August 2009

Francis LeSourd

At the age of 101, Northwesterner Francis LeSourd reflects on a 60-year legal career, recalls his civic accomplishments in Seattle, and shares his outlook on the future of law.

by Victoria Rowlett

Francis “Fran” LeSourd begins his 102nd year with a sharp mind; a continued interest in politics, current events, and history; and sober words for the profession he entered in 1932. “When I first started practicing, even attorneys on opposing sides were friends,” he recalls. “It was a buddy system. Lawyers should keep competitiveness out of their relations with other lawyers. The respect of other lawyers is important for the legal profession and for happiness.”

Seven decades ago, in difficult political times that have been compared to these, LeSourd graduated from law school at the University of Washington and headed off to work in the Washington, D.C., of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was 1933 and President Roosevelt faced challenges to the constitutionality of his social legislation. LeSourd’s luck placed him at the Department of Justice in time to draft the brief that persuaded an ultra-conservative Supreme Court to allow the Social Security Act of 1935 to live. But LeSourd was a Northwesterner at heart, and before the demise of the decade he rebounded to Seattle, where he became a leading practitioner of tax law, a pioneer for civil rights, and the “godfather” of Crystal Mountain. He also served as mentor and model to a host of lawyers who now sing his praises.

Former partner Larry Hard remembers his first meeting with LeSourd in 1969. “I’d passed the bar exam and clerked for six months when I came to interview for a job. He was the embodiment of what a lawyer should be: gracious and courteous to this very, very young thing. He was the kind of lawyer I always wanted to be.”

Rodney Waldbaum, also a former partner, benefited from LeSourd’s tutelage and friendship for 30 years. “He’s phenomenal — a great, great individual, a great tax attorney, and truly a gentleman. He wrote briefs out longhand with pencil and paper. With his remarkable intellect, acumen as a logical thinker, and unparalleled brief-writing ability, he could have practiced anywhere; but Fran said he was a man of the Northwest and had no desire to be back East.”

This man who has referred to himself as a “rebel” continues to live in the Laurelhurst home he purchased 60 years ago. The modest white clapboard house sits at the bottom of a hill, tucked back from the street behind a white picket fence and a swatch of lush lawn that runs up to the front porch. The interior of the home is as unpretentious and comfortable as LeSourd himself. He greets me in his living room, with grace, a smile, and a proffered hand. He would have stood up, but a fall shortly before his 100th birthday last year slows his ability to rise from a chair and curtails his ballroom dancing.

Just before his 101st birthday, Fran LeSourd seems frail but vigorous of mind, dignified, and thoughtful. His perfect eyesight has just begun to diminish and he complains of having had to order his first-ever pair of eyeglasses. Meanwhile, as he waits for the spectacles to arrive, he continues to consume information, study history, and keep abreast of affairs. The table beside his reading chair holds copies of the Seattle Times, Atlantic, Forbes, National Geographic, and Smithsonian, and books entitled Churchill’s Triumph and Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Though less physically vigorous, he remains a quiet, powerful presence that hints of the youth captured in his early photographs. Tall, stalwart, nearly swaggering, face front to the camera, with a full grin, feet spread wide apart, and hands on his hips, he looks like a youth who knows his mind and intends to follow its lead.

LeSourd graduated from law school with honors (Phi Beta Kappa and Order of the Coif) in 1932. He had joined the Chadwick firm at a salary of $75 a month when President Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration beckoned. Colleagues and his father urged him to decline. “So, being a rebel, I went,” he says. As luck would have it, the job was as bad as predicted, but it propelled him to the Tax Division of the Department of Justice and the work that was both pivotal to his career and laid the foundation for the remainder of his law practice.

