Ricardo M. Urbina Interview 1

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ORALHISTORYOFTHE HONORABLE RICARDO URBINA
FIRST INTERVIEW
4 NOVEMBER 2010
This is the first interview of the Oral History of U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina as
part of the Oral History Project of The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit.
The interviewer is Gene Granof. The interview took place in the chambers of Judge Urbina at
the United States Courthouse in the District of Columbia on Thursday, November 4, 2010, at
12:00 p.m.
Mr. Granof: Good morning, Judge Urbina. As you know, I’ve already done the introduction,
and we’ve had a preliminary conversation. I guess we should start
chronologically at the beginning. You told me about your family, your father and
your mother, and I think that’s an interesting story, so perhaps you can tell me
where they were from and how they met?
Judge Urbina: All right. My father came from Honduras, Central America, and my mother from
Puerto Rico. They met in New York City, actually, as a result of knowing some
mutual friends. I don’t know much about the romance, except that my father
became very enamored with my mother and went through all the traditional
courting rituals that were then typical, especially in the case of people who came
from other countries. They got married in New York and had three sons.
Mr. Granof: When did they get married?
Judge Urbina: They were married in the early 1920s.
Mr. Granof: Had they been in the country a while before they were married?
Judge Urbina: I think they had been in the country a couple of years. My father worked for a
dental technician, creating molds for false teeth, and my mother was trained as a
secretary, and she started working with small businesses and eventually worked
her way up with a larger corporate entity, a pharmaceutical entity. So, yes, they
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met early on. I’ve heard them speak about the Depression and some of the
difficulties that they encountered. Both my father and my mother grew up in an
environment that one might call very comfortable. My mother’s father was a
merchant in Puerto Rico, had several businesses – a restaurant and a clothing store
and so forth. My father was raised by his grandmother, although his mother was
present. He always called his grandmother his mother. His father was killed
when he was young. His father was in the military, and it was a fatality in some
war that was going on. He grew up on a farm, what he called an estate, which
was a large tract of land owned by his grandmother, who also had businesses in
the city of La Ceiba and in Roatan, which is where he was born. So they came
from what I imagine were comfortable circumstances. I believe they must have
been comfortable because both of them were very well educated, although they
had only graduated high school. My father spoke impeccable English and
impeccable Spanish. They went to a Jesuit institution called St. John’s College
High School, much like the one that exists here in town. My mother had excelled,
I’m told, in her early studies. I know for a fact that she was well educated.
Mr. Granof: She spoke English too?
Judge Urbina: Oh yes. Except for her accent, her English was perfect. And I know that she
knew many things in terms of basic education because, as I’ll tell the story as we
go on, at one point, she had to home school me in order for me to catch up to the
grade level that I was placed in.
Mr. Granof: Yes, you had mentioned that. What interests me is what drove your parents to
come here. It’s fascinating. You have two single people, they didn’t come with
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their families, they came alone and they came from prosperous circumstances.
Why?
Judge Urbina: I gather that when they left their home countries the United States still represented
a land of opportunity, and I believe that it was not long after they arrived that
circumstances changed radically. Fortunately, because they both had enough
education to get by, they were able to find employment, but I do remember stories
about my father getting beaten up when he tried to break picket lines to get jobs.
So I think that was basically it. They came here feeling that they had a cushion,
but the cushion more or less diminished to the point where they were really
struggling.
Mr. Granof: So they really came from prosperous circumstances, but as a matter of free choice
because they saw this as a greater opportunity?
Judge Urbina: Yes, they did. I think my father was anxious to see the world and to experience
more in life than he had in the small town he was from. Although Puerto Rico
was then considered a very separate country, it was strongly linked to the United
States. The mass emigration to the United States from Puerto Rico had not begun,
but people with business interests like my mother’s father were quite willing to
send their children to the United States for opportunities.
Mr. Granof: Do you know how old they were when they came here?
Judge Urbina: I think they were both teenagers, their late teens.
Mr. Granof: That is just an amazing story, that teenagers, basically from prosperous
circumstances, decide to take off and explore the world. Of course they did have
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the advantage of speaking English. I guess that’s what you do when you’re
young?
Judge Urbina: Well, I suppose so. I guess there were many people around that time that either
by choice or otherwise came to the U.S. with the American dream in mind.
Mr. Granof: Are your parents still alive?
Judge Urbina: No. They passed away. My father was in his mid-80s, and my mother was in her
early 90s. She died about eight years after he died.
Mr. Granof: So you have good genes for a long life.
Judge Urbina: I hope so.
Mr. Granof: Have you ever been back to either Honduras or Puerto Rico to where they were
from?
