living.
9 Q. What was the attitude of the Singaporeans towards the Americans
10 at that time?
11 A. Very favorable. I think we were highly regarded pretty much
12 everywhere in the world and we're talking late '60s. It was a very pleasant
13 place to live. It was very interesting. They had - the majority of people
14 there were Chinese, but they had a large minority of Indians from India who
15 were merchants. They had a lot of Malaysians. It was an interesting society
16 because the people who worked for the Chinese people in their houses were
17 Malaysians. If they had domestic help, they hired Malaysians and the
18 Malaysians were discriminated against. There weren't any black people, but
19 I saw - it was interesting to go to a different society where they practiced
20 discrimination and segregation like we did at the time, only it was a different
21 minority.
22 Q. What kind of social activities did you and Andy engage in when
23 you were living in Singapore?
-15- 1 A. There was a - it was the oil business and there was a pecking
2 order. The major oil companies were at the top. The company he worked
3 for, which was an offshore oil drilling company, was the next rung down and
4 then there were, you know, various levels. And you were expected to
5 entertain the people above you and be entertained by the people below you
6 and that was sort of the social structure, one in which I declined to
7 participate. I mean, we had dinner parties for friends of ours, but I didn't
8 get involved in the company politics.
9 Q. Any specific reasons?
10 A. I just didn't feel like it.
11 Q. What reactions did you have to working as a full-time stay-at-
12 home mother?
13 A. It didn't really count there because I had so much help, but we had
14 a lot of free time. I mean, we would go to the Tanglin Club, that was a
15 British club, where they had a swimming pool and it was certainly a country
16 club life. I took up duplicate bridge out of boredom and made a lifelong
17 friend who lives in California now who was my duplicate bridge partner. I
18 tried to learn golf, but I failed miserably. So I flunked golf and spent a lot
19 of time with the kids and with friends and doing nothing. It was strange,
20 because I had never spent any time in my life living that way.
21 Q. How did the dynamics of having household help and not having a
22 job, how did that affect your relationship with Andy?
23 A. I don't really know if it did, but our relationship sort of fell apart
-16- 1 over there because I found out he was running around on me so -
2 Q. Yes, you did not have much tolerance for that?
3 A. No.
4 Q. Did you talk about it or -
5 A. Of course. And, actually, I got fairly depressed at one point and I
6 had a doctor who sent me to see - there weren't any American doctors. I
7 had a British doctor who sent me to see a psychiatrist, who was Chinese,
8 and he couldn't understand where I was coming from, so I just got anti-
9 depressants from him and quit seeing him. It was a very strange situation
IO because I was living in a world, the oil business world, where what Andy
11 was doing was not uncommon. I was the odd person out in that situation.
12 Q. Were you isolated from your family?
13 A. Yes, of course. My family lived in the U.S., so they didn't have
14 any idea what was going on.
15 Q. Was it difficult to communicate with them at that time, those
16 years?
17 A. No E-mail. You know, we wrote letters, but they took a long time
18 to get back and forth.
19 Q. What about the telephone?
20 A. Occasional telephone, but telephone calls were very expensive.
21 Q. And there really was no other mode of communication at that
22 time?
23 A. No.
-17- Q. It was not - it was not easy. If you had an emergency, how would
2 you have contacted your family?
3 A. By phone. But the time was thirteen hours difference, so night
4 was day. It was not easy to have casual conversations because our timing
5 was totally off.
6 Q. Did anybody from your family come to visit you while you were
7 living in Singapore?
8 A. I think my brother may have, my younger brother, because he - he
9 worked in Southeast Asia. I can't remember the timing, but he's only three
10 years younger than I am and he was working for Citibank, so probably by
11 that time, he may have been living in Hong Kong after I moved to Singapore.
12 Hong Kong is actually quite far from Singapore, so I think he may have
13 come once.
14 Q. You said that after you found out that Andy was cheating on you
15 that you became depressed. Was that the first time in your life that you had
16 experienced depression? How did you react to that?
17 A. Well, depression is not a great thing. I mean, I was very unhappy
18 and I started taking some sort of anti-depressant, which made me feel like I
19 had a frontal lobotomy, so I just cut them in half and took them at night.
20 That was fairly late in the year that we were there. We were coming home
21 for a month over Christmas and I remember going ahead of time and taking
22 the two kids to visit my parents, went to Florida. The most God-awful plane
23 trip I've ever taken because the kids were, as I said, thirteen months apart. I
-18- 1 guess they were two and a half and one and a half at the time. And Bria,
2 didn't shut her eyes between Hong Kong and San Francisco - so needless to
3 say, I couldn't shut my eyes. And I remember in Tokyo this group of
4 Korean orphans got on the plane. We were changing planes in Tokyo and
5 they were so - they had little kids among them and they were totally well
6 behaved compared to my younger child. She didn't shut her eyes before our
7 layover in LA, at which time Bart was wide awake. So by the time I got to
8 Florida, which was more than twenty-four hours after I left, I'd spent the
9 night in Hong Kong, I was not in very good shape, let's say, but I never said
10 anything to my parents then about what was going on. Then I came to Tulsa
11 and while we were in Tulsa over Christmas, Andy got fired because there
12 had been a change in management at Reading and Bates and he had gotten
13 crosswise with a guy who had come into power. So he went back to
14 Indonesia because he had contacts there, to start a business. I can't even
15 remember exactly what it was. I stayed in the U.S. and went to work.
16 Q. When you returned for Christmas in about 19 -
17 A. It would be 1970, December of 1970.
18 Q. Did you remain in the United States after that or did you go back
19 to Singapore?
20 A. No, I stayed in the U.S. It was planned that I would because he
21 wasn't making very much money. I went to work full-time and put the kids
22 in child care, Miss Helen's, which was sort of a combination day care,
23 preschool at the time. I went to work for Doerner, Stuart, Saunders, Daniel
-19- 1 and Langenkamp because my firm that I had worked for had split up and the
2 lawyers I worked with there were scattered around town. So I went to work
3 for Doerner, Stuart. And my father died in April of that year and I went to -
4 Q. April of 1971?
5 A. Yes. He was in Florida at the time and I went to Florida to the
6 funeral and just decided I was, A, not going back to Singapore and B, going
7 to get a divorce. I dumped this on my poor family, who didn't have a clue,
8 at my father's funeral. That was an extremely emotional experience.
9 Q. What response did your family have?
10 A. They were very supportive.
11 Q. Had anyone else in the family gone through that type of
12 experience?
13 A. No.
14 Q. I would think at that time that divorce was still somewhat rare?
15 A. It was very uncommon. It was very rare and my mother was
16 concerned about how was I going to support myself and I said, "I can
17 support myself."
18 Q. You never had any concerns about that?
19 A. I never had any concerns about that, which was one of the real
20 benefits of my education and, no, I never had any concerns about that.
21 Q. Did your decision to get a divorce, go back to work full-time, did
22 that impact how your child care was going to be taken care of. Was it
23 private or public child care?
-20- I A. Actually, I had brought back with me, I had all most forgotten
2 that, my baby amah.
3 Q. Which is?
4 A. Which was the young Chinese woman who took care of the kids,
5 that I had hired to help take care of the kids in Singapore. And at the time I
6 left to come back, I was just bringing her with me for the month we were
7 going to be in the U.S. and I thought it would be a great experience for her.
8 She ended up getting very lonely and after she left, I discovered a lot of long
9 distance calls made on my telephone bill. So she was there and I had her
IO stay an extra month or two. Then when she left, I put the kids in day care.
11 Q. Did she try to get permanent residency here?
12 A. No. No, she thought this was a very strange place. They didn't
13 even use the right chopsticks at the Chinese restaurant. She said they were
14 Japanese.
15 Q. What happened to your father, do you know why he had passed
16 away?
17 A. My father had health problems because, you may remember, he
18 had polio.
19 Q. Right.
20 A. And he had a brace on his leg all of those years. He developed
21 some rare blood disease. He had too many red blood cells and I think that
22 ultimately impacted his heart, so it was sort of vague what he died from. He
23 was 72 when he died.
-21- 1 Q. How old was your mother when he passed away?
2 A. She was 65.
3 Q. What choices did your mother make after your father passed
4 away? Did she remain in the same location?
5 A. She stayed where she was in Florida. She traveled. I remember
6 she went to Hong Kong and visited John. She came to Tulsa a lot. When I
7 remarried, she came and stayed with the kids when Tom and I went on our
8 honeymoon. So she visited around. She had friends in Florida.
9 Q. When you decided that you were going to go through with the
10 divorce, how did you notify Andy and what other arrangements did you have
11 to make?
12 A. I can't remember how I notified him. I guess I sent him a letter.
13 He didn't come to Tulsa, so it certainly wasn't in person. It was in April
14 when I notified him and I think he probably wasn't surprised. My divorce
15 was finalized in August.
16 Q. When you went to work at Doerner, Stuart, were you an associate?
17 A. I was an associate. I was the eighth lawyer in the firm at the time.
18 Q. Were you the first female?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Did you work full-time?
21 A. I worked full-time.
22 Q. Did you have a specific partner you worked with?
23 A. Not really. But shortly after I got there, they made Bill Anderson
-22- 1 and Tom partners, so the whole firm basically were partners except for me.
2 Then Mike Lewis came shortly after I did.
3 Q. What type of work were you engaged in?
4 A. Mostly federal court, federal law related, mostly defense oriented
5 practice. We represented a bank. We represented Public Service Company,
6 the electric company. I worked on cases that Mike Lewis was defending for
7 the electric company, which involved everything. People getting zapped by
8 electricity and suing the company, people dying.
9 I got designated to be the person who would handle anything having
10 to do with discrimination for all of our clients because the Civil Rights Act
11 had passed and President Nixon had mandated affirmative action plans by an
12 executive order. So a lot of companies were under affirmative action plans
13 that required them to hire women and minorities and I advised them on that.
14 I guess my firm just assumed because I was female that I had been
15 discriminated against in my lifetime so I was the natural one to handle that
16 area of practice. And as a matter of fact, when I came back from Singapore,
17 I went to Sears Roebuck to obtain a credit card. Andy was gone and -
18 Q. You had a full-time job?
19 A. I had a full-time job. They wouldn't give me a credit card
20 because I was married. They said it had to be in my husband's name. So I
21 said okay. I took it out in his name even though he didn't have a job, didn't
22 have any income at the time, and it was all based on my income, but it still
23 had to be in his name.
-23- Q. In the year 1971 when you started to work at Doerner, Stuart, how
2 many women were members of the Tulsa County Bar?
3 A. That's when I remember there being about five. The first summer
4 after I was there, I went to the Tulsa County Bar picnic for the first time and
5 I remember being with Bill Anderson and Tom and there was a dinner. I
6 don't remember what it was, but it was sort of a semi-outdoorsy thing and
7 afterwards there was a stripper inside. I was so flabbergasted that I was
8 going to march in there and make a scene but Bill Anderson and Tom
9 dragged me off and took me home. The Tulsa County Bar Association never
10 had a stripper at its official functions after that.
11 Q. Do you remember who the Bar president was then?
12 A. Oh, I have no recollection.
13 Q. That was pretty typical entertainment at the time?
14 A. I think so.
15 Q. When did you first start to get to know Tom Seymour?
16 A. He was at Doerner, Stuart when I started in January. He was an
17 associate and then became a partner soon after.
