Being a public defender was just what suited John Strayer's vision of himself as a crusader who could see his younger self in his clients. But when he realized that the job entailed more than just intellect and his work style wasn't suited for it, he needed to find another way to serve. Find out how being the smartest in the room isn't the only way to help people.
Guest John Strayer had figured his post-graduation life would find him either the author of the Great American Novel or dead. While his ambition was large, so was his problem with alcohol. His alcoholism made him limp along senior year. Luckily, as he says, he hit rock bottom soon thereafter and has been sober 25 years. While the Midwest was a good landing pad while he got his life back on track, he missed the pace and intellectualism of the east coast and picked up and moved to D.C. He knew law school would be in the cards, but he first worked for Senator Carl Levin (D-MI). The big fights to achieve small wins in the Senate grated on his ambition and sent him quickly to law school. At Georgetown, he was introduced early to criminal defense and he felt he had found a calling to match his inner crusader for the marginalized.
After an early experience on a high-exposure case, he landed in Maryland’s public defender’s office. Unfortunately, his undiagnosed ADD made sticking to court times and case load problematic and he was fired. Despite his often grasping the law better than those around him, subsequent jobs in the legal field didn’t pan out either. When a coach suggested that he think about making his outside hobby of carpentry into a paying job—and he got a taste of property management through being the president of his co-op board, he realized that working with his hands gave him a new route to helping others. In this episode, find out from John how being the smartest in the room isn't the only way to help people…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
John Strayer is a former public defender who has found that working with his hands gets him in the zone far more than the law ever did. He is a property manager in Washington, DC, where he lives with and cooks for his wife.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
John Strayer: I was a true believer. There were some other people in the office who were maybe kind of libertarian, sticking it to the man, while at the same time not really liking our clients. I loved our clients. I mean, I felt that their humanity was why we were there standing up next to them, no matter what they did. And the things that they did were things that I did.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Being a public defender was just what suited John Strayer's vision of himself as a crusader who could see his younger self in his clients. But when he realized that the job entailed more than just intellect and that his work style wasn't suited for it, he needed to find another way to serve. Find out how being the smartest in the room isn't the only way to help people on today's Roads Taken with me. Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with my friend John Strayer, and we are going to talk about sticking it to the man becoming the man, what it means to be a man. I don't know. I'm sure it is going to be a far reaching conversation and I cannot wait. Thank you so much for being here, John.
JS: Well, thanks, Leslie. It's great to be here. I've enjoyed listening to your podcast a couple of times myself and really flattered to be invited .
LJR: So you may know then that I ask two questions of all of our guests and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
JS: Right. So I think at the time when I was in college, the answer is that you have to go in two directions because I was in some ways, two different people in college. Who was I? I was someone who thought he, more than other people, deserved to be at Dartmouth. And two, I was an alcoholic. Who did I think I would become? Respectively, someone who wrote great things or alternatively dead. I was, I was a mess when we graduated.
LJR: Did you know you were a mess, John?
JS: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't, I couldn't, I had a car or a van actually, and I was living in C&G where I had painted a crazy figure on one of the walls and you know, and doing other things that later when I was a public defender, I would keep people or try—sometimes unsuccessfully—try to keep people out of jail for doing, you know. And I couldn't leave. I watched everyone go for a week and they finally sort of kicked me out of C&G with trash bags of stuff. I really did limp out of Dartmouth and ended up in Madison, Wisconsin, where I hit bottom, thankfully fairly quickly, the following summer and got sober. I'll be 25 years of sobriety, July 4th.
LJR: Awesome.
JS: So I was thinking about—knowing that you would ask that question—I was thinking about it and it really was because I was two different people. I thought I was going to write the Great American Novel. I also knew there was no chance that would happen because I was spiraling. So, yeah, I was a mess.
LJR: But I like that you had those two pieces, the mess, the messy piece—and we were all messy to certain degrees. But then this other piece (that we all were to certain degrees) of feeling as though we either deserve to be there or faked someone into believing. But I think he thought, you know, I deserve to be here more than others. How did those two things happen together?
JS: Yeah, I think that one of the things early on in sobriety that I thought about, which was somewhat different, I think from other people, but was my ambition was part of why I got sober. Because I just, it kept telling me that there was a different person in there that really wanted to be. Sort of achieving things. The funny thing now is 25 years later, you know, one of the best decisions I, or not really decisions, but changes in my attitude that I ever made was giving up on the idea of being a writer in any sense whatsoever. And now I'm on Twitter anonymously and I'm pretty sure being a writer is a miserable choice of ways to live. [LJR: Existence.] And I'm actually quite glad I somehow got off that track. 23-year-old me thought it was like really sort of a noble thing to do. And also, but that in some ways helped me get sober because I was not on track to do that. I was on track to be a bad waiter for awhile.
