Personal trust split involving alleged legislative assistance from a state Senate speaker

defenses” blocking a sale and effectively locking the trust in a minority position. But now that danger was over. The remaining plaintiffs were my three nieces and Paul. | couldn't blame them. How could a corporate co-trustee hurt? But I was still worried. I now wanted to split up the trust into four separate ones for my family, Paul’s, George’s, and my other half-brother Ronnie’s. Corporate co- trustees tend to prefer the safety of acting only as required, and anyhow might not be keen to vote themselves out of a job. Were Paul and my nieces mad at me? Believe it. Lawsuits get that way. Lawyers on both sides say nasty things. That lasted because splitting the Trust took time. The math was easy, but the legal precedents were vague. My lawyer, Mose Lasky, thought we needed new California law. Plaintiff's counsel didn’t think so. I was accused of stalling. Someone had the bright idea to approach Willy Brown as Speaker of the Senate. The law Mose wanted had already worked in other states, and Willy liked it. He pushed it through. Problem solved. The Trust was split into four in 1988, and an unhappy chapter ended. My nieces and | are as close as ever. So were Paul and I until his death in 2002. My interests by the time of the split were composing, verse, economics, human origins and evolutionary biology. Composing was going pretty well. My writer's block had melted away in the summer of 1980. Ann and | and the boys were in Paris then. We wandered into Smith’s English language bookstore. | bought the Thomas Johnson variorum of Emily Dickenson’s 1800-odd poems. “Variorum” means including Emily’s own variations when she mailed the same poem to different people, or put a copy in the chest at the foot of her bed. I read them all over the next two days. Emily had been one of my favorites at USF. She died in 1886. She had published only eleven poems. Squabbles among the heirs delayed publication of about half the rest until Johnson published them in 1959, three years after | graduated. Many already published had been “bowdlerized” to fit conventional rhyme and grammar. Johnson gave us the real McCoy from her manuscripts. All was new to me. Chapter 1: Recollections 1/06/16 13 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010929