The Thurber Era

Cleveland Thurber was the son of a prominent Detroit lawyer who served as private secretary to President Grover Cleveland. By the age of eight he lost both of his parents, and so was raised in the custody of two aunts-one of whom married into the Canfield family. He gravitated toward his father's profession, and after service in World War I and Harvard Law, he joined Miller Canfield.

In the history of the firm, it appears that only Sidney T. Miller, Jr., served a shorter apprenticeship. Thurber advised important clients and worked on important cases from early in his career. Qualities that inspired confidence throughout his life-high intelligence, a keen perceptiveness about people, his father's charm and tact-made a deep impression on Sidney Trowbridge Miller. It was a natural fit-the father who had lost his son, the son who had lost his father, the older man passing knowledge and responsibilities to the younger. After the elder Miller's death in 1940 and the death of Ferris Stone in 1945, leadership passed into Thurber's hands.

With Thurber very much in command, the senior attorneys-including Lawrence King, Edward Reid, Emmett Eagan and William Butler-presided over a measured expansion of the firm's geographic reach and its range of specialties. Offering wages of $200 per month, they hired a cadre of excellent young lawyers, most of them veterans of World War II and the Korean War, who would become the firm's backbone-John Gilray, James Tobin, Berrien Eaton, Stratton Brown, Richard Gushee, George Bushnell, Peter Thurber, and Lawrence King, Jr. "It was a very different time," Bushnell recalled, "but we had fun. We all knew one another. We all helped one another. And we just had one hell of a great time."

Under the leadership of Stratton Brown, the firm's bond practice became its best-known specialty. Brown rose to national prominence in the field. While growing the bond department from three lawyers to twenty, he drafted key laws establishing state housing and hospital authorities and testified frequently on issues of public finance. His handiwork can be seen across Michigan, in the highways, roads, sewer systems, schools, hospitals and factories that were built with the help of Miller Canfield's bond department. The most famous of the firm's bond projects was the Straits of Mackinac Bridge, a critical link in the nation's transportation system, not to mention the physical and social geography of Michigan, and for a time the longest suspension bridge in the world. 

The easy collegiality and friendship among these lawyers of the postwar generation persisted as they moved into partnership and became the firm's backbone. In 1966, those characteristics were evident to Robert Gilbert, who would join the firm in that year and later become its chief executive officer. "Miller Canfield struck me as a place where people were genuinely nice, where people weren't pretentious," he said. "They were decent human beings." Gilbert also perceived that Miller Canfield tolerated diverse opinions and philosophies. "There was almost a gentleman's agreement that if you functioned responsibly as a lawyer, you were not going to be forced into any pattern," he recalled. "Almost every organization tries to set a pattern of acceptable beliefs for its people. There's 'the right mindset,' and there wasn't that at Miller Canfield." 

As the members of Thurber's generation began to retire in the 1960s and '70s, the postwar group increasingly set the tone of the firm, a hard-to-define yet distinctive mixture of integrity, collegiality, intellect, informality and humor. The lawyers who learned the profession under that post-war group invariably speak of the powerful examples they set. Collectively, they provided a model of how to practice law that persisted in the firm's institutional memory long after their retirement. Simple honesty and fair dealing were the sine qua nons, with clients and opponents alike. David Joswick, who joined the firm in 1969 and worked closely with Gushee for many years, remarked: "Dick has always said not, 'What can we do?' but, 'What should we do?' That stuck with me."

Change and Continuity: 1980-2002 »