Judge Robert C. Coates has lusted after the Esmeralda Gemstone Mine for three decades.  He tried a partnership offer with the paranoid gent who owned it.  Too fearful!  The older owner then signed his rights over to an uninterested son, but just then, checked himself into a County Rest Home.  The County thereupon placed a lein on the Mine.  It took years to convince the County to lift the lein (what could IT do with such an asset?), but the son was generally out-of-town and diffident.  Years passed.  Finally, Judge Robert C. Coates persuaded the diffident son to take the $50,000 being (finally) offered by an experienced, Gemstone Mining Company.  Coates set up an escrow and, even through the fee simple ownership had originated from an unusual Mining Patent no longer issued by the Federal Government, a policy of title insurance did issue.  With this, the Mining outfit was able to secure an investor to fund the “first phase” of gemstone mining, and, after permits and delays, the blasting began and today the tunnel approaches the pegmatite core and, all hope, dozens of gem pockets.  One pocket alone from the Mining concern’s last mine, yielded $2,000,000 is gems and a window-front at Tiffany’s, on New York’s Fifth Avenue.  Judge Robert C. Coates and his Partners should be so lucky!

Judge Robert C. Coates is a geologist, and was, in his youth, an adventurer.  At age 22 he and four compadres climbed the fearsome Picacho Del Diablo, an awesome spire set apart from the main, 8,200′ plateau of the Sierra San Pedro Martir, in Baja California.  Usually a five day climb, the Coates-Albright-Hession party decided to try to do it in three.  They succeeded.  The first day was a 14-hour boulder scramble and rock-climb up Diablo Canyon from the desert floor.  Next, up the spire.  Straying off the route (one, had done it before!) meant facing vertical cliffs all-around…The group stayed together!  The last pitch to the summit was across a 50 degree face, with a crack displaced some 3 inches.  Simple enough, eh?  All one needed to do was lean against the rock and edge sideways up the crack for some 50 feet.  Except…that there were 50 to 60-mile wind gusts, and it was starting to snow!  On the summit, the view extended to mainland Mexico…and around westward, all the way across to the blue of the Pacific.  “The most atavistic moment of my life”, later reflected Judge Robert Coates.  Down, in the november snowfall, Coates does not remember anything except trotting to their packs in the Canyon  bottom.  They each ate a candy bar for dinner, slid into their sleeping bags and, In Coates’ case, edged under a snug boulder whose surface encased his, and slept.  Awaking in the dark of the morning, they found that the stream was full, but all else surrounding them was dry:  A wild wind had blown all night!

“One day, I want to live in a City that does not have the scandal of homeless women!” Judge Robert C. Coates began making this declaration to publicly-involved friends after retiring from the San Diego Superior Court, in 2011.  Intriguingly, , every person he said this to, responded with, “Me, too!”  Judge Coates decided to say it to the Chief of San Diego’s Catholic Charities (which runs the only “Day Center” specifically for homeless women — and some 500 individual women “sign in” each month at Rachel’s Women’s Center)..  Rachel’s does great work, but only a small part of what is needed to actually accomplish Judge Coates’ goal of getting ALL of San Diego’s homeless women….properly housed!  Coates’ group has been meeting monthly at Rachel’s and has proven to be useful, pin-pointing the “gaps” in mental health services to homeless women, by County agencies.  Further, Judge Robert C. Coates has fixated on a large, City-owned building, that is being vacated:  The “old”, downtown Public Library building on “E” Street, between 8th and 9th.  It happens that this charming and sturdy edifice is not yet “reassigned” by the Mayor, and it is located across “E” Street from Rachel’s housing on the 2nd floor of the Old Downtown Post Office Building and only one block away from Rachel’s itself.  Why not turn this historic building into Homeless Women’s Housing?  It would accomodate about 500.  The Housing Commission Director says he wants it.  So Judge Coates plans to keep pushing this idea.  Will others join him?   Possibly.

