Then Governor-Elect Phil Hoff is crowned "King of Winooski" on election night, November 6, 1962!
On January 4, my law firm, Hoff Curtis, hosted a reception here in Burlington to celebrate the publication of “Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State,” by Samuel B. Hand, Anthony Marro, and Stephen C. Terry (Castleton State College and University Press of New England 2011).
The reception brought some 200 guests together, some from across the country and some from around the corner, to honor the book’s authors, its publisher, and — most of all — the person who is it subject, former Vermont Governor Philip H. Hoff.
I can’t pretend to be an objective reader of the book. Far from it. In fact, I am an unabashed Hoff partisan of the first rank.
Let me share with you a bit of the personal history that I share with Governor Hoff and his wife, Joan.
Phil and his wife Joan entered my conscious world during Phil’s first campaign for Governor, nearly 50 years ago. I was a nine-year old, home sick from school and still in my pajamas. There was a knock at the front door of our family home in Rutland. I answered the door and there stood a handsome young couple, asking if my mother was at home. I brought her to the door, and listened as Phil and Joan explained that Phil was running for Governor of Vermont and asked for her support. Mom assured them that she would vote for Phil. and Phil asked her whether she could help persuade my father to vote for him too. She laughed and said that no persuading would be needed. Her husband, she explained, would need no persuasion. My father was, she assured them, “a spotted-dog Democrat.” That was to say that “he would vote for the Democrat, if they ran a spotted dog.” The Hoffs laughed too, and went away in the gathering dusk and on to a narrow 1,300 vote victory in November that made Phil the first Democrat to be elected Governor of our state in 108 years, and the first ever to be popularly elected.
The Hoffs have never left my consciousness since. I had been proud when, in March of 1968, Hoff became the first Democratic Governor to break with the Johnson Administration over its Vietnam War policy. Two years after Phil finished 3 terms as Governor, in 1970, he ran for the U.S Senate. Phil was the anti-war candidate, running against an incumbent Republican Senator, Winston L. Prouty, in a state with a long tradition of nearly always re-electing incumbents. Like most my generation, I still shared Phil’s opposition to the war. I felt strongly enough about it to devote nearly every free hour I had that summer and fall to his campaign. We lost. In the end, we lost by large margin, but my loyalty to Phil and Joan was firmly established.
Early imprints are important, and in 1980, after college, law school, and two years as a judicial law clerk, I wanted my first lawyering job to be at former Governor Hoff’s Burlington law firm, then known as Hoff, Wilson, Powell and Lang. The firm had already hired another of my co-clerks and had no opening, so I started my practice as the second in the shop of a nearby solo practitioner.
But I promptly went to work with my law clerk friend and Governor Hoff in the pro bono representation of a very early grass roots health care reform organization, Friends of Health Care, Inc. We opposed what we believed was an unwarranted redevelopment of the local university hospital, and in the course of what was the very first contested certificate of need proceeding in Vermont history, persuaded its management to shave 15 million dollars from a nearly 100 million dollar price tag. At the time, we thought that was real money.
Thereafter, Phil hired me to staff a blue ribbon commission he chaired that studied and recommended restructuring of our state’s bar admissions system as well as suggesting that Vermont Supreme Court adopt our first mandatory continuing legal education requirement. The Court largely accepted our recommendations and, in 1982, Phil offered me a full time job at his law firm.
Eventually, I became a partner in that firm, and in 1989, when I was ready to leave and start a new practice with David Curtis and John Pacht, Phil and our Hoff Wilson associate, Julie Frame, agreed that together we should start the law firm that has become known as Hoff Curtis.
That’s a long history if it were intended just to disclaim objectivity about the new book. But it isn’t just intended to do that. It’s also to share with you the depth of my satisfaction at seeing the book and our reception guests extend a significant measure of recognition of Phi’s unique role in changing the State of Vermont for the better.
Two of the books three authors, retired UVM historian Sam Hand and former journalist Steve Terry, were present and offered remarks. So did the man who saw to it that the book got published, my old friend, Castleton State College President, Dave Wolk.
At 87 years of age, Phil was in fine form. In his remarks, he thanked our guests for attending, gave credit to Joan for for being the kindest, most gracios and most loving person on earth, and then ever the warrior, turned the crowds attention to the next election, which he asserted will be a crutial fight to protect the interests of the ordinary person.
With all that said, let me add the book is just terrific. It’s long enough to set the Hoff campaign and governorship in historic perspective as a pivotal time in the sea change that has made Vermont an vibrant and interesting place to live. It’s short enough at only 194 pages, to the tell the story with impact.
Thanks so much to its authors and to its publisher, for making the story accessible to whole new generations of Vermonters.
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