 Welcome to another show of Celebrate Life. My name is Gary DeCarlas, and I am your host. The show is, again, all about celebrating the lives of people in our community. Some are well-known, others not so much. But we know that everybody has a story to tell. Over the years, I've seen too many obituaries and wished, boy, I wish I could have met that person. Well, this show is all about meeting us while we're still very much alive and well. And welcome to the show. If any of you would be interested in being interviewed yourself, please write me at celebratelife0747 at gmail.com. Or if you have questions or comments about our guests, again, write me at celebratelife0747 at gmail.com. And I'll make sure the guests get to see them. Today, I want to welcome a good friend and guest, John Franco. Also, an Adva Giant fan like myself. Good to have you on the show, John. What a curse, but yes. Thank you. So, we're here to celebrate your life, John. Okay. So, where would you like to start? Well, you have the con, so you ask the questions. Okay. Well, where did you grow up? I am a native remuner. I grew up, I was born and raised in Barrie. I lived indexing in Barrie Town outside of Barrie City. I had a, my parents built a house. It was one of the first subdivisions in that part of Barrie Town. And so we were kind of surrounded by farms on each side. We had a sugar shack in the back, an apple orchard in the back, a sugar bush up the end of the street in a farmer's field in the front of our house. When we used to go skiing on the farmers, one farmer, Mr. Bassett, had a hill and we'd go skiing there. Those are the good news, the bad news is that if you didn't stop, it was a barbed wire fence at the bottom of the hill. So, yeah, it was very rural. I mean, the grade school I went to was a four-room schoolhouse that had two grades in each one, and we did not have a telephone. Wow. Yeah, we didn't have a telephone. During the Kennedy assassination, one of the neighbors ran over to tell, we did have a TV, so let's turn on the TV, the president's been shot. But yeah. Do you have siblings? Yeah, my sister passed away four years ago. She was a year and a half older than me. Okay, I'm sorry about that. And what did your folks do for work? Oh, gosh, my father had a small auto dealership in Barrie that was started by his father. My mother was politically active and when my sister and I were old enough to sort of not require child care, she worked, she got elected to the state legislature in 19- and it's actually the state senate in 1964. Lost her seat and reapportionment in 1965 and then served another two or three terms in the late 60s and early 70s. This was during the Phil Hoff era, so politics was always there. And she worked for the secretary of state's office for a while, then became a realtor. Wow, where do you think she got that political instinct? From her parents. Parents were big Roosevelt Democrats, yeah. Interesting, wow. And my grandmother was really quite, my her mother was quite a, you know, didn't think about it at the time, but she was a career woman. She got a civil service appointment by president Roosevelt to head up a small post office in East Barrie, Vermont, which was very fortuitous because my grandfather became disabled as a result of a farm accident that he suffered earlier in life and he had really debilitating arthritis in his hips. So she supported the family and they put both my mother and my aunt through college. They were the first members of the family to go to college. And my grandmother did this all the while being a stage four breast cancer survivor. Imagine that in 1940s that she had stage four breast cancer and survived. She used to say the rosary a lot and now I know why. Oh my goodness, yeah. She was a dynamo. She was a dynamo, yeah. Yeah, and it wasn't really, you know, I often wish I could go back in time and talk to my grandparents, particularly as an adult and kind of, you know, share their experiences because particularly my mother's mother's life was really quite remarkable and what she does as a woman was not, she was way ahead of her time by 20 or 30 years was not really appreciated, you know. So they lived close by you? Oh yeah, they lived, my mother also grew up in Barrie Town. They lived in East Barrie. My father's parents lived in Barrie City. My grandfather was an immigrant. He came to the United States when he was 17. He was from Torino, Italy. And was he a stone cutter? No, he was a tour de France racer. I think he got a draft notice. He told me this one night. And he rode his bicycle to France and hopped the freighter, worked in the hotels in New York as a baker and a cook for 10 years and then got into auto mechanics because it was high-tech and sexy. Spent a while in Paterson, New Jersey and came to Barrie, Vermont because it had an Italian community. Started a small service station and he kind of grew that into a small, small auto dealership that sold student bakers, dodgers and Mercedes Benz. My goodness. And