This is interview number 15 in the Raymond Goetz oral history project.
And would you please tell me your name?
Michael J. Davis.
And when did you start on the KU Law faculty?
August of 1971.
And who was dean at the time?
Well, Martin Dickinson had just become dean.
Larry Blades hired me.
But during the period, I was hired in December of 70.
And as I say, I arrived in August 71.
By that time, Larry Blades had left and Martin had become dean.
Thank you.
And at some point, did you become the university's general counsel?
I did.
In summer of 1974.
And how long were you the general counsel?
Six years.
So that would have taken you through 1980 or so?
Correct.
I became dean in 80.
And how long were you dean?
Nine years.
There was a subsequent year in 05, 06 where I was in interim.
But 80 to 89, I was dean.
Great.
Do you recall when you first met Reg Yates?
I met him very briefly at a gathering at Paul Wilson's house.
I was so naive.
I'd been working in DC for a congressman.
And we'd gotten him re-elected.
And so it was the fall of 70.
And I was interested in teaching.
And I was interested in whether I could go home again.
I'm a Canson.
And so I naively simply wrote the dean and said,
I'd like to be on your faculty.
What do I need to do?
The first letter I got back was from George Coggins,
who was a very close friend of mine in law school, saying,
who in the hell do you think you are?
To try to become a mayor.
I didn't know he was there.
He had just joined the faculty.
So I was coming back to Clay Center for Christmas
and had only been married a year and a half or so.
And so I arranged to stop in Lawrence
and have an interview, if you will.
It was just basically overnight and the next morning.
And that night, Paul Wilson had a little something
at his house.
Barclay, I remember being there.
Of course, Martin was there.
Paul, the host, Bill Kelly was there.
Ray was there.
And the next morning, I talked to a few more people,
went over and played basketball.
The gym, which I found out was very important
because Larry Blades had been on the Dartmouth varsity team
that had gone to the NCAA Final Four when he was an undergrad.
And your athletic ability was part of his,
one of his criteria, whether you'd be hired or not.
But I made a few baskets.
And the next thing I know, I got a letter
offering me a job on the faculty.
And so what was your first impression of Ray?
Well, you know, you can't help but be impressed, right?
And, you know, he was friendly,
but you could tell there was a lot of steel there too.
And I, of course, didn't get to know him
just beyond acquaintanceship until I actually joined the faculty
and started hearing all the stories.
So what kind of stories did you hear?
Oh, yeah, the same ones.
I read your piece about him, you know, a few years ago.
And those stories, you know, the terror he brought to first year students.
Yeah.
But yeah, but he's also, as you know,
he was also very gracious and helpful to young faculty,
always willing to do what he could to get you from here to there.
Anything in particular that he did for you that you recall?
No, he gave me some encouragement.
I mean, he said, you know, from what I hear, you're doing a good job
and, you know, keep it up.
I remember a couple of those.
But I don't remember.
I do remember my first year there, meeting him up there in the office.
Old grain, as we call it.
You know, the profane call it Lippincott, but it's still a grain to us.
And it was a Friday afternoon.
I said, you know, what do you got going?
And he said, well, I'm going to Kansas City for dinner because I'm 50 years old.
I think it was tomorrow or something.
I thought 50 years old.
Good God. You know, I was shocked.
He was that old because he didn't appear that old and nobody was that old.
Well, you know, Bill Kelly was that old and, you know, Greg,
some of the Paul Wilson was that old, but not Ray.
He was kind of one of us.
Huh? Yeah.
So that's interesting because he was a full generation older
or a little more really than
than a lot of the faculty.
The faculty was so young when you started and really still young
when I was in law school, starting to do.
Did did that difference in age
affect his relationship with you and the other younger faculty people?
And if so, how?
I don't believe it did.
I don't believe it did.
I mean, we did not socialize with the getses,
but I don't think the other generation did either.
I mean, you know, they had their own.
They had, of course, a large family.
And I don't think they socialized a whole lot, you know, with Lawrence people.
