John, born on August 4, 1923, grew up in
Carson Valley, Nevada, at a time when the
open range was dotted with cattle and sheep
ranches. Game was plentiful, and John’s father
taught John and his brother how to fly fish
and hunt when they were children. They were
dirt poor in those years, so dinner often included
the fish and game they had harvested.
John carried this tradition down to the next
generation and on summer and fall weekends,
he would take Tom and his older brother to
the Sierra or Nevada deserts to hunt and fish,
sports that Tom still enjoys. John also introduced
Tom and his siblings to skiing, and
Tom has spent all of his winters since childhood
on as many ski slopes as he could find.
John says he went to college at Notre Dame by accident. As noted,
money was scarce, but his mother worked as a clerk in a dress shop
frequented by a woman who was the administrative aide to the Nevada
governor. They became friends, and the administrative aide told
John’s mother that the governor was a Notre Dame graduate, and that
he liked to help students get to college. She asked whether John would
be willing to go to Notre Dame if he could go on a scholarship. His
mother said yes, and that’s what John ended up doing. WWII interrupted
his education at Notre Dame. John enlisted in the Marine
Corps, then transferred to the Navy where he would earn a commission
and serve in the Pacific as a landing craft skipper on an LCT. He
spent the war landing troops, tanks and equipment on the beaches of
Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Maybe he ferried our Hero,
Joe Reynolds – see p. 53.
John got out of the service in 1946, and thanks to the G.I. Bill, was
able to go directly to law school at the University of Colorado, graduating
in 1949. As soon as he finished, he returned to Nevada and took
the bar exam, then opened a solo practice in Reno. At that time, there
were no public defenders, so John handled a lot of murder case assignments
for the county and the state. After a few years, he and attorney
Bud Bradley decided to form a plaintiff’s personal injury firm in Reno
and their practice changed to primarily focus on serious injury cases.
Bradley, Drendel & Jeanney is still in the same business today.
Tom grew up in Reno and left the state only for Catholic (Jesuit)
high school boarding school, college and then law school at the Mc-
George School of Law at the University of the Pacific in Sacramento,
California (at that time, Nevada still didn’t have its own law school).
47 JOURNAL