Page 368 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
There were about fifty attorneys, of which about a dozen were part- ners. Every one of them was married. Few spouses had paying jobs. Within a year, two more female associates came aboard. Brenda Feigen-Fasteau, straight out of Harvard and a vice president of the National Organization for Women (formed in 1966), was very smart and a very militant feminist, something that some of the partners had trouble dealing with. She refused to digest depositions for Gerry Walpin, because she believed that type of work to be beneath her. Brenda left after a couple of years. Flora Schnall came aboard from Milbank Tweed as a senior real estate associate in 1970. Flora, who became a partner and with whom I ended up working very closely when I moved to the Real Estate Department. (See Chapter Twenty- Five.) When I ran recruiting in 1978, more than half of the hires were female. By the time at which I retired, there were more women than men at the firm. Males still constituted a substantial majority in the partnership ranks, however.)
Ace and Renée were the antithesis of Max Freund, who was formal, tough, and old school, and Gerry Walpin, who was essen- tially a slave driver with monovision and a pronounced Napoleonic personality. (This description was a natural one for Walpin due to, as I said, his very short stature, and his overbearing compensatory manner. If I haven’t made it clear, I should: I didn’t care for or respect him, feeling him to be intellectually dishonest. When I was a junior associate and quite immature, I decorated a wallboard hidden behind a no-longer-used interior door with the label “Gerry Walpin Growth Chart.” It featured a vertical row of four lines adjacent to which were dates. As the lines descended in the chart, each bore a later date, the reverse of what you would see if your own child were the subject. I would say that I am ashamed of the foregoing, but in truth, I’ve managed to maintain my immaturity with respect to Mr. Wal- pin to this day. After he retired from Rosenman, Walpin sued President Obama, unsuccessfully, of course, when he was dismissed from a job to which he had previously been appointed by one of his heroes, George W. Bush.)
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