Judge Urbina: Yes. When my mother died, my wife and I went back to Puerto Rico and we
visited her hometown, and we stayed there for a week or so. We traveled
throughout Puerto Rico so I could kind of connect the memories that she had
planted in my mind with the actual locations and the people, and that was quite
beautiful. I did not visit Honduras until about five years ago when my wife and I
decided to go to the very town in which my father was born, Roatan, and
interestingly enough I have relatives there. We went to the capital of the little
island and I retrieved my father’s birth records, which were handwritten in this
beautiful kind of script, the way they used to do in those days, and chronicled
such facts as marriage, of his mother being married, or not being married. It was
very interesting how they would characterize people. I think his mother was
married, but his mother’s mother, the grandmother, had not been married when
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she had children. The birth records, I didn’t truly expect to find them because
there’s no computerized system of keeping those records. So my wife and I stood
in line and waited patiently, and I say patiently because people in different
countries have great patience for doing things. People stood there, nobody
complained, and finally when it was our turn I told the clerk who I was and what I
wanted. I saw her go back and blow dust off old leather-bound journals, and she
pulled one, and I thought oh boy, she’s not going to find it. But she found the
page, and it described when my father was born, where he was born, his parents,
his deceased father, his mother, and the grandmother and so forth. I found out
through those records, because I was able to research them further, that my greatgrandfather,
not my grandfather, but my great-grandfather, came from Scotland to
Honduras as one of these soldiers-of-fortune guys with Standard Food or one of
those big companies. And there was a notation that he had had a child. He had
been with a woman who had a child but they were not married so it was kind of
interesting.
Mr. Granof: So you have Scottish ancestry?
Judge Urbina: Yes I do. So now I have to go visit Scotland.
Mr. Granof: I don’t know if you’re fluent in Spanish, but do you speak it?
Judge Urbina: Yes, I am fluent in Spanish. When I was growing up, my father would speak to
me only in English, and my mother would speak to me only in Spanish, so I got a
good foundation because my mother spoke very good Spanish, as did my father.
Of course when he’d speak to my mother, he’d speak to her in Spanish. But I
supplemented my initial introduction to Spanish in the home with studies. I
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studied Spanish in high school and then I took advanced courses in Spanish in
college.
Mr. Granof: Does your wife speak Spanish?
Judge Urbina: Yes she does. And my children speak Spanish.
Mr. Granof: That’s wonderful. It’s terrific to be bilingual like that. I was thinking about how
much richer an experience you had going back to both Honduras and Puerto Rico
speaking the language of the country.
Judge Urbina: Well yes, it was a wonderful experience in that regard and for another reason as
well. My father, and I’ll show you his picture, my mother’s and father’s picture
over there —
Mr. Granof: I was going to ask whether that was a picture of them.
Judge Urbina: In the Latino culture, there’s kind of a strange love-hate relationship with Europe,
especially Spain. Unless you’re from Spain, then you probably, if you’re Latino,
you’re probably the product of some conquest that the Spanish inflicted on some
indigenous population.
Mr. Granof: I can understand that.
Judge Urbina: And so there’s this love-hate relationship, plus, especially with respect to Latinos
whose ancestry hails from the Caribbean part, and other parts, South America as
well, there was an influx of African slaves, and so — I don’t want to brand Latinos
— but sometimes you find that some Latinos are not too anxious to speak about
their African origins. They tell their Spanish origins and they downplay their
indigenous origin.
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Mr. Granof: Is there still a fair amount of discrimination in Latin America, especially Brazil
say?
Judge Urbina: I think there is. I mean it’s interesting. Have you ever watched – not that you
would be tempted to – but if you ever watch Spanish soap operas, the stars of
these shows are always Caucasian looking, they’re always beautiful, they don’t
really show much of an African presence unless it’s servants in these shows.
Latinos don’t talk about this out loud. They may talk about it to each other, but
they never talk to non-Latinos about this because it’s a taboo. But my point being
that when I got to Roatan, I saw the most interesting looking people. People with
skin much darker than mine with green, green eyes – I suppose you would see this
in Brazil and many other places I’m sure – but it was such a contrast from what I
was used to because of the history I read. The whole set of islands off Honduras
were mostly indigenous, Carib, Arawak, and Mayan – Mayan on the mainland.
Then when slaves were brought to that region, many of them gravitated towards
islands once they were freed and many of them kept themselves quite segregated,
and many of them do so now. The bottom line is that the British came – this is
what I’ve read – the British came when fighting the French and told all these
inhabitants, mostly African on the islands, that they had to swear allegiance to
Britain, and they refused. As a consequence, many of these African slaves or
direct descendants of African slaves were taken off these islands, because the
British feared they would join the French in the battle, and were deposited in
certain areas off the Honduran coast, Roatan being one of them. Roatan is an
island right off the coast. My father never spoke about our African ancestry for
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reasons I’ve already explained, so getting to see these people and then actually
getting to meet one of my cousins who had a very British name who still lived
there, a very lovely lady, dark skin like me, was quite an interesting kind of
anthropological experience.
Mr. Granof: So there really is just a tremendous mix of diverse genetic characteristics, which
is not surprising; we’ve got some of it here in the United States.
