ABA Commission on Women in the Profession

Women Trailblazers in the Law

ORAL HISTORY

f

MARY MURPHY SCHROEDER

Interviewer: Patricia Lee Refo

Dates of Interviews:

August 30, 2006September 16, 2006October 13, 2006January 3, 2007

THE ORAL HISTORY OF THE HONORABLE MARY MURPHY SCHROEDER,

CHIEF JUDGE, UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

Voice Transcription

SESSION ONE

Refo:

Today is August 30th , 2006. My name is Trish Refo and I'm

sitting with Chief Judge Mary Schroeder and this is the first session

of the oral history for the Trailblazer's project, and thank you very

much for taking the time to do this with us. Let's begin at the

beginning. Tell me when and where you were born.

Schroeder:

I was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1940, which seems a very

long time ago. When I was born, there was a little story in the

Boulder Camera, the daily newspaper, saying that my father, Richard

Murphy was sitting in the waiting room of the maternity ward of

Community Hospital reading a book entitled "Reveries of a Bachelor."

I never knew whether that was true or not.

Refo:

(Laughter) That's a great story. And your mother was Theresa

Murphy?

Schroeder:

Yes.

Refo:

What was her maiden name?

Schroeder:

Theresa Kahn. She was a remarkable woman and she came

from one of the great Jewish families of Pittsburgh. My father was

the son of a wild Irishman who had studied for the priesthood.

Luckily for me, he decided against it. My parents were unable to

marry during the 30's. Nepotism laws prohibited the wife from

working for the same employer as the husband. Both needed the

jobs at the University of Pittsburgh to support their families. When

my father took a job in Colorado they decided they'd better get

married so that they could be together. They met at the University

of Pittsburgh. In the 20's she was the coach of the women's debate

team and he was the coach of the men's debate team.

Refo:

What were her parents' names?

Schroeder:

Well, her father's name was Charles Kahn. He was a merchant.

Her mother's name was Genevieve Guggenheim Kahn. Two cousins

named Guggenheim came to the United States several generations

before her. One of them has a very large museum named after him

in New York on 5th Avenue, and the other was my great-great

grandfather.

Refo:

O.K., and did your mother have siblings?

Schroeder:

Yes, she had several brothers and sisters. One of her sisters

was very talented musically. She was one of the first people to ever

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sing on the radio at KDKA, one of the country's earliest radio stations

and located in Pittsburgh. Two of her brothers were haberdashers.

Refo:

And your mom obviously was, was a working mom, when you

were growing up, or some part of that time?

Schroeder:

Well, they were in Colorado, when WWII broke out. Because

the draft took away many of the teachers the University permitted

her to teach along with my father, who was too old for military

duty. She always believed that women should do what they wanted

to do and that there was no reason why women couldn't do the

same things that men do. She was a feminist. She was born on

August 26th , which is women's suffrage day, 17 years, to the day,

before women got the right to vote.

Refo:

Wow.

Schroeder:

She later taught in the public schools in Champaign-Urbana,

Illinois, off and on, which is where I eventually grew up, and she was

always very active in community work.

Refo:

Where was she educated?

Schroeder:

She went to the University of Pittsburgh, as did my father.

They were both from western Pennsylvania and Pitt, (it has always

been called Pitt) was the great working class University of the area

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and it provided an awful lot of opportunities, particularly in the

Great Depression, after both my parents' families lost everything.

Refo:

I know sometimes it's hard to talk about the influences our

parents have on us but can you talk a little bit about the influence

your mom had on you?

Schroeder:

Well, my mother had incredible judgment. We moved to

Illinois when I was about five, after my father accepted a position

teaching at the University of Illinois. It was just after the war and my

mother was not able to work because they reinstituted nepotism

rules for whatever reason. We lived in a house that was very close to

downtown Urbana, Illinois, and everybody who came to shop would

stop in at our house to have a cup of coffee and talk to my mother.

I really got an education about life at my mother's kitchen table,

because everyone with any kind of problem came in to talk about it

with my mother. There were battered women, for example, whose

husbands were beating them and didn't want to leave the children.

There was one woman who thought there would be an election

scandal in a town about a hundred miles away, where some of the

ballot boxes were still locked up under an official's bed. There was

much worry about childrens' illnesses, delinquency and pregnancy.

Just about everything that you could imagine came through my

mother's kitchen, and I absorbed all of it.

