Byron Raymond White (1917-2002): One of the Greatest, 0918 COBJ, Vol. 47, No. 8 Pg. 76

• Author: CHARLES B. WHITE, J.
• Position: Vol. 47, 8 [Page 76]

47 Colo.Law. 76

Byron Raymond White (1917–2002): One of the Greatest

Vol. 47, No. 8 [Page 76]

The Colorado Lawyer

September, 2018

August, 2018

PROFILES IN SUCCESS

CHARLES B. WHITE, J.

This article is part of the “Six of the Greatest” series profiling outstanding lawyers in Colorado history.

Justice Byron White served his community, the country, and the legal profession in many different roles over the course of his life. He was a leading scholar at the University of Colorado and Yale Law School while setting records as an intercollegiate and professional athlete. He volunteered as a naval intelligence officer in the South Pacific during the Second World War, clerked for the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and returned to Denver as a hardworking and highly successful attorney in private practice. He was active in Colorado and national politics, state and local bar associations, and community and nonprofit organizations. Called back to Washington with his family on being appointed to be the deputy attorney general of the United States, he then served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for 31 years. And yet, with all his accomplishments, he never lost his modesty, his sense of humor, or his keen interest in and affection for his family, friends, and each new person that he met.

Beginnings

Byron Raymond White was born on June 8, 1917 in Fort Collins, Colorado. He was the second son of Alpha Albert (“Al”) White and Maude Burger. Al’s father, Ephraim Godfrey White, grew up in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, fought in the Second Seminole and Mexican Wars, and settled as a farmer in Iowa, where he fathered 15 children.¹ Ephraim returned to Iowa after distinguished service with the 22nd Iowa Infantry Volunteers during the Civil War.²

Al White moved to Colorado from Audubon, Iowa in 1900 and worked as a sheep rancher and farmer in Ft. Morgan and Pueblo before starting a career in the lumber business in Fort Collins. He married Maude, who was also from Iowa, in 1904. In 1920, three years after Byron was born, Al and Maude moved with Byron and his older brother Clayton (“Sam”) to Wellington, where Al became the branch manager of a lumber supply company. Al served as Town Trustee and Mayor of Wellington in the early 1920s, when the population of the town was about 350. The Whites were active in the community, played tennis and bridge, and were avid fans of high school and college sports.

Sam and Byron played baseball, basketball, and football, and ran track. They swam in the irrigation ditches and fished the Poudre and Big Thompson Rivers with Al. They also worked unloading lumber, shoveling coal, maintaining the railroad, and harvesting sugar beets, which were the principal crop in the area.³ Byron started work in the beet fields when he was 7 or 8 years old for $1.50 a day. When they were in high school, the boys rented 25 acres of land and contracted to bring in the beet crop. They hired other boys to help them block and thin the fields, hand-hoe the weeds, and harvest and top the beets. As Byron said many years l after, “There was very little money around Wellington, and I suppose you could say that by the normal standards of the day we were all quite poor, although we didn’t necessarily feel poor because everyone was more or less the same. Everybody worked for a living. Everybody.”⁴

Sam White graduated from Wellington High School in 1930. As valedictorian of his class, he received a full academic scholarship to the University of Colorado–Boulder (CU), where he played both football and basketball and earned all-conference honors. Four years later, Byron also graduated from Wellington with a “straight A ranking” and was named the most outstanding student and valedictorian in his class, which also earned him a full scholarship to CU. As he put it, “My folks had never gone through high school, but they always put going to school first, ahead of everything. I can’t remember when I first thought of going to college. My brother Sam was always going to go to college, and as far as I can remember I was, too.”⁵