The GRAND CANYON has been a lifetime fascination for Judge Robert C. Coates.  While the Universe is some 14 million years old, and the Earth 4.5 million years old, the rocks in the Grand Canyon go to over 2,000,000 years.  Hiking across this great, natural “vista to the past” was, as Judge Coates has put it, “A profound, religious experience.”  The occasion for this strenuous hike was a summer Geology Field Tour that Judge Coates enrolled in as a Geology Major at San Diego State College (it was not yet a University).  Two professors and 23 geology guys (plus, one statuesque brunette, assigned to Professor Thomas..) bounced along in a yellow bus:  First, to Vegas via Death Valley and its giant crator, and thence, eastward to Zion and its giant, white sandstone walls and streams laced with cottonwoods… and then, gradually upward through an increasingly dense, scented pine forest to….the North Rim.  The bus jerked to a stop beside a trail head in the trees and Professor Blake Thomas rose with his deep, basso voice entoning:  “Anybody want to hike across the Grand Canyon?  If so, we will pick you up at the El Tovar Hotel on the other side, mid-afternoon tomorrow.”  Five strapping young men grabbed their packs and bedrolls and scrambled out and onto the downward trail.  In the lead all the way, Judge Robert C.Coates (who had read book after book on the Canyon’s geology.  One memorable one was Hans Cloos’ Conversations With the Earth.), strode through bed after bed of Time, ever deeper into the earth’s history, observing as he went, awestruck..  

     They arrived at Phantom Ranch at the Canyon’s bottom, at 8:00 PM.  Dinner was over and the geologists had brought no food!  They talked the cleaning-up cook into a roast beef sandwich each, plus a couple of huge cans of grapefruit juice for the morning, and they hit the sack.  The group split up, three heading up Bright Angel Trail which was 14 miles long and had the advantage of water, whilst Coates and fellow Eagle Scout, Al Venton, chose the Kaibab Trail:  shorter by 4 miles, but no water!  The swinging suspension bridge (with planking wide enough for mules to traverse) was an exciting start with wide, rushing rapids below!  A mile up the trail, Coates and Venton overtook a lady walking alone.  She had no water; so Judge Coates gave her his canteen.  Toward the top, Judge Robert Coates and pal Al were plodding slowly in the blazing July heat —  50 paces and a stop.  50 paces and a stop… At the summit, they hitch-hiked westward to the El Tovar and in its soda fountain where Judge Coates recalls downing 4 root beer floats.  Almost exactly as they sauntered out of the hotel, the yellow bus came to a stop at the curb.  Professor Thomas welcomed the five adventurers aboard:  “Here are the tough guys!”, he shouted.  Three years later, Judge Robert C. Coates was to win a Sierra Club “Campership of the Year” (given to a “Young person likely to give a lifetime of service to the environment.”) and Coates chose the two-week rubber raft trip down the 315 miles of the Grand Canyon, rapids every mile. This was in 1962, the last year that “the river was wild” before the plugs went in at the Glen Canyon Dam.

As a freshman at San Diego State, the eventual Judge Robert C. Coates was a painfully introverted person.  As he has put it:”I just read Tolstoy and other books and played baseball”.  He did hit pretty well, with a .483 average most of the way through the season (until calculus caught him!).  This was his style until his Junior Year, when Mary Ann Kovacevich very gracefully told Coates to, “Bug off”.  He concluded that he did not have a winning formula for like…and that he needed to get one.  Fast!  So Coates and Pal Bob Miner (he, with a similar personality, but tops in math!) found the Fraternity containing the most men “not like them”, and they joined.  Delta Sigma Phi was about to get kicked off campus and Coates and Miner heeded the Frat President’s call to “do something positive, and visible, like volunteering for Student Body Committees”.  Judge Coates became chair of the 4-member ‘Campus Chest Committee”, along with Miner and Delta Sig, Jack Brennan.  They organized a 7-College, countywide World University Service, “WUS Week”, repleat with pancake breakfasts.  And pretty soon introverted Robert Coates was speaking to Student Councils, Circle K Clubs, YMCAs and Kiwanis audiences.  He had something to say!  Simultaneously, his wide reading came across Dr. Harrison Brown’s The Challenge of Man’s Future, an analysis of population pressure, food and water supplies, projecting into the future.  Sobering stuff!  And it caused Coates (who was sandwiching in political science courses along with his science:  He was to be the only SDSU student to pass the U.S. State Dept. Foreign Service Officer’s Exam, that year:  holding his degree in geology!) to begin to notice American politics.  Coates developed a dislike for the stuffed shirt, John Foster Dulles.  He noticed that Dulles holier-than-thou posture pitched Nassar, Egypt and the Aswan Dam into the Soviet camp and, as the Delta Sigs volunteered to take in a Hungarian student, over from the Hungarian Uprising of 1958,  Coates also reacted with disgust as America promised aid to the Freedom Fighters, and then delivered none.  Consequently, Judge Robert Coates began to examine the Democratic candidates for President.  Jack Kennedy’s Huston Ministerial Association speech turned young Coates to Kennedy and the Democrats.  By then, Judge Robert Coates was an engineering geologist on the City of San Diego’s Miramar Dam Project.  After a couple of abortive phone calls, Coates went to Kennedy Headquarters on “C” Street, and started his public life:  licking stamps! 

