Interview with Barry Schneider

Interview with Barry Schneider

Schneider, Barry ; Gashurov, Irene

Nineteen sixties; Harpur College; Alumni and alumnae

Recipient of Distinguished Alumnus Award. Principal of Schneider Mediation. Avid athlete at Harpur College. (His nickname at Harpur was “Peanuts.”) Mediation judge in Phoenix. He (Ret.) served on the Maricopa County Superior Court for 21 years, from 1986 to 2007. He first practiced in New York City and moved to Phoenix in 1971. He was an associate at Langerman, Begam, Lewis, Leonard & Marks until 1977, when he formed the partnership Rosen & Schneider, Ltd. He has a strong background in Arizona civil litigation from the perspective of both a judge and a civil trial attorney. While on the bench, he served on the Criminal Department, in addition to serving as Presiding Civil Department Judge and Presiding Family Law Judge. His 18-month tenure on the Arizona Supreme Court’s Committee on Jury Reform led to groundbreaking changes in the rules and practice of jury trials in Arizona.

2019-03-11

In Copyright

Barry Schneider.mp3

2019-03-11

Oral Histories from 60's Binghamton Alumni

66:48 minutes

Alumni Interviews
Interview with: Barry Schneider
Interviewed by: Irene Gashurov
Transcriber: Oral History Lab
Date of interview: 11 March 2019
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(Start of Interview)

BS: 00:00
[inaudible] My name is Barry Schneider, graduated 1964 from Harpur College, and I am now a retired superior court judge in Phoenix, Arizona. Today is March 1, 2019.

IG: 00:17
Where are we? And [inaudible]

BS: 00:19
We are in my office in Phoenix I have as a retired judge. I became a mediator/arbitrator. I do not practice law, although my license is active and I have an office in Phoenix at 1313, East Osborne Road, Phoenix, Arizona, 85014.

IG: 00:39
And what are you doing?

BS: 00:41
And I am told that what we are doing is compiling some kind of an oral history of my wonderful time at Harpur College in the (19)60s.

IG: 00:49
Exactly-exactly. All right. So, thank you very much for that intro. So maybe we can begin by your just tell me a little bit of by way of background, where did you grow up and who your parents were? What they did? Did they encourage you to continue with your higher education?

BS: 01:11
Absolutely. I was born in the Bronx in New York, right near Yankee Stadium, and my family moved when I was 12 years old to the south shore of Long Island, to Woodmere New York, five towns on the south shore, and I went to high school at Hewlett on Long Island. I graduated high school in 1960 I had played varsity basketball and varsity baseball in high school, and my parents were off born in the United States from parents who had emigrated around turn of the 20th century from Russia and other countries around there. My father was a small businessman who owned a small manufacturing business that manufactured leather wedding albums and such. My mother was a homemaker. She-she was a brilliant card player. She is a life master in Bridge at a very early age, played poker in her later years, very smart woman. I had a sister that unfortunately passed away when I was a junior in college. She was 17. The family moved to Long Island when it came to applying to colleges, my high school limited us to three applications, and I applied to Cornell engineering, because I figured I could not get into Cornell otherwise, and I had an interest in math at the time. And I applied to University of Vermont, and I applied to Harpur College, which was definitely promoted strongly by my high school guidance counselor. He put it in terms of, economically, it is obviously a good deal, but scholastically, it has got an excellent reputation. It is going to be a growing, wonderful university in the northern part of the state. It is part of the state system. It is going to have funding, presumably, it was 1000 students or so when I applied, it sounded great, and I was accepted to all three and I chose Harpur.

IG: 01:12
Why?

BS: 01:58
For all those reasons, I liked the idea that it was small. I did not really want to go to an engineering school in Vermont. I did not really know anything about it, so Harpur seemed the right fit for me. And my parents are very encouraging. Fact, I still remember, finally, my father passed away in 2006, 92 I still remember fondly the trip that he and I took from our home to Binghamton from my orientation. It was just the two of us. It was a wonderful couple of days together. So, they were very supportive.

IG: 04:27
Had you- thank you. Had you ever visited Binghamton before arriving on campus?

BS: 04:37
I do not think so. I am not sure. I do not have a recollection of it. I do not think so.

IG: 04:47
So, what were your first impressions your-

BS: 04:50
I did visit. I did visit because I remember being taken through the dorm and knocking on somebody's door. I cannot remember who it was. It could have been somebody became a big director. No, he was here behind me. Was not Andrew Bergman. He was a year behind me. Was Andrew Bergman's good friend I was thinking about that was not them knocked on somebody's door. They showed me the dorm room. So, I was there for a brief time before I actually went there. And my impressions were, what did I know? 17-year-old kid from Long Island. I do not know anything.

IG: 05:26
So, you know you-you had not experienced rural life before, right?

BS: 05:33
No, Suburban. You know, Bronx in suburbia.

IG: 05:37
Okay, so-

BS: 05:38
Camps every now and then.

IG: 05:40
Yeah. So, what were some of the first impressions that you had of the place of the students that you met on your first days?

