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You know, I've been reading the Daily Journal my entire legal career.  I never gave much thought to the men and women whose job it is to report the daily legal news.  Now I have.

There's a reporter at the DJ named Noah Barron who not only reported my dad's passing, but talked on the telephone with me for more than an hour at a time when I really needed to talk about my dad to someone who makes his living being curious about people's personal lives.  It made a huge difference in my experience of my father's passing.

You see.  We make these differences in one another's lives all the time.  We just usually fail to acknowledge one another for it. 

So I want to thank Noah for the article carrying his by-line published in the DJ today.  

And I want to thank Dad for following his own best advice from our river rafting adventures:  keep your oar in the water (for balance) and paddle through your fear.  I would never have had the courage to go to law school were it not for the example he set -- which you can read about in Noah's fine article below. 

DAILY JOURNAL NEWSWIRE ARTICLE
© 2008 The Daily Journal Corporation.
All rights reserved.
-------------------------------------------

June 17, 2008

JURIST FOUGHT FOR GAY RIGHTS BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR
By Noah Barron
Daily Journal Staff Writer
This article appears on Page 2

LOS ANGELES - Superior Court Commissioner Donald W. Pike was a self-made millionaire, a self-taught thinker who went to law school but never college, an adventurer and a legal pioneer who broke ground on gay marriage rights three decades before it was fashionable. He died in his Los Angeles home on his 84th birthday on June 9 from complications from Parkinson's disease.

Back in 1982, the Daily Journal profiled Pike, setting down in print many of the stories that came to form the man: his impoverished beginnings in Nebraska, the fifth of nine children, his family's "Grapes of Wrath"-esque exodus to California and his early jobs as a child of 14 working as a farm laborer.

Before he was appointed commissioner to the Los Angeles County Superior Court bench, he was a milkman, an insurance salesman, a merchant marine in World War II and a lawyer, and then in his 60s became a millionaire through his real estate investments.

"I am ridiculously proud of my father," Pike's daughter, Victoria Pike Pynchon, said. "He took every opportunity to improve his station in life and improve the future of his children. But he didn't accomplish these things alone. No one does."

Pike's marriage collapsed in 1962 and he moved from Los Angeles to Sacramento to start a new life.

Later, presiding over domestic cases in Los Angeles, he would say that his failed marriage gave him special insight into family woes.

"Having had two marriages helps me understand family law," he said in a 1982 Daily Journal profile.

Pynchon said she was deeply hurt when Pike left home but reconnected with him as an adult, becoming a lawyer herself and watching him on the bench. She said he sometimes grew emotional during custody battles.

"He would call a recess whenever he was going to burst into tears," she said. In describing his leaving his family, Pike said, "I was terribly guilty."

Pike was 35 before he earned his high school equivalency. When he set out to start over in his 30s, he visited a a psychologist whose IQ test told him for the first time that he was intelligent.

"I thought the rich were smart and the poor were dumb," he said in a 1982 interview.

"He lived in fear of poverty," his daughter said.

Pike wasted no time, passing a college equivalency test offered by the State Bar and then attending McGeorge School of Law by night while delivering Dad's Root Beer by day, sending support checks home all the while. He passed the Bar Exam on his first attempt.

Gary Pike, the commissioner's nephew, said that while Pike was practicing civil law, he drafted contracts for gay men and women that emulated the rights of married couples.

The work reflected a legal sensibility decades ahead of its time, Gary Pike said.

Retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Eli Chernow worked with Pike when Pike was a commissioner, from 1973 to the mid-1990s.

"He was a good friend and great colleague. He left a big hole when he left the bench," Chernow said.

Pike is survived by his wife, Juanita; his two daughters Sharon Lawrence and Victoria Pynchon; and two grandchildren. Four of his nine siblings are still alive, Oscar, Lois, Dorothy and Kenneth Pike.

Private memorial services will be held in Pynchon's Los Angeles home. Instead of flowers, the family asks donations be made in Pike's memory to the Alliance for Children's Rights at http://www.kids-alliance.org

noah_barron@dailyjournal.com