     When Kennedy won, Judge Coates became County Chair of the Young Democrats, which then sported 13 Clubs.  Soon, Coates ran for the County Central Committee and, in a field of 26, he garnered more votes than any, and 10% more than the extant Democratic County Chairman:  Coates, at age 24, became Vice Chair.  The next year, under the tutelage of his eventual, brilliant Law Partner, James H. Miller, Jr., Judge Robert C. Coates ran for (and over 3 Democratic rivals) became Democratic Nominee in the 78th State Assembly District.  The District was only 41% Democratic (the then rule-of-thumb was that a D needed 56% registration to win, in California).  When Coates lost, he declined Governor Pat Brown’s offer of help if he moved into an adjoining Assembly District which was being vacated.  Judge Coates had determined that he wanted a “life in public service”, and that legal training was needed for him, for that.  Coates thus went to Law School.  At the end of a legal career of 12 years, Judge Coates was teaching at the USD Law School, publishing legal articles and was a leader on the Executive Committee of the San Diego Trial Lawyers…and he was about to become a father.  Noting that his 75-hour weeks were not going to cut it in fatherhood, Coates “ducked into a cushy job”, a Judgship!  Appointed by Governor Jerry Brown, Judge Robert C. Coates served on the Municipal and Superior Courts for a total of 28 years, retiring just short of his 74th birthday.  “Every instant on the Bench was was a profound privilege — assisting people solving human problems”, he said.  Judge Coates was also known for asserting that he had “Boiled the job down to only two components: 1) Fall in love with everybody who shows up; and 2) Call balls and strikes, ruthlessly”.   When he went to the Bench, Coates carefully boxed 7,200 “closed case files” from his early law practice.  Today, Judge Coates relished being asked to serve his community regarding homelessness and low-income housing as well as with the Climate Crisis, and Coates takes great joy in…being a lawyer, again! 

Whitney Coates, daughter of Judge Robert C. Coates, was married to Kellis Landrum on Saturday, May 25, 2013, at her mother and step-father’s La Mesa Home, with Whitney’s father officiating with a wide smile.  100 friends and family attended, and after the vows (which included Whitney promising Kellis “Never to discuss anything important before Kellis had had 2 cups of coffee”), they together murmured, “”Mostly”, which the Judge then repeated into the microphone.  Judge Coates had done a wedding at that spot before:  He officiated at the wedding of Mimi, the mother of his two children, to Bob Halgran (a splendid person; a Naval Academy graduate and, like Judge Coates, a former Scoutmaster) 11 years before.

     Judge Robert C. Coates has a fine photo of Whitney on his Office wall:  with Whitney standing thigh-deep in a river next to a car which was obviously bogged down in the torrent.  “That river, 75 feet wide, was not there when we drove in.  The Baja Hands among us had gazed at the heavy storm pelting the peaks to the west, and opined that “None of that water will make it to us”….But when the party went to drive out three days later, they were confronted with the adventure of having to throw stones into that river for a day, to build a causeway for the 4-wheelers to drive across.
     This was Whitney Coates’ introduction to Baja camping, at age 4 and remains a most memorable trip of their lives, with Whitney up-and-early, singing to campers’ tents:  “Good morning to you.  Good morning to you, we’re all in our places, we’ve brushed our teeth and washed our faces.  Good morning to YOU!”  They hiked the desert canyons, ate cactus fruits, and Judge Coates wrote on the beginning manuscript of his eventual opus on solutions  to the American scandal of homelessness.  Now, 27 years later, Judge Robert C. Coates plans a late summer expedition to the very mountains on which that heavy rain had fallen:  the Sierra San Pedro Martir, with its Mexican National Observatory at 9,200” — and, across the deep, 6,000 crevass of Devil’s Canyon, the imposing spire of Picacho Del Diablo, Baja California’s tallest peak.  Judge Coates climbed this one, Thanksgiving weekend, 1961, and has published on its geology.