BS: 05:48
It is hard to remember the first impressions my first activities. I remember this. I do not know if it is of any interest, but I have an athletic interest. I went to college having no-no dreams of ever having any intercollegiate experience. I remember my high school basketball coach laughing at me. He says, “As soon as you hear that basketball bounce, you are going to be in the gym.” I am 5'6", (5')7", whatever, and I am a little tiny runt. I so the first thing I did was, I think I knew who my roommate was. I think we met before we went up there. We had a mutual friend. He got kicked out of the school in our sophomore year, but I went down to the gym, which was then the small gym, which I do not know if it is a women's gym now or not, it was not the big field house by any means, and there were on the outdoor basketball courts. There were a bunch of games going on. One of the players in one of the games was a junior at Harpur. His name is Jimmy Davis. I knew Jimmy pretty well because he was a star of the basketball team a couple of years ahead of me at Hewlett, and his younger brother was a year behind me at Hewlett, and we were teammates on the basketball team. And in fact, I remember talking to Jimmy before I made my decision about Harpur, because I would I knew that he had gone there, and he was very encouraging. And I saw Jimmy on the play on the basketball courts playing with his older guy turned out to be the basketball coach. And Jimmy says, "Hey, peanuts." So, peanuts was my name from orientation week until I graduated and I got into the game that the coach was playing, Jimmy was playing. I do not know if Mickey Greenberg was there. Probably was. And because of Jimmy, who the coach idolized, Jimmy was a God. He was a great player, because I was kind of part of his whatever I was seen by the coach as, hey, this is potential, whatever. In fact, the coach had told me that my JV basketball coach in high school had met him earlier that summer at some coaches’ conference, and for some reason he knew I was going to Harpur and mentioned to the coach, Frank Pollard, hey, this kid, peanuts is coming, you know, keep your eye out for him. That is my first recollection of anything during orientation week. Remember getting the beanies, and if you know when the beanie, they-they did an H in your forehead. And I was, I was always getting an H on my forehead because I was challenging these ridiculous norms, whatever, that is what I remember. I started off as a math major, and I think either after my first semester or my second semester, I said, "No, that is not for me." I had four eight o'clock in my first semester. It was freezing cold. I never could not get the you know; I did not want to go to class. And I have a good friend, Tony D'Aristotle, who graduated a year before me, who was also on the basketball team, local from Binghamton, still lives in Binghamton. Used to live Montreal, taught Montreal in McGill, taught at Stanford, taught and spent time down South America back in Binghamton, I stayed his house. When I am there. He was a math major; he was a professor of math. He was a PhD in math, and he remembers the conversation that I do not remember when I told Dick Wick Hall, who was a professor of math, I do not think this is for me. And Hall said, okay, he could not care less. So, I started as a math major, then I had to figure out a major, and I majored in economics. There was that a little bit of math in it.

IG: 05:48
Yeah. How- what did you think of-of the students in your classes?

BS: 05:48
I loved it. There was all this political, civil rights stuff going on, hippies, beats. On beatniks and dressing, you know, differently. I remember the fun we used to have, and I was kind of a part of that. I was, I went up to Buffalo to-to demonstrate against house on American Activities Committee, and I, I was part of that group, but I was not as fringed as they were. But I remember going into town wearing my Harpur jacket, carrying my communism textbook from social science whatever, just to get a reaction from the local people. I mean, we had fun, but we were but we will push. We were part of that generation, the sexual revolution, civil rights revolution. I remember Stokely Carmichael coming to the campus.

IG: 10:51
When-when?

BS: 10:53
(19)63, (19)64.

IG: 10:55
I had not realized that.

BS: 10:57
And John Lewis, I think, was with him as well.

IG: 10:59
Oh, really?

BS: 11:00
I think so. And I just kind of was on the background, just [crosstalk]

IG: 11:06
We actually have their- we have John Lewis's interview for another collection.

BS: 11:12
Okay, yeah, but I was very wrapped up in that social in the social political culture.

IG: 11:18
I had not realized was that that early in the (19)60s.

BS: 11:23
Before the Vietnam War, it was purely the civil rights movement. And I marched on Washington in 1963--there was groups that were being sent by Harpur College, and I did not really get a part of that. I go home, it is August, back home and talk about parents encouraging you. And my sister had died earlier that year, and I am home and the civil rights march, the March on Washington, and I said, I want to go and by myself. I got on a train, and my mother packed me a lunch, goodbye and good luck and Godspeed. She was proud of me. So was my father.

IG: 12:05
How wonderful.

BS: 12:06
It was, tearing up, but I mean to me, those four years were irrepla- irreplaceable. Girlfriends broke up with me, all that stuff. It was a real coming of age experience.

IG: 12:26
Tell us a little bit more about the groups that you socialized with and-

BS: 12:30
I was a member. I was kind of rushed by. We did not have they did not have fraternity news. Then they had social clubs. And one of the leading social clubs was Adelphi. I do not know if it is still there. This is where the President the senior class was a member, and all-all the Upstate waspy guys. And then there was SOS, which was much more ragged and much more rowdy. Then there was ITK, there was goal yards, and I was somewhat known on campus. I mean, I was six men on the basketball team in my freshman year. I started in my junior year, and I got rushed SOS rushed me. Some of my best friends were in SOS, and I chose Adelphi because that was, you know, that was the prestigious thing to do. And I got so tired of it. By my junior year, I basically dropped out. I got tired of things like the pledge, this pledges with pledge, and then we had sat down like we had this authority. No, yes, no, yes. It just bothered me. I said, I do not want to be part of this, so I dropped out and I became more of the hippie kind of-

IG: 13:46
Well, tell me about the young people who were part of this hippie group.

BS: 13:52
They were-

IG: 13:53
Who were they? They were from Long Island in New York City-

BS: 13:56
Mostly- there was mostly downstate, but some upstate as well. They dress scruff here they most of them were, well, a lot of them were literature majors, very artistic, very creative. Deborah Tannen, okay, big name in Harpur College was a good friend of mine. She was a year behind me, and I hung out. She one of her best friends was my girlfriend at the time, and we and her boyfriend at the time was also a year behind me, Mike Tillis, who is now in Israel with a long, Hasidic kind of a life for many years. And we would double date. I had a car. We would go out after games. Deborah Tennant and I were good friends, and we still are in contact with each other, although I am not, you know, she is Deborah Tannen and I am not. She is really a celebrity. I mean, she is, she is, she is amazing. The last reunion, we spent some time together, I have pictures of my phone with her. She is wonderful. And she was, really, she was an English major. She became, you know, a linguistics PhD. I guess they are related, but that is the kind of folks I was hanging out with. They were not really. Some of them were just hanging out in a snack bar. They were not. Some of them were not good students. Deborah was my girlfriend was and who is your girlfriend? Elaine Selling. I have no idea what has happened to her. She had broken up with a boyfriend before me. We went out. She dumped me to go back with him. That is all what I remember. I am just trying to think there was, who were these kids. I mean, I was friendly with the athletes and kind of this group, you know, I was, I was sort of a bridge between them, of sorts.

IG: 15:58
The athletes were not politicized.

BS: 16:01
Yeah, some of them were.

IG: 16:01
Some of them were.

BS: 16:02
Yeah, but not as much as these kids.

