Tom Graff passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. The following is his account of opening up EDF's California office in 1971, as described in "Acorn Days (1990)".

It was sometime in mid-April of 1971, still considerably less than a year after I had ripped up my East Coast roots and taken up residence in a dynamic and pleasant-enough San Francisco law firm, that I received a letter that permanently changed my life. The letter itself was straight-forward and brief. William A. Butler, Washington, D.C., counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, had been given my name by a mutual acquaintance. Mr. Butler inquired if I happened to know anyone who might be interested in helping to open a West Coast office for EDF

After a day or so of cogitation, I responded by calling Mr. Butler. Tell me more about EDF, I asked. And, by the way, I plan to be visiting D.C. with a client next month. Would it make sense to meet at that time?

An early morning D.C. breakfast get-together several weeks later ensued. Later, the same evening, following a full day of Washington meeting on behalf of the client, I boarded an airplane bound for Islip, which was at that time an airfield far enough out on Long Island to be thought of as rural.

I can't remember who met me at the airport. What I do remember is that I was soon ushered into somebody's living room — I'm not sure just whose — filled with six or seven passionate, articulate, and yes, slightly crazy defenders of the environment.

I surely was not at my best. It had been a long day, and just the day before I had flown cross-country with my client, trying to prepare him for what I knew would be difficult meetings with a phalanx of skeptical bureaucrats. So I can't say I had a terribly good answer when Charlie Wurster grilled me about what my scientific credentials were, or when Art Cooley and Dennis Puleston inquired patiently, was I a birder, a backpacker maybe, did I have any trace of eco-advocacy or even environmental interest in my past?

As a more or les conventional 60's liberal, I could point to a smattering of good works on my record to go along with a solid Ivy League academic and professional pedigree. Still, my actual litigation experience consisted of one trial in a rural county courthouse (that I ignominiously lost) and a few routine motions. And my political experience, such as it was (a year as a lobbyist for New York City on Capitol Hill) had little bearing on what would be hired to do, namely, to sally forth and wage battle — in accord with EDF's then-motto, "Sue the Bastards" — against the major water and energy utilities of California and the Western United States.

Yet as I was put to bed late that night and early next morning on the drive to Kennedy Airport for my flight home, I dimly recall thinking that, despite my obvious failings as an environmentalist, Rod Cameron was giving me the distinct impression that I would be offered a job helping to open EDF's Berkeley office. Berkeley was the choice primarily because Rod thought the proximity to the university would give us more access to pro bono scientific assistance and to a free first-class law library.

That's what happened. On about August 1, 1971, with me and two professional colleagues (each of us briefly trained in an intense, week long series of encounters with the forefathers on Long Island) and an office manager/secretary, EDF-West opened its doors. My two colleagues had diverse backgrounds. Dr. Gerald H. Meral was a fishery biologist by training, a veteran canoeist and already a dedicated environmentalist as conversant as any about the river-ruining policies of the Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation. Rapids on both the Stanislaus (now hundreds of feet under water) and the Tuolumne Rives in California are named after Jerry, who was one of the first ever to paddle through them.

Michael Palmer was the other lawyer. Aristocratic in bearing, a lawyer's lawyer, and generally a cautious and somewhat introverted man, Michael complemented rather well my more plebian, political, impulsive and extroverted style.

Both Jerry and Mike had been hired independently of me and of each other. Our status was that of three equals; none of us could tell either of the others what to do. By any conventional management standards a prescription for disaster, the system worked quite well, since none of us, except maybe for Jerry, who did have a policy agenda, had much of an idea what made sense to do and what didn't, what was a golden opportunity in the early days of NEPA litigation and what was a lost cause.

The first thing the three of us did agree on was who to hire to run the office. We found a recently laid-off Latin teacher named Portia Lee (modern languages were in, Latin was dead), and she proceeded to take us three neophytes under her wing, as she helped turn several dorm rooms on the third floor of a former fraternity house into the august West Coast headquarters of the Environmental Defense Fund.

As I said, we really didn't know a lost cause even when it stared us squarely in the face. The first major issue the office plunged into was the construction of the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River. Most of the early battles to Save the Stanislaus were waged out of EDF's office, in administrative and judicial litigation quarterbacked by Mike Palmer, with me as frequent understudy. The fact that New Melones was a several hundred million dollar project, duly authorized by Congress, and well into construction by the time we first sued to stop it did not faze us. What mattered to us was that the project made no sense — the waters it backed up still have not been sold seventeen years later – -and that it would drown what was perhaps California's most beautiful and popular white water river.

Several books have since been written about the war over New Melones; none suggest that we ever had a chance. Nevertheless, three years later, a statewide initiative election designed to block its construction was organized by Jerry Meral and a few colleagues. And five years after that, Mark Dubois, an early ally in the struggle and co-founder of Friends of the River (now one of the nation's leading river conservation groups) risked his life in an effort to prevent the New Melones Reservoir from being filled. By hiding himself deep in the canyon and chaining himself to a rock below what would otherwise have been the water line, Mark caused the Corps of Engineers to stop filling the reservoir that year. Unfortunately, a few years later, the spring flood filled the reservoir and mooted the issue.

Among the other projects that we began back in that first year was a piece of litigation which finally had its first substantive evidence taken sixteen years later, in the spring of 1987. Had I been able to predict that future, I guarantee that I would never have filed the suit. We also filed an action that set one of the first important precedents under the California Environmental Quality Act (California's junior NEPA) and two suits which challenged the adding of lead to gasoline, a cause that EDF has long championed, with ever-increasing success, in its Washington, D.C office as well.

Before too long, my original colleagues moved on. Mike Palmer left to resume the private practice of law late in 1973. Jerry Meral left to serve the administration of Governor Jerry Brown in Sacramento as Deputy Director of Water Resources in 1975, and Ph.D. economist extraordinaire, Zach Willey, succeeded Jerry. David Roe, lawyer and author-to-be, arrived a year later, following Dick Gutting, who was Mike Palmer's successor. David's arrival resembled mine, long on promise, short on obvious environmental credentials.

Zach, David and I have served EDF for 48 years combined. The office staff is now younger than we are, although office manager Mary Jane Gallagher has guided our office with distinction for nearly twelve years. Four times over, we are no longer the junior office within the EDF family. But the spirit which the founding trustees and early staff imparted lives on in EDF's West Coast incarnation. With a staff of 15, several of whom — Dan Kirshner, Terry Young and John Krautkraemer — have now also been around EDF for nearly a decade of more, the California office has already set EDF records for experience and longevity.

Who could have predicted anything like that in 1971? Not me.