Harry Lee Anstead: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

• Author: Pudlow, Jan

When a couple of Bermuda-shorts-clad, camera-toting tourists peek into the empty courtroom at the Florida Supreme Court and shyly step inside, a man wearing a black robe bellows out: "Welcome! Come on in! Where are you folks from? Why, Jacksonville is my hometown, too."

Moments later, when the newest justice, Raoul Cantero III, and his three children and wife walk into the court-room, he greets them all with hugs.

That's Harry Lee Anstead--friendly, unpretentious, genuine, treating everyone the same.

The courts belong to the people, every person deserves a fair shake at justice, and all people are created equal--these are philosophies that 64-year-old Anstead takes to heart and will bring to the court as chief justice, say those who know him well.

"He is one of the purest hearts you are ever going to find in the judiciary. He's a very purely motivated, highly idealistic, and highly altruistic judge with strong beliefs about fairness and equity. He feels very strongly about his goals and ideals and lives them. I think he'll make a great chief justice," said former Bar President Terry Russell, who grew up in Jacksonville's Springfield area, across the tracks from the Brentwood housing project where Anstead was the youngest of six children raised by a single mom.

"He had an upbringing that I'm sure greatly affected his outlook and made him a very compassionate man," Russell said.

During the Great Depression, right after Anstead was born, his father deserted the family, and his mother Loretta, a genteel woman who could play piano by ear and paint, who was educated in a convent and had little practical experience, worked at whatever job she could find to keep her family together.

"In those days, as today, the government's solution would be to take each of those six children and place them in different foster homes. My mother made up her mind that was certainly not going to happen," said Anstead.

"To see my mother overcome financial hardships was the greatest role model for me."

The turning point for the family was moving into the new Brentwood housing project.

Framed behind Anstead's desk is a letter from U.S. Senator Claude Pepper to his mother, praising her for being devoted to her children despite being broke, and for refusing to give up as she was tossed from one social agency to another. Even though she didn't have a job to pay the meager rent, finally she qualified for the subsidized housing.

"This was the most wonderful thing that happened to us," Anstead said. "It was newly constructed. The main street was lined with trees touching each other. I was raised in an environment I would never substitute if I had a million choices."

He smiles recalling the warm sense of community at Brentwood at that time: a full-time day care center, an elementary school within walking distance, a nearby garden-style park with rose bushes, and a Grecian-temple style band shell that drew neighbors together. Very important to young Harry Lee Anstead, a self-described "latch-key kid," were the athletic fields, staffed with coaches who inspired him to play every sport.

Still, there were plenty of barely-scraping-by bleak times.

Michael Anstead, a computer software analyst, said his father would tell stories of passing out in school from malnutrition.

Boyhood jobs took Anstead to treetops for mistletoe to sell door-to-door at Christmas and peddling his bike with a big basket to deliver groceries. A scar on his hand is a lasting reminder of the frugal deli manager who insisted none of the bologna roll be wasted when shaving slices on the electric cutter. Like his siblings, Anstead contributed what he earned to help pay the family's bills.

"I think we have a wonderful ability to forget the painful, and it's the togetherness and everybody looking out for everybody else that you really remember in a positive way," Anstead said.

Wilson Barnes, marshal at the Supreme Court, says it is because Anstead does remember his tough childhood that makes him a great justice today.

"I'm an African-American with my roots in the Deep South in Virginia, and I worked very hard in whatever I had to achieve in life," said Barnes.

"He comes from what I call the same socioeconomic model. And some people, when they arrive at a particular station in life, they kind of forget this background from whence they have come.

"But I can tell you that Harry Lee Anstead has not.

"He's very passionate about children, very passionate about those who need uplifting. As I analyze it, that is probably the primary basis of our closeness. And then, he's just nice people!"

Tallahassee lawyer Pete Antonacci recalled that when he was deputy attorney general, he got a call at 8 a.m. from Anstead on the day in 1994 he was to be sworn in as a justice on the Florida Supreme Court.