18 Q. Did you immediately become friends?
19 A. Yes, we were friends. We worked together and we didn't - we
20 didn't start dating until - I think it was October after I was divorced. I may
21 have had to ask him out. I can't remember exactly.
22 Q. Was there any kind of anti-nepotism rules in the firm?
23 A. No. No, nobody really knew what to do with me. They were all
-24- 1 very excited that we started dating and when we got married the next
2 summer. I don't know if they expected me to quit, but I just kept right on
3 working. And then Sara was born in 1974, and I took a maternity leave for
4 six months, although there was no such thing as a maternity leave.
5 Q. When did you and Tom get married? What was the date?
6 A. June 10, 1972.
7 Q. And where did you get married?
8 A. Tulsa, Oklahoma.
9 Q. Did you get married at a church?
10 A. I got married at Sharp Chapel at the University of Tulsa by a
11 minister who had been a street minister for a street church. A guy we met
12 through some situation, a neat guy. I had gotten married in the Episcopal
13 Church the first time in Battle Creek. Well, we didn't really have a church.
14 Tom was raised Methodist, I guess, Southern Baptist or Methodist, I can't
15 remember which, but he wasn't really going to church either at the time.
16 Q. How were your religious views evolving by this time?
17 A. Oh, they were probably on hold. I mean, we didn't have any
18 discussions, Tom and I, before we got married, about religion and it was a
19 fairly nondenominational kind of church service.
20 Q. Did you believe that your divorce or the experience that you had
21 with depression affected your attitudes toward religion?
22 A. No.
23 Q. What do you think the most significant effect of your experience
-25- with depression was?
2 A. I didn't like it, but it was case specific, as it were. So when I got
3 rid of the problem - when I stayed in Oklahoma and the problem went to
4 Singapore or Indonesia, that disappeared.
5 Q. What questions did you have about how the children should
6 interact with their father?
7 A. I didn't have to have any questions because he never showed up.
8 Q. How long was it before he became involved in their lives?
9 A. He didn't get involved in their lives until Tom wrote him after we
10 were married. We probably had been married a year and Tom wrote him and
11 told him he wanted to adopt the kids. Then I guess he decided that he
12 needed to have some sort of relationship.
13 Q. Did - do you have any recollection of the kids asking questions
14 about their father?
15 A. I'm sure they did. I mean, they must have, but no, I don't really
16 remember. If they did, I just said, you know, he was - had to change jobs
17 and I was staying here and he was working over there - but they were so
18 young.
19 Q. You married Tom in June of '72. What happened after you guys
20 got married?
21 A. We continued to practice. After we went off on a honeymoon.
22 Q. Where?
23 A. Where did we honeymoon? We went to Jamaica for a week and
-26- then we went to Mexico for a week. In Mexico City, we were out walking
2 around and it was a real hot day. I remember walking into this little
3 restaurant and we sat down, somebody plunked a glass of water in front of
4 both of us and we drank it without even thinking, and I have never been
5 sicker in my life. So the second week was not idyllic, shall we say.
6 Q. And when you came back, you both went back to work at Doerner,
7 Stuart?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. Were there any rules associated with your employment there?
10 A. No.
11 Q. What name did you go by?
12 A. I went by Stephanie Kulp Seymour.
13 Q. Kulp was your maiden name?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. So you adopted that as your middle name?
16 A. Yes, because they would let me do that in Oklahoma on my
17 driver's license, unlike Michigan.
18 Q. At that time when you got married, were you considered to be
19 chattel?
20 A. Probably. I don't remember. The laws were beginning to change
21 in that regard. The Equal Rights Amendment, the fight over the passage of
22 the Equal Rights Amendment was in the early '70s and I got involved in that.
23 The Consumer Fair Credit Act was passed in '74 and I was able to get a
-27- 1 credit card in my own name for the first time, and then I became an expert
2 on that law. We had banking and financial clients, so I advised them about
3 the ramifications of that new law. So things were beginning to change.
4 Q. Were you ever involved in any kind of demonstrations?
5 A. No, not really. And I never joined anything. I just, for some
6 reason, had an aversion to joining organizations and so while I went to
7 meetings, to National Organization of Women meetings, I never joined.
8 Probably thank goodness, because when I wanted to become a judge, I didn't
9 have any of that in my background. But I was involved in a lot of - I
10 helped set up Call Rape sometime in the '70s. I don't remember when. And
11 I was involved in the City Human Rights Commission on various
12 committees. So I was doing a lot of things and I guess I got my name out
13 there because I talked a lot, spoke a lot on the Equal Rights Amendment.
14 Q. After you returned from your honeymoon and went back to work,
15 where were you living?
16 A. We bought a house just before we got married. An old house over
17 on South St. Louis, a great old house that had been built in the '20s. And I
18 remember our banking client, Utica Bank, having a fit because we needed to
19 close before we got married, in my name as a single woman and his name as
20 a single man. We didn't move in together. We weren't living there, but the
21 bank said we couldn't do that. And I said, "What do you mean you can't do
22 that? We're your lawyers. We say you can do that. You will do that." So
23 they did do it, but not without raising a question about whether it was even
-28- 1 legal to have a house in the names of an unmarried man and woman. If we
2 had been brother and sister, they probably wouldn't have thought anything
3 about it.
4 Q. When you look back on the property rolls with respect - or in the
5 abstract of the house - the original mortgage would have been in the names
6 of you two as single individuals?
7 A. Yes, it would have been bought in our separate names.
8 Q. That was probably very rare at the time?
9 A. I think it probably was.
10 Q. Was there any public fallout from that?
11 A. Nope. A little consciousness raising.
12 Q. How long did you live in that house?
13 A. We lived in that house four years. Sara was born there, our first
14 child together, in 1974. And I then took a six-month maternity leave
15 because I decided that was a nice thing to do and I wasn't paid for these
16 maternity leaves. I never even asked about that. I just took off, but with the
17 understanding that I was coming back. And they called me up about various
18 matters while I was off, so I was providing free legal advice to my
19 colleagues at that time.
20 When I went back to work, I worked four days a week after Sara was
21 born. I hired, at that point, a woman who effectively became the nanny,
22 although, they weren't called that back then. Virginia Davis had been
23 working for Grandmother's, Inc., which was a babysitting outfit here. I first
-29- 1 met her when Bart and Bria got the chicken pox before I was married. I
2 called Grandmothers, Inc. and they sent Virginia Davis to the house. She
3 was a terrific person who always wanted to start her own day care center, but
4 she never got her act together sufficiently to do that, so I hired her full-time
5 when I returned to work after Sara was born. I also had a full-time
6 housekeeper who came and took care of the house and the laundry. I wasn't
7 making any money because I was paying it all out, but the house was
8 running well.
9 Q. How did you make decisions about what school the kids were
10 going to go to?
11 A. I was always a big public school fan. I had gone to public
12 schools. Tom had gone to public schools, so we never considered anything
13 else. Lee Elementary School was between our house and our office, and our
14 office was only ten minutes away from home. Before that, after Sara was
15 born, we put Bart and Bria in Montessori. It was a local Montessori school
16 here and Mrs. Davis picked them up. Then when it came time for elementary
17 school, they just went to public school, which at the time had a gifted
18 children's program. So it was a great place.
19 Q. How long did the kids attend Lee?
20 A. They attended Lee all through their elementary school years,
21 which for the older two, was until junior high. It would have been through
22 sixth grade at that time. And then because we were in a totally drug ridden
23 junior high school district, and you didn't have the option of going to other
-30- 1 public schools, we put them in Holland Hall, both of them, a year apart for
2 junior high, with the thought that we would get them to go for high school to
3 Booker T. Washington, which was by then a terrific magnet school. That
4 didn't work out because they were in Holland Hall for three years and had
5 made many friends and they wanted to stay, so they ended up staying.
6 Q. When was Sara born?
7 A. 1974.
8 Q. What was different about Sara's childhood than Bart and Bria's?
9 A. It was more stable and we were living here and they weren't
10 running around the world, I was working four days a week and Sara had
11 older siblings, which was great for her.
12 Q. Were there differences in the views between Tom and Andy about
13 the father's role as a parent?
14 A. Totally different. Andy sort of tolerated the kids when they were
15 tolerable, liked them when they were tolerable, didn't do a very good job of
16 tolerating them when they weren't, and they were very small at the time.
17 Bria was a very colicky baby and as were Sara and Anna, but Tom was a
18 very nurturing sort of guy. He was crazy about the kids so he was totally
19 helpful with new babies and toddlers and helped with the cooking and that
20 was great.
21 Q. So you resumed the idyllic life that you had come to know?
22 A. Yes. The one I had envisioned when I got married the first time.
23 Q. What involvement did you have with your family during those
-31- 1 early years?
2 A. Well, my father had died. He died before Tom and I got married,
3 and so it was 1971. Tom and I got married in 1972, so Tom never knew
4 him. But my mother visited often and we got together with my siblings quite
5 a bit. We would often go to Florida all together at the same time in the
6 winter over Christmas. My siblings were scattered and were having babies,
7 the older ones. So, it was not an everyday occurrence because we didn't live
8 in the same place, but we got together at least once a year.
9 Q. Okay. Well, I'll just start with community work. Were you
10 engaged in community work in Tulsa?
11 A. Some. Mostly related to issues involving women or
12 discrimination and I think I mentioned I was in a group that incorporated
13 Call Rape. That was just the beginning of women being interested in
14 domestic violence issues and Call Rape was one of the first organizations to
15 be set up in relation to that. I was on the Tulsa Task Force for battered
16 women, the legal advisory panel, and that was the precursor to - it was after
17 that the Domestic Violence Shelter, the first shelter here, was built.
18 Q. Did you have any experiences with individuals who sought help
19 from the Task Force For Battered Women or from Call Rape?
20 A. No, I was just mostly doing legal work for the people who were
21 directly involved in that.
22 Q. When was Sara born?
23 A. Sara was born in 1974.
-32- Q. So you indicated that you took six months off at that time?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. And then you went back to work?
4 A. Yes. Four days a week.
5 Q. What was your schedule like?
6 A. I worked Monday through Thursday. It didn't make a lot of sense
7 to me to work part days. It was easier for me to work full days and not work
8 Friday. It gave me a long weekend, so that was my work schedule.
9 Q. Who picked the kids up from school?
10 A. Mrs. Davis.
11 Q. What was your day like?
12 A. Tom and I would drop them off, one or the other of us would drop
13 them off on our way to work, and she would pick them up.
14 Q. Did you and Tom go to work together?
15 A. Sometimes we did, but not all the time because we were often
16 doing different things.
17 Q. When did your day begin and end, your workday?
18 A. It didn't begin before the kids went to school, so 8:30, I think,
19 typically.
20 Q. What do you remember about billable hours when you first started
21 practicing?
22 A. They existed. Let me think. We didn't have to bill so many hours
23 in a year, and I just remember striving to bill 40 hours a week.
-33- 1 Q. Do you remember what rate you were billed out as an associate?
2 A. I have no recollection.
3 Q. There was no link between what you were billed at and what you
4 earned?
5 A. No.
6 Q. So Sara was born in February of 1974. And what was it like
7 raising an infant with toddlers? Well, actually, they weren't toddlers. They
8 were already in elementary?
9 A. Bria was five and Bart was six when Sara was born, so they were
10 great help. That's a wonderful age. So it was considerably easier than
11 raising my first two children thirteen months apart.