had Maria Vantrap as a client. Leaving her. So it sounds like life was, well, very family-oriented for sure as a child. Yeah, you know, Barrie was very, you know, when they say it takes a village, the neighborhood I grew up with was kind of in a rural area, but it was a little bit suburban. And the, you know, when we were like five or six, we would just go out in the neighborhood and play. And sort of all the mothers knew where the swarm of kids was. We had a school sort of in the center of the neighborhood where everybody congregated. And, you know, even like during the summer, that's where everybody would go. Like we would have baseball games that were co-ed and things like that. So I mentioned in your questionnaire, there were in particular four mothers who really kind of stood out as being the, you know, the village keepers. And back in the mid-1980s, I started to send them Christmas cards, you know, thanking them for, you know, for what they did. And one Bev Wilmot lives in Williamstown who just turned 99 and is still alive, a shout out to Bev. And I still send her a Christmas card every year and she sends me one. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, yeah, you know, finally you get to be older and you go, that was really special. Yeah. So having grown up in Vermont and being a Vermonter, are those friendships that you started early on in your life, have they continued? Aquaintance is, yeah, particularly for a few people that I went to high school with, we still remain fairly close. A couple of my classmates have since passed away, but, you know, the best reunions we used to have was in my high school reunions and we would have one every five years. So I still keep in contact with them, yeah. When you were young, John, what were some of your, like, when I grow up, I want to be a blah, blah, blah? Well, my grandfather started this auto dealership and my father bought it out in the early 60s. You know, it was a lot of work because you were selling cars, you were working nights and weekends, even on Sundays. I remember they finally passed the blue law that prohibited auto sales on Sunday and it was a godsend for our family because my father otherwise couldn't be home on Sundays. So anyway, my mother lectured me quite early in life that I was not going into the car business like my father and she really was the one that kind of pushed me to go to law school, but that was really kind of what I wanted to do. That was my calling, as we say. So, yeah, no, she said, you're not going into the car business like your father. And I said, don't worry, I'm not going into the car. It just wasn't my cup of tea at all, just not at all. But the law and the use of language, that seemed to capture your... That was from my mother's side. I mean, she was, my mother really loved history. She read a lot of history. She loved to travel a lot. She was really particularly enamored in British history and she was involved in politics. So, I mean, that's where that came from. Yeah, absolutely. My father, not so much, but I think he kind of tolerated it. Okay, what was high school like for you? How big was high school? Oh, gosh, how big was Spalding at the time? Maybe 1,000, 1,200 students? We had, at that time, Spalding High School was a part of the very city of Barrie. I lived in Barrie Town, so they used to tuition us in. There were a number of other students, like from Berlin and Williamstown and surrounding areas, it also went there. But, so we had about, I think it was about, I think our each class was about 300 students. Did you hold any offices? Did you sports clubs? I tried football for a while, didn't like it. Was on the ski team for a couple of years and then the last two years we couldn't find a coach. But I like that. That was really, our ski coach was, he was an undergraduate Norwich cadet and he was into military training. Let me tell you, I thought football was hard going out for ski team was unbelievable. It was like, holy cow, it's like the Long March, you know, it was like, wow. I mean, and I was in, when I was a sophomore in high school, I was in incredible aerobic shape. I mean, unbelievable. And also I had to be because my Alpine skiing technique wasn't that good. So in order to make the team, I had to agree to do the cross country and the jumping. So cross country skiing and I would race Alpine a little bit if they had an extra slot. But I was in really good condition. But what they're really, really the training he put us through was a real, I think that really was an important lesson for me about our perseverance. And I mean, it was hard. It was hard. And to my, to this day, because of all that aerobic training, I still have low blood pressure. I swear to God, don't worry. All those arteries really got expanded out from all that running, you know? I mean, we would run on the railroad tracks. Berry City used to have a ski area in downtown Berry right across from the sewer plant. Yeah, a skyline skiways that had a