Interview with David S. Hammer

Interview with David S. Hammer

Hammer, David S. ; Gashurov, Irene

Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in law; Harpur College – Alumni living in New York City

David has worked as a trial lawyer for more than 30 years and was engaged in civil and criminal litigation. He served in the U.S. Justice Department in the Antitrust Division and as an Assistant United States Attorney in Miami and in Manhattan. For the last two decades he has worked in private practice in New York.

2018-02-23

In Copyright

David Hammer.mp3

2018-02-23

Oral Histories from 60's Binghamton Alumni

57:52 minutes

Alumni Interviews
Interview with: David S. Hammer
Interviewed by: Irene Gashurov
Transcriber: Oral History Lab
Date of interview: 23 February 2018
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(Start of Interview)

IG: 00:00
Doing.

DH: 00:01
My name is David Hammer like a sledgehammer, and I am 70, and we are going to be engaged in an interview about Binghamton in the (19)60s, as I understand it, Harpur as I knew it then. We are at my law offices at 505 5th Avenue in the law firm Lankler, Siffert and Wohl.

IG: 00:17
And where are we?

IG: 00:29
Okay, so um, just let us start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

DH: 00:36
I grew up between, I mean, half the time in Manhattan, half the time in the Bronx.

IG: 00:41
Oh-oh.

DH: 00:43
I was born in Manhattan. We moved to the Bronx. We moved back to Manhattan, we moved back to the Bronx.

IG: 00:49
What did your parents do?

DH: 00:51
They were both court reporters. They both were- my father--I forget it took it as a, as-as an achievement of distinction, was one of the earliest users of the stenotype, and my mother, was a little bit younger, learned the stenotype, and they both worked in the New York court system. So, my father was assigned to the Bronx Supreme Court and the Manhattan Supreme Court. We moved back and forth.

IG: 01:20
And tell me a little bit about your parents where you know, did they grow up in the United States?

DH: 01:28
Right. My parents both were born in the United States. My mother was born on the Lower East Side. My father was born in what is in Harlem, actually near Burt Lancaster and both of them were born before the First World War. Their parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe.

IG: 01:56
Um, so their parents came. I am just curious, because I-

DH: 02:02
Pretty much between all four grandparents came in the 15 years between 1885 and 1900.

IG: 02:11
I see, I see, okay. Um, all right, so did your parents went to college?

DH: 02:19
My father went to college. My mother did not.

IG: 02:23
But there was an expectation that you would go on.

DH: 02:26
Yes.

IG: 02:26
You- that you would go to college. Did you have any siblings?

DH: 02:30
I have a sister. She also went to college.

IG: 02:32
Okay, so education, I assume, was valued in your family.

DH: 02:37
Yes, and then, I mean, all of my friends in the- I mean, I went to Stuyvesant, and I think we had like, a 95 percent college rate, so it was just assumed that I would go to college.

IG: 02:53
So, what were your reasons for going to Harpur?

DH: 02:57
To be candid, I did not get into Yale, um, and Harpur was a good, a good school, from my father's point of view. It was also the attraction of being an inexpensive school in those days. I forget what it cost, but it was nothing. And if you had-- the state gave out Regent Scholarships and stuff, and it really was, maybe it was $2,500 a year or something like that.

IG: 03:24
And did you get a Regent Scholarship?

DH: 03:27
I did, and there were various other forms of financial aid, and you could get a job as a messenger and some something, so that it was really no burden, either the students or the students’ parents.

IG: 03:39
Had you ever gone upstate before coming to Binghamton?

DH: 03:43
I had never gone to Binghamton before, but yeah, no, we would be in upstate. I mean, we had been, we have been to Niagara Falls and places like that. Binghamton—I-I think I had heard of Binghamton because Rod Serling, whose TV show I think I watched. I think Rod Serling that lived in Binghamton for a while.

IG: 04:01
Yeah, I know that, and I do not know that he graduated, but he did live there. that is true, I remember that. So, what did- what was your reputation of Harpur College back then?

DH: 04:16
I do not know what his general reputation was, but the reputation--I had a very good friend whose brother went to Harpur and who spoke very well of it, and it was thought of as being a better school than city. I mean, if you were going to go to a school that was not expensive, it was thought of as being a better place to go than city, and it had a good reputation. I mean, it was very small back then. I started in the summer, and there were, like 1200 I think there were 1200 students in the summer of (19)64.

IG: 04:51
Summer of (19)64.

DH: 04:51
Right. You know, those members of my family who were very big on credentials kind of denigrated the school. School, because it was not Princeton.

IG: 05:01
Right.

DH: 05:02
But then I did not get into Princeton, so, you know, I mean, it was, it was a good school, and I was happy to go there.

IG: 05:08
Yeah. So, did you visit the school before coming there in the summer?

DH: 05:12
No, I did not, I did not.

IG: 05:12
This was-

DH: 05:14
Yeah.

IG: 05:14
You know, you saw for the first time as you-

DH: 05:17
Right.

IG: 05:18
-entered the program. So, what were your first impressions? I mean, it was pretty rural.

DH: 05:24
Well, my first impression was a little bit distressed by the sort of dreary brick buildings, which reminded me of the projects in New York. They seemed to be the sort of New York State institutional style of building, but the area around it, the school was beautiful. And in those days, Binghamton was not an unsophisticated place. I mean, it had IBM, it had Ansco, it had quite a few industries with highly educated, you know, engineers and stuff, places that I think have now closed down and moved away. So, I mean, it was mixed. I was a little lonely for being away from home. On the other hand, a little excited about being away from home. And I really was taken with how beautifully the surrounding countryside was that was before I realized that it rained 90 percent of the time.

