November 24, 1926 - May 7, 2023

Walter Gerash planned to write a memoir.

He tried starting it in 2006, just as he was winding down his career as a legendary criminal and civil rights lawyer in Denver. He wrote a few pages about some cases he argued, and a few more about social justice and the law. His heart was in it. But his head, not so much. By that point, at age 80, details had started slipping his mind and the yarns he hoped to weave into the book were fraying.

“I’m stuck,” he’d say with a frustration that, in hindsight, was his way of reckoning with the slow creep of dementia.

Walter started and stopped working on the book a few more times over the next few years, but ultimately couldn’t write it.

And so, in the weeks following his death in May 2023, his family and friends helped piece together aspects of his career they knew he wanted people to remember. They also put into words what Walter never could have: What he meant to them. What they learned from him. And what, in addition to his legal victories, made him unforgettable.

In a profession with more than its share of bullshitters, Walter was a straight shooter who identified with his clients, warts and all. Anyone who met him knows he didn’t hide his own warts. And anyone who understood him knows he wouldn’t have wanted his portrait prettied up or censored.

Just tell it like it is, he would have said. And get the damn thing done already, will ya?

From somewhere else

You could tell the minute you met Walter Louis Gerash that he wasn’t from Denver. He smacked of a place much faster and with more fight.

He was born in the Bronx on Nov. 24, 1926, three years after Yankee Stadium opened and three years before the Black Tuesday stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed clobbered families nationwide. Among them were his parents, Leah and Ben Gerash, who each also came from somewhere else.

Leah grew up in a Ukrainian village near Odessa where rising antisemitism prompted many in its Jewish community to flee. In her late teens, she, her three brothers, two sisters and parents settled in New York.

Ben came alone to New York at age 17 from a small town in what is now Moldova where about 200 Jews were murdered in a pogrom at the turn of the century. He left behind a family he would never see again just before World War I to avoid being drafted into the Czar’s army. He didn’t speak much about them, as if he had swallowed the sadness of their loss.

The couple felt relatively at home in the Bronx, where half the population was Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the time of Walter’s birth. As the eldest grandchild on Leah’s side, he was for years the main object of her large, loving family’s attention and hope.

“They were warm, inviting people who had marvelous dinners full of conversation and teasing,” Walter’s younger cousin, Arlene Feld, remembers. Those evenings, she says, would often end with penny-stakes poker games, and lots of vodka and laughter.

Leah had a millinery in the Bronx. 

Ben worked the docks in Manhattan, and later as a machinist in the garment district until he was laid off in the 1930s. Too proud to tell his family he had no job for long spells during the Depression, he would dress as if for work each morning and take the subway to the New York Public Library to teach himself to read English. As his comprehension improved and job prospects flatlined, he bored into the writings of Scott Nearing, the American socialist-turned-communist economist known for his rebukes of greed and exploitation.

Ben shared what he learned with his eldest son, who faced his own tsuris from kids in their mostly Irish neighborhood bullying him for being short and Jewish. They discussed the news of the day as reported by the leftist People’s World newspaper. They bonded in their moral seriousness and the way both felt the pains of the world so personally.

Becoming “a radical”

Walter enlisted in the Army right out of high school at age 17. He was eager to fight fascists in World War II, but also drawn to service because it would later pay for the college education his parents couldn’t afford.

Federal law banned the Army from shipping GIs overseas until they were 18, enabling him to take a year’s worth of classes at Washington State College in one semester on the federal government’s dime. His infantry unit went to Hawaii, where it prepared to deploy to Japan in mid-1945. President Harry Truman’s decision to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that summer prompted Japan to surrender just as Walter’s unit was about to ship out.

He was the only New Yorker in that unit, and his buddies got a kick out of his Bronx accent and 5-foot-6-inches of bravado. His stint in the service introduced him to young men from all over the country who shared their own families’ histories as outsiders or underdogs. Those friendships helped inform his view of a common American struggle. He carved his purpose and identity out of that struggle, out of advocating for working people, the vulnerable and oppressed. And he found anthems for that mission in socialist folk songs of the era, which remained some of his lifelong favorites.

From San Diego up to Maine

In every mine and mill

Where working folks defend their rights

It's there you find Joe Hill

It's there you find Joe Hill

I dreamed I saw, I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

Alive as you and me

Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"

"I never died" says he,

“I never died" says he

Walter headed after the war to Los Angeles, where his parents and brother Jerry moved to join one of his uncles, a nightclub owner with ties to the underworld. He enrolled at UCLA on the GI Bill and signed up with the Communist Party.

