TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW OF JEFFREY B.

BARTELL FOR DANE COUNTY BAR ASSOCIATION

Interviewer:  Ed Reisner

Date of Interview:  June 28, 2018

Transcribed by:  Ann M. Albert, Court Reporter

MR. REISNER:  Good morning.  It's June 28, 2018.  I'm Ed Reisner.  I'm here for the Dane County Bar History and Memorials Committee, and I'm going to talk this morning with Jeff Bartell and take an oral history.  Good morning, Jeff.

A            Good morning.

Q           Let's start at the beginning.  Where were you born?

A            I was born in Madison at University Hospital January 29, 1943.

Q           1943.  During World War II.  There's gonna be a test on history a little later in this interview. 

A            Oh, good.  Should have prepared.

Q           Did you go to Madison schools?

A            I did.  I grew up in Madison.  I went to -- well, I started at Midvale.  Before that I should say that my family moved to Milwaukee when I was about four years old, and my dad started a radio station in Milwaukee, WOKY, which was very successful.  And we moved back to Madison about six years later, and he started WMTV television station here, which at the time was Channel 33.  It's now Channel 15.  And I've lived pretty much for the rest of my life in Madison.  I went to Midvale School, Cherokee (what was then)               Junior High School, and then West High School.  After West I went to UW-Madison.

Q           And you started UW-Madison in 1961?

A            Yeah.

Q           Still the era of panty raids and high jinks. 

A            Well, it was.  I didn't get involved in any panty raids, but I was a pretty serious student. 

Q           You stayed at UW for law school, graduating in 1968?

A            Correct.

Q           This is where the history test comes in.  I sat and watched a CNN special on 1968, and it dawned on me that it was one of the most momentous years in the history of this country.  

A            It was.  Yeah, I was on campus during much of the Vietnam protest.  It actually started my first year of law school.  I entered law school in 1965.  One of the first things that happened was the -- I think it was the first antiwar protest that occurred in Madison, which was a sit-down in front of Truax Field at the gates.  Some protesters went out there to confront the commander of Truax, the Air Force base, and when they couldn't get in, they sat down in front of the gate and blocked the traffic.  And they were arrested by the police and taken away.  And a couple of my new law school friends decided that they should defend the protesters.  They were charged with ordinance violations, obstructing a roadway.  And in trying to determine what kind of a defense to mount, the first-year law students thought this through and figured that this was selective prosecution because in the fall of that year, there was, as there is every year, a group of students that gather on Langdon Street for "Yell Like Hell" before homecoming, and they block traffic for a good couple hours there and the police don't do anything about that.  So we thought this is -- this is unfair.  And so among the things that we did is they sent me, again, the first-year law student, out to the police department downtown and to interview a detective there.  And they were -- the detective seemed to be happy to talk to me.  And I said, now, how is it that you make a decision about which obstructions to charge under this ordinance?  He said, well, this "Yell Like Hell," this was a University kind of function.  The other one was kind of unauthorized.  I said, okay, but they both obstructed the roadway; right?  Yep, they did.  And I said thank you very much.

So when the case came before Judge Buenzli in Dane County Court -- no circuit court in those days -- my classmates put me on the stand, and I stated my name, and they asked what I had to do with this case.  And I said, well, I went to the police station and I talked to detective so-and-so about obstructing roadways.  And Judge Buenzli said, "Just a minute, just a minute.  Mr. Bartell, were you out there on that day that the defendants were charged?"  I said no.  He said, "You may step down."

So that was my first lesson in criminal defense.  And it was obviously memorable 'cause I still recall Judge Buenzli ushering me off the witness stand.

Q           Was this in the fall of the year that you began?

A            I believe it was.

Q           So you were very much the neophyte at that time. 

A            I was.

Q           What reason -- why did you decide that you wanted to be a lawyer?  Were there lawyers in the family?