IG: 06:26
Because you came there in the most beautiful season-

DH: 06:29
Exactly.

IG: 06:29
-in Binghamton. And so, the school had changed to a trimester system-

DH: 06:35
Right.

IG: 06:36
-by the time that you arrived.

DH: 06:37
Right. And in the summer, I mean, that I started, nobody took school particularly seriously, and it was like being in a kind of quasi summer camp with an academic patina to it. I mean, maybe like going to music camp for kids to do that. It was a great--I had a wonderful time that first summer, and then in September or October, whenever the second trimester began, then school began to get more serious.

IG: 07:05
Did you have an idea of what you wanted to study, what you wanted to get from Harpur College?

DH: 07:12
I cannot say that I did. I mean, being a lawyer was always- because both of my parents were connected with the court system. Being a lawyer was always sort of in the background, but I wrote for the school paper, and I went to Columbia, the school of journalism, and for a while I thought of being a journalist, so I was not really set on any particular profession. And um-

IG: 07:36
Did you go to the school of journalism right after graduating?

DH: 07:39
I did. I did, and I found that I had no particular talent for sciences. So, I mean, I flunked chemistry, I remember, and so, yeah, I just took literature and history courses and made some friends among the faculty.

IG: 07:55
Tell me what- we will stay on this topic a little bit. So, tell me a little bit about the school newspaper, because none of my interviewees have spoken about that yet.

DH: 08:09
Well, the school newspaper was actually a fairly good paper, which came out, as I recall, twice a week. It was then called the Colonial News because, for reasons that I do not recall--Binghamton, the school were the colonials. That was its nickname. It later became the Pipe Dream. If that is still the name,

IG: 08:28
Yes, there is still the Pipe Dream.

DH: 08:31
And, you know, it was not a lot of news on the campus those days, so that most of the stuff was, you know, articles, kids got everybody wanted to be a reviewer of the drama. Tony Kornheiser was the editor of the sports section. I was the feature news editor. And it was interesting. I mean, you got to write a lot. And in fact, since there was not a lot of other stuff to read on campus, I mean, if you wrote for the newspaper, good portion of the school read it.

IG: 09:10
So, what kind of things did you write about?

IG: 09:11
At Stuyvesant?

DH: 09:11
I started off reviewing plays I had been in my senior year play it in high school. So, I thought for a while-

DH: 09:13
At Stuyvesant. I thought for a while maybe I would be involved in drama at Harpur, and I was not a good actor, but I started reviewing plays. And then I- when I became Features Editor, I wrote about everything. I mean, I wrote about- we did reviews of the various departments, something that was really- we were not qualified to and we just tried to fill space. I mean, it is not easy to fill two pages of feature stuff in a school of that size twice a week.

IG: 09:54
No, I can appreciate that. I worked as a reporter.

IG: 09:59
Um, so, um-

DH: 09:59
Oh.

DH: 10:03
The thing about the school in those days was it was small enough so that if you really wanted to, you could participate in almost anything, something that would be a lot harder in a large school. I mean, you could be in plays, even if you were not particularly talented. You could write for the paper. There was a literary magazine you could write for that.

IG: 10:21
I did not know. I did not know that there was a literary magazine.

DH: 10:24
Well, Milt Kessler [Milton Kessler], who was the poet, the school poet. Then, as I recall, was the faculty advisor. And no, so it was a good experience. I mean, you could really get a taste of a lot of different things, activities.

IG: 10:34
And the- there was a good theater program, because there is still a very good theater program.

DH: 10:48
Well, it was not good in the sense of turning out professional

DH: 10:54
productions, but it was good in the sense of being ambitious, of being of having a kind of educational rather than theatrical aim, I mean it, it selected plays of the past- Shakespeare was never put on, which I think was a mistake, but plays by lesser playwrights that well, there was an Ibsen [Henrik Ibsen] play, Rosmersholm- Rosmersholm that was put on was a bit of a disaster. There were plays by Brecht. I mean, there were serious plays that one would not see in New York that the department put on. And there were usually large productions in which everybody who wanted to participate could participate, and then that was supplemented by a one act program in which theater majors directed a play, so that it was like off Broadway, more of on guard stuff was put on, in addition to the stuff chosen by the department itself.

IG: 12:00
Do you remember any of the pieces that-

DH: 12:02
There was a- I remember, and I- what is his name, Synge, S, Y, N, G, E, an Irish playwright--there was, I forget the name of the play that was put on. I was, I was in that, and cannot remember many others, but, you know, in some ways they were more fun because the directors were students, little bit older than yourself.

IG: 12:28
Right.

DH: 12:28
And they spent a lot of time and a lot of passion in-in doing it. Oh, yeah, no, there was also a play the End Game we put on. I had a part in that. So, yeah, I mean, my goodness. I mean, I really do not have acting talent, but I managed to-

IG: 12:47
It is so wonderful to have that experience.

DH: 12:50
Yeah. I mean, I had an opportunity to participate in stuff that I would never have had if I had been on a major campus.

IG: 12:52
Right-right. Do you think that any of the plays that were staged were, in some kind of weigh a commentary on the times, because this-

DH: 13:04
I do not know, pony, it is hard to-

IG: 13:06
No.