“I became a radical,” he told his son Doug in a video interview half a century later.

Jerry, who is seven years younger, remembers Walter taking him as a teen to a gathering of the Labor Youth League, which viewed post-WWII America through a Marxist lens. Though he was never very close with his brother, he credits Walter for “giving me that direction, that little push” toward a political creed that “had a deep influence on me in terms of my humanity and worldview.”

It was a bad time to be a Communist. College students during the McCarthy era couldn’t earn degrees in California unless they took a loyalty oath swearing they weren't a member of the party. Unwilling to sign, Walter transferred to the University of Chicago, where he finished his undergraduate degree and earned a Master’s degree in history. He had been rejected from a doctoral program and unable to find a teaching job when he returned to Los Angeles to work for two years organizing Continental Can Company workers to unionize. 

It was then that he met Helen Ptashne at a rally protesting Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs’ executions. They married soon after and Helen, as he later told it, offered him advice.

“She says to me, ‘You know, you’re always arguing and everything. Why don’t you become a lawyer?’ I said OK.”

Walter enrolled in UCLA’s law school where, after a year and a half, he suspected that his professors were messing with him because of his politics. He also worried his Communist ties would disqualify him from being admitted by the California bar. He decided to transfer to the University of Denver’s law school, partly because it had no political restrictions and partly because Helen wanted to train as a psychiatrist, and the nearby University of Colorado medical school admitted far more women than universities in California.

The long shadow of McCarthyism followed the couple to West Denver, where the application for the housing project they moved into asked about their political background. “Yeah, I didn’t sign,” Walter told Doug. “Helen signed.” 

He snagged a clerkship his last year of law school with Francis O’Neill, a well-known criminal defense lawyer in Denver who hired him full time after he passed the bar. They worked together for two years, the elder mentoring the younger lawyer on everything from trial skills to running the business side of a law office. 

But Walter grew restless. It was the late 1950s and the Vietnam War had started. President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to protect Black students trying to attend a high school in Little Rock. The Chicano rights movement was taking root, including in Colorado. Walter, who believed the government exploited “the overwhelming majority of the people,” as he later wrote, saw the law as a way to “help modify this oppression.” So, he quit O’Neill’s office to start his own practice and take cases that confronted the injustices of that era.

As he told Doug in the video years later: “I decided if I was going to be a lawyer, I was going to help people.”

“The Walter Gerash School of Law”

Walter practiced mostly criminal law as a young attorney, and through one of his cases managed to win an argument before Colorado’s Supreme Court in 1959 challenging the long-standing practice of excluding Spanish-surnamed people from serving on juries. He argued a similar case before the U.S. Supreme Court 15 years later, winning a landmark decision that set precedent for the right to inspect juror questionnaires for race.

Those rulings made jury trials more fair for people of color. They also made Walter the go-to lawyer for minority and left-leaning causes throughout Colorado. 

He would use profits from paying clients to subsidize his pro-bono work representing members of the Crusade for Justice and the Black Panther Party, mimes who stripped their clothes performing political farces and Dominican nuns who shed their blood on a nuclear silo. He fought for people arrested protesting everything from the Vietnam War to pollution at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to Columbus Day. Among protestors and folks who practice civil disobedience, he found kinship.

Francisco “Kiko” Martinez, a lifelong Chicano activist and human rights lawyer from the San Luis Valley, met Walter at a National Lawyers Guild convention in 1971. The two became fast friends, he says, largely because they were more interested in history and politics than legal theory or trial practice. What drew them both to the law were the wrongs it could be used to right.

As a self-proclaimed graduate of what he calls the "Walter Gerash School of Law,” Kiko says he learned from Walter that the art of great lawyering lies mainly in the ability to empathize with clients’ struggles and tell their stories in a way that preserves their dignity.

“He could really open up his heart to people. He could take on their pain.” 

Cindi Andrews hired Walter to represent her in a lawsuit she says she is bound by a legal settlement not to discuss. Walter’s younger son Dan says the suit was against the manufacturer of a furnace that catastrophically burned Cindi and her son when it exploded.

“I can’t tell you anything about the case, and I won’t. But what I can say is the life I have today is thanks to Walter Gerash,” Cindi says. “He spent so much time with you that he actually got to know your experience. You got a piece of that man’s life when he worked with you. And after he represented you, he still kept track of you and made sure you were doing well.”