College Student–Athlete

Byron continued to work hard in college. He lived in a rooming house his first year and pledged to Phi Gamma Delta, the same fraternity that Sam belonged to. He waited tables at a sorority to earn some money, and when he was through working at night, he went home to study. He later remarked, “I don’t think I thought any more about my grades in college than I had in high school. I guess I just got in the habit of working.”⁶ He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and served as president of the associated students in 1937–38. In addition to his academic pursuits, Byron continued to enjoy, and excel in, athletic competition. He won three varsity letters in football, four in basketball, and three in baseball. In 1937, he was selected as a member of the All-America football team and began to attract attention from the press, which nicknamed him “Whizzer.” He famously disliked both the attention and the name. During his final season, he was the leading ground-gainer and leading scorer in college football. He and his teammates were unbeaten and untied in the regular season, but lost to Rice in the Cotton Bowl. He was the runner-up (behind Yale quarterback Clint Frank) for the Heisman Trophy. In March 1938, the CU basketball team, with Byron as one of the leading scorers, advanced to the finals of the inaugural National Invitation Tournament at Madison Square Garden but were beaten by Temple.^[7] He graduated that year, ranking first in his class of 267 students.

The Pirates and the Lions

Byron continued to combine his academic and athletic interests after college. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar in December 1937. Art Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, had offered him the then unprecedented sum of $15,000 to play football during the 1938 season and sent his player–coach Johnny Blood out to persuade him to join the team.⁸ Byron intended to decline the offer in favor of studying at Oxford University, but changed his mind when the Oxford authorities agreed that he could begin his studies in January 1939. Byron turned out to be a good investment for Rooney, albeit for a last-place team. He led the league in rushing with 567 yards. He spent the 1939 season studying in England and Europe, entered Yale Law School in October of 1939, and then took a semester of from law school in 1940 to play for the Detroit Lions, which had bought his contract from the Pirates. In 1940, he again led the league in rushing. He played for the Lions during the 1941 season, his last. He later observed that the money wasn’t the important aspect of football for him: “[W]hen the season starts and the whistle blows you play for the same reason you always play games. You play to win.”⁹ In 1954, Byron was named to the National Football Hall of Fame. Today, the NFL Players Association annually recognizes players who “go above and beyond to perform community service in their team cities and hometowns” with the Byron “Whizzer” White Award.

Rhodes Scholar

After one season with the Pirates, Byron attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar from January 1939 to October 1939, again following in the footsteps of his brother, Sam. On the advice of lawyer friends from Denver, he studied the English common law foundations of the American legal system. The Oxford academic schedule gave him a chance to travel in Europe, where during a stay in Germany he enjoyed “horsing around” with young German men and debating about the threat of war, which was on everyone’s mind. In Munich, he also spent a few evenings with John F. Kennedy, whom he had met earlier at the American Embassy in London during a Rhodes Scholar event hosted by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy.¹⁰ When the war started, all of the Rhodes Scholars were called back to England and then America.

Yale Law

Byron enrolled in Yale University Law School in October 1939. In 1940, he won the Edgar M. Cullen prize for the highest scholastic grades.¹¹ He was chosen for law review after his first year, but, as noted above, decided instead to take time off from school to play football for the Lions. He made up the courses that he missed by studying at CU the following summer. The United States’ entry into the war in December 1941 interrupted his legal studies, but after the war he returned to Yale and received an LL.B. degree magna cum laude on November 9, 1946 and was awarded the Order of the Coif. He also took a brief respite from the law to get married to Marion Lloyd Stearns, the daughter of CU President Robert L. Stearns, on June 15, 1946. Byron and Marion had been acquainted in Boulder, although she was four years his junior (sharing his birthday), and met again in San Francisco during the war, where Marion was stationed as a Lieutenant in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service).

Byron’s family originally sparked his interest in the law. His uncle, Charles Sumner White, was a lawyer in Audubon, Iowa, and Sam and Byron enjoyed visiting him with their parents. Byron said that his father, Al White, “was always interested in the law and would have made a fine lawyer himself. He used to like to discuss and argue all kinds of things with my brother and me.” Byron observed that “Yale Law School was the most stimulating intellectual experience I had had up to that time. There was a fairly small enrollment and a relatively large staff, so you had a great opportunity to be exposed to some of the finest legal minds in the country.” He was impressed by the legal realists on the Yale faculty: “[T]hey had a very exciting approach to the law and...