Frankfurter's Pritch

Traditional starting point for a brilliant legal career is a year's service as secretary to a great Justice of the Supreme Court. Justices Holmes and Brandeis crystallized this tradition. Some of their young men were Stanley Morrisson, Thomas G. Corcoran, W. Barton Leach (Holmes), Jim Landis, Dean Acheson, Calvert Magruder (Brandeis). No newcomer to the Court in recent years is more alive to its traditions or more avid to enrich them than is Felix Frankfurter. Last week, fresh from his first term in Washington, pausing in Cambridge, Mass, en route to kudos at Oxford, Justice Frankfurter announced who his first protege would be: Edward Fretwell Prichard Jr. of Paris, Ky., who was graduated by Harvard Law School cum laude last year and stayed on with a teaching fellowship. Friends of this year's Harvard Law graduating class opined that His Honor could scarcely have chosen more picturesquely. For even at Harvard, "Pritch" Prichard, a roseate, rotund, raven-haired extrovert weighing 260 Ibs., is rated unusual.

Pritch confidently styles himself "The Future Governor of Kentucky." At Princeton (Class of 1935) he made himself conspicuous by running the Democratic Club as a practical vote-getting machine in a community normally Republican. He beat Colonel Henry Breckinridge (Lindbergh attorney), candidate for the U. S. Senate, in a campus debate on the New Deal. He blathered his way out of punishment for a Democratic beer party, enrolled the dean and proctors in his club. At Harvard he made the Law Review, stumped the State for Roosevelt in 1936, but his chief fame rests upon having coped successfully with the withering classroom manner of Professor Edward Henry ("The Bull") Warren. In the midst of a laying-out by the Bull, Pritch raised his hand for silence and declared: "Sir, it is not stupidity that makes me give the wrong answers, but terror of the monster before me." He has promised to let the Bull rewrite the statutes of Kentucky.

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