Refo:

And your father was Richard Murphy?

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Schroeder:

Yes.

Refo:

And his heritage was Irish you said?

Schroeder:

His father was Irish but he married a woman who was of

German and Pennsylvania Dutch stock and who was a staunch

Methodist. It was a rather unusual union I think. He had three older

sisters and he was the caboose.

Schroeder:

His sisters were pillars of the WCTU and when my father's

father died, my father was basically raised by his sisters because his

mother wasn't able to care for him. His sisters were much older

than he.

Refo:

Obviously you never knew your father's father?

Schroeder:

No I didn't. Dennis Jerome Murphy was his name. My

brother, Richard Dennis, is named after him and my father. I was

named after my father's mother whose name was Mary Weber, W-e-

b-e-r, Murphy. She died when I was about three, so I never really

knew either of my paternal grandparents. My maternal

grandfather, Charlie Kahn died long before I was born, but I knew

my grandmother, Grandma Kahn. She was "formidable." She would

arrive on the train for a three week visit with her fox stole and an

intimidating aura. She wore the fox stole and beautiful rhinestone

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clips. I still have one of them. She had incredible posture and she

seemed to me about six feet tall I don't think she really was.

Refo:

Were you close to her as a kid?

Schroeder:

Not really, because she was rather scary and she didn't spend

that much time with us, but I liked her. She was Austrian and she

made wonderful cookies. She used some Yiddish words and used to

call my brother a "fresser," which I think meant that he ate a lot.

Refo:

Was there anybody in your childhood, the generation ahead of

your parents, either family or not family, who was particularly

important to you growing up?

Schroeder:

You know, I think ironically the family that I spent more time

with than any other was when I was in high school was the family of

one of the law professors at the law school, Ed Cleary. He taught

evidence and later was the Reporter for the Rules of Evidence. His

daughter Ann, a few years older than I, was very musically talented

and gave me flute lessons. Their second daughter Marty Cleary, who

is now Marty Cleary Strong, was one of my best friends, I loved the

Cleary house, a big house on Pennsylvania Street in Urbana, and I

loved Ed Cleary. He later came to Arizona to teach at Arizona State

and he was one of the big reasons I was willing to move there. I

didn't know anything about Phoenix, had never seen Arizona, and

the law school at Arizona State University was brand new, but I

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thought, "if it's good enough for Ed Cleary it's good enough for us."

He was raised in Jacksonville, Illinois (the same town my husband

came from) and Ed's parents were both deaf. They taught at the

state school for the deaf in Jacksonville and must have been quite

remarkable.

Refo:

Talk a little bit about the influences that your father had on

you.

Schroeder:

I adored my father. He loved his family, he loved words, and

he loved books. He had mountains of books, and every one of his

books had written in it where he purchased it and how much he

paid for it. He had a number of collections on argumentation,

debate, public speaking and elocution. He was an expert in

parliamentary procedure and so was my mother. They both

believed in parliamentary procedure, running orderly meetings, I

think that is why I am able sometimes to preside well over difficult

meetings, I think there's a certain "procedure" gene that people

have. So I've always loved civil procedure. Though I've never really

studied parliamentary procedure, I got a lot of it through osmosis

from my parents. My father would teach outside the University for

extra money, conducting seminars for union leaders on how to

conduct a good union meeting. Over there is a print of one of

Norman Rockwell's famous "Four Freedoms" series for the Saturday

Evening Post. This one is "Freedom of Speech" and depicts a man

speaking up at a union meeting. My father always had a print of that

in his office. He really believed in free speech. He was a member of

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the AAUP, American Association of University Professors Committee

on Academic Freedom. It tried to make sure that no professors

were fired for exercising their right to free speech. That was just a

core value for him so I think that must have had an influence on me

as well.

Refo:

You mentioned your brother Dennis. Is he older or younger?

Schroeder:

He's three years younger. He's an economist with the Federal

Trade Commission.

Refo:

Did you guys have a sibling rivalry relationship growing up?

Schroeder:

No, we were actually pretty close growing up. Well, to a

certain extent we had a rivalry, because he's very musical. When I

started taking piano lessons, I would pick the pieces out slowly,

painfully reading the notes on the page. When I finished my half an

hour mandatory practice, he would crawl up on the piano bench

and just play it all by ear. It was very discouraging.

Refo:

So he was born when you all were still in Boulder?

