This Guy's Crazy About 1776

SAN JOSE, Calif. <br> July 4, 2008&#151; -- In one small corner of shiny, high-tech, forward-looking Silicon Valley, it is always 1776.

Richard Alexander is perhaps one of the valley's best-known personal injury lawyers, and he spends his days defending clients -- many of them who've been injured working in some of the world's most sophisticated scientific laboratories and factories.

But when he gets up each morning at his home in Palo Alto, this neighbor of Apple's Steve Jobs is most likely to raise Old Glory or the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole in the yard.

And when he steps out of the elevator at his offices in downtown San Jose, the first thing Alexander sees is a museum-quality model of John Paul Jones' ship the Bonhomme Richard, an 18th century sideboard and a vast number of Colonial-era prints and etchings -- perhaps the largest private collection of Revolutionary War memorabilia and art west of the Mississippi.

"It just started out as a few interesting items but quickly became an obsession," says Alexander, sitting in a conference room surrounded by myriad Colonial prints, Houdon's bust of Jefferson and a replica of the lamp in Boston's Old North Church ("One if by land …")

Lifelong obsessions with the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers aren't rare in New England, where after all, one is surrounded by that history. But Dick Alexander grew up in Cleveland.

His elementary school, however, happened to be named after Nathan Hale, his middle school after Paul Revere and his high school after John Adams. It was his curiosity about these historic figures that first sparked Alexander's interest, and he began to research that era.

"What I learned was the power of an idea in the hands of the just," says Alexander. "How those little colonies defeated the world's greatest empire. And then I realized that those revolutionaries were us. I decided if they could do it, so could I. That's why I decided to go to law school."

But his Revolutionar War interests had to take a back seat during Alexander's college years. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago Law School, and afterward moved to California and began to build his practice.