Judges and other Dirksen Federal Building staffers hosted a surprise birthday party in early June for a courthouse fixture–Lou Rubin, one of the city’s last court buffs. He was turning 90.
Chief district judge Charles Kocoras told the 50 or so people at the party that when he was a rookie prosecutor here in the early 1970s he preferred that the buffs not attend his trials–he didn’t want any more witnesses than necessary to his mistakes. But as he grew more experienced and confident, he said, “I was dying for them to watch my trials. I would get the word out to them–Kocoras is on trial, come watch–because I wanted their approval.” He said the buffs were astute and frank. “They knew if you were doing good or doing bad, and they weren’t going to BS you about that.”
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This buff had done clerical work for a law firm during the Depression, Rovner had told me on another occasion. The woman had always wanted to be a lawyer, but her family’s financial needs had prevented her from attending law school. “It was very funny when she gave me the victory sign, but now I get tears whenever I think about her,” Rovner said. “I was doing what she had always wanted to do.”
At Rubin’s party the guest of honor listened bashfully at the front of the room, hands clasped behind his back, as the judges praised him and told their buff tales. He’s lanky, with an unusually upright posture for a 90-year-old, and he navigates the hallways without a cane. He has silver hair and heavy-lidded, watery blue eyes. As always at the courthouse, he was dressed in sport coat and tie.
While Rubin basked in the limelight at his party, the other regular buff, George Berkowitz, scowled in a chair on one side of the room. Berkowitz enjoyed only the cake. He and Rubin are fans of the courthouse but not of each other. “Rubin sucks up to the people and they make a party for him–ahh,” he told me, waving his hand in disgust. “I don’t even consider him a court watcher. He just kills time hanging in the library. When he goes to court he sits there ten minutes, and then he disappears.”
After high school Berkowitz worked nights as a photoengraver. “And what the hell ya gonna do in the daytime?” Watching trials seemed as good a pastime as any, and the price was right. He often went straight to work from 26th Street. When he retired 20 years ago he switched to the Dirksen Building, largely because it was easier to reach using public transportation.
Long ago, trials, especially criminal trials, attracted many spectators in Chicago and elsewhere. In the late 19th century judges and lawyers began to speak of spectators as obstacles to justice. In 1893, on the eve of the opening of the county criminal courthouse at Dearborn and Hubbard, the Chicago Herald noted that the galleries in the new courtrooms would be much smaller than they’d been in the previous courthouse, none holding more than 100 spectators, in keeping with the wishes of most judges and lawyers. The Herald quoted one Chicago lawyer as saying that many verdicts had been decided “more by what the audience seemed to want than by what came from the witness stand and bench.” The paper added, “Some of the most eminent members of the bar predict the time [is] at hand when in the trial of a case, particularly a criminal one, no spectators at all will be permitted.”