Schroeder:

He was born in Boulder but you know I have a theory that

people's brains get imprinted with the geography of where they

spend their first five years. I spent my first five years in Colorado,

and I love the mountains and the grandeur of Colorado. We left

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before he got that same imprint, so he was imprinted with the

prairie. And so I wound up in Arizona. I went to college in the east

near Philadelphia in a very beautiful suburb, but I tried to get back

west as soon as I could. My brother went to college at a wonderful

school named Grinnell, in Iowa. I remember driving him to college

for his freshman year and I had to get out of there after ten

minutes. I could not exist in that little town, in the middle of Iowa,

with one gas station, but he absolutely thrived in it.

Refo: n

Do you remember the move from Boulder to Urbana?

Schroeder:

Yes I do.

Refo:

Was that a big deal? Was that disruptive for you?

Schroeder:

It was disruptive because Colorado was so beautiful and it was

right after the war. We had this old car that kept breaking down. It

was a 1940 Hudson. There was no housing at the University of Illinois

because all of the veterans were coming back on the GI bill. We had

to buy an old house that was falling apart and redo it. It belonged

to an old lady that lived in it for eighty years. When the ceilings fell

in on one room she would just close off the room. It was pretty

traumatic for the family. I don't know how my parents did it with

these two little kids and the car that was always breaking down and

no decent housing. We had to live in a tourist cabin. There weren't

motels in those days. There were little tourist cabins, and we lived in

one for three weeks. The post war changes that occurred right

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after World War II had an impact on me and, I think, on many

members of my generation. I think we got imbued with a kind of

spirit of change and of moving forward.

Refo:

What grade school did you go to?

Schroeder:

I went to an elementary school called Leal School in Urbana,

Illinois.

Refo:

A public school?

Schroeder:

It was a public school. It was the best public school in Urbana.

Urbana had a pretty good public school system, because all

university towns generally have good public school systems. In fact,

and it's ironic, one of the reasons that I thought that it would be

good to move to Arizona was that I thought that we were moving to

a university town, Tempe, Arizona. It turns out that Tempe is really a

bedroom community for Phoenix, and we never lived in Tempe

anyway. we decided to live in Scottsdale. The "college town" in

Arizona was a great delusion on my part but it all worked out.

Refo:

Any special teachers that you remember in your grade school?

People who were of particular importance to you?

Schroeder:

I had a male teacher in sixth grade.

Refo:

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No kidding? So did I.

Schroeder:

Did you? Well I think it is quite unusual and I thought it was

very good for me to have a male teacher after all those women

teachers in elementary school. He was very supportive of the girls in

class and encouraged them to speak out. That did make an

impression on me.

Refo:

What was his name, do you remember?

Schroeder:

Mr. File.

Refo:

And middle school? Where did you go to middle school?

Schroeder:

I went to University High School which had a special program

called the "sub-freshman" program. I was one of those people who

was caught in an arbitrary cutoff date for starting first grade. If you

were born before December 1st then you started first grade at one

year and if you're born after December 1st you start it the next year.

I was born December 4th, so I was almost a year older than some of

my contemporaries in elementary school. Then I found out about

this program at University High School in Urbana, a laboratory school

operated by the University of Illinois. It had a program, that one had

to pass a test for admission, that combined seventh and eighth

grade. It was called a sub-freshman program. I did that program

and I was able to make up the year. I think that put me on track.

The upper classmen used to call the sub-freshmen the "subbies" and

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we were really pretty much at the bottom of the ladder, but it was a

good program for me. The rest of the high school was open to

anyone, but dominated by faculty children. I got a pretty good

education for what amounted to a midwestern public school

outside the great schools of the north shore suburbs of Chicago.

Our athletic teams were terrible and the kids at the Champion and

Urbana High Schools referred to us as "Puny Uni."

Refo:

Was it affiliated with the University?

Schroeder:

Yes, was run by the University as a laboratory school and was

supposed to be experimental. I think I got the short end of some of

the experiments.

Refo:

Like what?

Schroeder:

Well, the "New Math" started at Uni High. The genius of New

Math was a man named Max Beberman. He was a genius; he

admitted it and everyone knew it. But we were the very first kids,

to be experimented with and as a result I never learned any math. I

spent years trying to catch up a little bit to understand how calculus

works. I don't think that I ever did. Fortunately, my brother is fairly

mathematical, and as an economist, he's much better than I am. My

children are very good. I don't think that I'm an idiot

mathematically, but I just never "got it" and that was poor.

