My Friend Abbott
By Rudy Michaels

Having heard in early May that my friend, Judge Abbott Goldberg, had died, I felt a true sense of loss.

We had not been close during the past few years but, beginning in the late forties, our paths crossed many times and we became friends.

The Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle carried obituaries, recording his history, and acknowledging his important contributions to California law.

It is not my purpose to repeat any of this but rather to recall some of the encounters I remember with joy, now mixed with sadness.

Abbott was already a Harvard Law School graduate when he entered the Army to become an officer in a tank destroyer unit. He became seriously ill, was released, settled in San Francisco, and became an aide to the Chief Justice in the formative days of court reform. When Dean Snodgrass of Hastings, also a Harvard alumnus, needed faculty members for the fresh-out-of-uniform class of '48, Abbott signed on as an ad hoc professor to teach Conflict of Laws.

And that's how I first got to know him and his impressive intellect. I was a face in the crowd but he had the good grace to give me an "A" in this esoteric course. The papers were number-coded anyway. I knew him, but he didn't know me.

After graduating, I went to work as a clerk to one of the Supreme Court Justices. Our offices were in the same suite and we quickly became acquainted. One day, he came to my cubbyhole in mid-morning and said: "Come on, I want you to meet somebody."

That "somebody" was the late Bernie Witkin, then Reporter of Decisions and already famous. Almost every morning around ten, a small group of the young - well, thirty-two was young then and we were the same age - guys around the Court would gather in Bernie's office and be entertained by his pearls of wisdom.

After my stint at the Court ended, Abbott and I went separate ways but our paths crossed again when he had come to Sacramento as the Deputy Attorney General who made water law history.
By then, I had become Chief Counsel for the State Welfare Department and a Court of Appeal ruling jeopardized the state's eligibility to receive federal funds. Talk about a crisis! Abbott became head of the rescue effort and we worked closely together, first, to get a Supreme Court hearing and then to try to put things right.

During that time, I saw his uncanny ability to get to the heart of the matter, and to find cases which, when put in the proper light, would support his point. During our days together in the law library - remember, legal research was still all in books then - I became convinced that all he had to do was look hard at a row of books and one of them would fall out and open up at the right page. Well, we won.

Again there was a lapse when he joined the Department of Water Resources, but when he became a judge, several cases involving my agency came before him, and once I even appeared as a witness in his Court. That's an experience I will never forget.

We had no regular schedule but would meet now and then, sometimes for lunch.

One aspect of his life which was only mentioned in passing by the papers was the severity of the illness which befell him while he was in the service. It was a serious gastric disorder which haunted him all is life and which he bore with great courage. He had so many surgeries that once he told me that his abdomen looked like a relief map of the Battle of Verdun.

What especially endeared Abbott to my wife and me is that he took a personal interest in our younger son who, at a very young age, became the victim of Crohn's Disease. Abbott befriended him and our boy learned from him that even a devastating illness need not keep you from becoming a useful member of society. And that, too, worked.

He will always be in my mind and in my heart as a multi-faceted, impressive man, highly intelligent but down-to-earth and always a joy to be with. May he rest in peace.