[conspire] Meet Robert Howard Schnacke

[Rick Moen]

There was once a lawyer and senior state and Federal judge named Robert
Howard Schnacke (1913-1994).  I never met him, but I have a connection
to him that I'll arrive at shortly.  This is a story that I can tell now
because he's deceased.  If I'd known the personal-connection-to-me part
while he was alive, I'd _not_ have related that bit.  Living people can
sue; dead folks cannot.

Robert attended UC Berkeley in the 1930s, where the only photograph I've
been able to find of him was taken:
https://link.shutterfly.com/gYAHEZNiQ1 .  That's pretty young, but does
he look like anyone you know?  (Hold that thought.)
Seems as if he was not one for the limelight.  After Berkeley, he got
his J.D. from Hastings Law School (1938).

In 1956, Robert married June Doris Borina, a formidable person in her
own right.  She was also an attorney (attended Stanford before that),
and had the distinction of being the female DA in California (in 1947).
Her family was Croatian, if you're wondering where 'Borina' hails from.
The Schnackes lived (like any on-the-make Bay Area attorney in those
days) in Hillsborough.

Robert was in private practice as a lawyer for quite a while after
Hastings, then, during WWII, was a US Army special agent in the Counter
Intelligence Corps (1942-1946).  After some positions of increasing
responsibility, he became a prosecutor -- Assistant US Attorney and
chief of the Criminal Division in the Northern District of California,
1953-1958, and then U.S. attorney for the Northern District of
California, 1958-1959.  Then, in another major step up, he became a
judge at Superior Court of California, 1968-1970.  In 1970, President
Richard Nixon appointed him as Judge to the Federal District Court for
the Northern District of California (in San Francisco).  He remained in
that position until his death in 1994, age 80.

'Schnacke' is pretty darned ethnic German, you will perhaps agree.
Further support of that idea comes from the names of Robert's parents:
Carl Henry Schnacke and Elfrieda Adelaide Hanschen.  ('Elfrieda', for
heaven's sake.)

What sort of judge was Robert?  William Turner in his book _Figures of
Speech_: First Amendment Heroes and Villains_ described Robert thus:

  Schnacke, like so many judges, was a former prosecutor.  While a
  U.S. Attorney, he has even prosecuted a sedition case in the McCarthy 
  era, charging writer John Powell with having accused the U.S.
  military of using germ warfare in the Korean War.  Schnacke was a 
  crusty, conservative Republican known to be hostile to civil liberties
  cases.  But he had a maverick streak as well, perhaps evidenced by 
  his being caught in a noontime police raid of the Market Street 
  Cinema adult theater in the Tenderloin.

(Spoiler:  Turner classes Schnacke as one of the villains.)[1]

Over his long career, Robert heard quite a few important cases, which
I'll omit here, and instead get to the personal-connection-to-me bit:
In October 1957, 44-year-old Assistant US Attorney and
chief of the Criminal Division for the Northern District of California 
Robert Howard Schnacke had a brief fling, outside his year-old marriage,
with a 16-year-old woman.  And that produced, well, me.

And that's the thing that you don't talk about until the party in
question is dead and therefore cannot sue.  (Although truth is a
complete defence against defamation, you have to be prepared to prove it
in court.  Doing so within a lawsuit brought by a very annoyed and very
rich veteran judge and prosecutor would be particularly Not Fun.)

I got some parts of this tale from discussion with my biological mother,
whose privacy I protect, but I can safely reveal the fact, amusing to me
when I heard it from her, that she's Norwegian-American.  I'd always
said 'No idea' or 'some kind of Euromutt' when people asked where my
genetic ancestors hailed from.  I always said kinship is almost
everything when it comes to family culture, and that genetics means
roughly nothing at all, unless you need a bone marrow transplant, and
that I'm Norwegian-American because I was raised that way.  (Mom, i.e.,
my adoptive mother, was English with a bit of Dutch.  Dad was an
immigrant from western Norway.)  And I still strongly hold that view.
You are what your upbringing and kin make you, not what your genes would
suggest.

But it's amusing that the _genetic_ picture is likewise Norwegian -- and
German.

Paul Zander and Mark Weisler:  Apparently I have a toehold in your
tribe.  I'll try not to wreck it.


[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=tk_CwYd4ULIC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=%22Robert+H.+Schnacke%22&source=bl&ots=xddJO-0rhg&sig=ACfU3U2n4lWpu1Z4EI86IHO1uFi8tXwesw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjX9LaUt_flAhWACjQIHenjC1IQ6AEwCXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Robert%20H.%20Schnacke%22&f=false