So, I mean, the relationship was mostly
a professional and B, just, you know, a chat in the hall.
But I don't think the young people were differentiated from.
I mean, there weren't very many people his.
Era, right?
I mean, they were either older or younger and.
But I think it was more just their own personal choices to when and how to.
Now, that loosened as as time went on.
But for in the I didn't I didn't think I was in his house until I was dean.
And that was at least nine years after I come.
Yeah, that's interesting.
The. Were you Dean?
Well, I think you were.
You were Dean then when he started phased retirement. Right.
And how did that come about?
By that time, he was a very busy arbitrator. Yes.
And that was part of it.
He didn't want to cheat us and he didn't want to cheat
the people he was arbitrating.
So it was a personal choice.
It wasn't me tapping him on the shoulder and saying, by the way,
you know, you're not here as often as you used to be.
It was entirely.
And I'm not sure anybody had ever done it before.
I was just fresh out of the general counsel's office and I.
Saw no reason why I don't think I ask anybody's permission to,
you know, he got half his salary and.
Did half his work and kept probably wrote as much as he had before. But.
Yeah, I made that decision.
He and I made that decision together.
I just kind of announced it to everybody else.
So some of the other folks that I've interviewed
told me that.
That Ray, when he started, of course, he came in
with 16 years of experience at Safer Shaw and which was unusual.
And when he got to KU,
he actually kept some of his
pension fund clients and continued to do work.
And I can't remember who told me this.
It may have been Judge Lungstrom or somebody else.
But at some point,
I guess it was Martin Dickinson when he was Dean,
went to him and said, you got too many irons in the fire outside the law school.
Sounds like Martin.
OK, you know anything about that?
Yeah, I vaguely remember
Martin was, you know,
I don't know whether it was a written or unwritten rule
that there was sort of a 20 percent.
Of your week could be spent, you know, doing things that related to you,
you know, whether you were working as an attorney or or, you know,
helping a firm or whatever.
Whatever.
And I think I don't remember
whether that rule was created by Martin or whether he was enforcing one
that was already and I don't think there was any written rule.
I think it was an unwritten rule, you know, that
at least 84 days a week, you needed to be at the law school.
And of course, you only taught three days a week.
So you could certainly fulfill all of your teaching responsibilities
Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
The first few years I was there.
So that all I know is, yes, that was Martin's decision.
And that was Martin's point of view about everybody.
It wouldn't it wouldn't have been necessarily just right. OK.
Did did raise
kind of exceptional private practice experience?
Did that affect his relationship or how his fellow faculty members
looked at him as a member of the faculty?
No, not at all.
Well, that increased admiration, if anything.
And I'm I'm sure it affected Ray's view of the rest of us
who hadn't had that much experience.
But but that's not what you ask me.
Yeah, yeah, because a number of the students of Ray's have mentioned,
you know, his the extent of his private practice experience
is something that they thought really added to his. Sure.
Yeah, his value to the faculty.
And I just wondered if the faculty felt the same.
Yes. Yeah.
If anybody didn't, they never mentioned. Right. So.
Did said Shapiro Shapiro told me that
he he didn't seem to know
how big a deal Ray gets was as an arbitrator.
Did people on the faculty know that he was really a highly esteemed arbitrator?
Yes. Yeah.
Was he a baseball fan?
Ray, not particularly, I don't think.
No, no, no, because because I always was.
And I know I don't think so.
Just another client.
That's great. I love that.
Did his work as an arbitrator have any effect on his
his teaching responsibilities, the negative effect or any kind of effect, I guess?
No, absolutely not.
You know, I've read the student evaluations for every faculty member every year,
and he was always right up near the top.
At or near the top.
And I did read them.
You did. Yeah, I had forgotten we did it, but OK.
The so Ray was a renowned practitioner of the Socratic method.
And were you aware of his reputation in that regard?
Yes. Did you ever hear from any students about his Socratic method?
Well, nobody came to my office.
But again, every year, every student had to fill out an evaluation in writing.