Judge Urbina: Oh absolutely. I think there’s a lot of it that people don’t know or don’t admit to.
I read a book recently called The Known World, which is about blacks in Southern
Virginia in the early 1800s, old slaves, and the whole culture that grew out of that.
It’s an historical novel but it’s a novel. So yes, these issues of race and color are
all very interesting.
Mr. Granof: Yes. And now when you went to see your cousin, what was her reaction?
Judge Urbina: Well actually I didn’t go to see her because I didn’t know she existed.
Mr. Granof: I should say, when you met her.
Judge Urbina: Right. It was a beautiful thing.
Mr. Granof: How did you find out about her?
Judge Urbina: Well, the island is small, and there was this young gentleman who was kind of a
server at the restaurant at the hotel that we stayed at, and we got to talking. He
spoke very good English, and when he heard my name, he said, “Well, you know
there’s a woman who lives here who was Urbina but now she’s Smith because she
married somebody, and I wonder –” And I said, “Gee, I’d love to find out.” So
he researched it, and he went to her home and he mentioned my interest. This
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lady had actually met my daughter, who had years before visited Roatan. And I
found out that the woman and I were related. What a pleasure and surprise.
Mr. Granof: How about the Puerto Rican side? You said you had been back?
Judge Urbina: Yes. I’ve been back to Puerto Rico. I know that I have many relatives there, but I
didn’t try to track them down. I wanted to spend more time just kind of looking at
the island. I don’t have any relatives that I would consider close relatives. I know
that my grandfather had many children — I think he had six, including my mother
— and that the family was widespread. Many of them got to the United States
and died of one thing or the other. One of my mother’s sisters died of the
aftermath of alcoholism, a brother died of the aftermath of alcoholism, and there
were a couple other deaths, so my mother and a sister were really the two
remaining that lived here. Her sister died before she did, her older sister, and
then my mother. So I never got to know much about our Puerto Rican relatives.
Mr. Granof: But from what you said, it was a rewarding experience for you to go back to
Puerto Rico.
Judge Urbina: Oh absolutely. My mother spoke so affectionately of her home growing up, and
she would relate stories about what it was like as a child playing in the streets and
watching the horses and buggies go by on the cobblestones. I went to the very
same – I can’t say it was the same house but certainly the same block where she
grew up – and indeed the streets were covered with cobblestones. That really
brought back such precious memories of my mother’s description of things. She
always spoke about the beauty of the island. Of course, Puerto Rico has been
ravaged by drugs and organized crime, and sometimes we hear so much about that
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that we forget that Puerto Rico is really a garden spot. It’s just one of those places
where God has touched the earth. So I got to see that. It just reinforced all the
positive things that my mother expressed and felt about the island.
Mr. Granof: What a wonderful experience.
Judge Urbina: Yes, it was.
Mr. Granof: So, when your parents came to the United States as teenagers, and they’re well
educated, and they were able to get jobs in the 1920s, and then the Depression
starts.
Judge Urbina: Right.
Mr. Granof: And they were living in New York?
Judge Urbina: That’s right.
Mr. Granof: In Manhattan?
Judge Urbina: In Manhattan, yes.
Mr. Granof: Do you know, was it Upper Manhattan, Upper West Side?
Judge Urbina: I think they were living on the East Side, at least that’s where I was born. I was
born at 108th Street and Lexington Avenue. Now exactly where they were living,
I think it might have been in the vicinity of that because I know that so many of
my relatives were still there when I was growing up. Even though I wound up
living in Queens, I would still go back to the city, and that’s where my cousins
and other relatives lived.
Mr. Granof: In the 1920s and 1930s that area was really quite different than what it is today,
wasn’t it?
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Judge Urbina: Yes. I gather that my parents were in the minority there but were able to stay
there because of their work. They worked nearby, when they had a job, were
working, and I gather that they were tolerated because they were just hard
working, regular people.
Mr. Granof: When did they have children?
Judge Urbina: My oldest brother is almost 13 years older than me, and the middle brother is
11 years older.
Mr. Granof: So your older brother was born — help me out with the dates.
Judge Urbina: I’d have to do the math, but he was born I would say in 1933, and my other
brother was born in 1935. I was born in 1946.
Mr. Granof: Okay, so you were really a post-War boom baby.
Judge Urbina: That’s right. I was one of those baby boomers. My brothers were born before
that, and although we grew up in the same household, they left to go into the
armed forces when they were 17 and 18 years old; they left together to go to
Korea.
Mr. Granof: To go to Korea?
Judge Urbina: Yes. So I was born in 1946. We were still living in Spanish Harlem until I was
approximately nine, and that’s when my brothers left, when I was eight or nine.
Mr. Granof: They lived through World War II. Are they still alive today?
Judge Urbina: Oh yes. They’re both in New York.
Mr. Granof: Are they retired?