LJR: Yeah, and so do you also think that ambition led you to the messiness, too?
JS: I, you know, I don't know. I think it was kind of in the cards, not so much from my personality, but sort of, you know, from a predisposition genetically combined with some tragedy—my mother had a heart attack freshman fall, and it caused a lot of brain damage and, and she wasn't the same person. And then she died seven years later. And so dealing with that grief and I was just I was a complete mother’s boy when I came to Dartmouth. I mean, if you asked me my opinion about something, I would tell you my mother's opinion. And in some ways, her ambition for me was related then to the alcoholism. But you know, I think there was a physical predisposition and it runs in my family. And so I, yeah.
LJR: Yeah. Okay. So was the move to, I know you went to law school. Was that, not Wisconsin?
JS: Right. So, yeah, so I was talking about the good decisions I made. One was not to be a writer. One was not to go to law school the first year I thought I was going to go. So I was coming out of you know, recovery and are in recovery and, and starting to get my act together. Being able to read paragraphs. And I thought, okay, I want to go to a different, I want to be back on the east coast. I miss being part of the conversation. I missed the speed. I missed the pace. I miss the intensity. I love Chicago, but I was living with my folks and, and I missed the east coast. And so I said, okay, well I need a sort of an excuse to go there. And so I figured I would apply to law school. But I wasn't able to put it together. Like I could, I could read, but I could not take the LSAT. I just couldn't. I said, you know what? I can move without sort of the life plan, dictating it without the external thing. And so I just picked up and moved and just said, I'll go out there and I'll get a job. So I moved and I crashed on Mike Beckley ‘96’s floor in Tyson's corner, Virginia. And that taught me very quickly I did not want to live in the suburbs because it was a apartment building in a parking lot, surrounded by highways named after traders and you couldn't get anywhere. And so I found an apartment in Adams Morgan two weeks later, which is two blocks from where I'm sitting right now.
Then I got a job in the Senate working for Carl Levin. Before the internet, it was like a classified ad. Yellow book, I think: Progressive Midwestern Democrat seeks staff assistant. But the leap with, you know, maybe a couple of thousand dollars, knowing that I could get a job and something would happen. And I didn't know what…I applied to my home Senator's offices, Dick Durbin, and Carol Moseley Braun. And, you know, I applied, I started asking around about like, what is lobbying? I didn't know. I, and I was just going to get a job and I did and it worked out very well. I met some great people. It was a landing place and started going to AA meetings and met, you know, some friends that I have to this day.
LJR: Yeah. So building the community and kind of being in the fray, getting that part of you back, I guess like the argumentative Dartmouth writer [JS: Yeah] All that stuff that you used to be, but law school was still looming like in the mind.
JS: Yeah, it was still in my mind. And one of the things I learned very quickly is that politics is a slog the day to day. So many little fights. And Carl Levin was a great guy. Really. He had been a public defender and a civil rights marcher. Really just a fantastic guy. But he was fighting little fights day in and day out. You know, the fund, the military in a way that was slightly less insane; to run investigations and things about money laundering and get, you know, make an inch forward in the legislation. And I was still really ambitious and I was like, I'm going to do bigger things than this, and so, yeah, I applied to the sort of top three law schools in DC. I got into Georgetown. So I went, cause I wanted, I really liked DC. I liked it immediately. I'd love that there were people—once you got past the self-importance—they were experts on everything you could want an expert to be. You would go out and you would meet somebody who worked at the state department. Or actually who was studying it at SAIS Johns Hopkins to work at the state department. And people were interested. They wanted to talk about it. I mean, I have the stereotype, but I felt like Chicago, like wonderful people, but they get mad if you don't talk about the Bears to the Bulls. There are plenty of people like that in DC, but you can find others who really like talking about what they do and they do interesting things. And I, and people complain about that all the time. I loved it. I thought it was great. So I was excited to go to law school, took out a bunch of loans that I still have, and was really excited and thought I was going to do something around. I dunno, the first amendment.
LJR: That sounds about, right.
JS: Yeah. I now think that is by far the least important one. I've got all kinds of strong opinions about that kind of stuff. But, but I was, I was going to be type. The thing that changed there was during my first year I was starting to read dissents by Justice Marshall. Georgetown's weird in that you'd take criminal procedure as a 1-L and I took it my fall and I loved it. And I was like, oh, this guy, this guy knows what he's talking about. This is good. And so very quickly I was attracted to criminal defense. Cut to several years later, I'm at the DC public defender's office. I've defended Lee Malvo in this massive case with national attention.