IG: 16:05
Yeah. What kind of things did they talked about? What, what did you talk about when you were with them?

BS: 16:10
Oh, what typically young men talk about? Women basketball exams in school? Nothing that I can remember that is, you know, particularly [crosstalk]

IG: 16:22
[inaudible] on American activities. Did you talk about anything political or [crosstalk] when was in the air at the time?

BS: 16:29
I think the Vietnam War. I cannot remember where that was starting to heat up. But, you know, there were draft issues. You know, we were concerned about the draft. Some of us, some of them, my classmates, went to pretty, not extremes, but went to medical school they could not get into us, and went to Bologna, just, you know, right, basically, to avoid the that is not fair to say, but I went to graduate school, I lasted a semester, and then I went to law school.

IG: 17:07
Where did you go to graduate school?

BS: 17:10
Rutgers in economics. I actually lasted a semester, and then I quit in the second semester. I did not like it. My economics advisor was a guy named John LaTourette. It was a wonderful guy.

IG: 17:24
Yeah. So, you know, just, let us backtrack before you went to law school. So, you know some of the professors that made an impression on you. Can you remember some names?

BS: 17:36
John LaTourette. He was my Economics professor. Took a number of courses with him. There was a guy named Hamilton, associate sociology professor. He was pretty left. He had a good relationship with a lot of these students. There was a guy who taught statistics, I do not remember his name, that I just enjoyed. We had a good relationship. I hate, I hate his statistics. I think I got to be in this, somehow, Van [Robert VanHadel] something. I kind of have an image of him, but he would not remember me. I do not remember him. I lived off campus since my sophomore year, starting my sophomore year, since I was able to, I did, and I lived with some upperclassmen, and I lived with guys in my sophomore year who were dirty, who were stealing exams. They all got kicked out, and I was not and I said, do not, I do not want to see it. Leave me alone. But I was in the house with these guys. It was very uncomfortable. But did not never I was, I always, I was, you know, what is that word Teflon? I was Teflon. About that me. I never got, nobody ever talked to me. But I never got pulled in. But I knew the guy that knew the combination to this, and then he was able to get the exams and go away. I do not, I do not want this. I do not want to do this. And I would, you know, I was pretty good student in economics. I was actually second highest in the class in that in that major. It is hard to say, but those guys got kicked out in my sophomore year. My roommate, I told you about, he was involved in that. There was about half dozen-dozen that did not graduate because they were shamed out of the school. And it was, it was a was scandalous, what was going on. And, you know, I did not blow the whistle on these guys. I just go away. I do not want to know about it.

IG: 19:41
Right-right. Kennedy assassination.

BS: 19:45
Oh yeah, our yearbook. I remember I was in the snack bar. You know, everybody remembers where they were. And there is a picture in my yearbook, which I have at home. My house burnt down, but that did not burn. And. Then whoever took I-I am in one of the pictures, and we are just like this, you know, totally morose and sad and looking down, and that was captured in the yearbook. Did you ever see the yearbooks back?

IG: 20:16
Yes-yes-yes.

BS: 20:17
Okay, there is pictures of the Kennedy the day Kennedy was killed. Very moving, but it was just I was I remember being in the snack bar. Snack bar was like the womb. It was where everybody went. And I will tell you a cute story. Perhaps I am now living in Phoenix. I have all kids who are about how old eight, seven, ten, eight and eleven, and a bunch of families going to the movies on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, and we are going to see the In-laws. And I had no idea Andrew Bergman wrote this, and I am sitting in the movie, and I am laughing louder, harder than everybody else in the theater, and I said out loud, and my wife will swear to this, this feels like I am in the snack bar, and it was Andrew Bergman who hung out in a snack bar. This is same humor that I grew up with in Harpur College. Was in that movie, you know, the movie

IG: 21:24
With De Niro.

BS: 21:25
No Peter Faulk.

IG: 21:27
Oh-oh [crosstalk]

BS: 21:29
Go see it on Netflix. It is one of the it is, Peter Faulk and Alan Arkin.

IG: 21:36
Yeah, they are great actors.

BS: 21:37
And Alan Arkin is this dentist, and Peter Faulk is his, who knows? Why is his CIA agent? We do not know for sure. And he gets Alan Arkin, who is his most upright, prudish kind of guy, to go to South America to some banana republic. And they get into these scrapes and-and they are running because people are shooting at them. And the famous scene is, is that Peter Faullk is saying serpentine-serpentine so they have to go back. Serpentines means when we run like this. So, he has already run straight, has not been shot now he has to go back and sir. It is hilarious, but it was the humor that I knew and felt comfortable with from Harpur College snack bar.

IG: 22:17
It comes from another place. It comes from another place. It comes from, you know, maybe New York City.

BS: 22:26
Oh, yeah. Andrew Burton was from New York City.

IG: 22:28
Exactly.

BS: 22:29
Of course.

IG: 22:29
That is where-

BS: 22:30
But that, but we infected the snack bar, and that is, you know, that is how we sat around. And there is those that have, not jokes that we told, but those-those-

IG: 22:41
Kind of humor.

BS: 22:41
Yeah.

IG: 22:42
Which is, how would you describe this humor?

BS: 22:46
It is kind of little bit it is a it is a little screwy. It is not, it is not [inaudible] young men telling jokes. It is kind of a warp view of the world. The other story I heard about Andrew Bergman, who wrote Blazing Saddles. Now that you have seen, right?

IG: 23:07
Yes.

BS: 23:08
And Mel Brooks confirmed this about two or three years ago. He had this one-on-one interview on HBO for a couple hours. Was one of my- I was a big thing at Harpur College too. Was a 2000-year-old man? They just came out. Mel Brooks and Carl Erin is 2000-year-old man on record came out just before at that time, and we used to speak to each other from phrases from the record, I will never walk. I do not walk for a bus will always be another. You know, fear is the main compulsion, propulsion, whatever. The story I heard, and it was kind of confirmed by Mel Brooks, is that Bergman wrote this book Blazing Saddles. He went on to history at Wisconsin for post graduate. And it's, I never read the book, and a movie theater picked it up and says to Bergman, write the script. And this is a story I heard. Bergman had a lot of trouble writing the screenplay, and he was not producing, and he had writer's block, and he had all those problems. So, the studio says, "Okay, we will give you some help." So, Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor are hired to help Andrew Bergman write this script. And can you, I always say this, can you imagine sitting in a room with these guys? They are crazy. I mean [crosstalk] of course, everybody would have had a peak into that. So Blazing Saddles then gets published, I mean, produced, and it is incredible. And it is that humor. Also, it is the opening scene when Mel Brooks is Indian chief and comes up on these African Americans who are working on the railroad, and he goes schwatzers.

