Ten days or so later, he got the word: He was the most outstanding job candidate that day, but the firm just wasn't ready to hire a Jew.
'I had never faced such blatant anti-Semitism in my life,' Wolf, now 75 , recalled of that moment in 1959.
He stewed about it for a few days and then went to see Page Keeton, dean of the UT School of Law.
'He sat there like a sphinx and listened,' Wolf recalled. 'He thanked me for coming by. I kind of felt better having told him about it. I didn't know how to read his reaction.'
And thus began a series of events that would open the doors at major law firms in Houston to Jews, shape Wolf's career and cement Keeton in Wolf's mind as a pillar of justice.
Wolf has been in the news lately: The Texas Transportation Commission tapped him and Jay Kimbrough, a former chief of staff for Gov. Rick Perry, to lead an overhaul of the Department of Transportation. Wolf has had other high-profile assignments as well.
In the 1970s, he took a leave of absence from practicing law to turn around Texas International Airlines, which became Continental Airlines. He led David Dewhurst's transition team after Dewhurst was elected state land commissioner. He currently serves as acting chairman of Falcon Seaboard Co., a private investment concern owned by Dewhurst, now lieutenant governor.
But what stirred Wolf's memories of the late 1950s was a dust-up this year over a UT dormitory named for a professor at the Law School who had been active in the Ku Klux Klan in Florida after the Civil War. In 1954, Keeton recommended naming the dorm for William Stewart Simkins, who taught for 30 years until his death in 1929.
Wolf, who wants people to know that Keeton stood up against discrimination and would never have sought to honor someone for Klan activities, shared his memories of how the dean ended a longstanding anti-Semitic practice in a series of interviews with the American-Statesman.
'He's a hero to me,' Wolf said of Keeton.
Several days after his meeting with the dean, Wolf saw a note on the Texas Law Review bulletin board: 'Howard Wolf — See Professor Woodward immediately.'
Wolf reported to Kenneth Woodward's office, where the professor explained that Kraft Eidman, a lawyer with Fulbright, Crooker, Freeman, Bates & Jaworski , the third-largest law firm in Houston at the time, wanted to fly Wolf in for an interview. That was a highly unusual invitation; firms routinely conducted interviews on campus.
Wolf responded that he had promising leads in West Texas and New Mexico. Besides, he said, he had already had an uncomfortable experience with another Houston firm.
'Howard, I know all about that,' Woodward replied, according to Wolf. 'Listen to me very carefully. Fulbright knows all about you and your qualifications. I believe if you go to Houston, they're going to offer you a job, and I and several other people on the faculty hope you will accept it.'
Wolf went for the interview, and the firm, now known as Fulbright & Jaworski, offered him a position. 'I accepted it with the thought that I could come to Houston for two or three years and learn a lot,' Wolf said.
Back on campus after the interview, he was once again summoned to a meeting. This time, it was with five faculty members: Woodward, Jerre Williams, Millard Ruud, Charles Alan Wright and Ernest Goldstein , all of whom have since died. The professors wanted the 24-year-old law student from McCamey, a small town in West Texas, to know the back story.
It turns out that Keeton's neutral demeanor that day when Wolf told the dean of his rejection belied a growing disgust with a longstanding practice. Wolf was no stranger to Keeton. As a first-year law student, Wolf had done well in Keeton's class on torts. Moreover, Wolf had run successfully for president of UT's Student Government, beating none other than Richard Keeton, an undergraduate and the dean's son.
After hearing Wolf's story, Keeton summoned several senior members of the faculty to his office.
'One of the professors described him as livid,' Wolf said. 'Keeton was pacing the floor. He said, 'I want you men to get on the phone and call the top partners you know at each of these five firms, and you tell them the following: A firm came to our campus and interviewed one of our highly qualified students and told him he would not be accepted for employment because he was a Jew.'
'We've all known for years of this policy in the large Houston firms. That policy must end and must end immediately, or I will bar them from coming on the University of Texas campus and interviewing.'
Besides Fulbright, the firms at issue were Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Bradley; Baker, Botts, Andrews & Shepherd; Butler, Binion, Rice & Cook; and Vinson, Elkins, Weems & Searls . They collectively employed 323 lawyers, according to the 1959 edition of the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory. Wolf said the firms had one or two women but no Jewish or black lawyers.
