This Guy's Crazy About 1776

SAN JOSE, Calif.
July 4, 2008— -- 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.

But his love for the American Revolution and its heroes never really let him go. Almost from the beginning, at every chance, he used the number "1776." These days it's both his home address and the final digits of his office phone number. Same with the flags: His Palo Alto neighbors have grown used to seeing Old Glory or the Bennington Flag -- or strangest of all, the Serapis flag with its random red, white and blue stripes -- flying over the Alexander house.

A chance visit 30 years ago to a Boston print shop set Alexander off on a lifelong quest for Revolution-related prints and engravings, from original broadsides (he owns a Boston Massacre print) to modern lithographs portraying that era. The result is that stepping out of the modern elevator and into the Alexander Hawes law offices is like walking back in time.

Beyond the windows lies Silicon Valley -- Apple, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, all of the great technology companies racing their way into the future -- yet on the firm's wall is Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware," Benjamin Franklin's last portrait, engravings of Trumbull's famous paintings in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda -- including "The Declaration of Independence" (Alexander always keeps a pocket full of $2 bills, which include the painting, to hand out to visitors).

There's even some strangely elegant and tropical French prints of the Surrender at Yorktown that Alexander found in a Parisian print shop. And hundreds more -- a collection that continues to grow each year as Alexander, often with his wife and son, makes his annual pilgrimage to Boston for Patriot's Day and to attend services at Old North Church.

For Dick Alexander, the American Revolution is more than just a collector's paradise. It's an attitude, a philosophy, that has meaning for him every day: "I think of the American Revolution as being a group of lawyers who got together to fight the Redcoats. And, despite impossible odds, they triumphed. That's how I like to see myself -- only in my case, I fight the pinstripes of insurance companies.

"Sometimes, when I sit in a courtroom on an especially difficult case, I look up at the Stars and Stripes and tell myself if those guys could do it, so can I."

Never were those odds longer than in a recent case fought by Alexander. A young man had been ordered to clean an electrical panel at a local corporation -- and had somehow managed to survive (after $6 million in medical bills) being electrocuted with 12,000 volts -- literally the entire local electrical grid.

No one else would take the young man's case, arguing that it was simply a workman's compensation case. But at the request of the young man's mother, Alexander took on the case … and a year later, won a judgment of $15.5 million by showing that the victim's supervisor had violated company policy.

"It was my most challenging case ever," said Alexander, "My Valley Forge. I looked at those Stars and Stripes a lot during that trial."