DH: 13:07
It is hard. I mean, it is hard to see an immediate connection. They did not, I mean, I am not really sure they did put on- I mean, they did put on, you know, Arturo, we and I, and I and I suppose I think that was actually a student production, and I think that the person who put it on probably had some connection in his mind between that and Lyndon Johnson, but it was not an immediate connection.

IG: 13:36
Right. Yeah, okay, and about your newspaper, so did you what-what were some of the, I mean, the Vietnam for force was on everyone's mind.

DH: 13:46
And there was a, there was a Marxist professor, not, it was not a professor. It was a Marxist scholar. Isaac Deutscher was a very famous scholar. And-

IG: 13:56
I know the name.

DH: 13:57
Yeah, was a wonderful man--had been unable to get a permanent position in England, because it now turns out, he was blacklisted by Isaiah Berlin. And he came to-

IG: 14:11
He was blacklisted by Isaiah I cannot believe it.

DH: 14:14
Yeah, well, it has come out that Isaiah Berlin had some animus towards him, and there was job opening, I think, at University of Sheffield. [IG speaks in the background ,inaudible] Yeah. Well, he was a wonderful man. He was one of the most charming, sophisticated men I have ever met.

IG: 14:14
You met him?

DH: 14:16
Oh, I spent a lot of time with him. Yeah.

IG: 14:28
How did you spend a lot of time-

DH: 14:39
Well, he was, he was, he was, he was on the campus full time as a visiting scholar. In fact, he was hoping to get an appointment on the faculty-

IG: 14:49
Right.

DH: 14:50
-which did not happen. In any event, he died a year or two thereafter, but, um, you know, we had read the Prophet Unarmed [The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929]. We have read one of in a history class. We had read one of the three, one of the trilogy that he had written about Trotsky, and he was very well known.

IG: 15:09
Right.

DH: 15:10
And I met him at, I do not know, various faculty dinners that I was invited to, and I organized a debate between Deutscher and several of the professors at Harpur.

IG: 15:25
Where was this?

DH: 15:26
This was at Harpur.

IG: 15:28
This was at Harpur!

DH: 15:29
We had. It was on the radio. Yeah.

IG: 15:31
That is tremendous.

DH: 15:32
Yeah. He was, he was so [inaudible]. I had very primitive notions about what a Marxist scholar would believe that I thought he would believe in, you know, the inevitability of Marxism and-and that he would believe that art should be used only for the purposes of revolutionary change. And this guy was so sophisticated that I began to blush-

IG: 15:57
Right.

DH: 15:57
-as I would raise my objections to him. I mean, it was, he was a remarkable man. And, you know, Rebecca Grajower, I do not know if her name ever came out. There was a lady professor of political science who fell in love with Deutsche and posted a lot of different things in which students can meet with him. And I went over to he had a very modest little apartment in one of the dorms that he was given there.

IG: 16:29
That blows me away. [crosstalk] I have never respected that people of that stature would be at Harpur College.

DH: 16:35
Well, he was, of course, an unusual situation, because he had been unable to get jobs-

IG: 16:40
Right-right.

DH: 16:40
-in England, and I guess, probably in those days, a job at a state school New York probably would pay fairly well. A guy named Blair Ewing made it impossible for him to get the job at Harpur, he wrote this denunciation of Deutscher as a Marxist, that kind of turned the tide. Yeah, it is funny. It is unfortunate. Mel Shefftz [Melvin Shefftz, History Department] you never came into touch with, did you?

IG: 17:08
No.

DH: 17:09
He was a professor at Harpur, uh, died in 2011 who was very much touched by Deutscher--really thought highly of them. And, you know, if you were interested in Deutscher tenure at Harpur, could have told you a lot about him. I just thought he was really he had a first-rate mind. I mean, it is clearly a level above most of the professors we had. We had able professors, but Deutscher was on a level above them.

IG: 17:37
I mean, yeah, this is, I even I heard of him, you know, without any Binghamton before Binghamton and I certainly have read Isaiah Berlin's essays on Russian culture, Russian literature, the Hedgehog on the Fox. And I read his I read the biography of him by-

DH: 17:59
by Michael Ignatieff [crosstalk]

IG: 17:59
[inaudible] Ignatieff and he is now a politician in Canada.

DH: 17:59
Well, I think that biography actually talks about-about the episode with Berlin and Deutscher.

DH: 18:12
So anyway, that was one of the-

IG: 18:15
Tell me. Told me about these meetings with Professor Deutscher outside of the classroom. You said that there were faculty dinners that uh-

DH: 18:27
I do not know if they were formal faculty dinners. There were a group of- there were an awful lot of old-line Marxists on the Harpur faculty, but a very different type than I gather exists today. These were people who were scholars, who were, you know, they-they were, they were, they were not people necessarily, who came out of any movement, but they were people who were persuaded that the Marxist analysis was correct. And all of a sudden, one of the leading Marxist intellectuals appears on campus, and in that little world, he was a rock star. So, there were a constant set of dinners and lunches and-and lectures. I mean, he gave a like a seven- or eight-part series of lecture on Marx's theory that were packed, and we had a couple of East European emigres who gave them very spirited objections. And it was intellectually very exciting. I mean, you got a sense of what a genuine first-rate mind was like.

IG: 19:39
Well, because they were, you know, they were- their agenda, their intellectual, you know, their philosophy was really informed by lived experience.