IG: 24:54
[laughs]

BS: 24:54
It is class, it is classic. That is classic.

IG: 24:58
That is very New York.

BS: 25:01
How much more New York can you be-

IG: 25:03
No, you cannot.

BS: 25:04
-than Mel Brooks, and it is just, I went to see Blazing Saddles. I had just it was early (19)70s. I moved here in (19)71 to Phoenix, and we went out with another couple, also from New York, who have been here a few years long, more than we have, and we went to see Blazing Saddles in the movies. And as we are walking into the theater, there is this family of cowboys and cow girls and cow, cow father, cow mother and five, five or six cow kids in their cowboy hats and their boots. They are thinking they go to see, going to see a shoot them up. And they go into a Wayne movie, right? They go in, they sit down in the theater and kind of watching them. And the opening scene, when Mel Brooks goes Schwartz, they on-on mass, get up and leave the theater. Phoenix is not New York, no, it is not. It is not, it is, it is more and more it is, you know, it is, it is progressing. This was a small Southwestern town. It is still conservative, but there is a lot more of that happening. liberal stuff happening anyway. So, I do not that is fine. I knew Andrew Bergman a little bit. And I remember when I went to see the movie with Bert Parks that he wrote about stuffed animals. They were killing these rare birds and rare animals. I forget what they are doing. It was, it was a ridiculously comic type of thing. Bert Parks played his Miss America role, and Marlon Brando had a role in that, in which he played, which he mocked himself in The Godfather. And I remember writing a letter to, I do not know if he ever wrote back, writing a letter to Andrew Bergen and say, “How did you ever get Marlon Brando to sit down and accept this role?” I forget the name of the movie, but it is a Bergman was good. He was he has not done anything in a long time. I do not think, but I think he was very successful. I think he had a place on Central Park, South or North, or whatever, and.

IG: 27:26
Let us talk about you then.

BS: 27:27
Okay.

IG: 27:28
Okay, so, I mean, you obviously had an interest in comedy.

BS: 27:33
Well, yeah, I like [crosstalk]

IG: 27:35
Films?

BS: 27:36
Yeah.

IG: 27:37
Was that- was there an opportunity to do that at Harpur was-

BS: 27:43
A little bit.

IG: 27:43
Film Club, or-

BS: 27:44
I have to go to the restroom. Can we shut this off for a while when we do that? Professor is the one that I remember was Sidney Harcave, who was a preeminent Russian history scholar. I took two or three classes with him. We used his textbook Russia, a history and I remember once I had three finals on one day, and I was freaking out, and I went to him, and his advice to me was, get a good night's sleep. I wanted to take it some other time, but he would not do that. He was really fantastic professor, and I really enjoyed his classes, walking around campus. I am remembering now things like Sid Arthur Herman has his novels, the kids walking around reading that stuff, part of the, you know, the evolution of-of these young people who are starting to sprout their own wings and separate themselves from their parents’ generation and from and changing the cultural surroundings that they were part of. There was a beehive of that kind of activity back in the (19)60s. [crosstalk] Yeah, I mean, I did not understand I was not the scholar they were. So, I was kind of listening to them talk about it. But I had a girlfriend who was a literature major, and Deborah Tanner was her best friend. I mean, I had, if I wanted to talk to these people, I had, I had to pick up the book that they were reading, kind of and but I enjoyed it. I mean, it was, it was a wonderful awakening coming, you know, coming of age kind of a thing. There was, you know, I still look back upon those days terribly fondly, and always felt very fortunate that I had that opportunity. But on the other hand, having gone to Harpur College, there was a little bit of a of a burden in that when I graduated law school and I went out interviewing for jobs, I put down Harpur College and all that stuff. The first question I got from everybody interviewing me, where is Harpur College? Nobody ever heard of it. This is 1968, (19)69 and it was a bit of a, you know, an obstacle.

IG: 30:13
It was in you-

BS: 30:15
It was founded in 1948 and it had an amazing reputation, but nobody knew about it. It was not known. And these high-priced lawyers in these large law firms who went to all the Ivy League schools and were snobs about that, their first question to me was, where is Harpur College? So, I would not answer, but I had this. It was, it was incredible. Every single interview I got that same question. They never heard of it. They have now.

IG: 30:48
They have now, and they have-

BS: 30:51
And, I am sorry, they changed the name because the name, you know, I understand, [crosstalk], yeah, they changed it two or three times. It was SUNY at Binghamton. It was Binghamton University. Harpur College developed a great name. I am sorry that it was not still not the name of the school.

IG: 31:09
Yeah, because, as someone told me, you know it your generation got the end and the generation. Well, while Harpur College existed, that you got an elite education, liberal arts education for almost no money.

BS: 31:34
Right. I think we had an incoming class. It was told student body was about 1000 our incoming class is about 300 something. 10 percent of those kids were valedictorians in high school. Mean, these were top students in each of their schools who could not afford to go to an Ivy League school. This was the their-their opportunity, and the school thrived because of not only the professors being like Sidney Harcave, this preeminent scholar in his field. There were others in geology, there were in in all different all different departments, but the kids were very active and creative, and they part of what created that environment, not just the professors. It was that it was this frenetic activity, the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, obviously was heating up things I was thinking about that one of my good friends who was a year ahead of me. He was on the basketball team, Kenny Hoffman. His name is on the Vietnam Memorial in DC. He was a pilot, and he was killed, and it was not much after we graduated, we needless to say, most of the students were very actively opposed to the war, and I was really was not sure I was one of them. And after I graduated, I marched in down Fifth Avenue. I was anti-war, and I really did not understand as much until I saw Ken Burns thing on-on public TV.

