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Richard \u201cDick\u201d Duane. Courtesy of his family<\/p>\nRichard \u201cDick\u201d Duane. Courtesy of his family<\/p>\n
Richard \u201cDick\u201d Duane was born on March 6, 1939, in New York City and died peacefully on Jan. 28. <\/p>\n
He grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and, later, the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. There, while attending Jesuit schools, Duane swam competitively. He also took up body-surfing and spearfishing and thereby acquired a profound love for the natural world. <\/p>\n
Duane graduated from Loyola High School in 1956 and attended college at UC Berkeley, where he swam and played water polo. As Duane told his children too many times to count, he also had his life forever changed in college by \u201cwandering into a matin\u00e9e,\u201d as he put it, of \u201cThe Life of Apu,\u201d a film by Satyajit Ray that happened to be screening at Pauline Kael\u2019s Cinema-Guild Theater on Telegraph Avenue. \u00a0<\/p>\n
After college, Duane served as a lieutenant aboard the United States Navy aircraft carrier USS Oriskany. His fondest memories of that period seem to have been the perfect stillness of the South China Sea on a windless day and hiking to the summit of Mount Fuji. Duane enrolled next at UC Berkeley law school and had his life changed two more times: first, by falling in love with Katharine \u201cKit\u201d Howard; and, second, by interning with the civil rights lawyer C.B. King in Albany, Georgia, during the summer of 1964.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After law school, in 1965, Duane married Kit and drove with her across the United States in a VW bus, like one did in those days. They settled first in Jackson, Mississippi, where Duane practiced civil rights law. Duane and Kit then moved to Washington D.C. so that Duane could work for the Legal Services Program that was part of President Johnson\u2019s war on poverty. Their first child, Daniel, was born in Washington D.C. in 1967.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Duane. Courtesy of his family<\/p>\n
Duane and Kit moved back to California in 1968 and settled in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Duane worked there as Director of Legal Aid for the Western United States. Their second child, Kelly, was born in 1970. Soon after, the family relocated to West Berkeley. Duane then went into private legal practice with Mike Ballachey, Kenny Meade, Ted Lyman, and Gene Seltzer, working for more than 30 years out of offices at the corner of Center and Milvia streets. Duane was also a regular mentor to students in the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Among Duane\u2019s many enthusiasms were friendship, Irish poetry, lifting weights at the Berkeley YMCA, and, on stage at the Freight and Salvage, playing bluegrass banjo with his pals in The I\u2019ll Be Right Home Honey Band. Duane found an equal measure of joy through rock climbing in Yosemite. His countless ascents there included the Regular Route on the Northwest Face of Half Dome and, at age 64, the Nose Route on El Capitan. Along the way, Duane accumulated many impressive climbing-related scabs on his hands and forehead.<\/p>\n
In the late 1990s, Duane helped Tom Frost lead a successful effort to get Camp 4, the legendary Yosemite climbers\u2019 campground, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, thereby protecting it for future generations. In still later years, Duane and Kit spent summers with their children and grandchildren in the High Sierra. With his beloved Kit, Duane also walked 900 miles of the Camino de Santiago through France and Spain. <\/p>\n
He is survived and lovingly remembered by all of the following: his wife, Katharine; both of his children, Daniel and Kelly; his children\u2019s spouses, Mario de La Vega and Elizabeth Weil; all four of Duane\u2019s grandchildren (Pablo, Lila, Audrey, and Hannah); and a truly astonishing number of dear friends and acquaintances.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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