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This first originated when I was speaking as
a young professor at the Alpha Delta house on
the campus. It was for a fraternity affair,
and the fraternity members had stuck a
cigarette in the mouth of the moose which
was hanging over the fireplace. That reminded
me of this story which I had heard at Fort
Benning, Georgia when I was on the staff
at the school before I went over-seas. And it
related to a group of people, who, after World
War I, decided that they would go to Alaska
to homestead and to look for gold.
They got pretty well organized, each individual
had his own job to perform, but they had one
little man who didn't have anything yet to
do, and they had no cook. So they appointed
him as the cook. But he said, "Well, I will
accept on one condition, and that condition
is if anybody ever complains about my
cooking, then they have to be the chef."
Well, the cooking was pretty bad, and it got
worse, but nobody complained. And finally,
after a long time, he decided to fix things for
sure, so he went out on the frozen tundra of
the North, and gathered up a great pile of
moose defecation. He brought it back and
baked it into a gorgeous looking pie with a
great crust all covered with butter, something
that smelled very savory on the outside.
One of the big lumber jacks came in,
dug his elbows onto the table and took a
great big piece of pie, spit it clear across
the table and said, "My God! Moose turd
pie! But good, but good."
I related that, of course a lawyer could relate
almost anything to something else if you
give him enough time, but I related that to
perhaps law school itself. There are times
when you may think that legal education
bears some similarity with moose turd pie —
but good, but good — because in the long
run, it will pay heavy dividends.
That particular story I told for the first time
after I came back from the University of
Michigan. I had taught there for the full year,
came very close to staying on the faculty
at the University of Michigan, but returned
to Illinois. And in making some speeches
to alumni, one of the questions I was
always asked was how did this relate to the
University of Illinois? And I said well it's still
moose at Michigan, just as it is at Illinois.
Incidentally, one of you, who might be
listening to me, did me the honor on one
occasion when I was at Professor Scholl's
house celebrating a birthday party,
of organizing a group of students to show
up bringing with them a moose turd pie.
Literally baked, covered with meringue,
with candles on top and presented it to
me. It was synthetic, a true phony, because
they had used cow rather than moose,
but otherwise, it worked out rather well.
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