Kay, Fredric

Part 1 of 2 and was recorded via telephone on July 27, 2020 and it covers the following themes: 

b. 1939 

  • Move to Tucson in 1946. Attending Thomas Boarding School for 2nd grade. East side and the remains of old Fort Lowell. Horse culture. Visiting Mt. Lemmon and seeing Prison Camp in use. 

  • Boarding school experience. Class with Ted DeGrazia. Memories of visiting downtown. 

  • Tucson in the 1950s and urban growth. The area around Country Club and 6th Street.  Tucson High before the construction of Pueblo and Catalina High Schools. 

  • Attending the University of Arizona in 1957. Working part time in bill collection for a local manufacturing company. Employment options for young people. Father’s stationary store in downtown Tucson. The decline of small, independent businesses. Roh’s Radio and early television. 

  • Youth culture and sense of community in Tucson. Car culture, informal drag racing, drive-in movies. 

  • Description of the University of Arizona in the late 1950s. 

  • Work as a process server after college and exposure to legal profession. 

  • Attending law school at New England School of Law in Boston. 

  • Return to Tucson in 1969 and bar exam. 

  • Working for the City of Tucson prosecutor’s office. 

  • Move to new Pima County Public Defender in 1970 and growing interest in defense work. 

  • Move to Arizona Federal Public Defender in 1971. 

Part 2 of 2 and was recorded via telephone on August 5, 2020 and it covers the following themes: 

  • Work at the Federal Public Defender’s office, continued. Creation of Tucson office and funding situation. Caseload and office culture. Women in the law. 

  • Typical cases of the 1970s, frequency of cases. Rise of mandatory sentencing guidelines in the mid-1980s and loss of judicial agency. 

  • Drug smuggling in the 1970s. Aircraft, trucks. The Norman Brothers. Types of drugs. Increase in guns. Organized crime retirees. 

  • Immigration cases. Language interpretation in Federal courts. 

  • Working on Native American cases. 

  • Changes in Tucson’s legal community from the 1970s to the 2020s. Changes in legal practice, rise in specialization, discovery, research teams. Increase in the amount of decisional law from more courts. 

  • Computers and the increasing ease of legal research. 

  • Arbitration. 

  • Decline in trials in criminal cases; shift in power from judges to prosecutors. Changes in jury composition. 

  • Kay’s attitude towards defense work. 

  • A few prominent Federal cases. 

  • Leaving Federal work and starting at Pima County Juvenile Court in 2006. Changing attitudes towards juvenile sentencing. 

Aengus Anderson