Read H. C. Hirschboeck Autobiography

AUTOBIOGRAPHY HERBERT C. HIRSCHBOECK Copr. 1981 H.C. Hirschboeck TO MERT AUTOBIOGRAPHY HERBERT C. HIRSCHBOECK Page No. 1. Early Years .......................................... 2 2. After High School .................................... 6 3. Amateur Theater ...................................... 11 4. After Law School ..................................... 13 5. Beginning Law Practice ............................... 17 6. Europe ............................................... 20 7. Dunn & Hirschboeck ................................... 25 8. Early Supreme Court Appeals .......................... 26 9. The Depression ....................................... 34 10. City Attorney's Office .............................. 36 11. Baby Bonds .......................................... 49 12. Miller, Mack & Fairchild ............................ 56 13. Marriage ............................................ 60 14. Return to Individual Practice ....................... 68 15. Cancer .............................................. 74 16. Hirschboeck & McKinnon .............................. 77 17. Thorp Finance Corporation ........................... 79 18. John Smith .......................................... 83 19. World War II ........................................ 86 20. Whyte & Hirschboeck ................................. 90 21. New Associates and Partners ......................... 95 22. Michael and John Cudahy ............................. 97 23. Milwaukee Bar Association ........................... 100 24. Miller Brewing Company .............................. 102 25. Welfare Committee and the 1950's .................... 105 Page No. 26. Some Vacations ...................................... 115 27. Dominican High School and St. Monica Church.......... 117 28. The 1960's .......................................... 119 29. Malcolm Whyte Deceased ........................... 125 30. Elizabeth and John ............................... 133 31. Mert ............................................. 136 32. Eightieth Birthday ............................... 139 33. Knighthood ....................................... 143 34. Our Daughters Nancy and Cathy .................... 146 35. Open End ......................................... 147 36. Retirement ....................................... 148 37. Family Memoirs ................................... 151 38. Of Counsel - Curiosities ......................... 154 ****** Appendix I .................................. Genealogy Appendix II ....................... Let's Let Lawyers Live! AUTOBIOGRAPHY HERBERT C. HIRSCHBOECK I was born about four o'clock in the morning, Pentecost Sunday, June 5, 1898. My father and mother, Stephen and Katherine Hirschboeck, lived in a lower flat on Cramer Street, just north of Bradford Avenue, on the east side of Milwaukee. I was their first child and, while my father raced on foot a mile to the south to call Dr. Hurth, my mother was left alone to bring me into the world. Dr. Hurth, who lived on Cambridge Avenue, near Oakland Avenue, hitched his horse and buggy and sped through the dark early morning with my father to the flat for post-natal care of mother and child. At age 81, in the year 1979, I can imagine the limits of communication and transportation of 1898. As a boy I saw the spread of telephone service to homes and the early development of automobiles—nonexistent then. I am grateful to my courageous and able mother and the efforts of my father's race for help. Writing about one's self can be excused for an old man whose memories tell him of much that he can be grateful for so that he can express his thanks. I entered first grade at St. Peter and Paul's school at the age of 7. School was not far. We had moved to my grandfather's duplex on Webster Place, between Cramer Street and Oakland Avenue. My mother loved me dearly and kept me home under her own tutelage so that through- out my school life I found myself a year older than most of my classmates. -1- 1. Early Years My father was an amateur photographer and filled albums of pictures of my early boyhood. He took me on picture taking field trips. Sometimes we also went to watch the old Milwaukee Brewers play at old Borchert Field. He was not a very ardent fan but my father had a facility with statistics and knew more baseball lore than most fans I have known. At the age of twelve I contracted typhoid fever. My mother carefully nursed me at hone during a long illness. My memories of her great care and prayers for me will never fade. She had my little sister, Elizabeth, (born May 10, 1903) to care for and was expecting my younger brother John who was born March 25, 1910. In the spring of L913 I took the examination at Marquette Academy and was awarded a four year classical course scholar- ship. Four years of Latin