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On the other hand there were two other geniuses who taught

at the High School: one was in art and one was in music. The art

teacher's name was Mr. Laska and he took the little sub-freshmen

and gave them a survey art course, beginning with Egypt and going

all the way through Picasso, that changed my life. It just opened up

a whole world for me. The music teacher's name was warren

Schuetz. He was a genius too. I think both Laska and Schuetz never

finished getting their doctoral degrees because they began teaching

at University High School, and they just stayed there because they

loved the kids. Schuetz' genius was in getting all of the students to

participate in music programs, particularly choral music programs.

They would produce a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta every year and it

was the status symbol of the school to have a lead in the Gilbert &

Sullivan. (I didn't but my brother did.) The school had a "grand

reunion" decades later. Somebody asked, just for the heck of it, how

many people are still involved in music, and of the people who were

there who had been students in the era of warren Schuetz, an

unbelievable number raised their hands. I would say almost half or

at least a third of the people there had gone on to sing in choirs or

whatever, for life. He opened the world of music to all of us.

Schuetz did a survey course of music for the little sub-freshmen that

was remarkable. It took us from medieval music and Gregorian

chants up through Aaron Copeland.

Refo:

Wow. Am I right that you still have a love of Gilbert & Sullivan?

Schroeder:

Oh I still do.

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Refo:

Is that where it started?

Schroeder:

That's where it started. Of course you remember everything

that you learn when you're in high school, so I can still sing almost all

the words of a number of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Gilbert wrote

remarkable poetry about the law. He was so good at mocking the

law that a lot of lawyers and judges love Gilbert & Sullivan. Both

Justice Rehnquist and Justice Ginsburg loved Gilbert & Sullivan. They

sang and played some at the Chief's funeral, and Justice Ginsberg

appeared once or twice with Justice Rehnquist in Gilbert & Sullivan

productions.

Refo:

Were you a good student in high school?

Schroeder:

I was pretty good.

Refo:

What did you like the most? What classes besides the music

and the art?

Schroeder:

High school?

Refo:

Not math.

Schroeder:

No, not math. It's hard to say, I guess maybe I enjoyed social

studies the most, but I wasn't really much interested in classes. I still

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have a recurrent dream that I'm in French class and that I haven't

studied all year and an exam is coming up. It was a small school and

there were lots of activities, so I was on the student council and the

chorus and all of that. I had a lot of friends. One of my classmates

was George Will, the columnist.

Refo:

Is that right?

Schroeder:

Yes. I think he was the treasurer of the student council while I

was the chairman of the Finance Committee. We had to decide how

much money various activities should get and I think my prophecy in

our class yearbook was that I was still in a Finance Committee

meeting arguing with George Will. The great issue when we were on

the student council was whether or not sub-freshman should have

representation on the student council. George and I had a debate. I

supported having the sub-freshman represented on the student

council and he was opposed to it on the theory that the upper

classes could take care of the interests of the lower classes. I think

that that pretty much encapsulates our later philosophies as well.

There were four of us who used to hang out together. One was

Marty Cleary Strong, who eventually married John Strong, the son of

the Dean of the law school at Ohio State, and a very close friend of

Marty's father, Ed Cleary. I'm still very close to the Strongs. They

lived in Tucson for many years and he taught at the University of

Arizona Law School. I think their son is doing a residency in Tucson.

John and Marty now live in Oregon. I haven't seen them for a while

but we've stayed in touch over the years. There was Stewart Cohn,

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the son of another law professor, Ruben Cohn. Stew became a law

professor as well and he teaches, I think at the University of Florida, I

haven't been in touch with him in years, however.

Refo:

That's a pretty high powered high school four-some.

Schroeder:

It was a pretty high powered group, I suppose.

Refo:

How would you describe yourself when you were in high

school?

Schroeder:

Well, I could never get my hair to do what I wanted it to do. I

really enjoyed going out with groups of people. I dated a lot of

different folks. The class above me was unusual because it had 21

boys and 7 girls, or something like that, and so the odds were pretty

good and I enjoyed the University. I enjoyed growing up in a

University town and I liked to go to the library and order books at

the great University of Illinois library, and I loved sports. I avidly

followed the University of Illinois teams.

Refo:

Did you play sports in high school?

