Legacies Project Oral History: Steven Pepe

Mon, 08/29/2022 - 12:21pm

When: 2022

Transcript

[00:00:00] INTERVIEWER: I'm first going to ask you some simple demographic questions. All these questions may jog memories. Please keep the interest rates and point for now. We can elaborate later in the interview. Can you please say and spell your name.
[00:00:22] Steven Pepe: Steven Pepe. S-T-E-V-E-N and the last name is spelled P as in Paul, E as in Edward, P as in Paul, E as in Edward. Doesn't look like Pepe, does it?
[00:00:33] INTERVIEWER: What is your birth date including the year?
[00:00:35] Steven Pepe: January 29th, 1943.
[00:00:38] INTERVIEWER: How old are you?
[00:00:40] Steven Pepe: Seventy-five.
[00:00:43] INTERVIEWER: How would you describe your ethnic background?
[00:00:48] Steven Pepe: Caucasian, French, and German.
[00:00:52] INTERVIEWER: What is your religious affiliation, if any?
[00:00:56] Steven Pepe: Roman Catholic.
[00:00:56] INTERVIEWER: What is the highest level of formal education you ever completed?
[00:01:04] Steven Pepe: I graduated a degree of JD and law. But after that, I did a Master's in law at Harvard. After my JD at Michigan.
[00:01:14] INTERVIEWER: Did you attend any additional school or formal career training beyond when you completed it?
[00:01:18] Steven Pepe: Yes. I was at the London School of Economics for two years doing post-doctoral research on low-income housing.
[00:01:29] INTERVIEWER: What is your marital status?
[00:01:32] Steven Pepe: Married.
[00:01:34] INTERVIEWER: Is your spouse still living?
[00:01:35] Steven Pepe: Yes.
[00:01:36] INTERVIEWER: How many children do you have?
[00:01:38] Steven Pepe: I'm sad to say, we have none.
[00:01:40] INTERVIEWER: How many siblings do you have?
[00:01:43] Steven Pepe: Two.
[00:01:45] INTERVIEWER: What would you consider your primary occupation to have been?
[00:01:48] Steven Pepe: Well, law I guess you would say it was a primary occupation.
[00:01:52] INTERVIEWER: And at what age did you retire?
[00:01:54] Steven Pepe: At what age?
[00:01:55] INTERVIEWER: At what age did you retire?
[00:01:58] Steven Pepe: Age you say. I was 66 when I retired.
[00:02:16] INTERVIEWER: Now we can begin the first part of our interview beginning with some of the things that you can recall about your family and history. We're beginning with family naming history. By this, we mean any story about your last or family name or family traditions and selecting your first or middle names. Do you know any stories about your family name?
[00:02:38] Steven Pepe: I know about my mother's family. They were German Lutherans in Northern Indiana and their name used to be spelled as Goring. They changed it during World War I to Gering to make it more Anglo because of the very large anti-German sentiment in the United States during World War I. I think when she came around, they were very glad they did that because Hermann Goring was wondering arch villains in the German Nazi party. The PEPE is French from southern France and it is believed that because it is an odd spelling and pronunciation, that there was a good arrow, PEPE or PEPE, I should say. From Italy. Italy under Napoleon was his brother sat on the throne in Italy. The Italians could serve in Napoleon's army. Accordingly, allegedly, Gumaro Pepe served with Napoleon on his invasion of Russia, which was, as you probably know, a disaster, and only about one in three soldiers made it back alive. It's believed Gumaro did make it back alive and then the joke in our family was is why were not still Italian and why we became France, coming from Southern France is the joke is that the government said you have an option, Gumaro. Do you want your government benefits paid for by the Italian government or the French government and he says, I'm going to France.
[00:04:22] INTERVIEWER: Are there any naming traditions in your family?
[00:04:27] Steven Pepe: By juniors and that stuff?
[00:04:31] INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
[00:04:31] Steven Pepe: No. My brothers and siblings were not named after any parents or grandparents or uncles or any of that sort. No.
[00:04:45] INTERVIEWER: Why did your ancestors come to the United States?
[00:04:53] Steven Pepe: That is a story I really don't know the answer to. My bet is that they were from poor backgrounds and that the opportunities in the United States were very high. My bet is that the Pepe side came to Indiana where Indiana was still a French territory and I think that the German family came later. But I don't really know the details of that.
[00:05:21] INTERVIEWER: You wouldn't know any stories about how your family came to the United States?
[00:05:25] Steven Pepe: I don't.
[00:05:27] INTERVIEWER: How did they probably make a living either in the old country or here in the United States?
[00:05:33] Steven Pepe: In United States, both families were farmers in Northern Indiana.
[00:05:38] INTERVIEWER: Describe any family migration once they arrive here in the United States and how they came to live in this area.
[00:05:46] Steven Pepe: Well, I don't know where they may have lived in the United States before Indiana. The only migration I know from Indiana is from Northern Indiana to Indianapolis, Indiana where my mother and father married. My father got a job in Indianapolis working for the Office of Price Administration during World War II.
[00:06:09] INTERVIEWER: Would you know which family members came along at the same time?
[00:06:13] Steven Pepe: Well, as I said, from Northern Indiana to Indianapolis, so the rest I have stayed in Northern Indiana.
[00:06:22] INTERVIEWER: To your knowledge, did they make any effort to preserve any traditions or customs from their country?
[00:06:31] Steven Pepe: I believe they all became very a culture to the American Middle Western middle lifestyle and did not maintain any traditions or events that are related to either the German heritage or the French heritage.
[00:06:51] INTERVIEWER: Are there any traditions that your family has given up or change?
[00:06:57] Steven Pepe: Since I don't know of any traditions that really celebrated that related with their ethnic origins of being French or German [LAUGHTER] about if they gave up.
[00:07:08] INTERVIEWER: What stories have calmed down to you about your parents and grandparents?
[00:07:17] Steven Pepe: My grandfather, all my cousins are now die-hard Republicans and have been for years and years. They claim that my German grandfather was a Republican. I said, whoops, I'm sorry, that can't be possible because he and I used to sit on the front porch of his farmhouse near Valle, Indiana. And he would go on for a long period of time bragging about the wonderful Williams Jennings Bryan, the man of the people, the man for the farmers, the man that had the iron costs. When they get us back on the gold standard. I have printed money, ran for president three times and lost. I said, Williams Jennings Bryan isn't unabashed, unadulterated, a Democrat. Always has been and always will be, so please don't say grandpa was a Republican. [LAUGHTER] That's one story I remember from my granddad. My grandfather on the page side was a blind sadly. I don't remember any particular story he said was told of him about them. I really can't remember the other family stories that are passed down tradition other than when I experienced with Grandpa Gary.
[00:08:45] INTERVIEWER: Do you know any courtship stories like how your parents or grandparents met?
[00:08:51] Steven Pepe: Mother started working for the WOWO, which was at that time one of the largest radio broadcast networks in the country. My dad ran a Sinclair station in Fort Wayne. I don't know exactly how they met, but they met, felt in love, and were going to get married. My grandfather, the Williams Jennings Bryan fan, was going to have none of it. His daughter was not going to marry a Catholic. Thank you very much. Rumor has it, so I do know a family rumor, that Grandpa Gary got a shot gun, got in his car from a villa and drove in Fort Wayne planning break up the wedding. Happily he stopped and talked to a Lutheran minister to I guess either get some moral guidance or some courage or whatever. Happily the minister talked him out of it and he packed up his gun and went back to the villa. When my older brother was born, all the animosity about marrying a Catholic quickly melted away when that first baby came.
[00:10:07] INTERVIEWER: At what point in your life did you feel the most accomplished?
[00:10:17] Steven Pepe: I would say probably when I retired from the Court, that I was able to look back and realize that I had had, to my mind, a very successful career. One of the things I was very proud of when I was on the court, whenever I wrote opinions, I always wrote them to try to explain to the losing party why they lost, so that at least they knew that I listened to all their arguments, I understood them, and could explain why I disagreed with them. I must say that there were three evaluations that I went through every eight years you have to get reappointed as a magistrate judge. There's a committee put together of lawyers, citizens, no judges on it. They send out questionnaires to all the lawyers, but not all of them, but a very large sampling. Lawyers who practiced in front of the chairman of this committee is on each of the three told me that I got almost no negative comments from all of the lawyers. That was a great sense of accomplishment being able to please both sides when one side is always going to lose.
[00:11:29] INTERVIEWER: Growing up, what did you look up to? Who was your inspiration?
[00:11:35] Steven Pepe: My father and my brother, as well as my mother, but in different ways. I think my father was an inspiration because of what many young men have their fathers. He was hard working, he was dedicated to the family. My older brother was four-and-a-half years older than me, so that we really work in the same cohorts. We didn't have any overlapping friends though. Some of the brothers of my friends were friends of my older brother. He was that taught me sports. My father was older and I think did not have an athletic youth. Whereas my older brother taught me football, baseball, basketball, and I looked up to him for that. He also was musically inclined. He played the saxophone, which encouraged me to then start playing the piano.
[00:12:33] INTERVIEWER: What would you say is the most difficult part of being a judge?
[00:12:50] Steven Pepe: I guess the most difficult part for me was trying to be confident that I had my arms around all elements of the case. At one time, particularly when I was about to sit down and write an opinion, now I had two law clerks that were law school graduates and often very bright and capable people that would assist me in as so that they made that task a lot easier. Whenever a brief didn't get into me in time before oral arguments, I always thought that there was a big hole in my knowledge of whatever that brief held as soon as the oral arguments were over, if I couldn't delay them until I could read the brief before I heard the oral arguments that I would immediately turn to that brief to see what I have missed, if anything.
[00:13:40] INTERVIEWER: What was your life like growing up in Indiana?
[00:13:47] Steven Pepe: I would say rather vanilla, not doing any outstanding events. We grew up in a middle class neighborhood. Neighborhood itself was not integrated, but the school I went to and the church we went to was integrated. I probably have my closest attachment to my mother growing up. It was she who, I guess provide the warmth and encouragement on a more daily basis than my dad or older brother did.
[00:14:37] Steven Pepe: Some incidents in childhood that you may get to later so I can hold this off for other questions are all volunteer. I got what a couple of the standing memories was. My mother remained Luther, my father was a Catholic. My mother was a Republican as even though her dad was William Jennings Bryan fan. My dad was a diehard Democrat. In 1948, Truman ran against Dewey, whether supported to each ad supported Truman. Truman upset Dewey. There's a famous picture of Truman was the Chicago Tribune saying, Dewey defeats Truman. Truman seeing it with a big smile. Because he knows that's not true, you just repeat it. Do it. Anyway, I was about 5 and 48. I remember sitting on the living room floor of our home. My father had not yet come home and whether it was fixing breakfast, and he came in quite intoxicated, and he had been out celebrating with his Democratic friends the election of Truman. If you remember 5, the record he put on the Victrola was the Chopin Polonaise and a minor. He said, well, you dance with me to Truman's victory. [LAUGHTER] she was dancing mood. Forget that. But that was the first time I get every member absolute fury. I was so angry at my father for humiliating my mother. I didn't understand all the ins and outs about the political dimensions of it. But that is a memory that has stuck with me for years and also I think made me sensitive to don't ridicule people. That's cruel. Another memory I have as a child, I think I was much older. I may have been even still five. There's a very nice department store. I don't know if you know what Hudson's used to be in Michigan bit used to be the biggest store downtown. Back to Thanksgiving, courageous to be sponsored by Hudson's. Well, the equivalent of Hudson's in Indianapolis was a place called ls heirs, and they had a lovely lunch in room where it had white tablecloths and you got dressed up to go. My mother took me down there, and we had a nice lunch and I was wearing white shirts, white socks, white shirt probably. I was getting ready for our first communion or something like that, but I was all cleaned up to go to this lovely lunch. We came home, and she put the car in the garage and she went down to talk to her next door neighbor, Mrs. Pettigrew. I looked over in the backyard and I said, oh my God, they have a new swing set in their backyard with a slide so I make a beeline to that and I go up to the slide and slide down the slide, and then I go walking out to join rather, and this is Pettigrew and rather looks at me. They had painted this slide green. I had not realized that. I was green in my pants, my socks. My mother, I just shows me what a dear mother she was. She says, oh my gosh, Steven, look what you've done yourself, and what's more cruel than that. She knew that that I was not planning to do that. It wasn't an accident. It was St. little boys do. I think was a demonstration of the kindness and empathy that my mother have. I like to think a lot of that rubbed off on me.
[00:18:27] INTERVIEWER: What lessons have you learned that a shaped you into the person that you are today?
[00:18:36] Steven Pepe: Again. Having a mother demonstrate kindness. Father told me don't really cure people, be sensitive to them. The other major factor, when I was 10, my parents had not intended to have a third child, but they did, and my younger brother had down syndrome. His name is Randy. At that time, the public school system had no educational programs for people that were mentally handicapped, so that my parents have spent a great deal of money to try and get tutors to tutor him. Eventually, after about four or five years, archdiocese the Catholic started a special school downtown for all the people that had down syndrome who they were Catholics or not. That was the first educational opportunity they had, that was with a group of other students. In the public schools didn't do it for probably 15, 20 years later when the courts made them do it, because it was discrimination against the handicapped. The other thing is because my brother had a congenital heart and it was probably in the hospital in his early years about every three months for a week or two, that we had no health insurance. Of course, he had a preexisting condition. So getting health insurance was nearly impossible. Eventually because my parents were in the retail florist business, a group called the Federal telegraph delivery service, which had ways in which he could have flower scent in other cities for customers in your city. They finally did get a large public health care system that didn't prohibit preexisting conditions. When Randy was about 12 or 13, we were able to finally get him insured. But the lessons on that is that the great difficulties that people who have disabilities of any sort phase and obviously, the recent debates over health care make it clear to me that you have to have health care system for everyone. It can't prohibit people that have preexisting conditions. It's an obligation not only a private employers and citizens, but they aren't able to do it. It seems to me that the government must do it because these people are completely innocent on their needs, and need to have them met by the government if they can't do it on their own. That also made me very sensitive to the less well-off. I'm fairly certain that his effect on me was directed me to go into legal services after I finished my clerkship in Washington to work for the least well-off in the Washington DC area for several years. Then I continue that for the next 14 years doing clinical legal education, which our clients were basically you'll services clients and therefore people had very low incomes, lots of needs and oftentimes very troubling legal problems if they got themselves into. That I'm competent was a very big effect, just having the awareness of the needs of people like that.
[00:22:24] INTERVIEWER: What's the best piece of advice that you have received?
[00:22:31] Steven Pepe: That I have received? For me it always has. I think it's probably good advice for anyone. That was my father at that I guess it was probably the one that drove that into me. On my mother's side, the advice to be sensitive to those that are less well-off than you are. Again, very important advice to me. She modeled that in her entire life. My brother, he had an IQ of about 65. Average IQ is 100. He was severely retarded. My parents never institutionalized him. My mother cared for him until he died at 50. She's amazing. When he was born, his life expectancy was six. That was pretty good pretty good parenting. [LAUGHTER].