A            There were lawyers in the family.  My dad had gone to law school before the war, before he joined the Navy in 1941 or '42.  But he hadn't finished.  His older brothers, both of whom were lawyers, had attended UW Law School.  And my dad always told me as I was growing up and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my career, as a child of the Depression, he said, you know, a lawyer can always hang out a shingle and make a living.  And that stuck with me.  And I also, I should say, I took a course as a senior called business law, which was an undergraduate course, and I aced it.  It was a bunch of multiple-choice questions, and I got a 98 or something on it.  And I said, oh, being a lawyer's gotta be easy, you know.  And not incidentally, as long as I stayed in school, I was avoiding the draft.  I was avoiding going to Vietnam.  So I took the LSAT and went to law school.

Q           So we actually did not overlap in law school.  I started in 1969, but I was on campus while you were in law school.  I remember being at the Stock Pavilion when Ted Kennedy gave a speech, which was interrupted, and I was shocked that people could interrupt a United States senator. 

A            Well, at the law school they interrupted the professors, some of whom were very chagrinned by that, and at least one or two retired because they just didn't want to be challenged by the students the way that was starting to happen.

Q           Let's talk some more about law school.  After your experience, your brief experience as a witness, do you remember professors particularly?  Do you remember other students particularly or classes? 

A            Oh, yeah.  I remember law school pretty well.  I wasn't one of the students who would regularly play cards down in the lounge.  That was not my thing.  And in fact, during law school, I was active in other ways.  I was actually working at J.C. Penney selling shoes, and I also played in a band on campus, a rock band on campus.

Q           What instrument?

A            Keyboard.  I started playing piano when I was five years, six years old and have played ever since.  Still play. And the other thing I was doing is we were raising horses, and at the peak I was in charge of about 40 head of horses out west of town.  And I'd go out there in the afternoons after class and throw some hay out and some corn and muck out some stalls and do a little riding.

Q           Let's get back to professors.

A            Yes.  Well, one of my favorite classes was labor.  I thought I was gonna be a labor lawyer.  And Nate Feinsinger, who had a national reputation, I took everything I could from him.  It turned out I never became a labor lawyer.  I loved legal history with Professor Hurst.  And, oh, there were -- I remember torts, I think Professor Campbell's class.  But labor law was where I was focusing my attention.  I sort of liked criminal law, but I didn't want to make a career out of criminal law.  But I liked Professor Frank Remington a lot, took his class first thing in the morning.

Q           Frank's son, the judge, is a client of mine at Woodcraft.  He's a woodworker. 

A            Really? 

Q           And it astonishes me how many of the mannerisms of his father -- he talks the same way, rocks on his heels when he talks. 

A            Oh, yeah.

Q           It's amazing. 

A            Yeah.

Q           Well, after selling shoes and feeding the horses during law school, did you work in a law firm or a governmental office at all?

A            In the year between my second and third year, I went to work in the Attorney General's Office as an intern.  I guess I was a paid intern.  And I really, really enjoyed that.  I enjoyed the public policy aspects of serving in state government.  And that kind of convinced me.  It was worthwhile to interview with law firms, and I interviewed with an accounting firm, Arthur Anderson.  But I decided I really wanted to go into public service.  And that summer I also played cocktail piano up at Chula Vista in the Dells, so I would work during the day at the AG's Office and I'd drive up to the Dells and play cocktail piano for a couple hours, two, three hours in a smokey bar.  You know, you could smoke in bars in those days, and my clothes got so stinky.  And then I'd drive back, catch some sleep and go back to work the next morning.  That was my regular routine for five days during the week.

Q           The last few months of law school, the spring of 1968, there were a lot of things happening that caused great disruption in people's lives.  You finished law           school, though, in May or June of 1968 and took a job with the Attorney General?