Judge Urbina: One of them has been retired for quite some time, my oldest brother. My other
brother works as security for the Marriott LaGuardia Hotel.
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Mr. Granof: Are you close them? Do you see them?
Judge Urbina: Yes. We’re very close.
Mr. Granof: Are they married?
Judge Urbina: They’re married. They have children. My oldest brother has been married three
times and has children from two of those unions, one of whom is a niece that is
now in law school in Charlotte. My next oldest brother has been married three
times. He has a daughter who is a Ph.D. audiologist and he has a younger son
who is in his early 20s and also lives in New York.
Mr. Granof: Do you have a family reunion every once in a while?
Judge Urbina: The children of my brothers pretty much lead independent lives and are not as
accessible as we’d like them to be even though I think most of them are still in the
New York vicinity.
Mr. Granof: They’re all busy?
Judge Urbina: They’re all busy. But we stay in touch. My niece, my oldest brother’s daughter,
and I are very close. We speak to each other three or four times a month,
especially now during her law school experience. She’s at the University of
Charlotte; it’s a small law school that has just been accredited.
Mr. Granof: What year is she in?
Judge Urbina: Her first semester was in January of 2010, so she’s now in her second semester.
Mr. Granof: I won’t ask you if she’s enjoying law school.
Judge Urbina: No, I don’t think she’s enjoying it. She’s scared to death all the time.
Mr. Granof: When your brothers went into the military and off to Korea, why did they do that?
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Judge Urbina: To be honest, they didn’t want to stay in the house. My father was a very, very
difficult man, for reasons which I now understand, being an older person myself.
I think he was very frustrated with many things in life, to be perfectly candid. He
was a very bright man but could not get the kind of advancement that he really
thought he was worthy of. In other words, he wound up ultimately as being a
tool-and-die maker, which is a pretty good job, but he couldn’t pass the Post
Office exam. He wanted a good, long-standing federal job and that was a
frustration. I’m sure there were other frustrations in his life that would make him
moody and unpredictable. My brothers were at that age, you know, 17, 18 years
old, when their wild oats need to be sown. So my oldest brother enrolled in the
Air Force, and the middle brother enrolled in the Marines to fight in Korea.
Mr. Granof: I can understand the Air Force, but the Marines?
Judge Urbina: Well, if you knew my brother, you’d know why he picked the Marines. When
they left, I was traumatized because I felt I was being left alone.
Mr. Granof: You were pretty little then.
Judge Urbina: I was nine. Let’s see, I was born in 1946. I was very little. I think what
happened is they joined and then the war ended. So they might have joined
perhaps toward the end of the struggle.
Mr. Granof: You must have been close to them, or at least looked up to them as older
brothers?
Judge Urbina: I looked up to my brother Al, the middle brother, very much because he was a
tough guy.
Mr. Granof: He’s the one that joined the Marines.
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Judge Urbina: Exactly. And I adored my oldest brother. He did things for me – our relationship
was and still is quite exceptional in that he would come back from school and he
would save half of a candy bar for me, you know, things that you just don’t
forget. He was my go-to person. He was a person who I could trust. Maybe my
mother was too, but she had her hands full. She worked full-time and she raised a
family, and that was always the case. But he and I, we were tuned in and still are.
Mr. Granof: Did they think of going to college?
Judge Urbina: My brother Louie did go to college. He graduated from Hunter College.
Mr. Granof: Was there any expectation that you would go to college or that your brothers
would go to college? Did your parents expect that of you?
Judge Urbina: My parents certainly expected it of me. I think life was significantly less of a
struggle when I came along. I mean as I progressed toward that age, I think they
were more secure. They weren’t highly paid people but they were well
established, and the whole American dream became much more feasible for them.
When I went from New York City to Jackson Heights and was enrolled in a
Catholic grammar school in fourth grade, then once I started that process, once I
began to experience some success, everything was, the whole milieu, was to train
to go to college or to get some great job.
Mr. Granof: That’s interesting that the difference of being born in 1946 versus, say, 1936, or
even before, because of the range of insecurity in the 1930s. That whole
generation was traumatized by the Depression and it wasn’t until the post-War
period that the American dream started being realized for a whole range of
people. Apparently, that was true for your parents, and you and your brothers.
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Judge Urbina: I think that’s exactly correct. And I wouldn’t have analyzed it that way except for
this conversation and kind of reviewing things in my mind in advance of this.
Again, this was part of the explanation for my father’s anxieties that I didn’t
appreciate until much later when I realized this was a culture where the man in the
house was supposed to be the breadwinner, and where my father as the man in the
house felt he was not living up to his potential. I think he did. I think he
approached things in the right way. But, let me put it this way, I think this
constituted some of the kind of “post-Depression” traumatic syndrome that he
had.
Mr. Granof: Piled on with all the other difficulties of growing up in a culture which still was
fairly discriminatory.
Judge Urbina: Yes. And he was very sensitive about that.
