Eric L. Kemmler – 50th Reunion Essay

Eric L. Kemmler

25 Holmes Circle

Farmington, CT 06032-2507

thekemmlers@sbcglobal.net

860-919-7895

Spouse(s): Sarah Beckett Kemmler (1978)

Child(ren): Alexander B. Kemmler (1985); William E. Kemmler (1988); Nathanthiel S. Kemmler, (1987, d. 2017)

Education: University of Chicago Law School, JD, 1973

National Service: U.S. Army Reserve, corporal, 1970–76

Career: Associate counsel, Connecticut Mutual Life, 1974–1980; tax lawyer—pensions and estate planning. ESPN, Inc., May, 1980–May, 2009, Vice President and Associate General Counsel.

Avocations: Jazz. General Counsel, Connecticut Broadcasters Association. Board member, Connecticut Public Affairs Network.

College: Ezra Stiles

By graduation I had been accepted by Cornell, University of California Berkeley, and University of Chicago law schools. But with the draft hanging over my head and wanting some time before resuming academics, I decided to join the Peace Corps, hoping that the draft would no longer be a problem two years later.

My project was based in Belém do Pará, Brazil, and was to advise agricultural cooperatives. About 30 of us persevered though two months of training in El Centro, California (where conditions better emulated India than Amazonian forests) and another in Belém. I and over 90 percent of the trainee volunteers recognized that the project had no viability due to a lack of funding and resigned before becoming enrolled volunteers. Also, with the announcement of the draft lottery, it seemed prudent to return home and deal with the draft.

My lottery number was 52, but I was able to join an Army Reserve unit before being drafted. That led to six years of Reserve tedium, but I never got closer to Vietnam than Fort Polk, Louisiana. I consider myself a draft dodger.

1970 began law school at the U. of Chicago. I think all the Yalies in my class were astonished how student unfriendly the university was. My apartment mate, Dick Obermanns, Class of ’68, was in the political science department. His advisor had three offices, each with office hours, but he was never in any of them during its posted hours.

After graduating, I returned to Connecticut. Finding a job turned out to be tough because, while most lawyers in the area then had heard of the U. of C., few of them had ever met a graduate; there were only three in the state.

In 1974, I met my wife Sally, née Beckett, a Brown and U. of Connecticut law grad, at an old family friend’s wedding. Our marriage led to our introducing the late Dean Huffman to his eventual wife, Joanne Thieme, a childhood friend of Sally’s.

We have two children, now self-sufficient and confident adults. Alex graduated from graduate Northwestern in 2007, and William, NYU in 2010. Alex is the vice president of product development at Aiwa Corporation (consumer electronics) in Chicago and William is a freelance film editor and nascent independent film producer living in Brooklyn. We have lived in Farmington, Connecticut, since 1980.

My first job was with Connecticut Mutual Insurance Company (now absorbed by Mass Mutual), where I did pensions and estate planning. My second and last job was with ESPN, which I joined in 1980 as its second attorney. ESPN had only 150 employees then. Over the years, I did nearly everything. This was contracts, licensing and rights acquisition, but included employment law, copyright and trademark, antitrust compliance, litigation management, joint ventures, programming content review (usually for investigative reports) and the legal affairs of ESPN’s international department. The contracts I helped write and negotiate entailed literally billions in revenues on one hand and expenses on the other.