In Memory of Donald Stuart Burris
Beloved husband, crusading lawyer, and Brentwood Art Center Board Member.
Donald Stuart Burris – aka Donny Baby or as he sometimes referred to himself “just a boy from Brooklyn” – passed away on September 30, 2022. Don was a longtime board member of Brentwood Art Center, as well as a Director Emeritus.
Although in a hospital some 5,000 miles from home, he was still surrounded at death by his wife of 56 years, Patti, and his two children Darren Burris and Tamar Burris. Don was that kind of larger-than-life man. And he is greatly missed.
Don was born on September 7, 1943, the first of two children born to Louis and Alma Burris. He was raised in Brooklyn and East Meadow, New York, where he got into all sorts of adventures including running an underage poker ring with some of his fellow high school students at East Meadow High and sneaking off to Miami for spring break only to be discovered by his own grandmother in a grocery store.
“Don was always a man who made things happen.”
Don was always a man who made things happen. After completing college at Alfred University in 1965, he moved to New York City where he met Patti in the dorms of New York University. At that time a scruffy young employee at Time magazine, he borrowed a few bucks off Patti to get something to eat, decided she was cute, and invited her to share malts and pretzels on her dime. They married about a year later and moved to Washington, D.C., where Don attended Georgetown Law School. With his photographic memory and zest for the law, he served as editor of the Georgetown Law Review and ranked at the top of his class. His future was bright.
Upon graduating from law school, the newlyweds moved to San Francisco where Don worked as a clerk for the honorable Judge James R. Browning in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the family had their first child, Darren. This began both a beautiful, long friendship with the judge and a remarkable legal career for Don. After working in the appeals court, Don returned to the East Coast to serve as special counsel on the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee before returning to California for good with his wife and now two young children in tow.
“A fixture of the community.”
In 1976, the family settled in Santa Monica, where Don worked as an attorney, coached soccer for his kids, and became a fixture of the community. He was well-known for bringing random reading books to new neighbors, for serving overcooked hamburgers at block parties, for “kidnapping” people to take them on day-long adventures when they were supposed to just go play a round of racquetball, and for driving the getaway car when his children engaged in prank toilet papering wars on friend’s houses. He was also always available for legal advice or a friendly neighborhood conversation, no matter the hour of day.
Don had many highlights in his long, illustrious career. In addition to his time with the Watergate committee, he worked as an adjunct and associate professor for Georgetown Law Center and as an associate professor at Loyola University of Los Angeles Law School and he acted as a judge pro tem with the Los Angeles County Superior Court system. Perhaps his greatest feat was serving as co-counsel alongside legal partner E. Randol Shoenberg in the historic 2004 Altmann v. the Republic of Austria case. This landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the government of Austria to return six famous Gustav Klimt paintings to the family who had owned them before the Nazis looted Austria. Altman set the stage for numerous additional cases involving looted art and property stolen by the Nazi authorities during World War II and Don was an expert in the field. In the years that followed, Don received numerous awards and presented lectures about stolen art via many organizations around the world.
Perhaps his greatest feat was serving as co-counsel alongside legal partner E. Randol Shoenberg in the historic 2004 Altmann v. the Republic of Austria case. This landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the government of Austria to return six famous Gustav Klimt paintings to the family who had owned them before the Nazis looted Austria.
There are really no words to describe the extraordinary mark Don left in his life. He loved his family, the Beatles, soccer, the Dodgers, all things British, mayonnaise, World War II (and all history really), the law, and every single person who came across his path. He loved to travel and try new things and he found new best friends on street corners and in cafes, in airplanes and everywhere he went. Wherever he passed, he left behind an indelible unforgettable impression and a promise to help someone’s child get into law school, or to connect someone with necessary business partners, or to invest in their dream – and often many of those promises came true. He always knew the statistics on every sporting event, even sports you didn’t know he was interested in. He had an uncanny ability to add both facts and flavor to a conversation about any subject. If it had happened at any point in history, Don knew about it.
In addition to his loving wife and two amazing kids, Don is also survived by his three grandchildren: Sierra Fino, Reef Burris, and Raiden Moorehead, as well as by his sister Jacqueline Burris, his best friend and cousin Mark Josephs, and the many, many people all over the world who had the pleasure of making his acquaintance.