A            Correct.  I became an assistant attorney general.  And it was an exciting time on campus.  I mean, the Dow demonstration, there were lots of marches going on.  There were lots of acts of civil disobedience.  And it tested my beliefs in the law and what are appropriate actions for citizens to take.  I didn't agree with civil disobedience.  It was not something that I was involved in.  I certainly was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, and about that time I was able to convince my dad to switch sides.  He had been a big supporter of Lyndon Johnson and the importance of stopping Communism in Southeast Asia, and over Sunday dinners at home I was finally able to convince him that he was on the wrong side of that issue.  So I was on board with the protesters philosophically, but I was going into law enforcement, so it was -- it was an interesting juxtaposition.  And then shortly after I joined the AG's Office, I   was involved in a number of criminal investigations that were centered on antiwar protests, including the firebombing that took place at UW-Whitewater and, of course, the Army Research Center in Madison.

Q           You stayed with the AG's Office for three years?

A            That's right.

Q           1971. 

A            Right.

Q           And I think our paths crossed for the first time actually in '71 -- well, '72 I was working for the State Bar and had some responsibility on court reorganization, and you had a major role in restructuring the courts in Wisconsin. 

A            I like to think I did.  So in 1971, after about three years in the AG's Office as an assistant attorney general, the governor offered me a position as staff counsel and coordinator of a task force that he was appointing, a citizen study committee on judicial reorganization and to take a look at the judicial system of Wisconsin and make recommendations to give to the legislature as to reforms.  He appointed 40   citizen members, both lawyers and lay members, but all of whom were outstanding, I mean, well-recognized citizens around the state.  And I guided that task force as the staff leader.  I asked my friend from law school, Conrad Goodkind, to come and help me.  He was practicing insurance law in Milwaukee at the time, and I asked him if he would like to come back to Madison and work on that, and he did.  And we together led this task force of citizens of varying familiarity        with the legal system to conclusions and recommendations that really now, even now, form the basis of our judicial system.  Eliminated two levels of trial court, created a court of appeals, set rules for the supreme court, some substantive law provisions, judicial qualifications and various procedural reforms, almost all of which were adopted by the legislature starting in 1972-73, moving forward to a constitutional amendment in 1977.  And the only major recommendation that was not accepted (and that still should be accepted) is merit selection of judges.  We warned at that time that judges who have to raise money and run for election are going to be pulled into contributors, and it taints the judicial system to force them to do that. And although you can get good judges by any system, the bulk of evidence around the country shows that you get a better judiciary and a cleaner judiciary by using a merit selection system. 

Q           The merit selection, yes.  Recently it's starting to come back as something that people are talking about, but I don't know what the prospects might be. 

A            It's very hard to get citizens excited about giving up the right to vote for judges, even though they have no idea about the qualifications of the people they're asked to vote for.  Some people don't even remember their names right after they voted for the judge, but it's what they regard as a right they just refuse to relinquish. 

Q           As court reorganization, the work of your committee wound down, you moved on in state government?

A            Yes.  Well, I went to meet with the governor.

Q           Which governor? 

A            Governor Patrick Lucey.

Q           Thank you. 

A            And I told him we were winding it up and there was still some work to do, but I was looking to either go back to the Attorney General's Office or maybe run for district attorney or something that would involve public service.  And he said how would you like to be securities commissioner.  And I said I didn't know we had one.  I said what does the securities commissioner           do?  And he said, well, I don't know for sure, but why don't you look it up in the statutes, give it some              thought and let me know whether you're interested because the position is vacant, and I would really like to get somebody who would be a real regulator and not somebody from the industry who is going to be an apologist for misdeeds in the securities business. So I looked up the statutes.  There are actually three statutes that were involved, three chapters that were involved, and it was securities, franchise and corporate takeovers.  And then I went to the law school and I talked to some of my professors and others there who said, you know, this is really probably a pretty good job being a regulator.  And I thought about it some more, and I went back to the governor and I said, yeah, I'll take this job.  And so at age 29, I was appointed to this position.  I became the youngest state securities regulator in the country at that time.  And I took over, and I hadn't had any securities regulation courses.  I don't think they taught securities           regulation when I was in law school.  If they did, I wasn't aware of it, but I don't think they did.  I had corporate law.  I knew corporate law.  I had accounting.  But I needed on-the-job training when I got there. 