IG: 33:28
Emily being your- you said, Emily.

BS: 33:32
No-no, Ken Burns.

IG: 33:34
Ken Burns. No. You said, somebody did not understand.

BS: 33:39
I did not.

IG: 33:39
You did not understand.

BS: 33:40
I did not understand why I was so it was the- my friends were opposed to it. So, I am I did not really understand the gravity, the gravitas, the you know, that, you know, I hated Nixon and I hated the war and I did all that stuff, but not. It was not until I became a lot, until recently, really, when all came together with-with-with Ken Burns's incredible documentary on the Vietnam War. It was amazing. It was just a hell hole. Kick any deeper and deeper, and I did not really appreciate it at that time. I was not as knowledgeable. It was not as aware.

IG: 34:21
And all the people that orchestrated it already knew that it was,

BS: 34:25
I am not sure. They were kids. They were rebelling. They were revolting.

IG: 34:26
The administration-

BS: 34:28
Oh yeah, they knew Johnson knew he was caught me, lied about Tonkin Gulf and all that to get us in there, just like George W Bush did to get us into Iraq.

IG: 34:43
So, there was Vietnam moving over. All of you did that create anxiety?

BS: 34:51
Yeah, sure, the draft and the war and all that. I do not remember it exactly, but we were so opposed to it, we could never see ourselves carrying a gun in Vietnam. It did not make any sense.

IG: 35:07
Did your professors support you?

BS: 35:10
A lot of them did.

BS: 35:11
They did not need to. They did not need it. We did not need protection. We did not need protection. We were not doing anything illegal. We were not doing anything that was going to get us in trouble. We were not, you know-

IG: 35:11
Did they sort of protect you?

IG: 35:26
Did they encourage you to go on to grad school?

BS: 35:29
John LaTourette encouraged me to go on to economics. He gave me a reference letter. And actually, lots of rec, I think, was from Rutgers. I had spent some time there, and he got me a fellowship, which I felt badly about, but I said, it is not for me.

IG: 35:51
So, what happened next? You dropped out of Rutgers. How did you become? I mean, give me sort of the arc of your career. How did you become a superior court judge?

BS: 36:06
That is a very it is interesting to me. I am not sure to anybody else, but I am trying to think of whether I should, I should say this on the record, but I dropped out of graduate school in Rutgers after one semester, and I knew that I am looking at being drafted. I do not have any-any educational protection, so I applied. I had been accepted in graduate school at City University in New York, and I lasted. I went about a month, and I just stopped going. I never quit. I never announced it resignation letter. I just stopped going. So, I am knowing that in my mind, I got to, you know, I got to figure out something a lot of a lot of people I knew were signing up on in reserve units to avoid getting drafted, to delay it by a year or two, my best man at my wedding who was simpatico, and all the things that we felt at the time. He winds up going to officer candidate training school in the Marines, and he is now in Vietnam as a second lieutenant, which is the most dangerous position on the battlefield. He is the guy saying, follow me, and he gets shot in the back by his own men. He survived, thank God, but he went, he signed up in a reserve unit that got activated, and he is now in Vietnam. That is the kind of stuff that was happening that was after we graduated. So going to law school had a lot to do with figuring that piece out. I did not really ever dream of being a lawyer.

IG: 37:47
What did you dream of becoming?

BS: 37:49
Nothing.

IG: 37:50
Nothing?

BS: 37:51
I could not play professional baseball because I was not good enough and I was too short for basketball. So, I had no dreams. My father had a nice business. My father was such a wonderful man. He would have embraced the fact, if I would have gone into business with him, it would have been the happiest man in the world. He understood that I did not want to do that, and he encouraged me to do whatever I wanted. So, I went to law school. I applied late. I got accepted to Brooklyn Law School, St John's law school, and I think I was rejected NYU in Columbia, maybe because it was late, maybe because I was not good enough. A lot of Harpur graduates were at St John's, people a year ahead of me or two, and I knew them pretty well, and it was easy for me to get in, you know, to kind of be engulfed and protected by them. So, I went to St John's. I was living at my parents’ house, and on Long Island. I take the train every day from Long Island to Brooklyn. Was in Brooklyn, and now it is in Queens, and I did real well. I was like top five in my first-first semester, and I thought I flunked out. I went on a ski trip with some of these my friends from Harpur who were your head of me, and I told them, I am not even buying my books for next semester I flunked out. They laughed at me. I am telling you, I flunked out. We were at the ski trip, and my mother calls and she reads me my grades, and they sounded okay. And I tell these graceton, these friends of mine, they said, “My God, you are probably number one in the class.” I said “I was number five.” I made Law Review, which is a whole other world in law school, it is a you spend a lot of time with the elites of the elite students in law school, putting together a legal magazine, periodical. I scholarly, and you spend hours reading and editing and discussing and looking for it is, it is a whole other life. And I did that for the rest of my law school career. And I did, I did not study as hard because I had Law Review for one thing. And I thought it was a piece of cake now. So, I went from like an 85 average to a 77 average in my second semester, then I kind of leveled out. I did okay. I did not. Was not good enough to get a job in the big Wall Street firms because they never heard of Harpur College. For one thing, my first job out of law school-

IG: 40:17
When was this? What year?

BS: 40:20
I graduated law school in (19)68 if I would have graduated with my class would have been (19)67 but I spent that year screwing around graduate school, and I still had to worry about the draft, because now I was about 25 and 26 is the magic number, so one of the things I did was to apply. I got a job within what is called OEO, legal services for the poor, Office of Economic Opportunity, federal concept, and John-Robert Kennedy had a lot to do with that, bringing publicly funded law firms, in effect, into the ghettos to assist the people who live there.

IG: 41:08
Is that a precursor of legal aid-

BS: 41:10
Legal Aid in New York was criminal, so this was the civil side.

IG: 41:14
I see, I see.

