One of the greatest giants in all American jurisprudence was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who sat on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court for 30 years, from 1902 to 1932. During the last three years of that tenure, I was there in the room with him. Let me explain.

That highest of all our courts has nine justices, including one chief. While I was employed there, the chief justices were ex-president William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes.

Justice Holmes was appointed to the court by President Theodore Roosevelt and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1902. I became a page in the Supreme Court two weeks after my 14th birthday, Sept. 5, 1928, and sat behind him on a little chair in the Supreme Court chambers then in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington. There were three other pages, all teenage boys. We wore blue knicker suits and stockings. We waited on the justices, brought them books from the library, drinking water and carried documents to their homes by street car at the end of the day en route to our night high school classes. It was for me a dream job and paid $110 a month – a fortune. My widowed mother needed the extra income.

Oliver Wendell Holmes lived in a red brick row house on I Street, about three blocks from the White House where Calvin Coolidge lived, succeeded by Herbert Hoover. After FDR was inaugurated, he made a formal call on Judge Holmes and found him reading Plato.

Justice Holmes was born in March 1841 at a time when Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams were still alive. (A shiver runs up my spine when I write that.) He attended Harvard College and studied law there before and after the Civil War. His family was as illustrious as a New England family could be. His father, for whom he was named, among many other honors was a famous essayist, a physician and dean of Harvard’s medical school.

Justice Holmes was an ardent abolitionist and left his classes to join the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was always an officer and was wounded three times in three battles: 1861, bullet to the chest at Balls Bluff; 1862, wounded in the neck at the battle of Antietam, where 22,000 men died; 1863, Chancellorsville, where he almost lost a severely wounded leg. Each could have been lethal and his father wrote a famous article about his son for whom he searched among the dead and dying in a thrown-together hospital. He always went back and in 1864 was engaged in a trench war battle near Bethesda, Md., within eyesight of the uncompleted Capitol building in Washington (the nearest the Confederate army ever got) when a tall civilian in a tall hat stood up to get a better look. One of the Union officers yelled, “Get down, you damn fool!”. The man did and was quoted as saying that he was glad a soldier knoew how to talk to a civilian. The man was (you guessed) Abraham Lincoln and the soldier was Holmes.

Of his war service he said, “Life is a profound and passionate thing.” And to have avoided the war, which many did, was to be judged “never to have lived.”

In 1872 he married Fannie Bowditch Dixwell (great name), who after 57 years of idyllic married life was a semi-invalid who answered the door a couple of times when I was the guy ringing the bell. So did the justice, although it was usually Poindexter, the Negro butler, who was a dignified buddy of mine and brought luncheon to the court when it was sitting.

Justice Holmes left a profound legacy behind in his 30 years on my court. He’d already had 20 years as a justice and chief justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and had made a name for himself as a brilliant craftsman with the English language and an imaginative thinker and pioneer in the growing background depth of the American version of the common law.

As he phrased it, speech was indeed to be free and only could be limited in situations of clear and present danger, still an area of vital concern this very day. In Holmes vision you had to know “what the law has been and what it tends to become.”

His fellow judges adored him. In the conference room, they, including the chief, stood when he entered. He had an old, old man’s elegant Boston Brahmin accent, almost guttural, was genial and held his own with the witticisms. I was there arranging the table before closing the door and leaving them to their vital privacy.

Thought was to be free, including the thought “we might hate.” “The life of the law is not logic – it’s experience.” There was “free trade” in ideas. He paid his federal income taxes although, by law, he was exempted. (This is no longer true). When he died with no heirs, he left his estate to the federal government.

In the years I was there, he shared a limousine with the first Jew on the court, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, appointed by Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

A gentle closeness joined them in their numerous dissents. Until his last four sitting years, he had walked to work, which might have made his remarkable longevity possible what with all the Civil War patchwork on his amazing body.

On a personal note of closing, I realized in Law School at the University of Virginia I was studying cases I’d heard argued by the most brilliant advocates in the land, sitting up on that platform with the “nine old men.”

One day I took Judge Holmes up on the private elevator when the regular operator was elsewhere, trembling in my boots because I’d not done it before, and I had to get the elevator even with the floor so the most beloved old man wouldn’t trip and fall. I did a good job and was rewarded with some not-quite-intelligible mumble of appreciation.

The judges never knew our names. I was the “tall boy” in Judge Holmes’ vernacular. Some days I went in the robing room to get the nine to sign group pictures for eminent people who asked for them. I’d show him the line he was to sign on. “Mumble, mumble.” But he’d do as he was told. Memories. What a marvelous start in life. So much to be grateful for!

Attorney Austin Cunningham has been the president of five business companies and in 1988 was named Outstanding Elder Citizen of the Year for South Carolina.

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