So what I did in the first three months that I was there is I set up seminars for myself with the staff, and it also gave the staff an opportunity to show themselves or to show what they know and perform a little bit.  And so we had early morning seminars on various aspects of the office's responsibilities.  And in the process, I learned a little bit about securities law, which I continued to learn during the seven years I was there.

Q           You also got involved in some national organizations on securities and regulation of securities. 

A            I did.  Within a couple years, I became the president of the Central Securities Administrators Council, which was the states around Wisconsin.  And after that I became president of the Midwest Securities Commissioners Association.  And finally, in the last year that I was Wisconsin securities commissioner, I became the president of the National Association of Securities Commissioners, NASAA.  I led the national organization and its dealings with the SEC and with Congress.  I traveled to Washington and testified a few times and would go around meeting congressmen about securities issues. And that last year I was fortunate enough to be appointed to the Federal Securities Code Project led by Professor Louis Loss of Harvard.  A group of us were trying to reconfigure the federal securities laws which had been adopted over a long period of time,              1933 to 1940, and put it into a code that worked, that was cohesive and worked together.  It turned out to be an excellent work product, but it got nowhere in Congress and it's never been adopted.  But I worked with some luminaries in the securities law field, lawyers and judges, and it was a tremendous experience for me.  I was -- I was just a kid.

Q           Did you happen to cross paths with David Ruder --

A            Sure did.

Q           -- during this?

A            Sure did.  David, former Dean of the Northwestern Law School, was on the commission.  He was on that group.  And I got to know him a little better -- I had known him a bit before that, but I got to know him better,     and I kept in touch with him afterward too.

Q           So you mentioned you were commissioner of securities for seven years.  What was the next step in your career?

A            Well, the securities commissioner's term is six years.  I was in my last year when I was president of NASAA, the North American Securities Administration Association, the Wisconsin administration changed and Governor Lee Dreyfus came in.  And I would normally have had to leave the position of securities commissioner, but it would have been right in the middle of my term as president of NASAA.  So I had a luncheon with Bill Krause, who was Lee Dreyfus's chief aide, and I said I'd really like to stay until next October to finish out my term.  And he said sure, no problem.  So, I stayed for the seventh year.  But as I ended that term, I started thinking, well, now I'm really a securities lawyer.  I'm not a labor lawyer.  I did handle one labor case while I was in the AG's Office.  It was the TAA strike in 1969.  And I was sort of a criminal lawyer too 'cause I'd done some of that both as an assistant AG and as the securities commissioner.  But I was now, I realized, I was a securities lawyer.  So I looked around for a job that would keep me in Madison because at that point, Angie was a judge, and we weren't leaving Madison, and our kids were -- let's see, that was '79.  Yeah, all five of our kids were born by that time.  They were all born in the seventies.  So we were gonna stay in Madison.  And there were only a limited number of law firms that practiced securities law, even all over Wisconsin, and most of them were based in Milwaukee.  So I joined Michael Best & Friedrich, which had a small office, I think about six or eight lawyers at the time.  I was recruited by Jack Pelisek.  I had met most of these lawyers during a term as securities commissioner because they would be handling cases or filings or registrations when I was a regulator.  And so I joined the Michael Best office and began practice.  And it was very exciting, and I was -- I was working a whole lot.  I was going to the office early in the morning and working until late at night.  And I made a whole lot more money than I did as securities commissioner.  By the way, the securities commissioner's salary is fixed during the term of office, so I was in there for seven years.

Q           Same salary. 