pommelift. So we would run down there and he would make us run down there, which was three or four miles from the high school along the railroad tracks. And then we used to have to do wind sprints up and down the hill and then run back to the high school. So you needless to say, it was pretty grueling. Did all that conditioning pay off? Were you guys good? No. It was pretty, it was pretty startup. I remember they had one Montpelier High School that hosted a meet and they used to have a little 20 meter jump up at Hubbard Park in Montpelier. But the problem is the runout of the ski jump went across the access road. So it's sort of like kids that are playing, you know, a basketball. They go car. It would be like, get away from the car to pass before the next jumper comes because you had to go across the road. Yeah, that was fun. I really, that was really, I love, I love, I love that period of time. And it was really when they say when you're working on a team like that and they get people kind of from different, you know, different. Now they call them what do you call a silos, you know, and then you actually interact with one another. That's really important. Yeah. Sounds like it was great. Yep. Good for you. So I'll, I know you're a die-hard giant fan. We've talked many of these talks over the years. Yeah. Why did that come from? Well, it came from because the NFL had a regional feed and Channel 3 had the Giants all the time and that was what was on. But I remember it was about when I was about in the sixth grade. I really, I would say I really fell in love in the sixth grade. And it was YA Tittle and the Giants and it was just, it was magic. My father took me to a game in Yankee Stadium in 1963, which was probably the high point of my relationship with him. It was just magic. Being a kid from Berry, Vermont and sitting there and looking at the freeze in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium. It was like, whoa, whoa. You know, and see YA Tittle in person playing football and Sam Huff and it was great. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah. And then there were the lean years from them until the Lawrence Taylor Rear in the 1980s. It was like Joe Pasarczyk, which is the low point of all Giants history. We won't talk about that. And then there was the helmet catch during the Super Bowl in 2008, which was better. That was better. That was the high point. And I just saw that that was rated the number, the fourth best Super Bowl ever. Absolutely. Yeah. They pulled Giants fans. What was the worst moment in Giants history? What was the best? The Pasarczyk Fumble was the worst. The helmet catch was the best. Okay. So then you go to college. Where did you go to school? UVM. Okay. AKA Camp Catamount. Big city. Yeah. A lot of, you know, a lot of kids from Spalding, from Vermont went to UVM. It was really pretty affordable. My sister was 18 months older than me, but she was one grade ahead of me. So she was at UVM at the same time. Comparatively affordable. I remember it cost a tuition women board for each of us was $500 a semester. Wow. So that's great. So, you know, no student debt when I came out of undergraduate, which was really important. My, you know, my parents did save up for it. So they were able to do that. What was your major? I had ended up with a double major in political science and history. And if I didn't go, if I didn't play hooky my last semester and go skiing at Stowe all the time, I would have also had an English major. But I had this three day a week schedule. So it was anyway. Okay. And did you go right onto law school, right from undergrad? I had applied and it was, it was really hard to get into law school then because law school became very, very attractive. A lot of people wanted to go. And I was on a number of waiting lists and I finally got into, you know, it was like middle of October from the University of San Diego says, if you hop in your car right now you have a position and I just went, I wasn't interested. Long story short, Vermont law school started up and I got admitted very early to go there in 1975. So that's where I ended up going and had three other people from Barry and we commuted down one year and I rented a farmhouse with three other friends for the next two years down there, lived in Sharon outside of Royalton. So it was interesting living in Sharon, Vermont where if you went to the grocery store you had to go to the purity supreme in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. So buying a loaf of bread was literally an act of interstate commerce. Did law school challenge you, John? It did. It took me a while to get it. Once I got it, it wasn't terribly hard. I, my second year in law school, I took two months off to run for lieutenant governor and the Liberty union ticket with Bernie Sanders. He ran for governor and they had a three, Bernie was great. They had a three cut policy. They said, if you cut three classes, you're out. And I said, Bernie, they have a three cut