Hers was among the many product liability and personal injury cases Walter fought with the same zeal he brought to his political cases. He won a fat settlement for a client who lost his leg in a train accident in a case he co-counseled with famed California litigator Melvin Belli, the self-proclaimed King of Torts. He also won a $9 million judgment (later reduced on appeal) against the University of Denver in a case about a trampoline that, as Walter persuaded the jury, broke his young client’s neck.

His success in court stemmed largely from his ability to pick and connect with jurors – and to make them feel as though the neck broken on that trampoline, for example, was that of their own child. He could inspire in jurors such poignant empathy for his clients and instill such a strong sense of responsibility to mete out justice that, in more than a few closing arguments, he brought them along with him to tears. 

“My mom always thought it was crocodile tears, but I don’t think it was an act,” Doug says of his father’s performance in the courtroom. “He cared a lot about his clients and was able to reach down into something inside him and be effective transmitting that to the jury in a really powerful way. I think it was very genuine. It took a lot of heart.”

“His presence in front of the jury was like nobody else’s,” adds Tony DiVirgilio, a former cop who started working with Walter as an investigator in the 1980s. “He could always get the jurors’ full attention and have them completely involved in what he was saying. Once he made a point, boy he would just emphasize it. That voice of his would just bellow. It was, like, holy mackerel.” 

Each legal victory boosted Walter’s reputation – and his mojo. He at some point in the late 1960s or early 1970s took to citing Aristotle and Shakespere in motions and showing up to court in purple or green velvet suits. In time, capes, berets and fedoras became his hallmarks. If you didn’t know Walter, you might have mistaken his look for camp, but that would miss how serious he was and how earnest even his schtick.

Kiko recalls going to a restaurant with Walter in Fort Morgan during a trial there. “I was of course a long-haired Mexican guy dressed like we dressed in those days and Walter, well, he had his own unique style,” he says. “A woman there asked us if we were with the show that was coming to town. She meant the circus. Walter and I always got a good laugh about that one.”

Walter would sometimes yell in the courtroom, his righteous indignation testing opposing counsels’ and judges’ patience. He could usually slide by with a mischievous grin.

That smile was his magic bullet. It helped him talk his way out of traffic tickets when he would run lights in his red Cadillac with a peace sticker on the bumper. It mitigated his habit of sending his soup back at restaurants – in some cases, two or three times – because it wasn’t hot enough. And it gave him a pass for quoting Marx’s “Religion is the opium of the people,” loudly, and in front of the rabbi, in the middle of a friend’s son’s bris.

His cousin Arlene Feld says he once told her he styled himself largely after her father, Jack Feld, the LA nightclub owner whose swagger and hubris he admired. “My dad was big and bold and everybody knew him,” she said.

Wherever he learned it, Walter was prone to pushing boundaries – sometimes too hard.

“There were any number of times when I would be with him either at his office or at his home – either around staff, or partners, or younger associates, or his children – and his voice would crack windows. There were also times he would make people soil their underwear because he could be so volatile (and) angry,” says his former colleague David Savitz.

“He was a wildman. He’d get into fights with judges or prosecutors. Tantrums. He even wanted me to join him in wearing a beret to court,” adds Scott Robinson, Walter’s buttoned-up law partner for nearly two decades who never in a million years would have agreed to it.

Denver County Court Judge Ray Satter recalls Walter’s intensity in court with a chuckle.

“He was my hero, always fighting those causes, always very passionate – and sometimes too passionate. He’d do those arguments and really go to town in front of me, and I’d eventually say, ‘Mr. Gerash, there is no jury.’”

Things at home

Walter thrilled his mother’s side of the family by becoming the first among them to work as a white collar professional. But his father – who approached parenthood with the belief that praising children ruins them – was reserved in his assessment of his eldest son’s achievements.

With his own sons, Walter wanted closer relationships. A fitness buff most of his life, he taught Doug and later Dan to ski and swim. He took them on vacations to body surf in the ocean. He tried sharing with them his passion for classical music and chess. And he schooled them in lefty politics much the way Ben had with him.

Doug remembers the early years of the Vietnam War when Walter didn’t trust American news outlets’ coverage of the conflict, so he bought a shortwave radio to listen to international broadcasts. Father and son figured out how to tune into Radio Hanoi and other stations reporting that the US was intentionally bombing schools and hospitals in Vietnam.

“It was a new experience for both of us, listening to that news each day about how many civilians we were killing. We would sit there looking at each other with our jaws dropping. It had a big impact on me,” Doug says.

