Credos.

• Author: Hutchinson, Dennis J.
• Position: Justice Byron R. White - Testimonial

When Byron White moved in the spring of 2001 from Washington, D.C., where he had been a public servant for forty years, back to Denver, where he had begun his legal career after World War II, he brought with him a vast cache of personal memorabilia that had been collected over a lifetime. The collection includes scrapbooks that his mother started when he was in high school and which were continued by his wife, Marion, after they were married in 1946. It also contains other artifacts--athletic programs, photographs, portraits, bronze busts, plaques, trophies--running the gamut of a life spent largely in the public eye since late adolescence. For the time being, the collection is being stored in the federal courthouse that bears his name, and a special room is being considered to house the collection. When White delivered the collection, two of his former law clerks who were living in the Denver area helped sort and arrange the material. Among the artifacts is a chapbook that White began in high school under the direction of his remarkable English literature teacher, Evelyn Schmidt Ely. (1) White explained to the former clerks that his values, first bred at home, took root under Mrs. Ely's direction. Two works, he said, became polestars in his life. The first was John Milton's sonnet, which is customarily entitled, On His Blindness:

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere hall my days, in this dark world and wide, And that once Talent which is death to hide, Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; "Doth God exact day-labour, light denied," I fondly ask; But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need Either man's work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his State Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who stand and wait." (2) The poem, copied out in a round, young hand more than sixty-five years before, now carried an immediate poignancy--White had recently suffered a series of small strokes that prevented him from speaking more than a word or two at a time and that precluded him from sitting by designation on federal courts of appeals after his retirement from the Supreme Court. Thus, nearly a half-century of public service--"man's work[s]"--was finished.

The other work copied in the chapbook, its particular pages rubbed with wear...