Louis & Sandra Kushner
Kip Lurie, a character in the classic 1949 Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn comedy, Adam's Rib, offers his counsel on lawyer-on-lawyer romances: Just say no. "Lawyers shouldn't marry other lawyers," he insists. "This is called in-breeding; from this comes idiot children... and more lawyers."
Pittsburgh attorneys Louis and Sandra Kushner didn't heed that advice, choosing to join the same downtown law firm, marry and, as Kip Lurie would put it, breed. The verdict? A happy marriage of nearly 40 years, two thriving careers and three great kids - including, yes, another lawyer.
Munching on a bagel in the kitchen of his Squirrel Hill home, Louis Kushner explains how easy it was to pick first-year University of Pittsburgh law student Sandy Reiter out of the crowd. Not only did the Wheeling, W.Va., native sport a towering beehive of red hair back in 1964, she also was one of only three female law students in the class. He first asked her out in that most romantic of places, the law-school library, but more exotic dates would follow. After a languorous courtship of five years, he stepped things up by asking her to fly to the Bahamas with him on the spur of the moment. Reiter, by now the only female associate in a downtown law firm, dropped her brown-bag lunch and hopped a plane. "I thought that was so cool," she reminisces.
They would marry a year later, but they didn't choose to work together right away. Sandy Kushner felt the itch to do public service, and she headed off to join Neighborhood Legal Services while her husband started his career as a labor and employment lawyer for the Grant Street firm of Rothman Gordon. It wasn't long before Sandy Kushner's trial-advocacy skills gained the attention of other lawyers, and one of Rothman Gordon's founding partners urged the firm to bring her aboard.
The Kushners were both initially hesitant to work together. In the wake of many new federal employment-discrimination laws in the early-1970s, however, the practice's business was booming, and they needed the help. The Kushners drafted rules for working together that they still follow today. He explains: "We never talked about the office at home - not cases, not people, not events." She didn't mind that arrangement. Her parents, S. Robert Reiter and Sarah Reiter, had worked together in her father's law firm (he as the lawyer and she as office manager) and "they talked law 24/7," Sandy Kushner recalls. "I didn't like that they brought their work home."
The reverse was also true. The Kushners resolved never to talk about their home life at work - well, almost never. Sandy Kushner remembers one time when she couldn't resist, one time when she "ruined a billable half hour" by barging into her husband's office to get something off her chest. "That was rare," she stresses.
They found that they worked so well together that they began tag-teaming their legal opponents. As Louis Kushner explains, "If I can't settle a case, I tell the opposing lawyer, 'OK, if we can't settle, I will have Sandy try it.'" Does the threat work? Oh yes, he says, proudly. "You don't want Sandy to try a case against you."
These days, the pair still work at the same firm, a mere one office apart from each other. They no longer have the same practice area, but a little diversity hasn't hurt them. Rather the opposite. "You have to have a working relationship that allows you to retain some independence, to remain in charge of your own life even if you work together," he suggests. On occasion, they take separate vacations, such as the heli-skiing trip he's taking this February with the couple's three grown children. "That's an important part of our relationship," says Sandy Kushner.
They do enjoy working together on Jewish causes, including Partnership 2000, a commitment by many American Jews to build relationships with and raise money for communities in Israel. The couple's only daughter, Ashley Kushner, 33, is working there now for the U.S. State Department. She is engaged to Pittsburgh lawyer Benjamin Orbach and now works alongside him on Middle East peacekeeping. To her parents, that sounds like a marriage made in Haifa.
Peter Karlovich & Steven Herforth
It's late on a Sunday afternoon, and Peter Karlovich and Steven Herforth are tidying up the restaurant-sized kitchen in their Mount Washington manse after a party the night before. A reporter arrives at the door, and when the doorbell rings, the tune it plays is, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." This well-known Pittsburgh gay couple found their pot of gold in 2000. That's when Karlovich and his business partners sold their high-tech company, E-Transport, to a Canadian firm that won a bid over Federal Express. E-Transport, where Herforth also worked, provides services to international transportation industries transferring cargo. At the ripe old age of 39, these two local men decided to retire and stay in Pittsburgh, building an award-winning dream house atop Mount Washington. They hired local architects, builders and consultants.
The result is 10,500 square feet of jaw-dropping Modernist architecture, complete with sweeping views of downtown skyline, an elevator, an infinity pool, eight bathrooms, a fitness center, a disco (with professional equipment) and a temperature-controlled wine cellar for storing up to 1,800 bottles. Wait. Don't hate them because they're fabulous.
Before all the Perrier Jouët and petit-fours parties, the couple, who've been together for 22 years this spring, lived on $14,000 a year and ate mac-and-cheese meals when they were starting out in business. They met while working for the same now-defunct company, Starcom International, in the 1980s, although they each had different jobs there. Karlovich, the techie, was a computer programmer. Herforth, the communicator, was in customer support.
When, two years later in 1987, Karlovich decided to go into business for himself, his significant other eventually joined the company, but not right away and not under Karlovich's direction. "We wanted to make sure no one could say, 'You're sleeping with the boss,'" Herforth explains. The key to making working together work for them was having different portfolios within the same company, providing for different outlooks and different stories to tell each other over the dinner table. Working together had its advantages. They drove one car to work at E-Transport, scheduled vacations together and "didn't have to go to each other's boring work parties," explains Karlovich. You know the kind, chimes in Herforth, "where you have to sit there, listen, pick your nose and not contribute."
Both were pleasantly surprised that here in Western Pennsylvania, some 20 years ago, being an openly gay couple did not damage their careers. "I was concerned about how people would view us as a gay couple. We had not one iota of difficulty," says Herforth.
Gay - but not carefree. These days, Karlovich and Herforth spend their retirement, as funny as that word sounds to the 47-year-olds, not just lounging by the infinity pool, but fixing up local houses, investing in area start-up businesses such as Spin, a new bar in Shadyside, and mSpoke, a Web-content management software company, and working on numerous philanthropic and political causes. They serve on at least a dozen nonprofit executive boards between them, including the Pittsburgh Glass Center, Mount Washington's Community Development Corp., Persad Center, Pittsburgh AIDS Taskforce and Delta Foundation. They host fundraisers on a regular basis, opening up their home to local politicians such as Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and even national figures such as former Vermont governor turned National Democratic Committee chairman Howard Dean and supporters of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Dems' 2004 presidential nominee.
"I can say no in 14 languages, but Peter can't say no in English," quips Herforth. Sometimes, they say, they're surprised to wake up and find that they've become leaders. Stresses Karlovich: "We're just two kids from the suburbs who got lucky. We're the same people, loving this city and wanting to make it as good as possible."