Transcript:

You know, people would often comment about how messy his office was, but from his perspective, it was highly organized. He knew where everything was, even if I didn’t know. You know that they say that when the earthquake hit, it cleaned up his office. He could, you know, tell me that whatever it was he was looking for is over in that pile, about a third of the way through, and gosh darn it if he wasn’t right.
When I was in law school a friend who I live in Seattle now and he also lives there was going by Bill’s office one day. He stopped, backed up, he looked in, he walked in and really, I thought this was pretty, you know, brave of him. He says, this office is a mess. And Bill says. He looks around, he said, and he says, and who are you?
So he introduced himself, and he said, this is Office System S, and Bill said, I know where everything is in this office. Okay. I can certainly attest to those piles that Kathleen talked about. But my recollection related to that, the fact that he knew where everything was, while I was working for him, the law, someone from the law library insisted that Bill had a book.
And he said, I absolutely do not. I had it. I returned it. And the librarian, one of the people working in the library, asked for permission to search Bill’s books and probably spent about three days in there. And lo and behold, the book was not there and they had to admit they were wrong. And I always thought that was hilarious.
Because they were convinced. And when he, when the person walked, first walked in the office, he, I could see the reaction. I know this book is here. No, it was not. Went to his office and you could, couldn’t walk around in it because it had two and three foot high stacks of paper different things for different stuff he was working on.
I think his secretary had some idea which stack was which, but that may be contributed to his sort of operating with me through just these, you know, wide ranging discussions with just working through it all verbally. He is deceptively organized with the emphasis on the word deceptive.
Cause I know my office is. Is not like his, but it’s not, you can’t land airplanes on my desk either. You know, and it’s not just at Stanford. I saw him when he was at the NLRB, his office looked exactly the same. So I think he just encased it in plastic wrap and sent it back to Stanford, but he knew, and the third pile, one third down what was there, so, but he always knew where to put his hand on what he was looking for there, you know, but it’s, it’s really sort of a.
An image that reflects sort of the robustness of his life and all of the work that he’s done and accomplishments that he’s had in that pile over there about halfway down, you’ll find a case. And it will exactly be where he points to it. So that goes back to the encyclopedic. Nature of Bill’s mind, everything is always halfway down.
That’s the problem. I think I don’t know how anything makes it to the top or the bottom because everything you’re looking for is halfway down.