[00:23:52] INTERVIEWER: If you could change anything, that's happened in your life, what would you?
[00:23:57] Steven Pepe: Well, I've often wondered what I would've done when I was in college. I was in mathematics for two-and-a-half years within political science and got a major in Political Science, fully intending to go into the Foreign Service. The counselor he was from Germany and had been very involved in Foreign Service and his son was in the Foreign Service. He basically said, the problem with foreign services, you're never your own boss. No matter what your policy position may be on an international relations issue, you have to implement the policy of the United States government, whether you like it or don't. That's when he urged me to become a lawyer. Well, obviously lawyers don't always get to argue what they think is right. They have to often argue what they think is wrong even though because our clients insist that they do so. There's that conflict also. I always wonder what my life biography would be had I gone into foreign service during a period of time when international relations just became ever so much more complicated with the United States playing always the leading role after World War II. That's like, I don't know if that's a regret, but it's curiosity.
[00:25:19] INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to become a judge?
[00:25:26] Steven Pepe: I had been practicing laws as an advocate for, let's see, 10, 12, 14 years. This conflict that I said that you don't always get to do what you think is right. When you're advocating a position for a client that may not be one you would agree with on a moral ground. Sometimes you're even arguing for interpretation of the law that you think will probably lose, but it's the only interpretation of the law that would help your client. This role conflict between doing what your client says at times and this isn't always the case, but I would say maybe, why not ten cases you would face this dilemma. That was a conflict that I found troubling. That's it. Just satisfying things about being an advocate where the other person tells you what they need and want you to argue. Obviously there are limits. You can't argue anything, it's illegal. But there's sometimes things you think you would rather be arguing on the other side, let's put it that way. When this judicial position became available in Ann Arbor on the federal court, that became very attractive because when I became a judge, I realized that every day you can go to work knowing that what you're going to try to do your best is do what's morally right, what's legally right, and what is the best and right outcome for our society. That was a great relief of not having that tension. In some of my cases I used to have when I was in private practice or legal services work. That was one of the big attractions to it. It's also obviously prestigious to be a judge that it's nice to say, all rise, when you walk into a room. My wife used to at thanksgiving, tease me, when she says all rise, on the thanksgiving [LAUGHTER] dinner to ridicule me. That's a factor. It was also nice to be able to have law clerks who are, being Ann Arbor, there are often very bright qualified lawsuits when they graduate, could have gotten clerkship on appellate courts or federal district judges anywhere in the country. But so many times they would be in love with somebody that's still had one or two years to finish up with the dental school or maybe even had another year at the law school, so they need to find a job in a harbor for one or two years that would look good on their resume. But they didn't want to have to drive all the way to Detroit and back every day to get that job. My clerkship position, and especially with my connection is still with the Michigan Law School faculty because for 12 years after I became a judge, I continue to teach in the faculty. The law School faculty would always send me some of these very capable law review quality students that because of some amorous relationship with either a man or a woman, they had finished up some other education in Ann Arbor had to stay here couple of more years. I got very capable law clerks and it's just fun to work day in and day out with very bright people.
[00:29:03] INTERVIEWER: [OVERLAPPING] [BACKGROUND] This is about your earliest memories of childhood.
[00:29:07] Steven Pepe: I may have shared them with you already.
[00:29:08] INTERVIEWER: Yeah, I know. Yeah. [OVERLAPPING]
[00:29:14] INTERVIEWER: Keep track.
[00:29:19] INTERVIEWER: What languages were spoken in your household?
[00:29:22] Steven Pepe: English.
[00:29:26] INTERVIEWER: Would you remember what was your house like?
[00:29:28] Steven Pepe: Oh, yes. The very first house we lived on Berkeley Road, I probably don't remember that. I think we moved from that to not very far away by the blocks away to 46 Street. It was a very simple, probably 1,800 square foot Cape Cod with three bedrooms upstairs that were really quite small because if you imagined 1,800 square foot is now about half the size of what most people are now buying as houses. Center entry right into the living room. My brother and I originally shared a bedroom with bunk beds. Again, one of the memories I had is that [LAUGHTER] my brother could always tease me that there was a wolf under the bed and that I shouldn't get out to go to the [LAUGHTER] toilet because there was a wolf that had gotten into there. He was on the upper block and I was on the lower block. At time I was impressionable enough [inaudible 00:30:42] [LAUGHTER] I better be careful. Finally, when I realized this was a spoof, I leaned up backwards and put my feet up on the springs underneath him and started wamping on one of his springs to get even for him, telling me there was a wolf under the bed. I remember the kitchen was small. I remember a time when my mother was preparing a chicken. I think they may have bought chicken with feathers. She may have been plucking the feathers off this chicken. I remember starting to cry. I felt so sorry [LAUGHTER] for this chicken. I was, what did you do [LAUGHTER] wrong they're now tearing you apart and we are going to eat you. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, you could become too sensitives at times.
[00:31:44] INTERVIEWER: How many people lived in the house when you were growing up and what are their relationship to you?
[00:31:49] Steven Pepe: Well, there were the my parents and my two brothers. There were five of us in the house after I was 10, but more that there were just four of us. That was Tim, when Randy was born.
[00:32:05] INTERVIEWER: Were their different languages spoken in different settings such as at home in the neighborhood are like in local stores.
[00:32:12] Steven Pepe: I think we were a very, as I say, vanilla, white, middle-class neighborhood. There were no foreign languages spoken.
[00:32:25] INTERVIEWER: What was your family like as a child?
[00:32:30] Steven Pepe: Well, I think we were very warm and close family. As I say my parents ran a retail flower shop, so they both worked in that. Of course, when I was young, that was the [LAUGHTER] daycare location is they would take me to the store and I wouldn't learn to sweep up this outfit and put the trash away and try to push the windows and do little simple things from a time I was probably about six until I was 26. When I was in law school, I used to go back and on holidays and work in the flower shop. That working together created a very tight bond. As I got older of both my father and my mother taught me more and more about the business, designing and how to put together procedures and wedding bouquets and centerpieces and even funeral pieces. Later [LAUGHTER] when I was old enough to drive, I would occasionally deliver. [LAUGHTER] I was always asked to deliver flowers to somebody in the hospital or someone on her birthday at their home, maybe very excited to get the flowers, but then allow the [inaudible 00:33:46] funeral homes. Then you come into the back of funeral home where the public isn't allowed or isn't it supposed to be and they were more [LAUGHTER] kitchen one or deceased customers who was like on a bench, getting ready to get made up for the casket. I can't say that was supposed to be [LAUGHTER] enjoyable part of the job, but I must say it was memorable. [LAUGHTER]
[00:34:19] INTERVIEWER: What is your earliest childhood memory?
[00:34:23] Steven Pepe: Again, I think I may recounted that was the time my father came home from the election night when Truman defeated Dewey and had the go around trying to get my mother to dance to Truman's victory.
[00:34:41] INTERVIEWER: What did you do for fun?
[00:34:49] Steven Pepe: In the neighborhood we did, I guess most of the things a lot of kids did. Bicycling, going kids houses to visit them, playing basketball here and there. Just joking around friends. I had went very close friend, Mike Fox, who I don't want for the time we were both 5.5 and sadly, he died about 15 years ago, very young. Well, 60, before 75 considers that very young. His daughter is my grand daughter, and she lives in the Northern suburbs of Detroit, so I get to see her a bit. But he and I used to have a great time. We used to go over we lived on the edge of the University of Butler. They had a student center. The big deal was to get a quarter and go over to the student center and buy a soda, or a Coke or an ice cream or something of that sort, which have all these big college kids there that for a kid in grade school was a lot of fun. Mike and I had many wonderful times. He would stay over at my house. I would stay over at his house. [NOISE] His dad died when he was probably six. I may be one of the only friends he ever had it ever met his dad. I remember him. He was a very handsome person that died, I think when he was about 35, maybe it was 40, 42. He'd been in the Navy in World War II. I remember him in this little library ahead of their house. His wife is sitting on one chair and he was sitting in the other which later became the guest chair. After his dad died and I grew up in high school and college and through law school until I moved away permanently from the Indiana area. I would be over there every Christmas, sitting in that chair where his dad was in his mama be in the other chair and Mike would often be sitting at the desk. I remember when we got older and could drink we you would always have an early time, is that was her favorite bourbon. We would always have an early times to toast the holiday. But I never missed a Christmas at their house all those years. He was in my wedding. I was in his wedding. It was a very close friendship and I'm very sorry that he passed away. Unfortunately.
[00:37:36] INTERVIEWER: Did you have a favorite book by any chance?
[00:37:42] Steven Pepe: [LAUGHTER] I did. There was I think they call it Five and Dime. Down from her dad's flower shop was and I would get paid. I went down there and I bought this book called a Aesop's Fables. I brought it back to the store. There was this woman that worked in the store, she was half African-American, half Caucasian. Her name was Myla and I loved her. She teased me about buying that book. I felt so bad about it so [LAUGHTER] that certainly made me make it my favorite book. I did. I also remember a childhood incident at the flower shop with Myla and my father. I think I may have been there and probably about 10, 11, I wasn't terribly old. But a woman came into the store and Myla went out to wait on her. Then they got to be quite a ruckus in the front of the store. My father goes walking out and this woman said, she says, "I want a white person to wait on me." My father said to her, "If Myla isn't good enough to wait on you, you're shopping at the wrong store and I ask you to leave immediately." [LAUGHTER] I was so proud of my dad. That was in the '50s and that's when, civil rights have not yet gotten the in the eyes of the administration. He was very foot dragging on Silver Rights and I was very proud of my dad to stand up for Myla. That was the first time I'd seen discrimination against African-Americans infuriated me.
[00:39:31] INTERVIEWER: Were there any special days, events or family traditions you remember?
[00:39:35] Steven Pepe: Oh, all the holidays and birthdays. The holiday since we were in a flower business, that flowers are a very popular. We always are busy at work. At the holiday time, particularly Christmas but also Easter. There was also a unity and warrants working together and then going home and celebrating together. It used to be when we finished on Christmas Eve very late often, there was a midnight mass out of this Franciscan, what she would call it? I guess you'd call it Franciscan monastery was a big house. These were people that were the brown robes with the white centers around their waist and thing hanging down, wore sandals even in the winter though I think they were socks and sandals. There was always a midnight mass and they're only probably about 25-30 people got invited to this, but our family always did. Dennis and I would often serve masses, we will be altar boys. That was always a big deal to be able to go out to Alberta retreat house and to go to the midnight mass and you see this beautiful house they lived in. It was like a [LAUGHTER] mansion, much like a French chateau. Some sort was a very large, beautiful place. For their living in poverty, this is [LAUGHTER] pretty all.
[00:41:07] INTERVIEWER: What was the typical day like for you in your pre-school years.
[00:41:10] Steven Pepe: For my pre-school years?
[00:41:17] Steven Pepe: Well, in my pre-school years, my mother was with me most all the time and I can't remember any unusual events, but I assume that she would read to me that we would do various toys I would play with. When I got a little older, I would be able to we always had neighbors that had age, kids that were also the same age and Dennis and I so, I would be a friend, Jimmy, who lived next door and my brother was a good friend of his older brothers. Jimmy and I would play with his house and my house. That's before I got to be good friends with this other fellow Mike Fox and then passed away.
[00:41:56] INTERVIEWER: What work did your mother and father do?
[00:41:59] Steven Pepe: They were retail florist. Before that as I say my father had worked in Sinclair in Northern Indiana in Fort Wayne. World War II broke out and he was too old to serve so he went to work for the Office of Price Administration, which was the federal government that kept inflation from getting out of control by regulating prices. He moved to Indianapolis on that. Then after the war ended, he was offered a job by a fellow by the name of Howard Sams who had this Sam's publishing company and what did he did? He published the manuals on all of the guns and all the all the weaponry of the United States Army. After that, he was going to expand into other publications. My dad said no, he wanted to go into business for himself and he went into a flower shop. I don't think my dad, mom together, working 40-50 hours a week ever together made more than 14 $15,000. How are you going with this other fellow Sam's? It became Walter more press and finally sold out to the Mickey company. My parents would have been millionaires many times over because of that career decision. But I'm not sure that I would have been the same person I am. I'm sure I wouldn't been. [LAUGHTER]
[00:43:36] INTERVIEWER: Today's interview is about your childhood up until you begin attending school. Even if these questions jog memories about other times in your life, please only responded memories from this earliest part of life.
[00:43:48] Steven Pepe: Because this before I started even grade school. It's going to be slim pickings [LAUGHTER].
[00:43:53] INTERVIEWER: Where did you grow up and what are your strongest memories of that place?
[00:43:59] Steven Pepe: I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. Probably my strongest memories are the playground at my school where every day we would have recesses and I would enjoy playing sports or whatever with classmates. I had a very large class. In my eighth grade, there were 52 students. By the way you really want me to get before I even got into school. I guess the playground would be after that. Let's see. Obviously, I enjoyed doing things with my mother and my dad, but most particularly my mother who was around more often than my father since he did most of the work. There was an empty lot across the street from us and we used to go over there and play tag football with my older brother and some of his friends. Early on I was just an observer, but later on, they let me also play. Again when I was five and this is before I started school I met this fellow, became my closest friend, Mike Fox. He lived about five blocks away from me. I would either go over there or they would bring him over to my house. We also had that next door neighbor, Jimmy Reardon was same age so the three of us used to horse around. We had a little dog named Bimbo, who would regularly run away, but always come home. I think I'm dry, pretty much a blank on other things at that age.
[00:46:18] INTERVIEWER: How did your family come to live in Indiana please?
[00:46:22] Steven Pepe: The Second World War broke out and my father, who had been working for Sinclair Oil before that, he was too old to be drafted, so he volunteered to join the Office of Price Administration, the OPA, and it was headquartered in Indianapolis. They moved from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis so that he could work in the Office of Price Administration, which was the organization that regulated prices so that there wouldn't be massive inflation during the war when scarcity broke out. If the price is just wouldn't be driven up sky high, that would be so that there was a policing force that went around checking the pricing protocols from various companies.
[00:47:11] INTERVIEWER: What was your house like?
[00:47:13] Steven Pepe: It was a simple, about 1,800 square foot. I think it would be called the Cape Cod. It was stone on the outside. Indiana had a lot of limestone from down by Bloomington, so it was Indiana limestone, which is a very gray whitish stone. It was as I said, small one in front window on the left, which the living room area when equally sized window on the right of the center entry. That was where the dining room with the kitchen behind that upstairs roof had two dormas and that was projections that come out, but we can walk down to the Windows, but the rest of the upstairs is slanted roof, so and it had a green roof with the white brick.
[00:48:15] INTERVIEWER: Have you ever thought about visiting the your childhood home?
