125th Anniversary Celebration
Charles Greg West JD’72 Prior to law school, I spent six seasons as a smokejumper parachuting into forest fires in Alaska. The Bureau of Land Management offered me a permanent job, but an exsmokejumper friend, who was just starting his second year at the University of Washington School of Law, urged me to go to law school. It was either continue to sleep on the ground, eat combat rations and drink coffee out of tin cans or use my head, as my mother always said, for something besides a hat rack. So off to law school I went. I am very happy I made the decision to go to law school. At Willamette, I quickly discovered that my law class was a group of bright, talented people. It also became quite evident that we were blessed with a very good faculty. The two, in particular, who taught
Richard B. Hagedorn JD’73 I had a long-term desire to be a lawyer, even preceding college. I thought a career in law would allow me to combine my interests in business and law while serving others. I hoped to be a small-town lawyer and did practice for about five years before moving into academia. I became a law professor because I enjoyed law school and could still pursue my interests in business and commercial law while teaching and writing in those fields. I chose Willamette for law school because I had wanted to practice in Oregon, and I thought Willamette University College of Law was the best law school in the state. Professor Jack Mylan was a great
me that law could be fun and that it really was about helping people with their problems were John Paulus and John “Jack” Mylan. The faculty was so good that all but one person from our class who took the Oregon State Bar exam passed the first time. The one guy passed the second time, giving our class a 100 percent passage rate that I doubt had occurred before and hasn’t and won’t be duplicated again. I felt very lucky to have started school when I did.
At Willamette, I quickly discovered that my law class was a group of bright, talented people. My strongest memory of my time at Willamette is playing bridge in the student lounge every day and the keg parties our class had every chance we got. We were a very social class, and there was lots of camaraderie. We still remain a close group, and large numbers of us meet every five years.
influence on me during school; he was a superb teacher. Professor Henry J. “Bill” Bailey was as well. He was a great scholar in the field of commercial law. My strongest memories of my time in law school were of my firstyear fall semester exams and the opportunity to build friendships with other students. Between my second and third years of school, I clerked for Oregon Supreme Court Justice Edward H. Howell. In law school, I had a sense that I was learning for the purpose of developing an ability to serve others. My family has had a long and wonderful history with Willamette University. My parents were undergrads in the 1930s. My sister and brother-in-law were undergrads in the 1960s. I received my J.D. at WUCL in 1973, and I have been a member of its faculty since 1984. Willamette University is a wonderful institution that has helped to make Oregon the special place that it is.
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