LITMIR.BIZ

      Source: The Berkeley Historical Society, Ying Lee: From Shanghai to Berkeley (2012)

      Fay and Marvin Stender with their friend Ying “Betty” Lee when she stayed with them in Chicago in the fall of 1954.

      Alice was now Mrs. Gary Gray. Since leaving Chicago, she had reenrolled in the four-year law school program at Hastings as a first-year student. Fay was incredulous. She considered Hastings a dreadful school, a factory not suitable for someone who cared about the public good. Fay invited Alice to bring her husband to Fay and Marvin’s home in the Berkeley Hills for dinner. The house impressed Alice as damp, dark and Gothic. Marvin caught Alice looking skeptically at the meal that Fay placed on the table — two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, baked potatoes and sour yogurt, a product not widely in use at that time. Marvin firmly told Alice and Gary, “This is the way we eat.” Alice found Marvin blunt; Fay found her husband’s emphatic dismissal of bourgeois culinary skills another of his endearing qualities.

      One afternoon, Fay asked Alice to walk with her to the San Francisco municipal court to see if they could observe a jury trial. Fay’s flamboyant outfit included several bangle bracelets which clattered whenever she moved. Alice and Fay discovered a case in progress, opened the door and spotted available seats all the way in the front. The entire courtroom stared open-mouthed as Fay noisily made her way forward with Alice in tow. The pair stayed all afternoon to hear the details of a woman’s slip and fall on a shattered jam jar at a local Safeway grocery store. It amused them both that neither attorney could correctly pronounce the names of the plaintiff’s broken tibia and fibula. These bumbling litigators were undoubtedly among the men who were so dismissive of women law students.

      Heeding Fay’s sharp criticism and her own mounting dissatisfaction, Alice soon quit Hastings. She and her husband Gary spent many evenings socializing with Fay, Marvin and Betty. When they discussed music and literature, Fay mostly did the talking, mesmerizing Alice both with her intelligence and with her phenomenal talent on the organ installed in the Stenders’ living room. Fay also dominated their frequent political discussions, though she still lived in great fear of the Cold War. The boldness that later characterized Fay’s public persona took years to develop.

      * * *

      Dean Levi was quite tickled by Fay’s return to the University of Chicago law school after just one semester’s absence. He told anyone who would listen how his law school was considered by a woman student to be so much better than the law school she transferred to that she immediately sought to retransfer. Fay eagerly started attending classes while Marvin went to work for Professor Hans Zeisel on an experimental jury project that Dean Levi had launched two years earlier with a grant from the Ford Foundation. The project ultimately took fifteen years and cost the staggering sum of one million dollars to publish a definitive study of criminal trials. Some of the findings set forth in The American Jury later played a key role in assuring a diverse and sympathetic jury for the Huey Newton murder trial.

      The outrage of Chicagoans at Mississippi’s lack of justice temporarily took the focus off of Chicago’s own largely unaddressed race problems, which Fay observed daily in her run-down Hyde Park neighborhood. When Betty Lee came to visit that fall of 1954, Fay delighted in giving her friend a tour of the ghetto she had originally found so appalling. Marvin’s father was himself a local landlord. Betty had just emerged from an intense love affair, feeling wounded and looking for a place to recover, which Fay and Marvin gladly offered. In the close quarters of their apartment, Betty again became accustomed to Fay’s late night staccato typing. She felt sorry for Fay’s classmates, knowing that Fay brought her typewriter to exams and likely unnerved anyone seated nearby. By mid fall, Fay’s interest had alighted on local politics. Abner Mikva, whom Marvin had met at the jury project, was making his first run for state office. Fay and Marvin joined Mikva’s volunteers, while their friend Betty Lee joined his paid staff.

      In the spring and summer of 1955 Fay concentrated on her studies, finding it increasingly difficult to suppress her disapproval of how the law aided the haves over the have nots. Meanwhile, with many of their old friends gone, she cultivated new friendships at the law school, including Brian Gluss, a young Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge University, who had been hired to assist on the jury project on a one-year worker’s visa. With his heavy accent and eccentric habits, this tall, skinny Brit in army shorts stood out in sharp contrast to the rest of the jury project staff. Brian also liked to live dangerously, a wild partier who often hung out at black clubs with an inter-racial couple from the project.

      Fay often played Beethoven sonatas on the grand piano in the lounge at the International House where Brian lived. She drew him out in private conversation, unearthing painful secrets he had not spoken of in fifteen years. His parents had fled devastating pogroms in the Ukraine for London in 1906, around the same time Fay’s ancestors fled the border city of Brest-Litovsk. As she coaxed Brian to share his stories, she was soft-spoken, gentle, and reassuring. Years later, those nurturing traits disarmed her most aggressive black militant clients. In response to her probing questions, Brian revealed to Fay that he had been a survivor of the London blitz during World War II: the bomb that hit their home left him and his parents with only a few scratches, but killed his visiting grandmother and his twelve-year-old brother in the next room. His parents had never recovered.

      * * *

      After the summer quarter ended, Fay and Marvin returned to the Bay Area for Labor Day weekend. Fay played the piano for her sister Lisie’s wedding to her long-time boyfriend Don Stone at a small ceremony in their parents’ home in Berkeley. That same weekend, national and international headlines decried the apparent lynching in Mississippi of black Chicago teenager, Emmett “Bobo” Till. Emmett’s gruesome remains were displayed in an open casket visited by thousands of mourners at an African-American church in Chicago’s South Side, not far from where Fay and Marvin lived. The murder of Fay and Marvin’s neighbor Emmett Till would ignite the Civil Rights Movement.

      Fay now took her studies far more seriously. In her third year she took antitrust law from Dean Levi and earned a high A from him. Generally perceived as a cool, unemotional person, he spoke of Fay glowingly at alumni functions. The esteem he held her in undoubtedly dissipated over the years as he became increasingly conservative. He was later appointed President of the entire University of Chicago and ultimately named United States Attorney General for Republican President Gerald Ford. By that time, Fay had gained a national reputation for radicalism.

      Yet Dean Levi had a temporary sojourn as a suspected Lefty in the eye of a national political storm himself, during the quarter that Fay took his course, and it centered on his ambitious jury project. In October, all hell broke loose. Brian Gluss feared he would lose his worker status and be deported. Marvin, as the sole support for himself and Fay, also had his job on the line. It was another lesson close to home, underscoring the dangerous third rail of the McCarthy era in politics.

      The jury project on which Marvin was working had started as a small study of jury deliberations to refute critics who ridiculed jurors as mere pawns of veteran attorneys. The designers of the project anticipated tape-recording a hundred jury deliberations with the consent of the lawyers on both sides. Though the experiment was backed by the Chief Judge of the circuit, some judges and lawyers became immediately alarmed at the idea of “jury bugging.” The Department of Justice strongly opposed the project, which conservative radio commentators derisively dubbed jury “snooping” and trumpeted as a national scandal.

      As a liberal think tank, the University of Chicago remained under great suspicion that it might be infiltrated by Communists. In early October of 1955, Dean Levi was called to Washington, D.C., to appear in front of a House subcommittee investigating whether the law school was attempting to undermine the integrity of the entire American jury system. Warren Burger, the future Chief Justice, and then Assistant Attorney General, accused the law school of plans to eavesdrop on 500 to 1,000 juries nationwide.

      This public display of shocked disapproval contrasted markedly with the Department of Justice’s own secret program. In the spring of 1954, Attorney General Brownell had secretly authorized bugging by the FBI in the purported interests of national

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