Mr. Granof: Now, when you grew up, your mother worked?
Judge Urbina: Yes.
Mr. Granof: Was that common?
Judge Urbina: By this time, there was much more of a Puerto Rican presence in that area, in the
late 1950s. From what I recall, there was a lot of ethnicity in terms of Italians and
Irish, and then the Latinos were beginning to move in. In fact, I think when I left
New York there were more Puerto Ricans in New York City than there were on
the island. Literally. I mention that because those of us who had parents, who
both could work, they did work.
Mr. Granof: What are your earliest childhood memories? Did you view your family as being
reasonably comfortable? You had enough to eat, and that sort of thing?
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Judge Urbina: Yes. I did not think of us as being in any material way deprived. I didn’t have a
larger context to compare it to, but I ate fine. Of course I spent a lot of time with
the babysitter who was an older lady who my mother had known from
Puerto Rico. She was very kind, spoke no English, but very kind and loving.
Mr. Granof: She was probably good for your Spanish.
Judge Urbina: Probably was. And so I was inconvenienced from time to time. I didn’t like
having to go from school to after-school activities every day because I saw some
kids going home and so forth, but I never drew the conclusion that I was in a bad
situation as compared to other people.
Mr. Granof: When I grew up, my grandparents barely spoke English, and the culture was such
that I thought that the real America was always somewhere else, like the Midwest,
like Chicago. It took me until adulthood to realize that the urban areas were just
as much America as the farmland of the Midwest. I wonder if you had that sense
at all, or people around you had that same sense of not really being quite in the
cultural mainstream.
Judge Urbina: I think that’s a very interesting point. Now that I can look back I can give it a
name, but at the time it was just manifested as a sense of being uncomfortable. I
could never feel fully comfortable with my surroundings and with people and so
forth. I think that was because, as now I would characterize it, I was kind of a
marginal person in many respects. I wasn’t white, I wasn’t black. My birth
certificate says “white,” which is absurd, but that’s the way it was in those days.
My environment constantly gave me mixed signals about who I was and whether
I was accepted or not, and who were the people that were, and who I was in
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relation to them. Even as a child I remember going to after-school and
encountering incidents which I think might have been racially prompted. Even
though it was kind of an ethnically eclectic group, still it was mostly white.
Mr. Granof: I can’t say that I had that, but I do remember, for example in the first grade, when
you learn to read, the readers that they had were “Dick and Jane Go to See
Grandpa on the Farm.” Well their grandpa looked nothing like my grandpa and
we didn’t live on a farm.
Judge Urbina: Exactly. And it’s not a complaint, it’s just an observation. One question I’ve
been asked from time to time is how would I compare the racism I experienced in
New York City with the racism I experienced when I came to Washington. The
best I can do is to say that when I felt racism growing up, it wasn’t that people
said they were better than me, it’s just that they said I wasn’t as good as they were
because they were Italian or I wasn’t as good as they were because they were
Irish. When I came down south, it was the same phenomenon, but turned on its
head because they said I’m better than you are. It was nuanced differently. So I
had to kind of understand that distinction because when I had incidents growing
up, and I didn’t have a lot, I don’t mean to overstate that, but when I noticed, it
was always because there was a cadre of people who were excluding me because I
was not part of that group.
Mr. Granof: You weren’t Italian or Irish.
Judge Urbina: Exactly. But then of course when I came to Washington, it was different.
Mr. Granof: It’s surprising how long racism persisted. Into the 1960s.
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Judge Urbina: Well, I think even then it was a real phenomenon but it was much more discreet
and isolated. It wasn’t kind of a general policy anymore.
Mr. Granof: It was becoming unfashionable.
Judge Urbina: Exactly: and the New York Athletic Club, for example, was stuck in its old ways
and eventually it was going to have to give those up.
Mr. Granof: We’ll get to that in more detail later, but growing up, you started school, in New
York Public Schools? You lived in Manhattan?
Judge Urbina: Right.
Mr. Granof: And you were having some difficulty there?
Judge Urbina: Well, I didn’t realize I was having difficulty. Apparently I was, but it wasn’t the
kind of difficulty which the teachers or the principal brought home or
communicated to my parents.
Mr. Granof: You weren’t a discipline problem?
Judge Urbina: No. I was not. I mean, from time to time I had a scuffle here and there, but no.
Nothing unusual. In fact, one of the most pleasant memories I have was from a
principal called Mr. Schumaker who, when my mother came to tell the principal
that we were moving to Queens, she first told the teacher, the teacher called the
principal, and the principal came down. I’ll never forget it because it was the first
time I got this kind of positive feeling from my school environment. The
principal spoke to my mother and was very polite, very kind, and he said, we’re
going to miss Ricky, he’s a real gentleman, and he’s going to go far in life. I had
never heard that from anybody before.
Mr. Granof: And you were in what grade then?
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Judge Urbina: I was in the third grade.
Mr. Granof: So you went through the first, second, and third grades, and kindergarten?