DH: 19:51
Yeah.

IG: 19:51
You know, they lived through the wars, they lived through Marxism. You know, they lived so it was, it was-

DH: 19:58
But he was also a man of very deep European culture.

IG: 20:01
Yeah.

DH: 20:02
Um, and yeah. So.

IG: 20:05
So, how was it? How was it to mix with these towering intellects?

DH: 20:11
Well, he was very different than-than the normal professor [inaudible] that-that Harpur. I mean, to meet Deutscher would was to be inspired. I mean, even today, at the age of 70, if I had to think of the half dozen most impressive and admirable people that I have met, I mean, I would, I would list him as one.

IG: 20:35
Yeah.

DH: 20:37
He was- he had a kind of charm, which was overwhelming and which was really hard to describe, because he was not a physically impressive guy. He was this little guy, about five foot three, but was- it comes out a little bit actually, in his books which have this kind of ornate quality to them. No, I love Deutscher, and a lot of other people love Deutscher, and we were all- it would have been great if he could have gotten a permanent position at Binghamton. My relationship with other faculty members was, again, I think, probably a little bit different than it would have been if I had gone to Columbia-

DH: 21:19
-in the sense of, you know, these people did not commute from great different distances they lived on or near campus. So, you were able to form some close relations. And I formed a couple that continued until I was in my mid (19)60s, and they were, of course, 20 years older. I do not know if that is what goes on now.

IG: 21:21
Right.

IG: 21:46
That- you know, it certainly goes on you know, from my experience at the graduate level, professors and their graduate students sometimes, you know, form lifelong relationships, especially if they are proteges of these professors. But at the undergraduate level, it is different, so really unusual.

DH: 22:09
It was not a great- there was not a large graduate school presence when I was in an undergrad. So anyway, what can I tell you.

IG: 22:21
That is, that is really, I mean, just out of my own curiosity, how did Isaiah Berlin, I mean, he had this atrophied arm, right?

DH: 22:29
I do not [inaudible] He had a limp, I thought, but he had some sort of lameness, yeah.

IG: 22:33
He had polio.

DH: 22:34
How did he, um blacklist-

IG: 22:37
No, how did he strike you as an individual?

DH: 22:39
Isaiah Berlin, I never met.

IG: 22:40
Oh, you never met him. He was not-

DH: 22:42
No, I am talking about Isaac Deutscher.

IG: 22:43
I understand. But I thought that Isaiah Berlin came to one-

DH: 22:47
No-no-no.

IG: 22:48
Okay.

DH: 22:49
Isaiah Berlin's connection Isaac Deutscher was simply, as I understand it. He had blacklisted him in England.

IG: 22:55
I am sorry, right? I am sorry. I thought that he was, at one point, you know, friends and would come to this. I am sorry. Okay, so you said that you know you formed relationships with faculty that lasted over a lifetime.

DH: 23:12
Yeah.

IG: 23:13
So, who you know?

DH: 23:15
Well, all right, so I do not these are names. I do not know if they are going to be familiar. One was Mel Shefftz, who was a professor of European history. Another was a guy named John Hagopian, who was this brilliant but very difficult English professor who, whenever I would meet him after school, was involved in some new affair that had just broke his heart. It

DH: 23:44
was overly dramatic about it. Another one was a very odd and ultimately-

IG: 23:49
And he would confide in you.

DH: 23:50
Yeah, he would, I mean, I think he would confide it in everyone. He is- I want to throw myself. I remember he once said, “I want to throw myself off the Library Tower.” It was-

IG: 24:01
Was he that much older than you? Or probably-

DH: 24:04
[inaudible] he had been a World War two veteran. I remember him telling stories about World War Two. He was in love with a woman named Betty Aswat Aswad, who may have wound up on the faculty. I am not sure. Yeah, I do not know. There was T. Patterson Brown, who later spent several years in jail for pedophilia. Has his name come up in any of these?

IG: 24:31
No.

DH: 24:32
He was a charismatic philosophy professor who had been in graduate school at Oxford and was a genuinely brilliant man, but really not a good guy. He actually turned me on to marijuana the first time. He decided that he was a proselytizer for it. He thought that all kinds of- he believed, with Timothy Leary, that it was a gateway to great, new forms of perception. And then he went off and became a cult leader and. Uh, Bruce Leon Goldstein, I remember interviewed me because he was keeping a file on Brown. He wanted to get rid of him. He was the department chair of philosophy.

IG: 25:12
That is, yeah, incredible.

DH: 25:12
And Brown later went to jail for four or five years when I was an Assistant US Attorney, Brown saw me on TV and wanted me to somehow intervene in his case. I forget what it was exactly that he wanted, but I did a little research, and it turned out the charges were true. So, yeah, Brown was-

IG: 25:13
Really colorful.

DH: 25:42
Yeah, colorful group of colorful group of people. And I do not remember other--you know, the faculty at Binghamton, those youth was interesting. A lot of them were really very intelligent people, but they were often unproductive. There was always a reason why they were Binghamton rather than at some larger school, and it usually was the fact that smart as they were, they had not written very much, yeah, or they had gotten involved in some field that nobody else was interested in. I remember Robin Oggins, who, I guess, was there until recently, I am not sure-

IG: 26:19
And who was she or he?

DH: 26:21
Was he. He did his dissertation on falconry, and there was not really a big market for that.