Woodward called the Fulbright firm to relay Keeton's message, which was soon passed to Leon Jaworski, a partner who, as a colonel in the U.S. Army during World War II, had firsthand knowledge of the Nazis' persecution of Jews. Jaworski served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals and would later gain fame as a special prosecutor in the Watergate case, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Wolf said, 'I was told that Jaworski's response was, 'That's something that needs to change. You call the Law School and you tell them to send a qualified candidate, and we'll hire him and that practice will end.''
Wolf graduated with honors in the top 10 percent of his law class, passed the bar exam, reported for basic training in the Air National Guard and started work at the Fulbright firm in early December 1959. He declined to name the firm that turned him down.
'When I went to Houston, I didn't want to be the token Jew,' Wolf said. 'I wanted to be a lawyer who graduated from the University of Texas with honors and had been on the Law Review. I am confident that if Dean Keeton had not intervened, this practice of discrimination would have continued for some indefinite time into the future.'
Keeton, who died in 1999 , is a legend at the UT School of Law, where he worked for 58 years, including 25 as dean. His bust stands in a hallway, and the street in front of the school bears his name.
The university's governing board stripped Simkins' name from the nearby dorm in July after Tom Russell, a former UT law professor who now teaches at the University of Denver, wrote an article detailing Simkins' Klan activities, which included assaulting a black man, participating in a train robbery and sowing fear in Florida's 'black belt' as a masked night rider.
Richard Keeton, a lawyer in Houston, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a former state comptroller and Austin mayor, said it's inconceivable that their father would have been aware of Simkins' past.
Stanley Johanson , who has taught law at UT since he was hired by Keeton in 1963, said of the late dean, 'There was not a discriminatory bone in his body.'
A memorial resolution approved by UT's faculty and president after Keeton's death noted that he sought to make the first black law students at UT feel welcomed after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a state law barring their admission. What's more, he rebuffed efforts by the UT System Board of Regents, alumni and politicians to dismiss or silence professors who espoused controversial political and social ideas.
Earlier, as law dean at the University of Oklahoma, he testified on behalf of black students that the state of Oklahoma's hastily assembled 'separate but equal' law school for blacks was anything but equal.
Correspondence on file at UT's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History shows that Keeton recommended naming the dorm for Simkins in a March 1954 letter to UT President Logan Wilson. Keeton described Simkins as 'a man of fine character' who is 'well respected' by his former students. The dean also wrote that the dorm's name 'is not a matter of tremendous importance.'
Keeton amended his recommendation the next month, proposing that the dorm be named Harper-Simkins Hall, so that Henry Harper, a longtime dean of the Graduate School, could also be honored. That suggestion wasn't followed.
There's no doubt that Simkins was a colorful figure who spawned traditions that were still part of the school's culture 25 years after his death. A prime example was the Peregrinus, a make-believe creature that came from a Simkins lecture and that evolved into a kind of school mascot.
Larry Sager, the current dean of the UT School of Law, said the Houston firms weren't alone in discriminating against Jews. Sager, who is Jewish, said he encountered anti-Semitism when he applied for jobs in New York after law school in the late 1960s.
'This was pretty morally precocious of Page Keeton, and that in turn makes me think that a knowing embrace of Simkins' past would have been pretty out of keeping with the man,' Sager said. 'For many people in our community, he is a heroic figure, beloved by many graduates.'
Word of Wolf's hiring spread quickly in Houston's legal community, and the other firms began to hire Jews as well. At the same time, Jewish clients of law firms pressed the firms to hire Jews. In time, blacks and women would make inroads, but that took longer because there weren't that many of them in law schools in the first place.
Notwithstanding his plan to stay two or three years, Wolf spent 44 years with the Fulbright firm, retiring in 2003 after a five-year posting at the Austin office. He said he never experienced discrimination after he was hired.
Wolf's career focused on business and corporate law, with two leaves of absence for commercial activities, including a stint as president of the airline.
He's hardly retired, though. He keeps three offices: one at Fulbright's quarters in downtown Austin, one at the Capitol complex for his TxDot work, for which he is accepting no salary, and one at Falcon Seaboard's quarters on San Antonio Street.
During an interview at his 24th-floor law office in One American Center, Wolf speculated that some alumni had asked Keeton to name the dorm for Simkins.
'It's ridiculous to think Dean Keeton would have honored anyone for their views on slavery,' Wolf said. 'I consider Keeton a giant.'" (source)