Judge Urbina: Yes. Three different public schools first through third grade.
Mr. Granof: Why three different public schools?
Judge Urbina: As an accommodation to my mother’s schedule and the babysitter’s schedule.
When this lady was not taking care of me, my grandmother took care of me, so
from time to time my mother’s schedule would change and she had to find a
school that would provide the kind of aftercare that would accommodate that, and
as a result of that I wound up going to three different grammar schools.
Mr. Granof: Were you able to walk to those schools?
Judge Urbina: I was walked to the schools, and by the time I got to the third grade I could walk
several blocks to my grandmother’s house.
Mr. Granof: Were your memories, to the extent that you have them, were they pleasant?
Judge Urbina: The truth is, I have more memories of the aftercare or post-school daycare than I
actually have of lessons and learning, and I think the reason became apparent later
on.
Mr. Granof: And let’s get to that. When you got to the fourth grade, your family moved to
Queens?
Judge Urbina: Right.
Mr. Granof: You told me about your father’s and mother’s decision, mainly your father’s
decision, to move to Queens. I take it you weren’t involved in that?
Judge Urbina: Oh no. I wasn’t consulted. But I did, of course, listen to conversations, and I
knew that the neighborhood was becoming increasingly more dangerous. I knew
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that there had been times when my mother and I on our way to the fourth floor
walkup would have to step over people who were passed out on the stairs with
needles in their arms and things of that sort.
Mr. Granof: That was in your apartment building?
Judge Urbina: That was in my building.
Mr. Granof: So you were in a fourth floor walkup?
Judge Urbina: That’s right.
Mr. Granof: Now by the time your family decided to move, had your brothers left?
Judge Urbina: Yes. They were gone, and that’s when – my parents were still looking to achieve
the American dream – this is the recollection that I have. Because now when I
recall what they were saying, they really felt that this was not the environment
they wanted to raise me in and that they wanted to put me in a school where I was
capable of advancing myself. So I think that was a big piece of the American
dream, the educational part.
Mr. Granof: They wanted a better life for you.
Judge Urbina: Exactly.
Mr. Granof: And for themselves as well.
Judge Urbina: Oh absolutely they wanted it for themselves. I think they felt they deserved a
better life. I know that they saved a lot; they must have saved a lot to buy the
home. It wasn’t a luxurious home, but given their income and so forth, I know
that they must have saved a lot and sacrificed a lot. So they looked, and I don’t
know what led them to Queens, I don’t know why they went there. I remember
going to a lawyer’s office, the first lawyer I had ever met, who was involved with
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the transaction. And next thing you know, my mother was telling me we were
going to move to Queens.
Mr. Granof: This was in the 1950s?
Judge Urbina: Yes. I was nine years old, so yes.
Mr. Granof: That was when Queens was really being developed.
Judge Urbina: Yes. It was a really beautiful area. I mean Queens was called Long Island in
those days. But you’re right, it was being developed, and as a consequence,
although there were homes built, there was still a lot of expanse of undeveloped
land. To me it was almost like living in a park because there were animals there
and birds, and at the back of my house there was this huge lot which extended I’d
say an acre or more, and so I would go with the dog and play in the back there. It
was just a wonderful place. Now there are several hotels there.
Mr. Granof: So you went from a fourth floor walkup in crowded Manhattan, highly urban, to
suburban Queens?
Judge Urbina: Yes. That’s right. Suburbia in many respects, and so I was thrilled, of course.
Mr. Granof: A single-family house?
Judge Urbina: A single-family house. Semi-detached. It turned into a two-family house when
my father had the foresight to develop the first floor into a second apartment. I
knew there was going to be a lot of work involved because my father was hellbent
on making it a beautiful home. He wanted to make sure that it was one of
the nicest homes on the block.
Mr. Granof: As a tool-and-die maker, and someone who had the skills to work as an assistant
dental technician, it sounds like he was probably pretty handy.
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Judge Urbina: He was handy, and what he couldn’t do, he knew what should be done. So he
could create a blueprint in his mind of how things should be laid out and where
they should be. He had some skills. I mean, as I said, he had skills in a number
of different areas, but especially now as I look back, I can see he taught me things
that I’ve been able to retain over time about gardening and about home repairs
and things of that sort.
Mr. Granof: Did you have aftercare there?
Judge Urbina: No.
Mr. Granof: You probably didn’t need it.
Judge Urbina: No. It was about three-quarters of a mile walk to school. My mother took me the
first day of fourth grade, and after that I walked back and forth myself.
Mr. Granof: They decided to put you in parochial school?
Judge Urbina: Yes.
Mr. Granof: Because?
Judge Urbina: They weren’t particularly religious. I mean, they believed in God, but they were
not particularly religious. They were both Catholic, or had been born Catholic,
but they didn’t go to church or any of that.