LJR: The box truck. Or what's it called?
JS: Oh, the box truck. The white box truck and the two guys who terrorized Washington, DC, in this elaborate plot to murder this guy's ex-wife and take his kids. It was amazing. Right out of law school, I got hooked up because of somebody…I did something. I did the criminal defense clinic at Georgetown, and the person hooked me up because they needed somebody. They were worried about the, some of the attorneys who got the job and they felt like they needed help. And so they paid me a stipend to help out. And I did a lot of organizing and sort of coordinating. It wasn't like I was the guy doing the cross-examination, which was good. Cause it turns out I'm not good at that. Yeah, national attention. And, you know, I sat at a table where a famous journalist that everybody will have known, basically explained to us why the smart thing to do would be to let him interview Lee Boyd Malvo on his program, I mean, but just made a very convincing case. And, you know, afterwards the lead attorney was like, well, that would get our client executed. We’re not doing that. You know? And it was this really interesting experience to be in the news. I wasn’t the guy making the news, but I saw it getting made and I saw the way the local crime reporter identified the attorney on the team who had some self-esteem issues, who was later going to get divorced, identified that man and flattered him and finagled him. And that guy was the guy who ended up speaking on the record about the whole process of bunch, sometimes in ways that, you know, it was a six person legal team. He wasn't the lead. But he was the one who spoke to the press and, and it was an office full of personalities. And part of managing them meant that we, you know, that that's just kinda how it went. And and that was a lesson, that plus my time in the Senate watching, I think a bankruptcy bill and the communications bill I'm watching, knowing like, oh, Phil Graham is actually evil and he's pushing this because, you know, and then reading the news stories and like, they're going to pretend they don't know that bankruptcy is caused by health issues and divorce. Like, they're just going to quote somebody who says that as one side of the story. Well, that's too bad because it's like a fact. Yeah, so I, I was just absolutely dedicated to the cause of criminal defense at that point.
I eventually got a job in Maryland as a public defender. They were less full of themselves. And they were really good people. And the thing about it was I was, you know, I don't know, 10, 12, 15 years sober at the time, but I still hadn't been diagnosed with ADD. And a thousand misdemeanor cases a year, about 115 at any one time. And, and you're in court and you've got 15 cases set for trial and they're all going to get resolved before two in the afternoon. It was my dream job. I loved it. And I wanted to stand up for those clients. It made me feel good about myself. That that was my job. Law school had kept pointing me that direction, and I was really bad at it. I just was, was not a good public defender.
LJR: Because of all the layers of stuff you've had to deal with.
JS: I mean, yeah. And I mean, honestly, I mean, ADD, I had problems sleeping and waking up. I mean, it was really basic stuff and I was really hard on myself. But like I had tons of trouble getting to court on time in the morning, just terrible trouble. And the worst thing was I was a true believer. Like there were some other people in the office who, you know, we're maybe kind of libertarian in like, you know, sticking it to the man while at the same time not really liking our clients. I loved our clients. I mean, I felt that that their humanity was why we were there standing up next to them, no matter what they did. And the things that they did were things that I did my senior year of college. Like misdemeanors, you know…Wisconsin as an alcoholic, I didn't walk anywhere, you know? I was driving, you know, and, and I'm standing up next to 19 year old kids who were facing prison time because of that. And and I, I wanted to say the judge so many times, like, you realize that this kid could go on to graduate Dartmouth and Georgetown, like behaving like that because it’s me, you know, except that he's black or that he's Hispanic or he's just poor and had totally different circumstances because it's, it was me. I really desperately wanted to help those people. And I was not good at it. I was late to court. It was horrible. It was really horrible.
Now other things in my life were going well at that point. I'd met my wife, we got married. She was really trying to help me get organized and things like that. She's super organized. But it was just a constant struggle. And I knew I had to get out, but I was no good at doing it. I was sort of, you know, feeling around for other jobs, but not really pushing for it. And it's, it's hard to get fired from a state agency, but I got fired because, I mean, I just was late too many times and they finally fired me and it was, it was awful. It was just really terrible.
LJR: Because your identity was probably part of that now.