And they they were anonymous.
So there was there was some griping about how tough he was,
but mostly people appreciated
what came out of his grilling.
Do you know why?
Do you have any idea why he was so so good at the Socratic method?
No, but that it's a combination of.
Information and he had it all.
Personality and he had it all.
And the ability to drill down, you know,
you're looking for X, but you need to get through RST, U, V and W
to prove why X is X.
And he was superb at that.
Yeah. Yeah.
I just wonder if it in some ways is just a natural thing.
I mean, not everybody taught it that way.
That's for sure. Yeah.
And it is a natural.
Yes. In many ways, I always believe that.
And there are some people who are exceptionally smart and exceptionally dedicated.
And just couldn't do it that way.
Just had to lecture or or, you know, just ask one big question
and then let people free fall from there.
And, you know, it showed up in student appreciation because, again,
it's well, a few students complain, particularly first year students,
because they were being coddled in other classes.
The everybody came to it, think, appreciate.
Him for who he was and how we did it.
Did anybody ever come to you and ask to be translated?
Not that I remember, probably.
There was a steady beat to my about, you know,
I want to be in so and so's class and I don't want to be in.
I pretty well discouraged that, you know, the computer would do the job for all of us
or whatever system we had at the time.
Did you ever talk to Ray about the students that you had?
Yeah, what did he say about that?
No, he was sort of pleased.
That many was getting their attention.
Yeah, which was the point.
Yeah. So what a really my most valuable possessions these days is I really
think that the students are the most valuable people in the world.
One of really my most valuable possessions these days is I wrote Ray
when I realized he wasn't going to arbitrate anymore.
I had written him to select him as an arbitrator,
so he wasn't anymore because it was health.
And he wrote back and, you know, I told him that I valued his teaching very much.
And he wrote back, I was not everybody's cup of tea.
Was that the kind of thing that he said to you?
Sure. Yeah.
Well, I remember telling Steve fear this, and it kind of fits in the last two or
three things you act every spring.
So I started in the summer of 80.
So probably not in the spring of 81, but in spring of 82, 83, 84, Ray would come in
and tell me he was retiring and I would say, no, you're not.
And of course, he had every right in the world, which he knew perfectly well,
even better than I that he had the right.
But we would get in this, you know, ten minute argument about whether he was
going to retire or not.
And finally, he'd say, all right, you know, one more year.
And the final time he came in, I said, no, you're not.
And he said, well, I have a heart problem.
I said, that's cheating.
True story. Yeah.
So he did he retire fully after the fall of 87?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, he may have taught as an adjunct once in a while, but he left the faculty.
Yes.
Was he an an active member of the faculty in terms of faculty meetings and that?
Yeah. Yes, he was.
What what does that mean?
I mean, I don't know.
Um.
They were lifelier in those days, and then they became, you know,
a lot of young people full of ideas about how we ought to do things.
And then there were conservatives like
and I don't mean political conservatives.
I mean, let's keep things the way they are.
Martin would be one of those.
But he was more of a mediator
than a position taker, frankly.
I mean, the biggest fight was over Saturday morning classes.
I remember that that that went on that rage for a semester.
And by God, we won the little guy.
Why are we teaching on Saturday?
Nobody else is teaching on Saturday.
So and I think he backed that one, that the five day week, you know, fact.
Yeah.
He he must have worked a lot.
Yeah, and he was in his office, you know,
you know, a man, but I think he worked a lot
either from home or on the road.
I mean, I think, you know, a lot of his writing was not necessarily done up
in his office on his typewriter.
I think I think he he probably worked outside the building
as much as he worked inside the building, at least if you take the teaching
out of the equation.
What was he like as a scholar?
He was excellent.
I mean, he he emphasized quite
naturally the practical aspects of the law
and its application in specific instances,
you know, rather than theorizing about, you know, what it might be.
So I think I mean, I was told a lot by a lot of people
that his stuff was very helpful to them in their labor practices
and probably more that than
the rest of us who had less experience were writing about.
