Five of the Greatest: Donald S. Graham (1909-2003), 0716 COBJ, Vol. 45 No. 7 Pg. 37
| Author | Charles Casteel Dale Harris, J. |
Charles Casteel Dale Harris, J.
Last
year, Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP celebrated the 100th
anniversary of its founding as Lewis & Grant in 1915.
From the time he joined the firm in 1940 until his death in
2003, Donald S. Graham was one of three giants upon whose
shoulders the firm stabilized, grew, and prospered. The lives
of the other two—Richard Davis and Donald
Stubbs—have been memorialized in earlier editions of
the "Outstanding Lawyers in Colorado History"
series.
The Early Years
Don was born on January 5, 1909 in Pittsburg, Kansas, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Canfield Graham. When Don was just a youngster, his father's work in the oil business took the family to Oklahoma, first to Bartlesville and later to Tulsa. After finishing high school in Tulsa in 1926, Don worked for a couple of years to save money for college.
Don started college at the University of Tulsa, but after one year he transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder. There, he completed his undergraduate and law school work—on an accelerated basis—in 1932. As those of us who knew him would have guessed, he graduated first in his class, was managing editor of the Rocky Mountain Law Review (later renamed the University of Colorado Law Review), and was a member of the Order of the Coif
In law school, Don was a classmate of Don Stubbs. They studied together in preparation for final examinations and for the state bar exam. To help pay their expenses, they worked various jobs at the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house in Boulder—they waited tables, stoked a coal furnace, and shoveled snow from the sidewalks. Thus began a close friendship between these two promising young lawyers that would only strengthen once they joined the same firm several years later.
And, of course, it was Don Stubbs who introduced his sister Lucile Stubbs—known to all as "Luke"—to Don Graham. Luke and Don were married in 1947. This was truly a wonderful marriage that blossomed and flourished for more than 50 years. Theirs was a true friendship and a rare partnership that was marked, among many ways, by their shared love of the arts and opera.
Following graduation from law school in the depths of the Great Depression, Don found work in the legal department at the Federal Land Bank of Wichita, Kansas. In his six years there, he became an expert in real estate and related legal problems.
He was lured back to CU Law School to teach courses in conflicts of law and federal court procedure during the winter quarter of 1940. A deal had been struck, however, between the Lewis & Grant firm and the dean of the law school (Robert Stearns, who previously had been a lawyer at Lewis & Grant) that Don would join the firm as an associate following his brief sojourn as a member of the CU faculty. So in April 1940, Don Graham began his 63-year association with the law firm that one day would proudly bear his name. He later described his starting salary of $175 per month as “not substandard for the time” but at the “prevailing or above prevailing wage.”
Military Service
Not long after joining the firm—in 1942—Don was drafted as a private in the U.S. Armed Forces. His first assignment after basic training was to Lowry Air Force Base for a course in the maintenance of the machine guns used in Air Corps heavy bombers. Upon completion of the course, he was assigned to an Air Corps base in Salina, Kansas. He later was commissioned as an officer in the Judge Advocate General Corps and saw service in London, in Paris and, after World War II hostilities ceased, in Frankfurt, Germany. While in Germany, Don was allowed to visit the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, and in his later years, he recalled with great admiration the leadership of that tribunal by the chief prosecutor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. He was discharged from military duties in 1946 with the rank of Major.
Building a Law Firm
When Don returned to Denver in 1946, he rejoined Lewis & Grant—as did Don Stubbs upon his discharge from the Navy. Within a year, that firm of six attorneys merged with the small firm of four lawyers that Richard Davis and Quigg Newton had started a few years earlier to form Lewis, Grant, Newton, Davis & Henry (later Lewis, Grant & Davis). This began the professional association of three remarkable men—Dick Davis, Don Graham, and Don Stubbs—who would go on to build one of the Rocky Mountain region’s finest and most durable law firms. In...
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