12 Q. What was Tom's schedule like during those early years?
13 A. Pretty much the same as mine. We probably did drive separate
14 cars by then because I tended to come regularly. He always came home for
15 dinner. That's one thing we did, we always had dinner together with the
16 children every night. And if one of us had to do work afterwards, I would do
17 mine at home. Sometimes he would go back to the office.
18 Q. Who made the meals?
19 A. I mostly made the meals back then. He loved to cook and I think
20 he would have cooked during the week if I had asked him to. If we had a
21 dinner party, we both cooked. I just - it was a nice transition for me from
22 work to home to cook dinner because the kids were all around. It was just a
23 way to wind down and I enjoyed cooking. So most of their growing up
-34- 1 years, I cooked dinner during the week.
2 Q. How long did you maintain your four-day-a-week work schedule?
3 A. I maintained that until Anna was born. She was born in 1977. I,
4 again, took six months off, and I went back to work four days a week. And I
5 was still working four days a week when I applied for the judgeship.
6 Q. By the time Anna was born, had you become a partner with the
7 firm?
8 A. Yes. I became a partner in 1975 when I was working four days a
9 week.
10 Q. What was that process?
11 A. Oh, the guys got together and decided they would make me a
12 partner.
13 Q. What did that mean in those days?
14 A. Well, I was the first female partner in Tulsa because there were so
15 few of us, at least at a regular firm. I mean, Phyllis Zimmerman, I'm sure,
16 was a partner with her husband because there were just the two of them. I
17 was invited to be partner and then I got to go to the partnership meetings and
18 I got a percentage. I don't even remember what it was. It wasn't very big. I
19 do remember, however, that some of the partners were concerned about
20 whether Tom would control my vote until we had our first partnership
21 meeting. Tom made a motion that died for lack of a second and then they
22 decided that maybe that wouldn't be a problem.
23 Q. Did you and Tom have similar attitudes toward the practice of
-35- 1 law?
2 A. Not really. Before we got married, he worked all the time. After
3 we got married, he worked less, but he worked more hours than I worked.
4 Q. What type of issues did you debate with each other?
5 A. How to raise kids more than legal issues.
6 Q. What interests did the kids have during their elementary years?
7 A. They started playing soccer. That's when soccer came to Tulsa
8 when the older two kids were in elementary school and they both signed up.
9 And Tom actually was a referee. He didn't coach, but he became a soccer
IO referee. So every weekend we had two soccer games and he was refereeing
11 in addition to that. It was pretty busy.
12 Q. Did the demands of work require you to do extra activities on the
13 weekend?
14 A. You mean extra work activities?
15 Q. Yes.
16 A. Tom would go in on Saturdays. Most of the lawyers would go in
17 on Saturdays. I learned early on that they did more goofing off on Saturdays
18 than anything else. I just preferred to take my lunch during the week, keep
19 my nose to the grindstone, and get my work done during the week. So I
20 rarely worked on weekends unless we were getting ready for a trial and it
21 was just before trial, but that wasn't very often. Most of our cases settled or
22 were resolved on summary judgment motions or motions to dismiss.
23 Q. When did you first consider pursuing a judgeship?
-36- 1 A. When Jimmy Carter created a position, a new position, on the
2 Tenth Circuit and designated - well, actually, Congress created the position
3 and the President designated it for Oklahoma. He set up merit nominating
4 commissions to which one applied, and he announced he was looking for
5 women and minorities, of which there were close to none on the federal
6 bench at the time, especially at the circuit court level.
7 Tom encouraged me and I thought, why not. So I applied and that
8 was in 1978.
9 Q. What did you think it meant to be a judge on the Tenth Circuit
10 Court of Appeals?
11 A. I didn't have much of a clue except that I knew it was - I always
12 loved the law and I liked writing and I liked the legal issues in cases and so I
13 just thought it would be interesting. I didn't have any idea about quantity of
14 workload or anything else for that matter. I knew I would, ifl got the job,
15 would be the only woman on the Court of eight judges. The Court sits in six
16 states and the judges come from the various states in the Circuit, which are
17 Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Kansas, New Mexico and Wyoming. When I did
18 some research about the nominating commission, I discovered that it was
19 composed of eleven people, six of whom were lawyers, five of whom were
20 lay people, and that they had all been appointed by the President, with the
21 help of the Attorney General, from the six states involved. It really was kind
22 of an interesting concept.
23 Q. What was the role of the Judicial Nominating Commission?
-37- 1 A. They were charged by the President with interviewing people,
2 soliciting applications from women and minorities to the extent they didn't
3 receive any, and proposing three to five names to the President for each
4 position.
5 Q. Were there other women within the Circuit that applied?
6 A. One.
7 Q. What state was she from?
8 A. Oklahoma. This was an Oklahoma position.
9 Q. It was an Oklahoma position?
10 A. Yes. And there had been, I found out subsequently, two judges,
11 one from Kansas and one from Utah, who were proposed by the same
12 Commission and they had no women applicants from those states. They had
13 two in Oklahoma.
14 Q. Who was the other one?
15 A. Alma Wilson, who was a state trial judge at the time. So there
16 were two of us and they had a total of thirty-five applications. And I heard
17 this story afterwards, it was told to a friend of mine who lives in Colorado
18 who was a friend of a woman named Josie Heath, who was on the
19 Commission. Apparently the chairman, Mr. Pense, I'll never forget him - he
20 was a 70-year-old trial lawyer from Wyoming and he came to my interview
21 in his cowboy boots - but apparently, he changed the procedure for the
22 Oklahoma position and treated it differently than he had in Kansas and Utah.
23 At the first meeting he called, he said, "We have thirty-five applications and
-38- we need to reduce the number so let's go around the table and everybody
2 throw out somebody who's obviously not qualified." And he started with me
3 and threw my name out. Josie Heath, who was not a lawyer, a lay person
4 from Denver, said subsequently that she was sitting halfway around the table
5 and she was stunned. She said, "Why are you throwing her name out? She's
6 pretty well qualified, it seems to me." And he said, "No, she's not. She's
7 got four children and couldn't possibly handle the job." Then she was really
8 stunned and didn't know what to say. So it was going around the table and it
9 got to her. Fortunately, for me, she gathered her wits and threw out Pat
10 Irwin, who was then a sitting justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court, who
11 turned out to be Mr. Pense's favorite candidate. Mr. Pense was horrified and
12 said, "He's clearly well qualified. Why are you throwing him out?" And
13 she said, "Because he has five children and couldn't possibly handle the
14 job." They then had a discussion about whether the number of children
15 should be a disqualifying factor, decided maybe it shouldn't be, threw both
16 of our names back in the pot, and we were both on the list of four that they
17 ultimately proposed.
18 Q. Do you remember who the four were?
19 A. Dale Cook, Federal District Judge from Tulsa; Pat Irwin, who was
20 a justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court; and Lee West who had been a
21 state trial judge in Oklahoma and recently on the Civil Aeronautics Board.
22 Lee had been living in D.C. and he had just come back to Oklahoma and was
23 practicing with Hall, Estill as I recall. So those were the four names.
-39- 1 Q. What do you know about the process for the ultimate selection?
2 A. That was very political because we were all trying to get chosen
3 by the President. Everybody was campaigning and I didn't really know what
4 I was doing. I'm not sure the other people did either, but the women's
5 groups were - had been agitating to get women appointed to the these
6 positions. There had only been two women ever in the history of the U.S.
7 appointed to a federal court of appeals. FDR had appointed a women to the
8 Sixth Circuit in the '30s and Johnson had appointed Shirley Hufstedler to the
9 Ninth Circuit. She was still sitting at the time. So all the women's groups in
IO Washington were lobbying for me to get it.
11 Dobie Langenkamp, who was my partner at Doerner, Stuart, Saunders,
12 Daniel and Langenkamp, had left and gone to work for the Carter
13 administration in the Department of Energy, and he was in D.C. He was a
14 friend and he had a contact in the Carter Administration. So Dobie did some
15 work for me. And when I went back to D.C. to do my own lobbying, he
16 hooked me up with a woman, who was a friend of some aide to Roselyn
17 Carter. She worked at the White House and I got an interview with her, not
18 with Roselyn, but with the aide. So those were my contacts.
19 Dale Cook was a Republican and he basically didn't get too far
20 because he was a white male in addition to being Republican. President
21 Carter actually appointed some Republicans, a black woman on the Second
22 Circuit and an Hispanic male on the Ninth Circuit, among others, but a white
23 male Republican probably didn't quite fit what he had in mind. And I
-40- remember Griffin Bell, who was the Attorney General, commenting when
2 some reporter asked him, "Well, how come if this is a merit nominating
3 process, how come more Republicans aren't getting this position?" Griffin
4 Bell thought a second and he said, "We' re not running an affirmative action
5 program for Republicans."
6 So Dale Cook was a non-factor. I think Pat Irwin, my recollection
7 was, didn't really have any contacts and so it was between me and Lee West,
8 who as it turned out, had gone bird hunting with the Associate Attorney
9 General in charge of judgeships in the Justice Department, while he was
10 back at the CAB. But I got nominated, I'm sure, because the President was
11 looking for more women.
12 Q. Were there any stories about how President Carter made his
13 decision?
14 A. Well, I've heard that Roselyn was a big force in this whole
15 process. There was a story I subsequently heard from Mike Lewis, one of
16 my former partners. Some lawyer friend that he knew told him this story
17 afterwards. There was some guy, who must have been one of the applicants,
18 who was still pushing for the position even after he didn't get his name on
19 the list. He had done a lot of work for Jimmy Carter when Carter ran for
20 president. He had become a friend of Chip Carter because Chip had come to
21 Oklahoma for Jimmy Carter when he was running. Apparently Chip had told
22 this lawyer that if there was ever anything he could do for him, let him
23 know. When this fellow was trying to get on the list to be considered by the
-41- 1 President, he called his friend, the lawyer, who called the number that Chip
2 Carter had given him, which was a number in the White House. He got Chip
3 Carter and told him that his friend was really well qualified and would like
4 to be considered for the position. And Chip said, "Hold on a minute, I'll see
5 what I can find out." He was gone a long time and when he came back and
6 he said, "No, I don't think that will happen." He said, "I talked to my
7 mother and there's a woman - there's a woman named Seymour on the list."
8 So I think Rosalyn probably had a lot to do with the consideration of women.
9 And the President had set up in the Justice Department - there were actually
10 women in the Justice Department, women lawyers, who worked for the
11 Attorney General and were charged with finding women to apply for these
12 positions.
13 Q. How did you find out that you were the one who was going to be
14 selected for the position?
15 A. It was a very long process. I got a call from one of the women in
16 the Justice Department who told me that the President was going to nominate
17 me and that the FBI was doing a background check. I got calls about that
18 from people who were interviewed by the FBI. The ABA, there was a Tenth
19 Circuit representative - the way it works for the ABA, each circuit has a
20 representative to the ABA Committee. They do the background checks on
21 nominees for judgeships and then they report to the Committee, the
22 Committee votes, and then tells the President or the Attorney General
23 whether the Committee thinks the individual under consideration is qualified
-42- for the position. And nothing happened for a long time. I heard nothing
2 from anybody. I had no feedback from anyone saying they had been called
3 by the ABA representative, even though I had feedback when the FBI called
4 them. And then one day the Tenth Circuit representative, a guy named John
5 Couch, called me up and asked if he - he wanted to come and interview me
6 the next - actually, I think it was the same day. I said sure. So he showed
7 up in the office. He asked me no substantive questions about anything. He
8 asked me how I could take care of my four children and handle the job and it
9 was very short and that was it.