The first few years he learned tax law and honed his trial skills while prosecuting the government’s case against tax evaders. Eventually, LeSourd also began to write briefs in Supreme Court cases involving taxation and New Deal social legislation and, among them, the case that determined the future of the Social Security Act. He labored two months, virtually around the clock, on a brief to the Supreme Court supporting the constitutionality of the Social Security Act. “The final draft was written by attorneys higher up, but I think my draft prevailed pretty much,” LeSourd says. “The Supreme Court at that time was a bunch of old fogies who were against the taking of money from one and giving to another. We had to prove it didn’t.” They succeeded, with the court in essence confirming the power of government to promote the welfare of its citizens.

Marriage and the birth of his first son brought LeSourd to a crossroads. He could take the road to wealth, high-profile work, and the prestige promised by law practiced in the East; or he could return to the wilds and the more measured life offered by the Northwest. He apparently did not hesitate. “The most important thing for me was the enjoyment of life. I loved the outdoors, the mountains, and the water, and Seattle was the place for that. Also, it was a better place to raise children. As long as one made enough money to live a comfortable life, I saw little advantage in accumulating a lot of wealth.”

He accepted a job with the Department of Justice Lands Division and returned to Seattle, where he became involved in the brouhaha surrounding government ownership of power-production facilities. He also joined Little & Leader and worked on firm matters when he had time. For a short time, he returned to Washington, D.C., to defend Bank of America in a dispute with the government over interpretation of banking regulations. The comptroller of the currency had obtained an order that directed the bank to produce in Washington, D.C., the books of account from each of the bank’s branches in the West. LeSourd drafted and filed a complaint that captured headlines and generated such public outrage against government overreaching that the comptroller desisted, allowing LeSourd to win a permanent injunction and Bank of America to remain in business.

Back in Seattle, LeSourd’s law-firm work dealt with other facets of the law such as corporate representation and anti-trust litigation. Eventually, he abandoned the government work to focus on the more lucrative private clients and, in 1941, became partner of Little, LeSourd, Palmer & Scott. His reputation as a practitioner in tax law continued to grow and, within a decade, had extended to the Northern frontier.

In the early 1950s, Alaskans, in LeSourd’s words, “viewed the U.S. income tax as something that applied only to the lower 48 states.” He developed a rapport with an Anchorage attorney with a wide practice but limited expertise in tax law and began a pattern of commuting that made Alaska his “second home.” He recalls the character of the place half a century ago. “Anchorage in the early 1950s was still a pioneer town. The hotel still had the ethics of a bush roadhouse, which was that no one would be left for the night out in the cold. If there were two beds in your room and they had no other room for some chap, they would move him in with you in the middle of the night.… There was one main street in town, and every other door in town was a bar.”

LeSourd thrived on trial work and was, according to his partner Waldbaum, “an excellent trial attorney.” He described LeSourd’s in-court demeanor during a three-month trial that involved LeSourd and his future partner Woolvin Patten. “They had completely opposite trial styles. Fran was an aristocrat …. No one questioned him. His air of complete confidence and right convinced others he was right. Patten, on the other hand, had the demeanor of a comfortable, well-worn shoe. He would appear in the courtroom looking disheveled, with a torn sleeve in a jacket that looked as if it had come from the Goodwill, a befuddled old man who would, with his lazy cross-examination, lead the witness unsuspectingly down a rosy path, then turn and cut the witness off when they reached the point Patten intended to make.” In 1960, this odd couple came together with future Congressman and U.S. Senator Brock Adams to form LeSourd Patten & Adams.

Fledgling lawyers either thrived under LeSourd’s tutelage or chafed over his exacting standards. Hard and Waldbaum feel privileged to have worked with this man they both call a “great mentor.” Waldbaum recalls LeSourd as “a critical thinker who carefully reviewed his attorneys’ drafts and made appropriate changes. It was fascinating to watch the work product go back and forth until the document finally passed muster. Some associates thought he was overly critical, but he was a nice man and the back-and-forth always improved the product.” Hard elaborates: “Whatever I prepared, if I gave it to Fran to review, it always, always came back with his comments, always improved. He was a meticulous lawyer, a meticulous writer, a great man” who believed the client deserved the best work product possible.