 BOB COATES

Judge Robert C. Coates will be pardoned, he hopes, for looking, first, to some legal facts and principles, as he approaches the issue of whether Gay people should be premitted as volunteers in the Boy Scouting movement.  First, he notes, is the U. S. Supreme Court’s stand that protects the right of Scouting to exclude gays if it so decided —  based on two First Amendment, Constitutional rights:  the right to freedom of assembly and free association, and the right to freedom of religion.  This latter, because many churches, notably the Mormons, Catholics, Baptists and Pentecostals, utilize the Boy Scouts as their official, church youth program to inculcate as to Church doctrine.  The second legal fact is that, within Scouting, the owner of a Scout Troop, Cub Pack or other “unit”…is the sponsoring institution, usually a church; and some 75% of these are churches like those mentioned wherein homosexuality is considered sinful, because contrary to Biblical teaching.

     With these things in mind, Judge Robert C. Coates has long thought that Scouting should change its National ban on Gay volunteers — but only to the extent of permitting the individual sponsoring Institutions to make the decision, whether to allow Gay persons to be volunteers, or not.  This move would preserve everyone’s rights, the Catholics and Mormons and Baptists and Pentecostals, on the one hand….and the Women’s Clubs and Unitarians and others who might welcome Gays, on the other.  It should be noted that these latter groups are presently, arguably getting their “right” to a Boy Scouting program, blocked without consideration of their and “their youth’s Constitutional rights to freely associate, and to practice their more tolerant, shall we say, beliefs, within Scouting.  Would this not respect everyone’s, of course, dissimilar views, letting all kids get the “fresh air” of Scouting?

     Finally, Judge Robert Coates, an Eagle Scout, past President to the Eagle Scout Alumni Association and holder of many leadership posts within San Diego area Boy Scouting, conceives that ALL BOYS should have the fabulous opportunity to be afforded the maturing, ethical, substantive education that a boy gets, almost automatically, as a Boy Scout.  The current policy does not serve this noble end, and thus, ought to be modified,  “tweeked”, as it were.  After all, it is easier to ride the horse in the direction it is going!

 

     ROBERT C. COATES

As a thirteen year old Boy Scout, Judge Robert C. Coates was first introduced to the mountains of Baja California, Mexico.  It was love at first sight.  He had never before seen such a rich mix of granite boulder piles interspersed with sugar pine stands and wide meadows…and withal, a lake (Laguna Hanson), for goodness’ sake!  Through college, this love affair continued, with many camping trips there and into the wilderness, hot spring canyons on the eastern scarp of the mountains; and then, over the Thanksgiving Weekend in 1960, Judge Coates and four of his sturdy friends decided to take on a real challenge:  to climb the fearsome, 10,100 foot spire of “Picacho del Diablo, from the desert floor.  This peak is offset from the further south, high “Sky island” plateau of the Sierra San Pedro Martir, a seldom-visited Mexican National Park.

     Going in, Judge Coates had no real appreciation of the danger this climb represented.  A mistake off of the known route would wind one up facing vertical cliffs, down hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet.  The start of the “usual” approach involved one man swimming out into a waterfall-fed pool, finding a shelf of sand under the fall, and, using the few handholds, climbing up through the waterfall to its top, then throwing this man a rope with which he hauled up the packs, and then, his commpadres.  But, when Coates’ party got there they found that a flood had carved away the sand bar, and this route was impossible.  They followed the alternative, a precipitous, 4-hour climb up and around the fall on sheer cliffs.  Ropes were employed there, as they were further up, the second day.  The start was early, around 5:30 AM as the sun crept above the Sea of Cortez far to the east.  All day was spent bushwhacking and boulder climbing, up the steep and bush and tree tangled Diablo Canyon, and at 8:00 P.M. by flashlight, the only one who had been there before announced:  “This is where we camp!  The jumping off point to the peak.”