10 And the next thing I heard was a call from one of the women, my
11 contact in the Justice Department, who said that they had gotten a call from
12 the ABA which was proposing to rate me unqualified for insufficient trial
13 experience. And she said because the ABA had taken so long, the Justice
14 Department had done their own background check, and the Attorney General
15 thought I was exceptionally qualified, and they were not going to withdraw
16 my name. They were going to ask the ABA to appoint somebody else in
17 place of John Couch and to do a recheck.
18 When I heard this, I immediately wrote a letter to the ABA because
19 they had - I had gotten all of their rules about how they're supposed to
20 operate and if they're going to propose to rate you unqualified, they're
21 supposed to tell you in the interview and give you an opportunity to respond.
22 Well, of course, John Couch did none of that. So I wrote a letter to the
23 President of the ABA and said, "You didn't follow your own process."
-43- And, as it turned out, there had been no real background check
2 because once the ABA appointed John Sutro, who had been president of the
3 ABA, to replace John Couch, I started getting a lot of feedback from people
4 telling me they had gotten a call from the ABA. None of that had happened
5 with John Couch and I don't think he called a soul.
6 The end result was I got through the process and was officially
7 nominated. My name was sent to the Senate in October of 1979. My
8 interview with the committee had been at the end of January or early
9 February of '79. So my name was forwarded to the Senate. I was confirmed
10 on October 31. I had my hearing earlier in October.
11 Q. What was that like?
12 A. It was easy. I mean, I had all the kids there. I had a hearing in
13 the Senate along with Tom Brett and Jim Ellison who had been nominated
14 for federal district court positions here in Tulsa; Lee West, who had been
15 nominated, when he didn't get the circuit position, for a federal district court
16 position in Oklahoma City; and Frank Seay, who was the nominee for the
17 Eastern District position. We all had our hearing at the same time, so mine
18 was very short. It was very non-controversial.
19 Q. The proceedings, I take it, were not as combative back then as
20 they are now?
21 A. No. No, they weren't combative at all.
22 Q. There was a lot of deference paid to each individual who had been
23 nominated?
-44- 1 A. Yes. They asked us some questions. Bob Doyle was there
2 because he was, by that time, married to Liddy Hanford Doyle, who had been
3 my law school classmate. So she had sent him over to be nice to me, which
4 he was. Everything worked out fine. And then I had my formal swearing in
5 on November 16th.
6 Q. How old were the kids then?
7 A. Anna was two, Bart was twelve, Bria was eleven, and so that
8 would have made Sara five.
9 Q. And how old were you?
10 A. Thirty nine. I had turned 39 in October.
11 Q. As you were going through all of these different stages of your
12 life where you were the first female to do so many different things with
13 respect to law school, your work at Baker and Botts, Doerner, Stuart and
14 then this position, did you have any concept or understanding of the fact that
15 you were blazing a trail for other women?
16 A. I did. I mean, I knew in the sense that I knew there hadn't been
17 anybody before me because it was kind of lonely out there, but I have a
18 much greater sense of having been a trail blazer now with women - when
19 women started coming after me and looking up to me - but at the time I was
20 doing it, it was just - I was just doing what I wanted to do in a man's world.
21 Q. How did women generally react to you during those formative
22 years of your career?
23 A. I would say they acted fine. I've always gotten along with people,
-45- 1 so I never had any trouble with secretaries or working relationships with
2 people. I had more reaction from guys than from women. I remember Sam
3 Daniel, one of my partners, asking me - I was working late on something
4 and his secretaries all left at 5 :00. He was running around looking for a
5 secretary about 5: 15 and he had something that he wanted typed, so he asked
6 me if I would type it. And I said, "Hell, No - type it yourself."
7 Q. The first time anybody had said no to him about anything?
8 A. I'm sure. But that was more of the kind of response I got from
9 guys than from women. I wasn't running across professional women. I
10 wasn't really practicing in state court where there was one woman judge,
11 there certainly weren't any women judges in the federal court at the time. I
12 was treated very nicely in court. Allan Barrow, the federal judge here, loved
13 me because he loved women and so he was very deferential in the
14 courtroom. It was always, "Gentlemen and Mrs. Seymour," and he just went
15 out of his way to be nice. One time I remember being at a pretrial
16 conference, which were run by "Judge Marilyn," which was probably before
17 your time, but he had a long-time career law clerk named Marilyn who ran
18 his pretrials, as she ran a lot of things, so we referred to her behind her back
19 as Judge Marilyn. We had been in the conference room with her and we took
20 a break. There were lawyers from Oklahoma City on the case, it was a bank
21 related matter, and we all went to the restroom and to talk on the phone. As
22 I was coming back down the hall, the back hallway from the restroom to go
23 back to the conference room, Judge Barrow came out of his chambers, saw
-46- me, and threw his arms around me to give me a big hug. I was looking over
2 his shoulder when the two lawyers from Oklahoma City came around the
3 corner at the end of the hallway and their mouths just dropped open.
4 Q. That'sjustthewayitis?
5 A. That's the way it was.
6 Q. What is your memory of your swearing in?
7 A. It was a lovely ceremony. Monroe - I invited Monroe McKay to
8 come from Utah. We had struck up a friendship over the phone because he
9 had called me a lot during the process - he was one of my new colleagues on
10 the Tenth Circuit. And Bill Holloway from Oklahoma City, who was the
11 other judge from Oklahoma at the time, was there, a lot of lawyers, and
12 friends and my family. It was just a very nice ceremony in the courtroom.
13 Q. What interaction did you have with the President?
14 A. I had no interaction with the President.
15 Q. Who did the swearing in?
16 A. Bill Holloway.
17 Q. So it was here in Tulsa?
18 A. It was here in Tulsa.
19 Q. Did you ever get to make a trip to Washington other than for the
20 Senate hearings?
21 A. Afterwards to attend new judges' school.
22 Q. How was that?
23 A. Very interesting because President Carter, by that time, had
-47- appointed eleven women to the courts of appeals from across the country and
2 I had not previously met any of them. We were all back there. I think there
3 were something like 40 new circuit judges that Carter appointed. There was
4 an omnibus judgeship bill after President Carter was elected, which created a
5 number of new positions, mine was one of those. And so he got to appoint a
6 lot of judges in his four years, a lot more than a sitting President normally
7 would. So I got to meet the women that Carter had appointed and that was
8 really interesting. One interesting thing that I learned was that out of the
9 eleven women, six of them - to my recollection, six of them had gone to
10 women's colleges. I thought that was sort of an interesting commentary on
11 the kind of education I had.
12 Q. Did you become friendly with any of those women?
13 A. Yes. Among those women was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who later
14 went to the Supreme Court. She was appointed to the Second Circuit. Pat
15 Wald, who was appointed to the D.C. Circuit and later became chief judge.
16 Amalya Kearse was the first black female appointed to the Second Circuit.
17 Oh, gosh, Mary Schroeder was appointed to the Ninth Circuit and later
18 became chief judge. Dorothy Nelson was appointed to the Ninth Circuit.
19 I'm not remembering all the names. Dolores Sloviter was appointed to the
20 Third Circuit. She later became chief judge. Carolyn Randall - she was
21 Carolyn Randall at the time - was appointed to the Fifth Circuit, and later
22 became chief judge. So it was a really - it was a fun experience and a very . . 23 mce occas10n.
-48- 1 There was a black tie dinner in the Supreme Court for all of the new
2 appointees, who were there at the new judges' school, and Warren Burger
3 was the Chief at the time. We had cocktails in one beautiful Supreme Court
4 room and we had dinner in another beautiful Supreme Court room. At the
5 end of the dinner, there were toasts. Finally, Justice Burger clinked on his
6 - glass and announced that Justice Blackmun, who was there, would give a
7 tour of his chambers to all the attendees and their spouses except for the
8 women judges, and they would meet Justice Burger at a different location.
9 We' re all looking at each other wondering what was going on. So we
10 women judges troop out and meet Justice Burger, with his wife in tow. And
11 he gives us a tour of his chambers, a separate tour. Justice Burger liked
12 women also. And I will never forget, he's telling us - it was very interesting
13 because the Chief has two sets of chambers - they're connected, but one in
14 which he does all of his administrative work, of which there's quite a bit,
15 and the other one in which he does his judicial work. We were in one of
16 them, I can't remember which, and he says, "Oh, ladies, come here and let
17 me show you - you'll be particularly interested in this." And he showed us
18 his kitchen. Whereupon I thought Mary Schroeder was going to come
19 unglued and punch him out, but she was doing all of this behind his back.
20 So it was so - it was strange.
21 Q. How long was judges' school?
22 A. Oh, three days, I think.
23 Q. What kind of things do they teach you?
-49- 1 A. Oh, there were judges who were brought in to talk about different
2 topics, like opinion writing, and we had somebody talk about ethics. We had
3 somebody talk about the code of judicial conduct. And I will never forget,
4 this male judge is up there talking about how spouses of judges are not
5 supposed to be involved in politics. Abner Mikva, who was an appointee
6 from D.C. to the D.C. Circuit, raised his hand and he said, "Well, I can tell
7 you my wife is not a tea server and so she's not going to stay uninvolved in
8 politics." And so there was some discussion about that, how you weren't
9 supposed to put political signs in your lawn even though it was your joint
10 lawn and so forth. Subsequently, a couple of years later, my husband Tom
11 ran for mayor of Tulsa and he had to get an opinion. I had to write to
12 request an opinion from the Committee on Judicial Conduct saying it was
13 okay for my spouse to run for office in Tulsa, Oklahoma, because there had
14 been a prior opinion stating that spouses shouldn't get involved in politics
15 which had pretty much indicated that running for office was a no-no.
16 Q. Was this just because of the appearance of impropriety?
17 A. Yes. I'm strictly prohibited from.being involved in politics in any
18 way, shape, fashion, or form. And because most of the spouses had been
19 female all these years, it was not considered a big deal.
20 Q. When you finished judges' school and returned to start ...
21 A. I had already started.
22 Q. Oh, you had already started?
23 A. I had started. I was sworn in on November 16, 1979. I don't
-50- 1 remember what day of the week it was. It probably was a Thursday or
2 Friday and I had a term of court in Denver the next week.
3 Q. What did you learn about that?
4 A. I had gotten briefs ahead of time, before I was officially sworn in.
5 I didn't have any chambers. I came down here. There was not a phone.
6 There was not a typewriter. I had hired my secretary at the firm, Joan
7 Swope, to come with me as my secretary. I had one law clerk, Nancy
8 Vyhnal, whom I had hired. I still hadn't hired the other two law clerks. So I
9 went back and used my old office at the firm to get ready. And then I went
10 off to Denver to sit for two days, including an en bane. It was an interesting
11 experience. Of course, I had met Judge Holloway and I had met Judge
12 Monroe McKay. Bill Holloway is the world's nicest man and he was all
13 solicitous about my coming to Denver and meeting the other judges.