A            And I started -- I remember I started as an assistant attorney general at $8,700 a year.  And by the time I left the securities commissioner's office in 1979, which was 11 years after law school, I was making $25,000 a year.  But I got a big raise when I went into private practice, so I felt I had to work real hard for that.

Q           Did you begin as an associate, or did they hire you -- 

A            No, they hired me as a partner.  And then about three years later, my old friend Conrad Goodkind, who had left the Securities Commissioner's Office before the end of my term and joined Quarles & Brady, approached me and said Quarles would like to open a Madison office and would I be interested in leading that office.  And I said yeah, let's talk.  So I had a number of meetings with the management committee at Quarles & Brady.  Some of those meetings took place at The Gobbler because we didn't want to meet in Milwaukee and we didn't want to meet in Madison, so we met halfway between at The Gobbler Restaurant in Johnson Creek, and we came to terms, and I on a day in January, 1983, I moved from the Michael Best office on the ninth floor of what was then the First Wisconsin Building down to the small office on the third floor, just me and my secretary.  And we opened the door.  They sent over a "Quarles" sign that they'd had in the closet in Milwaukee, and we hung that outside the door, along with a coffee maker, and we rented some furniture.  And it was just the two of us for a while.  And then a couple lawyers from the Quarles Milwaukee office decided they wanted to come            over to Madison, and they did.  And then we started hiring from Madison.  That was the start of the Madison office of Quarles & Brady, which is now somewhere around 50 lawyers and a staff of about 100.

Q           And you're retired as of?

A            I retired from Quarles in, what is it, 2008.  Quarles at that time had a mandatory retirement provision in the partnership agreement that required partners when they turned 65 to wind down their practice and transfer clients to younger lawyers within two years.  And so in 2008, I started to do that.  In 2010 I was no longer a partner.  So I've been fully retired for eight years now.

Q           How have you kept busy since 2010?  Have you gone back to feeding horses, selling shoes?

A            No.  The horses were sold a long time ago.  And I don't sell shoes anymore, although I do sometimes take my grandkids to the shoe store and fit them 'cause I don't trust those kids who are doing that now. No, I had a real great benefit given to me by Governor Jim Doyle.  In 2006 he appointed me to the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents, which is a tremendous responsibility and a tremendous challenge, and it was great fun.  I really enjoyed that assignment.  And it kind of bridged the retirement period for me, so as I got less legal work to do because of retirement, I got more work to do for the Board of Regents.  A regent can do as much or as little as he or she           wants to do on that board, and I wanted to do a lot.  There are 26 campuses in the UW system.  Thirteen are four-year campuses and 13 are two-year campuses, and I traveled to all of them to speak to the chancellor, the campus dean and the faculty and the students there and just kind of learn what's going on and get an impression about the quality of the educational services that are offered and the issues that the campuses are facing.  So more and more, that became what I did after retiring.  And I was on the board for seven years, 2006 to 2013.  And then shortly after that I was asked to join the Edgewood Board of Trustees, which I did 'cause I loved higher education, I loved the issues that are involved.  So I joined that board, and I'm still on that board.  And I'm on a number of other boards. 

But one of the passions I have is we spend much of the winter in Tucson, Arizona.  We've been doing that for 20 years, before we were both retired.  Angie retired as a judge about the same time I retired as a partner at Quarles.  And so we've been spending more and more time in Tucson.  And I got involved in a nonprofit organization in northeast Tucson that provides volunteer services to elderly and infirm people to allow them to remain living in their homes as long as they can and want to.  It's called Sunrise Neighborhood Assistance Program.  I joined the board of that organization, oh, about six or seven years ago.  The next year they made me the treasurer, and the year after that they made me the president.  And they asked me to be president for life, but I'm not          going to do that.  But it is an organization that, I think, provides really valuable services to people in that neighborhood. It's the northeast part of Tucson near the foothills, and it has about 3,600 households. And on a budget of about $35,000 or $40,000 a year, we serve, at any given time, about 100 clients, taking them to medical appointments or to the grocery store or giving friendly visits to those who we're concerned about, or caregiver relief, those who take care of those people, or we deliver cookies on their birthdays and offer socialization and educational programs.  And it's just a win-win-win for the neighborhood, for the clients and for those of us who volunteer. 