LeSourd’s high principles, and his belief that humans should be treated as individuals, not as members of a stereotyped group, colored the civic work that may remain his greatest legacy. In the 1940s, as a commissioner with Seattle Housing Authority and later its attorney, LeSourd was instrumental in transforming Profanity Hill, the red-light slum district on First Hill, to Yesler Terrace, the first deliberately racially integrated public-housing project in the nation. That same decade, as a member of the Seattle Civil Service Commission, he worked to overcome the discrimination prevalent within the Seattle transit system by revising the testing protocol so that Commission employees, rather than bus drivers, administered the driving tests. African-American applicants then began to pass and became city bus drivers for the first time. When lauded for these feats, LeSourd would say, as he did at the dedication of the Yesler Terrace Community Center named after him, “It takes a lot of people to do these things, not one man at all.”

Just as early life experiences shape us all, so LeSourd’s childhood and youth helped to form the man. Francis Ancil LeSourd was born June 22, 1908, in Seattle, grandson of namesake Frances Asbury LeSourd, representative to the Washington Territorial and State Legislatures, and Mary LeSourd, state chair of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In the first decade of the last century, horse-drawn carts delivered milk and ice to the door; LeSourd’s mother churned her own butter and washed clothes using a scrub-board and wringer; and his father often walked from their Ravenna home to work at Dexter Horton’s small bank in Pioneer Square. The outdoors served as a young boy’s entertainment and his school of character-building. LeSourd nurtured a lifelong connection to nature while roaming the wild areas in North Seattle. He hiked Ravenna Park, fished for trout in the creek that ran into Green Lake, and biked out to Lake Forest Park where “we’d strip off naked and swim in the lake near the railroad tracks and, when we heard the passenger train coming, all line up and stand naked on a log until it came alongside, then we’d dive in.”

As a child, he was mischievous, rebellious, and perpetually curious. His mother forbade his climbing on the house under construction next door, so he went directly to explore and fell two stories onto his face. The freedom to roam gave him physical and intellectual independence at an early age. He developed principles and opinions, never doubted their soundness, and possessed the self-confidence to act on his convictions. “One year, the school instituted a compulsory savings plan. I was always a rebel, and so I refused. Teachers needed 100 percent participation for credit — I went to the bank and closed my account, and my teacher kicked me out of her class. I was sent to another teacher, who sent me from her class. I finally ended up in the gym — the gym teacher didn’t care about the credit. I was in favor of savings, but felt that the students should not be forced to put their money in a bank dictated by the school.”

He attended the newly opened Roosevelt High School, then matriculated to the University of Washington, intending to major in international trade. An enterprising lad who paid for his own schooling, he sold the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal door-to-door, trapped skunks in Lake Forest Park and sold their skins, collected and sold stamps, solicited subscriptions for the Post Intelligencer, and worked for two community newspapers. Summers he worked outdoors, at his grandparents’ farm during threshing season, logging on the Olympic Peninsula, and setting chokers at a logging camp in the Cascades. This last job helped him to define his future career. “Hard work, and every night I’d go back with my legs all beat up to the bunkhouse, where there was this old chap who had originally been a high climber — the highest paid guy in the whole logging operation — until age forced him down from the lines to making beds. I thought then I would find some occupation where the older I got, the more valuable I would become.” He changed his major to law.

In summer of 1929, LeSourd took a sabbatical and further developed his character and codes of living. During work in a Tlingit Indian village, he learned to take vacations early in life from “a couple who had worked all their lives to save for a vacation, and by the time they could take it they were too old to enjoy it.” He traveled to New York City, where he witnessed the Great Crash. “Wall Street was jammed with people, just standing around and not a sound. They were stunned — all of their savings gone.” Working as a seaman on a freighter headed around the world, he scraped cockroaches off his food, witnessed knifings in the fo’c’sle, and experienced the arbitrary demonstration of rank firsthand when a first mate ordered him out on deck under the blazing tropic sun to clean grease fried under the winches. This journey sent him reeling from his father’s Republican politics to a more liberal stance and back to complete law school.