14 Everyone stayed at the Brown Palace, so I got there and checked in. Bill
15 had told me ahead of time that the judges all got together for cocktails before
16 dinner in the Chiefs hotel suite. The Chief then was Oliver Seth. Bill had
17 told me before I left Tulsa that he would come and collect me and take me
18 down to introduce me to everybody. And I knew approximately what time,
19 6:30. I sat there and I sat there and I sat there and it got to be 7:00 and I was
20 thinking, you know, what is going on. Finally, Bill Holloway showed up all
21 in a snizzle. The Brown Palace had lost me. Bill didn't know what room I
22 was in and he couldn't find me. And, of course, they were all down there in
23 the Chiefs room wondering where this person was.
-51- 1 So that was my beginning. And I went down and got introduced to
2 the judges and the next day I sat on cases.
3 Q. Do you have any recollection of the first case?
4 A. No. I have a recollection of the first one I wrote. It was an
5 employment discrimination case involving a man who worked for a railroad,
6 but other than that, no. And on the second day, which was when the en bane
7 was, I got sick. I was throwing up and there was no way I could go to court.
8 I had to call the judges and say I'm not showing up. We sat in panels of
9 three. I was sitting there wondering what are they thinking, that I'm too
10 scared to show up or something? As it turned out, Tom was home with our
11 children, who were also throwing up. So I had a bug of some kind. Those
12 were my first two days of sitting on the Tenth Circuit.
13 Q. What were your thoughts about dividing your time between Tulsa
14 and Denver?
15 A. It wasn't really a division because the court held oral argument a
16 week every other month and that was the only time I went to Denver. So
17 most of my work was done in Tulsa, Oklahoma, all the preparation and
18 opinion writing.
19 Q. Did the kids have different attitudes about your becoming a judge?
20 A. No, they just thought it was neat. I mean, they started referring to
21 me as Judge Mom after they went to the Senate hearing. They thought that
22 was fun. I was just going to a different office as far as they were concerned.
23 They didn't really have a clue.
-52- 1 Q. Did people start to treat you differently once you became a judge?
2 A. Yes, everyone started calling me Judge and it was so strange. I
3 mean, I would be in the grocery store and somebody would call me Judge
4 and I would look around wondering who they were talking to. It took me a
5 long time to get used to that concept and it was just - it was odd to go from
6 practicing law to being a judge because I wasn't a judge who was seeing
7 lawyers on a daily basis. I was a judge who was sitting down here, you
8 know, working away in my private office with my law clerks. It was very -
9 it was strange to go from private practice to that kind of position. It took me
10 a little while to get used to it.
11 Q. So you began your career as a judge at the age of 39?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. And you continued in that full capacity until what age?
14 A. I took senior status at age 65. And I'm still working.
15 Q. During those years, do you have a specific or some specific cases
16 that you have a very distinct recollection of?
17 A. Well, probably the most renowned case I sat on was Brown v.
18 Board of Education. We would get our briefs maybe a month, three weeks
19 before a term of court and they would just arrive in a stack. I would have so
20 many for Monday and so many for - we sat four or five days a week. And I
21 picked up this brief and it was it was Linda Brown Smith v. The Board of
22 Education of Topeka, Kansas. I got the case in probably about '91 because
23 the opinion was filed in '92 and it was the same case as the one the Supreme
-53- Court heard. Linda Brown was the child over whom school integration in
2 Topeka, Kansas was fought - her mother brought the action on her behalf
3 and she was the plaintiff child in that case. The Supreme Court ordered in
4 the '50s that schools be desegregated in Topeka, Kansas and elsewhere in the
5 country. That child grew up, married, and became Linda Brown Smith, the
6 Supreme Court had remanded the case back to the Tenth Circuit, which had
7 sent it back to Topeka, Kansas, and it had never gotten closed. So Linda
8 Brown Smith reopened the case on behalf of her daughter, claiming that the
9 School Board had never desegregated the schools in Topeka, Kansas, and
10 that was the case.
11 Q. Did you decide that?
12 A. We decided that. The District Court had granted summary
13 judgment for the school district, the Tenth Circuit reversed. There was lots
14 of evidence that nothing much had happened. The City was still segregated
15 and kids went to the same old elementary schools and for economic reasons,
16 the City hadn't really done much by way of integration.
17 Q. Have you followed up on that since then?
18 A. Yes. We commented in the opinion on how various cities had
19 desegregated, some by busing, some by magnet schools. They ended up
20 settling the case and developing magnet schools in Topeka as a result of that
21 case. That one certainly stands out in my memory.
22 Q. Fifteen years ago?
23 A. Yes. Death penalty cases - those were always hard.
-54- 1 Q. Why were those hard?
2 A. Because I'm not a big believer in the death penalty, for one thing,
3 and I had to decide when I applied for the position if I could ever affirm a
4 death penalty. I was living in this state where we had a lot of people on
5 death row, I knew that. And I rationalized before I applied that I wouldn't
6 be on the jury making the decision or sentencing somebody to death, that I
7 would instead be seeing the case from a legal standpoint and I thought I
8 could apply the law. I don't remember when I got my first death penalty
9 case, but it was in the early '80s. There was a huge backlog, the Oklahoma
10 Court of Criminal Appeals was not deciding the capital cases very fast, and
11 the process was really long. We didn't get them until the end of the process.
12 I remember in the mid '80s, we started getting some and we had an en bane
13 question about the constitutionality of the provision of the Oklahoma death
14 penalty statute regarding aggravating circumstances. We held the provision
15 unconstitutional and that sent all of them back, literally, to the state courts
16 for resentencing. So then we didn't get a lot more capital cases until maybe
17 the late '80s, and then we got tons of them again in the '90s. Those are hard
18 cases because somebody's life is at stake and because Oklahoma sentences
19 all kinds of people to death row that nobody else does. I mean, no other
20 state in the Tenth Circuit has the number of prisoners on death row that
21 Oklahoma did and does. They might have five, whereas Oklahoma would
22 have 150. So we were getting all of our capital cases out of Oklahoma.
23 Q. Did you ever have to make a decision on a frantic appeal?
-55- 1 A. Many times.
2 Q. And how did you respond to that?
3 A. Frantically, as we all did. Subsequently, we developed a system
4 when we began to get a lot of last minute appeals that solved that problem by
5 requiring the federal district judges who got the case first, because you have
6 to go to the trial court before you get to us, we asked the district courts to
7 send us copies as soon as anything got filed. And panels were created
8 separately so that we always knew when we were up on the next death
9 penalty panel. We didn't do that on first habeas cases because those weren't
10 critical. I mean, those were decided on appeal in the ordinary course and the
11 execution date wasn't set until after the decision was made. It was the
12 second successive habeas cases which were filed when there was an
13 execution imminent that were hectic.
14 Q. What was the most dramatic death penalty case you were ever
15 involved with?
16 A. I have sat on two where the defendant was actually innocent and I
17 have to say those fall in that category. The first one involved a guy that -
18 THE INNOCENT MAN that John Grissom has written a book about - was my
19 case. Frank Seay, the federal district judge in the Eastern District of
20 Oklahoma, actually granted the writ of habeas corpus based on ineffective
21 assistance of counsel. The State appealed, and that was the state of the case
22 when we got it. I just remember the record in the case being so skimpy, but
23 the issue before us was ineffective assistance of counsel. The defendant
-56- 1 wanted a new trial. We agreed and affirmed the grant of the writ. The
2 defendant got a new trial and subsequently DNA evidence established that he
3 was not the person who committed the rape and the murder. In fact, DNA
4 evidence pointed to the guy who fingered him, a man who had been in the
5 bar and said the defendant, who was mentally slow, as I recall, had left with
6 the victim. So there was that case.
7 The other case was incredible. Tom Brett - these were all out of
8 Oklahoma - Judge Brett granted a writ of habeas corpus. The case involved
9 an execution-style murder around a pool in a small town in western
10 Oklahoma at 2:00 a.m. in the morning at a motel. The absolutely only
11 evidence was eyewitness identification. These people were partying out by
12 the pool when a man walked out at 2:00 a.m., pulled a gun, and shot the
13 victim dead. The eye witness gave a description, which was passed around
14 in Oklahoma, and some Tulsa cop said, "Gee, that sounds like" - I don't
15 remember his name, but it was the man who was charged in the case. They
16 had a mug shot because he had committed some minor burglary or something
17 and they had a picture of him. They did a photo lineup, put his picture in it,
18 she picked him out and said, that's the man, and they tried him. No evidence
19 other than identification. No gun, no fingerprints. In his defense, he put on
20 twelve people who were not acquaintances, who testified that at 10:00 or so
21 that night, he had been at a horse race in Dallas.
22 In rebuttal, the State put on somebody who testified that there was
23 this small airport near the little town in western Oklahoma, that this was
-57- 1 clearly an execution-style murder, and if whoever hired the murderer had put
2 him on a private plane and flown him to this little airport, he could have
3 gotten there in time to commit the murder. The jury convicted and sentenced
4 him to death.
5 Subsequently, Pat Williams, who, as you know, is a criminal defense
6 lawyer here, a renowned one, and Racehorse Haynes, a big criminal defense
7 lawyer from Texas, represented the defendant in his habeas action. They
8 gathered evidence that showed the police were called before the trial by a
9 prostitute from North or South Carolina, I don't remember which, who said
10 she'd overheard a particular policeman talking to a woman about killing this
11 man in Oklahoma who was her ex-husband, and the police didn't disclose
12 that to the defense. That was Brady material, as you know, a constitutional
13 violation not to disclose information that might be exculpatory, and it was on
14 that basis that Pat Williams and the Texas lawyer took the case and argued
15 on habeas that the defendant was entitled to a new trial.
16 It turned out during the evidentiary hearing in the habeas case, this is
17 a fascinating case, the cop was dating the ex-wife of the victim and they
18 were having a custody fight over their children. So we have a motive. And
19 the policeman's own police department was investigating him for having
20 heard that he was involved in an execution-style murder someplace else.
21 All of that evidence was presented at the evidentiary hearing, and
22 Tom Brett granted the writ, ordering a new trial based on the Brady material.
23 That's what came up to us on appeal. I will never forget looking in the
-58- 1 record at the photo of this cop - or ex-cop by then - from North or South
2 Carolina and he and the defendant could have been brothers because there
3 was a picture of the two of them in the habeas record. Needless to say, we
4 affirmed the grant of the writ. It went back and the State was actually going
5 to retry the defendant because this woman was damn sure that he was the
6 guy who did it. I read in the paper that two weeks before the retrial, the
7 witness choked to death in a public restaurant after getting a bone caught in
8 her throat. Now, do you want to write a novel or make a movie? Is that not
9 incredible?
10 Q. That is incredible. But there's no book written about that one?
11 A. No, but there should be. So those were two of my cases. I don't
12 know how many I have actually sat on in the years I've been on the Court,
13 how many death penalty cases, not all that many, you know, 30 or 40, but
14 two of the defendants were actually innocent.
15 Q. Have there been any cases that you decided on legal grounds, had
16 to deny the relief sought, the individual was executed and then it was
17 discovered that he was innocent?
18 A. No.
19 Q. How did your work as a judge affect your performance as a
20 parent?
21 A. Well, I can tell you the opposite of that. I think my parenting
22 made me a better judge because you learn about negotiating solutions to
23 family problems, and dealing with colleagues sometimes becomes like
-59- dealing with kids, spouses. Becoming a judge actually made my life easier
2 because I am in total control of my schedule when I'm here. So unlike law
3 practice where you have to show up places and see clients, it was very easy
4 for me to take off and go to school plays, and kid's school conferences, and
5 soccer games and that kind of thing. So in that sense it made it better, and I
6 could read· briefs at home if I wanted to.