JS: Exactly, exactly. You know, during the periods of unemployment or as a temporary lawyer, after that, you know, those, that would be what I would yell at my wife when she'd be frustrated that I didn't have a permanent job or whatever. I'd be like, you don't understand my entire identity was being a public defender and I was terrible at it. I desperately wanted to be good at. And I was bad at it. I mean, it wasn’t just late. It wasn't just having trouble keeping track of 15 cases, all set for trial. It was, you know, it was sort of bad judgment on some…trying to figure out plea agreements. And I just was no good at like unknowing what the judge was going to do. I'd be like, Jennifer (my good friend), how do you, how do you tell your clients is the judge going to give them six months? How do you know Judge Kim's going to give him six months? I don't know why I can't, you know, and I just wasn't good. There were all sorts of things. I wasn't good at. I mean, I could think great about the law, but that's not what being a lawyers about. At least not that kind of lawyer. I mean, people knew I was one of, I mean, I was like, oh, you and Tim (oh, I forget his name) So you're the smartest guys in the office. And I was like, that's not worth fucking anything clearly. Right. And I knew. I knew that, you know, people tell me, oh, you're so smart. Yeah. Well, my client's doing a year and he really shouldn't be. And I, you know, and then, and my whole identity was tied up with it. It was disaster. I mean, the good news is, you know, I didn't drink, I didn't start smoking again. And my wife stuck with me. And I failed for a number of years trying to find another job in the legal field. And I talked about, you know, being part of the news and learning some lessons that way, being an e-discovery lawyer, reading executives’ emails in lawsuits, you know, in discovery, some pharma cases where I got to read what pharma sales people, email to each other. You would be horrified. And meanwhile, I'm this Dartmouth educated Georgetown lawyer sitting in a room full of a hundred people being ordered around by a 26-year-old associate in some massive law firm. Again, I was one of the smartest people in the room. It was worthless. You know, I frequently would understand the law better than the associates telling us, you know, what documents we were supposed to be highlighting. I'd be like, that's actually…nevermind. You know, I'm just a guy at a computer, just sitting there, hitting the button to the next document, looking for a privileged document, doing my best. Mostly undiagnosed with ADD, so spending a lot of time on my phone and just sort of failing for several years in a row.
LJR: Did you ever think of like becoming an adjunct someplace or teaching at any level?
JS: Yeah, but I sat next to an adjunct professor. One time she taught five classes at American University. She also temp lawyer in the summer because it didn't pay enough to live in Washington DC. I was like, well, that doesn't sound like fun. Yeah. I mean, I thought about all kinds of different things. I applied to work at the national association of criminal defense lawyers. I tried to get into policy of various kinds, immigration, you know, all the sorts of progressive causes that have lawyers working for them. Juvenile justice. I had worked in coming out of the Malvo trial and different things. Nothing really materialized. There was a glut actually, what was it? 2009, maybe. So it was the financial crisis. Giant law firms were telling their new associates not to come. They were paying people, you know, a hundred thousand dollars to not work at their law firm, wait a year. Cause that was cheaper than paying them 120 to come and have no work to do. It was a terrible time to be looking for a legal job.
So I was home a fair amount, and I started refinishing furniture. I had grown up in a house that was old, a hundred year old house. And my mom had spent my childhood stripping woodwork, which may account for the ADD, all that lead paint. In any case, my memories of it were fond. And we had had a carpenter for a guy named Rich Golden. But I used to eat lunch with Rich Golden and talked to him about being a carpenter. And my, you know, my mom stripped all the woodwork in our house. And so I started stripping the woodwork and in our house here in Adams Morgan, which is actually a hundred year old building and started to get into it.
And, you know, I had been a boy scout. I had, I had done some outdoorsy things. But I hadn't done any work with my hands since the jewelry studio. I made a ring for a high school friend. So I started getting really into that and we had a two bedroom. And I asked my wife if we could turn our second bedroom—it was a closet essentially. I asked her if I could turn it into a woodshop and she let me. And so I started making pieces of furniture and I started working with my hands alot. And a career counselor slash therapist had pointed out the ADD. And so I got on medication for that, which was just a revelation. I couldn't wake up in the morning before that. And, and for the last, however many years it's been. I go to sleep at a regular time, thanks to one drug. I wake up in the morning next to my ADD medicine. It's changed my life. You know, I can talk about liberal arts education and how that allowed me to think creatively and just follow what I like to do. And that's what the career guy was like. He's like, what do you do all day given your free time? And is there a way you can make that a job?