[00:48:18] Steven Pepe: I have visited both that own, which was really the second home I was living in. The first home was over in Berkeley Avenue, which I also visited. This was about 10 years ago there was a Judicial Conference in I think it was in Louisville. We drove from Ann Arbor through Indianapolis and on the way back. In fact, it was quite interesting. In fact, I think it must. Yes.
[00:48:55] Steven Pepe: On the way back, we went and visited what allegedly is the log cabin that Lincoln when he was a child living in Kentucky. I think it's probably been largely reconstructed and it's inside of another building. We went and visited Lincoln's home and then we went and visited my home which put me in pretty good company, so that was it.
[00:49:24] INTERVIEWER: I'm really sorry, we already asked about this actually, unless you want to add [inaudible 00:49:43]
[00:49:46] INTERVIEWER: Did you go to highschool? And if so, where? And What do you remember about it?
[00:49:50] Steven Pepe: I went to high school in Indianapolis. It was the central city high school, we lived on 46th Street and this was down at 16th Street and by Central City High School, it had a mixture of students from all different directions from the city and it had all sorts of economic classes mixed together. This is when it used to be safe to hitchhike. My father's flower shop was at 34th Street, so he would often drive me down and drop me off at 34th and meridian, and then I would hitchhike from 34th Street down to 16th Street. I guess today that would probably be considered very risky, but back in those days, Indianapolis was a very safe city. I remember one time when I got picked up by a woman driving this gorgeous Lincoln Continental, I didn't think I'd ever been in a nicer car and she was real sweet and she drives down and she pulls in front of the highschool and lets me out and a bunch of my classmates were walking up the steps and I said, Goodbye mom, when she pulled out, so I remember that being my first car, kind of a dirty trick but it was funny how those impish things happen when you're a kid.
[00:51:25] INTERVIEWER: What about your school experience, is it different from school as you know it today?
[00:51:31] Steven Pepe: Well, I mean, for one thing, the size of the classes back then, as I said in my eighth grade, I had 52 students with one nun keeping us all and control and given the fact if you're going to have 52 kids from lots of different mixed backgrounds, you're going to have lots of different interests in lots of different levels of intelligence and at that time, teachers taught to the medium intelligence level or interest level of the class so I found that a lot of my grade school was, to my mind, repetitive and boring. In high school, we also have larger classes, but obviously the level of complexity depended on the classes you chose. So by choosing government or calculus or advanced mathematics courses, you would get much more challenged. Again, today I think classes are so much smaller, I think they're often much more integrated around capabilities so that you have some of the smart kids in smarter sections and more modest kids in other sections. I think that you get a lot more feedback on your intelligence, which there was much more testing today and it wasn't, we used to do one test, I think in third grade and in seventh grade, which was an IQ test and there wasn't the annual testing. Once we got to high school, there was but it wasn't until my junior year in high school that a brother Raymond called me into his office, I thought maybe I'm in trouble, and he really wanted to know what I was thinking about going to college. I told him a couple, Indiana University, possibly Purdue, possibly Xavier, which is a Catholic school in Cincinnati and that was the first time I was ever told that all my test scores indicated that I should aim higher than that possibly. Again, I think that in today's education compared to back then, it wouldn't take you to your junior year of high school when your teacher singled you out and said, you're above average in your test and you should aim higher from your college choices and other sorts of things. In high school, I was in my senior year of high school in a very serious automobile accident on Halloween, think we're coming up for the 55th anniversary of it this coming Halloween. We, sadly to say, the driver of the car, which was a 1954 Ford with no safety features, no seat belts, obviously no airbags, the driver sadly had been drinking. We went to a summer party where there were some women that we were going to pick up and then take to another party and driving over there, the person that was drinking had another friend of mine, Jim Mahler, drive the car but once we left the summer party to go to the other party, Bob asked Jim for the keys, and Jim didn't think anything about it, and he gave him the keys and Bob drove from the slumber party and sadly, he took off and started driving very fast. It was raining that night, the roads were slick and then he started swerving the car back and forth, I remember lot of screaming and then we went off the road and hit a concrete culvert, those things you go into your driveways and often have the drain tube that goes underneath them, they are solid and the right front wheel of the car that hit the culvert first, went through the floorboard, caught my right foot, snapped it off and push it up to my knee. Happily, I had taken my glasses off because of the vanity of picking up the women. I went in to cover my face and my elbow went into the dashboard, which was solid metal and fractured my elbow. My other foot was broken, the car flipped, I was thrown out of it. Later it was shown that the indentation where I landed and where the car flipped is about a foot apart so I was very lucky it didn't rollover on me. I obviously was knocked out, I remember waking up there and there were lights flashing by that time, the ambulances and police were there, there were a bunch of women standing around looking at me and I said, Do I have a right foot? I couldn't feel any sensation in my right foot and the woman picked up a blanket that was covering the lower part of me and then she said you'll be fine, you'll just be fine. I knew I was in trouble when that occurred. We went down to the St. Vincent's hospital, my father was already there. At the time we arrived, we came on the second ambulance, the first ambulance had the woman that sat between Bob and myself, Cecily Elder, and sadly her back was broken so she was one of the first ambulance to the hospital. When I got there, Jim Mahler, the third fellow on the car that later became my roommate at Notre Dame, his father was chief of staff at the hospital, so he was already down there and he told my dad, he says who's your orthopedic surgeon? He said, Well, we've never had one because none of the kids have ever broken anything but it's Tom Brady, but he lives out in Meridian hills, it'd probably take him an hour to get here. And Jim's dad, Dr. Miller, said to my dad, Bill, there's an orthopedic surgeon, Frank Troop that's scrubbed and ready to operate. He can't operate on Cecily Elder because she needs a neurologist. I would recommend you authorize that he be allowed to operate on your son. He's not yet board-certified, but he's very bright, he's very capable so my dad authorized that and I was on the operating table within 15 minutes after arriving at the hospital and I think that probably saved my right foot from having to be amputated. He was able to reset the foot and in fact, he used that operation to get board-certified, you always have to have some successful, difficult procedures to demonstrate your capability so I was his test case, but I was very fortunate. I remember waking up the next morning, I was plaster of Paris from my ankles to my shoulder only my right arm did not get broken. Anyway, that was a devastating wake-up call and obviously changed my career plans significantly.
[00:59:10] INTERVIEWER: After the accident, how long did it take you to recover from your injuries?
[00:59:14] Steven Pepe: I was in a hospital for I think it was six weeks and then it was at least another six months before I was able to walk without assistance and I think I mentioned the last time with my younger brother had Down syndrome, but my parents did not have insurance because of preexisting conditions. But later this Flourish Telegraph Delivery Service, which is a nationwide program, offered florist, a insurance at reasonable rates and did not disqualify pre-existing conditions so we were able to get insurance and it kicked in on eligibility one week before my accident, otherwise, the six-week stay in the hospital would have probably bankrupt my family. This was in my senior year and therefore, it really changed my career plans significantly.
[01:00:24] Steven Pepe: Since the elderly woman who had her back broker is also on the hospital even longer than six weeks, but she was there the whole six weeks I was there. Whenever my parents came down to visit me, they would go down to visit Sissy, and whenever Sissy's parents came to visit her, her parents would come down to visit me. We hadn't known each other before this. I mean, I knew Sissy, but my parents didn't know each other. One day Sissy's dad comes in. The reason that they had an orthopedic surgeon down there so fast is that afternoon when another one of her brothers who has had a cast removed from having fallen out of a tree. They had lots of broken bones and they had six kids and their family, it was a big Irish Catholic family. Finally, Sissy's dad came down one day and he said, Steve, where are you planning to go to college? I said, well, I was hoping that Senator Heartkey would get me an appointment to the Naval Academy. I don't think I'm eligible right now. He said, no you are not. I said, I probably was thinking of going to Indiana, or Xavier, or Ball State possibly. He said, did you ever consider Notre Dame? I said No, I didn't think I could get into Notre Dame. He said, what were your board scores? I told him, and they were about, I think, 97 percentile. Then you said what were your grades at cathedral? They were quite good. He was very familiar with that high school and it's standing and that sort of thing. He goes away and he comes back 20 min later. He says, apply. You're in. It doesn't work like that anymore. Apparently, he was very well-known. Later, when I was a judge, I was asked to serve on the Kroc Institute for International [inaudible 01:02:20] Studies. We had a conference in New York. Ancillary to the conference, we were going to go to the first Notre Dame army game played at the at the new Yankee Stadium. Notre Dame army did the first college football game at the old Yankee Stadium. Anyway, at halftime, they were showing films on the Jumbo-tron of famous plays and events but in Notre Dame army series. One of them was this fellow that caught interceptor. Notre Dame was behind, I think there were behind by one field over there, it was really nothing. But it was in the fourth-quarter, game was nearly over. An army was threatening. They were down on Notre Dame's 12 yard line. The army quarterback throws a pass and it gets caught by a fellow on the two yard line, and he runs 98 yard for a touchdown. Nobody wins. Well, that guy who ran was the guy that was the father of this girl, Jack [inaudible 01:03:29] He was an American football player. I think that's why he could make a phone call back in 1960 and his word alone get me admitted to Notre Dame. That made a big difference on the college I went to. I think that made a very big difference in a lot of my life up having selected at that university.
[01:03:53] INTERVIEWER: Could you please describe the popular music during the '60s?
[01:03:59] Steven Pepe: The \60s was a musical transition in the late '50s and the early '50s. Crooners like Frank Sinatra were a hit, and Perry Como and then in the late '50s, Elvis had hit the scenes. Elvis was just an extraordinary talent. Very well promoted. He did basically the rock and roll that many people said that it was a white guy that stole African-American music and made it popular to a white audience. Elvis was that person, and that was true. He also did Bible songs imbalance, which were more from his religious background and from the rock and roll genre that had been adapted from a lot of African-American musicians at the time. But the transition was, there was this group of four fellows from Britain, from Liverpool that came over and got on the television show, and T he Beatles just started wiping up a map on popularity and start eclipsing poor Elvis. That's when Elvis got into more and more ridiculous outfits. Bell bottoms, and sequence, and scarves, and everything of that sort to try and keep his brand going. But he could still fill stadiums. But the transition then was to the Beatles and they had enormous number of songs. I mean, obviously the one that they started off with, the first show, its element that they were on was, I Want to Hold Your Hand. Then that went on throughout most of my high school, the Beatles and those that were copying the Beatles were the the genre of choice through high school and even into college.
[01:06:06] INTERVIEWER: Did music have any particular dances associated with it?
[01:06:12] Steven Pepe: Yes. I remember when I was in eighth grade, there was this Mrs. Gates dancing school, and we all had to put on coats and ties and the women put on nice dresses, that was once a week. We learned to do waltzes, and we learned to do foxtrot, but we also learned to do the jitter bug as it was called. Obviously when we were at high school activities, while they occasionally played some slow music that you shouldn't be doing a foxtrot 2 that we probably just rocked back-and-forth, holding each other. Most of the music was faster and more jazzy, and the jitter bug, which eventually evolved in this standing twisting like that, not quite like to floss. It's now quite popular apparently. But it was very popular and a lot of energy, and was there enjoyable?
[01:07:15] INTERVIEWER: What were the popular clothing or hairstyles at this time?
[01:07:30] Steven Pepe: It was later in college and law school when hair started getting longer during the Vietnam War. In high school I would get a haircut every two or three weeks at Phil's barber shop down on 42nd Street in Boulevard. It costs two bucks back then. I must have gone to that place for 14 years. The hairstyles were what I would call conservative. The clothing didn't start getting odd until into the '60s when they started introducing bell-bottom pants and more psychedelic coloring in shirts and other clothing. In high school, it was straight, traditional slacks like you would see today like what Jim Harbaugh wears to every football game, those slacks. Colors were generally pretty bland. I remember in my freshman year, pink got in to be a big color. My mother bought me a pink suede jacket, which was a cat's meow. That's really what you'd want to have if you were going to be cool. I remember that after she got the coat and I was wearing it, that we went to a drive in and I got some French fries and accidentally I touched the coat and left marks on it with the grease from the French fries. I was devastated. This was the end of the world. I just got this gorgeous coat and I hadn't even gotten home before I ruined. Well halfway my mother knew that they have take a little cleaning fluid and she got the oil stains out by four o'clock that afternoon I was much relieved. That was probably my most avant-garde outerwear, was that pink suede coat that I probably wore for three years. The other coat I would have liked to worn in high school would had been leather jacket. In my eighth grade when I played football, I played football sixth grade through eighth grade. In my eighth grade, I got a hernia. Again, that was before we had insurance. I had to have a surgery on that and recuperate for a week and my father attributed that to my being injured having played football. He forbade me to play football in high school, which I so badly wanted to play and be able to get a leather jacket with the big C for cathedral. My pink jacket had to be a [LAUGHTER] substitute for that. Given what we now know about head injuries with football, maybe that was a wiser choice that my father made than I realized at the time when I thought that he was treating me very cruelly. I also played the piano in grade school, I think it was from fourth or fifth grade through eighth grade. I'm pleased to say I was pretty good. In my last two years, I often would be playing accompaniments for people that were playing trumpets are violins. In my eighth grade, I was the featured pianist of the eighth grade recital. I got to play two pieces, one of them being Chopin's polonaise military. Like I told you the last time about my dad playing polonaise, A minor when he came home to ridicule white mother after Terminal beat Dewey. I wanted to keep playing the piano, but in high school, the teacher Brother Eugene would only teach you piano lessons if you learned an instrument to be in his marching band, so I started taking the clarinet. I said, I don't want to be in the marching band. I want to be on the football field with a uniform playing. I told my parents that I wanted to quit music, and they said, well, we're sorry to hear that but they went along with it. I now still regret that they didn't say, why is it you want to quit music? Because they clearly would have found me another teacher that would have just solely taught me piano. That was one of my early foolish decisions based on vanity too, because it was a sense of self-esteem that I didn't want to be in the band. My older brother had been in the band and I was quite proud of him. He was a very good saxophone player and played with a great jazz group that used to play at a lot of the dances. For some reason that I foolishly made a decision to avoid music when I should have kept up that, I think I would have greatly appreciate it. I still have the piano that I bought when I was 13 years old with money from a paper route. That's a Baldwin acrosonic. I once went to the university of music school they have a sale of a year of small grand pianos and other pianos. They said they also took trade-ins. They asked me what do I have? I said I have a Baldwin acrosonic, and he says, we think that was the finest spin at piano ever made. It's only when we ever bought for a practice piano that wasn't a grand piano, and it is a great piano. Anyway, I digress.
[01:13:33] INTERVIEWER: Can you describe any other fads or styles you miss there?
