He opened the _American Heritage_. “Here you speak of Katzmann as
being, in spite of his name, a Mayflower descendant. He wasn’t. His
father was a German, his mother Scotch and came from Roxbury. They
were poor. His mother used to work. Fred had nothing. I think when he
went to Harvard an aunt helped him out a little, but he used to tend
furnaces to work his way through. Sometimes he earned a bit singing.
He had a fine voice. Even when he was starting up his practice he
still used to sing sometimes at churches and funerals.
“We got pretty close over the years. I don’t think in the end
there was anything he kept back from me. I knew about his family,
his social life, his practice. I knew how he felt about the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. In that he never changed. He didn’t just think
they were guilty, he _knew_ they were guilty. He wouldn’t have
avoided the case, for he never did put off dirty jobs onto other
people, but sometimes he’d say to me, ‘Mike, if I had my life to live
over, I’d never want to go through that again.’ He always felt it
shortened his wife’s life, the whole business. For years they had to
have guards round his house. He said whenever he woke up nights he’d
hear them tramping round.
“A lot of things I set myself out to tell you,” Dray went on, “but
they slip through my mind right now. Just this, though. I’ve built up
a good practice in Hyde Park. I’ve done all right here. But I always
have the feeling somehow that it was Fred’s practice, that anything
I’ve amounted to has been through him. I want to defend his memory,
and that’s why I’m talking to you.
“I’ll tell you another thing. When Jerry McAnarney was on the
Sacco-Vanzetti defense, he thought his clients were innocent. I never
heard any of the Defense Committee boys criticize Jerry. He went to
the governor’s committee afterward and he still thought they were
innocent. But he and Fred stayed the same good friends all through
the years. They were partners together on that Willett-Sears case.
Maybe you remember, that case lasted fourteen months—the longest jury
case in the history of Massachusetts. I suppose if anyone asked Fred
to name his ten best friends, Jerry McAnarney would have been among
them. And if Jerry named his best five, Fred would have been on the
list. I remember, too, just a short while before Jerry died he said
one day right in this office: ‘No matter what they said about you,
Fred, you were all right.’”
So we talked—or rather, I listened—as the lawyer talked through the
afternoon. Katzmann had avoided the Dedham courtroom the day Thayer
passed sentence, but Dray had gone there deliberately, and had heard
Vanzetti’s speech to the court and watched him point his finger at
the judge. For Dray, Vanzetti had seemed a sinister figure at that
moment with his glaring eyes, his heavy bobbing mustache, and his
passionate foreign voice.
Inevitably, we got to the subject of the guns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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