Jan 6 1922 - Nov 20 2014
David was Born in Fresno, California and grew up in nearby Fowler. His parents were Roy and Elsie Turner. He had an older brother Jim and younger sister Margaret. Young David attended the Iowa Grammar school, to which he commuted by pony. Appropriately, the pony's name was Pony. The Iowa Grammar school had four rooms and accommodated all the children in Fowler until they went to high school.
When not in school, David spent much of his time outdoors. The family had a cabin in what would later become Grants Woods. His father, Roy, would often ride up on the weekends on an Indian motorcycle, but duties on the farm meant that he could never stay for very long. When David got older, he enjoyed backpacking with his friend, Larry. They would borrow a draft horse from the farm and pack it with salt pork, confident that they would be able to catch and fry up rainbow trout fished from the alpine lakes 30 miles to the East in the Sierras. From this, David gained an appreciation for backpacking which he would share with his children and grandchildren many years later.
Roy's father (David's grandfather) Murray moved from Nebraska to California in 1894. He had visited California to see what all the hype was about and after returning to Nebraska, he told his neighbors that the claims about the Golden State were grossly exaggerated. Murray then hastily sold his farm and moved out west. Roy was around 14 when they moved to Fowler.
The 80 acres that they purchased were pristine -- the Turners were the first to farm that soil. They grew cotton, peaches, olives, and produced dairy with a herd of Jersey cows. A truck from Danish Creamery would come every morning to pick up the rich Jersey milk. Later in life, David would often remark that commercial whipping cream was "thin watery stuff". Today's cream is 36% milk fat, but the cream of his youth was thick enough to stand a spoon in. Unbelievably, David had a low cholesterol all his life, so go figure.
David's father Roy suffered a stroke on his right side, leaving him with profound aphasia (difficulty speaking) and paralysis. Unable to use his right arm, Roy relied on his mechanical wizardry to design a variety of one-handed farm implements which allowed him to continue farming. Though proficient in his profession, Roy felt that farming was not an acceptable career choice for his children and encouraged them to study hard in school. Even so, there were many chores to be done and David became an accomplished ditch digger building open irrigation ditches. Irrigation systems such as these require constant tending, for routing the water from one field to another effectively requires one to build and disassemble small dams.
Digging ditches must build strong muscles, because when David entered UC Berkeley he was able to walk on the crew team. At 6'3" 180 lbs, David was the smallest member of the crew (aside from the coxswain). He sat bow, which requires both strength and the ability to make slight adjustments to maintain a straight course. In 1941, his crew won the national championships in Poughkeepsie, New York. He told a funny story about the trip:
The Junior Varsity team had to take a train from Berkeley to Poughkeepsie. Whenever they were in a pretty part of the country, like Monument Valley and the Appalachians, it always seemed to be night time and pitch black. During the daytime, all they could see were cornfields and the drab outskirts of cities. The trip was not uneventful: their boat was on board, and early on some inattentive person opened a door too fast and bashed a hole in the hull! Incredibly, the boat builder himself was on board, a master craftsman by the name of Pocock. He spent the rest of the trip repairing the hole fiber by fiber.
After his junior year, David joined the navy and went to officer school in New York City. He stayed in a Columbia dorm on the 13th floor. He never once used the elevator. From there, David was transferred to Pensacola Florida for flight school. By the time he got his wings, the war in Europe was over and the war in the Pacific was winding down. Given the choice to go home or relieve war-weary soldiers, David elected to join a company in Okinawa. He performed one carrier landing, and the trip home took him to Honolulu, through the Panama Canal, and back to port in Florida.
After the war, David returned to UC Berkeley to finish his degree in Mechanical Engineering. During this time, he met his future wife Phyllis. His crew team also returned to Poughkeepsie in 1947 and was again victorious. Timing is everything, however: in 1948, the year after he graduated, six of the eight members of his boat went to the London Olympics and won the gold medal! Training for crew had other effects: while they were dating, Phyllis was embarrassed by the amount of food David could consume in one sitting. When going out with friends, she would require him to eat a first dinner at home before joining their companions at the restaurant!