[01:13:35] Steven Pepe: Of hula hoops got quite popular. I can't recall exactly whether that was in grade school or high school. I think it was in late grade school and continued on high school, which became quite a fad. I can almost say a fad I never mastered. [LAUGHTER] I don't know why I didn't, but I just couldn't get the timing down to keep it going. Other fads? Yes. There was a dance called the stroll, and this was a group dance. You would line up and you cross your legs and everyone would be doing all the same moves. It was a fad dance that groups did for a year or so, which is quite a manageable dance unlike the hula hoop.
[01:14:48] INTERVIEWER: Were there any slang terms or user words not in common use today?
[01:15:06] Steven Pepe: I remember gross, but gross is still in common use. Profanity I knew then it's towards government [LAUGHTER]. Martha, one television it ever was back in the '50s or '60s, that would be forbidden. Even the mildest of statements. I think right on it's still in fairly common use. Maybe not.
[01:15:51] INTERVIEWER: Did your family have any special sayings or expressions during this time?
[01:16:05] Steven Pepe: No. I hear reframe my mind coming obviously from my parents. To always do your best and if you do your best, you don't have to worry about it ever failing and that was a comforting adage that I heard regularly. I must say a good principle to live by.
[01:16:36] INTERVIEWER: Were there any changes in your family life during your school years?
[01:16:41] Steven Pepe: Yes. The biggest change in our family life was when my Down syndrome brother was born. We at that point needed to move to a larger house. But I was 10 and my older brother was about 15 or 14.5 years, 4.5 years older than I was when Randy was born. I think by the time I was in grade school for at least four years, my mother had been working at the flower shop with my father on a very regular basis. That when Randy was born, he needed near constant attention. He would be hospitalized probably every three months with some infection or other problem that also involved my mother would always stay at the hospital with him for the two or three weeks and it would take for him to recover. I remember his first year. There were several times that the doctors told my mother to prepare that he was not going to make it. I think her ending devotion to him pulling through those situations. I remember there was a photograph. The earliest photograph I remember taking of Randy was taken at the hospital because they thought that he was going to die and they went has some pictures. Looking at those pictures today, at that time, he had absolutely no visual symptoms that he had mongolism. Anyway, they became very apparent. But his early pictures, he looked just as normal as any little child. Happily. He pulled through all those. But that caused a great disruption that as my mother had to be home much more regularly, it caused some very extreme financial hardship. My parents never had to go on welfare, seek any assistance with the medical bills. But again, we did not have insurance until I was 17. That was my senior year in high school right before the accident, so we got that insurance. There was like seven years of heavy financial situations when my mother couldn't continue to work, which means my father had to hire another employee, which meant that there'll be less income available to the family. Secondly, it was very worrisome situation with Randy because he was very very fragile. He had a congenital heart that meant there was a hole between the two ventricles and that therefore the heart work very inefficiently because the oxygenated blood would get mixed with unoxygenated blood to flow through the hole in the heart so that the heart had to work doubly hard to make up for this flow. He later had a heart about the size of a football in his chest. At the time that this was first discovered when he was young. Open heart surgery of that surplus just beginning. Later, it became so commonplace that he should have had it even when he was in his teens and it would have helped him. But again, the doctor didn't recommend it. I think that decision was heavily influenced by a bias against Down syndrome people being high risk to be operated on. But I regret that they didn't do that surgery. Anyway, that was the major change in our life situation and had a profound effect on me because it really readable my appreciation of how lucky I was and how unfortunate many other people are through no fault of their own and that made me, I think a lot more empathic to less well-off people.
[01:21:14] INTERVIEWER: Sir I have a question. Did your brother ever faced any discrimination at school or in public from people?
[01:21:25] Steven Pepe: The people in our parish treated him with just love and affection. He as I said, they didn't have any public education for him at the time. But that was an institutional discrimination against handicapped people. It was not individually directed at Randy. Then when he got in his special education program and then later a workshop, those are all programs geared to him. He was never institutionalized so that he wasn't exposed to other people. It might have been discriminatory. I think that he did not face discrimination. [LAUGHTER] Preferred Disneyland and my mother, she must have been in her '70s. Randy was 30, 35, but he needed a wheelchair to get around. If you have a wheelchair Disneyland, you get to go right to the front of the line. They they treat you like royalty. I shouldn't advise you, but that's the way you go get some wheelchair and you won't have to wait in line, and escorted by one of the park employees. We were being put in a line in this one [LAUGHTER]. Got up here [inaudible 01:22:46] [LAUGHTER] that says I'm retired. He noticed that was a screw thing lay off. But happily, no, he did not face discrimination as I say, my mother treated him like a king. As a result, he had just a wonderful sense of self-esteem and a wonderfully cheerful disposition. I remember in his funeral.
[01:23:25] Steven Pepe: Giving one of the eulogies. Mom and dad had three kids, and only one of them was normal. We're burring him today. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, he had a really wonderful life. Just a wonderful life. Basically because of my mother who was a saint, she just devoted her life to him. As he said, he was never institutionalized. He always was cared for at home.
[01:23:53] INTERVIEWER: Question 2.
[01:23:55] Steven Pepe: Yes.
[01:23:56] INTERVIEWER: Was it hard for you and your older brother because your younger brother was receiving so much attention from your mom?
[01:24:03] Steven Pepe: I can't speak for my older brother, because as he said, he was 14.5 and that's when adolescent, you're separating from family, what you see. You don't want too much parental attention. I never noticed it. I think in large measure, the covert message is that Randy has special needs. He is a focus for love and affection in the family that treating him with love and affection got rewarded by the parents so much, that if anything, his presence, instead of having me feel neglected in any way, have me feel more included in a team project. That was wonderful because you can say I'm choking up even thinking about it.
[01:25:00] INTERVIEWER: What holidays did your family celebrate? How are holidays traditionally celebrated in your family and how should family create its own traditions and celebration?
[01:25:09] Steven Pepe: We celebrated all of the traditional Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. Obviously, we celebrated Thanksgiving, which is a secular holiday. Fourth of July, we would always get sparklers and celebrate that. The celebrations always revolved around a big family dinner. We had an aunt and uncle that moved to Plainfield, Indiana, which is about 20 miles from Indianapolis. So we often celebrated either our house or at their house for various holiday dinners. They had a daughter that was my age, and another daughter that was two years younger than us so that there was a peer association with that close relatives. The other relatives all lived in Fort Wayne. Occasionally, we would go up to a Thanksgiving dinner or a Christmas dinner at Fort Wayne. But usually Christmas and Easter, we would celebrate at home because again, with the flower shop being a very busy time at holidays. That it was really difficult to plan an out-of-town trip off even though it was only two-and-a-half-hour drive to Fort Wayne. My parents usually exhausted. It was easier to have the short trip to Plainfield or have the meals at our house. The only special thing that I can recall that our family did was this midnight mass that they had on Christmas eve at the Albert Retreat house, where my brother and I would be altar boys and serve with the Franciscan priest that would celebrate the mass. That was an annual tradition for at least a dozen years, as I can remember it. Other than that, I can't think of anything special that we did. Probably was a pretty average.
[01:27:31] INTERVIEWER: What special food traditions that your family have of any recipes and preserved and passed down in your family from generation to generation? Are there family stories connected to the preparation of special foods?
[01:27:45] Steven Pepe: I can't really recall. A very common food was simply fried chicken. I don't know if there's any family recipes on that. But until we gained conscious of the problems of fried food, particularly in fats that were not healthy for you that where we threw care to the wind and would have chicken fried in lard, which was just the leftover bacon fat that would be kept in a jar on the stove. That would then be used to cook in a skillet, fried chicken and other things. There was a neighbor of ours on 46 Street. This is before Randy was born. Frank Georgiana and Frank was from a big Italian family and loved to do a big spaghetti and meatballs that he would spend most of the day cooking either their house. There's one time I recall it came over and did the whole event at our house. Frank Georgiana, he was a big shot at Allison Division of General Motors and in World War II, and during the Korean War, when getting supplies was difficult, Allison Division of General Motors, I think they made tanks during the '50s as well as during the Second World War. With Frank Georgiana was able to get supplies. That's why he eventually became a vice president at Allison Division. But it was reputed that he did so because he had connections with the mob and the Georgiana being a very big Italian. [LAUGHTER] I always regretted not having a chance to have a discussion with Frank Georgiana about a such rumored connections he may have had. The mob in Indianapolis was not a big enterprise by any means, but it did exist. I think it ran numbers rackets and gambling houses and probably sold bootleg alcohol. I don't think it was into drugs. But there was one customer that my dad had whose name was Toughy Mitchell. Toughy was undisputed mobster. He always paid cash. He always came in and he wanted the biggest flower. If there was a funeral, he always wanted the biggest flower piece that was set other than maybe what the family was doing. He always put $50 bill down on the counter. He said, "Bill, I want this to be special." Back then $50 would be about the equivalent $500 or maybe even more. Now, it was a big flower arrangement that he would get. Toughy Mitchell was always very pleasant and gentle and little overweight and could have been well typecast in a movie that's a member of the mob.
[01:31:20] INTERVIEWER: When thinking back on your school years, what important social or historical events were taking place at that time and how did they personally affect you and your family?
[01:31:35] Steven Pepe: Well, in my early childhood, again, the first political memory was the time that Truman beat Dewey and my father came home after celebrating all night and embarrassed by mother by asking her to dance and celebration. But in '52, the next presidential election, Dwight Eisenhower was running and he was a military hero. I was named after another military hero, Douglas MacArthur. My middle name is Douglas. Having been born in '43 during World War II, and at that time, Douglas MacArthur and Eisenhower, where the two stellar American generals, Eisenhower in Europe and McArthur in the Far East. But Eisenhower by this time was Mr. Clean. He was an idol of everyone. Mcarthur sort of faded. After he came back to United States, I think he was thinking of running for president in '52, but Eisenhower was capturing all the glory because he was, I think a little less bitter, a little less as autocratic and used to work for McArthur and someone said yes, "What was it like those three-and-a-half years you were underling to McArthur" and Eisenhower respondent, "Those were three of the best years of acting training I was ever given, because our McArthur was a huge ego." Anyway, Eisenhower is a big fan. Both my parents, even though my dad was a Democrat, was a big Eisenhower fan, he voted for him both in '52 and '56. I remember my brother reached out for ties to school every day and I think this was in '56. But anyway, in the back of his tie he had Stevenson button, for Adlai Stevenson. He didn't want my dad to know that he was supporting another one, another party. Obviously, when Kennedy got in the election against Nixon in 1960, that was a very big deal to the whole Catholic community. The first time that any Catholic was trying to win a national audience, a national election of the highest office. He was bigger than Elvis, I guess you would say.
[01:34:10] Steven Pepe: I'm sure I think I've lost the focus and some of the other parts of your question other than some of the figures that were big in my childhood.
[01:34:20] INTERVIEWER: What historical events were taking place at the time and how did they personally affect you and your family?
[01:34:32] Steven Pepe: The Korean War, I remember and MacArthur came out of retirement to lead the allied troops in the Korean War. The North Koreans had gotten very far South of 38th parallel and MacArthur had a brilliant idea of what was called the Inchon invasion. If you go into the Northen Korea and have a naval invasion from sea behind the lines, everyone thought this was a crazy idea. It was dependent on all sorts of conditions having to be favorable, including weather and timing that turn out to be a brilliant success. At that time, we thought the war would be over shortly because the Koreans quickly went back and they were on their heels. But sadly they counter attacked and there were times when the American troops were driven to the Southern end of the peninsula. I remember very distinctly seeing on television some of the eclipse of the attacks and signs of the war and there was a fear that for the first time ever that the United States might be defeated. Truman relieved MacArthur of the command and gave it to a Matthew Ridgway who was a great tactician and a morale booster. With that, we were able to have a great counter attack and eventually fight our way back to the 38th parallel which eventually then led to the armistice which still exists to this day there's never been a peace treaty because this would be younger. I remember my brother and I are having uniforms as kids. I had an army tans uniform with and my brother had a Navy uniform with those bibs and cross tie that you see in the pictures. Obviously in the Korean War we were a little bit older and beyond that. Obviously the Vietnam War was a big event in my older years. Since '60 about the time of this accident to be at the Vietnam War gearing up because I graduated in '61 and this accident was Halloween of 1960. That was the year Kennedy got elected. Kennedy was killed three-and-a-half years later, and at that time I think we had 12,000 military advisors in Vietnam at the time of Kennedy's death. I think three years later under President Johnson, we had 540,000 Americans fighting in Vietnam. I must say this is one of the indirect blessings of my having been in that horrible automobile accident because of that I was classified what was called 1Y. 1Y would be called up for active duty only if most able-bodied soldiers had already been killed. It was very low at the pecking order, so I did not get drafted. I was not saddened by that, I felt patriotic, but by the time that this thing became an issue because they get during college and into law school, I kept getting student deferments. But by that time the youth of America had so much turned against this war that cannot serve. I was not considered an embarrassment or something once you be ashamed of. In fact I knew some people even went to Canada to avoid the draft. They say injuries that I had incurred made me ineligible to go in any of the regular early layers of people that get drafted. That war was much more visible on television at that time. Television was covering things much more thoroughly than they did even in the Korean War. Korean War would once a week there will be a group of film clips that would come over, but the Vietnam War was on our television every night. The brutality of it and the ugliness of it was apparent, and then a number of Americans being killed was apparent. I must say at the time I did not have the empathy and understanding of how horrible it was for the Vietnamese that the Americans killed over a million Vietnamese. This war could have been settled in 1968. President Johnson had a peace agreement that was going to be worked out in Paris. Kissinger got wind of this because Kissinger was convincing with both the Johnson campaign and the Nixon campaign. I Had Humphrey won the election, I think Kissinger would have been his National Security Council just like he became for Nixon. [NOISE] Just once.
[01:40:57] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 01:40:57].
[01:40:59] Steven Pepe: Recent documents will come out that Nixon through a woman whose name I think was [inaudible 01:41:05] I think it was told president she was connected to President Diem in South Vietnam. He refused to go to Paris and basically destroyed the chances for peace agreement that would have been worked out. Had that happened Humphrey Poppy would have been elected. In retrospect, this looks like a treasonous act on the part of Nixon. When you add to it that Nixon although he said he was going to give us peace with dignity, he kept that war going another three-and-a-half years, killing another half a million Vietnamese and costing American more than 20,000 additional casualties. Through much of that war I was studying political science at Notre Dame. The horror of that war was very traumatic for my generation. I remember being in Washington, being involved in the big piece March. I was at time working for a judge in Washington. The horrors of that and the fact that the deal Nixon got was no better than the deal Johnson could have gotten in 1968 had Nixon not interfered with that peace deal. Johnson didn't want to let out that Nixon did this even though he knew it. Because he didn't want the world to know that the CIA had President Diem's phone [LAUGHTER] tapped and there are other sources and methods he didn't want to reveal that he would have had to reveal if he tried to attack Nixon with that.
