Exit Growling

In his 44 years at the University of California School of Jurisprudence, Professor Alexander Marsden Kidd has had no trouble living up to his obvious nickname. In all the university's vast (3,250 members) faculty, no teacher is so fierce in pursuit of his prize (knowledge) or so furious in the treatment of his enemy (the lazy student) as the law school's "Captain Kidd."

Professor Kidd is a sharp-beaked little man with a shiny bald pate, who came to the Berkeley campus in 1905 and has been teaching there ever since. In that time no student who was as much as 30 seconds late has ever made his way into one of his lectures; those who tried it wish they had saved themselves the tongue-lashing. On the outside, Captain Kidd was a mild enough man, quick with advice or even a small loan for a student who needed it. But inside his classroom, peering out from under his green eyeshade, he was a different man.

Deep Purple. Sometimes, enraged at a sloppy recitation, he would bang his heavy books together, jam them under his arm, and stalk out of the room in the middle of class. More often, he would turn purple, angrily adjust his eyeshade, or ferociously tap his forehead until his rage was spent. "You should be ribbon clerks!" he would bellow at his students. "Ribbon clerks behind a counter."

No matter what his courses--on mortgages, notes and bills, evidence or crime--he gave them all with the same intensity. Phi Beta Kappas have flunked them and law-review editors have gotten Ds. Once he gave such a stiff examination that 31 out of his 35 students failed it. Later, the students gave him a dinner and presented him with a medal. On it was etched the motto of Verdun: Ils ne passeront pas (They shall not pass).

In 44 years, Captain Kidd has put hundreds of students through such paces. One was the late General Hugh ("Ironpants") Johnson; another, California's Governor Earl Warren. ("An average student," says the Captain of Governor Warren. "I always figured he'd get farther on his personality than his legal knowledge . . .") They all learned what the Captain was after. He loathed the traditional law-school curriculum in which each course is a separate package, bound by the particular textbook cases at hand. He wanted to force a student to draw upon his entire knowledge of law. For all their sufferings, his students never regretted the hours they spent under the peppery little man who insisted that they look beyond their case books and think for themselves.

Damned Embarrassing. Last week the Captain found out just how grateful his students were. They had come by the scores from all over California to attend a dinner to mark his retirement from teaching. The Captain was quick to make it clear that he wasn't saying goodbye for good: he hoped still to go on living at

Berkeley. There he would spend his days playing pickaback with his grandsons, or buying blocks of baseball tickets for the neighborhood kids. He would still go down for his daily dog paddle in the faculty swimming pool, and would still nibble the raisins he likes to keep in his briefcase. As for the farewell dinner, it was just sentimental nonsense. "It's damned embarrassing to have your obituary read in front of you," growled the Captain. "I just want to exit laughing."

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