policy. They're going to kick me out. And he says, John, let me tell you, you run, you go back, if they cut you out of school, we'll rip the shit out of them at a press conference. They didn't say a word. Is that where you met him? No, I, I was, I was, wanted to talk about a change moment in your life. I had got out of UVM. I graduated in 1974. And about that June, Liberty union had their statewide convention down here on, it was in a cafeteria, one of the churches on Wunewski Avenue, South Wunewski Avenue. And Bernie was there. And I had seen Bernie had been on TV. So I decided to go. I was looking kind of for an outlet for politics after being in college. And I mean, Bernie was, this is in 1974. Bernie was just really incredibly, you know, he was an incredible speaker. He was an incredibly charismatic. I mean, he had a really way of not speaking gibberish in terms of left-link politics, but speaking from the heart. And that was, you want to talk about a moment in your life where that changed, that definitely changed. So I became involved in Bernie with Bernie. We were doing some things like the U.S. Senate had written this report about disclosing all this corporate ownership in the United States. And we were, we had all the inside poop who was owning their power companies that was raising everybody's rates. So when Bernie was running for governor at that, governor of Senate, I forgot what it was in 74. And we would have these press conferences that we would expose this stuff using this U.S. Senate study. I remember coming up here, I was working at a paint store in Barrie. And we would, I would drive up and Bernie lived on off of Maple Avenue in a Duplex. And we would, you know, we'd plot out this press conferences and stuff and it was great. Otherwise I would have gone crazy working at the paint store, but that was a start. And then I ran for, I ran for actually state Senate Washington County that year. And then I ran for lieutenant governor in 76, also in Liberty Union. So Liberty Union still, even though it's now got a new name, the funk still has a warm place in my heart. All right, absolutely. And then, so at some point you moved to Burlington. Well, I moved to Burlington when I went to UVM and I kind of was here back and forth for a period of time after that, even when I was in law school. I would sublet an apartment here in Burlington because this is where both times I got summer jobs and also I had friends up here. Did not want to stay in Central Vermont. I didn't really, by that time I didn't really have any, all the friends I had had in high school had moved on. So, so yeah. And then I actually, after law school, I got a job as a public defender in Burlington. So my only other time after, basically after college and being in law school that I didn't live in Burlington was a stent for in 1991. I went with Bernie down in Washington and went this first year and he was in Congress. Didn't like the city and moved back to Vermont. What were your, the years when you did work for Bernie as the city attorney? That was like, that covered a lot of territory. It covered, Bernie was elected in 1981. They stonewalled his appointments. You and a number of other people got elected on the city council. You had five out of 13 and that, the way the charter worked, that gave him a particular amount of power. Anyway, finally the city council, at that time they called it the Board of Alderman, allowed him appointments. So I was appointed as an assistant city attorney at that time. Greatest job I ever had. Great, absolutely no question. And then a little bit through Peter when Peter was mayor from 89 and through to early 91. But just, you know, we were doing stuff, fascinating stuff. We had four cases in the US Supreme Court at the time. We did things like tax reform in the public trust doctrine in the waterfront. And it was just, it was a great time. It was the best legal job I've ever had, bar none, bar none. I mean, I go to get together with people and I just say Bernie had to get together a couple of years ago when I was running into Joe McNeil and I just said, you know, there's just, it was never, professionally, never a better time. And we were young and we were full of it. And you know, it was like, you know. And intellectually it was challenging you. I mean, it was pushing all the buttons. Well, you know, you used to sit through those meetings. I used to call them the Monday night fights. You know, it was like, oh yeah, it was, we were not only up against the city council majority, we were up against state legislature, up against the governor. The whole edifice of the ruling class was against us. Yeah, yeah. You know, we were really just the beachhead here. But you shot, you really shined through that. I mean, I think. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, I'm glad it was, that you saw it as a great time for you too, because we certainly. Oh, yeah. I mean, there was nothing, you know, you try to, you know, they say, what do you do after when you have an experience like that and you're fairly young and it's really, it's really hard to recreate it. And it just, you don't. You know, it's like, what did Bill Clinton do after he was president? He was fairly young. It's like, I don't know. Did you ever think of running for office as a? I did. I tried. I ran for state senate in 1972. Didn't do well. But after the Bernie year. No, no, no. You know, for one thing, I don't like campaigning. And the other thing is that one of the problems is being trained as an attorney to really develop an opinion about something. I really have, I really wanted like really drill into it. And it's really hard to be a generalist when you're in a legislature in a city council because you're not really sure whether the position people are taking is really the right one or the good one or the smart one. So it just wasn't what I, you know, I had, I had more success being a pain in the ass than being an elected official, you know. Yep. You did a good job. Being a pain in the ass. So what was it like to work with Joe McNeil? That Joe was a. Originally, Joe and I were quite wary of one another until then we developed this great relationship. It was sort of this good cop, bad cop relationship. I was the bad cop and Joe was the good cop in the, in the diplomat for the city. And then it was particularly, I think it was when we had the Bernie decided to tax the hospital and we had the hospital case. And that's when we really played it out. Actually, Joe had some other trial and Bernie and Joe assigned me and Frank Murray to do the trial and it was just, that was just great fun. It was wonderful, you know. So we ended up, we ended up having a close friendship and professionally. It was just really, it was just a great time working with Joseph. Yeah, yeah. Well, I had Joe on the show a little while ago and it was also a great time for him in his life. I asked him, I said, were you gonna, did you ever think of running for office? And he, he said, Gary, I looked around and I saw what it took to not only run for office, but to be in office. And he said, that's okay. I think I'll stay with my legal profession. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, and it's frankly in terms of as an attorney, the power that you have or that you can have, you actually have more power as an attorney to affect things. Case in point being the waterfront. I mean, there was a tell story about that. The late Avery Hall, who was on the waterfront, they had a waterfront commission at that time. I had just started working in City Hall. It was like the second week I was there. And it was like a Rosanna, Rosanna Dana question for those of you who are old enough to remember Saturday Night Live. And he said, well, they had this presentation by the railroad about the development. They wanted to put in this development on the waterfront and they mentioned that it was on filled land, meaning it was land that was filled in to Lake Champlain. And he came in and he said, what's all this about the filled land? And I said, Avery, that's a really good, it was really the question that changed history. It was Avery, the question that changed history. So I hopped in the car and go down to Vermont, the Supreme Court Library, which at that time was actually books and stuff and came across something called the public trust doctrine that basically said the filled land was not private land. It couldn't be privately developed. It was owned by the, it was actually held by the state in trust for the people of the state of Vermont and it had to be put to public use. So I came back and I said, Bernie, you're not going to believe this. The railroad doesn't own the property. Wow. So it took another, took another 89, it took about another eight years for that to work its way through because there was litigation about that. It went to the state supreme court. We ended up winning that decision in 1989. It was a great time too. They waited until the Friday before Christmas, Christmas, on Monday is Christmas weekend. They had this announcement of this waterfront decision and then there was more litigation. The railroad tried to go to the supreme court the next year, the U.S. Supreme Court and then we had to get authorization from the legislature to do any kind of development down there. So, but that was, you want to talk about the legal career. That was certainly the high point of my life. You know, no question about it. Absolutely. And what a difference that makes. So far, I get a little, I get a little annoyed that a lot of things that I think could have been good down there didn't pass because it wasn't perfect or you couldn't get everybody to agree to it. Like, repurposing the Moran plant, I don't think the Moran frame is probably the best use of that site. There were a lot of other proposals down there that I think would have been good. And I get, you know, you can't, you're not going to get consensus on something like that. And so things have