I had done some, but I think they were by far
more practical to the people who read them than than most of the pieces in there.
Yeah. And he'd been on the Law Review, as I recall, at Chicago, right?
When he was a student, am I right?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. I mean, he one of the things that was interesting, he wrote like
he must have been just a person of boundless energy
because he was still practicing at Saferth and he wrote three law review articles,
one published in the Iowa Law Review,
the Iowa Law Review, one in Duke's Law Review and one in another law review
that I forget. But he was still practicing as a lawyer,
but it must have been in looking ahead.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think I did talk to him about that.
And he wrote them to establish a basis for seeking an academic position at his age.
Most of us came there in our late 20s or early 30s,
having gotten out of law school at 24 and then done some things.
And then, but coming in when he came in, I think he felt he needed to show some
gravitas, academic gravitas to help him get the kind of job he wanted in academia.
Yeah, I mean, his articles that I remember really being of practical help
were he wrote one on secondary boycotts that was published in the KU Law Review.
And some of my narrators have described their work on that.
And that was a very practical piece, but also scholarly.
And then his article on the public employee bargaining law in Kansas.
Both.
OK, I already asked you that.
When he retired finally, did the law school do anything to acknowledge that?
I'm sure we did. I just don't remember.
Yes, and we did it for everybody.
Then, of course, we would have done it for him.
I don't I don't recall the details.
OK. So there's a sculpture outside of the current Green Hall.
And but when you and Ray were on the faculty,
you moved from old Green Hall to the current Green Hall.
And I think I'd like to hear about Ray's ideas about a sculpture.
Well, my recollection or art, my recollection is that.
The building committee.
That Martin appointed was himself, Ray, me.
And the librarian at the time, Barney Reams,
and a student, Chris Hall, and the five of us.
Basically represented the fact that we would go back to faculty meetings
and get improved and things, but the whole idea of the new building.
And there was a tremendous battle over whether Jimmy Green would or could be moved.
And I don't recall any dissent from the faculty.
I don't recall. I'm not saying it didn't happen.
The general feeling was Jimmy Green.
It was going to be Green Hall.
We'd already figured that out.
And Jimmy Green should probably be in front of Green Hall.
And there there are models of the new building with Jimmy out front.
And there were there were
spotlights to project him against that back wall of the courtroom
that just to the left of the front door to the building.
And he was going to be at night.
He was going to that statue was going to be projected against that wall.
And then Topeka,
I think, led by the attorney general, decided he wasn't going
and that he couldn't go.
And so, you know, screw us.
And that's why there was a big lump of cement out front.
The building with nothing on it for the first 10 years, maybe eight or 10 years.
What did you graduate? Eighty five.
I think it got in there right after I graduated.
Yeah. So that that means for eight years,
you know, we moved in fall of 77, as I recall,
78, President Ford came out or former president for it or whatever
and inaugurated the building.
But it was, yeah, years before anything was on Jimmy's
hunk of cement out there.
Yeah. Was Bob Steffen the AG at that time?
Yeah, but I
it was who was his successor?
Now, it was I think it was a KU grad law grad.
I can't remember his name.
I can't remember either. Anyway, it doesn't make any sense.
No, then the legislature got involved.
I mean, it was it was a big frickin deal.
And KU Law School, in our view, lost.
Right. Well, I think everybody agrees.
Or most people agree.
What did Ray have some ideas about
what kind of art to put in there and how to connect up
the old building and the new building?
Yeah, no, it was what I described earlier in our conversation.
It was but we were recording some kind of big beams coming on.
Bouncing around those three buildings,
new green, old green and Frasier,
obviously Frasier being the high point in between the other two.
Right. So like lasers? Yeah.
Yes. And then multicolored.
And yeah, I mean, it was it was a terrific idea.
How far did it get?
It was gaining enthusiasm when
Chancellor Wesco decided what was going to go down there.
I don't think certainly the dean
and I don't think anybody on the faculty had much influence
about the selection of that particular sculpture.
