Emeritus Professor William B. Owens died July 13, 1973. Professor Owens received his LL.B. from Stanford in 1915 and joined the law faculty for the following year. After experience in private practice and with the government, he returned to the Law School in 1920 and taught until 1953. He taught nlainly in the areas of practice and code pleading, partnership, and private corporation . Professor Owens is remembered also for his community theatre activities, especialJy his appearance in “Seven Keys to Bald Pate” and “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

Emeritus Professor Lowell Turrentine commented after Professor Owens’ death “Bill’s students will remember him for his sonorous voice a meticulous organization and detail of his lectures which made notetaking a cinch. The younger generation of lawyers does not know of his arduous and expert work as one of the commissioners who formulated the Probate Code of 1931. This, to be sure, consisted mostly of sections which had been scattered through the civil and civil procedure codes. but it took a lot of work to organize them and many adjustments and improvements were made. After the code was enacted, I said to Bill, ‘Why didn’t you people eliminate the expensive and superfluous publication of notice of hearing of each petition for probate or administration and substitute a schedule of such hearing to be published by the county clerk?’ He replied, ‘We did exactly that in the first draft of the Code, but the newspaper lobby told u that unless we took it out they would defeat the whole code.’

“One other thing which neither the lawyers of Bill’s time nor of today have heard is that in his year of retirement at Channing House Bill came to be known as ‘the man who helps everyone else.’ “