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Beyond the good fortune of time and place, we had the greater fortune of having parents committed to public service. Our father, a deputy city attorney, became the legal advi- sor to the school district where, in his forty-one-year tenure, he was the go-to person for solving the district’s problems. He authored much of the California Education Code and staunchly defended the right of teachers not to be required to sign a loyalty oath as a condition of employment during the McCarthy Era. Our mother, in addition to rais- ing Stephen’s rather willful younger sibling, was active in civic organizations such as the League of Woman Voters, the Democratic Party, and the World Affairs Council. We fre- quently had dinner companions from abroad who were passing through San Francisco. “Rick Stearns, who is a judge in Massachusetts secured a copy. He was also Bill Clinton's roommate at Oxford. He sent it to him, and Presi- dent Clinton looked at it and he said, ‘He does have a sense of humor.’ “So anyway, obviously, while it may not be apparent, you need a sense of humor to be on the United States Supreme Court. That's the lesson of that. So we want to thank the College for supplying that ingredient.” The rest of the conversation was engaging – humorous and engaging. But Judge Breyer has asked that, rather than offer an abridged version of that conversation here, we republish the remarks he made for Justice Breyer’s 2022 Harvard Law Review Tribute. You can’t say no to a Judge, especially when he is asking on behalf of a Justice. So: How do you account for my brother’s relentless optimism? I have two answers: time and place. The time was the ’50s. America had overcome its most severe depression in history. We had won World War II and defeated the greatest threat to democracy we had ever faced. People were employed and consum- er demand was back. Not even the Korean conflict, which ended in a truce, could dampen the widely held belief that we could prevail over any threats to our way of life. Stephen was just over ten years old, and his life would be shaped by that decade’s unprecedented period of calm. As to place . . . San Francisco, a small city with a big city’s attitude. It was ethnically mixed, had a public school system open to all, and boasted a trade-union movement that demanded and received the benefits of full employment. Elsewhere, such as in the Jim Crow South, Americans faced terrible injustice. But San Francisco was a place of relative promise. Our mother understood our shortcomings as well as our strengths. To be blunt, we were not a family of athletes. We utterly lacked hand-eye coordination (n.b. bicycle mishaps in the future). Added to that woeful fact was our father’s complete lack of interest in the outdoors. Even the wilderness of Golden Gate Park created angst for him. This rather cramped view of California’s opportunities prompted our mother to send us to summer camp. The first time she sent us, I was two and a half, so Stephen was in charge. Over the summers, we camped and hiked in the Sierras, swam, and went horseback riding. All of these were required and, after some period of time, actually enjoyed. Scouting was next: we were expected to earn at least twenty-one merit badges to obtain the rank of Eagle Scout. Our parents also encour- aged Stephen to work summers as a hasher at Camp Mather in Yosemite, the San Francisco Recreation and Parks camp frequented by families of police and firemen. (This probably was not the genesis of his passion for cooking.) 57 JOURNAL