When I came to Austin in the summer of ’76, I lived in a duplex on W. l3th Street in a spot where there is now a brick apartment building. One of the many things I loved about my neighborhood was a little shack on West Lynn called Murray’s Bagels, where a nice Jewish guy named Murray made and sold truly decent bagels, even by my New Jersey standards.
For years after the bagel shop closed, I would run into this fellow around town, particularly at political rallies and avant-garde art performances at Zilker Park.
“Hi, Murray,” I would call.
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Malcolm Greenstein, Margaret Tucker, Tom Kolker |
It was a long time before he told me that his name was Malcolm Greenstein. Murray was his dog. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one confused. Some years later, a friend mailed Malcolm a copy of his FBI dossier, obtained in a pending lawsuit. Despite talking to Greenstein’s landlady and others, agents were only able to list one of the most frequent visitors to Greenstein’s Colorado home as “Murray L.N.U.” (Last Name Unknown).
Malcolm Greenstein is an example of what happens to you if don’t get the Big Chill: If you stay as caring and committed and actively involved with the cause of the disenfranchised as you were, say, in college. What happens is that despite the gray in your beard and the lines around your eyes, you remain astonishingly youthful: vibrant, connected, a little edgy. When other people are vacationing in Grand Cayman, you are in South Africa, witnessing a tribunal of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Or in Chiapas, learning Spanish. In Guatemala, hanging out with Jennifer Harbury. In Uganda, building houses for the international arm of Habitat for Humanity.
“‘Malcolm’s Summer Vacation’ has become something of an Austin legal institution,” sighs his partner, Tom Kolker, a lanky, bespectacled fellow whose retiring demeanor contrasts with that of his more flamboyant colleague. “You can tell a judge your client’s leg is broken, his whole family is sick, and your office burned down — the best excuses mean nothing if they want you in court on a certain date. But after 20 years, this vacation has a life of its own. The judges actually schedule around it.”
In fact, both Kolker and Greenstein mention the Summer Vacation as a factor in the founding of their partnership. This legal Odd Couple met in the mid-Seventies when Kolker was working in the Student Attorney’s office at UT. “There was a car-towing scam going on around the university; Malcolm filed one of the suits. As I got to know him and saw the kind of work he was doing and the involvement he had with clients and the community, I asked him if we could work together. He said, ‘Yeah, well, I’m about to go out of town for six weeks, I could use some help.'”
Greenstein and Kolker is not much like other law firms: not in the kind of cases they take, the kind of cars they drive (think Toyota), nor the kind of office they run. For 20 years, they have officed on the Eastside; in ’83, they bought a cozy house on E. Cesar Chavez, half a block from a soup kitchen, where a significant portion of their work is walk-in business from the neighborhood. “We’re like the country doctors,” explains their associate Margaret Tucker. “We don’t specialize, the way a lot of attorneys do. We do DWIs, family law, employment cases, everyday crimes and misdemeanors.”
While in law school at UT in the Eighties, Tucker was the director of the Texas Human Rights Foundation, an organization devoted to gay rights and AIDS activism. After graduation, she spent three years in New York with her girlfriend, Liz Lambert, who had taken a job with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. While Lambert prosecuted the perps, Tucker worked the other side of the street up in Harlem, as legal director for a minority task force. Upon the couple’s return to Austin, Tucker began coordinating the defense efforts on the Infosex case, in which obscenity charges were filed against the producers of an AIDS education video that aired on public access television. Through this work, and through her friendship with Kolker’s wife, lawyer and activist Virginia Raymond, Tucker was recognized by Malcolm and Tom as one of theirs; in ’94, they asked her to join the firm.
Country doctors though they may be, these three lawyers are known for tough, high-profile cases with a political component: sexual harassment, censorship, discrimination, and, most challenging, representing citizens against the police and the government. In one such case, Tom Kolker represented a client who allegedly was raped by the Archer County sheriff when he came to question her about a domestic violence incident. “Afterwards, she went to the Rape Crisis center in Austin. They’d sent her to the police, who did a great job, and charges were filed by DPS. But the grand jury in the guy’s home county dismissed the charges, and she showed up in my office with about a week left to file,” remembers Kolker.
After months of labor by Kolker and another lawyer, Ed Tuddenham, the woman won a judgment of $2.5 million. “The odds were as long as they could be,” says Kolker. “But I think our ability to win that case came as the result of a history defending people against law enforcement agencies. It’s an incredibly difficult thing. And to work in a caring way with someone who’s been a victim of that kind of treatment takes experience as well.”
The lawyers are also known for their work in the community. Whether you’re an undocumented Central American, a bicycle activist, or a student demonstrator, you have a friend at Greenstein & Kolker.
Malcolm is a Big Brother (he hit the organization’s 10-year limit when his kid turned 18 recently), a board member for Hands-On Housing, legal advisor for Youth Options, and, I think it’s fair to say, an honorary member of every left-wing organization in our city. This student of the Torah is the politically savvy model of the Man About Town: He is seen everywhere, everyone knows him, and his perennial bachelorhood is an eyesore to the yentas of Austin.
Margaret has been active with ALLGO, Informe SIDA, La Pe�a, and the mentor program at Sanchez Elementary school. One of eight siblings raised by a clergyman and a teacher who left a comfy lifestyle at St. Stephen’s Academy in Austin for an inner-city Houston neighborhood, Margaret never learned to compartmentalize her life the way most of us do: one afternoon a month for volunteer work, three checks a year to charity. Talk of homeless dogs and needy children weaves naturally with her banter about movies, parties, and books. She and longtime companion Lambert share a weakness for strays of every species; neither their backyard or their guest room is often empty.
Tom Kolker was the hardest of the group to arrange a interview with for this article because of his deep, daily commitment to a pro-bono project outside the office. With his wife, Kolker is raising three children, and he is doing so in a hands-on manner that most in his profession would claim to envy — though when you choose the Lexus and the nanny, you give up the freedom to stay home with a sick child, as Kolker had the day he missed our interview. When we finally got together, he was shy and self-deprecating about his lack of an activist r�sum� to match his partners. But as far as I’m concerned, an active-duty parent is fighting society’s good fight in one of the most important ways possible: with a thermometer, an Elmer’s glue stick, and a box of macaroni. You want to talk about needy children, talk to us.
Tom Doyal, local attorney and fiction writer, sums up the Greenstein-Kolker-Tucker ethos like this: “It’s rare in the legal profession to find attorneys who have a genuine daily commitment to justice, as contrasted to the normal scramble to make a living in the profession. And it’s hard to speak up for the marginalized people in society and keep a sense of humor. These folks are the exception.”
Author and regular Chronicle and NPR contributor Marion Winik is leaving Austin next year to live in Pennsylvania.
This article appears in December 25 • 1998 and December 25 • 1998 (Cover).