7 Q. How did you evolve as a legal practitioner over the years?
8 A. Oh, heavens, I don't know. I got better as we all do. Practice
9 makes perfect. I don't really know the answer to that question. Certainly,
10 the nature of the law practice evolved. I mean, Congress was busily passing
11 laws that didn't exist when I was in law school, energy related,
12 environmental related, the firm had a big securities class action litigation
13 representing a plaintiff in the Homestead case, in which I was involved. So
14 the nature of what I was doing changed over time just in terms of the types
15 of cases. But basically, I was doing the same thing. I was working on
16 federal court cases, I was writing a lot of briefs, I was doing a lot of research
17 more than going to court, filing motions and the like.
18 Q. Did Tom continue in private practice?
19 A. Yes. Well, after I became a judge, he ran for mayor, as I
20 mentioned, in 1982. He left the firm to do it, lost, and then he went out on
21 his own.
22 Q. Why did he decide to do that?
23 A. I don't know. Just decided he would rather do that than be in the
-60- 1 firm. He had to take off to run for mayor, so then he developed his own
2 practice.
3 Q. How did the two of you balance your work lives with your home
4 life?
5 A. We juggled a lot, but I had good help. I had Mrs. Davis all those
6 years. I had her until Anna was 11 or 12 before she retired. I had Emily,
7 who I still have, who was the housekeeper, and then she became basically
8 kid keeper as well after Mrs. Davis retired. By that time, Anna was 11 and
9 Sara was 14, so they were busy in school all day, so Emily did the car
10 pooling. We, Tom and I, made a big point to go on the weekends to all of
11 their sports activities. We didn't take them to practice. Mrs. Davis did that.
12 We traveled a lot, took the kids on a lot of trips. I think we did a moderately
13 decent job. Even when we're both working hard, we're both pretty efficient
14 at balancing family life and kid life.
15 Q. Tell us a little bit how you evolved and how the Court evolved
16 during the time that you were there.
17 A. Well, the Court - appellate courts - are interesting places because
18 you sit in panels of three, so you hopefully have collegiality among the
19 judges. One of the early stories - kind of cute, fun stories we have - during
20 my first years on the court, there was a judge named Bill Doyle from
21 Colorado. He was already up in age and he was an Irishman with an Irish
22 temper who could get fairly cantankerous. And in his later years, which
23 were my early years, he got very testy about judges who disagreed with him,
-61- 1 even though the judges were disagreeing on legal matters. Judge Doyle
2 would call them up and chew them out personally, ream them out if they
3 disagreed with him. I remember Monroe McKay warning me ahead of time,
4 before I sat for the first time, that Bill Doyle had this tendency and that I
5 shouldn't take it personally. I laughed and I said, "Oh, I bet he won't do
6 that if it's a woman." Sure enough, he didn't. I could disagree with him on
7 anything and he never got cross with me. So my colleagues learned that
8 pretty fast and they would call me and get me to call Bill and tell him that I
9 was the one disagreeing with him so they could avoid getting reamed out by
10 him. I told my colleagues they were hiding behind my skirts. Our Court
11 was pretty collegial because we were a small group. There were only eight
12 of us when I went on the Court. We all sat together in Denver for the entire
13 term, unlike many of the other circuit courts. Some of the courts were
14 getting really big. The Fifth Circuit got huge and it was split into the Fifth
15 and Eleventh Circuits.
16 But then we had a huge case explosion in the early 1980s. I
17 remember one year our case load grew 16 percent. President Reagan had
18 been elected in 1980 and new positions were being created. Our Court got
19 two new positions about the same time that three of our judges took senior
20 status and were going to be replaced. So we were faced with the prospect of
21 getting five judges appointed by President Reagan, and the country had taken
22 a conservative turn. In the first few years of the '80s, there were a lot of new
23 judges going on circuits across the country and there was a lot of political
-62- 1 tension, shall we say, between them and the many Carter appointees, of
2 which there had been a lot because of the Omnibus Judgeship Bill. There
3 was another Omnibus Judgeship Bill in the Reagan years because of this case
4 explosion. Before we got any of the new appointees, we actually had a
5 conversation about how we didn't want to have a divisive court and that we
6 were going to go out of our way to be friends socially so that we could
7 hopefully avoid some contentiousness as a court. We were very successful
8 in doing that.
9 In 1985, I got my first female colleague. Deanell Tacha was
10 appointed from Kansas and then it was she and I versus the guys on non-
11 legal issues. Over a period in the '80s, we got five new judges, two of which
12 were new positions, so there were then ten of us. In the early '90s, we got
13 another new position, that was Paul Kelly from New Mexico, so there were
14 eleven of us. And then sometime later, I think in the Clinton years, we got
15 an additional position. So then there were twelve active judges on the Tenth
16 Circuit, which there are now. Over that period of time, judges took senior
17 status and were replaced. So we had a lot of senior judges helping out.
18 I became Chief Judge in 1994. You become Chief by seniority, it's
19 not a popularity contest. The most senior active judge becomes Chief. That
20 happened to me when I was 58, in 1994, when Monroe McKay, my
21 colleague, decided to take senior status. He had only been Chief for a couple
22 of years. Then Jim Logan, another Carter appointee, took senior status and
23 suddenly I was the only remaining active judge on the court who had been
-63- 1 appointed by a Democratic President, which was sort of an interesting
2 phenomenon. In over ninety percent of the cases it doesn't make any
3 difference. Ten percent of the cases, it probably does just because of
4 different philosophies about constitutional issues, search and seizure, and
5 that kind of thing.
6 But the dynamics of the Court change every time you get a new judge
7 because you have to learn about who they are and how they operate, and they
8 have to get used to you and they're sitting with their new colleagues
9 immediately. We rotate panels in our circuit every day of the week when we
10 sit, unlike a lot of other circuits. The result is that we all sit together often,
11 which helps maintain collegiality. The Court just sort of evolves over time,
12 and it changes in personality and in the way the particular judges approach
13 work.
14 Clinton got four appointments as more judges took senior status.
15 When Deanell was appointed, she was 3 9 and had four kids, so we were the
16 youngest, and a lot of other judges were older and took senior status when I
17 was just beginning to be Chief Judge. It's a dynamic process which makes
18 the job more interesting, I have to say.
19 Q. What additional responsibilities did you have as Chief Judge?
20 A. Oh, it was a pain in the you-know-what! Many administrative
21 responsibilities, which I really didn't like at all. The Chief of the Circuit is
22 basically administrative chief for the whole circuit, all the way down to the
23 magistrate judges. The Chief of the Circuit gets every judicial misconduct
-64- 1 complaint that any lawyer or pro se prisoner elects to file against any judge
2 of the circuit, including magistrate judges, and the Chief has to assess them
3 and decide whether to set up an investigating committee. There are not that
4 many, but they're constant. And employee problems as the Circuit grew.
5 When we grew as a court, the Circuit staff grew, the staff attorneys, the
6 clerk's office, and so on. The Chfof ends up with all of that stuff on her
7 desk and that was not my favorite thing. I'd rather be deciding cases.
8 Actually, I thought about quitting the first year because I disliked that part
9 of it so much, but the Chief of each circuit sits on the Judicial Conference of
10 the United States, which is a body composed of the chief circuit judge in
11 each circuit and one district judge elected by the district judges in each
12 circuit, plus the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It is the policy making
13 arm for the courts and there are Judicial Conference Committees of judges in
14 particular areas who actually work on matters like new federal rules, whether
15 cameras in the courtroom should be allowed, whether new judgeships are
16 warranted, and any number of other important matters. All of the work of
17 the conference committees funnels through the Judicial Conference itself.
18 That was very interesting and there were only two other women on it when I
19 started. One of them was a district court judge and her term ended, and then
20 there were two females out of twenty-seven voting members. I remember
21 sitting there looking around thinking, "I can't quit. I need to stay on this
~ 22 body - this virtually all-male body," and so I did and that's one of the
23 reasons I stayed on as a Chief. But it was a lot of work.
-65- 1 Q. You served for how many years?
2 A. Seven. It was a seven-year term.
3 Q. What was the most interesting personal experience you had during
4 that time that resulted in or that was associated with your being Chief?
5 A. Oh, well, I had some interesting experiences when I first started.
6 I did two things that earned me the admiration of my male colleagues. I
7 fired the circuit executive, that was my first official act. He was not very
8 good at all and Judge McKay - Judge Holloway before him - had taken a lot
9 of the matters the circuit executive should have been doing into their
10 chambers and had their administrative assistant doing it. I decided I didn't
11 want to spend seven years with somebody getting paid a lot of money who
12 wasn't doing his job. The circuit executive serves at the pleasure of the
13 Court and I announced what I planned to do, asked if anybody objected,
14 nobody objected, and I did it.
15 Q. And the other thing?
16 A. One of my colleagues is the world's nicest man. Unfortunately,
17 he has the worst time making up his mind about decisions and he had a huge
18 backlog of cases which nobody had really ever dealt with. The Chief Judge
19 creates the panels. So I called that judge on the telephone and told him that
20 because of his backlog, I wasn't going to let him sit on oral argument cases
21 until he got caught up. He was not happy, but he got caught up and he
22 subsequently thanked me profusely for making him get current. Those are
23 the two major things that I did out of the box.
-66- 1 Q. Did you have to spend any more time in Denver as a result of
2 being Chief?
3 A. Not a lot. We hired an excellent circuit executive and by that
4 time, we had E-mail and fax, so many matters could be handled that way. I
5 did my judicial misconduct complaint work here in chambers. I only sat
6 three days. I cut back my caseload when I was there so I could take the
7 other two days during court week in Denver to do what I needed to do.
8 Q. Did you encourage any of your kids to follow in your footsteps by
9 going to law school?
10 A. I would have been delighted if all of my kids followed in my
11 footsteps. But they grew up around a dinner table - because, like I said, we
12 always had dinner together - and that's when we talked politics and cross-
13 examined them about their lives. After living with two lawyers, they all
14 decided they didn't want to follow our footsteps. They all went off to
15 college and majored in whatever they wanted to major in. The girls were
16 more politically interested than Bart was and they were always very
17 opinionated on feminist issues. Bart became an engineer and went into the
18 computer field. Bria got a masters in clinical psychology, specializing in
19 play therapy. Anna majored in psychology and worked with welfare families
20 and then autistic children before she had her first child.
21 Sara was an art history major, which she loved and she still loves.
22 She went to Boston College and, in her last year, she interned in Senator Ted
23 Kennedy's office. And when she walked to his office from the subway, she
-67- 1 would go by these kids out in uniforms doing calisthenics on the Boston
2 Commons every morning. She inquired about what they were doing and
3 discovered they were members of City Year, which was an organization that
4 actually was started by some Harvard law school graduates. It involved
5 getting high school and college graduates to join together as a corp to work
6 on various public interest projects. Bill Clinton saw the same thing on a
7 visit to Boston and created AmeriCorps, which was patterned after City
8 Year. It gets kids to work for a year for very little pay doing public service
9 work. In City Year, they were divided up into teams and each team had a
10 sponsor like a law firm or corporation, and they worked together on projects
11 around the city. Sara became intrigued by the concept, took her first
12 political science course her senior year, and then decided that she wanted to
13 join AmeriCorps, which had been created by then and was running City
14 Year. So she signed up and did that for a year. She worked in a poor, mostly
15 Hispanic, inner-city school in Boston assisting the art teacher. In addition,
16 her team worked with its corporate sponsor to obtain a grant to fund a
17 playground for the school. That experience made her decide she wanted to
18 save the children of the world and she concluded the best way to do that was
19 to go to law school. So my art history major ended up becoming a lawyer,
20 the only lawyer in the family.
