2001 Remembering Chuck Goldmark - William L. Dwyer

Remembering Chuck Goldmark

William L. Dwyer

Just over fifteen years ago – in December 1985 – my wife and I were invited to Christmas Eve dinner at the home of our friends Chuck and Annie Goldmark. We had to decline with regret because we had visitors and had planned a gathering at our house. So instead of being at the Goldmarks’ on Christmas Eve we were at home. That night came a telephone call from Peter Goldmark, Chuck’s brother, with news so unwelcome that in memory I can still hear his voice on the telephone. And I spent the rest of that sleepless night, and the next day, along with a growing number of other friends, at Harborview Hospital, talking with the police, hanging onto every word we could get from the overworked doctors and nurses, hoping for favorable reports that never came.

We all know that calamities are part of life, but this one was exceptional. Chuck Goldmark and his beautiful wife Annie were among the best our very uneven species can produce. He was a skilled, courageous, and public-spirited lawyer and, among many other achievements, an accomplished mountaineer. (The photograph we see here was taken by Stim Bullitt in the Cascades in 1982; the three of us were hiking and had just stopped for the night on a rocky ledge; Chuck is gazing upward toward where we would go the next day; I am sitting down and probably asking when the cocktail hour would begin.) Annie was a gifted linguist, a charming companion, and a loving mother. Their two children, Derek and Colin, were bilingual, bright, and promising – but above all, they were just young boys.

All four of them were cherished by a large and diverse group of friends, and when their lives were taken so brutally, so senselessly, so profoundly in violation of the most elemental standards of law and morals, it seemed that fate was not just being arbitrary, as it often is, but was determined to mock every virtue and destroy every hope.

There was an immense outpouring of anger and grief – and then, after the first shock had passed, a new consensus. All of us at once, so it seemed, decided that the legacy of Christmas Eve, 1985, would be not despair but action, not resignation but a resolve to pick up the torch, to honor Chuck and his family by bringing their ideals into reality as well as we could.

That flame is still burning, and one expression of it is the annual Goldmark Award Luncheon. Chuck would be pleased that this event is held in his memory, and doubly pleased that today we will honor Ken MacDonald and hear from Bob Utter – two of the finest champions of justice in the history of our state.

Any description of Chuck Goldmark as a person must begin at a sprawling, isolated wheat and cattle ranch in Eastern Washington. He and Peter grew up there in the company of two remarkable parents, John and Sally. Nature is often rough, winter and summer, in that part of the country, and the boys were always close to nature. As Chuck said later, "By giving us life on the ranch, John and Sally gave us something very special – the chance to learn things that few people ever learn. How a cow reacts to a cutting horse. What the grass is like in the spring. What the wind sounds like in a blizzard. We were in a place where your life was what you made it. No one else was in control. No one else was able to decide whether you could make it through the next day."

The boys picked rocks from the fields, ran farm machinery, planted and threshed wheat, herded cattle. They went to a one-room country school on the Indian reservation, and later to high school in town.

Chuck was a teenage boy when I first got to know him. He was already a capable ranch hand, and in the years that followed he became an airplane pilot, college student, international student leader, Army officer, law student, husband and father, and lawyer.

As a grown man he was physically strong and tireless, and even mountain climbing came naturally to him. His partner Jim Wickwire, who knows what he’s talking about, says that Chuck quickly became very good at mountaineering without ever making a full commitment to it.

He did make a full commitment to his wife and children. As Peter says, "Chuck devoted himself to his family and had the unique ability to leave work and reenter family life with energy and tremendous enthusiasm. He played constantly with the children at activities they loved: electronics, books, puzzles, skiing, hiking, biking, and rocketry. . . . And if Annie needed Chuck for support, he immediately dropped everything to be there."

As a lawyer Chuck was brilliant and clear-minded; hard-working and well-spoken; cool under pressure; and unfailingly kind and generous. He brought out the best in everyone who worked with him – usually just by his example, but sometimes by exhortation. Barbara Clark recalls that Chuck was her first contact when she was hired to establish the Legal Foundation in 1984. She says: "I lived in Lynnwood at the time and on my first day of work there was a major snowstorm. I called Chuck to say I didn’t think I could make it in. In a matter of fact manner he indicated that I could make it, I just needed to apply myself with a little more energy to the problem. And, of course, I did make it . . ."

Above all, Chuck knew what being a lawyer should mean. He knew that just as the composer’s job is to create music (he was a great fan of Bach), and the artist’s job is to create beauty, the lawyer’s calling is to create justice. As Kevin Kelly has said, "Chuck believed that it is the responsibility of each of us . . . to try to improve some aspect of society beyond ourselves." He served that ideal with an ever-growing confidence, ability, and success, and without caring who got the credit.

I remember a remark made by the president of the Washington State Bar Association in the early 1980s. Chuck had just argued before the State Supreme Court in support of the IOLTA plan that would make millions of dollars in unused interest on lawyers’ trust accounts available for legal aid to the poor. The bar president did not know Chuck very well, but he was present for the hearing. He said afterward that hearing Goldmark argue that day had made him proud to be a lawyer.

Chuck was a co-founder of the Legal Foundation of Washington, and he became its president. There were other causes – the North Slope Eskimos and the Pike Place Market, among others – which he served with the highest distinction.

At 41 years of age Chuck was in his early prime. Given a normal life span, he would have accomplished much more for our community and our nation – but it was not to be.

Well, these few words are only a sketch, and we cannot bring back our friend and colleague. What we can do is to carry on the work he would have done had he lived, and in that way to give him and his family the one kind of immortality that is within our power to confer.

When we do that, we can be sure that if Chuck were here he would say: "Way to go. Today you gave it all you had. That’s good enough. But tomorrow, with a little more energy, you can do better."

-- William L. Dwyer, February 23, 2001