Biography
When I was in high school, the inquiring reporter for the school newspaper asked me the question of the week, “What is your pet peeve?” I said, “hypocrites.” (Not original, but honest.) Fortunately, the reporter was a poor speller. When my answer appeared in the paper, it was rendered as “Hippocrites.” This was taken by many to mean Hippocrates, which was certainly as reasonable a reading as any.
Being peeved with Hippocrates would have been commonplace if we had been assigned any reading about the Greeks, but this was Macoupin County, Illinois, in the early 1950s. We were not burdened with trivia, and the revelation that Hippocrates was my pet peeve was greeted with awe. Hey, my colleagues said, this is pretty heavy stuff. My career was launched.
I grew up in strangely stable circumstances. At the time, I didn’t realize how exceptional the circumstances were or that they would become truly rare. Both of my parents, all four of my grandparents, and all eight of my great grandparents lived in the same small town, Carlinville. This is what is known as having community ties.
After four years at Washington University (1954-1958) and then a year of grad school (also at W.U.) I studied at the Yale Law School for three years. When I finished at Yale, my draft deferment expired. So I was in the Air Force from 1962 to 1965, doing legal work. I came to Northwestern in 1965, taught law and wrote scholarly books for forty-two years, then did full-time research for two more years, and retired at the age of 73.
At odd hours during the 1960s, I wrote two articles that were published in popular magazines. One, published in Harpers, was an analysis of farm politics. The piece drew on research i had done for the Yale Law Journal. The second popular piece was an entirely new venture. I was (and I remain) an admirer of the work of A. J. Liebling. As a sort of tribute to Liebling, I wrote an essay about boxing, which was eventually published in Sports Illustrated. I briefly considered trying to make a living as a writer, but I couldn’t produce the work fast enough. I would have starved.
In the 1960s, all Northwestern law professors had bronze nameplates on their office doors. Bronze! Cast, not painted. Faculty did not often move from school to school in those days. The nameplates were a foot or more in length, depending on the number of letters in the name. The honorific was “Mr.” or “Mrs.”, not “Prof.” and certainly not “Dr.” even though the J. D. degree had already replaced the traditional LL.B. at most schools. We were lawyers. I still have the bronze “Mr. Heinz” in my basement (along with much else).