BS: 41:15
And that is where I got a job and I applied to the to the Selective Service that I think what I am doing here is more important to my country than carrying a gun in Vietnam did not work, so I eventually did not, did not have to get drafted. It is a long story that I am not going to tell now, but a lot of what I did, and a lot of my-my-my friends, were doing this frenzy time was figuring out ways not to get killed in Vietnam. Trump does. Trump did the same thing. You know, my I never mind. So, I really took the law school, and I graduated in (19)68 I am working at Bedford Stuyvesant, legal services for the community center, whatever borrow legal services for the poor, going down every day with 10,15, files the landlord and tenant court representing people that were being evicted and it was not going anywhere. It was not a job that [phone rings] I will let Chelsea answer that. So, then I got a job in a small Wall Street firm does not exist anymore. It was like 12 lawyers, not a big they had some big clients, some big Israeli connected Bank Leumi, Israel was a big client of theirs and other Israeli connected businesses. And then my wife.

IG: 42:58
How did you meet your wife? Is that your wife?

BS: 43:01
That is my wife.

IG: 43:01
Yeah, I thought so.

BS: 43:03
We have a great first date story. But I guess, since I am revealing so much about myself, I will tell you that in a moment. But my wife said to me, this is now 1970ish, and I am working now at [inaudible] and Bookstein, no longer it in Bedford, Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. And she is from Connecticut. She went to NYU, that is where we met, and she is working in the city we have by the time we move; our daughter was eight months old. But before we had children, she was working at banker's trust thing, which is now Bank of America, and doing very well working on whatever. She was having horrible experiences on the subway with perverts on the subway, and she said, "I cannot I cannot stand this anymore. I- we have to move." So, the logical thing for any New Yorker like myself, she is not a New Yorker, was to move to Long Island or Westchester or New Jersey. And we looked at some houses, and then we kind of looked at each other, and we said, “Boy, if we get, if we move and keep this job, we are stuck for the rest. We cannot move. We are, we are just imprisoned by this system. We cannot afford ever, or buy in a house we cannot afford whatever.” So, we said, “Let us take a look at this.” I never heard of Phoenix. I heard of Phoenix. I never knew anything about it, and I was out of a law school friend of mine, we graduated, and we were at a party at his house, and we are sitting around, what do you want to move to? What do you want to do? I do not want to go to Miami. It is too it is too much like New York. It is too much the same. So, somebody says, What about Phoenix, Arizona? I said, “Where is it? What is it?” So, I had, we had from law school. We had these little two by four little diaries, pocket diaries that a large publishing house handed out. And they had an atlas, and they had all the states broken down by Northeast, Northwest, and there was Arizona, right next to New Mexico, next to Texas, and it was close to Las Vegas. This far from LA looked like a good place, and I started reading about it. They have not. They just established an NBA basketball franchise that is important. So, sight unseen. Basically, I came out here for an exploratory run. Nothing happened, and we packed up. Six months later, we packed without a job, we packed up. We just moved out here. Some connections. I had to take the bar exam in those days. You had to have a six-month residency, and then you took the bar exam. Not true anymore today, so I got a job in a firm because I was not licensed to just do Scrivener work for a couple $100 a month. I still had to look for a real job. And I finally got a job in a law firm downtown, a prominent personal injury law firm, which I knew nothing about. And I was there from (19)72 to (19)77 when I formed a partnership with an older friend of mine, and we were together from (19)77 to about (19)84 and we kind of split the sheets, and we kept the name, but I was on my own, kind of building a practice. Meanwhile, friends of mine, good friends of mine, are applying and becoming judges on the Superior Court or state court of general jurisdiction, and I am talking to my friends and, "Gee, that sounds like a nice gig. I mean, I like to do that. " And I am 42, 43 years old, kind of young, but it is- we have merit selection in Arizona. We do not have general elections. Least the three largest counties in Arizona, you go through a screening process, you make an application, there is a commission that is half lawyers, half lay people presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. You submit your application. In my day, there was like 75 applicants for two positions. They call through them, 15 or so are then interviewed, then they take five and they send it to the governor, and the governor must choose from that short list, and half of that short list has to be different political parties. So, depoliticize it is to bring it is called Merit selection, and it was kind of new at the time it came in, oh, maybe a few years before that, I would never run for election. It is not who I am. Bruce Babbitt was the governor at the time, and I did my application, got my interview, and I was appointed on the first shot, which was not remarkable, but it was usually it is two or three times when you to get it. I was very fortunate.

IG: 48:16
What kind of cases did you try?

BS: 48:18
Well, we have three departments. We have, well, we have more than that. We have a civil department, we have a criminal department, we have a probate department. Most of my time as a private lawyer was in civil. I did not do any criminal, really. I did some domestic relation. Domestic Relations was the other one. Domestic Relations, probate, civil and criminal. I did when I left the firm and joined with this guy. I needed business, so I did anything that came in the door, and I did some divorce work, which nobody wants to do. So, the- our court is a court of general jurisdiction, which means we are, we are not a local justice of the peace court. We are not- we do not hear small matters. We hear major matters, major felonies, murders, kidnapping and we hear major civil cases for millions of dollars as well as little cases. So, we hear, as a civil in the civil department, we hear everything that could be filed, medical malpractice case, lawyer malpractice case, products liability case, automobile accidents, partnership dissolutions, real estate fraud, transactions, everything that you ever learned about in law school is on your plate as a civil department judge, criminal is what you would expect in criminal. I had no, no background the criminal, but I took to it, and I need today, 10, 15, years, 12 years after I retired, I will run into one of the lawyers used to practice in my court, and they think of me as a criminal person, criminal, you know, and I am not. It took me six months to learn the language I. Had no idea what was going on when I was on criminal. I was scared to death. I mean, I look out on the morning. We have a morning calendar in criminal and that is when we do our sentencings, emotions for release, our conferences before we did our trials. And there would be maybe 12 inmates sitting there in the jury box waiting for their case to be called, and on that side of the room, maybe their family members are sitting behind them, and on the other side of the room is the is, is the victims, and then there is the prosecutors and the defense lawyers. And I used to walk out on a bench. I used to look at this array, and I say to myself, I know less than every one of these people in this courtroom about what I am doing, but it took me about six months, and all of a sudden, I had-

IG: 50:49
You gained the confidence just by doing up and doing it.

