"I'm always learning on the job."
Long-time Oregon Bankruptcy Judge Donal Sullivan
By Adair Law
This article is based on an oral history of Judge Donal
Sullivan conducted by Adair Law. The oral history
was completed in Summer 2004 for the U.S. District
Court of Oregon Historical Society, and is accessible
to the public at the Oregon Historical Society.
When I met Judge Donal Sullivan in May 2004, I knew that his would be the first oral history from a bankruptcy judge in the U.S. District Court's collection. From my interview preparation, I was aware of the range of his accomplishments. But I hadn't expected to meet a man with such a self-effacing manner. At one point during an interview, I asked Judge Sullivan what were his aspirations when he became clerk of the court in 1965. His dry, but laugh-provoking response was, "to survive."
Youth and Urban Education
The second son in a family of four children, Donal Sullivan was born in 1931 into an Irish Catholic family in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, James Joseph Sullivan, was a Purple Heart veteran of World War I. Wounded in the Argonne, he went on to attend St. Louis University where he studied accounting and met his future wife, Maureen McGovern. Born at a time when his father was out of work, Sullivan recalled, "In those days they didn't have unemployment. They had what they called relief, and I never knew what relief was, other than it was a very disgraceful thing if you went on relief. And I had relatives who did. And my dad, of course, took the view that he would rather die than go on relief." In the mid-1930s, his father found work in Philadelphia in the intelligence division of the IRS. Their objective was to find fraud and his father liked to refer to himself as a "detective with a pencil." The family moved to suburban Philadelphia in the late 1930s and then to Chicago. In talking about his youth, Sullivan remembered, "In Chicago I got my early training as a city kid. We lived in a highly urban area, apartment houses. I would say it was a lower-middle class area.
I went to a local Catholic
school on Chicago's north side. There I got my early
training in how to defend myself when there are all
kinds of competing people and influences." There
were four children in the Sullivan family, James,
Donal, Maureen, and Kathleen. Their apartment
was five blocks from Lake Michigan, and Sullivan
recalled the pleasures and perils of his youth. "I spent
a lot of time on what they call the 'Rocks' on the
north side of Chicago, which is an area composed
of breakwaters, big boulders....No lifeguard, of
course, so you either learned to swim or you
drowned."
His younger sister Kathleen contracted polio in
the summer of 1943 and the Sullivan children were
quarantined. "The health people would put a sign
on your front door, which meant visitors were not
Judge Donal Sullivan became a bankruptcy referee in 1969.
