Tierney to Deliver Memorial Address

Milwaukee Bar AssociationI hope that many folks reading this post will elect to attend the Milwaukee Bar Association’s annual Memorial Service: it will be held this Friday, May 6, at 10:45 a.m., in the Ceremonial Courtroom (Room 500) of the Milwaukee County Courthouse. It is an event that a number of us have come rarely to miss—largely because we enjoy it, as I explained in a 2009 blog post noting the remembrance by Tom Cannon of his father, Judge Robert C. Cannon, L’41, and in a post last year anticipating Mike Brennan’s remembrance of his own father, James P. Brennan, L’60. The Memorial Service is an opportunity to remember attorneys who died with the past year, after serving the profession and thus the larger society: some names and careers will be familiar to a particular attendee, whereas others will be unknown to him or her—but in this context the latter are not much less meaningful. I see that this year’s Memorial Address will be delivered by Joseph E. Tierney, III, L’66. That is certainly a longstanding name in this region’s legal profession, as discussed previously in posts on this blog, including Gordon Hylton’s description of the legal education of the first Joseph E. Tierney, L’11 (that’s 1911), and my own account of Joe III’s remarks, at a law school event, concerning his late mother and father, Bernice Young Tierney and Joseph E. Tierney, Jr., L’41. I much look forward to Mr. Tierney’s remarks (no doubt remembering among others his late partner, Paul Meissner, who died within the past year) and to the rest of the special session of court, which is the form that the Memorial Service takes.

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The Marquette Law School Graduate Who Coached in the NBA Finals

Several former Marquette University law students achieved fame on the athletic playing fields after their time at Marquette—world class sprinter Ralph Metcalfe and Packer star Laavie Dilweg come immediately to mind—but only one former student ever coached a team to the championship finals of the nation’s leading professional basketball league.

Francis “Frank” Zummach was born in Milwaukee in 1911, and attended Marquette University High School and Marquette University before enrolling in the law school in 1932.  Taking advantage of a program that allowed Marquette undergraduates to enroll in the law school after three years of college, Zummach received his undergraduate degree in 1933 and his law degree in 1935.

Unlike most Marquette law students of that era, Zummach received a J.D. degree, rather than an L.L.B.  In the 1930’s, Marquette awarded a more prestigious law degree (the J.D.) to graduates of the law school who also possessed an undergraduate degree and who prepared an acceptable thesis on a legal topic during the third year of law school.  (Zummach was also among the first Marquette Law School graduates to take advantage of the diploma privilege.)

While a student at the law school he was widely recognized as a student leader, serving as the all-university junior class president and as a member of Interfraternity Council.  (In the 1930’s, law students were much more integrated into the regular student body than they are today.)  One of his fellow students at the law school was his former Marquette basketball teammate, Ed “Boops” Mullen, who has the distinction of being Marquette’s first ever basketball All-American.

The 5’10” Zummach joined the Marquette basketball team in 1930 as a college sophomore.  His coach was the legendary Bill Chandler, who had just left Iowa State to take over the chronically weak Marquette basketball team.  By mid-year, Zummach had played his way into the starting line-up, helping the Hilltoppers achieve their first winning season in nine years.  He was made co-captain of the team the following year, and the local cagers compiled another winning record and nearly upset national champion Purdue, which was led by national player of the year John Wooden.

Zummach’s senior year, his first at the law school, was even better as the team went 14-3 with victories over Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Michigan State, and Indiana.  After exhausting his eligibility as a player, Zummach became an assistant coach at Marquette and served in that capacity through the 1938-39 season, apparently while practicing law in Milwaukee.  (As late as 1940, the Blue Book of College Athletics still listed Zummach as the assistant coach of the Marquette varsity.)

Zummach’s connection to professional basketball begins in the fall of 1939, when he was offered the position as head coach of the Sheboygan Redskins of the National Basketball League.  The Midwest-based National Basketball League, which was founded in 1937, was widely regarded at the time as the nation’s premier professional basketball league.  Sheboygan had entered the league in the fall of 1938, but the Redskins had been a disappointing 13-17 in their inaugural season.

The community-owned team turned to Zummach to improve the franchise’s on-court performance.  Zummach accepted the position, which paid him $500 to coach the team and $100 to serve as its legal counsel, and moved his law practice to Sheboygan, where he opened a law office in the Security National Bank Building.

