Steve Novick's parents and brother all tell the same story about his decision to leave a well-heeled New York law firm just one year after he graduated from Harvard Law School.
As his family explains it, Novick found out that he would have to defend a giant pharmaceutical firm that had sold an allegedly dangerous drug and he just couldn't do that.
The only problem: Novick himself says the story isn't true. The firm did have a drug case that he might not have relished taking on. But he says he left because he was simply lonely and wanted to come back West.
By his early 20s, Novick had overcome so much in the eyes of those around him that they had trouble believing that he could fall prey to the normal doubts and uncertainties of life. Literally from the time he was born -- when his mother says a doctor saw his deformed feet and tried to strangle him in the birth canal -- he had been overcoming a deck stacked against him, often in spectacular fashion.
Now, at 45, Novick continues to challenge the odds. He has turned himself from a political insider virtually unknown to the general public into a credible first-time candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, one who just might beat the pick of the party's establishment, House Speaker Jeff Merkley, to face Republican incumbent Gordon Smith.
Win or lose, Novick has created a political brand for himself. His political ads have gone viral on the Internet and you can't go to a Democratic event without seeing people wearing "votehook.com" buttons -- a reference to the birth defects that are his most obvious feature.
Novick's campaign and life are defined by more than his 4-foot-9 stature and the hook that serves as his left hand. He graduated from Harvard Law School at 21, and was soon handling multimillion-dollar lawsuits for the federal government. The son of back-to-the-land New Left parents, he still reflexively jumps to the side of the poor and the working class, the unions and the environment.
Now he's hoping voters will buy a colorful progressive who is always ready with an acerbic quip -- and who is willing to say tax hikes have to do more than hit the wealthy but also must touch the top ranks of the middle class.
"Even if people disagree with you sometimes, they would rather have somebody who stands up for principle than somebody who is caving," he says. "We learned that with Ronald Reagan. People disagreed with Ronald Reagan on a whole host of issues but they were willing to vote for him because they thought he said what he believed, even if they thought what he believed was nuts."
Unconventional childhood
Novick's upbringing was far from conventional. His mother was forced to drop out of college when she became pregnant with him at 18. She briefly married his biological father, but the marriage soon ended. Rebecca Novick Harmon says she later learned that her doctor had tried to prevent her son's birth, and she described a series of challenges in his early years.
Other doctors, believing he would never walk, wanted to amputate his feet. She resisted and moved to Massachusetts, where she could get public funding for an operation to break and reset his legs to help him walk (nature hikes eventually became one of his favorite activities).
Early on, she says, it was clear her son was bright, memorizing Dr. Seuss books before he could read.
More remarkably, he seemed perpetually upbeat and determined. His stepfather, Bob Novick, came into the family when Steve was 5. "He had a lot of the same characteristics that are the same now," the elder Novick says. "He was real quick, very cute and very determined and very courageous."
His mother taught at a Head Start center in San Francisco, and her son was the only white kid in the class. Within a couple of weeks, by sheer force of personality, he had turned bullies into friends. Whether it was hanging laundry or playing pickup softball, he always wanted to be part of the action.
"I just sort of did what I could do," Steve Novick says. "It's not like I remember that I had all these obstacles to overcome."
His family eventually settled on a farm near Cottage Grove, where his mother supported the family as a waitress. There wasn't much money. But the tight-knit family, which grew to include two younger brothers, reveled in books, music and plenty of left-wing politics.
"The kid didn't have a chance," says Harmon with a laugh. "He was raised on Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and one of the first (adult) books he read -- he was probably 9 or 10 -- was 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,' " the story of the American West from the Native American perspective.
When he was 13, Novick's local school shut down after voters defeated a tax levy. Novick learned he could take classes at the University of Oregon. Within months, he had entered UO's honors college, and by age 18, had received a bachelor's degree in history and math and was accepted to Harvard Law.
Superfund expert
After law school, Novick tried out big firms in New York and San Francisco. Feeling adrift, he moved to Washington, D.C., and got his dream job, working in environmental enforcement for the Department of Justice.
Novick plunged into the arcane task of determining the costs polluters must pay under the federal Superfund law. The new law was still being interpreted by the courts, and several lawyers involved in the issue say Novick played an important role in helping make the case that the government should be reimbursed for all cleanup costs, regardless of whether the polluter thought the costs were too high.
