In the summer 2023 issue I received online today, the alumni bulletin of the law school from which I graduated, Harvard, reported the death last autumn (2022) of a classmate, Covert E. Parnell III, whom I cannot say I knew well but whose company I had now and then enjoyed while there. Pete was an unusual guy, even if his resume was classic top-of-the-line HLS.
He was born and grew up in Alabama, attended Birmingham Southern College, and graduated magna from Harvard Law. Then he clerked for a respected judge on the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, Francis Van Dusen, followed by service as one of the last clerks for Justice Hugo Black. When Black died while Pete was his clerk, the incoming justice, another Southerner, Lewis Powell, kept him on.
Pete always said that Black had hired him because he was a decent tennis player, always rumored to be a requirement to be a law clerk for the justice, who played frequently into his old age. Pete's being an Alabaman can't have hurt him either, as Black was partial to brilliant law grads from his home state. This was despite the prevalence of dislike, to put it mildly, for Black in Alabama because of his individual but generally progressive views (even though he'd been a Klan member in his youth): "Hugo Black used to run around in white robes scaring black people; now he wears black robes and scares white people" was the derogatory line about Black in the South.
He had been a Senator from Alabama during the New Deal and was FDR's first nominee to the Court, in 1937; Roosevelt had not had the opportunity to appoint a justice to the Court which had been striking down his legislation for his whole first term. Black was named after the collapse of Roosevelt's attempt to expand the Court so as to outvote the conservatives dominating the Court. It was felt that the safest political path was to nominate a sitting Senator.
It shouldn't be surprising that law came easily to Pete. Powell undoubtedly kept him on because everyone who knew Pete was impressed by both his brilliance and his charm. When I ran into him sometime later, I asked him about a clerk who served at the time he did and was well-known. In Pete's view, he was a "cottonhead". Pete became a partner in a major Los Angeles firm only five years out. This was quite uncommon, then and now, and I suspect he was the first member of our class to become a partner in a major law firm.
I lost track of him and so, apparently, did most of my classmates. I checked out the firm listing once when I was going to be in LA and he was gone. Several years later, I was at some legal gathering and found myself introduced to a young woman who was at Pete's old firm. Without getting very specific, something lawyers are very good at, she indicated to me that he had gone through some kind of crack-up and that as far as she knew, he was living in some nondescript part, of which there are many, of the LA metro area. She had no idea what he was doing. "He was the brightest, nicest lawyer I've ever known," she observed.
His obits all said he had been the lawyer for Home Savings and then on the executive team at H.F.Ahmanson & Co., which owned Home Savings. He then was a name partner in what was apparently a small firm and also served as executive director or chair of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. He retired and lived in Rancho Mirage, Calif., for the last 21 years of his life.
There's more of a story there. I say that because the obit referred to both his partner of many years, who is male, and also to a son. He appears to have been active in the Church of St. Paul in the Desert, which is in Palm Springs. He became an inactive member of the California bar in 1997, only four years before he retired completely.
It's possible to suggest all sorts of suppositions about his life based on the scant evidence I've had access to. Yet, his story reminds me of the title character in Calvin Trillin's memoir, Remembering Denny. Trillin set out to learn what had become of a Yale classmate whom he admired for his easy disarming way and charm that appeared to guarantee a successful life. While Denny had achieved outward success as an academic and in government, following his time as a Rhodes Scholar, it turned out that he had demons of his own. He had a series of false starts in his career, and despite his accomplishments as a professor, had committed suicide at 55.
In a review of Trillin's book, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt concluded: "At the end of Remembering Denny, the author recalls how one of Denny's more recent acquaintances 'seemed offended when I referred to Denny as an old friend.' He said, 'Roger would have said that you didn't know him at all.' Mr. Trillin replied, 'I couldn't agree with you more.'"
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