IG: 26:29
Yeah, and yet, you know, places like Columbia had many of these people with very niche interests, and they so but that is really interesting. You are the first person to talk about these people. So, you know you meant you talked about how these faculty members made an impression on you, but did the just the closeness of being around these intellects, these academics did that, but did that give you, you know-

DH: 27:14
I cannot say that, you know-

IG: 27:16
-confidence did that, you know.

DH: 27:18
I mean, well, the fact that they treated me as a kind of equal. Even though younger person, and gave me confidence. I had far more confidence that I should have had in those days in any event.

IG: 27:30
Why do you say that?

DH: 27:31
Well, I mean, because I was like the typical jerk, you know, spouting off in class about stuff that I know nothing about, giving my theory of the universe.

IG: 27:41
Well, like what, you know [inaudible]

DH: 27:42
I remember we were talking about Brecht and alienation, and it triggered this thing that I started talking about alienation in general, which of course, was not what Brecht meant by alienation at all. And it was only later, when I actually read the assignment that I should have read beforehand, that I realized beforehand, that I realized what a fool I had made of myself. So, I mean, I do not know. And then when I went to law school, University of Chicago, then I met some really serious intellectuals, in a way that my professors at Binghamton were not. I mean, they may have been as intelligent, but they were not as ambitious. They were not as consumed by, you know, the field that they were teaching.

IG: 28:29
Right-right. But in some way, it is kind of a softer introduction to this world.

DH: 28:36
I am not unhappy about going to [inaudible] I am in Binghamton. I had a lot of fun.

IG: 28:39
And, you know, so-so was there any, were you involved in any kind of student activism?

DH: 28:48
No, you know, it is funny that you should- the activism at Harpur in those days was almost all about the war. There was almost, I do not remember any civil rights activism. There was a group that I belonged to that we had a Saturday morning program for inner city the extent that there were inner city kids in those days at-at, in Binghamton. And, you know, everyone in his heart supported it, but the real demonstrations and the rallies and the trips to Washington were about the war. There were not many black students in Binghamton in those years. I mean, I only remember a handful, and a couple of those were foreign students. Yeah, and the woman's movement did not really become big until after I left. I mean, maybe in 1968 when I graduated, it was beginning to percolate up upward. But it was, it was the war that 90 percent I mean, the free I remember in (19)64 when I first started, when the free speech movement in Berkeley started, there was a rally that was in sympathy to the free speech movement. And there was some, I mean, I remember there were restrictions on women in the dorms how late they could stay out. And that caused, yeah, and I remember Bruce Dearing, the president, trying to come up with some justification for this, obviously not believing in it himself and but there was, it was, there was the stuff that concerns campuses today was not present on-on Binghamton campus in those days on the Harford campus. It was the war that consumed everyone. And I met my first- I mean, I-I met in my first year, I met two guys lived in my dorm who were returning GIs, who had been in Vietnam.

IG: 28:53
Did they talk about the war?

DH: 30:03
They did mostly the difference because I was 16 when I started this difference between a 16-year-old and [crosstalk]

IG: 31:18
It is huge.

DH: 31:19
Yeah, especially at 20. Well, I was just about to turn 17, so I- but and a 20-year-old, or a 21-year-old who had been to Vietnam was really just a different category entirely. So, I was just mostly impressed by these guys. They seemed, you know, really grown-up people. And I remember gradually how the Vietnam thing began to progress and how students began to get angrier and angrier. In the very beginning, all of the petitions and all the speeches were how this is inconsistent with American tradition. And as time went on, it was, you know, American imperialism and stuff like that. And then I came, when I went into the army myself, and when I got out of the army, I came back to Binghamton for a year. And I mean, at that point the-

IG: 32:12
Tell us about that. I mean, you went to the army.

DH: 32:15
I was drafted. I went to this Columbia School of Journalism. I was drafted into the army. I spent two years in Germany. I got out. I had not any particular plans. I had an idea of going to law school, but there was a period of a year before I could get into law school, and I decided, well, I will go back for masters at Binghamton. And I went back and they would and this was three or four years after I graduated, and the school had been transformed, there was a much bigger graduate presence.

IG: 32:45
So what year was this?

DH: 32:47
This was (19)70 the (19)71 to (19)72 and the there was some violence. There was a larger black presence. There were some demonstrations the basketball team boycotted, asking that the coach be removed. It was just a different place. I mean, it was a different campus, and the Vietnam War had really become the focus of a tremendous amount of student activities. I remember Senator Goodell [Charles E. Goodell] --was that his name spoke on the campus. He had said, you have to get out, and we ought to get out in 90 days. And he was picketed by the Spartacus League, because why should they wait 90 days? [laughter] That is really what they said. Yeah, but it was just a very big change in that short period of time. And then, and of course, then the women's movement had begun to really take hold in the minds of a lot of women. So.

IG: 33:54
So, tell us about your career. I am not speaking in the royal way. I say us, because people will be listening to us. So, what, tell us about your career, you went to Columbia Journalism School, then you went to the army. Did you have any was there any idea of making a career in journalism at some point?

DH: 34:22
There was, but after a year in journalism school, I felt this is not for me.

IG: 34:24
Why not?

DH: 34:32
I just felt what I wanted to do was feature writing, and what basically exploded was the new journalism as a form, I mean, the Mailer books, the Armies of the Night-

IG: 34:47
Right-right.

DH: 34:48
Miami, and the Siege of Chicago. And that was something that I really would like to have done, but I just felt it was emotionally overwhelming to do that sort of thing. And. Also required a tremendous amount of talent-

IG: 35:04
And time.

