Changed Lives Testify to Judge’s Compassion

For most of the few hundred American men and women fortunate enough to be appointed to a coveted federal appeals court judgeship, the position is more than a full-time job: dissecting and ruling on 250 or more cases a year, ranging from highly complicated business disputes to appeals from condemned inmates.

But for Harry Pregerson, now 78 and in his 23rd year on the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the prestigious post is only one dimension of his life.

Pregerson--who grew up in Boyle Heights and studied law at UC Berkeley--is also a combination social worker, supply sergeant and building contractor.

Once described as “a thug for the Lord,” Pregerson has started four homeless shelters, a special wing for psychologically scarred veterans at the Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles, and child care centers near the Century and San Diego freeways. He also played an instrumental role in creating a training center near Los Angeles International Airport that has taught more than 8,000 construction workers and placed them in jobs.

Some of the projects evolved out of court cases Pregerson presided over. Others he launched as a private citizen with a penchant for helping the poor, particularly homeless veterans.

On a recent day, Pregerson, wearing a leather jacket and his trademark cowboy hat, visited some of the centers and the people they benefit.

As he walked around a homeless shelter in Bell, he spread good cheer while urging that repairs be made to the bathrooms and that the shelter’s director cajole government agencies to donate used chairs to replace battered furniture. Meanwhile, the judge made calls on his cell phone to ensure that there would be enough turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner.

“People find it hard to say no to the judge,” said Robert Freeman, who runs the center for the Salvation Army.

Colleague Calls Him ‘Wonderful Networker’

Launched in 1988 with 17 cots in a vacant federal warehouse, the shelter now houses 350 people nightly and provides three meals a day, drug and Breathalyzer testing, motivational lectures by ordained ministers, job training and a barbershop donated by California Pizza Kitchen’s founders--former federal prosecutors whom Pregerson met years ago when he was a trial judge at the U.S. courthouse downtown.

Pregerson’s ability to requisition goods--be they turkeys, barber chairs, beds, treadmills or huge freezers for food storage--is attributable to a quality not always associated with judges.

“He is a wonderful networker,” said 9th Circuit Judge Procter Hug Jr. of Reno, who has known Pregerson more than 20 years. “The ties he develops are astounding,” ranging from the judge’s former Marine buddies to housing developers, Hug said.

“He is an astounding person with all the things he does, and still keeps current with his judicial work,” Hug said.

That included holding court Sept. 11 within hours of the terrorist attacks on the East Coast. Pregerson, Hug and their colleague Kim Wardlaw, who were on a panel scheduled to hear dozens of motions needing swift action that day, had to decide whether to go forward or cancel court, as many did because of the fear of more attacks.

For Pregerson the answer was clear.

“We can’t let terrorists shut us down,” he said in a brief interview on his cell phone that morning while driving to the 9th Circuit’s Pasadena courthouse from his Woodland Hills home. Hug and Wardlaw quickly agreed, and the judges plunged into the cases.

A few weeks later, Pregerson was considerably more relaxed when he dropped in on the Lennox-area job training center of Century Housing Corp., a nonprofit organization that grew out of the settlement of the massive Century Freeway lawsuit that he presided over for more than two decades starting in 1972. Pregerson even kept control of the case for more than a dozen years after he was elevated to the appeals court and could have surrendered it to another jurist.

As part of a settlement that eventually permitted construction of the 17-mile freeway from Norwalk to LAX, Pregerson saw to it that 4,000 housing units were built to replace homes in the freeway’s path that were destroyed.

Moreover, he insisted that a major portion of the construction jobs go to minorities and women. When it turned out that there were not enough of them qualified for the jobs, because of years of discrimination, Pregerson helped forge an apprenticeship program.

‘This Program Gives You an Opportunity’

More than 8,000 people--about two-thirds of them minorities and women--have been trained as carpenters, electricians and ironworkers since then.

“One of the proudest moments of my life was to develop this program,” Pregerson told trainees during a break. “This program gives you an opportunity. When you leave here, you have a trade; you’re somebody.”

As Pregerson talked of his days as a 75-cents-an-hour laborer helping build an airplane hangar at the start of World War II, Eric Love, an aspiring carpenter, asked, “Are you actually a judge?”

“Yes, I am a judge, though some people don’t think so,” responded Pregerson, amid chuckles from the people who run the training program and have known him for years.

In fact, Pregerson has spent almost half his life on the bench. Gov. Pat Brown appointed him to a Los Angeles Municipal Court judgeship in 1965 and elevated him to the Superior Court a year later. President Lyndon B. Johnson tapped Pregerson for a position on the federal district court in Los Angeles in 1967. A dozen years later, President Jimmy Carter elevated him to the 9th Circuit, whose jurisdiction spans nine Western states.

Since his confirmation, Pregerson has written noteworthy opinions protecting spotted owls from developers, prohibiting law enforcement officers from using pepper spray against environmental activists and barring California from using a gas chamber to execute convicted murderers because it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

As important as those rulings were, Pregerson is just as proud of his role mediating a dispute between the Montana Department of Transportation and preservationists that in 1998 saved a Great Falls bridge overlooking the Missouri River.

Pregerson, an admirer of 19th century explorers Lewis and Clark, even wrote a poem extolling the virtues of the bridge’s “battered balustrades” as part of his efforts.

The judge says that saving the bridge was akin to the work he did resolving the freeway dispute and adjudicating another case, in which he persuaded Los Angeles to invest $100 million in its aging Hyperion sewage treatment plant to stop periodic spills of raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay.

He takes pride in pushing adversaries to find common ground if at all possible.

“Getting the appointment to be a judge has given me a certain amount of power to help people, help the community and do the right thing,” Pregerson said.

That attitude rubs off, said Ann Marie Hickambottom, Century Housing’s development director: “He inspires people to do good things.”