In rebuilding the Redskins, Zummach recruited heavily from the ranks of Marquette’s basketball alumni, and the 1939-40 team included five former Hilltoppers.  (Unfortunately, he was not able to recruit his former teammate Boops Mullen, who already played for the NBL’s Oshkosh All-Stars.)

In his first year as a professional coach, Zummach’s team compiled a respectable regular-season record of 15-13, which was good enough for a first place tie with Oshkosh in the highly competitive Western Conference of the ABL.  In-state rivals Sheboygan and Oshkosh, which was led by three-time MVP and league scoring leader Leroy Johnson, squared off in the first round of the NBL play-offs.  The team split the first two games of the series, but the All-Stars edged Zummach’s Redskins by a score of 31-29 in the third and final game.

The next year the NBL abandoned the two-conference format, and Zummach’s Redskins finished with a record of 13-11, which was good enough for a tie for second in the seven-team league.  In the first round of the play-offs, Sheboygan defeated the Akron Firestone Non-skids two games to zero, setting up a rematch with Oshkosh, which had won the regular season and defeated the Detroit Eagles in the other play-off series.

Much of the credit for the Sheboygan team’s success was attributed to Zummach’s skillful coaching.  On the eve of the Sheboygan-Oshkosh play-off series, the Milwaukee Sentinel wrote, “Team play and spirit, stout hearts and an excellent coaching job by Frank Zummach have combined to put the Redskins among the cage elite.” (Milwaukee Sentinel, March 11, 1941.) Unfortunately, the All-Stars, playing in their fourth consecutive NBL final, again proved to be too much for the Redskins, as Zummach’s cagers fell to Oshkosh by scores of 53-38 and 54-36 in the best of three series.

Although all of Zummach’s teams at Marquette and Sheboygan were all-white, he was not insensitive to the plight of black athletes.  Prior to the 1940-41 season, the Redskins hosted an exhibition game against the renown Harlem Globetrotters.  At first it appeared that the all-black Globetrotters would have nowhere to stay—in this era, Sheboygan had a reputation for being particularly inhospitable to African-Americans—but Zummach’s efforts one of the Sheboygan hotels was persuaded to provide rooms for the visiting team.

In 1941-42, the Redskins slumped to a 10-14 record and a fifth-place finish, thus missing the play-offs for the first time in Zumbach’s tenure with the team.  Although the Redskins continued to play well at home, they won only two of eleven road games that season.  At the conclusion of the season Zummach stepped down as head coach to concentrate on his law practice.

Using many of the players that Zumback had recruited, his successor, former player Carl Roth, led Sheboygan to the 1943 NBL championship by defeating Oshkosh and the Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons (now the Detroit Pistons) in the play-offs.  The Redskins remained one of the dominant teams in the NBL until 1949 when the NBL merged with the Basketball Association of America to form the National Basketball Association.  Sheboygan was a charter member of the NBA, but the problems of competing against teams in much larger cities led it to drop out of the league after the 1949-50 season.

After stepping down as coach of the Redskins, Zummach remained in Sheboygan where he formed the long-standing law partnership of Wolters & Zummach in 1945.  He was also an active member of the Wisconsin Bar Association.  Although he is currently retired at age 100, Martindale.com still lists him as a practicing lawyer in Sheboygan.  He is currently the oldest living former Marquette University basketball player and the only professional basketball coach from the 1930’s that is still alive.

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Look to Your Left, Then Look to Your Right: Marquette University Law School, Fall 1919

At all most every law school founded before 1960, a story is told about a past dean who addressed incoming classes by telling them: “Look to your left and then to your right, and three years from now, only one of you will still be here.”  The softer version of the story ended “and only two of you will still be here.”

The story is probably apocryphal in its origins, although it was certainly used by later deans to emphasize the difficulty of legal study.  Today, the story is usually told to illustrate how lax legal education has become in the modern era.

To the extent that that this story reflects past reality, it is actually a commentary on how easy it was to get into most American law schools before the great surge in applications that began around 1970.  Even Harvard Law School did not reject a qualified applicant until 1939 (although it is true that Harvard had stiffer entrance requirements than most law schools in the first half of the twentieth century.)

Most law schools accepted all applicants who met their minimum entry requirements and then let the chips fall.  Those who could handle the work continued to graduation.  Those who couldn’t either flunked out or dropped out.

