the leader of a local trio. Fortas attended South Side High School where, at the age of sixteen, he graduated second in his class in 1926. After graduating from high school, Fortas won a scholarship to attend Southwestern at Memphis, a liberal arts college now called Rhodes College. At first, Fortas considered studying music, before settling on English and political science and graduated first in his class in 1930. Fortas earned scholarships from both Harvard Law School and Yale Law School but ultimately decided to attend Yale, becoming the youngest law student there at 20 years old. He became editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and graduated cum laude and second in the class of 1933. One of his professors, William O. Douglas, was impressed with Fortas, and Douglas arranged for Fortas to stay at Yale to become an assistant professor of law. Shortly thereafter, Douglas took on a series of government positions, including with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in Washington, D.C. In 1937, he was made assistant director of the public utilities division at the SEC. Throughout this period, Fortas commuted between New Haven and Washington in order to fulfill his responsibilities to Yale and the government. Personal life In 1935, Fortas married Carolyn E. Agger, who became a successful tax lawyer. They had no children, and after his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, they lived at 3210 R Street NW in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Fortas was an amateur musician who played the violin in a quartet, called the "N Street Strictly-no-refunds String Quartet" on Sunday evenings. It often included prominent musicians passing through town, such as Isaac Stern. Fortas was a good friend of the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, calling him "a spectacularly great figure". Fortas visited the island often, frequently lobbied for the island's interests in Congress, participated in drafting the Constitution of Puerto Rico, and gave legal advice to Marín's administration whenever requested. The Puerto Rican actor José Ferrer portrayed Fortas in the film Gideon's Trumpet (1980). Early career Leaving Yale in 1939, Fortas served as general counsel of the Public Works Administration and then as Undersecretary of the Interior in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. While he was working at the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, introduced