David liked to tell the story of how he moved up four boats in one day. One night, David had to pull an all nighter to study for an upcoming test. Exhausted, he went to the morning crew practice with low expectations. "Well, I don't have anything today, so I'll just pull as hard as I can and when I'm done I'll just fall out of the boat", he thought to himself. So he pulled and he pulled, holding nothing back, and the coach saw that their boat was excelling. He moved David up to the next fastest boat. Again, David pulled and pulled and again the coach promoted him. Before the practice was over, this process had been repeated four times. The moral, of course, was to try hard and never hold back.
After graduation, David never exercised again. Whenever anyone asked him about his fitness, he would wiggle his pinkies and say "exercise? This is my exercise. I do it every day!"
David and Phyllis were married in 1948 and David got a job as a floor manager at a nail factory in Pittsburg, California. He found the job noisy and tedious. Once, his boss came to him very upset. He was holding fistful of nails from their competitor, and they were all perfectly straight and unblemished. "Why aren't our nails this damn good?" he shouted. David calmly pointed to a nearby mountain of nails and said, "If I went through this pile of a million nails, I'll bet I could find 5 perfect ones too!"
After a short while, Phyllis had the idea that this was not the best life for them, so she encouraged him to go to law school. With his excellent grades from college and with the help of the GI bill, David applied and was accepted to law school at USC. They moved to the Westwood district of Los Angeles and bought a laundromat to supplement their income. For the next few years, David studied law by day and fixed washing machines by night. He graduated third in his class.
One of his first jobs after he graduated was to represent Japanese Americans who had lost property during the Japanese internment. The work was important to him because when he had been in elementary school, half of his classmates had been Japanese. David was vehemently opposed to Earl Warren's decision to confine Japanese Americans. In David's opinion, Warren, who later went on to become a Supreme Court Justice, never made a good legal decision in his whole career.
David later became in-house counsel for a company called Budget Finance. His secretary, Phyllis Cardoza, remembers him as the best boss she ever had. David's daughter Joan was very young at this time. Once, when she was in her father's office, secretary Phyllis asked her "What do you think your dad does all day?" to which Joan replied, "Oh, he just talks on the phone". Joan also remember secretary Phyllis taking dictation using shorthand. By the next day, those strange swooping characters would magically turn into perfectly typed pages.
Remembering her time working with David, Phyllis Cardoza writes,
He was a true gentleman, a scholar, an honest man, and a lawyer to be admired. Back in the early 60s, at Budget Finance Plan, when he would be dictating a document to me (before dictating machines, word processors, and computers), if I would ask him a question about something he had just said, he would stop and give me a mini-lecture, explaining the concept.
He started getting together in the conference room some attorneys who handled finance companies and securities (our company was floating stock and bond issues at the time). Many more attorneys wanted to join them, so he asked me to arrange a dinner in a private room at a restaurant, at which the California Commissioner of Corporations was going to speak. After I did so, I suggested that I check in the 60 or so people who had signed up. He liked that idea, and invited me to stay for the dinner, "...but you don't have to stay for the talk," ihe said. I told him I was interested in the topic, so I did stay. Thereafter, I came to all the meetings, even after he left the company. The group became an offshoot bar association called the Financial Lawyers Conference. At one of those meetings without him, some lawyers from another firm asked me how I was making out with your dad's replacement. I equivocated, not wanting to speak badly of his successor, so those lawyers suggested I come in the next day to interview. I accepted their job, and they assigned me to work with a securities attorney (a perfect fit).
After I married and had a baby, a former boss asked me to handle a probate case for him. From that one case evolved my full-time practice handling decedents' estates for attorneys. I credit your father for accustoming me to working with various different attorneys.After Budget Finance, David joined the financial arm of Southern California Gas Company. He won 10 trials in a row. (Sadly, he did not win the 11th).