      They built a brief fire, ate, and hit the sack.  The next morning the climb was steeper…all day.  As the summit was approached, they could see the “false summit” to the north, and turned to a 50 degree slanting slab of rock, the only way to the Peak.  There was a 3 inch ledge that crossed the slab, angling some ten degrees upward so, if one leaned against the rock, one could easily inch oneself sideways bit-by-bit, to the summit.  No problem!  However, by then, it was blowing heavy gusts.  and the first snowflakes were flying horizontally.  Would they be blown off and down that long, long slab and off the cliff below?  Up they went, one by one.  

     On the Summit the view was magnificent.  “The most atavistic moment of my life”, Judge Coates was later to exclaim.  Looking east, you looked across the brown expanse of the Laguna Salada and desert, on across the blue of the Sea of Cortez and saw the mainland of Mexico…..and then, around westward, one gazed over the chasm of the Canyon to the greensward of the plateau’s forested surface, and then, as in the east, the brown of the Baja peninsula all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  WOW!  But with the storm gathering there was no time to waste after signing the register in the iron box (26 before them, no hispanic names), so they hied back down and down.  In the Canyon bottom the snow was falling in earnest and the parties silently found there respective, huge boulders under which to snuggle, ate one candy bar each, and fell asleep.  At dawn, the brush and rocks were bone dry —  dried by the wild, nighttime howl!

     Through the ensuing decades Judge Robert C. Coates camped many times in the glory of the uninhabited “Martir” plateau.  Eagles and condors soar the skies, there.  The North American continent’s southernmost aspen stands crowd against pines and cedars and wide meadows grace the landscape.  The Sierra San Pedro Martir pint-sized plateau is some 25 miles long, north-south, and a dozen miles wide.  At the southern extreme it is 6,200 feet and it shelves gradually upward to 8,200 at the northern end, and then, a nice knob invited the Mexican government to place its National Observatory at 9,200 feet.  The view afforded there is, as one can imagine, almost comparable to that from the Picacho.

     A geologist by undergraduate training, Judge Robert Coates took to reading the sparse geological literature on this fine, small Mountain Range.  Like the ranges in San Diego and San Bernerdino Counties (and indeed, like the high Sierra Nevada to the north!), the Martir’s rocks are composed of Jurassic and Triassic metamorphic beds (some 150 million years), intruded into by an 85 to 93 million year-old series of granitics.  Eventually, San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Cl Coates began publishing articles on this unique, “Sky Island” mountain range.  These publications caught the attention of the renowned Explorer’s Club of New York City, which offered Coates a full Membership (if he’d pay his dues, of course!).  This home for such luminaries as Jacques Cousteau, Sir Edmund Hilary and Teddy Roosevelt, now boasts a dozen Chapters around the U.S., and, since La Jolla is home to many who, from Scripps Institution of Oceanography for example, have dived to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or explored Antarctica or Borneo or the “plastics patch” (the size of Texas) in the north Pacific, or the location of Genghis Khan’s tomb — Judge Robert C. Coates gets to rub elbows with such interesting folk at monthly, San Diego meetings.  Some day, maybe he and his bride, Ana, will attend the Annual Explorer’s Club “do” at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York.  

Judge Robert C. Coates, now a  Partner/attorney with the San Diego Law Firm of Olins, Riviere, Coates and Bagula, Is a longtime Trustee of the Pacific Rim Parks Foundation, the brainchild of famed architect and artist, James Hubbell.  Hubbell noticed that the nations that surround the Pacific Ocean are increasing their trade and cultural exchanges, and, at least arguably, beginning to share a common “Pacific Rim culture”.  “This deserves to be encouraged and fostered”, thought Hubbell, and the idea of a “string of pearls” Parks, surrounding the Pacific Rim, was born.  Judge Coates, long a fan of Hubbell’s art and architecture, joined the Pacific Rim Parks effort, early on.  Then, there were only three such Parks:  on China, Russia, and the U.S.  “Why not in Mexico?” asked Judge Coates.  He happened to be speaking to Hubbell’s Foundation chair, who challenged Coates to see what he could do to help create a Park, in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.

