Eulogies

By Garrison Keillor

He was a St. Paul boy from the East Side, the rough side, who got scholarshipped to Harvard, came back to Minnesota to practice law and landed on the Supreme Court at 61, an age when a man thinks about cutting back. He was a conservative who defended civil liberties and championed the poor and oppressed and authored Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal, for which he received reams of hate mail, much of which he read. He was a man possessed of integrity and kindness. Every day after lunch, JUSTICE HARRY BLACKMUN took a walk to clear his head. He went out alone, in his navy blue cardigan frayed at the sleeves and his old blue overcoat, walked around the block and, coming back to the Court, stopped to listen to the picketers who gathered daily to protest abortion, some carrying signs that accused him of mass murder. He had respect and compassion for them. They never noticed him, the small lean bespectacled man with gray hair; his humility shielded him. Then he walked up the steps under the EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW inscription, went in to his office and resumed reading the law, which was his work.

--By Garrison Keillor