[01:42:56] INTERVIEWER: This set of questions covers a relatively long period of your time from the time you completed your education, entered the labor force or started a family and when your spouse and you retired from work, so when possibly talking about a stretch of time spanning as much as four decades. I'd like you to tell me about your married life. First, tell me about your spouse. Where did you guys meet?
[01:43:24] Steven Pepe: I must say I'm married and remarried. My first spouse and I met when I was working in. No, I guess it was really when we were in law school. We owned a house on North Division right across this place called haul crazy gyms at the corner of division and South University. We were the nearest open house to the law school and lawyers club. We were a party location every weekend starting about four o'clock on Friday and ending about five o'clock on Sunday. She was among some of the crowd that we got to know there. I got to know her in law school, but then I graduated, went to Washington and spending a year clerking for a federal judge in Washington and then after that we started communicating long distance. She was still an Ann Arbor. She was working for the Institute for Gerontology. The weekend that I was at this training program [inaudible 01:44:37] college, I should say, in Western Massachusetts. On the weekend of Woodstock everybody in my group was going to Woodstock. It's a big antiwar counterculture celebration, but I didn't. I went back to Ann Arbor and saw Penny and we fell in love and we're married in Midland. We lived in Washington for about a year-and-a-half, and then I got a fellowship to London School of Economics. She also applied and got into London School of Economics get to get a master's degree in sociology.
[01:45:30] Steven Pepe: We were two years in London, we were then two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I was getting a master's degree in clinical law at Harvard. That's where we then moved, I got a teaching position at Michigan Law School, to direct their clinical law program. We moved back, and I said, "Well now it's time to talk about having children." She came from a family of eight children, a very large Catholic family that obviously didn't believe in birth control, or very effective birth control,. Excuse me for that, you can cut that out. [LAUGHTER] Anyway. I knew that she didn't want to have more than two children. She says, 'Okay, I'm willing to have children if you will commit yourself to equal child-rearing obligations.' Of course this was in about 1972, at the height of the burgeoning women's rights movement. I said that I'm fearful if I say yes to that, one of two things is going to happen. I am now an untenured professor at one of the most competitive law schools in the United States, one of the top five law schools. I fear one of two things is going to happen, either I will keep the promise to you and I will get denied tenure, and I will resent you and any children we have, or I will not keep the promise to you and you and the children will resent me for not having kept it. I said it sounds to me like [LAUGHTER] you're telling me we're not going to have any children. She says, "Well, maybe I am." Then I said, "I wish you had raised this when we were still in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because I had job offers from the Boston College Law School, and Boston University Law School. There I think I could have gotten tenure and still been much more of a father. Anyway, it turned out we did not have children. She worked very actively in social gerontology, given her interest in the problems of the elderly, one of the clinical programs I started when I was teaching at the law school was a clinical program on legal rights of the elderly. I also got very well-versed in that. We would often lecture on that at various programs that she would sponsor around the country. I guess you would say probably about after 18 years, but I didn't discover it until into our 22nd year of marriage, that she ran a program that did training programs on legal rights of the elderly all over the country, and they would go off and do these about probably once a month. That was back in the days when if you stay over a Saturday night, your airfare would be about 50 percent of what it would be if you came back on a Friday night. If you stayed over Friday and Saturday night, you could save a lot of money. She says that that's why they were always staying over, and she would come back on Sundays, even though the conferences started on Thursdays. Well, [LAUGHTER] we got a postcard one time, "Dear Penny and Jim, it was so nice to have you, hope you can stay with us again from a bed and breakfast in North Carolina." I said, "What is this all about?" [LAUGHTER] She said, "Oh, a bunch of us after the conference went down there and stayed." I bought it for about another year. But then when she was going to a conference that was supposed to be in Texas, she left me a number, and I checked it with the phone company, and it was a telephone number [LAUGHTER] in Miami, Florida, so I got suspicious then. I was on a board of directors, I had a key to her office. I went down in her office, but I went into the file offices that had travel vouchers, and I started looking at these travel vouchers. It turned out that there was a pattern that on Wednesday and Thursday nights, she would be in like 607, and Jim Butwin this other fellow on her staff, would be at 605, which are obviously neighboring rooms. Then on the weekend there will be one bill for a bed and breakfast that they both put it on their travel vouchers. It turned out that this had been going on for like three or four years. I confronted her with it and I told her that if we get in therapy and if she would discharge him from staff, because I couldn't trust her traveling with him anymore, that I would obviously stay married and forget about it. She said she would not have any further relations with him in a romantic nature, but that she was not going to discharge him. That's when I decided that this was an impossible situation. I would be just uncertain forever when every time she would travel with him, because they always went together. I filed divorce and about five years later I met a woman that was a surgical nurse, and we dated probably for about a year, year-and-a-half. I think I met her about three years after the divorce from it. Anyway, we eventually got married on a very romantic wedding, it was up on Mackinac Island. I don't know if you've seen somewhere in time that wonderful movie with the Grand Hotel. Well we were married on the front porch of the Grand Hotel, by a federal judge that I worked with. Then we had a carriage ride and a lovely reception at the hotel, for a small group of family members, including her son and daughter, both of whom were in the wedding. Both of whom I later married. Jann retired probably about three or four years before I did, and she got me interested in playing bridge again, a game that I used to play as a kid. I was in a bridge-playing family. My parents used to play with my aunt and uncle, the ones I said last time we lived in Plainfield. But anyway, I was the second child in a bridge playing family, so I was compelled to hold, as soon as I can hold 13 cards in my hand to come and learn bridge, I was about 6. My adolescent rebellion when I went to high school was to never play bridge again. Well anyway, Jann got me interested in bridge again. After she retired she got very active in bridge tournaments and became a life master in bridge. Because I didn't have any biological children, it turns out that her son who lives in Charlotte, but his wife went to the Michigan Law School, so they were living three years here in Ann Arbor. I got to know him fairly well, and he sort of became what I would like to have had had I had a son, a very bright, dedicated person, committed to liberal causes. His wife was the one that was in law school. He came back and finished a degree at Michigan, in economics. Her daughter, Jann so much wanted, having been divorced earlier, she wanted to do everything she could to get both her kids having college degrees. Chris finally got his in economics from the University of Michigan. Stephanie was less a student. She was at Eastern Michigan, and then she struggled there. Then she went to Washington Community College for a while. Then she transferred to Western Michigan, which has a reputation for being a big party school. I think that she got such a bad grade point average that they were not going to let her continue at Western, so she dropped out of college. I'm happy to say after she married and had two children of her own, that she went back to Eastern, and did get a degree in hospital management. Jann was finally elated that her two children had college degrees, both in the Ann Arbor community, and the son came up from Charlotte. It was a big celebration for Stephanie getting her degree. Anyway, Stephanie became a surrogate, was a stepdaughter. They had two children, London and Jack. Both of their biological grandfathers had passed away, so I became Grandpa Steve, to them. I inherited [LAUGHTER] two grandchildren, and attend their sporting events, and parties, and we have a vacation up at my condominium at Lake Michigan, every summer, which the kids called Grandpa Steve's vacation house. Through my second marriage got a family and got some kids. They say it's great to be a grandparent because you can have all of the benefits of enjoying the kids, but then you can go home [LAUGHTER] and they don't have to deal with the difficulties of raising them. Anyway, I don't know if that's enough detail.
[01:55:38] INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your working years.
[01:55:41] Steven Pepe: Can I go back to college, because I don't think [OVERLAPPING] did much in that, and the working years are long and extensive. I think I mentioned the last time that I was in that serious automobile accident. By the way, today is the 58th anniversary, 60.
[01:56:03] Steven Pepe: Today is the 58th anniversary of the morning I woke up after the Halloween accident. Plaster of Paris between my ankles and my neck with my right arm, everything broken. But anyway, I told you the story how the other woman that was involved in the accident and her dad was an all-American at Notre Dame and was able to get me admitted to Notre Dame, even though I didn't think I was going to be able to get in. I originally became a mathematics major and I was B plus as a math major, my older brother was getting a PhD in Mathematics, In Indiana at the time. After about two-and-a-half years, I said, I get stuck on an equation, and I try and try to solve it, and I can spend a week or two weeks trying to solve this equation and I've made no progress. Then after you go, the professor explains to the class how the equation was supposed to be solved, I said I could have read three or four books in that period of time had I been in a different field. I said, why am I only doing something that I'm B plus at? I said, it's clear you're only competing with your older brother, [LAUGHTER] and he'll always be a better mathematician than you, so I switched to political science after my first semester of my junior year. This was a day and age when it was expected that you would have [inaudible 01:57:39] four years of college into four years, instead of four years of college into six years as a lot of kids do today. In order to get enough political science credits, [inaudible 01:57:55] I had to take all of my electives and basically make those mathematic courses so that my real electives, I can get my political science courses so I could get sufficient to have a major in that, which I was able to do. But by using all my electives for basically those mathematic courses I had taken in the first two-and-a-half years, I feel I cheated myself out of a liberal education. Now in my retirement, I'm going back and reading history and philosophy and studying music, [inaudible 01:58:32] a lot of concerts and trying to get myself some of the liberal arts education. I'd say I cheated myself out in college. In college, one of the sturdiest events was, obviously in a Catholic college, was the assassination of John Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963. Obviously the school was devastated and all of the classes were changed, except for one, number theory class taught by a very demanding math professor who rigorously took a role to make sure you were there and would grade you down, but if you did not attend all classes. We went in to Dr. Carlefero's math class on the afternoon of the 22nd. He comes storming into the room and starts out saying, Kennedy killed Diem, what goes around, comes around, now let's turn to the Corales integral, and starts writing a math equation on the board. We were devastated. What a heartless thing to say. What he was referring to was that President Diem, who had been a friend of Archbishop Spelman, graduate of a Catholic university, an American, a very devout Catholic, he became president of Vietnam because of a lot of his clinical connections in the United States, and he was just terrible and he was corrupt. He treated the Buddhist horribly because he was a Catholic. He was just not a good person nor was his brother, so the Kennedy administration realized there's no way we're going to win this war with this guy in the office. The generals wanted to have a coup d'etat, and Kennedy resisted it very much, but finally, when he appointed Henry Cabot Lodge to be his ambassador to South Vietnam, Lodge says, we've got to let the generals do this, so they authorized that the generals could go ahead with their coup d'etat. Kennedy had no idea. What they thought was going to happen is that president Diem and his brother, and both of their wives, would be thrown out of office, flown into Paris, set up in a palatial home or apartment in downtown Paris with enough money to live, legaly for the rest of their life. That's what commonly happened in lots of coup d'etats. That didn't happen in this case and both of them were murdered that very afternoon. Apparently Kennedy was [inaudible 02:01:21] when he heard that news. He had no idea that they were going to kill Diem and his brother. Anyway, that was a memory that stood out as a sad memory of mine because I thought it was an indictment of this math department professor that could be so heartless. Yes.
[02:01:49] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 02:01:49] Sorry. [inaudible 02:01:49]
[02:02:01] Steven Pepe: Anyway, I think I earlier mentioned that we lived in a community that was mixed economically and the parish we had was mixed racially. The neighborhood I lived in in the '40s and '50s or in the '50s really, was not yet integrated. African-Americans had become population after about 42nd street, and we lived on 46th street, so there was a four block division. Happily that neighborhood is totally integrated now, but at the time it was horrible segregation in housing. Largely the responsibility, I think, of the real estate community and obviously the racial attitudes of whites. But anyway, our parish, because it encompassed all the way down to 38th street.
[02:03:07] Steven Pepe: Our parish because it went all the way down to 38 street was integrated. When I was in college, I thought that instead of having just summer jobs and maybe going to summer school, that it would be nice to have an intercollegiate tutoring program for largely minority kids. It was open to anybody, but it was largely minority kids that we ran out of the parish school. That was a 10-week program, a very intensive tutoring on reading skills. But we also had in conjunction with that, at least once every one of the weeks, either a sporting event or a tour to the children's museum or to the archaeology museum or to an art museum. But one time we were going to in Annapolis zoo, this is a petting zoo, so you can go up and touch some of the animals. Anyway, [LAUGHTER] there is this cute little black kid and he had a pullover that looked like it was brand new. It had one of these bibs in the pocket, but the bid was up. When he went to pet this little coach, and [LAUGHTER] the coach just takes a bite out of that bib. Just like you've taken a scissors, cut a U-shape out of his bib on his pullover this kid have. I look down at this kid and his eyes just welled up in tears. He looked up at me and he says, "My dad is going to whip me when I get home for this." But anyway, I talked to his father. I offered to buy him a new pullover. He didn't get beaten. That was a distinct memory of a kid that was trying so hard to do things right and had some misfortunes befall him that he thought it was going to get him in trouble because he hadn't been more careful with his clothes and it wasn't his fault at all. It's really my fault. I should have known goats take bites. Anyway, the other thing in college after your first year they used to award rooms by your academic grade point. As a result, I could get good rooms. I became a popular roommate to have. Anyway, this other friend of mine that had been in that car accident, I talked about the one that had been driving and then foolishly that [inaudible 02:05:54] him drive. He was a classmate. He was a pre-med student. The last two years he and I roomed together, and that's what he was trying to decide what language to take. He was pre-med, and he says, I think I should take German because all the best medical literature is not in English, is written in German. I said Jim, there's a new course of study in language in Russia just starting this year. As a political science major, I said, I think that we're on the verge of a thaw with the Soviet Union. The Cold War into the '60s was very hot. I mean, particularly even over Vietnam, they were backing the North. Vietnamese and the Chinese. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other things, so their relations with Russia were still hot. But I said, I think we're on the verge of a thaw. I think that if you take Russian, you will have language skills and talents that a lot of graduate doctors won't have. I think that will open doors up for you. He decides to take Russian instead of German. I said, by the way, all the good German literature in medicine will be translated in English, I can assure you. My prediction came out pretty well for him. I'll give you a hiatus scenario on this because he and I are still close to as the friends. We communicated yesterday even. He went to Johns Hopkins Medical School. In their second year they have a semester off to go work in some medical program or some other just something that's called a clinical semester off. He wanted to go to Moscow State University. I always tease him MSU . [LAUGHTER] Anyway, he applied and they wouldn't let him in. He realized that it's probably because they are embarrassed to show American medical students the lower quality of their medical schools. Johns Hopkins is in Baltimore. Jim drove down to Washington DC, and he set up an appointment with Senator William J. Fulbright, who was the Democratic Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He's also the person after whom the Fulbright graduate fellowships are awarded and named. Jim goes down, talks to Fulbright and explains to this. Fulbright gets on the phone, and within even put Jim left the office. Fulbright through his connections in Russia got Jim admitted to MSU. Jim goes over that for this semester and incursion proves his language skills. He graduates. We're still in the middle of Vietnam war. Every doctor they graduated because they'd beginning student deferments for college and then for medical school. Every doctor would then be drafted, be given a rank of second lieutenant, and they'd be shipped to Vietnam behind the lines and hospital facilities. But Jim, because he had these language skills, and this thaw that I was saying was coming did come. Nixon Surgeon General was the guy with the name Ego Burger. Dr. Ego Burger wanted to have exchanges with Russia. He wanted somebody that spoke Russian. Jim was made an aid to the Surgeon General of the United States right out of medical school. He said Dr. Burgger, we can't have a second lieutenant working for a cabinet level officer, Sergeant General. We're going to have to start you off with the rank of Major. He started off as a rank of Major. Also we're going to send you to Johns Hopkins School of Foreign Relations to get some education on the political and historical background of Russia. Here Ego Burger made several trips to the Soviet Union. This was while I was in London with Penny. We met once in London. It was very funny. We weren't expecting him. We lived in Austin. All of a sudden we get a knock on the door, and it was Jim. Oh my God. He was flying back from Moscow, and he had a layover in London until the next day. He got in a cab and he didn't have enough money to pay the cab. He says, do you have five quid? That's five pounds, so I can pay the cabbie. He had taken the risk that he was going to find my home and help meet with money to pay his cab fare, which I did. Anyway, that was a surprise. He was able to delay his flight couple more days. Another time we met in Paris. This time it was one of his harebrained ideas. He says, we'll meet at seven o'clock at the eternal flame in front of the Arc de Triomphe with the big circle around. Well are crossing on the hovercraft from London recently. We got there about almost eight o'clock. I went up to the guard with my hesitant French and said, was there a fellow here from American here? He said, yes. He said he left about 15 minutes ago. Happily, we were staying at the same hotel. We asked the concierge, where would you recommend eating? We went to the first place. You'd be incremented five places. We went to the first place and they were there, so we met. But anyway, so Jim's now making very high ranking connections when he's with Ego Burger on these site visits to Russia. He then met Brezhnev, cardiologist, a guy by the name of Dr. Chazoff. When Jim finished his stint in the military, he went back to his residency and some other work at Harvard. There was a guy at Harvard named Bernard Lown in the School of Public Health, and he's the one who invented the defibrillator. Dr. Lown, Jim, and Dr. Chazoff, then another fellow who was a fundraiser, they said, the biggest health risk to the world today is a nuclear conflagration. There simply is no medical response to it. The hospitals we just overwhelmed, and if they are already destroyed. These four said we should form an international organization of Russian doctors, American doctors, and doctors from all over the world. They formed what was called the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. This caught on big time. I think in about three or four years they had like 60,000 doctors in 108 countries. Five years after they were formed, Dr. Chazoff, Dr. Lown, Dr. Miller, and a jump past story, the guy that was into fundraising, were all standing on the stage Oslo receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. About having a roommate that makes you feel it. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, it was his idea. He wrote the constitution for it, and it was one of the moving force behind it. Boy, my every glad he took Russian in college instead of German. Anyway Jim, technically the award of the Nobel Prize was given to the association. But the four founders were the ones that were able to be the recipients of it at Oslo. Jim he's now, we don't have an ambassador to North Korea. They don't have an ambassador, an envoy in United States. But they do have an envoy at the United Nations. So Jim now is in communication with their envoy at the United Nations. He's now trying to do a similar thing with North Korea to work on the prevention of nuclear war. Anyway, that was my story that started in college and has come up to the current moment with much more than you probably wanted to know. What other event in college?