Q           This doesn't surprise me at all looking at your resume.  I'm astounded at the variety and number of things that you've been involved in with public service activities, not the least of which for me was your service on the Board of Visitors and Board of Directors of the Wisconsin Law Alumni Association along with, at times, your good friend Conrad Goodkind. 

A            Right.

Q           So it was certainly beneficial to the law school to have you and Conrad involved in that.  You mentioned your wife.  And I did take Angela Bartell's oral history as well.  And I know that you have -- at least some of your children are lawyers, and you mentioned grandchildren.  What would you say to a grandchild who came to you and said I'm thinking of being a lawyer in 2018? 

A            I would say, "Great, do it."  Two of our five kids are lawyers. 

Q           Would you say it's an occupation that you can always hang out a shingle?

A            That's one aspect of it.  But the other aspect of it is even if you don't want to be in private practice, even if you don't have an interest in practicing law for money, a legal education gives you an understanding of the world around you that you can't get any other way. 

I remember as a new law student the lights that went on, the doors that opened as I learned what all these relationships that we have with the government, with other people, with businesses, with everything that we come in contact with.  It just opened my eyes to how things work.  And I think that legal education that I got, whether I was gonna go into public service or private law practice or business or anything else, was worth it.  Even if I became a professional piano player, it was worth it.  And I would tell any of my grandkids who want to study law that they should do that.  By all means, if they have an interest in it, go ahead and do it.

Now, the practice of law during the time that I was involved in it changed dramatically, and I should say without trying to be pejorative, it became a business rather than a profession.  And it was still a business that I enjoyed, but it was not the same thing that I started doing when I entered it.  And the stresses that are put on new associates in the private practice of law, at least by many firms, are just something that I think a lot of people would not want to put up with.  My son started his career at Michael Best & Friedrich, which is the firm that I went with when I left state service.  And he worked very hard as an associate I guess for about five years, and he was spending more and more time at work and less and less time with his family and ultimately decided he would go in-house with a client where he didn't have to punch the clock as much.  He still worked hard, but his work was very much appreciated -- he went to Springs Window Fashions in Middleton, one of the largest window-covering companies and manufacturers in the world.  He is doing business law, which is what he practiced at Michael Best.  But he now has a family life and a personal life, which he didn't have before. 

My daughter is a lawyer, and she started in private practice in Chicago.  She also went in-house and is now with Conagra Foods in Chicago as their vice-president and chief litigation counsel worldwide, which is a huge job.  And she is able to balance that with her family life too.  So it's a different profession than it has been in the past.  But I still think lawyers are leaders.  I think they are people who can help resolve the most difficult issues that arise in society, and I think their services are valued.

Q           That might be a good place to stop because it's very positive.  But is there anything else that you wanted to add? 

A            Well, just reflecting over the last 50 years or so that I've been a lawyer, I've never regretted becoming a lawyer for the reasons that I've stated.  I've thought about, you know, what if I had done something else, what if I'd gone into my dad's business, which         he wanted me to do.  His business was communications, radio, television and publications.  And he wanted me to follow him into that.  But I sort of wanted to strike out on my own.  And I think it made him proud that I did that, even though he was disappointed that I wasn't working with him.  So I've never regretted the course I took. And I certainly haven't regretted not becoming a cocktail pianist.  It's a bum job, and I never got any tips.  But I enjoyed it.

Q           Well, thank you very much. 

A            My pleasure.

Q           I'll give you a tip.  But you'll have to wait until payday. 

A            That's fine.

Q           Thank you, Jeff. 

A            You bet.