Years later, when Doug was about 16, he says his dad gave him a copy of Robert Ormes’ “Guide to the Colorado Mountains.” Walter penned a note on the title page encouraging him to hike and camp as much as possible. “Who knows? It may be a future guide for ‘taking to the hills’ in a people’s war to save our country from fascism,” he wrote.

Helen had been busy with medical school, her psychiatric residency, then starting her practice when Doug and Dan were growing up. Housekeepers did much of the work raising them. Both say their parents’ marriage started unraveling about the time they built a house on Southeast Denver’s Magnolia Lane in 1968. 

“My memory of their divorce in 1972 was, jeez, it’s about time,” Doug recalls.

Dan, who is eight years younger, had a tougher time with their break up. His elementary school was across the street from home and he remembers looking out his classroom window one day to see men loading his father’s things into a moving van. His dad hadn’t told him he was moving out, nor about his affair with a woman named Rose that led to it. Walter – who didn’t like living alone – married her as soon as his divorce from Helen was final.

“That was classic Walter,” Dan says. “And it sucked.”

“My dad did his best, but he didn’t always think about the rest of us. He pretty much just plowed ahead. He was just trying to survive,” Doug adds.

The people closest to Walter weren’t always close with each other. Resentments about how he spent his time and money strained his sons’ relationships with Rose – and, later with his third wife, Joan Prugh. Walter was aware of those tensions, but less apt to work through than to ignore them. 

He found pleasure in many other pursuits outside work and family. 

He was a competitive chess player who relished pick-up games on the concrete chess tables along Denver’s 16th Street Mall – sometimes shirtless – as much as his weekly matches on his own ivory and mahogany set with his regular chess buddies. 

He read hungrily, especially books on history, politics and power. He devoured everything by Howard Zinn, whose writing he would quote verbatim. Zinn’s commentary on oppressed people and their quiet propensity for revolt resonated with him, maybe because the plight of his father’s family went so painfully unspoken. There was something about him, just below the surface, that seemed ready at any moment to fight.

There was also much about him that was joyful and quirky.

He had season tickets to the Colorado Symphony, and a stereo system in his den he would crank up and have you sit with him, listening to some concerto you’d never heard of over and over again until the parts that moved him came to move you, too. He would see it in your eyes and smile a smile that, if only for a moment, could make you melt. And he knew it.

He cooked up a killer kasha – buckwheat with egg and onion, his mother’s recipe from the old country – and relished fine dining, especially at new restaurants. He chewed with his mouth open, much to the dismay of his three wives.

Walter walked crazy fast. “Huge steps on short legs,” is how attorney Andy Reid, who worked with him in the early aughts, describes it. And he could dance – mostly ballroom, complete with dipping and twirling his favorite lady. 

He biked in the mountains and rollerbladed around Denver’s parks in high gym shorts he wore because they showed off his toned legs. 

I still got it, eh? 

And he swam laps at the Congress Park and LaAlma Park pools in the summer and at the Denver Athletic Club the rest of the year – always, of course, in a Speedo.

Long shots

Walter occupied several office spaces during his 50-year law practice, but worked in the building he owned at 1439 Court Place the longest. The redstone Victorian with the red light in its foyer – still hanging from its years as a bordello – stood alone in a parking lot surrounded by bigger, newer structures. “When a developer tore down every other building on the block to build two skyscrapers that, as it turns out, were never built, Gerash was the only holdout,” reads a Super Lawyers profile of Walter from 2008. As his friend, journalist Mike McPhee later wrote in his obituary, the building was a testament to his stubbornness.

In case the force of Walter’s will wasn’t apparent enough, he had part of the famous Dylan Thomas poem inscribed above the bay window behind the desk where he worked into his 80s: “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” 

This was the message hundreds of potential criminal clients saw as they decided whether to put their cases in his hands. 

If Walter could be volatile with his family and office staff, he seemed to have an endless well of patience and empathy for the people counting on him to keep them out of prison. He never spoke to clients or their families in legalese, but in plain language to make sure they knew his strategy and commitment.

“Time after time, I’d meet these clients facing devastating charges, and once they’d be in his office he’d boost their spirits and confidence. He was never judgemental about who he was representing. Regardless of how controversial that individual would have been, he would take it on,” investigator Tony DiVirgilio remembers. “If he believed that the prosecution was overstepping, overreaching, if he believed his client was being wrongfully accused, if he believed there was a rush to justice, you would never find a stronger advocate than him. You always had this feeling like this was a wrongdoing and we’re gonna fight this case and we’re going to win.”