Mr. Granof: They must have felt that the school was going to give you something that the
public school couldn’t. I know Catholic schools don’t charge a lot, but there’s
some charge.
Judge Urbina: Yes. There was some charge. My father had had a very good experience with the
Jesuits when he went to high school in Honduras. My mother, I don’t recall if she
said she went to a parochial school or not, but there certainly was the influence of
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the Church back in Puerto Rico on her, and I think that influence was a very
positive one in terms of family structure and that type of thing. So they were both
in favor of having me go to a school where I would be taught by religious
teachers.
Mr. Granof: So here you are, a nine-year-old, and you show up the first day, and does anybody
look like you?
Judge Urbina: Well, not too many people, no, actually. The school was right on the cusp of what
is now called Corona, Queens, and that area was beginning to become, instead of
white, was beginning to become African-American, so there were a couple of
kids, a few, who were of color, but it was mostly Italian, Irish, and Polish.
Mr. Granof: What was it like for you coming in?
Judge Urbina: You know on one hand kids can be very mean, but on the other hand kids have
this kind of universal value that they grow up with, and if you have value in their
value system, it’s not so hard to get integrated.
Mr. Granof: I think I know where you’re going with this, but I want you to explain it.
Judge Urbina: Well, athletics was one of the things that really helped me. The nuns weren’t too
encouraging with the athletic part, but there were also Christian Brothers. They
were very much into athletics. And also the academics. After I was able to catch
up, I was able to distinguish myself academically, you know the things that
schools do, spelling bees and things of that sort.
Mr. Granof: But you were more than just a good athlete. I mean certainly when you got to
college, and even in high school, in college you were an outstanding athlete.
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Judge Urbina: I was, but not in grammar school. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t physically
developed. I was small by comparison. My mother was 4’8” and my father was
about 5’2”. All of us – the sons are much larger – but I didn’t get my height until
I’d say, 8th grade, first year of high school. So I didn’t excel. Although I had the
heart, I didn’t have the physical equipment to really excel. But I tried hard, and I
was on a par with other kids. Of course we had one or two exceptional guys, but I
was not one of them.
Mr. Granof: So you get there. Let’s start with the academics. You go in and you hadn’t had
any problem with academics before, had you?
Judge Urbina: No. But I think that I had never previously been challenged academically, and
that’s to put it mildly. I may have mentioned to you at one point earlier, I came in
thinking that that was the least of my problems. At least I didn’t think about the
academics as a problem.
Mr. Granof: And you were in the fourth grade. In first grade, you’re not so conscious of these
things, but in fourth grade, you are.
Judge Urbina: Yes, because kids are beginning to evolve, and they’re beginning to show signs of
where they’re going. So one of the exercises was for the nun to ask each student
— everybody had the same book — to read a paragraph. When it came to me, I
couldn’t read it. It became apparent that I really couldn’t read. So that became
quite an embarrassment, and one that I was not prepared for.
Mr. Granof: How did you get to the fourth grade without knowing how to read? I mean this is
the 1950s in New York.
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Judge Urbina: The only thing I can think of, and I don’t know the answer to the question, this is
partially speculation, is that I must have been plucked out of these schools, first
through third grade, at a point before it became apparent that I was academically
deficient. That’s giving the schools the benefit of the doubt. If a kid couldn’t
read, then you would think the kid had some handicap of some kind. But none of
that ever came to my attention that I recall. So when the nuns – or rather when the
particular nun, and I remember her, Sister Viola, who was stern but fair – found
out I couldn’t read she called my parents in for a conference.
Mr. Granof: You still remember? You got up and you couldn’t read?
Judge Urbina: Oh yes. I stood up and I began to try to read but I couldn’t read words that had
any more than a few letters in them. The teacher thought it was nervousness at
first. She said, “Okay Ricardo, take your time.” And I just couldn’t.
Mr. Granof: Did they ever think that maybe you need glasses or something like that?
Judge Urbina: They never brought it up. She said, “Okay, well you sit down.” And I guess at
that point she noted that she needed to speak with my parents.
Mr. Granof: So she called your parents in? Were you there?
Judge Urbina: Yes, I was there. My recollection is that she was really quite nice and she had
already developed an idea, she meaning Sister Viola, which was to keep me back
a year because she, for whatever reason, felt I had the aptitude to catch up in a
year. My father very vocally and very emphatically rejected that idea, and so did
my mother. I’m not exactly sure why, because I was young, I was young for my
grade — I graduated high school when I was 17 — so I could have been kept back.
In those days it was not uncommon as you know, but nowadays they don’t do
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that. In any event, maybe my parents felt that I would feel branded or that it
would be a hurdle that would be difficult for me to overcome, but they said no,
and of course it went back and forth. Sister Viola said he doesn’t know anything.
I didn’t know my multiplication tables, and I couldn’t read. I didn’t have any
basic skills. They went back-and-forth, back-and-forth, until my father said give
him one semester, one term, one-half of the year, and if he’s not caught up by
January, then we’ll agree. As I remember, she rolled her head and she said okay.
