This book is about the times and public career of Eliot Howland Lumbard, a lawyer who most of his life lived and worked in Manhattan and whose legal career spanned more than fifty years beginning in the early 1950s. He was not your ordinary lawman.
In fact, he might easily have been identified as a Renaissance Lawman.
The concept was introduced by the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers referring to the graduation of future officers who would be sufficiently knowledgeable in order to develop and deliver better programs for coping with crime (see Sherman 1978). While Lumbard gained considerable expertise in the operations of the political and justice systems, he proceeded to capitalize on this knowledge to become both an advocate and initiator of progressive reforms. His activities are juxtaposed with many of the major historical developments of his time. This is done so the reader might be able to fit a little into the shoes of Lumbard and some of those other persons whose careers and interests overlapped with his. The greatest emphasis is given to the various public service aspects of Lumbard’s life and those of his generation.

The chronicled events should help readers better understand what motivated the people to behave as they did since the world today is a much different place than what Americans were experiencing in the first three decades after WW II. Cultural and technological changes have combined to make our present-day world quite different from over a half-century ago. Consider that in the spring of 2019 two NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch will make history by becoming the first all-women team to perform a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, but back in the 1960s, being a flight attendant was very often a young woman’s dream.

Readers interested in police work, WW II, civil rights, organized crime, legal ethics, criminal justice history, public service leadership, American government, policy making for crime control, the publishing process, computer-based criminal justice record systems, and the history and state of the maritime service should find this book especially rewarding. There are no other comparable books on the market. Lumbard bad a unique legal career and his contributions have seldom, if ever, been duplicated. His contributions on behalf of public safety have been largely forgotten.