and three years of Greek were re- quired in this course, but interest in English and elocution developed early with stories published in the Flambeau and gold medal awards in the annual elocution contests to reflect this. In my senior year I played the leading role in The Black Arrow (an adaptation of Stephenson's story) at the Pabst Theater. At that time the new St. Peter and Paul school had a large auditorium, which became the home of the Milwaukee Drama Players, an amateur theatrical group of young people from various Milwaukee parishes. Henry Rademacher was the director and such talent as my aunt and uncle, Anita and Walter Heiser, -2- William (later judge) Shaughnessy and Roland (later supreme court justice) Steinle and many others made up the casts of dramas p£ the period, such as The Man from Home by Booth Tarkington and The Dictator by Richard Harding Davis. I was a stage band but became an actor. A notable sketch comes to mind. One Christmas period "The Bishop's Candlesticks," an episode from Hugo's Les Miserables, was enacted by Judge Shaughnessy as Valjean, Anita Heiser as the Bishop's house- keeper and me as the bishop. A mandolin orchestra of St. Peter and Paul School in which my sister participated softly accompanied the dramatic scenes with Christmas hymns. I liked to enact character roles. My father was an accountant. A firm he had worked for went out of business and after a brief period with its successor, Munich Statuary and Altar Co., my father sought employment by others. I worked Saturdays and after school, first for my uncle Ed Coughlin who operated a market on North Avenue. As & delivery helper I went along on the horse drawn wagon running the parcels to the customers' kitchen doors, past their defending watch doge. I learned to dislike dogs. Later when a Model T Ford delivery truck was acquired I learned to drive It. Friday afternoons and much of Saturday mornings were spent in the back room of the market scaling fish and drawing chickens. It became hard for me to eat chicken, however well prepared. One summer I worked at the Munich Statuary and Altar Company which also made plastic advertising displays. For weeks I painted ivory tusks and red harness stripes on white elephants to advertise teas, coffee and spices. -3- About 1914 I applied to become a summer apprentice in the architectural office of A. C. Eschweiler. While the apprentice had jobs like hauling blocks of ice to the office for the water coders and keeping the cuspidors cleaned, I did get some useful training at the drawing board. Work in the office at the time included St. Thomas Acquinas church, Plymouth Congregational church, and a fine residence on Lake Drive for H. M. Thompson which later became the Cenacle and is now St. Mary's Convent, Episcopal. Next followed my after school, Saturday and summertime work at the Munich Statuary and Altar Company, the firm in which my father had invested and which he had left for other employment. I became a designer of altars and church furnish- ings. In the summertime, starting in 1915, I accompanied Frank Bercker, the Company president, on selling tours all over Wisconsin and surrounding states and as far west as Nebraska. I drove Model T Fords over the unmarked, unpaved roads of those years. Roads began to be marked in this period. The Yellowstone Trail, a circle of yellow painted on a telephone pole, marked the route to Minneapolis. Out into Iowa there was the Lincoln Highway which I drove after the rains one time becoming mired in axle deep mud some five times between Dubuque and Earling, Iowa. There was usually a farmer with his team ready at the worst places and for a dollar or two one could get a car freed from the deepest mud. Altars of my designs are still in some Wisconsin rural churches. The Way of the Cross at Holy Hill, Wisconsin, was built by our firm with backgrounds and housing for the sculptures of my design, and I -4- spent some weeks in the construction there. At noon time I ate with the Carmelite Fathers and Brothers in their meatless refectory. -5- 2. After High School I finished high school in 1917. Higher education then meant college, but an Arts and Science degree did not seem a goal I should seek. Marquette University Law School at that time had a four year course to graduation and an LLB degree. The first two years combined college courses in Philosophy and English. My designing and amateur theatrical work tended to emotional expression and I thought some training in colder reasoning would be good education for me. The courses in logic lacked application which the case method of studying law provides, so I decided to go to law school. There was no law school aptitude test in those days and no applicants' waiting lists. At my job I earned enough for

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