Page 369 - WhyAsInY

Do a JoB—Harvey tHe litiGator
Ace, an outspoken liberal, was a good friend of Jack Green- berg, the then Director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and worked on many civil liberties cases, pro bono. He was a not a fan of Freund, a reasonably nonvocal conservative, or of Walpin, an outspoken right-winger, and he did not withhold his views from me.
When, in March 1970, I had the first of my knee operations (this one to deal with the osteochondritis dissecans that had kept me out of the army), Ace and Renée astonished me by driving all the way to Kings Highway Hospital in Brooklyn to pay a visit to the patient whom they had known for no more than five months or so. The only CBS work that Ace did not bring me in on involved his almost weekly depositions of Record Club of America executives in Phila- delphia. Renée would accompany him. About five years later, some time after Ace’s wife died, they married.
• Yaverbaum v. OPEC. Well, not really, but I wanted to get your atten- tion as I point to one slice of history and my very, very tangential relationship to it. In 1973, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries proclaimed an oil embargo against the United States, two results of which were severe gasoline shortages (result- ing in huge lines, which Phyllis, who was pregnant with Peter, managed to avoid, thanks to the kindness of the owner of the local gas station) and much higher energy costs, generally. We repre- sented Con Edison and other utilities in a suit against some of the oil companies. Ace got me involved in drafting a complaint that charged that the oil companies had conspired unlawfully to increase fuel prices artificially in order to profit from the public’s perception of the embargo. A Republican appointee to the Southern District Court, whose prior law firm had represented oil companies, dis- missed the complaint without any evidentiary hearing. It was an action that did little to increase my confidence in the courts. The embargo having ended, the utilities did not pursue the litigation, one which I still think had merit.
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