Schroeder:

No. That's one of my generational problems. Schools didn't

encourage girls to do sports. The boys would somehow come out

every Spring and they could run two miles, high jump and show off

other track skills. I was just amazed. Once a year they would have

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the girls go a quarter of a mile around the track and we'd just barely

make it. All of these boys seemed to know how to do this from the

get go.

Refo:

Okay this is tape two.

Schroeder:

We were talking about sports when I was in high school. In

later years I was rather bitter because I really would have liked to

learn some sports. I spent thirty years trying to learn how to play

tennis and finally gave up because it was too hard for me. I swim and

I've become a devotee of exercise, I do it religiously, every day, and I

think it's too bad that girls didn't have that opportunity to

participate in athletics at a high level when I was growing up in the

50's and the 60's. So I've been a great supporter of Title IX and I

think it's done a lot of good. Women are so much healthier today

and look so much better because we've become aware that you

have to be active physically. That simply was not understood when I

was growing up. Boys were active physically. Girls weren't. They

stayed home and learned to cook.

Refo:

Right. You were obviously a leader already in high school and

that's not something that's stopped. Any thoughts on where those

leadership skills and qualities came from that early?

Schroeder:

Well I never really thought of myself as a leader. I always

thought of myself as kind of a participant, but an active one. My

mother was very active politically. She was a pillar of the Democratic

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Party in down state Illinois, Champaign County, Cunningham

Township. And the local Democratic Party used to meet in our

living room from time to time, and so I would listen to all those

discussions. I learned about all of the issues of the day such as

fluoridating the water, the quality of the schools that were not

legally segregated but may as well have been, because people did

not live in integrated neighborhoods.

The great issue that I learned about in my mother's kitchen

and that scared the daylights out of me was religious education in

the schools. When I was getting ready to go to first grade in

Champaign Urbana, there was religious education in the schools and

students had to choose which religion to be instructed in. I did not

have one. My parents had decided they were not going to bring me

up in any formal religion because they were from mixed

backgrounds. I didn't have one to choose and so I was very

frightened about going to school. However the Constitution came

to my rescue. A remarkable woman named Vashti McCollum, in 1947

when I was 6, when I was just about to go into first grade,

challenged the religious instruction in Urbana and took it to the

Supreme Court in the case of McCollum v. Illinois. The Court in 1948

held that the religious instruction violated the First Amendment as

an establishment of religion. I learned about all this through my

mother's following it so closely. It gave me a real sense of how the

law affects people because it affected my life at a very early age, in a

very particular case, that came out of my neighborhood. That, I

think, made an indelible impression that has never left me. By the

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time I was ready to start the grade where religious education had

existed, it had been ruled unconstitutional.

Refo:

I read somewhere that you went to Quaker Sunday School for a

while, is that true?

Schroeder:

I did for a while, yes. One of my mother's friends decided to

start a First Day School, a Quaker Sunday school, and she collected all

the children of her friends who didn't have any other place to go. It

was intended to be a study of the Bible and what the Bible says, but

not for any particular interpretations or lessons from it. It was more

in terms of literature and culture. The Quaker "Friends" were

wonderful people. Because this was a University town there were

quite amazing young people among the lost souls who wound up

going to the First Day School with me and my brother. One was Igor

Stravinsky's grandson whose father, Soulima Stravinsky, as on the

music faculty at the University of Illinois; Johnny Stravinsky. People

were always asking him what he was going to be when he grew up,

and he would say "A cowboy!" I learned a little bit about the Bible

and about the prophets, but I learned a good deal about the other

people who went to First Day School with me and that was worth

the whole thing in and of itself.

Refo:

Has organized religion ever been a particularly important part

of your life?

Schroeder:

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No, not with a mother who was Jewish and a father who grew

up resisting the Methodism of his sisters. I went to Swarthmore. It

was founded by the Quakers, along with Bryn Mawr and Haverford. I

think I got a leg up in getting in because I said on the application

that if I had to have a religious preference it would be Quaker. The

culture of the Friends includes the idea of "meetings" where people

get together and with no formal votes, act through consensus, I

always liked that tradition. It made an impression on me that the

people were not divisive but would try to come to reasoned

conclusions. I remember sitting in on some of the meetings of the

Society of Friends in Champaign-Urbana and seeing how they would

try to resolve problems and I thought that was very, very

constructive. It did not make me religious however. My mother was

very conscious of being Jewish, of her Jewish heritage, which was

very important to her. She suffered a great deal of discrimination as

a result of it and always told me that I should be prepared to suffer

discrimination as well. Of course, I was never identified as being

Jewish because my name was Murphy, although within the Jewish

religion I am considered Jewish because it is inherited through the

mother. When I was at Swarthmore, we had a little club we called

"hemi-semites" or maybe we called it the "semi-hemites", but there

were a lot of us who were half Jewish. It was very interesting,

though, that the people whose fathers were Jewish identified

themselves as being Jewish because of their name, and those whose

mothers were Jewish, although they technically were actually

Jewish, were not identified as Jewish, because of their names. It has

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always been an interesting phenomenon to me that people are so

stereotyped by the nature of their last names.

Refo:

Did you celebrate Jewish holidays, Christian holidays, all of

them, none of them in your family?

Schroeder:

Oh, we celebrated Christmas in a very non-religious way. My

father was very traditional. He loved to collect things. He was a

book collector, but also collected ornaments for the tree that were

very odd. He had an amazing sense of humor and his favorite sign,

that he collected during the depression, was from one of my

mother's family haberdashery stores. The sign said "Tiger pants half

off." My father just thought that was the funniest sign he ever saw,

so he brought that out every year and hung it on our Christmas tree.

Refo:

(laughing) Where is that sign now?

Schroeder:

(laughing) I don't know. I wish I had it.

Refo:

That's great. So when you were in high school at some point

you obviously started thinking about where to go next. Was there

ever a question in your mind about going to college?

Schroeder:

Oh no, no, there never was a question about going to college

and there was never a question in my mind that I should leave

Champaign-Urbana. It was not that I wanted to leave home. I

thought it was very important that I get out of Champaign-Urbana.

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I learned a great deal from growing up in a university town. It was a

great influence. I thought I was going back to it when I moved to

Arizona and then found out too late that I was actually moving to a

big city. I wanted to go east because that's where it seemed the

good colleges were. Also I wanted to go to a co-educational school;

that was very important to me. Although I applied to Wellesley

because the Seven Sisters, as the leading women's colleges were

then known, were well organized in Champaign-Urbana. The alumna

would put on teas for the girls who were thinking of going to

college in the east and then they would have graduates of each of

the Seven Sisters of Bryn Mawr and Barnard, Radcliffe, Pembroke,

etc. talk about their schools. I applied to Wellesley because the

woman who promoted it at the tea emphasized it was close to a lot

of mens' schools. That had a certain advantage to me in my

impressionable youth, but I wound up going to Swarthmore because

it was coed, and small and I wanted to be near a city with a great

symphony orchestra. That was very important to me because had

learned in high school that I really loved music. I wanted to be near

a great city, but I didn't want to live in a city. I wasn't prepared for

that. Swarthmore was near Philadelphia with a great orchestra,

some great museums and so Swarthmore seemed to be a good fit

for me.

Refo:

So what year did you enter Swarthmore?

Schroeder:

1958. The fall of 1958.

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Refo:

And did you, were you on scholarship?

Schroeder:

I had a little scholarship that was just enough so that my

parents could make it and save to educate my younger brother.

Refo:

Were they supportive of your decision to go to Swarthmore?

Schroeder:

Oh absolutely, absolutely. They thought it was very important

that I get out of Champaign, Urbana and that I go to an eastern

school with a great academic reputation and opportunities, and so

there was never any question.

Refo:

Do you remember how big the school was and what the split

was between men and women?

Schroeder:

It was just about even, the split between men and women I

think when I was there, it's a little larger now, there were about 900

students, with between 200-300 students per class.

Refo:

Did everybody live in the dorms?

Schroeder:

Pretty much, pretty much, and it was a very strict

environment. I was quite amazed. My parents had raised me

without any curfews, except when I asked for one. If I was a little

dubious about where I was going I'd make sure that they told me to

be back by 11. But it was a very strict environment for the girls in

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college then. You were only permitted one weekend away from

campus per month, as I recall, and you had to be in on weeknights at

a certain time. They would lock the doors on you after midnight on

weekends, and I was kind of surprised by that.

Refo:

No boys allowed upstairs?

Schroeder:

No boys allowed upstairs except on Sunday afternoon and

then you had to have the door open wide enough so that a foot

could go through it. (laughter)

Refo:

Two feet on the floor (laughter).

