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I am fifty-eight years old and I have been practicing law for twenty-eight years this August, and married for twenty-eight years this December. My wife’s name is Adora. She’s a remark- able person in her own right. We have one daughter. She’s twenty-one, the pride and joy of our life. Now, both my parents were in the Air Force in the 60s. My dad was an airman, a non-commissioned officer. He was a medic, a field medic; and my mother was a lieutenant, an officer. She was a trauma nurse and outranked him then and did to the day she died. We eventually settled in a small farm town in central Illinois just outside of Decatur. 1300 people, eleven churches. Now if you can picture Central America – small rural farm town where there’s a grain elevator in the middle of the town and railroad tracks that go next to it and a main street where there’s a barbershop pole outside a dilapidated building and little boys on their Schwinn bicycles on their way out to a baseball field for a little league game. I was one of those boys. In the wintertime you would see a long parade of station wagons with their headlights on, traveling across black- top roads next to a barren cornfield on the way to the next town for a Friday night basketball game, just like a scene out of Hoosiers and Gene Hackman. That was my town, and I was on that team. But due to a spinal cord tumor which appeared while I was in high school, I began my senior year paralyzed in a wheelchair. And I had two fairly significant experiences subsequent to that which formed my own sense of direc- tion eventually into the practice of law. In 1986 I went to South Africa for the summer. Flew from Kennedy Airport, Canary Islands, finally arriving what felt like days later in Johannesburg at midnight. And I sat there and watched as my luggage arrived, only to learn that TWA had left my wheelchair back in New York on the jet bridge. Topic for another time. But this was apartheid South Africa, okay? For a twen- ty-one-year-old, can you imagine what a shock to the system it was to see a truly segregated society in living color? Whites only water fountains, whites only lunch counters, entire shopping mall areas and restaurants, no blacks allowed. One day we visited a blacks only medical college that was filled with Zulu tribesmen who were as educated as any- one I ever met, studying to become doctors and nurses. Equal justice under the law became a real thing for me that summer, and I’ve later come to appreciate that equal justice is the sine qua non of any truly civilized society. Two years later, I decided to go spend a summer in commu- nist Eastern Europe. I spent seven weeks in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the garden spot of the Soviet block, East Germany. Oppressive, gray, dark – joyless. Outside of Prague, we got pulled over, allegedly for speeding by this little Soviet po- lice group. Now, I was twenty-three years old. I didn’t appreciate that policing in that part of the world was more of an entrepre- neurial venture than it was public service, okay? They were try- ing to communicate to us that they wanted us to pay a $500 fine, preferably in U.S. dollars, but I didn’t know that. I was scared. I thought, what if they take us to jail? I don’t speak the language. I’m in a foreign land. What if they take my passport? Do I get a phone call? Who would I call? And suddenly due process became a real thing for me. That Bill of Rights that I remembered studying in my junior year of high school. So like every person here, we marvel at how we even got here. Our journeys were all very different. But we do understand the beauty and the significance of the rule of law in this magnificent land. When I look at the diversity and the array of backgrounds of the other individuals who are here tonight, many, like me, are first generation lawyers; but there is a fourth generation lawyer whose grandfather was a judge. We have another who has four – God help him - four current trial lawyers in their family. I don’t know what that Thanksgiving is like. We have one federal prosecutor who said “I don’t have a whole lot to say about myself. I’m an immigrant, having come to the United States in 1982 from Guyana at age seventeen. You can imagine my family’s pride when, after living in the U.S. for only five years, I was accepted at Harvard Law School.” But that’s not her most proud achievement. Her most proud achievement is raising her triplets, one of whom became the first African-Amer- ican Rhodes Scholar from the University of Georgia. We have another winner of a Rhodes Scholar competition in our group tonight. We have people who were former patrol offi- cers and one bomb squad member. We have a New York lawyer whose claim to fame is that he’s married to the Senior Rabbi of Central Synagogue. We have in our group the special prosecutor serving pro bono for the televised trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. We have many that serve on all kinds of boards, local charities and whatnot, and we have one recent past president of the nation- ally prestigious Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel. 63 JOURNAL