21 (Interview was adjourned.)
22
23
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2
3
4
5
6 ORAL HISTORY OF STEPHANIE K. SEYMOUR
7 TAKEN ON BEHALF OF WOMEN TRAIL BLAZERS IN THE LAW,
8 A PROJECT OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION,
9 COMMISSION ON WOMEN IN THE PROFESSION
10
11
12
13 CONDUCTED BY NANCY SIEGEL
14 ON FEBRUARY 27, 2008
15 IN TULSA, OKLAHOMA
16
17
18
19 Transcribed by Tina Hale
20
21
22 1 Oral History of Judge Stephanie Seymour, Third Session held on February
2 27th, 2008.
3 Q. Let's talk for a moment about your experience as a Tenth Circuit
4 Judge. First, if you would, describe your experience from the perspective of
5 a female.
6 A. Well, needless to say when I started, I was the only female on the
7 Court and I found my colleagues extremely welcoming. I never had a
8 problem with that. I didn't - there wasn't anybody - I had no feeling that
9 anybody on the Court thought I shouldn't be there and I just jumped in right
10 away to sit on the cases and participate. So I had no problem whatsoever
11 with being female.
12 I got an additional female colleague, as I think I've already said,
13 Deanell Tacha, in the mid '80s and she and I became pretty good buddies
14 because it was, oh, I had somebody to go to the women's bathroom with
15 finally. From a female perspective, she and I are different from the guys in
16 the sense that we don't have any testosterone. When the fellows are going at
17 each other in an en bane conference, for example, Deanell and I are the ones
18 who are usually the peacemakers or trying to figure out some way to
19 negotiate a solution to the problem as opposed to joining the fray, I guess I'd
20 have to say. So just - it is different being a woman. And I got another
21 female colleague, Mary Briscoe, in the mid '90s. So then there were three of
22 us and we - I remember we sat together as a panel, the first female panel
23 after she came on the Court. And for some reason, lawyers signing in,
-2- 1 although they knew who the panel was, our first names weren't listed and
2 they didn't have a clue we were female. I had the sense from some of them
3 that it was, "Holy Moly, I'm looking at three women seated up on the
4 bench!"
5 So from that perspective of changing the look of the Court, I had the
6 sense that that had an impact on lawyers coming before the Court because
7 they had been so used to having all male judges the whole time. But over
8 the course of the years the profession changed and many, many, many more
9 women became lawyers. Now there are such a mix of male and females
10 arguing cases all the time that it just doesn't seem to make any difference.
11 Q. Did you develop relationships with other female professionals as a
12 judge?
13 A. Not really. I mean, this is a fairly isolated job. I did some - we
14 had a Women's - I guess we still do have a Women's Lawyers organization
15 here and I participated in that quite a bit in the early days, but as time went
16 on, I sort of dropped out of that now that there are so many women involved.
17
18 In my day-to-day work, I don't see anybody in my chambers in Tulsa
19 because lawyers, in general, just don't drop in to see me and I'm not out in
20 the world so I only run into female lawyers at a party or someplace like that.
21 Q. Have you had the opportunity to mentor young women as lawyers?
22 A. Every now and then. Mostly college women debating about
23 whether they should go to law school and wanting some information about
-3- 1 that, or women in law school who want to talk about various kinds of work a
2 lawyer can do and what the difference is and that sort of thing. And, of
3 course, my law clerks over the years, that's one of the greatest parts of this
4 job, having law clerks, new law clerks come in every year and I'd say the
5 majority of them have been female over the years. So I spend a lot of time
6 mentoring them, talking to them about what they want to do with their lives,
7 and that's really fun.
8 Q. Has the advice that you've given regarding questions about what
9 to do with one's life changed or evolved over time?
10 A. Well, that's an interesting question. Probably, but I don't really
11 know in what regard. I mean, I guess maybe I do. Probably I talk more now
12 about how important it is to balance family and law firm - especially law
13 firm- life and how most firms require, especially in New York and
14 California, such long hours that it's very difficult to do that. So my advice
15 to them is don't go to those big firms, or find a family-friendly firm, so that
16 if you want to have children, you can do it and still lead - still practice, but
17 still lead a sane life.
18 Q. How have your views about the women's movement changed, if at
19 all, over the past - well, during the time - during your tenure as a judge?
20 A. Well, I've always thought the women's movement was important
21 because that's what really started to change society in how it viewed
22 females, and particularly how females viewed themselves with respect to
23 what they could do with their lives.
-4- 1 When I was in high school in the '50s, that was such a time of women
2 should be housewives and that has changed so dramatically. I think the
3 women's movement really had a lot to do with that. I mean, we have a
4 woman who has the potential to be the Democratic nominee for president
5 this year. That's the first time ever. I don't think we'd be here - we'd be at
6 that place today if it hadn't been for the women's movement.
7 Q. Do you think that there still is disparate treatment or sex
8 discrimination in the practice of law today?
9 A. Probably. I mean, I don't really see it that much, but I'm sure
10 there is in terms of women becoming partners in firms. I've - I mean, I hear
11 stories about that and there is just a difference between women lawyers who
12 become mothers and male lawyers who become fathers because women
13 actually spend more time caring for the children. So that's not really a -
14 discrimination in a sense. It's just a difference between the genders and
15 what women may want from - women may have different expectations about
16 their work than men do.
17 Q. Based on what you told us, they've added a female judge to the
18 Tenth Circuit once every decade since the 1970s. So they - you came in the
19 1970s, Tacha in the 1980s and the last one was in the '90s.
20 A. Yes. None in the 2000s.
21 Q. So far. There's still time.
22 A. Not much.
23 Q. Do you think that there have been policies or practices that have
-5- 1 developed within the Tenth Circuit that have been more family friendly over
2 that period of time?
3 A. You mean within our court?
4 Q. Yes.
5 A. Oh, yes, I know that. I mean, with two - I was Chief for seven
6 years and then Deanell Tacha was Chief for seven years. She just finished
7 that term and during that period of time, our court policies became much
8 more family friendly. I mean, we both encouraged flex time for staff people
9 and we hired a female Circuit Executive and then we hired a female Clerk of
10 Court and we - and the head staff attorney is a female. So I think that
11 changed dramatically in terms of expectations of lawyers and willingness to
12 grant continuances of oral argument for some family-related matter. I just
13 think the attitude about things that my male colleagues really wouldn't have
14 thought of and things that Deanell and I brought to the table that simply
15 didn't exist before then.
16 Q. How would you describe the advantages or benefits of being a
17 female on the court?
18 A. I think I - females are treated a little differently by our male
19 colleagues than they treat each other. Maybe, again, it's a testosterone
20 thing, but I think they respond to us differently and I think that's just a
21 male/female thing. We're not the same as guys are and I think it's been very
22 good for the court to have women on it from that standpoint.
23 Q. What disadvantages or limitations have you seen with respect to
-6- 1 being on the court - being a female on the court?
2 A. I don't think any. I can't recall one.
3 Q. What is your proudest accomplishment as a member of the Tenth
4 Circuit?
5 A. I think my answer to that is simply my view of handling cases,
6 which is my view of how we work together as a court. I think I've had an
7 influence on collegiality of the court in terms of working with colleagues
8 who have very different views than I do about the law, but they know from
9 the way I interact with them that I respect their views, that I know they hold
10 their views as strongly as I hold mine even though they may be totally
11 opposite from mine and I think my ability to deal with my colleagues on that
12 level was probably my proudest accomplishment.
13 Q. How do you believe history will treat your role on the court?
14 A. Kindly, I hope. I don't know. I'm viewed as more liberal than
15 my colleagues. If you want to talk about legal philosophies, I got an award
16 this year from the Federal Bar Association for my civil rights opinions and I
17 think that if you' re looking at my decisions over the history of my time on
18 the court, I'm viewed as a more - having a more liberal view of the law, a
19 more flexible view of the law, an inclination to support people who -
20 minorities, people who are the underdog in cases.
21 Q. Tell us about the award that you referenced. What was it?
22 A. It was the Federal Bar Association. About five years ago, the
23 National Federal Bar Association started giving an award, a civil rights
-7- 1 award, and it isn't just to judges. In fact, the first couple of people that got
2 them were civil rights activists in the South. I'm the first female to have
3 gotten one and I thought it was great.
4 Q. Who awarded it and how did the ceremony go?
5 A. They had a national meeting in Atlanta, a black tie event. That
6 was their national conference. They had a black tie dinner and they made a
7 big deal out of it and it was great. The award was a lovely piece of glass art
8 that they gave me, and it meant a lot to me to receive it.
9 Q. How long have you served as judge on the Tenth Circuit?
10 A. This is my 29th year.
11 Q. And I think you mentioned that you had taken senior status at
12 some point?
13 A. Yes, two years ago.
14 Q. What prompted that decision?
15 A. Turning 65 and having spent 27 years with a full caseload and just
16 the notion that there is more to life than working at that level for - that
17 degree for the rest of my life.
18 Q. What's the difference in your responsibilities between being a
19 traditional judge and then taking senior status?
20 A. When a judge takes senior status, he or she can do whatever he or
21 she wants to. I can completely retire on full salary. I can work as little or as
22 much as I want to. I have elected to take a 40 percent caseload which allows
23 me a secretary and two law clerks and my chambers. And I do it because I
-8- 1 love my job and I enjoy my colleagues - but it also gives me a lot of time to
2 travel to see my kids and my grandkids and that's important to me.
3 It changes the dynamics when you take senior status because you're
4 no longer a member of the en bane court. So when cases get en banced for
5 the purpose of settling what the law is on the Tenth Circuit, I have no role in
6 that except and unless I was on the panel. And if I was on the panel, I can
7 elect to sit, but otherwise, I can sit and watch the fray from afar. I know
8 some of my colleagues - I have one colleague in particular who could take
9 senior status and who hasn't and I think it's because he doesn't want to give
10 up that part of being a judge. But I have to say I am very happy not to have
11 to participate in en banes.
12 Q. Have you tried to weigh in on the type of cases that you still
13 receive?
14 A. I have weighed in only to the extent that I said I don't want any
15 death penalty cases.
16 Q. Okay.
17 A. But other than that, no. I mean, I could say I don't want to sit on
18 any criminal cases or I could say I only want to sit on criminal cases, but I
19 haven't done that either. I take a random selection like my colleagues do.
20 Q. The reason you do not want to handle any more death penalty
21 cases is?
22 A. I don't like death penalty cases. They're difficult.
23 Q. Your attitude towards death penalty cases has been fairly
-9- 1 consistent throughout your career?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. How has taking senior status changed your relationship with your
4 colleagues?
5 A. Well, I don't sit with them as often, but other than that, I haven't
6 - I know some of my colleagues who are on senior status feel like they're
7 not as relevant. I think that comes from not sitting on the en bane cases.