been, I think things have been stalled out for too long about what we do with the waterfront. The North 40, which we acquired as a part of our settlement with the railroad, we still haven't, the city figured out what the heck we're going to do with that other than allowing scrub trees to grow on it. And they cut it down every now and then and use it as a dog park. That's it. Is the North 40 filled land or is that? Oh yeah, a big part of it. Sure, it was filled in. That part was filled in. When the railroad used to come in down here through Ingallsby Reveen and come in from the south and then in the Civil War, they relocated the wine. They tunneled under North Avenue and all the, through the escarpment and all that material that they got from tunneling, they filled it and then they, and they also needed to create warps that went out to the lake because this side of the lake is very shallow. And they didn't have enough drafts for boats to come in. So that's basically how that came to pass. Wow, wow. 1869 is when that happened. Wow. What are some other accomplishments during those years that you had? Well, tax reform was a big one. I mean, we really fought very hard for that. We had a number of things that now were taken for granted like the grocery seats tax, you know, impact fees, things of that nature. Tax classification. Finally, getting the legislature to, with the property tax reform that the legislature finally passed after the Vermont Supreme Court decision about state education was in a large part of Bernie's kept banging away at the unfairness of the property tax system. So I think to a large degree, you know, we can take credit for creating a climate that said that that really needed to change. What was it? I think it was called the Brigham decision where the Supreme Court said, no, if this system doesn't work. So in other things that I've done, I mean, I just, you know, it's been 45 years, Gary, so you're going to have to be a little more specific about that. How about all the in lieu of tax monies that Bernie went after with the hospital, the university and involvement? Small, yeah, we once again tried to get the Supreme Court to say that the hospital was not a charity and was not tax exempt. That was not successful. I mean, there have been, there have been settlements for the hospital, but it's a small portion of what they really should owe, given the value of the facility. And that would say, I would say that that's not been a great win for us. Great. You know. Okay. All right. It's been okay, but, you know, the same problem now with UVM and housing. It's that, you know, they, all the UVM and they want to put in housing but all the stuff in, but we want a grandfather, the student body that we have now. It's the same old crap. I remember in 1990, Gretchen Bailey and I, what we tried to go into Act 250 to get act, they were doing some expansion at UVM and wanted to get Act 250 to impose conditions that they had to house their students. We pointed out that Champlain house their students. At that time, Trinity College was, was, was viable. They house their students. St. Mike's house their students, but UVM has had this culture that they only house the first two year students. And then what you do when you were junior at senior at UVM, you should get an apartment. I did it, you know, and that's what you do. The single biggest problem with housing costs in Burlington is that, is that. Today. Today and back when my father, you know, let's just go back when my father went to UVM after, after the Second World War. They just haven't built a housing to house their student population. And that has had the impact on the, you know, the rents in the housing shortage in Burlington. You know, I think you can try to build housing in Burlington until you're blue in the face, but that's not what the cause is. The cause is UVM. The cause is absolutely UVM. And then what they've done is they, well, they built, they built some more, you know, dormitories in the campus, but they increase their, their, their enrollment so much, it's sort of like the, the Python that swallowed the pig. So you've got this big enrollment blip that's got to go through the, the snake and get on the, you know, I just look at this stuff and I can, I've seen, I've seen this play out for 50 years. It's like nothing new here. And it's a, UVM, it's the same old playbook. Mm hmm. Trying to catch its tail. No, that's just the game they play. That, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we'll, we'll, we'll do a few things that sort of look good, but it's really not fundamentally going to deal with the problem. I mean, UVM, if they really wanted to be, you know, progressive, they could have said, well, look it, you know, the student housing, particularly in awards one and two, that's privately owned, have somebody watch when those go out on the market and have the university buy the stuff up and turn it into university apartment housing in the neighborhoods. At least