David Roe – 50th Reunion Essay

David Roe

1061 Walker Ave.

Oakland, CA 94610

davidroe@mail.com

Spouse(s): Robin Gilleland (1970–1976), Sukey Lilienthal (1987)

Child(ren): Nathan (1990), Celeste (1993)

Education: Yale BA 1969, Oxford 1969–1971 (no degree); Yale Law JD 1974

Career: www.davidroe65.com

College: Silliman

It’s reassuring at least to recognize that mid-40s person who wrote my submission for the 25th reunion, extolling the new-to-him pleasures of marriage and children after two decades devoted to the infancy and childhood of the modern environmental movement.

It’s also nostalgic to be solicited for this submission by a genuine writer, Tommy McNamee, and by Tom Guterbock, who shared a bedroom with me freshman year in Bingham.

But with one wonderful exception, my closest lifelong friends haven’t been so much fellow classmates from college as ones from my graduate years. The exception is Rick Cantor whom I never even met during four years on campus together, but who for 30 years now has been my brother-in-law. He married one Lilienthal sister right out of college; I didn’t manage to catch the other until nearly 20 years later; but we’ve had a terrific time, with our inseparable wives, in each other’s homes (my Oakland, and his East Coast version, Brooklyn) and on the road (from Italy to Japan).

The four of us sneaked onto campus during one reunion, not registering but showing off our respective haunts to each other and the sisters, and his Yale and mine seemed to have overlapped almost not at all. It was an eye-opening reminder of how wide and how rich a diversity of experiences the place offers, and what a small fraction of it any of us could manage to grab.

Retirement for me was a gradual rather than abrupt change, and I seem to have taken to it, even to facing a lifelong deficit in music by trying (one lesson at a time) to learn to play the flute and developing a late taste for opera (being near San Francisco helps). For a small foundation created by a close friend, I’ve been in Cambodia every year for the last ten, which has enriched my life in a good cause on a small-but-promising scale. I’ve also enjoyed a fair amount of purely recreational travel, with my wife Sukey and, as often as we can, with Rick and his wife Andy.

Looking back on professional stuff, I’m deeply grateful to the Rhodes Trust for relieving me of credential pressure ever since; to Yale and Yale Law for pointing toward environmental advocacy as worthwhile work; and to the opportunity that a tiny California office of the Environmental Defense Fund offered me in 1976, to remarkable colleagues of complementary skills who together pulled off what we thought were remarkable results, some of them covered in my one book (caveat: all environmental victories are temporary; losses tend to be permanent). A much shorter, still non-academic version is here, from a much longer perspective. A law I wrote has been surprisingly durable and effective. But the best and most durable joys are, of course, private rather than public, in family and at home.