(Photo by Dion Ogust)
On his eightieth birthday on 27th day of November, Jerry Wapner — longstanding dean of Woodstock lawyers — will retire from the law practice he created not very long after arriving here with his family some 50 years ago. The following interview was preceded by Jerry’s warning, “I’ll try to be as forthcoming as I possible, which isn’t very much …” Despite this caveat the interviewee didn’t once seem to avoid an issue, veil a secret, or pull a punch.
There is one secret Jerry attempted to conceal. Two hours before our phone call I asked Grace Bakst Wapner and Jerry’s wife of 59 years, if she could provide me with at least a partial list of the organizations Jerry has represented on a pro-bono basis. I didn’t want to ask Jerry for such information directly, because I felt he would deem such disclosures self-congratulatory. Twenty minutes later I received an email from Grace informing me that I’d been correct in my assumption: no information would be forthcoming.
TW. Your father, Jerry, was a lawyer. You became a lawyer. Was this a family tradition you were expected to uphold?
JW. I don’t think so. My father’s father carried laundry bundles on his back, and his father rode around Russian working for the czar, of all things buying horses. And my son is not a lawyer, so if there was a tradition it was very shortlived.
TW. But did your father influence the way you practiced law?
JW. Not in the least.
TW. You’re considered something of anomaly — not a run-of-the-mill attorney. But every lawyer’s education is basically the same. When did you become different? And in answering that question perhaps you could provide me with a brief, even cryptic overview of your career before Woodstock?
JW. Well, before I came to Woodstock I was a lawyer in Manhattan in a small firm which a classmate and I formed … and, let’s see, … we took in three partners of the same age, just out of law school, then there were five of us on the 13th floor at 37 Wall Street. We rented on the 13th floor since it was cheaper because people didn’t like the number. And then it dwindled from five to four and then to three. And then that went on for some years and we were very scrapping young lawyers in a very dog-eat-dog world, and I can’t tell you what precipitated it — a variety of things, no doubt.
But one day a year before we came here, almost a year to the day, which would have been some time in May of 1963, I was with one of my partners in the Brooklyn Bridge subway station waiting for the IRT. We’d just come from court — as I recall, a singularly disgusting event — and I turned to him and said, “I’m leaving.” And I think I said, affording myself some prescience, I’m going to leave within a year.
Well, I did leave within a year. I was really disgusted with the city, which was crime-ridden and not a great a place for children. But it was more than that. That was one of the factors. Another was I really came to hate what was I doing.
TW. Which you’d describe as…?
JW. General practice, some criminal law, matrimonial, labor law…I worked on a wide variety of law, not really becoming attached to any of it.
TW. On another note, you’d played jazz piano pretty seriously in college, had you not?
JW. I had.
TW. And had you given piano a try professionally, or was that just too daunting?
JW. It was daunting. I mean I’ve got what I would call something a couple of notches below a minor talent. I’ve got an ear. So I never really learned to read music … really unfortunate. And not all that much technique. But I’ve got a lot of ideas, so if I could play what I think of or feel, I’d guess it would be good and maybe even better, but I can’t play it. And I’ve seen people and heard people who can and so, after a time … I mean I did play up here in the area at hotels and things like that, with small groups. But I just kind of gave it up … It wasn’t satisfying.
TW. Understood. But who is a jazz pianist who plays what you think you might have played, could you have played what you wanted to play?
JW. Wow. Bill Evans, Brubeck. But they’re so high in the stratosphere … There’s no way I could even leap…
TW. So now I first became aware of you through meeting your son Kenny, who would eventually become my best friend, when … were you “renting” Tapooz’s Lodge?
JW. We were renting a house on Tapooz’s property.
TW. And you started a lecture series …
JW. Yes, we had a venture called “Ohayo Mountain Hall,” some name like that … on Yerry Hill Road. We had lined up a whole series of people to come up, mainly from the city, many of who I knew but some Grace knew, too, who were activists, people like Dorothy Day and …
TW. Orson Bean?
JW. That’s right — Orson Bean. He started a Summerhill school. There were a whole bunch of people. We set up a program to present but our downfall was that the constituency that would’ve really attended the hall became alienated. And they became alienated because on the program we had, along with a speaker from the Communist Party, we had a speaker from a local chapter of the John Birch Society. And this obviously offended the left in Woodstock.