Outside of work, David could best be described as a serial hobbyist. From photography to horses to sailing, David consistently reached a high level of competency. From his early days as a boy scout, David had often carried a camera. He now explored the craft deeper by investing in a dark room and learning to process his own film. Some of his best photographs were of his children. In one photo taken on a backpacking trip in the Sierras, he sits back-to-back with his son David Jr, the pyramid formed by their bodies mirrored by the slope of Mt. Whitney behind them. Joan's interest in horses encouraged him to learn how to breed and train horses, which he did -- right in their backyard. He rode occasionally and went on at least one fox hunt.
But of all his hobbies, David really fell in love with sailing. He purchased a wooden sailing boat and joined the yacht club. The motor on his boat was not terribly reliable, so he got most of his practice sailing in and out of harbors -- a difficult task indeed! David was always patient, but when sailing he had virtually no inner clock whatsoever. If he and Joan were out on the water and the wind died, they would simply floated in when they floated in. There was no urgency, no frustration. Were they late for dinner? Well, the wind had died. What more explanation was needed? David became engrossed in related skillsets, including amateur radio and astronomy. He learned how to use a sextant and employed it to navigate 900 miles from LA to Cabo San Lucas in a yacht race.
David was not good at everything. Though he worked in the stock offerings division of Southern California Gas Company for many years, David was, by his own admission, not a good investor. Asked about the topic many years ago, he simply replied "I do not invest". He was not a particularly good cook either, but he had one undeniable skill in the kitchen: pie making. His pie crust was consistently flaky and never soggy. He also insisted on lots of fruit, and over the years added less and less sugar until finally he added none at all. Then his pies tasted rather bland, so his children asked him to stop making them. These same children also remember vacuuming flour from the floor, walls, and ceiling every time their Dad created one of his culinary masterpieces.
Before Joan and David Jr. were born, David and Phyllis designed and built a house in Manhattan Beach. In 1959, when the children were 4 and 5, they moved to Rolling Hills and lived there for the next 12 years. It was a big house with a 2 acre plot. In 1971, while Dave was a senior in high school, they downsized and moved to a cute house in Palos Verdes Estate. For whatever reason, Phyllis didn't like it very much, so they moved to Portuguese Bend a few years later.
Phyllis Turner was a remarkable woman. She worked at NASA as a guidance and trajectory engineer. Have you seen the movie Apollo 13? Do you remember the scene where all the engineers are furiously calculating the path of the rocket with pen, paper, and slide rules? That was what Phyllis did for a living. She was smart, shy, beautiful, sharp witted, and occasionally hot tempered. Her job was very stressful. One bad calculation and a multi-million dollar rocket would belly-flop into the Pacific. In 1974, when Joan was a junior in college and David a sophomore, Phyllis was diagnosed with lung cancer. Joan flew home from Wellesley and continued her studies for a time by mail. Phyllis died in February of 1975.
On a spring morning in 1991, Betty Schiff went for a bike ride. Betty lived a few houses down from David, and the two had met at a holiday party hosted by their mutual friends, the Schrivers. David saw her and walked out of his house looking very 'lawyerly' with his tweed jacket and glasses. "Would you like some coffee?" he asked. Betty did not drink coffee, but she agreed anyway. Two cups later and she was so wired that her teeth were chattering. The next day, David called and asked, in his classic matter-of-fact way, "would you like to go to a movie show?". Their first 'official' date was dinner after a trip to the symphony. David and Betty were married on June 6th, 1992.
David's family was small, but Betty's was large and generous with their love. David and Betty went on half a dozen cruises all around the world, including a honeymoon cruise in Alaska. They also enjoyed many family reunions all over the US. As grandfather to myself and to his adopted family, David was incredibly caring and unwaveringly patient.
David and Betty moved to Samarkand, a retirement community in Santa Barbara, in 2006. Alzheimers crept in, but he remained upbeat. David died in his sleep on a Thursday. He was much loved.