[02:14:27] Steven Pepe: Once was a great football school. Father Hesburgh, when he started trying to improve the academic quality of it, downgraded football, and sports and as a result, became more mediocre. For the three years I was there, there was a coach named Joe Kuharich. He was never heard of because he didn't win enough games to warrant you hearing of him. But then our final year, we captured from Northwestern a coach by the name of Ara Parseghian, by the way, who was the first non-Catholic coach they ever hired at Notre Dame. He came and turned that team around, and after nine games, Notre Dame was 19-0. They were number 1 in the country, and they were going out to Southern Cal to play for a national championship. It was thanksgiving Saturday. That night I was an officer in the Indianapolis club of Notre Dame, Minneapolis club. But we had an intercollegiate ball every thanks giving on that Saturday at a big, fancy ballroom downtown. We were having this big intercollegiate ball, which should probably be 300, 400 people would attend. I had been on these hats, and it's a national championship what I am because I figured we're going to beat Southern cow, and we're going to be national champions because we didn't play ball games back then. We were going to have a big celebration at the ball. Well, Notre lost by I think three points, and there was two critical plays. One Notre Dame square root touched on a one-foot dive play. By the way, Duffy, dirty from Michigan State, called airports. You get a week before it says take your two amps. The five, I think the field, you could take two, and then the conference names, three from the local, and parsley, you can check with the athletic director. He says no; we always let the host team name all five of them. Dirty says take your two because they are worse than ever in what was then the pack eight. Well, they did. This one pack, a referee standing by the Southern Cal bench, calls a holding play on a one-foot diet play. First of all, he wouldn't pass a bit, and you'll see it holding. Secondly, you don't hold the foot die play. It's all over with in about a second. That backed up Notre Dame, and if you squared field a little bit, they would have had winning touchdown. Then there was another time when Notre Dame maybe lost my two points. But anyway, kicking a field called range, and they call it 15-yard penalty. A Notre Dame player who is sitting in South Bend watching the game on television because he'd broken his leg, that week. I'm being called a 15 yard penalty, and it moved Notre Dame out of fields. Well, anyway, before that's her with a magic marker crossing out these national championships [LAUGHTER] on 500 ads. The next day, John McCain, who was a coach at Southern Cal Caldera Parsec, and he says, I would like to hold a press conference with you. I was promised the Rose Bowl if I could beat Notre Dame. They gave it to Oregon this morning. I would like to hold a press conference saying if the pack coaches yesterday afternoon in Pasadena or in Southern California, in Los Angeles. Stolen national championship that should have been won by Notre Dame by outrageous or fish-eating. Partying calls back the athletic directors, he says no, we don't complain about our losses. Otherwise, teams have complained against us. Anyway, another painful for college memory of having to cross out 500 national championship statements on these hats. It was a nice dance, anyway. Anyway, I think that exhaust I'm not sure what I have to say about college. Did you graduate on time?
[02:18:23] INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your working years.
[02:18:27] Steven Pepe: My initial working years were teaching. I guess when I came at Law School, the first job I had was I was a what's called a law clerk to a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is the court the judge Kavanaugh was from. Also, Clarence Thomas was from that court. Also, Justice Ginsburg was from that court. So the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, many, say it's the second most important court in the United States. People in New York, and the Second Circuit said, no, it's not, New York is a second because all the financial business in that court, but whatever, I got a clerkship on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. In that year, a judge who was still on the court was named Warren Berger. The judge I worked for had gone to Columbia Law School. He was number one in his class, he did a joint degree. He was at our Chief Law Review. I graduated law school at 26. He graduated I think at 21, it was just a prodigy. He went to clerk for the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Harlan Stone, who was a Columbia Law School graduate. After he finished clerking on the Supreme Court, he went to the Solicitor General's office, which happens with many Supreme Court clerks. Stanley Reed was the Solicitor General at the time. An opening comes on the court. Roosevelt named Stanley read to the, and Supreme Court, should read as 11th all UCO clerk for me. You already been there once, and I would like to have somebody experienced. He goes back, and it clerks on the Supreme Court for a second justice. The war ends, and John Jackson gets Justice. John Jackson gets named to be ahead of the prosecution teams at the Nuremberg war trials in Germany. He asked 11th off, he'd go clerked for him, and write examination questions for your criminal trials. Basically, he had clerked for three Supreme Court justices, which must be probably unprecedented. Anyway, had Humphrey got elected in 1968, which he didn't. It was a year before ape foreigners because it was scandal. Taking $25,000 for speech he gave from a company that had a case pending before the Supreme Court. But anyway, he was forced to resign. There were no Jews on the court, so that the Jewish seat was open. The one that Brandeis was the first Jewish justice, so Leventhal was expected, if Humphrey had been elected, that he was goning to get that seat. He was one of the saddest people I had seen in the world on November 6th, or whatever it was, the day after the election, when it was clear that Nixon had won. Anyway, the clerkships to eat down at a restaurant down by the White House. On the time that the opening for justice was imminent, we'd see Warren Berger on our court walking out of the West Wing of the White House. I go back, I told Judge Leventhal, I said Judge Leventhal. I said we had saw Judge Burglar walking out of the West Wing. I said, I'm sure he's going to get name, Chief Justice. Burger said no, he says Erwin going to get it. He was referring to Erwin Griswold, the former dean at Harvard Law School and was then Solicitor General of the United States. He said Erwin was going to get, I'm sure Nixon, who just had him over there to let him down gently. The next morning I picked up the Washington Post, Warren Berger named Chief Justice by Nixon. Now I'm going to go ahead and show that Judge, I worked for, he's not so smart after all. I go walking in and he was on the phone talking to Anthony Lewis of the New York Times. You probably don't know the name Anthony Lewis, but he was probably one of the most eminent a political columnist on the New York Giants at the time. I was walking, and I heard him saying, this is an ansi. We knew alert was, in fact yesterday, my law clerk. I'm walking out of the way that you're lying [LAUGHTER] . Anyway, that was a fun clerkship . It was near the top of the judicial system.
[02:23:12] Steven Pepe: When we were at Judicial Conference for a reception for Erwin Griswold, Solicitor General, Leventhal was joking because my court clerk was going to go clerk on the Supreme Court the next year with Justice John Harlan and I'm just going to go into legal services work. Leventhal says to Solicitor General Griswold, he says, "General Griswold, I want to show you what a Renaissance man I am. I have two law clerks. One of them is going to the top of the legal profession next year, and the other is going to the bottom." My court clerk, without missing a beat, says, "Yes, General Griswold, we dare not ask the judge, which is which which is very cute, since it was clear he was referring to me going to the bottom. Anyway, after my clerkship, I got what was called a rational Hebrew Smith fellowship. It was a program run by the Legal Services Corporation in which they recruited the law graduates that the best law firms in the country would be looking for, people went to major law schools, were a law review, had distinguished federal clerkships. Anyway, I got one of these retinal, he was dismissed and what they do is they give you to a program with all the salary paid so the program only has to provide secretarial and office support for you. I took a position in Washington DC. I was Anacostia across a river and started out doing legal services, we're doing work in housing law, which was disastrous at the time. There had been a major Southeastern Washington urban renewal project, and it was by the African-American community in the Washington area. Disparagingly referred to as the, they weren't shy and saying it but the N-word removal project of Southeastern Michigan, because it took a very large area of housing for African-Americans toward all down and built high-rise, very expensive condominiums for mostly Caucasians. Many of these people then had to relocate. Then they had me relocated across the river, Anacostia, where I work. There was really a housing crisis in Anacostia at the time because of its massive influx of low-income people. Happily back then, while Nixon had been elected, he had not yet taken a butcher knife to the Legal Services Program as he later did. We didn't have restrictions on what we could do as lawyers. The only restriction it has we could not do felony cases because there were public defenders offices that did felony cases. We could do misdemeanor cases, we could do Juvenile law cases, and we could do the whole panoply of a state and federal litigation. We gave what I would call full-service lawyering to our clients, which is a kind of lawyering that the wealthy get. That is that if we have a problem that needs a court solution, we work in court. If the court solution doesn't work, we then will work with the legislature. In that program, as I say specialized in housing law, there was a group called the National Tenants Right Organization that was forming to represent mostly public housing tenants, but also private tenants in private rental housing. Their headquarters was in Washington DC and they needed a lawyer. I became basically their general counsel. I wrote their articles of the corporation, which is funny because when I was at Michigan, I took all these Britain better law school courses thinking that I was going to go into the biggest artful, far-flung wag law firm that I could get a job in. Anyway, I didn't have a lot of corporate law. I was their general counsel, and I remember that these board meetings, they were just a stitch. If you had queuing back-and-forth and I would at times be the only Caucasian in the room, or at least one of very minority. Finally, they come to a resolution. I see that as you get that [inaudible 02:28:00] write it up a lawyer like, so I was supposed to distill this dialogue and argument into minutes for their bylaws or for the minutes of the meeting. Anyway, that was a lot of fun. There was one time when we were having a protest and we were going to March on HUD, Housing and Urban Development building. We're going to go down constitutional avenue then go over to HUD and have a protest. I went along thinking the case there be any arrest that they need to have a lawyer. There were two leaders that we're not in Washington. What was Ron Scott, and he was a Marxist from New York head of a big tenants right group in New York. The other was a woman whose name I think at least Jordan or something like that. But anyway, she was from St. Louis and she was just the opposite, and when she was a very middle-class type of woman though she was poor and live in public housing. Anyway, they were at the front. Because I was back about four or five rows, I noticed they walked right by the street that HUD was on. I said, Oh my God, they missed it. I go right into the Gulf to Rise and Brian, you were supposed to turn right back there at the street. That's it. That's the street Hudson. He says, "don't say a thing, don't let on." He says we're going to go up, we're going to take another route and we're going to take another route there, and we're going to take another route and we're going to come around from the other side and we're going to get them from that side. We went for three bucks extra to get to HUD. Anyway, a lot of them got into the building before they decided to close the building down. I still had my federal court paths from when I was clerking year before. I flashed that and they didn't look at the expiration date, so they let me in because I was afraid there would be some arrest. I go up to the eighth floor of the Housing and Urban Development, huge building, and at the time, George Romney, the former governor of Michigan and the father of the Romney from Utah that ran for president a couple of years ago is now running for Senate. He was the Housing and Urban Development. His office had two doors, two entrances, one on one side but one on the other side about 20, 30 feet away. Well, it turns out he was not in his office, but the crowd didn't know that. Mr. Jordan was standing on a chair in front of one interests and Ron Scott was standing on a chair at the other, and Scott was in this Marxist poor people diatribe against the powerful elite bourgeois class. Ms. Jordan was there. She says Rumsey you come out of there, Rumsey. She kept calling him Rumsey instead of Romney. [LAUGHTER] Then she said, we're staying until you come out. Then she started pulling out of this bag, she has her nightgown saying we're staying all night necessary. Finally, somehow someone opened the door from the inside, so they rushed the door and a bunch of the women got it on her side, not on the Ron Scott side. Then they go up through his desk and they're playing things in it and they're yelling and they're pulling out women's underwear, and pills and they said, you wouldn't believe. You tell the press to come in here right now. You wouldn't believe what Rumsey has in his desk. [LAUGHTER] Trying to embarrass him as they say. Romney was up at the White House the whole time and nobody got arrested. We had a lot of fun. Anyway, later that week, we were going to lobby for two bills and they just say we can give full-service work to our clients at that time. As general counsel for the National Tenants Right Organization. I went with them to the conference room with them, Banking and Currency Committee of the Senate, and there were two bills that we were trying to get past. When was the Brooke Amendment named after Ed Brooke, the African-American senator from Massachusetts and the other one, the Brooke Amendment, what was the other amendments? The Brooke Amendment was going to give money to renovate public housing nationwide, usually with the whole Housing Act then. They would give you money to build the original building. But then the local city would run it, maintain it, and pay for all repairs and reconstruction. That didn't work because buildings are getting run down, were getting adequately maintained. The Sparkman Amendment, that was the other amendment. The Brooke Amendment was to give money to renovate public housing projects. The Sparkman Amendment was to give money to guarantee that no poor person would pay more than 25% of their income from whatever source for housing. If their rent was more than that, in public housing was Sparkman Amendment, would subsidize it additional amount of money. These were two very important bills that we were lobbying to get passed. Ron Scott was there and the local tenants right was a guy by the name of Tony Abbott and he was a large return, nicest guy, mellow guy in the world. He was also African-American. He was invited to come in to talk to the inner chambers while we were sitting in a conference room. Tony goes walking in and Ron Scott sitting there angry that he didn't get called. As Tony's opening the doors so the people inside the room can hear him, Ron Scott stands up and he yells Tony, you tell them, they don't give you what you want, the mean niggers coming in next. That was going to be Ron. [LAUGHTER]