8 But in terms of the panels that I sit on, I haven't felt any change at all. I
9 mean, I give my views. I haven't - I certainly don't defer to the active
10 judges' views of the case simply because I'm not an active judge any longer.
11 Q. As you look back over the course of your career and your
12 relationship with your family, what are the most significant changes that
13 have occurred over time?
14 A. Well, at the beginning and then when I was practicing law, too, I
15 mean, it's not always easy to juggle a full-time practice and a family,
16 especially when you have four kids like I do. And I think over time as the
17 children got older, they became more accepting of what I do - well, I guess
18 in the sense that they became more intellectually engaged in what I do as
19 opposed to my just going to work - and so I think they're all very proud of
20 the fact that I do what I do. That changed their perspective of who I am in
21 some respects, but it's been - it worked out, I think, my raising of my
22 children, Tom's and my raising of the kids worked out exceptionally well. I
23 mean, they're all terrific kids, have married great people, are having
-10- 1 wonderful children, doing what they want and essentially are quite happy
2 which, of course, makes us happy.
3 Q. Do you feel that your expectations towards your grandchildren
4 will be different than they were for your children?
5 A. Well, only in the sense that it's easier to be a grandparent than it
6 is to be a parent. I mean, I enjoy them in a different sense because I don't
7 have responsibility for raising them. So it's a lot more relaxing and fun with
8 the grandkids and I'm sure I'm much more tolerant because we were fairly
9 rule-oriented parents as the kids were growing up, in terms of maintaining
10 schedules and requiring the kids to do what they were supposed to do. So in
11 that sense, it's great to be a grandparent and, of course, I think my views of
12 my children have changed now that they're adults. I mean, we have a
13 different kind of relationship than we did before and that's also great.
14 Q. Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would
15 have changed about your professional path?
16 A. I don't think so.
17 Q. I asked you what your proudest accomplishment was as a judge on
18 the Tenth Circuit. What is your proudest accomplishment as a woman?
19 A. Well, that's a hard question to answer because as a woman, I've
20 got several parts of my life. I'm extremely proud of my children but I'm
21 also extremely proud of what I've been able to accomplish in my work, so I
22 guess it's a dual answer. I like the fact that I was able to grow up in a time
23 in our country where I could do both.
-11- 1 Q. How do you believe the workplace will change during the work
2 life of your children with respect to gender issues?
3 A. I hope that the workplace becomes more accommodating about
4 women having children, law firms in particular. I really advise young
5 women lawyers now who are struggling with having families and practicing
6 law to start law firms. You know, there is no reason why women lawyers
7 can't start their own law firms and practice together more and bring more of
8 a sanity about working hours. I think that's true in a lot of fields. I know
9 my daughters have chosen to have different types of work lives than I did.
10 My older daughter Bria stayed home. With a masters in clinical psychology,
11 she stayed home with her children from, I'd say, after she had the second
12 one and moved back to New Jersey. She's been a stay-at-home mom, but
13 now she's gone back to work now that the oldest is 12 and the youngest is 5.
14 She started a couple of years ago to develop her own business as a life coach
15 and she's written a book and she's writing another book, but she's doing that
16 working from home. Sara, our daughter who is a lawyer, is working from
17 home since she had her first child. She has a nanny and she's working long
18 distance for her father instead of going off to an office because she finds it
19 easier to raise her children that way. So I think women are changing their
20 attitude about - when I got into this field and I think for a long time
21 thereafter, women who became professionals thought they had to do it in the
22 same way men did and I think that's changing and I think that's a good
23 thing.
-12- 1 Q. Over time has your attitude changed about what makes a
2 successful attorney?
3 A. No, I don't really think so because back when I started, what made
4 a successful attorney was what I still think makes a successful attorney. I
5 think what's happened is the law practice has changed and that we ought to
6 go back to the way law was practiced when I first started, when the billable
7 hour wasn't the be-all, end-all of a case, when in making agreements with
8 other lawyers your word meant your word, when taking depositions didn't
9 mean an all-out battle over every question asked. So I don't think my views
10 have changed. I think the practice of law has changed, and not for the better
11 in that regard.
12 Q. And what specifically do you see now with younger lawyers that
13 makes you feel that way?
14 A. A lot more contentiousness in the transcripts I read and even, you
15 know, when - sometimes arguments before us, but certainly in what I read in
16 transcripts about what's going on in the District Court and what I read in
17 briefs. I mean, in some of the briefs we get lawyers impugning the integrity
18 of a lawyer on the other side. Maybe sometimes for good reasons because
19 some lawyers, I think, are - have less integrity than we did in the past. The
20 practice has become more like a business than a profession in a lot of
21 respects and a lot of that has to do with billable hours and what's expected
22 of you in firms in terms of making money and really just the battles that go
23 on between lawyers now that didn't.
-13- 1 Q. So do you believe that there are ways that the practice of law
2 should reflect your life philosophy?
3 A. Sure.
4 Q. In what ways?
5 A. I think they should all - all those lawyers out there should act
6 more like women than guys.
7 Q. What is the single most important advice you could give to a
8 young lawyer, male or female?
9 A. I think, sort of arising out of what I just said, that the practice of
10 law should be enjoyable. It's a great profession and there's more to life than
11 working, and I would advise young lawyers to spend more time thinking
12 about how they can help the community as opposed to just thinking about
13 how they can help themselves in the furtherance of their practice of the law.
14 I think that's important. Lawyers have historically done that and I believe
15 it's important for lawyers to do that.
16 Q. Do you have any goals that you have yet to achieve?
17 A. More places in the world to travel to.
18 Q. How long do you think you'll continue on in your capacity as a
19 senior judge?
20 A. I don't have any vision of ever quitting doing that. I may cut back
21 some, but I just can't see totally retiring. I have no desire to retire and go
22 work for a firm, for example, and I don't, at least for the foreseeable future,
23 envision totally retiring and reading books and knitting.
-14- 1 Q. What effect do you believe this presidential race will have on the
2 practice of law?
3 A. Gosh, I don't know the answer to that. I think it will have a big
4 effect on the country in general just in terms of how the public is perceiving
5 what has happened in terms of the two candidates for the Democratic
6 nomination for president, one is African American and one is female, and
7 that is something that even ten years ago I wouldn't have envisioned. Maybe
8 that a woman would have gotten that far, but not that an African American
9 would have. So times are changing and I think the fact that a lot of young
10 people are supporting Obama, the African American, is indicative of the
11 change of views in our society.
12 Q. In what way?
13 A. In the very healthy way that he is viewed as somebody who is
14 perfectly competent to be president of this country, which is a different
15 vision, I'd say, than the great majority of Americans had when I was
16 growing up about African Americans and their role in society.
17 Q. Do you think that the American response to candidate Hilary
18 Clinton has moved us forward in our thinking about women or backward?
19 A. I think it's moved us forward.
20 Q. In what -
21 A. I mean, she's an extremely competent person and when she's
22 standing up there in the debates, especially back when it was, you know, a
23 stage full of ten - eight white males, one African American and we had an
-15- 1 Hispanic male, half Hispanic male - she held her own in all of those debates.
2 She's very smart and I think that portrays something to the American public
3 about women and what they can do.
4 Q. How do you react when you hear people criticize her as a
5 candidate because she's too strident?
6 A. Oh, I have two reactions: One, maybe she shouldn't be as strident
7 as she sometimes is; but two, a fellow wouldn't be criticized for that and I
8 find that offensive, and I don't know if that's ever going to change.
9 Q. You and your husband have been traveling all over the world in
10 recent months, is that true?
11 A. That's true.
12 Q. What countries have you visited, for instance, in the past year?
13 A. Chile and Argentina, Italy, Belgium, Alaska, which is not a
14 country, but it was fun and kind of foreign, France, Morocco, that's it.
15 Q. When you travel to these different countries, do you interact at all
16 with female professionals?
17 A. Oh, I would have to say not really, except to an extent when we go
18 on a tour.
19 Q. And to the extent that you've had that opportunity, have you
20 learned about the differences in acting as a professional in our country as
21 opposed to others?
22 A. Only in the sense that I tend to ask a lot of questions about what
23 life is like in those countries, even if the person I'm asking questions of is a
-16- fellow, like the guide we had in Morocco. I'm always interested in what the
2 role of women is in the particular country and how women are perceived.
3 We were in China a couple of years ago, and then we were in Vietnam
4 and Cambodia, and it really is interesting to see how different women are in
5 different parts of the world. But also in a number of those places, women
6 have very powerful jobs so - not in Morocco as much as in Southeast Asia
7 these days, but yes, it's very interesting to see the world.
8 Q. How does it make you feel after you have that type of exposure
9 about where we stand?
10 A. I think we stand - certainly our legal system, I think, is probably
11 the best in the world. The jury system we have and the fact that people here
12 - well, for example, we don't have a revolution if somebody disagrees with
13 who gets elected president. I'm thinking particularly about the Bush v. Gore
14 situation where Gore actually had the popular vote and it was a Supreme
15 Court decision that enabled Bush to be president. There are places, many
16 places in the world where there would have been a revolution over
17 something like that. Nobody would ever consider that in this country, at
18 least as far as I know, and so I realize from traveling over the world how
19 stable our country is and that's nice.
20 Q. Is it true that your nickname is the Big Kahuna?
21 A. On my court.
22 Q. And why, why is that? How did you earn that?
23 A. Not because I was Chief. It happened when I was out at a
-17- 1 restaurant having dinner with my colleagues and the waitress came over and
2 wanted to know who to give the check to. And one of my colleagues told
3 her to give it to me. I always got it because I was the only person who
4 carried a calculator. I had a calculator in my purse for purposes of dividing
5 up who owed what. I was the only female in this group of guys and the
6 waitress said, "Well, how come she gets it instead of one of you guys?" And
7 one of my colleagues said, "Well, she's the Big Kahuna." Maybe I was
8 Chief at the point, but that's where it came from.
9 Q. In closing, do you have any parting words of wisdom to those who
10 might be reading this oral history?
11 A. I guess, if anything, I would say that there's more to life than
12 having a career and being a judge. I have gotten so much joy and
13 satisfaction out of my marriage and my children and now my grandchildren
14 that I would say I'm a better person because of my happy personal life, and
15 I've been a better lawyer and a better judge as a result. And, therefore, I
16 would say to young people starting out these days that finding what you
17 really enjoy and finding a balance in your life is the most important thing
18 you can do.
19 Q. Thank you, Judge.
20 (Conclusion of session.)
21
22
23
-18- TABLE OF CASES AND STATUTES Oral History of Stephanie K. Seymour
Civil Rights Act of 1964, P.L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, 28 U.S.C. § 1447; 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971, 1975a-1975d, 2000a-2000h-6 (July 2, 1964); First Interview, p. 35
Romero v. Union Pacific Railroad, 615 F .2d 1303 ( I 0th Cir. 1980); Second Interview, p. 52.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 892 F .2d 851 ( I 0th Cir. 1990); and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 878 F .2d 585 (I 0th Cir. 1993); Second Interview, p. 53-54.
Williamson v. Ward, I IO F .3d 1508 (I 0th Cir. 1997); Second Interview, pp. 56- 57.
Bowen v. Maynard, 799 F.2d 593 (10th Cir. 1986); Bowen v. State, 715 P.2d 1093 (Okla. Crim. App. 1984 ); Second Interview p. 57-59.