that would keep the rents down. I mean, something like that or turn them into co-ops or even turn them into timeshares for the students so that you don't have, you don't have people investing in these things to speculate as a moneymaker to charge the students an arm and a leg to live in a rabbit warrants, which is what happens. Mm hmm. All right, so you left government at 91 or so after Peter, you were working with Peter from when he- I left City Hall in 91. I worked for Bernie in Washington. And yes. And for until the fall of 91 and then came back and then actually worked for Joe McNeil's firm and continued to do government work. I mean, I did work on the Barge Canal. I did work for BED. I was on the Electric Commission from 2000 to 2006. Okay, all right. No, I did that. I was involved in the healthcare reform in the 90s and 2000s. That was a bitter disappointment. Hmm, tell us. You're up against the man. You know, I mean, it was just- and they would just scare legislators with horror stories and you just couldn't get anything done. Mm hmm. You know, it was unfortunate. It was really unfortunate. There was some real opportunity and it just- I won't get into the details, but there were certain points the left didn't help itself either. But that was a big disappointment. I still have those- all those boxes and all that stuff. I run the show report and all the stuff. And I actually worked for the Shumlin administration briefly in 2011 on it. But very frankly, that he wasn't- he really wasn't- he was really scared to death of single-payer even though he ran on it. And then he put the kibosh to it a couple of years later. Yeah. That was a disappointment. So, and since then, I've been basically dealing with employment law, sort of what I've fallen into. Okay. Not exclusively, but sort of when I fill out my insurance applications, what's your area of practice? And I go, oh, God, I can't even remember. And then I look at it and it's just such a variety of things that, you know, and that's getting disappointing because the courts are just- they really don't- they're really being totally unsympathetic to employees now. They really make it hard to win discrimination cases and make it really hard to win lawful termination cases. It's gotten worse and worse and worse. Over the years, it's very different when I started doing this in 1995 than it is today. Very, very different. So, and it's not just the Republican courts, Vermont Supreme Court. When you look over your career, which has been incredibly successful. 45th anniversary, 45th class reunion last June. Wow. Went down there bragging about, since the COVID pandemic, I hadn't been sick a day. Went home, had a bad cold for a week. Oh, well. Is there anything you haven't done that you would like to do? That's a hard question. I should take some time to travel. It's hard to do it when you're a attorney. And I'm trying to- I think I said on your little- your questionnaire, I'm on the glide path to retirement, but can't find the landing lights, you know? Because I still have cases that I'm working on and I'm trying to resolve. Yes. And especially when you're working for yourself. Totally for myself. I'm totally self-employed. I mean, I vacuum and I- I don't do the windows, but the landlord does that, but I vacuum and, you know, that kind of stuff. So take out the trash. Do my own books. Answer my own phone. Do my own word processing. I mean, actually, if it wasn't for, you know, modern computers, the old days where you had a secretary and stuff, there's no way I could do what I do. You know, to do it as a solo practitioner. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you want to mention about your life? Well, one of the things- I mean, one of the things you have to- when I get older, I'm 71, you start counting your- you start- I think it's gratitude. And you have to sit back and you have to- you have to take stock in the opportunities that you had. You know, and I'm privileged. I mean, I came from a middle-class background. I'm a white male in this culture. You know, there are a number of people that were important to me in my life who have since passed away. And I've- you know, I've gone to their generals and I've talked to their families about how it was important for these people gave me an opportunity. And you have to recognize that. And then what you- I think you try to do is to try to use that privilege, if you will, that opportunity to try to help others, which is what I've tried to do. I've tried to devote my professional career to that. You know, that's important. You asked me what my famous- my best quote was and I couldn't think of it. It's actually from Carl Marx and his economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1848 when he said, we are creators of our own history but not under circumstances of our own choosing. And it's the dialectic between agency and circumstances. And I, unfortunately, hear too much now that all people are concerned about or talking about now