[02:33:57] Steven Pepe: Anyway, happily, we got what we want. I don't think Ron Scott had to go in that those two bills passed in the Legal Services Program. I also worked with the city council in getting a housing bill passed that improved housing quality. We represent a lot of groups on tenants rights activities. I defended a lot of people in landlord-tenant cases. There was one case I remember where a woman was being evicted. There was a thing called sewer services. Instead of giving the summons and complaint to the person who lived in the house. Oftentimes these people that worked for these mega landlords were just throw them in the sewer or throw them out. It's called sewer services, so that the tenant never gotten notice that they've even been sued for lack of paying rent. This woman is being set out. She said she'd not gotten noticed, which is common. I went over there. I'm just going to try to call District of Columbia state district level judge, if you get them to issue a restraining order to stop the eviction that was going on because as I'm sitting on the bedroom talking on the phone. All of a sudden, I feel the bed being lifted and the evictors were taking the bed I was sitting out to a victory and I stood up and finish my call. I did get the judge happily to stop the eviction, but they stopped and they left half of her belongings out on the street instead of taking them back in. That was the way people on the least well off in the District of Columbia and across this country were treated. During that year or two years I was there I think I had 10 trials, eight of them were jury trials. If I compare my experiences in those first two years of legal services to the experiences of any of my law school classrooms who went to large law firms, my bet is I got a much more diverse, complicated, and interesting and exciting legal experiences in those two years. We had a falafel in our program but due to some problems with the new director that got hired, who sadly any symmetric. The first day I went after he returned. Roger Wolf, who was the director of my office, was Jewish. He'd been transferred, instead of being a director of an office, transferred across town to become a staff attorney at another Legal Services Program in the Washington area, and that happened to every Jewish lawyer that had a prominent position in the program. We protested this and demanded this new director to be fired. The board of directors refused to do that. I think there were 15 of us, resigned in protest over this terribly antisemantic treatment that wasn't being addressed by the board of directors. One of the persons that had been the head of the juvenile division that taught me all I knew about juvenile law was Pat Wald, who later became a United States judge on that District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeal so she really went high in her legal career and was very outstanding. Anyway, I was unemployed. When I was at Michigan, there was a fellowship that I had been offered, but I obviously wanted to take the clerkship so I turned it down. When a woman called me. She said, this is the last year Michigan Law School is offering his Ford Foundation Fellowships for foreign studies. Would you like to apply for it? I said yes I'd like to apply for one. Just tell you low-income housing in England because they have a very sophisticated public housing program. It get mixed economic class. Public housing in England will have members of parliament living in it. I wanted to go over and say that so I applied and I got the Fort Fellowship. I also was runner up on the Fulbright Fellowship. I got to Fort Fellowship. I went to London, I think as I said earlier, I was registered for what was called the MPhil degree, master philosophy, called MPhil, and program I could do in two years. Hudd was going to finance my second year at Housing and Urban Development Fellowship for them after the Ford Foundation ran out. But when I got to England, I realized that the MPhil degree, the Master of Philosophy degree, was the degree that the British universities created to give out to students from their commonwealth countries, India, Pakistan, South Africa that they didn't think were smart enough to get a PhD so they created this MPhil degree so I said, well, United States is no longer a colony of the Great Britain, but I don't particularly want what are their second rate degrees. I switched out of the MPhil degrees and applied for a PhD program. I finished two years and all my coursework for the PhD and all I has to do is write my dissertation. Nixon at that time, because our balance of payments internationally had gone $200 million. It's a million with an M not B with a B, $200 million in the deficit. He canceled all foreign discretionary spending so my scholarship for my third year was canceled. What they called all but dissertation ABD from the University of London because they canceled my dissertation. That's what I decided I want to go into clinical legal education, which was the next phase of my job, which we can talk about maybe next time. But I was able to get transferred to Harvard and much of my research and low-income housing, I used to write my master thesis at Harvard. Anyway, it's 11:30, should we call it quits?
[02:40:34] INTERVIEWER: We could it for five more minutes.
[02:40:43] Steven Pepe: I can't recall whether I think this is an introductory lecture or their lunch. One thing I learned about legal education when I first started practicing. On the federal court everything I had learned in law school was perfect. Legal reading, legal research, legal analysis, legal argument, legal writing. That's what you do as a federal law clerk to a federal judge. Next year I was practicing law and I hadn't learned a number of things in law school that were essential to being effective lawyer. These were skills of interviewing is about finding out the facts. Counseling clients giving them advice, both legal advice and sometimes interpersonal advice and emotional advice. Discovery how to write questions and interrogate facts through the written process and not just your personal interviews, negotiations, all of these critical skills that I had not learned in law school. I said, why don't law school teach these? Well, two reasons. The major law schools turn out, what I call memo writers for the big law firms. The big law firms have the staff and the money to train their new lawyers in all these other skills of interviewing, counseling, negotiations, trial advocacy, jury selection, deposition taking. What I realized, if you're going through an elite law firm you're going to get trained by very good people in all these skills. But what about the lawyers that come out that are going to represent the other part of the country. They can't afford elite law firm lawyers. They are going to get those training. The law school should be doing it. The law school two reasons they didn't do it is one. Christopher Columbus created this law school methodology called the case method, which you'd have large classes asking questions, and a great student-teacher ratio. Like 50-1, 30-1, 40-1, 40 in the class to one professor. Clinical legal education has to be done in a much smaller group, 5-10-1 so it's much more expensive. Secondly, the elite law schools said, our major customers are the elite law firms. They want us to turn out memo writers that know legal analysis, legal writing skills, legal research skills. That's what they will use them as memo writers in the first several years and they will do the training. It was cheaper for law schools and also their major consumers, the big firms, were quite happy with the way law school was taught. I said, law school needs to change, has to become more like medical school, has to have clinical components to teach all these other skills so that the lawyers turned out to represent poor people or middle-class people, will have at least a beginning of learning how to learn these skills with the same academic and intellectual standards that they learn legal analysis, legal research, and legal writing. I wanted to go into clinical legal education. The best clinical legal education program at that time was a Harvard Law School. Harvard had hired a guy by the name of Gary Bellow, and Gary Bellow was Cesar Chavez's attorney and the farm workers attorney in Southern California. He was the lawyer that I think made Ronald Reagan hate Legal Services. Absolutely abhorrent because legal services represented poor people and farm workers against Ronald Reagan's big landowners and farm owners in Southern California who supported him so I think this is a good point to stop and we will take up clinically education in our next chapter of my working career.
[02:44:58] INTERVIEWER: Jamie has some vital questions to ask you about certain topics. My first question is, what kind of work do you think still needs to be done in terms of racially quality? [NOISE]
[02:45:13] Steven Pepe: I just read a book put out by the Cato Institute and they were talking about economic recompense. They estimated that the harm to African Americans during the slavery period was about one-and-a-half trillion dollars. Given all the discrimination that occurred in 100 years after the 13th Amendment that freed the slaves, was until the '60's under Johnson that they started passing some Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. It had teeth in them. In 100 year period, there was still extraordinary discrimination, economic and educational against African Americans. This book done by a very conservative think tank, the Cato Institute figures that even now, the disadvantages that African Americans have for admission to elite schools and for job opportunities given the fact that overall there's been a still a lot of deficiencies in economic income that makes a big difference in where you can go to school and what school you go to. Discrimination in housing it's still carried over because the schools often in African-American communities are not as good as in mixed race communities. They figured there's another one-and-a-half trillion dollars in economic deprivations that the African-American community is experiencing today in our economics. That's like $3 trillion in recompense. Now obviously this is not going to happen given the fact that there still is a United States Senate couldn't really happen in the House. But I see Kamala Harris is advocating for compensation. Secondly, we have to re-enact the Voting Rights Act. That decision in the Shelby County decision by the Supreme Court was outrage. Congress just a couple of years before, had done elaborate hearings. Looking at the need for continuing a number of southern states to still get pre-clearance before they could change their voting rules. Even though the Congress had recently done investigations much more thoroughly than the Supreme Court did, and had done it so recently to the Supreme Court decision, it was unprecedented for the Supreme Court to reject the Congressional findings and to overturn the critical portions on the pre-clearance of that act that, has to be reinstated immediately. I think that in addition to financial recompense that isn't going to happen, there needs to be more and more efforts to make sure that African Americans have an equal right. I think affirmative action, even though it sorted on its deathbed, was a critically important procedure and I think that it is still needed. In the employment market that is needed. Now the problem is there's always a lot of resentment when there's any preferential activity and the Supreme Court Justice Roberts say the way to end discrimination based on race, is to stop discriminating based on race. He's talking about special admissions policies in special advantages otherwise for African-Americans. But the playing field simply isn't level. There's no question there's a large cohort of economically deprived Caucasians that also had the same face, the same difficulties as the African-Americans do. But there is also a much larger cohort of Caucasians that, and also Asians that have not faced those handicaps. I just saw a chart in a debited Leonhard New York Times article and it charted the cost of living per capita income and went about like this. Then they charted those people that were in the two percent to the 10 percent and so there were the nearly the top 10 percent except for the one top one percent. Their growth in income paralleled that per capita income in cost of living. As a nation got better off economically, they got equally better off. They then looked at the top one percent, much better off since 1980 to now, with the gap getting bigger and bigger. They then looked at the top one-tenth of one percent, much bigger gap from the line of the per capita. They then looked at the percentile between the 10 percent down to 50 percent, that is the second 40 percent, much lower. They then looked at the bottom, 50 percent much lower, so the economic bottom, 90 percent in the last 35 years, have gotten progressively worse off. Obviously, I think there's a disproportionate number of African-Americans. There are more Caucasians in those lower 90 percent, but you're also not doing this well economically. Those issues have to be addressed in a democracy. The opening statement of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution talk about the purpose of a government is for the general welfare and that means the general welfare for all citizens.
[02:50:46] INTERVIEWER: In terms of disability rights and special education, what do you think still needs to be done and how much has changed or improved since you and your brother were young and in school?
[02:50:58] Steven Pepe: It's been like night and day. As I said, when Randy was in grade school age and even preschool, kindergarten age, there was no public education for him. It wasn't until finally the archdiocese to start a special school for people with down syndrome. But now there has been a great amount of effort to improve the educational opportunities and job opportunities, the sports opportunities. Michigan always has this wonderful special Olympics that I'm always happy to be a proud sponsor of, and where kids can compete against other kids with equal disabilities. There's been an enormous progress on that. I'm still on uncertainty curve as to whether the mainstreaming arguments are going to take it to the extreme, are helpful or unhelpful. In putting a person with intellectual difficulties in a class with students far average or above it seems to me is going to make that individual with intellectual disabilities feel not as good. Again, I'm just not certain which system is preferable. But the fact that they're even doing that is just extraordinary given the attitude towards people with down syndrome when I was young and other handicaps.
[02:52:33] INTERVIEWER: What is your most fond memory of your brother? [LAUGHTER]
[02:52:40] Steven Pepe: There are so many. The time we took him to Disney World in Orlando was one of our finest memories. My mother, I think was about nearly 80 at the time and Randy because he had a little difficulty walking so slow, was able to be in a wheelchair. When you're in a wheelchair at Disney land or Disney World, they take you right to the front of the line every time talking about discrimination in favor of being disabled. But anyway, there were many memorable events that he was just elated with. The other memory I remember the time he came home with his first paycheck. I think it was like $4.80 from the sheltered workshop that he worked at. He was so proud that he too was an owner, [LAUGHTER] which is a wonderful memory. [LAUGHTER] Another one is him dancing it with my grandmother, who sadly, I wasn't there when this happened, but Randy and her dancing episode she fell and sprained or broke her wrist. But anyway, Randy loved to dance and loved music. He also loved two movies, and he wore out several copies of each, one of the Superman and the other was Over the Rainbow, which was unusual that he would like that one so well, but I guess they both were hopeful. That one for a superhero and the other is that everybody can look this current situation beyond the rainbow. That's why I like the Wizard of Oz.
[02:54:38] INTERVIEWER: Did you ever consider another career path besides before?
[02:54:42] Steven Pepe: Yes, when I was in college, I seriously considered going into the Foreign Service. There was a professor who was my counselor in Political Science Department at Notre Dame, Gerhard Jeremiah, who was a refugee from Germany. He said he had a son in Foreign Service and he said that you have to accept and implement at times policies that you strongly disagree with and that you have no option other to do it or resign. I chose law, obviously law sometimes your clients ask you to do things that you don't feel are morally appropriate, but you are legally obliged to either do it for them if it's legal, or withdraw from representing them. I think that comes up maybe less often. Had I gotten into Foreign Service, I would have had to abide the last four years of the Vietnam War, which were totally unwarranted since I think it's '68, Johnson could have had a peace agreement had candidate Nixon not interfered with it by telling through an intermediary President Diem not to go to Paris, which sabotaged peace deal and also got Nixon elected head of the Paris Agreement or Humphrey might've gotten elected. Those next four years with massive more killing 27,000 additional Americans died, and probably a one-and-a-half million Vietnamese North and South died, where situations that I would have been just going crazy have you implement that plan. I would have had the same feelings about the Iraq war. I think this advice that I got to go into Foreign Service was a prudent one.
[02:56:47] INTERVIEWER: Were you scared to ride or driving cars after your accident?
[02:56:51] Steven Pepe: I was cautious, insensitive, and I was very glad when seat belts came into fashion because when I was injured, it was a car without a seat belt and at least now airbags and the other thing, so for the first several years I was very cautious who I drove with when I was driving, but not to the point that it got to be an obsession of any sort.
[02:57:15] INTERVIEWER: Did your parents talk about race or other social issues a lot growing up?