BS: 50:53
Reading it and figuring it out and understanding the lexicon. And it is not really hard. It is the easiest for me. It is the easiest. It was the easiest assignment. Criminal. There was some-

IG: 51:04
What was the hardest?

BS: 51:06
Civil was the hardest in terms of the difficulty of the issues. The hardest assignment probably was domestic relations, because you had to resolve unresolvable disputes. There was never enough money to go around, never enough time with the children. And you had people fighting it, you know, because they hated each other, and that was difficult on the toll it took on you personally, civil was the most difficult because the issues were the most, the most difficult.

IG: 51:44
Like what issues did you-

BS: 51:47
Just itis evolved. Now, you know, I have been gone 12 years, but I do mediation, so I see the cases at the mediation stage, and there is summary judgments, you know, 10 inches thick that you have to read through and prepare for oral argument to decide and on our court. We do not have any research assistance. We do not have any staff. We do it by ourselves. It is very, very time consuming, and it's, you know, every commercial case, they think they have entitlement to a summary judgment as a matter of law. So, they file one or two or more, and it is pages and pages and pages of stuff on. Could be economic loss rule. It could be on, you know, whatever legal doctrine is being bad need about, and it is constantly evolving and changing. You got to keep up. I got invited fairly often to speak at State Bar seminars on various issues, which was a challenge for me.

IG: 52:50
What kind of issues Did you speak about?

BS: 52:53
Motion practice, how to write motions, how to be more persuasive. I wrote about evidence, evidentiary things I spoke about number of times on some ethical issues the Code of Professional Conduct.

IG: 53:11
Such as?

BS: 53:12
Candor toward the tribunal. Point 3.3. Of the Code of Professional Conduct, you must be candid in front of a judge. You cannot be misleading or lie. And there are cases that are very interesting reads, and I would talk about that, you know, beyond the faculty, talking about things like that, oh, I do not remember all the things on my website, if you I do not know if you looked at my website. You might want to do that. I describe some of the things, you know, speech, speaking engagements, I have not had much lately. That is part of my problem. If it is a problem to where I am not as busy now, 12 years after I retired as it was three years after I retired, because nobody knows me anymore, I was a known item when I retired from the bench.

IG: 53:59
Why do not you teach?

BS: 54:01
I also taught at school.

IG: 54:02
Really?

BS: 54:04
I taught at ASU Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law. Taught for about five or six years. They had a very interesting civil practice. No, not civil practice, lawyering Theory and Practice class, which was basically a hands-on student. It was a lottery to get into those classes. They had to argue cases, try a case, and I was one of the faculty that took one of the little sections. And for about five or six years, I was a what is the word that you use for a professor?

IG: 54:43
Adjunct.

BS: 54:44
What?

IG: 54:44
Adjunct.

BS: 54:45
Adjunct at a new law school, which is now going out of business, Phoenix School of Law. I taught civil practice there for a few times, for a few semesters, while I was on the bench, because I was thinking of doing that when I retired being a law professor. But I did, fortunately, I did that on a full-time basis while still on the bench. I said, this is real work. I do not want to do this. The worst part of it was the grading. Was the creating the final exam and then grading it. I do not want to still hard. So, I just-

IG: 55:18
Got a graduate assistant?

BS: 55:19
No-no, I was the I was assisting the other professors in doing this. They were not going to assist me.

IG: 55:29
No. Things, things run differently, actually, not differently. But, you know, you could employ a graduate assistant from the law department.

BS: 55:38
Possibly. But I just, I like the I like the classroom. I like the interaction with the class. I am actually going down next this later this month, two young lawyers I know are teaching this class at ASU, and they invited me to be a guest for one of their nights, which I did last year. It is fun. I enjoy tremendously interacting with young lawyers. I enjoy interacting when a judge, when a new judge, is appointed to my bench, if I happen to have some connection, maybe through a friend or whatever, I try to reach out and say, here is some tips and whatever, I enjoy that.

IG: 56:19
Have you considered speaking at Binghamton? I mean, there is no law school, but there is a pre law program.

BS: 56:24
I have not considered it, but-

IG: 56:24
You have not considered it.

BS: 56:24
Well, it is a long trip.

IG: 56:27
It is a long trip.

BS: 56:33
I do. I go back. I went back to reunion on three, four years ago. I was there in 2008 which is when I got the Distinguished Alumni Award. So, I went back for that, and I went back once or twice after that, both times saying studying at my friend Tony D Aristotle's house on Carroll Street Downtown Binghamton, right next to the Italian American club. You know what that is?

IG: 56:56
Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah.

BS: 56:58
It has got this old house is over 100 years old. It is great.

IG: 57:03
You promised to tell me about-

BS: 57:06
My first date. People actually asked me to tell this story. My wife hates it every now, but last couple times, tell them how we had our first date. Okay, I am in my second year in law school in Brooklyn, New York, at St John's University. And a friend of mine from Harpur, a teammate named Roy Tompowski. He may have run across him. He is a pretty active alum. He is an accountant. Lives in Westchester, and Roy calls me, I want to be disparaging, because I am on the record, and says I got a girl for you. All right, Roy, you know what-what is the story? Well, she is at NYU uptown. She is a junior, she is very pretty, and she is very smart, and she is from Connecticut, okay, I will give her a call. So, I-I call once, and I do not roommate answers call another time, another time, and finally, we make this date for Friday night. What I find out later is that she had a boyfriend that she goes out with on Saturday nights, but she is trying to break up with him. So, she tells Roy at a party that she went to camp, the same camp Roy went to, that is the connection. And she was at a party of all the camp guys, and she went up to Roy, and she said, you know, you have a guy for me. So, Roy says, Yeah, but he may be too short for you peanuts anyway. So, she has worried about that. That is what she knows. So, we finally make this day for Friday night. And I figured I am living in Brooklyn. I had this new TR four that I got when I graduated. Sometimes I got somewhere along the way, and she is up in the Bronx, you know, the city at all, New York City. Okay, good. So I am in Brooklyn, Atlantic Avenue area by downtown Brooklyn. She is up upper she is right by, well, she is NYU uptown, okay, which is where the Hall of Fame was, Fordham Road, and about 200 and something street go up the West Side Highway. So, I decide to plan this evening for this first date for this hick from Connecticut. So, I decide the theme will be, I am going to show her how real New Yorkers live. So, I took up there, pick her up. I do not you know. First Date never met her, and the first stop was the Upper West Side to the Improv, okay, which was just opening at the time year or two. We do not remember what act we saw, but we think it was probably somebody like, was not Robin Williams, but it was Steve. What is his name? Could have been. Somebody? No, no, it was another guy. Used to be a school teacher in New York. Anyway, I have seen 1000 times. Cannot remember his name. He has been on Broadway a lot in the Wasserstein plays wrong. I cannot remember his name. Anyway, we do not remember what we saw. That was the first stop to about 10ish or so, and then I the next stop, I do not tell her, is to go from the Upper West Side down to the lower east side to catch this delicatessen. Okay, we are really, real New Yorkers. Hang out. So, we are driving down. We are making first date kind of conversation. What is your favorite color, that kind of stuff? Who is your favorite singer? What do you know, all that garbage? So, we drive, I drive, and I park, and she does not say anything. We go into cats' you ever been to cats?