DH: 35:05
-and time, and I- you know, unless, like Mailer, you were willing to take cocaine, marijuana and drink yourself after death, it was not something that I thought you could do. So, I went into the Army. I was a law clerk in the army, and the idea began to coalesce between that and the fact that I always was around the courts when I was a kid--of being a lawyer, I went out, I spent a year, I got a Master's at Binghamton in history, and then I went to law school. And after law school, I went to work for a big Wall Street firm for a couple of years, and then went to the Justice Department, where I was a federal prosecutor for 70 years, 70 years, excuse me, for seven years. Yeah, seven years would be a long time as a prosecutor. And I was, I started off in the antitrust division, and then I was assigned to Mariel, Florida. There was a big boat lift from Cuba then, and there were a lot of prosecutions, and then I came up to New York, and ever since I left the government, I have been doing defense work. I, for time, I tried a lot of murder cases. Now, at the age of 70, I spend a lot of time writing letters saying, I am shocked by what your client has done to my client, in which trigger a letter back saying, no, no, you have it backwards. It was what my client has done to their client. So, my practice is not quite as interesting as it once was, but-

IG: 36:34
Maybe it is time to-

DH: 36:36
Segue into something else.

IG: 36:37
Yeah. Well, I mean, continue this, but you know, think, think of the new journalism feature pieces that you are planning to write.

DH: 36:44
What I would like to do is, I mean, if I had $10 billion, I would divide it in half, give half of it to prison reform and half of it to saving the great apes. But not having $10 billion.

IG: 37:01
You write letters.

DH: 37:02
I write letters so.

IG: 37:05
How do you think your classmates or your you know; professors would remember you from that time? I mean, you describe yourself a little bit-

DH: 37:18
Well, you know, I think most of the except for the few classmates that I remain friends with, if any of them remembered me at all, it would be because I gave speeches at the stepping on the coat ceremony. Is that still going on?

IG: 37:30
I think so.

DH: 37:31
Yeah, so I do not really. I mean, I would hope that they would remember me as someone who gave amusing speeches, the people who I was close with probably remember me as someone who was smart and crazy somehow out of control, I think.

IG: 37:52
How out of control?

DH: 37:53
Oh, I mean, not anything that today would be considered a very big deal. But I did not go to classes. I smoked a lot of after deep [inaudible], a lot of marijuana. I mean-

IG: 38:09
You still got A's.

DH: 38:11
No, I got A's in some subjects, history, I did not do well in chemistry, which you actually had to learn something. I mean, and, and, I do not know. I mean, it is funny. I, there the there was only one person who went on to be a star in my year, and that is Camille Paglia. And I barely knew Camille at all.

IG: 38:35
Was she in any of your classes?

DH: 38:37
No. I mean, I guess we knew each other vaguely because I wrote for the paper and because Camille was the valedictorian of the class. I do not know that anybody else in our year went on to any particular degree of celebrity. I do not know when I do meet people after 30 years that I have not been in contact with the most common remark is, you know, you said to me, X, 30 years ago, but I forgive you. So, I gather that I was a pretty rude kid back then.

DH: 39:14
Yeah. I mean, I hope it was something more that, you know, you illuminated Shakespeare for me, but that is not what I get. What do you see a common thread in the people that you have interviewed Is there a quality of Harpur student that is different than just the ordinary person who grew up in the (19)60s?

IG: 39:14
Yeah.

IG: 39:34
I think that, well, the commonalities are that they, many of them think that they received the kind of, you know, education that you would expect of a small, elite college.

DH: 39:56
Yeah.

IG: 39:57
So especially the early graduates thought that, you know, they had just an academically superior experience. Um, as far as their and also, you know, as a demographic, many of the many of you are from the New York City area or from Long Island. I mean, that still remains true. But people have done such interesting things. Some-some, you know, some have had just good careers. But, you know, there are a number of people who I-I spoke with somebody just a few weeks ago who was this ethics professor at Columbia Medical Center, and he has written books on AIDS and-and collaborated with the president of AmfAR, Mathilde Krim, I think, for you know, but he so he became quite prominent. I am going to be meeting with somebody who is, you know, one of the head researchers at the NIH, and I forget what area of neuroscience, but, you know, I just, I am going to be seeing for another person is the head of her own nonprofit, you know, so-so there is, you know, there is a range.

DH: 41:32
Right. It is funny, you should mention demographics, because the sort of unstated, adventures of my early years at Harpur was meeting people from outside the New York City area, and I never really done that before. And I had a friend, Willie Malchek, who was a bingy, as we called them, who said the same was true in reverse, that they were a little bit afraid. They were told that all these kids from downstate coming up who are very smart and ambitious and but in fact, the differences between downstate and upstate were sufficiently small that it really did not hinder friendships. I mean, it is funny that that should have been an issue. I mean, considering the cultural clashes that I suppose exist now, yeah, no, I met people from Herkimer. I had not even known that that was a locale.

IG: 42:31
I know exactly where that is Herkimer.

