Goodbye and Hello to Judge Arnold Gold

When one gets old, “they” (new faulty grammar to accommodate the absence of a gender-neutral singular pronoun; drives me crazy; yes, I agree “he or she” is awkward, so let’s just say “she”… but I am a “he” so… oh forget it… picking up where we left off) lose friends with increasing frequency until …. Hope you are not offended by the juxtaposition of the death of grammar with human mortality. But I know that a dear friend who passed away has approved this column. He helped write it.

If the preceding paragraph did not prompt you to turn to a different section of the Daily Journal, we were on the subject of losing friends. For younger readers (all of you, whatever the number), “losing” is a relative term. Yes, it means loss, but not a complete loss. It’s not so much that you get used to it, you don’t. It’s when the loss is of a person in “their” ninth or tenth decade, Ecclesiastes comes to mind, 3:1-8. Would you all please turn to that passage? “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven… (for the unreligious you can skip the “heaven” part) a time to die and a time to be born.”

In my experience, when certain friends “die,” they stay, hang around, offer comfort but also criticism, and sometimes an elbow in the ribs. This reminds me of the film by Wm. Wenders, Wings of Desire. Invisible “angels” who are quite visible in the film and look and dress like humans visit Berlin. The angels eavesdrop on the thoughts of people and try to help them cope with their loneliness. But what do the angels know? One of them falls in love with a human, a trapeze artist no less, and gives up his angelhood to become mortal and discover human love. This angel doesn’t know what he is getting into.

This takes me to retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Arnold Gold who passed away last week at the age of 91. I guess the title gave it away. Hereinafter I refer to Judge Gold as Arnold. Respect intended. For more than 30 years, I was enriched by his friendship. He was a person of discriminating taste. He read all my columns. In fact, he is dictating to me every word of this column. So, if you don’t like it, blame it on Arnold. Getting a pat on the back from Arnold I wore as a badge of honor. But he loved to criticize, or should I say nitpick. In one of my columns, “If You Know What You Mean, Say It – If You Know How” (March 1993), I quoted a character who often appeared in my columns, Judge Learned Foote.

I quoted Judge Foote who said: “I collected $7,836 in sanctions in the first quarter, up 5% from last year. I made five lawyers cry, down 2%. Why is it that only the men cry?” Arnold nailed me, I mean he nailed Judge Foote. Arnold asked Judge Foote to explain the ambiguity: “The $7,836 in sanctions he collected in the first quarter were up 5% from last year. Does that mean the sanctions he collected during the first quarter of the present year was 5% more than what he collected during the first quarter last year, or 5% more than he collected for the entire last year? “I confronted Judge Foote and asked him to explain his ambiguity. Can you believe it? He just waved me off as if it didn’t matter. Typical Judge Foote. The other problem is the glaring error in logic. That truly troubled Arnold. “Judge Foote said he had made only five lawyers cry, down 2% from last year. That, of course, meant that in the preceding year he had made 5.1 lawyers cry.”

As I wrote in the column, “I marched into Judge Foote’s chambers and asked him how this could be possible. ‘Easy, he said.’ ‘One of the lawyers was only worth about 10% of a whole lawyer.’ Judge Foote thinks he said what he meant to say. I’m not sure that everybody understands him to mean what he thinks he means. This just illustrates the observation I made in Harris v. Superior Court (1992) 3 Cal.App.4th 661, 665, that ‘“[t]he matching of good writers and readers is a match in heaven.”’ Of course, why should I care? Judge Foote wrote the letter, not me.”

Arnold does not object to me bragging a little about his accomplishments. He was the undisputed expert on probate law. He received the prestigious Treat Award for Excellence from the National College of Probate Judges and was the lead author on the five-volume California Civil Practice treatise on “Probate and Trust Proceedings,” published by Thomson West. He also co-authored the Matthew-Bender handbook on depositions. And he was named Top Neutral by the Daily Journal year after year.

Arnold was kind to lawyers and generous with his friends. He could articulate with unfailing logic why a particular settlement was in the client’s interest. How else could he have achieved a settlement rate of over 90% in more than 1,000 mediations? Arnold and I will continue to talk, and he will continue to look over my shoulder and maybe offer a compliment now and then and not be shy about criticizing. And we will continue to argue over Breslin v. Breslin (2021) 62 Cal.App.5th 801.