BS: 1:00:50
It is cavernous. It is huge, and you have a choice when you go in. You can either go to the left for waiter service, or you go to the right for counter service. Waiter service, a little more expensive. I am a poor law student. I cannot afford the waiter service. I tell her I would love to have a pastrami on rye, but I cannot afford that. So, I have what New York is called two with which are two hot dogs [inaudible] and sauerkraut. For those who are not initiated, she announces that she does not really like this kind of food. It is almost like Annie Hall. She does not really like this food, so she orders a turkey on rye. I go get my two hot dogs with we continue our small talk and in cats as you get this little ticket that you, they punch as to how much you owe, we are standing on line now to pay. We are about three or four deep, and at the cash register there is this older guy, probably 30 years younger than I am now, but an older guy, little bit of a palsy, a little bit of shaking, and he is obviously an owner. He is looking around making sure nobody is stealing any silverware, that kind of a look. So, we are getting closer and closer, and then we get about one removed, and this old guy says, "Hi Willa." She goes, "Hi, Benny." What is going on here? So, Benny, turns out he is a minority owner of Katz's delicatessen. The majority owner is her uncle, Willa's uncle, Lenny, who is her mother's brother, Willa is named after William Katz, her maternal grandfather, who pre deceased her. She is named Willa because her mother wanted to name her after her father. So, she is named after the founder of Katz's delicatessen. This is her family.

IG: 1:00:50
Yes.

IG: 1:02:40
And she did not tell you.

IG: 1:02:41
What does your wife do? Did she continue working in a bank?

BS: 1:02:41
No, she-she, dropped out of, I think she dropped out of graduate. I do not think she ever got her graduate degree. Children were born. We moved out here. She started working for me when I was in practice, and kind of like doing my books and stuff, not doing any reception in and then when I got appointed to the bank, she was without a job, so then she went to work for a friend of ours. Was a lawyer, kind of running his office. And then I think he retired, and then she basically stopped working in that kind of a situation. She does a lot of charitable work. Now she has got five grandkids, and all that back is not great.

BS: 1:02:41
Never said a word, and Benny comped us. We did not pay. So, I am going, I could have a pastrami sandwich. And after we got married, we were still living in New York for those first three years. We used to get care packages from Katz. You cannot believe the pounds of roast beef that we would get hot dogs like an electrical wire. We did not pay for it. So that is my first date story I submit to you. It is one of the best first date stories you will ever hear. So, she never told me. She never she cut she was from Connecticut. She did not really, she said, this looks familiar. She knew it when she walked in there. But driving up, she never said anything, and certainly did not say anything when she walked in the Annie Hall thing, if you remember Annie Hall, Woody Allen in a deli with what is her name, Diane Keaton, and she orders like a roast beef on white with butter, and he goes, shiska. Was not quite like that, because she is not a shiska; so, but my wife, but she does not like this food.

IG: 1:04:47
Well, she is beautiful. I you know, let us think about wrapping up this conversation. But you know, the final question that I ask. What lessons do you did you learn from the-the- this time in your life, that Harpur College?

BS: 1:05:11
Lessons that I learned, the important importance of friendship, I made really good friends that I am so many. Some of them, I am still friendly with that. I am still the importance of having that warmth in your life, that support in your life, people who care about you, people that you care about. It was really a very nurturing place. In fact, when people graduate like Mickey Greenberg. You must know Mickey. Everybody knows Mickey well. One of me is very close friend of mine. We were teammates together. He was a great basketball player. He has died in the wool Brooklyn, New York. His parents were there. He lives in Binghamton. Since he graduated. He it is the womb. It was considered the womb, but there is that nurturing sense of the place that I carry with me, and I look back so fondly on, what did I learn? I mean, I learned what anybody does who becomes more worldly wise and on his own or her own, without parents constantly saying, do your homework, that kind of thing. You got to figure things out for yourself. But that is true in any that is true in any university, but in particular in Binghamton, I am not sure it was a learning thing as much as an experience of the warmth and the nurture and of the surroundings of the people that you were there with. It was an amazing experience for me.

IG: 1:06:41
Well, thank you very much for this amazing interview. Been very wonderful talking to you.

(End of Interview)

2019-03-11

Irene Gashurov

1964

Barry Schneider

Recipient of Distinguished Alumnus Award. Principal of Schneider Mediation. Avid athlete at Harpur College. (His nickname at Harpur was “Peanuts.”) Mediation judge in Phoenix. He (Ret.) served on the Maricopa County Superior Court for 21 years, from 1986 to 2007. He first practiced in New York City and moved to Phoenix in 1971. He was an associate at Langerman, Begam, Lewis, Leonard & Marks until 1977, when he formed the partnership Rosen & Schneider, Ltd. He has a strong background in Arizona civil litigation from the perspective of both a judge and a civil trial attorney. While on the bench, he served on the Criminal Department, in addition to serving as Presiding Civil Department Judge and Presiding Family Law Judge. His 18-month tenure on the Arizona Supreme Court’s Committee on Jury Reform led to groundbreaking changes in the rules and practice of jury trials in Arizona.

Audio

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