Oh, OK. So
you said that people didn't
socialize much with the getses.
But you you were in his house when you were dean.
What was what was that house like?
Because I lived right around the corner from it.
So I knew where it was. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, it was it was lovely inside.
I mean, the the art
collection was hard to miss.
It was pretty kitschy, as you know.
And but but otherwise, it was warm.
Did you know whose house it had been?
No. Jack Mitchell, the football coach.
Was moving out when the getses were moving to Lawrence.
And so they bought the football coach's house.
That's good. There's a factoid for you.
Yeah, exactly.
What did happen to where did did he get fired or?
I think he got fired.
He left town.
I mean, I don't remember whether it was for another job or for just
hightailing it out of town.
And I'm sure I knew the story at the time, but.
Did you ever been what that would have been 76 maybe?
I mean, 66 probably.
66. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean,
he apparently his first year raised first year on the faculty.
He was like a visiting professor, I guess,
according to stuff I got from the law school anyway.
That that makes that makes sense.
The everybody testing each other's each each other out.
Right. Right. Yeah.
A free look, a free look for both sides. Yeah.
Makes sense.
Did you ever discuss Ray's art with him, his art collection?
I don't believe so.
Yeah, I'm sorry that no one did, because I would really like to have
found somebody that did because I know it was there.
OK. All right.
When was the last time you saw you?
You might try Barclay Clark.
OK, he's not in good health, but
and I haven't gotten a report about him for three or four months,
but he's living in Arizona.
He's living outside of Phoenix, I believe.
OK. Maybe where's the University of Arizona?
Tucson. Yeah, yeah.
But he was he also had an art collection and was
my guess is he, you know, he'd been mayor and three times.
And my guess he'd been to the Getz House
more than and paid more attention to the collection.
So I think I have an email address,
but I don't I don't have it in front of me.
Yeah, no, that's I have your email address.
I'll look and see if I can find it.
OK, that'd be great. Thanks.
When was the last time you saw Ray? Do you recall? No.
What what did you
how did you feel when you heard he had died?
I mean, I was shocked.
Terrible. I mean, I
I don't think I had seen him for two or three years.
And so it was quite a shock.
I mean, I didn't know that he I mean, I knew he'd had these problems
going back to when I was Dean, but but
I didn't know it had gotten that bad or I would have made a point to go see him.
And myself, I guess, would be part of it.
But no, I felt I felt like I'd lost a friend in the law school
and lost one of its great. Right.
Any other memories of Ray that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to share?
I thought I saw him at his loosest.
Nineteen seventy four.
Three three people joined the faculty in 1971,
Mike Davis and Malin Louise Wheeler, who were married.
And so we were the class of seventy one.
Well, the Wheelers decided in seventy four to move back to L.A.
where they'd come from.
And so we had a going away party for Malin Louise.
And they made up the guest list.
And I was in charge of.
What was going to happen.
So I rented a school bus.
I got a third year law student who I trusted to be the driver.
And off we went to Kansas City with our spouses on a Friday night.
There was a bar and then there was a bar and then there was a restaurant.
And then there was the levy
and we headed home about midnight.
And on the way home, Ray gets saying his high school fight song for us.
One of many highlights of that evening, but but near the top for most people.
Did he regale you with stories of Barbara Hale being his classmate?
No, I don't believe so.
Yeah. So Della Street was his high school classmate.
Wow. Yeah.
Anything else you can think of that I haven't asked you about?
No. No, they were.
Great people.
I mean, you love Mo as much as you love Gray.
And she I think she had a hard time after he left.
I would see her in a bar by herself once in a while in Lawrence.
I'd always go, you know, join her.
But I think she struggled.
Of course, you know, they'd lost a child, you know.
And so it was a pretty tough decade there for a while.
But she was a great lady.
Yeah. I mean, incredible power academic couple.
Exactly. Yeah, that was the first thing that Steve called me about.
I said, what was his wife's name?
I said, Mo.
Anyway, OK, I'm going to stop the recording. All right.