     Judge Coates, then about to become President of his Rotary Club, succeeded in “stitching together” nine Rotary Clubs to work together on the Project.  They got choice, ocean-view land donated by the Mexican Federal Highway Department, Hubbell worked with architecture students from four countries for three months — designing and building the Park, and it may be visited near the entrance to the southbound Tijuana-to-Ensenada Toll Road, overlooking Playas de Tijuana and the Coronado Islands.  It is a beautiful facility, dedicated to Peace among the nations of the Pacific Rim.  Judge Coates took an afternoon of “vacation” from the Court to attend the Park’s dedication.  On his drive south, alone, Judge Coates found himself thinking “an idle thought” — “I think that I just might be ready to meet somewne..”  He arrived slightly late, and The Mayor of Tijuana was just finishing his address to the assembled 400.  Coates stood outside the crowd.  And as the assemblage was disbursing, he glanced to his left, up a hillside.  He saw five Rotarians assisting a beautiful woman, poured into a red dress, down the slope.  She was giggling and obviously enjoying the male attention, and Coates said to himself, “Goodness, that lady really likes guys!”

     He wangled an invitation to where she was going for lunch.  Elbowed others out of the way, to sit next to her.  And….eight months’ later, Ana Maria Fernandez became Mrs. Robert C. Coates.  The eighth Pacific Rim Park is about to be built, in Taiwan, with Judge Robert C. Coates still loyally an active (and grateful!) Trustee!

     After graduation from San Diego State with his degree in engineering geology, Judge Robert C. Coates landed a choice plum of a job:  as a Junior Civil Engineer/Construction Inspector, on the City of San Diego’s 1,000,000 cubic yards, Miramar (earth filled) Dam Project (Coates’ “backup idea” at the time if the City did not work out, was to go to Cuba and join Fidel in the Sierra Maistra Mountains — Castro was then viewed as a “friend to Democracy” by Americans ,opposing, as he was, the dictator, Bautista).   Coates was only one of two SDSU geology graduates that year to gain work in a geological field:  Did the others become house painters?

      The Miramar Dam Project was a dream project for Judge Coates.  He began preparing for a lifetime working in Water Supply.  He was nearly named as Resident Engineer on another City Dam Project, the Thing Valley Dam;  but was offered a job on the California Water Project, bringing water south from the Feather and Sacramento Rivers, to the thirsty Southland….but he “voted wrong” at a Young Democrats State Convention, and decided that he had to withdraw from the Water Project job, as it had, eventually, been conditioned on his support for a certain candidate.  Coates wound up making the Nominating Speech for that very candidate…but to preserve his public integrity, he withdrew from consideration for the Water Job:  A life-changing decision, as it turned out!

     While Miramar Dam was rising, another huge dam project was being readied for work:  The Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, 320 miles upstream from Hoover Dam.  Like Hoover, Glen Canyon was to be constructed in a deep gorge of the Colorado River.  The contractor on the Miramar Dam knew the Superintendent on Glen Canyon and gave Judge Coates a letter of Introduction.  So on a Friday after work, Coates and his outdoor buddy, Jack Hession (soon to be Sierra Club’s Staffer for Alaska, in Anchorage, after his Ph.D.) headed eastward.  They were given a tour of the Canyon bottom just as the first concrete pours were going in.  The “Batch Plant” preparing concrete was attached to the north canyon wall, just below its top.  Namajos had been employed to dangle in ropes, testing the rock’s strength, up and down the spot on the wall where the thin concrete curve of the Dam was to be attached.  A dramatic bridge spanned the mile of space below the Dam, permitting traffic from Page, Arizona, toward Kanab, Utah and the North Rim.  Upon completing their tour, Hession and Coates headed home the “other route” through Kanab, St. George and Las Vegas.  Making it home Sunday night, Judge Coates was at work at Miramar Monday morning, and Jack, having slept the drive back, was into his arduous routine of three jobs and Masters work at SDSU as he supported his Mother and Brother all the while.

     Following the Miramar Dam Project, Judge Coates was made Assistant Maps and Records Engineer, supervising 34 engineers, draftsmen and clerks; and, having taken many Administration Courses at night, was taken onto the City of San Diego’s City Manager’s Staff.  After four years with the City, Judge Coates launched (at age 26) his Campaign for the State Assembly.  After losing twice, he entered California Western School of Law.

 

Judge Robert C. Coates