Joe Saint Veltrie worked with Walter both as a law student and as a lawyer at what he describes as the apex of Walter’s career. “He was driven, and expected the people working for him to be driven, and we were,” he says.

That drive resulted in a string of acquittals in some of Colorado’s most high-profile criminal trials.

After heavyweight boxer Ron Lyle shot and killed his former trainer in 1978, Walter waged a self-defense argument and persuaded a jury to find him not guilty.

After Iranian student Afshin Shariati shot three teenagers – killing one – who were harassing him and smashing the windows of his apartment during the Iran hostage crisis, Walter bucked widespread anti-Iranian sentiment and pulled off another self-defense acquittal.

After his friend Kiko Martinez had been indicted in 1973 on trumped-up charges related to a string of bombings in Colorado, then fled to Mexico for eight years and returned to face trials in the 1980s, Walter won him his freedom. Kiko recalls when Walter’s dad, Ben, died in the middle of the trial, and that Walter rushed back from Los Angeles the night of the funeral so he wouldn’t delay the proceeding.

After 19-year-old Ross Carlson executed his parents in 1983 on a Douglas County dirt road, Walter and co-counsel David Savitz managed to persuade a judge to draw money from their estate to defend him by hiring experts on dissociative identity disorder.

After four United Bank workers were killed in the notorious "Father's Day Massacre" in 1991, Walter and partner Scott Robinson raised enough doubts about eyewitness identification that their client, James King, a former bank guard and police officer, was acquitted.

And after Rocky Mountain News columnist Greg Lopez was killed in a hit-and-run in 1996, Walter won a not-guilty verdict for his client, Jorg “Peter” Schmitz, by pointing the finger at Schmitz’s friend, Spicer Breeden, who owned the BMW in question. Breeden was the playboy scion of Denver’s prominent Boettcher family who ended his life after the crash. Walter described him in court as a "hateful, degenerate misfit.”

He loved those long-shot wins, and the media attention that came with them. Family and friends remember him waking them with early-morning phone calls to say he made the front page of the Denver Post or interrupting their dinners to make sure they saw him on the evening news.

Hey, hurry, I’m on Channel 7!

“He yearned for accolades, praise, and an audience clapping for him. It was an intense need going back to his dad, and one he could never seem to fill,” says his ex-wife, psychotherapist Joan Prugh. “I think Walter saw himself as a hero, and to me he always was.”

Still, he took defeats hard. 

In 2002, Sister Carol Gilbert and two other Dominican nuns, the late Jackie Hudson and Ardeth Platte, cut through a chain-link fence around a Minuteman III missile silo in Weld County, swung hammers at it, and painted a cross in their own blood on the structure. Walter was their lead defense lawyer.

“We were like one. One case, one body. There was just great love among all of us. And it was just really special to have him represent us," Carol says.

Having been convicted before for similar acts of civil disobedience, the trio tried to warn Walter there was a high likelihood they could lose. Carol – who ended up doing 33 months in prison on that case – says she, Jackie and Ardeth felt as bad for Walter after their convictions in 2003 as they felt for each other. 

I failed you, he told them.

Going gentle

Just as Walter’s story didn’t start with his career, it didn’t end with it, either. He did not, as had hoped, “burn and rage” into old age by fighting injustice. Not even close.

He mellowed out, instead.

As luck would have it, his type of dementia did not affect his body, allowing him to keep swimming throughout his 80s and taking long walks into his 90s. One day, he walked out of his independent living unit in Lakewood and wandered to a King Soopers a mile and a half away before a good samaritan recognized him and called the police. On the ride home, he talked the officer’s ear off about his work representing the Black Panthers.

Even COVID didn’t slow Walter down when he caught it at age 93. “I thought he was going to die. But it hardly affected him,” Dan says.

Dementia didn’t hinder Walter’s love life. He met Ann Kirchoff shortly after he and Joan Prugh divorced in 2005. Their romance lasted for many years, including a stint living together at a senior residential center in Lakewood. 

Nor did dementia diminish his passion for chess. “He could still beat the pants off of everyone who visited him,” says Susan Decker, Walter’s longtime process server who continued working for him as a caregiver in his retirement. She says she would challenge him to matches and “He’d play both sides of the board – my side and his own. 

“Then he’d go backwards though all the moves and look at me, like ‘Did you learn something?’”

Make no mistake: Dementia wasn’t easy for a man used to functioning at high levels intellectually. He was cranky at its onset, especially about his inability to write or remember at the end of a sentence what he meant to say at the beginning.