LeSourd remained good on his resolve to become a Democrat. His progressive opinions on domestic issues, opposition to discrimination, and beliefs in the rights of common citizens made his choice a good, though not necessarily exclusive, fit. He has voted for the candidate over the party on occasion. He has served as education director of the Democratic State Central Committee and as its finance director, and on the Finance Committees of U.S. Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Warren Magnuson. His respect for Jackson that never wavered though their association became strained as Jackson became more hawkish on international affairs. LeSourd was against the Vietnam War and opposes our intervention in Iraq. “One of the great tragedies of post-World War II in this country was that so many of our citizens and leaders were so emotionally gripped with ¬anti-Communism, the domino theory, and the belief that the U.S. could control the world by force that they led the country into wars and expenditures that threaten the solvency and social structure of the country, all to no real end.” LeSourd’s service as Senator Jackson’s appointment to the National Advisory Board Council for Public Lands swayed LeSourd’s opinion on the public’s use of public land. As a dedicated outdoorsman, he strongly supports national parks, the forest system, and preservation of a certain portion of our land resources in its natural state for future generations, but came to disagree with what he calls “far-out environmentalists’ efforts to lock up vast reaches of the public domain for a single use.”

Just as he advocated for balance in political and environmental issues, so LeSourd believed in balance in the conduct of one’s own life. Waldbaum remembers, “He paced himself, always made time for vacations and, though his number of billable hours might be fewer than most, he always made time for his family. This was true of his firm. Weekend and weeknight work was the exception, not the rule.”

Son Peter LeSourd recalls that weekends and time off were devoted to outdoor activities: skiing, sailing, backpacking. “Dad would announce that we were going sailing next weekend and leave it up to Mother to have everything ready to go.” Father and son raced their sailboat and Peter describes his father as “very competitive and a very, very good racer.” They backpacked all over the Cascades. Peter remembers that on his 16th birthday, his father took him on a week-long trip —  just the two of them hiking, climbing, and bushwhacking their way south from Stevens Pass Highway to the mid-fork of the Snoqualmie River.

LeSourd directed his independent spirit and ingenuity toward blazing new trails in the mountains and on the water. In 1954, he shared with two friends an idea he had for financing a ski resort through contributions of skiing families rather than corporate donors. Eight years later, with the help of LeSourd’s political contacts, Governor Rosellini, Senator Magnuson, and 850 families who contributed $1,000 each in return for ticket privileges, Crystal Mountain Ski Resort opened. “He was the leader of the project from day one … the godfather of Crystal Mountain,” says Founders’ Club Board member Dave Gossard. In the mid 1970s, LeSourd participated in the creation of the Seattle Sailing Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funded the campaign of a 12-meter sailboat, Intrepid, to become America’s contender in the America’s Cup. Intrepid lost to Courageous in the last pre-cup race.

His professional, political, and civic activities appear to have been carefully calibrated to exist in harmony with his family and sporting life, none trumping the others in their importance. LeSourd describes his philosophy of living: “A happy life was the ultimate. People who devote their lives to making money are making a mistake. You should be happy, and doing things for other people brings happiness.”

LeSourd retired from full-time practice in 1986. He continued “of counsel,” working four days a week, until 1990. Waldbaum says it was not unusual to see LeSourd in the office into his 99th year, doing private research or on the floor on his knees going through documents.

The business of lawyering has not changed for the better over the last 80 years, in LeSourd’s opinion. Lawyers are less civil to one another, less willing to cooperate, too competitive, and too specialized, all of which serve to detract from the quality of the representation provided to clients. He offers no solution; merely the concern of a wise man of great experience who holds the respect of his peers.
 
Victoria Rowlett is a Tacoma attorney and a contributing writer to Bar News. She can be contacted at vrowlett@msn.com.