or circumstances or not talking about agency. You deal with substance abuse. It's exactly what you deal with all the time. You deal with the circumstances that people are in, but they have to have agency. If they don't have the agency, they're not going to- they're not going to climb out of what they're in or they didn't have the agency to prevent getting into the province that they're in. Malcolm X talked about that all the time. Malcolm X talked about being in a really racist society, but Malcolm X and the Muslims went into the prisons and got people that were drug addicts and stuff cleaned up and having really productive lives. I mean, so- What I've enjoyed about your- in my relationship with you, John, is that agency part, you have said, I'm going to make a difference. I'm going to put what I've got into the mix here and see if that can help a situation out. Yeah, it's- Yeah, I've tried to do that. I've tried to do that. As I said, you know, nobody pitches a perfect game but I've tried to do it. And it's really hard when you're up against the inertia of the established order. It takes time to sort of break through and get people to see that there's a different way of doing it. And I'm really troubled of where we're headed culturally and politically. Yeah, it's just really, you know, we could be looking at a nightmare in November. I mean, you know, with- Have you mentored other lawyers? No, I'm really not very good at that, I have to say. I really not. That's one of the criticisms I've had about people even that I worked with that was terrible about that. I was like the one person in the public defender's office that didn't use interns and law clerks. I just would like kind of do it myself. And that's sort of the way I worked and that's why I've been on my own now for, oh gosh, 20 years. 20 years, 30 years. And as a solo practitioner, I've sort of been able to do that because I've been pretty self-contained. That's sort of the way I worked. So it's probably a failing. Hey, nobody pitches a perfect game. Especially, you know, people criticize Bernie about Bernie didn't do this. Bernie didn't do that. They have a progressive left. We make a socialist politician in the history of the United States that's had more impact on the political culture of this state and of this country than Bernie Sanders. And the answer is nobody. And all the ultra-lefts will Bernie didn't do this. Bernie wasn't perfect on that. It's like, give me a frickin' break. And he's still hanging in there. He's got, he was in yesterday. He's got all the farmer executives up there, you know, kicking him in the shins about, oh, well, we can't afford to cut prescription price, drug prices for Medicare because we're charging three times what the rest of the world does, you know, all that. So Bernie's still in there, still doing it. Yeah, he sure is. And you are too. Do you guys connect? I have, you know, since Bernie went into the Senate, not a lot. I mean, I went into him occasionally and he had to get together a couple of years ago and for people that worked for him and both in the city and in Washington. So that was fun. It was fun connecting with people like Jeff Weaver. Jeff Weaver and I were pretty close. Jeff used to, when Bernie was running in 2016, he would be at some of these talk shows. Like he was on Chris Matthews. Oh, he, he really knocked one out of the park with Chris Matthews. Really kind of a new one. And I would text Jeff. Jeff and I used to love the movie Spartacus. Jeff and I went to the movie Spartacus when it was re-released in 1991. We went to this big three projector, a cinemascope movie to watch it. All I can remember is who played Spartacus? Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas is dimple in the movie. So anyway, when I, when he would, when Jeff would go on these national things, I would text him and I would go, is that you, Spartacus? Yeah, so Jeff was a kid from St. Albans, Vermont, giving Chris Matthews his comeuppance. It's really pretty good. It's really pretty good, special. Any last words before we close? I just want to, you know, I just want to thank you. You know, you had great service to the community and to the city. You've always had a very, you know, you're very, you've not been a firebrand. You've been thoughtful. You've been measured and you've always spoken from the heart. You've always acted from the heart. And I think you'd never get really upset when the Giants screw up, which is really a feeling in your part. One last story, one last story, folks. Long time ago, the Giants were playing Monday Night Football with the, within the St. Louis Cardinals. And they were, it was terrible. Both teams were just awful and it went into overtime. And we're watching this game at Gary's house. And one of the announcers says, I think it was Frank Humphrey, he says, these teams are so awful. Nobody deserves to win. Nobody did. It was a tie. I remember it well. Yeah. Thank you, John. All right. Thank you. All right. Okay. Bye-bye.