Yet over time, the softening of his brain, as dementia used to be described, had the unexpected effect of softening his heart along with it. As his memories about his work and career grew foggy, he was able to focus more on the present, especially on his two grandchildren – Dan’s kids, Halle and Will Gerash.

Both remember times before Walter’s dementia when they were afraid of his loud voice and bigger-than-life persona. But as he aged, both say he managed to become just the right size for a supportive grandpa. He made it to most of Halle’s swim meets and Will’s soccer games, cheering them on as they competed. He’d spend hours in their backyard watching Will juggle soccer balls or shoot hoops. 

“When I’d make a goal or a basket, he would go crazy and say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that!’ or ‘That’s incredible!’” Will remembers.

Not that Walter stopped being Walter. After all, he gave Halle a book on J. Robert Oppenheimer for her 10th birthday and signed it, “Walter Gerash, Grandpa.” And, just as with Susan Decker, she says playing chess with him was more a demonstration of “let-me-show-you-how-good-I-am-at-chess” than a chance to teach her or have fun. 

“I would make a move and he would be like, ‘No, no, no, let me just do it for you.’”

Still, Halle and Will had in Walter what Dan says he never did as a kid: Someone more focused on them than himself.

“It was like this switch flipped to this other side of him, and he was always just so interested in what we were doing,” Will says. “I think it’s incredible how, in his old age, he just became the sweetest, most caring human ever.”

“I remember years ago being petrified thinking that someday Walter would retire and worrying he was going to die if he stopped working. We were afraid of that. But that didn’t happen,” adds Dan. “If there was one upside to his dementia, it’s that his priorities changed and he could focus on our family.”

Walter’s cousin Allen Feld recalls being struck by what he viewed as some positive changes in Walter after dementia forced him to retire. The eldest cousin who used to hold court over Feld family gatherings became a closer and far more relatable member of the clan.

“A lot of people get really crusty and ornery and spicy when they get older. But he was the opposite. He actually was a pretty gruff person who had a rough upbringing, his parents being from the old country and all that. He got sweeter as his life went on, and much more loving.”

Walter's transformation, and with it a new sense of vulnerability and gratitude, were not, of course, by choice. But he played his second act with grace. Those closest to him see it as a great achievement for a man who, as Susan Decker puts it, “had been crazy perceptive about people, but also pretty dumb.” 

Susan sat with him until the end, playing Mozart, holding his hand and recounting the stories he spent years telling her and so many others. 

“Even up until the end, you’d see his smile, that old smile. It had an incredibly kind softness to it. And that, too, was powerful.”

Walter died on May 7, 2023.

Legacies

For many in his family, his slower, sweeter years brought a sense of redemption and healing they treasure as much as any of his legal success.

For dozens of his colleagues, including his many former associates and interns, his memory endures in the ways he challenged and taught them. Most interviewed say no one shaped their careers – or brought meaning to practicing law – more than Walter.

“He sent the standard for legal mentoring, and I vowed I would impart that knowledge to other young lawyers who might be as interested in learning as I was,” David Savitz says.

For the many friends who became Walter’s clients and clients who became  friends, it is his commitment they will remember most.

“He had the compassion and the verve to serve justice. That, no doubt, is his legacy,” Cindi Andrews says. “It is once in a rare moon that we get a shining star like Walter. I will miss him forever.”

“Walter had a really fucking big heart, man,” Kiko Martinez adds. “Walter didn’t snub anybody. Walter talked to people on the street who big law firm people wouldn’t look at. Walter wasn’t a fake. He was genuine, but also firm, unshakable and irrepressible at the same time. I think about it. And, yeah, it was a big loss.”

Scores of Denverites and Coloradans will remember Walter not only as the caped Communist who stood in such stark contrast with 17th Street’s bevy of white-shoe lawyers, but also as a legal folk hero who fought like hell for the underdog. He brought a conscience and a spine to a justice system too often cowed by entrenched power and convention. And he brought soul to a city and state that, frankly, could use more old white guys in velvet suits quoting Marx and letting their freak flags fly.

Walter was flawed. And he could be as difficult as he could be delightful. But he lived with tremendous meaning and purpose. 

Had he ever finished that memoir, it would only have put into writing what he had demonstrated throughout his life: That underdogs should never be underestimated, and that what is right is also possible. With fervor and flair, he accomplished what he set out to do – using the law to champion working people and fight oppression. And, in his old age and the fog of dementia, he also achieved more.