History does not record whether Dean Max Schoetz delivered the “look to your left” speech when he greeted the entering class at the Marquette Law School in the fall of 1919.  But if it did, and had he used the softer version of the story, his prediction would have been borne out by subsequent events.  There were 92 students enrolled in the first post-World War I day division entering class, and only 66 made it to the second year.  One of those who did not was Milwaukee native Pat O’Brien, who later became famous as a Hollywood actor (e.g., The Front Page, The Knute Rockne Story).

Whether O’Brien and the other 26 students who didn’t continue on for a second year flunked out or merely decided to pursue a different path in life is difficult to determine.  To remain eligible to continue, students had to pass more than half their courses, and 70 constituted a passing grade.

Admission requirements for the law school in 1919 were fairly modest.  Ordinarily a student had to be a high school graduate and have attended college for one year.  However, if an applicant was a high school graduate who had not yet attended college, he or she was allowed to enroll in a four-year program at the law school in which most second-year courses were taken in the college—essentially to meet the one year of college requirement.  This turned out to be a popular alternative, particularly for veterans like O’Brien who were anxious to get on with their careers.  Twenty-nine of the 66 students who entered the day program in the fall of 1919 and continued on for a second year were admitted under this option.  Students who were not high school graduates could opt to take a special examination, and if they passed it they were admitted as well.  Anyone could enroll in the four-year night program whether or not they had finished high school, and 63 individuals did.  The total first year enrollment of 155 in the fall of 1919 was the largest in the school’s history.

Under a recent change necessitated by Association of American Law School guidelines, night students were not eligible to receive a law degree from Marquette beginning with the 1919-1920 academic year, but their attendance did qualify them to take the Wisconsin bar exam.  The diploma privilege had not yet been extended to Marquette, so all its law students were required to pass the bar exam before they could begin law practice.  Wisconsin also required that applicants for admission to the bar have completed a high school course or its equivalent, and a few evening students were attending law school and high school at the same time.

Only four students in the day division and only one in the night group were listed as holding college degrees prior to beginning law school.  Most of the students, day or night, hailed from Wisconsin.  Only 11 of 92 first-year day students are listed in the Law School Bulletin as being from outside Wisconsin, and except for a single student from Montana, the others were all from the Midwest: Illinois (3), Iowa (3), Minnesota (2), and Michigan (2).  Only three of the 92 were female.

Ironically, the night division (known as the “Owls”) was geographically a slightly more diverse group.   Out-of-state students accounted for 13 percent of the night class, just ahead of the 12 percent for the day division.  While there were also students from Minnesota (2), the night class featured individual students from the more distant venues of Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, New Hampshire, Virginia, and the Philippines.  Two of the evening students were female and one, Edward Snyder, was a medical doctor.

Attrition was even higher among the ranks of the night class with only 39 of the 63 night students returning for a second year.  Among those not returning were most of the out-of-state students and Dr. Snyder.

In the aftermath of World War I, which had disrupted the vocational plans of so many American men, the law school appeared to be reluctant to impose barriers in the way of anyone who wanted to become a lawyer.  However, it did not appear to be willing to carry along students who were unable or unwilling to meet its academic standards.  It is worth remembering, however, that law school education was not a prerequisite for bar admission in Wisconsin (and most states) in the early 1920’s.  Those who left law school were free to enter apprenticeship arrangements and qualify for the bar that way.  (In fact, they could still count their unsuccessful law school year or years toward the state’s three- year “law study” requirement.)

The following is the curriculum in effect for first-year day students during the 1919-1920 academic year.  The number in parentheses is the number of hourly meetings each week for that particular course.

FALL

The Study of Cases (1)

Criminal Law (2)

Criminal Procedure (1)

Contracts I (3)

Torts I (2)

Personal Property (2)

Common Law Pleading I (1)

Natural Law (1)

Total Hours:  13

SPRING

Contracts II (3)

Torts II (2)

Common Law Pleading II (2)

Agency (2)

Equity (2)

Real Property I (1)

Natural Law II (1)

Legal Bibliography (1)

Total Hours: 14.

The Natural Law course was taught by the university president, Rev. Herbert Noonan; Personal Property and Legal Bibliography were taught by Dean Schoetz.

Each course had a written examination at the end of the term, which meant that full-time day-division students took 15 exams during their first year of law school, seven in fall and eight in the spring.  Students in the 4-year program — those who lacked prior college credits — took year-long courses in English and Argumentation in lieu of Contracts I & II, Criminal Procedure, Personal Property, Agency, and Equity.

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