Schroeder:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Refo:

That's funny. Were there women on the faculty at

Swarthmore that you got to know?

Schroeder:

Yes, there were women on the faculty at Swarthmore but as I

recall the person who . I think was nicest to me was the Dean of

Women, Susan Cobbs. never forget her wonderful voice. She was

from the South. My junior year she came up to me, and she said

"Mayree" and I said, "Yes, Dean Cobbs?" "what do you plan to do after

you leave Swarthmore, Mayree?" and I said, "Well, Dean Cobbs I'm not

sure. I think probably go to graduate school." And she looked at

me and she said, "To what end Mayree?" (laughter) and I responded,

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"To what end? well I don't know, I'm not sure; there are a lot of

opportunities out there." "Do you think you might want to teach,

Mayree?" And I said, "Oh yes I might want to teach." "well that's

good because we have a scholarship for someone who would be a

good teacher and we thought we'd make your scholarship that

scholarship, as long as you haven't ruled out teaching." It didn't give

me any more money; it just gave my scholarship a name. But I never

forgot the line, "To what end, Mayree?"

Refo:

Right. Great! Did you view Swarthmore as a good school for

women? Is that one of the reasons you chose it over other places?

Schroeder:

I chose it in part because women could go to college on a day

to-day-basis with men. That's the way that I had enjoyed high school

and that's the way that I wanted to go to college. Swarthmore was

a great shock to me intellectually, however. I had not ever been up

against people with superb prep school educations and so I faced

what I think most people experience when they go east to school

from a public school. My children went through it: the shock of

being with many students who had had superb prep school

educations or come from New York, or Chicago's north shore and

those super high schools that they have there. It is so competitive

for those eastern students because there's so many of them that

they're just infinitely better prepared. I went to my first English

class and they were discussing symbolism and I didn't know what

they were talking about. I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. His novels

and his short stories resonated with me because many were about

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mid-westerners who were in a wholly different eastern

environment. I still read them because he's such a great writer, but I

read them then because he was talking about the kind of experience

that struck a chord with me. I felt I was in a somewhat alien

intellectual and competitive environment. There was a program at

Swarthmore called the Honors' Program, where the smartest of the

smart students attended seminars on very broad topics and write

two or three papers every week.

Refo:

Were you in the honors group?

Schroeder:

Well I was and I wasn't. I was encouraged to go into honors by

one of my professors, who was my great mentor at Swarthmore,

Professor Pennock, in political science. I was admitted to honors on

a probationary basis. After a while, I decided that maybe this wasn't

the thing for me, and that was agreeable to the professors too. We

worked out an agreement that now I think was a very forward

looking. I would be permitted a certain number of seminars, but I

would also be able to take regular courses. I wouldn't graduate with

a degree with honors, but I would be able to have the best of both

worlds. I took economics and history and political science seminars

and courses in Shakespeare and Renaissance Painting. That became

quite standard sometime after that, taking both seminars and

courses. I got through the first couple years at Swarthmore and the

shock of getting C's and not really knowing what I was doing. But,

once I got to the place where I was writing papers and was actually

26

taking courses that I wanted to, it was a great experience for me. I

enjoyed the last two years very much. The trauma made some very

good friends and with at least two or three of them I've remained in

touch through the years. It was a big deal for me when I received an

honorary degree from Swarthmore this year.

Refo:

How nice. When was that?

Schroeder:

In May.

Refo:

Of this year?

Schroeder:

Yes.

Refo:

Fabulous.

Schroeder:

It was a great event for me.

Refo:

I could ask why it took them so long (laughing)

Schroeder:

That's another story.

Refo:

Let's stay on that for just a moment. Telling me about going

to get that honorary degree.

Schroeder:

Well I had had some calls from the Development Director at

Swarthmore looking for money, and I told him I had never been

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invited back to talk to the students and I would really love to do

that. It seems they don't pay much attention to alums west of the

Mississippi. When the Development Director did come and visit my

office about five years ago. I was Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit.