So from that day forward, my mother would sit with me every night.
Mr. Granof: Your memory of that is so clear. It was clearly an important event.
Judge Urbina: Oh, it really was. It was a turning point for me. And I’m so grateful to the nun,
Sister Viola, and to my parents. I mean, not that it would have been the end of the
world for me to stay back a year, but once the decision was made not to, you
know, the nun agreed provisionally, and my father set the plan, the nun agreed
provisionally, and my mother then, of course, was delegated with the task of
making it happen. Once that happened, it was a feeling that I had to do this in
order to live a life that I wanted to live. That is to say, to be on a par with the
other students, to be able to get along with the other students, to feel comfortable
with the other students.
Mr. Granof: That you had strong family support seemed to make a critical difference.
Judge Urbina: Absolutely. And the confidence they had. My father was not really the nurturing
type. He’s not the kind that would sit me on his knee and say, “Well, you know
son you can do this.” He just said “Oh yeah, you’re going to do this.”
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Mr. Granof: They set expectations for you. And your parents were willing not just to set the
expectations but to take the time to make it happen.
Judge Urbina: Yes. And they never waivered. They said this is going to happen. So after a
semester, I was caught up. I could read.
Mr. Granof: What did they do? How’d they do that? You were going to school at the time,
right?
Judge Urbina: Yes, I was going to school every day.
Mr. Granof: Your mother helped you with the cards?
Judge Urbina: Right. So the multiplication tables were the first thing.
Mr. Granof: I think you said the cards were folded in half?
Judge Urbina: They were folded in half with the two-times table, the three-times table, they were
all listed in order, and she would quiz me on that in the evening and quiz me on
that in the morning when I got up and was having breakfast. I would have hot
cereal every day. She would quiz me on that and then the reading. She would
spend time going carefully over the books that we were using and then assign me
to continue the readings on my own which I did before I went to bed. So it was
about an hour-and-a-half or so of tutoring with my mother and then maybe
another hour or so of learning things on my own.
Mr. Granof: Did you feel you were making progress? Was this a sense of confidence on your
part?
Judge Urbina: Yes. I felt I was making progress for two reasons. One is that my mother felt I
was making progress, and the other was that I was increasingly better able to
participate in the class activities, discussions, and homework.
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Mr. Granof: The sister must have felt you were making progress as well?
Judge Urbina: She was very pleased. God bless her. She was very pleased. I think she was a
little surprised, but she was very pleased. It was not long before she was treating
me like everybody else, and there was nothing to suggest that I was not a true fullfledged
member of the class.
Mr. Granof: So you got through the fourth grade. Was your father involved in helping you or
was he just sort of in the background saying this is the way it’s going to be?
Judge Urbina: He was basically the supervisor, but from time to time he would do a pop quiz to
see.
Mr. Granof: To make sure that you were where you were supposed to be?
Judge Urbina: That’s right. He would make sure of course that I didn’t watch any television. I
Love Lucy was popular. There were a couple of shows on TV that I used to like
to watch, but —
Mr. Granof: Your family had a TV?
Judge Urbina: Oh, they had a TV, yes. So he would do a pop quiz, and he would get very
unhappy if I didn’t get a hundred percent on his pop quizzes. The pop quiz, he
would throw me the newspaper and say, “Here, read the front page to me.”
Mr. Granof: So he was involved.
Judge Urbina: He was involved. I was very afraid of my father.
Mr. Granof: Why was that? Because he was demanding?
Judge Urbina: He was a real tough guy. He was unequivocal in his demands, and he was quite
explicit in expressing his disappointments. It was the kind of household where
my father ruled all, including my mother; it was kind of an Old Country attitude.
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Mr. Granof: This was not atypical of Latin households, was it? Sort of a macho culture?
Judge Urbina: It was a very macho culture. It was typical, maybe this was an extreme example,
but it was relatively typical.
Mr. Granof: So from then on, it sounds like you breezed through academically, at least
elementary school.
Judge Urbina: It’s interesting, as I look back I realize that I was entitled to feel more confident
than I actually did because I had caught up, but that feeling of needing to catch up
stayed with me for a very, very long time.
Mr. Granof: Did that help you, do you think, as a motivator?
Judge Urbina: It did. And sometimes I think it hindered me because I felt I had to
overcompensate. I felt that I had to study twice as much as everybody else in
order to be able to stay up because that’s the pattern that had proved successful in
the fourth grade, so I had to do more, do more, do more than everybody else is
doing, and that was I guess the imprint of how to succeed. If he does one hour of
homework, I’m going to do two hours of homework, and so forth.
Mr. Granof: Because you didn’t really realize how smart you were?
Judge Urbina: Well, I don’t know about that.
Mr. Granof: You won’t say that, but I can say that. I’ve taken up a lot of your time here.
Judge Urbina: This has been fun.
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