DH: 42:33
Where is it? Is that in-

IG: 42:35
By Utica, it is by Utica. So, you know. But do you think that these cultural differences were overcome in time, or your maybe not cultural differences, but your relationships were-

DH: 42:50
Yeah, I do not think that they were sufficiently large to be impediments. I met believing Christians for the first time in my life, and that was interesting to me, and it kind of maybe prepared me for the army, where I actually met people who thought that unless I converted, I was going to go to hell, and were not nasty about it, but sort of anguished about it. I mean, so that was one big, one big difference in that. But I mean, as I say, there were no oh, oh. And for me, coming from an all-boys school, it took me a year or two to get my head around the fact that there were girls in class, which had not, I mean, there was only one or two women teachers at Stuyvesant, and there were no girls in the school. So, it was-

IG: 43:35
That is right, it was a boy school.

DH: 43:36
It was a boy’s school in those days, yeah. So that was something that was a bit of, I mean, it was, it was just interesting. I could not believe it. I was happy about it. But at the same time, it just is not this against some rule. And I do not, I have there were some women on the faculty. I took many more than in law school. We only had one woman in my law school, professor.

IG: 44:10
What I am thinking because you have, you have answered many of the questions that I was going to ask. So, you know what-what do you what are the most important lessons that you learned from this period in your life? How did it open?

DH: 44:34
Yeah, I think that is important lessons. I do not know. I think of them in lessons I found because I have a tendency to withdraw and isolate myself.

IG: 44:44
Right.

DH: 44:45
I think that the lesson is that, in fact, the opposite approach of engaging in stuff, even if you are not super talented and not going to be preeminent, is a much shorter. Way to satisfaction, fulfillment than withdrawing. You know, it is funny that is so long ago, I think of it almost like Ivanhoe. I mean, it seems it is 50 years ago. I mean, it-it has a kind of shine for me those years. I mean, not only because of my youth at the time, but because it was just so much simpler. The country was so much simpler, and, um, it was fun. I mean, we played football on the lawn, and there were tennis courts, and it was a good time to be alive and to go to school.

IG: 45:40
Right. What preoccupied you during those years? Do you remember?

DH: 45:46
Oh, I think the things that preoccupied, I mean, I felt that was short. I mean I remember; I mean global warming; I suppose a certain dignity being wishing that you were three inches taller does not. Um, same things that preoccupy, no, I had a tremendous crush on a girl who I now in retrospect, see was kind of bewildered and puzzled as to how to gently reject me. And Nancy Halper, who, who I have not spoken to in 50 years. I did not. I, in fact, the people that I was friendly with did not date until maybe our senior year.

IG: 46:34
I think that is because of the-

DH: 46:36
I think why I do not have any idea why that is, I think-

IG: 46:40
Maybe it was not. I do not either.

DH: 46:45
I do not think that that is, that is not, I do not think that that was typical of the entire population. It was, I suppose that I select, perhaps I selected friends-

IG: 46:55
Right.

DH: 46:55
-who had these qualities. I mean, I do not really know, but for some reason, the guys that I were I was friendly with, were kind of backward and in-in dating. And they certainly they were certainly not as free and as natural around women as it seems to me kids are today, nor were they as free and natural around people of different ethnicities as kids often seem to be today. I mean, there was a provincial quality. I suppose although we thought of ourselves as New York sophisticates, there was a provincial quality that we had. And then, I mean, I had various neuroses, as a lot of kids do. And I suppose my friends tended to be people who could accommodate that. Perhaps had some neurotics of their own. But in any event, we were a very backward group in terms of socially. We would just sort of go, walk around-

IG: 47:53
Kind of socializing, because apparently you were quiet, you know, you were quite adept you were socializing with these intellectual professors.

DH: 48:06
Right-right, okay, but it was a more of a cerebral kind of thing.

IG: 48:09
Right-right.

DH: 48:10
Yeah. And there was a big dorm life in those days. I do not remember. My recollection is that when, at least when we started, the dorms were single sex. And then they it was a big deal when they opened coed dorms.

IG: 48:24
Right.

DH: 48:25
So, there was a big dorm life in the evenings.

IG: 48:29
Right.

DH: 48:30
Usually, you know, amounting to jumping over chairs and stuff.

IG: 48:34
Yeah, and so-so you said you smoked pot a lot, and-

DH: 48:40
Only after I was turned on by Brown.

IG: 48:44
So where did you smoke? In your dorm room or in-in-

DH: 48:47
No, I, you know, I mean, I may be mixing up times here, when I was in the army, I certainly took a lot of-

IG: 48:55
Yeah.

DH: 48:55
-it was basically hash then.

IG: 48:57
Yeah.

DH: 48:58
In Harpur, I did not really smoke that much, but Brown turned me on. There was certain amount of it that went on in the in the in the dorms, not by any standard, a tremendous amount. But I did not drink, and there were not a lot of wild drinking parties. We did not have fraternities. We had some weird thing called social clubs. I do not know if they still have them that were just this very pale imitation of fraternities.

IG: 49:29
Yeah. So, did you belong to any of the social clubs?

DH: 49:33
No, and I remember a bunch of us mocking one guy who joined a group called the Odeon’s and they gave him some bizarre tasks. He had to get signatures written backwards, or I forget what it was, but no one ever took that particularly seriously. The big thing was living off campus that was considered the really-

IG: 49:59
Being semi-independent

DH: 50:01
Yeah, there was a sense of emancipation when we did that. Finally, you were not on for the first time in your life, you were really not being monitored closely by anybody. So, I did not.

DH: 50:01
What kind of music did you listen to?