When I told him Swarthmore had not invited me back to talk to the

students, he said, "you know there's something wrong here." I have

a very good friend who went to Swarthmore and the University of

Chicago Law School a couple years ahead of me who practices law in

San Francisco. David Bancroft and his wife Cheryl are lovely people,

we have often shared the observation that Swarthmore never seems

to pay any attention to us. After the chat with the Development

Director I did get an invitation to give a major lecture, but they sent

me the invitation in August for a lecture in October, so I said I was

booked, but let's talk about this for some other year, and I didn't

hear anything further. I must have complained so loudly to so many

people close to the school, including a member of the Board of

Trustees that one day I got a call from one of my classmates, now

one of the deans, who told me that the Board had voted to give me

an honorary degree! I was absolutely dumbfounded at the

ceremony. I didn't think I even belonged on the stage because the

other recipients included a physicist who makes electronic cellos for

Yo Yo Ma on the side, and a philosopher from Cambridge who has

done path breaking work. When I got up, I thought, "What am I

doing here?" But the President had researched my background, and

talked about my life and the cases that I decided. It turned out the

students just loved it because I had done things that they could

28

identify with and understand - when I walked back up the steps after

the ceremony and my little five minute talk, people shook my hand

and said "You are an inspiration," I was dumbfounded, because the

last time I walked up those steps, in 1962, I had my B.A. with no

"honors". This was a great day for me.

Refo:

I bet it was. I bet it was. Well let's go back to Swarthmore

outside of classes. What kinds of things were you involved with at

the school?

Schroeder:

Oh I did some music and I used to go into Philadelphia often to

the Philadelphia Orchestra. I was in the chorus. That was the

greatest musical experience of my life. I had almost no talent, but

they had a choral director who let everybody into the big chorus

that sang once a year with the choruses of Bryn Mawr and

Haverford. We sang the Bach Magnificat with the Philadelphia

Orchestra and so there I was, in the second to last row of the second

sopranos, with my little high heels, unsteadily perched on the riser,

but I was there--with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia

Orchestra. It was such a thrill.

Refo:

I bet it was. Was any of your family there in the audience?

Schroeder:

Oh no, no, no. There were hundreds of singers. Of course,

some of the others were very talented had been doing this kind of

thing all their lives, and they had already sung the Magnificat many

times and knew it all by heart. I think the next year we did it with

29

the Messiah and everybody knew the Messiah, of course, except me.

I know it now though.

Refo:

Now am I right that you were a bit of an activist in college?

Schroeder:

Well I wasn't really an activist but, you see, those years were

significant because that was the beginning of the civil rights

movement and those were the years when the Freedom Riders were

riding in the south. I wanted to do something to help, so I went in

to Chester, Pennsylvania which was near Swarthmore, and a very

segregated town. We did a sit-in at a lunch counter. My job was to

stay outside to count how many white people went in despite our

protest. It wasn't much, but I was really quite moved by the student

leaders of the civil rights movement who came through the colleges

to raise money. One of my friends went down to join the freedom

riders and it was quite a heady time. Brown v. the Board had come

down and it was my generation that was actually changing things,

and I thought that was just wonderful.

Refo:

Did those feelings and watching the civil rights movement

have any impact on your decision to go into law?

Schroeder:

Oh yes. When I was at Swarthmore, I got a little Ford

Foundation grant to go to Washington D.C. and study some

legislation. My mother had been active in politics downstate, in

Illinois, and my father had had a student who had been the

30

President of the Oxford Union Debating Society. My father's

student, Howard Shuman, had come back to the United States and

gone to work for Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, so I contacted

Howard. Senator Paul Douglas was one of the great figures in my

life. He's now under appreciated, but the University of Illinois has

an award called the Paul Douglas Ethics in Government Award. Paul

Douglas was an economist who tookno gifts. He founded the

environmental movement, really, by saving the Indiana Dunes. He

was a great senator, elected in 1948 with Harry Truman and Gov.

Adlai Stevenson. My father's student had come back from Oxford to

become his legislative assistant, so I cooked up this scheme to get

the little grant to live in Washington for the summer. Through

Senator Douglas' office's help I was able to study the passage of the

Truth in Lending Act. That was his baby, and I became fascinated

with the whole process of legislation. I talked to the banking

lobbyists; I talked to the consumer lobbyists. It was just so

interesting. I wrote a little paper that wasn't really very good but I

got an education. I went back to D.C. the next summer and worked

for Senator Douglas as an intern for almost nothing, but it was a

good opportunity. I learned from the time I spent on the hill. Most

important, I learned that while the women were expected to type,

the men would go to the floor with the Senators, I needed a law

degree, if I wanted to affect policy.

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