Judge Bruce Jenkins a Tribute

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Citation: Vol. 37 No. 1 Pg. 17
• Publication year: 2024
• Pages: 17

Judge Bruce Jenkins: A Tribute Vol. 37 No. 1 Pg. 17 Utah Bar Journal January 2024

January 2024

Article

By James Holbrook

I first met Bruce Jenkins in 1974 when he was the U.S. Bankruptcy Referee, and I was clerking for Judge Willis Ritter. Because we lived in the same neighborhood and worked in the federal courthouse, we often rode the bus together to work, talking about and exchanging books. In 1978, he became a U.S. District Court Judge, and I became an Assistant U.S. Attorney. I tried a half dozen civil and criminal cases in his courtroom until I became a full-time law faculty member in 2002. After that, we had lunch several times a year, including twice earlier this year.

Bruce was born on May 27, 1927. His father was a schoolteacher, and his mother, who was highly skilled in shorthand and typing, wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. During the Great Depression, his father had difficulty in finding jobs teaching, so his mother ended up going to work to support the family for a time.

Bruce grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood on the near westside of Salt Lake City. "Nice people, generally, struggling like the rest of us," as he described it years later. When he was ten years old, his father had a job teaching at Lincoln Junior High and his mother had saved enough money for a down payment on a house near the University of Utah. On his first day as a student in the 5th grade at Wasatch Elementary, he wore a new pair of bib overalls to school and discovered he was the only kid in school who wore bib overalls.

His parents were Franklin Roosevelt Democrats and Bruce campaigned with them for Roosevelt for President when he was five years old. He graduated from East High in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy at age seventeen. After basic training and service in California, the war had ended in the Pacific, and Bruce was assigned to a freighter carrying beer to the Marshall Islands. The ship stopped at Bikini, then Wake, and Kwajalein Islands, delivering beer. Later, these all were test sites of atomic bomb experiments.

Bruce left the Navy in 1946 and, with financial support from the G.I. Bill, enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Utah. He became active in debate and was on the university's debate team, which is how he met Peggy Watkins, who grew up in New York and became his wife.

Professor G. Homer Durham was chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Utah at that time, and Bruce was a political...