But the other thing that happened was I live in a 16 unit co-op and I was on the board and I was president of the board. I found, you know, people are like, oh, you're going to hate being on the board. It stinks, but you know, it's 16 units. There's five people on the board. So everybody's on the board every three years and there's nothing you can do about it, but I really liked it. And I didn’t like e-discovery law. And I started to figure out that I could do it for a living that I could be a property manager and do this stuff that you did as a co-op board—hire contractors to prepare the brick work, do some tuck pointing, get a new roof and sort of supervise that. And I started to learn, you know, plumbing, different things. And I became a handyman and I really, really liked it. Like I would lose myself in woodworking in a way that I never lost myself as a lawyer, as you know, working in Congress. I wasn't great at it. It wasn't that sense of like, oh, you're the guy in the class that knows all the answers because I wasn't great at it. But I could get better at it. And I lost myself in it, you know, time would pass and I would just be content. And so the hardest thing really was the identity. [LJR: Yeah.] Having to fail long enough that I would let go of the identity of me as a public defender as sort of a crusader for marginalized people.
It really, really helped that my wife worked in Congress and in politics and, and I became the supportive spouse of that person. In some ways, my identity, I was able to be the spouse of the person I wanted to be. [LJR: Oh.] Yeah. Which is really actually. Pretty awesome. I mean, I've gotten over those sorts of gender distinctions and it's been a great gift to be able to be part of a team where I don't have to be the one who's doing that, I can support that. I can do my own thing. I help people. But I manage it a condominium in Georgetown of sort of status-anxious, people who don't live in $5 million row houses. They live in $900,000 condos and it's rich old ladies. But I fix their toilet and I fix their plumbing. My wife loves to tell some of the stories, you know, to her friends who were like, oh, Angela, you're in the White House. And she's like, well, yeah, but my husband had the kill a bat. And I did cause it was sick. And there were kids coming in and outside of that door and the bat was there in the day, it might've been rabid. So I had to kill it. So I deal with some very real stuff and I get to help people. [LJR: Yeah.] They're not the people I want to help. Honestly, the rich old ladies in Georgetown, they're sweet. They're nice. They deserve somebody’s help. I wish I could help the people suffering with drugs and alcohol who are 23-years-old doing the exact same shit I did when I was 23-years-old, only getting arrested for it. I wish I could help those people. I still do. I miss it. But I, there are other people who can do way better than I can, and I still get to help people, even if it's not the people I'd go in and help. And I mean, and that's the lesson. I mean, I'm sure you've heard that over and over again in this podcast is that, you know, we all want to be productive. We want to be helpful. I mean, I don't think it's bad to say we want to amount to something, but in a way that contributes to people. And I think we all find it different ways. We find it in our outside and our hobbies. With me, with supporting my spouse, who's definitely doing that. You know, I'm able to do it in that at the end of the day I go home and somebody's condensate drain that was backing up with the humidity. It's no longer backing up cause I fixed it. And it's really nice actually.
LJR: Yeah, I do love that and I love that, you know, given time and perspective, you've seen that the things that you thought would serve you being the smartest in the room, you still are, but you're not, you don't have to exercise that because you've recognized the exercising of it doesn't actually achieve what makes you full and happy and right giving to people.
JS: Yeah. I got out of situations where I'd have to explain that it wasn't helping anybody, you know, where people felt compelled to tell me, oh, John, you're one of the smartest people. No one tells me that anymore, which is great actually, because it's not this sense of like, I'm not living up to something. And the thing is I knew, you know, my sister was just a year behind me. She wasn't as good at school as I was worked way up. And is a huge success now in her own way in her own world. I knew all along that the test score and the ability to shout the right answer out, you know, that that wasn't that important, but I was sort of caught in these worlds where I all simultaneously thought that it was, or that it was supposed to be, or somehow I had to turn it into that.
LJR: Well, you were getting rewarded for that point and then that stops. And so it's just great that you could recognize that ultimately and find other ways to fill you up. [JS: Absolutely.] And I don't think, you know, when you said these might not be the people that you'd want to help. I do love that you recognize they do need help [JS: Absolutely.] and your life is long. And who knows the impact of helping these now? [JS: That’s right.] Who knows what's going to happen?
JS: Yeah, that’s right.
LJR: Well, John, thank you so much for sharing all of these various ways of getting to kind of wisdom and it's, it's wonderful to catch up with you.
JS: It is. And I look forward to seeing you this summer back up in Hanover.
JS: That was John Strayer, a former public defender, who's found that working with his hands gets him in the zone far more than the law ever did. He's a property manager in Washington, DC, where he lives with and cooks for his wife. As John mentioned, the Dartmouth class of 1996, we'll be gathering in Hanover this July for our 25th-ish reunion. Registration is still available at dartmouth1996.org. For all listeners out there, we will keep putting episodes out until the reunion. So be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or visit RoadsTakenShow.com to access all the previous episodes. Check out show notes and read the transcripts and tune in again next week with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, for another episode of Roads Taken.