THE DECKER LAW FIRM - PETER G. DECKER JR.

The measure of Peter G. Decker Jr. is in songs sung, children healed, family loved

by Judi Tull

Peter G. Decker Jr.

Peter G. Decker Jr.’s story begins far from the world of riches and celebrity. It begins in Lambert’s Point in Norfolk where Pete was born the seventh child of Lebanese immigrants. His mom, Rosie, was just 22 when she had him. His dad, Pete Sr., whom he calls “Pop” was a junk man.

Sitting in his spacious office with its towering ceiling and fine appointments, gifts from friends and clients on table tops, and photos of family and friends everywhere, he reminisces easily about the poverty of his youth.

“We were very, very poor,” he says quietly. “I never owned a new suit until after I graduated from law school.”

Today, his name is known throughout Hampton Roads and well beyond for his superior legal representation, the law firm he established and his contributions to cultural and philanthropic organizations.

Portraits of Rosie and “Pop” Decker, painted by celebrated California artist Corinne Geras, watch over Pete every day.

The course of his life, in and out of the legal field, has been emblematic of his firm’s motto: People helping people.

This year, he celebrates his 50th anniversary as an attorney and, equally important to him, the same 50 years of involvement with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

He found his first great love as a small child. He’d heard Bing Crosby croon  “Toora Loora Looral” when he went to see the 1940’s movie Going My Way. Walking home, he tried out his own youthful voice and found that it was fantastic.

“People had porches in those days,” he recalls with a smile. “My mother was sitting out on the porch with some of the neighbor ladies and I remember so clearly running up to them and shouting, ‘Mom! I can sing!”

And so he could.

The following week he won the talent contest at Madison Elementary School, beating out, as he calls them “the big kids...even third graders. ” He won a little album.

“It might as well have been a castle!” he says of the thrill.

He sang at every opportunity. He was featured in shows and by the time he got to what was then the Norfolk extension campus of The College of William and Mary, he was producing and emceeing shows himself.

“I had a complex,” he says unabashedly. “As I got older, I realized how poor we were. I realized that other kids had things that we didn’t, that their families had nicer houses and cars. My dad had an old truck. I know it made me louder, maybe even obnoxious. Rather than befriending me, I think, people suffered in my presence.”

He’d gotten a “poor man’s scholarship,” based purely on need. He was working at the railroad yard, selling things door to door, working in a clothing store, playing bass fiddle in a dance band,  doing anything he needed to do to earn the money to stay in school, all while he was directing a show. He was, in his words, “burning the candle at three ends.”

The piper called for his pay. Pete passed out flat on the floor in the middle of directing.

Pete Decker and his wife, Bess, who he calls his soul mate, have been married for 47 years.

“She looked like something out of a story book,” he says, marvelling at the memory. “Like a princess.”

He dropped the hand of his date for the night and worked up the courage to ask this beautiful girl’s father if he might dance with her. Dance they did.

He and Bess married six months later.

“She is my soul mate,” he says.

They’re partners in everything, Pete points out. Bess has her own office at the firm, and has her own business, Design Consultants, although she works strictly within the family business. “No one hangs a picture on the wall of any building we own without Bess’s approval,” he boasts. “She does a wonderful job with all the designing and refurbishing.”

Around the time he started his law practice, Pete’s  life took another fortuitous and most unexpected turn.  Singer and actor Danny Thomas was enlisting the help of Lebanese Americans all across the country to come together to establish a hospital that would care for children. Naming it for the patron saint of hopeless, impossible cases, he called it St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Despite the fact that he had a new law practice, a growing family, and an already full life, the ever-tireless Pete Decker signed on.

And all of a sudden that light of celebrity shined a little brighter.

All of the lights in his life were glowing, in fact. A client of his was the only one of a band group charged with singing racy songs who was found not guilty; Pete’s local reputation was on the way to being sealed. He rattles off the names of the other lawyers as only a Hampton Roads long-timer can: Gordon Campbell, Bingo Stant, Sam Goldblatt.

And, he says, “Little old me.”

His accomplishments and accolades are many. His legacy is not just his philanthropic and civic work he’s undertaken — serving as Chairman of the Norfolk Airport Commission, Chairman of the Nauticus board, and  now what he calls “the crown jewel” as a member of the Board of Visitors at Norfolk State University—but the scores of young lawyers who he has taken under his wing: “I’ve enjoyed being a celebrity lawyer,” he says, “but the best part has been helping young people understand that law is not an ivory tower.”

His regrets are few. “If I had it to do all over again, I think I’d give show business a try.”

He is humble in the face of his success. “I’d consider myself the luckiest man if I hadn’t even made an extra quarter. I have a beautiful wife who loves me, and three sons who never gave me a minute’s trouble. That is the true success in life.”

His sons—Paul, a builder, Phillip, a restaurateur, and Peter III, an attorney with his firm—share their lives closely with their parents. This past summer, the whole clan rented a house at the beach; this summer, he’s taking all of them on a cruise.

Unbidden, he offers up what he wants his epitaph to be:

“Not that I made millions, had houses and cars. God blessed me with a wonderful family and for all the years I lived, I helped children live.”