[02:57:23] Steven Pepe: I know about a lot. They did talk about them. I think I told you the situation about my father had a woman of mixed race there, Mulatto Milo. When some woman said she wanted a white person to wait on her, my father told that customer that if Milo wasn't good enough to wait on her, then she was shopping at the wrong store and I would ask you to leave immediately [LAUGHTER]. There were things of that sort. We were in a racially integrated parish. As I said, the only time I went to a school that was totally segregated was the first public school I ever went to, which was the University of Michigan Law School. There was an African American in my class, there was an African American on the faculty, there was an African American the two years behind me and the two years ahead of me. All of the three years I was there, there was an African American at the Michigan Law School. All the other schools being Catholic Grade School, Catholic High School, and Catholic College, all were integrated.
[02:58:29] INTERVIEWER: How do you think that youth has changed in terms of caring about issues such as race, disability rights, politics, etc.?
[02:58:41] Steven Pepe: I don't know if I'm a good person to jury that given the fact I don't know how if I have enough experience. Given the fact that there is still progress being made in all fields, I assume that a large percentage of the youths are in favor of it. Though I must say that in the recent presidential campaign where the primary motive of the current president was to work on fear and anger and feelings of victimhood primarily for Caucasians, and looking at the people that were parading at Charlottesville, many of whom were very young, that it is clear to me that there is a very large cohort of young people that resent what they see as preferential treatment economically, educationally, and socially, for African Americans and Latinos. My bet is that the attitude of youths is as mixed as is the attitude of adults of commonly maybe reflecting the attitude of their parents.
[02:59:55] INTERVIEWER: How did the discrimination your friend and your brother received experienced youth.
[03:00:05] INTERVIEWER: Like how did the discrimination that girl who worked at the store and your brother receive impact to them, and does it give you a different outlook on things now?
[03:00:14] Steven Pepe: [LAUGHTER] It had enormous impact. That's why I think I chose a career I did, after clerking on the DC Circuit, I could have gotten a job with any major law firm in the United States and made probably 10 times what my lifetime earnings have been had I gone into private practice representing the most powerful, but instead I went into legal services, and when I went into clinical legal education for another dozen years, two years at Harvard then 10 years at Michigan Law School, I again was representing only poor people. As a judge, I had a particular sensitivity to pro se plaintiffs who were economically deprived and prisoner rights, and obviously, as you know, the prison population is disproportionately minority, so that they always got a very fair hearing, and I wrote some precedent-setting cases protecting prisoners from retaliation by the prison guards, that the Sixth Circuit adopted, expanding those rights enormously so that yes, seeing racial discrimination, and discrimination against the handicapped had a major impact on my career choices and my value system to this day.
[03:01:49] INTERVIEWER: What advice would you give to our generation?
[03:01:57] Steven Pepe: Take control of this vehicle is creating courts to disaster. I am so optimistic that it is the youth that is primarily leaning on the Democratic Party, but I hope it leans on the Republican Party also, to take on the major problems that this nation has gotten itself into in the last 35 years, starting with massive increases, disparities in economic income. The government no longer concerned about the general welfare of all citizens, but only about the welfare of the most wealthy and powerful that own the government and own both the Republican and Democratic Party. I'm hoping the youth will takeover the Democratic Party. I'm not sure that was the answer. I may repeat, a better judge, a little bit better. But I think we need a younger cohort speaking out. I'm so glad the public dialogue in this election in the Democratic Party anyway is over economic inequality, environmental degradation. That is a risk that is going to be just cataclysmic if we don't come to our senses soon and lead the world instead of recharging the efforts to protect this little planet we have that can annihilate most of life in a very short period of time. We're talking about the few hundred people at the needy people from the Guatemala and the central triangle countries coming into this country. Once countries lose 30, 40% of their shoreline become water, crops no longer can be planted and harvested. There is going to be hundreds of millions of environmental refugees invading neighboring countries that will make tapping in our southern border, look like child's play compared to the tsunami of warfare and environmental refugees that are going to be caused. Anyway, for the youth of the world, your kids, your adults, keep at it. It's essential. We messed it up, we made some progress, but we sure messed up big issues. Particularly letting the tax system and advantage is going to the wealthy way out of luck, so that now the top 1% own like 40% of the wealth in this country. Mine used to only own about 22% 30 years ago.
[03:05:04] INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that we haven't touched on? Or if you have any stories you want to share about your brother or your life just in general?
[03:05:15] Steven Pepe: I was asking Shirley when we were coming in, I don't know if I talked about Vito Giacolone and the evergreen Juice Company storage. [LAUGHTER] There was another flip on that just to show how powerful the mob could be during that period of time. I'd say finally you got Giacolone and Deday Lorraine, the ones that were extorting this $320,000 out of Albert Alan, saying that he hadn't paid off their ownership, that they had won at a poker table or Vitro Jacqueline's brother had won at a poker table. But they finally were prosecuted for tax evasion. There was another big case in Michigan where really, I guess it was prosecuted Washington DC. But a guy by the name of Foreman who grew up in Michigan and his mother lived here in Michigan, who's working in the Internal Revenue Service in Washington DC. Deday Lorraine and Giacolone knew that there was an investigation going on by the IRS because they're not paying taxes on this $320,000 and probably a good bit more from other sources. It turned out that Foreman's mother had also gotten involved in gambling debts and drug purchases. They leaned on her to get him to steal the special agents report out of the Internal Revenue Service. The way the government found out about this, is there was a copy of this in Vito Giacolone on his home. Or maybe it was detail around. But anyway, it had Vito Giacolone's fingerprints on it, and then they trace back who and how this could have happened and they traced it back to Foreman. But to me being a federal judge for many years. The concept that the mob, because lean on high-ranking government agents to get what they want by extorting vulnerable points was shocking and troubling to me. I think I did tell you the story also about Tony LaPiana. My brother being an actuary that came to Michigan. He was in Stanford, Connecticut where he worked. But to consult on, I think it was helpful answers or whatever it was in big health care system, that they had a lot of union members. At the presentation, Tony LaPiana was there representing the unions. He approached us afterwards. He says that as you are brilliant actuary. I see says with your intelligence and the actuarial sciences on health care and my access to the market through the union. We should form a joint partnership and we can make a lot of money. Dennis called me at dinner with him that night. He says, see what she could find out about Tony LaPiana [LAUGHTER] , he just offered me a partnership. The next day I called Greg state school with the FBI and I said, Greg, can you explain the situation about my brother being offered this partnership? A great first responses where your brother wear a wire, we've been trying to bring down Tony LaPiana ever since he moved here from Chicago and married one of my bosses daughters. He was enlightened to take over from Jack Toko and from some Google research, I think that he did become the final plan, but they could never lay a finger on him. He never got prosecuted. He was a generational change. When I was still on the court prosecution of a lot of the senior members of the mob, including Jack Toko, Vito Giacolone, Billy Giacolone's brother. This is called the geriatric mob case because these people all in their 70s or 75 years old. The crimes which they were committing were the old-fashion crimes: extortion, prostitution, gambling. The numbers racket.
[03:09:37] Steven Pepe: Tony labia, meet transitions, and there's not a lot proof of that. Because he was very skilled keeping it secret. But I think he made transitions into the Michigan mob, moving into businesses, unions, other illicit activities at mobs have control. I do think that the organized crime activities in Michigan are much reduced from what they may have been an earlier days before. It's a geriatric mob case, put those guys have operated without too much jail time for many decades. Anything else that may have been redundant?
[03:10:30] INTERVIEWER: Anything that you want to talk about, like else in your career or your childhood school anything?
[03:10:52] Steven Pepe: There's nothing that you've done an amazing job of covering much of my life. This is my life is frightening that you've done such a good job.
[03:11:06] INTERVIEWER: I know how little bit ago you mentioned how as a judge it was important for you. To give fare chance as far as the criminal justice system. Do you have anything you want to touch on the are from that?
[03:11:23] Steven Pepe: Well, I was enforcing many of the drug laws that were passed when Clinton was in office. There was a Bail Reform Act during that period of time. That at least librar is the way of granting bail. But the lunatic mandatory minimum sentences that were had most of our drug legislation. A law that was disproportionately I think, utilized against African-American, and particularly in the disparities between the sentencing protocols for crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Crack cocaine being a drug of choice in the African-American community more so the powder cocaine, which many more Caucasians utilized. But for the same cocaine drug in different forms. The sentencing guidelines were very much worse for crack, and then they're beginning to change those. These mandatory sentences and the Sentence Reform Act created a certain guidelines that require judges to sentence within those guidelines. Clearly cause many disproportionate number of lengthy sentences for the African-American community disproportionate to the white community. A Congress and the public is becoming aware of that. The extraordinary waste of lives and money and resources and the immorality of that. I think candidate Biden is going to have some flack thrown at him because he was in the Senate. One of the leaders on that reform because he was a Democrat and it was a Democratic president pushing for it. Those laws needs to be reversed. They have to give some serious consideration to either congressional act granting clemency to massive number of people that have been there for good for behavior in a certain a minimum amount of their sentence. That if they involve nonviolent drug offenses, that's got to be rectified. Because it's very disproportionate unfair of effect on African Americans. I must say I feel a little bit guilty because I was a part of the enforcement process during that era. Obviously, most convictions are by plea. Because at least in the federal system, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agencies. They almost always have impregnable cases with lots of corroborating evidence before they even go to a grand jury and get a grand jury indictment or bringing information against a defendant facing all that and then facing these draconian sentences. With a lot of statutory sentencing guideline benefits for a person that pleads guilty and accepts responsibility. That I think only 4 to 5% of the defendants ever go to trial. The overwhelming number of plea to those crimes. But anyway, that is an area where I think that our legal system, state and federal, went off the tracks a bit overreacted to a concern about drugs in the '60s, and '70s, and '80s. I may have regretted that I did not get more politically active. When I was at the law school in Michigan, I was trying to establish a new method of education, clinical legal education. In a somewhat hostile environment where the professor is mostly the light, the cheaper model of one professor and 60 students in a classroom, using the case method to teach law. Instead of having a ratio of 10 to 1 with a clinical professor and ten students that are practicing law. During that period of time, I had my hands full, fighting off faculty reviews, various hostile deans implemented during my 10 years there. There were three of them, and with each of them, I'm happy to say, that I came out convincing more faculty would agree. I check clinically education was in the program strengthened. But during that period of time. I probably had enough energy or time to get involved in politics. Then when I selected the judicial position, I was prohibited under the code of conduct for United States judges from being involved in politics, even giving contributions. I'm retired that I at least able to give contributions. But that's one chapter of my life I precluded myself on by other career choices so.
[03:17:15] INTERVIEWER: Judges aren't allowed to talk about their political issues?
[03:17:21] Steven Pepe: Federal judges under the code of conduct in the United States. United States judges are prohibited from any political activity, attending any political fundraising, attending a convention of either party, giving any money to either party or coming out and allow your name to be used in support of any candidate or speaking publicly in favor of any candidate. Technically, their First Amendment rights are restrained to private conversations that they can express their political opinions on but no public expressions or actions benefiting either party. Well, obviously there was a recent Supreme Court appointments that we've highlighted again how much the federal judiciary is politically selected by the executive and ratified by the Senate. It's hard to say that this code of conduct has kept the judges out of the political limelight but it would be far worse if they could speak at rally, show up at conventions like Mike Flynn did in general, yelling locker her up at the Republican Convention. First of all, it's outrageous for any military person still in, he wasn't in uniform then but still in service, could do that. But to have federal judges doing that would it be just outrageous to my mind. As bad as it is political, it would be a lot worse. The state system because in many states such as Michigan, the judges are elected, they can be members of parties and it was a recent judicial campaign I found out that they could also have their name listed in support of judicial candidates. I wish they would change that in the state of Michigan but again, since it is a elective system for the judges instead of appointed one, they are given much more license to be politically involved in our federal judges.
[03:19:36] INTERVIEWER: Do you have any professor or teacher who inspired you or motivated you?
[03:19:46] Steven Pepe: This professor Niemeyer at Notre Dame got me very interested in political science. Both the classic works of Aristotle and Plato and the other 18th century classic people like Kant Hume, Montesquieu, Montane, that greatly affected our government. There's a recent article that was written in Washington Post, I think a week ago today, talking about the swelling of authoritarianism around the world and here in the United States and going back to the concept of the liberal order that the United States was born into. We were so gifted to have those great founding fathers with founding mothers probably encouraging them and giving them some good ideas backstage. Like Abigail Adams telling John Adams to remember the ladies when he was in the Continental Congress. But we had people that were all well-read in the enlightenment thinking that wrote into our founding charter of the Constitution, our second founding charter, the first one was the Articles of Confederation that didn't have even taxing power that had poor Washington running an army on almost no budget. But the declaration of independence and the constitution, more so the declaration of independence, articulate liberal principles that were started unique to the United States. They were feared in Europe and that's why Europe wanted to quash them in the United States but they eventually spread to more and more countries. To England, France, Italy, the Scandinavian countries. After World War II they spread to Japan and Germany. These are not automatic and right now there is a regression in many countries such as Hungary, Poland, the United States, and several Southeastern Asian countries to authoritarian government our biggest economic and political rival now is no longer Russia but China, that is totally an authoritarian state that has blended authoritarianism with capitalism in a unique way that is appealing to many people and leaders in the world. I think the youth of America have to take back the government and help America again lead as the model for political and social liberalism. To do that, they must guarantee that the government is committed as the constitution says to the general welfare of all of its citizens which means much greater economic equality. Not perfect inequality, I'm a capitalist, that's an effective means of production. But it has to be tamed by some social policies and economic redistribution. Without it you don't have enough, one of the problems with the economy over the last 10 years. So much of the money has been sucked up to the top and the people at the top don't need to spend it. They do stock and investments. If 20 per cent of that money had been left in the bottom 90 per cent, almost all of it would have gotten spent which would have created much more demand for products, which would have caused corporations to want to build and expand their plants. One of the reasons they haven't over the last decade or ever since 2008 is because as they say, there's not enough demand and again, part of the reason for that is the economic vacuuming of the most resources to the very top 1 per cent or one tenth of 1 per cent. Economic liberalism also requires some greater economic equality. Not total economic equality, I'm not a socialist or communist but I believe that we must have the bottom 90 per cent keeping on that curve of the increases in the gross domestic product per capita and they have fallen way below that line. Unlike the top 10 per cent of people that stayed even in the top 1 percent, and one tenth of 1 per cent that is huge way above it. If we could do those things, I think we would be again, a shining light on a hill that would be a model of government for a lot of other countries. Democracies are less inclined, liberal democracies are less inclined to go to war with each other. Obviously, we've made some big exception sadly in Vietnam and Iraq but there still are less inclined to authoritarian countries. Call it a rap?
[03:25:15] INTERVIEWER: Thank you so much.
[03:25:17] Steven Pepe: Thank you.

Media

2022

Length: 03:25:12

Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)

Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library

Downloads

Video - 4GB

Subjects
Legacies Project