DH: 50:10
You know, I was late on that. I seem to have been late in everything. I remember in 1967 learning about the band, but I was late on Dylan, who I now love, but I remember somebody finally got highway 61 and listening to it and not being able to make head or tails of it. And it was only, frankly, it was a girl that I was dating many years later who really made me realize what a genius Dylan was. And I mean, I like the blues. I like the Butterfield blues band. I do not know if you know any of these names, but I was, yeah, I was not involved in any particularly avant garde stuff we had- I remember the people who came up were fairly eclectic bunch, Lovin' Spoonful played at Harpur, Buffy Sainte-Marie and I do not remember anybody else who had a name coming up when I was there.

IG: 51:17
Did you organize trips to New York City as a group?

DH: 51:20
No, did I organize? I am incapable of organizing anything. Yeah. I mean, we would go to New York City-

IG: 51:27
Yeah.

DH: 51:27
And once went to Washington for March against the war. But that was that there was a big political thing, whether or not the student union funds could be used for political purpose. Some of the conservative students were unhappy with that. Anyway.

IG: 51:50
You did not, you did not go to any of the clubs, for example, in New York City to listen to music.

DH: 51:57
No, I remember when I was at Stuyvesant. I remembered the-the I was in Stuyvesant (19)61 through (19)64 and Stuyvesant was on the Lower East Side, and the sort of Dave Van Ronk folk music scene began to sort of get and I was aware of the fact that that was developing, and I was aware of the fact that there was this guy named Dylan who was on the scene. But no, I was not deeply involved in any of that, nor was I particularly nuts about the Beatles I was in. I guess, my own little world in those days. It was only later that I really began. And I never really went to clubs. I mean all that much, but I mean I later I would go to concerts. So, I went to a couple of Dylan concerts and stuff. Yeah. I mean, was music a big thing for most of the other people that you have interviewed?

IG: 52:43
Some-some, just some.

DH: 52:50
Did you see the Vietnam series and on PBS?

IG: 52:55
I actually, I am afraid to say that I did not. I am completely aware of it.

DH: 52:59
Okay, but one of the most stirring things about that series was the music that they played, which was very well chosen. And really, you realize really, first of all how much very intelligent good music was written in those days, but also music's odd power to just evoke the whole atmosphere of a period 40 years ago. If you did you meet your mother, by the way, she lives nearby.

IG: 53:26
My mother?

DH: 53:27
Yeah.

IG: 53:27
I am staying over at my mother's house.

DH: 53:31
No-no, you emailed me. You saying this will give me an opportunity to-

IG: 53:35
Yes-yes, I am staying yeah-yeah. I mean she-she had she had guests. She has guests coming to her house frequently, so she could not do that to him. That is why I came now. So-so any lessons, and not any lessons, any advice that you want to impart to students, future students, listening to these tapes about you know, what they what they need to bring to their undergraduate to their college experience?

DH: 54:22
Well, I guess the advice it is always giving to students, which is that you are at a unique time in your life when you have resources available to you that will not be available to you elsewhere. There will be other advantages that you will have later in life that you do not have now, and you may have greater confidences, but you will never again have the opportunity to be in theater productions, to perhaps do film work, to write for newspapers, to do a range of activities that are professionalized in the rest of life, and which you just become an onlooker. So, one piece of advice I have is make use of it, and also by making use of it, you will often discover interests that you did not know you had, talents that you did not suspect that you had. You know the idea of going off and in a solitary way knowing yourself is implausible to me, because you often only know yourself by engaging in an activity and then finding that in fact, it is an activity that you love. So, all my advice would simply be, make use of the resources that are available to you. Do not despair if you are unhappy for a period of time or do not fit in, because that is often just part of the experience of being young, and enjoy Binghamton.

IG: 55:55
Happy, a happy, happiest memory of Binghamton.

DH: 56:00
Happy. Happiest memory of Binghamton. This is embarrassing to say. I cannot tell you what the happiest memory.

IG: 56:05
Okay.

DH: 56:09
But I remember throwing got into my head. There were two things that I remember that I cannot tell you. One is I was a big fan of Mickey Mantle is a name that probably is not familiar to many people anymore, but he was going to hit his eight and I made this boast in public, I will go anywhere on earth to see his 500th home-home run. And it turns out that he hit his 499th just before there was a Yankee Road trip to Kansas City, and the baseball team of Harpur gave me the number seven uniform, and their collection was taken up, and I went to Kansas City to see Mickey hit his 500th home run. So that is one happy memory, even though, but he turned out not to hit it there, but hit it in Yankee Stadium, three blocks from where I lived. And a second happy memory is the giant seafood gala that my roommates and I threw in our senior year. And I do not know why, but it was just an ecstatically enjoyable experience getting the lobster from the seafood mark, rather brutally throwing it in the boiling water and just having friends over. And I will tell you now the happiest moment, but it is embarrassing. It was when I thought this woman, Nancy Hopper, loved me, something that I was later disabused of. But for the moment, I was very happy. All right. Well, I hope that no one hears that late. I hope that the [crosstalk]

IG: 57:47
I thank you so much. It was-

DH: 57:51
Very nice.

(End of Interview)

2018-02-23

Irene Gashurov

1968

David S. Hammer

David has worked as a trial lawyer for more than 30 years and was engaged in civil and criminal litigation. He served in the U.S. Justice Department in the Antitrust Division and as an Assistant United States Attorney in Miami and in Manhattan. For the last two decades he has worked in private practice in New York.

Audio

Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in law; Harpur College – Alumni living in New York City

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Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in law; Harpur College – Alumni living in New York City