"A lot of the precedent that went into the law of Superfund cost recovery really sprang out of Steve Novick's brain," says Steve Gold, a Rutgers law professor who worked with Novick.
Novick, whom colleagues called the "king of costs," became one of the lead government attorneys in legal action stemming from the notorious Love Canal chemical pollution disaster in New York state.
By the fall of 1995, Novick and other Justice Department attorneys were locked in intense negotiations with the Occidental Chemical Corp. over how much the company would pay.
Steve Yablonski, Occidental's lead attorney in the final negotiations, described Novick as one of the few people who could have successfully reached a deal that called for the company to pay $129 million in damages. "He is just several notches above most people," Yablonski says. "He is a really bright guy, and yet he is not an egghead who can't function with most people."
Back in Oregon
Itching to get more involved in politics, Novick returned to Oregon to work on Tom Bruggere's losing Senate campaign against Smith in 1996. A succession of political jobs followed.
As the caucus administrator for Oregon Senate Democrats in 1997, Novick always looked for a catchy issue to tweak the Republicans then in the majority.
"He would whisper something in my ear about the corporate tax rate or the kicker," recalls Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard, then a state senator, "and before you know it he and I would sitting down and I would be writing out some remarks that I would take to the floor and would just outrage the Republicans. . . . I essentially became a mouthpiece for Steve."
In 1999, Novick was asked to lay the groundwork for the campaign against another tax-cut measure from Bill Sizemore. Novick leaped to the cause.
Novick became an expert on taxes and government spending, defending a public sector he saw as under siege.
He encouraged school activists to fight what he saw as overly generous video lottery commissions to retailers, but when he worked on Ted Kulongoski's race for governor, he didn't like how the candidate suggested there was waste in the schools. Novick says he didn't go to work afterward for the new governor because "I worried that I would be progressive window dressing in his administration."
Instead, he worked for the new state schools superintendent and then for a union-sponsored nonprofit that explained and essentially defended government finances.
Money not a priority
Novick rarely made as much as he had as a lawyer at the Justice Department, but that didn't seem to bother him. His girlfriend, Julia Bunnell, an Environmental Protection Agency official in Washington, explains: "There is so much going on in his mind all the time, he's always reading, learning and talking and getting information, I'm not sure he has the time to think about" acquiring things.
Everywhere he went, Novick quickly nested himself in a haphazard stack of paper that one co-worker joked became a tourist attraction. He was as unselfconscious about that as everything else. At parties, he'd plop down on the floor with curious kids to show how his hook worked.
"It's always a sense with Steve that you're joining a merry band of men," Portland political consultant Mark Wiener says. "He has a remarkable circle of friends who are in love with him. . . . Steve Novick has gotten more people to do things than any other adult I know."
For two years running, Novick persuaded friends and colleagues to parade around Pioneer Courthouse Square on April 15 with signs thanking taxpayers and chanting things like, "Payin' taxes can be rough, but they pay for important stuff."
Those on the receiving end of Novick's barbs could feel different. Anti-tax activist Sizemore debated Novick once and says of him, "I was just impressed that he was more acerbic and abrasive and in your face than a typical public figure would be. It would be like he didn't care much for the normal protocol of niceties. . . . If he wanted to call people names, he just did."
As Novick gets deeper into his own candidacy, he's become more careful. In September, he said in an interview that he would be "more willing to be critical" of the U.S. Senate Democratic leadership than Merkley. But by April, he said: "I'll be a team player and I want to help. I think that part of your job is to help (Democratic leader) Harry Reid be the best leader he can be."
It is a reminder of how far Novick is suddenly attempting to reach up the political ladder. He has thought of running for office for several years. In 2001, he prepared to run for a state House seat until redistricting moved his Southeast Portland home into a neighboring district.
Then he turned his sights on the congressional seat held by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., who seriously considered running for Portland mayor in 2004. But Blumenauer decided to stay put.
Novick considered dropping out of this year's Senate race after his youngest brother, Mischa, who had struggled with serious back pain, died of a drug overdose in May 2007. Steve Novick, who talked to both of his brothers on the phone virtually every day, says softly, "It helps to have something to do every day that is intense. . . . I miss him an awful lot."
If Rep. Peter DeFazio -- the consensus choice among Democrats as the strongest challenger to Smith -- had decided to run, Novick says he would have bowed out once again.
The Novick brand would have still been strictly for political insiders only.
