My Father's Career

-- By GeorgeMenz - 09 Apr 2024

Biographical Sketch

My father’s family was less than bourgeois. His father was a factory worker, an employee of Kodak who reinvested his pension into Kodak stock, and retired just before the advent of digital photography. My father was the sixth of twelve children. He began working when he was around seven on a paper route. In high school he worked summers at a Coca-Cola bottling plant, nearly going deaf from the noise. He paid his college tuition in part by working as a garbageman for his fellow students. Not realizing he was a work-study participant, they treated him the way college students normally treat college employees: indifference bordering on disdain.

My father told me once that he chose his college major because he wanted a job that would require him to wear a suit, and the only person he knew whose job fit that description was his brother-in-law, an accountant; on this basis he studied accounting. He told me another time that he took a semester of economics, and toward the end of the semester the professor asked him if he had considered majoring in the subject. He felt it was best to aim for something concrete. After he graduated he got a job at Pricewaterhouse in Boston. He also married, and, very shortly after, became a father. After a short time he decided that he didn’t want to be an accountant. He entertained two options: law and computing. He chose the former, and later he said this was the greatest mistake of his life.

Still, he did well on his LSAT, much better than expected, and received a full scholarship to Columbia Law School. His first night living in New York City, a man was murdered outside his building. A few months into his 1L fall, he came back to his apartment to find that his wife had left, taking their daughter—my half-sister. He was occupied, in law school, with an ongoing divorce and custody battle. Even so, he did well. After graduating he clerked with a second circuit judge. When the judge’s cousin was elected to high national office, the judge took his two clerks aside and intimated that he could help them get a job in Washington. My father declined: he wanted to be near his daughter, and to have a high-salaried position that would allow him to support her. His co-clerk took the judge up on the offer. His name was James Comey.

My father worked at Simpson Thacher, where he met my mother. He worked there six years; she left after eighteen months. They married in 1992 and had their first child together a year later. Shortly before I was born, this young father of three decided to quit his well-paying job at one of the country’s top law firms and take out a line of credit to open his own practice. Somehow, he succeeded. Despite trials and tribulations, the firm would survive over twenty-five years. He worked there until the day he died.

Success or Failure?

My father often described himself as a failure, or at the very least a disappointment. He said that he was the least successful person he knew. His friends were partners at large firms or the heads of important government agencies, able to afford tuition for their kids at fancy prep schools. They didn’t worry about being able to afford their mortgages. He felt he strained against the limitations of his upbringing. He expressed a sense that we, his children, were meant to achieve more than he could.

What is a good life, a good career? Would it be better for him if he had stayed at Simpson Thacher, enduring the humiliations of a senior associate until he could endure the humiliations of a junior partner and then bear the weight of a senior partner? Would it be better for him, for his family, if he had been at the beck and call of his employer and his clients—obliged to serve them, to make himself available to them, even if it meant less time spent with his wife and children, with his siblings, with his parents, his friends?

My father described himself as a failure, but in this, I think, he was engaging in the kind of self-deprecation, conscious rituals of humility, which I have inherited from him, and which he, perhaps, imbibed through Catholic guilt mutated in the light of the Protestant work ethic. He also described himself as fat, as indulgent, as mediocre. His life was an ordinary one. Without access to the contents of his mind, I can’t say for sure that it was a happy one. What did he leave behind? A family; a name. A sense that the world without him has been reduced. He was a man who woke up early each and every day, prepared to confront the reality of experience. Life was not, to him, an unending adventure. It was, in part, to be endured. In that endurance, he found, in fleeting moments and enduring commitments, a sense of beauty, love, and belonging.

He encouraged me in law school. Sometimes I felt the weight of his expectations irksome. The last conversation we had was about my classes. If he were around now, he’d be prodding me abut whether I thought I had a good shot at Law Review. I know this. I laugh at it. I don’t resent him for it. We argued, sometimes. I wish now I had been kinder to him. I wish I had done more. Death, whenever it comes, is surreal, because it brings an end to what we had naively perceived as an infinity of days yet to come.

If I can say anything about my father, it is this: he lived a life that I would be happy to have lived. I only hope that, in his final moments, he was unconscious of this loss—that he didn’t realize he was losing anything, that he retained the expectation of more and better days to come.