"You know, I'd like to meet some of your people," Anstead told Antonacci, who explained there was only a very small staff at the Capitol and most were housed at an office complex miles away. Anstead said he'd love to go, and he spent four hours meeting the worker bee state lawyers.

"He went into people's offices, and I'd say, 'This is the new Supreme Court justice,' and you could see people just fainting. State lawyers don't often get recognition. But Harry Lee Anstead was completely gracious with everyone and interested in anyone," Antonacci said.

At the July 2 passing-of-the-gavel ceremony when Anstead became chief justice, an attorney commented to his daughter, Laura, that her father sure is serious.

"I think that's a good way to describe him, and although my father may not take that as a compliment, I do. When you meet my father and talk to him face-to-face, you realize just how serious he is," said Laura Anstead, a Manhattan lawyer.

"If he is talking to you, he is sincere about his interest in what you have to say and is sincere in being interested in who you are.

"That part of my father--his sincerity--is the part I most respect and is something that I hope I have inherited."

Chris Anstead, another lawyer in the family and oldest of the five children, said: "The main thing about my father is he's very down to earth and always worries about other people's concerns. He's a very giving person."

Hanging near the entrance to Anstead's chambers is this quote from Aesop's "The Lion and the Mouse": "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."

That's more than a fable to Anstead--it's his philosophy of life.

When Anstead talks about his core values and the meaning of professionalism for lawyers, a movement in Florida he had a huge hand in developing, it is an elaboration on the Golden Rule.

"Talking about the meaning of life, the one thing I'm convinced of is it surely has to do with our relationships with one another," Anstead said.

"We're all in this life together. And if we can make a difference in someone else's life in a positive way, in an intuitive way it shows the meaning of life."

The flip side of the Golden Rule, he says, are the very words woven into America's founding principle that all people are created equal.

"In this country, the law has really been the way that we've gone about trying to carry out what was really a promise--and obviously, still doesn't exist--but we've been striving for that. And isn't that a wonderful thing to strive for? The people who have been leading the effort to strive for that have been law-trained people. And this is what I mean when I talk about the essence of professionalism, what causes you to strive always to do your best."

Two years before Anstead graduated from Jacksonville's Andrew Jackson High School, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

"What the judicial branch did was lead this nation out of darkness, the darkness of racial separation. The other two branches of government would have been more appropriate to do it," Anstead said.

"I am enormously proud to be part of a profession--in the judicial system-that issued this critically important decision in the history of this country. This decision was really the beginning of an enormous drive, in terms of fulfilling this great promise that all people are created equal."

Even though he was only a kindergartner, Michael Anstead will never forget walking with his father on the grounds of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany.

"My dad had never spoken to me with such a serious intensity on his face. I could truly see, even at that young age, how disgusted he felt about what happened there. Dad had that same look in his eyes when we walked the grounds of the cemetery at Wounded Knee, a short time later. My sister and I stared at the remains of a burned-out chapel that was filled with garbage, as Dad told us of the massacre that occurred there so many years ago," Michael Anstead recalled.

"Dad let us know that hatred and injustice were still being inflicted upon the American Indians. He explained things in such a way that it was easy to understand why and what had happened and how it continued to happen. I know it was so important to Dad for us to understand that everyone deserved to be treated equally. He constantly made us aware of prejudice and racism whenever he could."

Harry Lee Anstead tells how his was the only Catholic family in the neighborhood, and kids at school called him "pope lover," "dirty mick," and "fish eater."

"I remember going back to my mother, and she talked about ignorance that probably stemmed from parents, so don't blame the children. On the other hand, don't you take anything. You can give as good as you get. So after a few bloody noses on the ballfield, that ended with me," Anstead said.

But his Jewish friend, David, who moved in next door after World War II, wasn't so lucky.

"When we were out on the ballfield, I heard him being called names. He was called a `Yid' and a "kike," and I immediately related it to what I'd been called earlier. And I took up for my friend. More bloody noses. I was pretty good with my...