From Manilla, Iowa, to Nation’s No. 1 law firm in L.A.

One of the more powerful men in the history of Hollywood, studio boss Lew Wasserman, had some advice for a Manilla, Iowa-kid-turned Los Angeles lawyer.

“Ron,” said Wasserman. “You stay out of the limelight because it will only fade your suit.”

But one can only keep spectacular success under wraps for so long.

Ron Olson, 67, born in Carroll and raised in Manilla, a son of an insurance salesman-broker, is a primary lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson, the firm that American Lawyer magazine just named No. 1 in the nation. It is the first time the magazine has ranked a Los Angeles firm at the top.

Olson, a close, lifelong friend of the late Kenneth Macke, the former Target CEO from Carroll, is featured on the front cover of that leading legal publication looking very much like a man who belongs there.

It would be an understatement to say he comes highly recommended.

One of the more high-profile American financiers in history, Warren E. Buffett, has relied on Olson as friend and counsel for years.

“I could go on for pages about Ron — all very favorable — but there is a lot going on here so I will keep it short,” Buffett wrote in an e-mail. “Ron is a great friend and a great adviser. My wife and I made him a trustee under our will. That’s about as good an endorsement as anyone could have.”

In a phone interview from California, Olson said Buffett knows how to bring out the best in people.

“He makes friends that are very close,” Olson said.

A former Drake University halfback (when they played Division I schools), Olson projects the physical confidence of someone who even in his 60s might just believe he could still gain 10 yards if the linemen could find him a glimmer of light.

With a confident countenance, the twinkle of an office oracle, he has the commanding presence of someone able to provoke a settlement or plea bargain by just opening the door.

He has more than enough resume to back up the magazine-cover image.

Munger has represented Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in recent deals.

“They’re very responsive,” Buffett tells American Lawyer. “They get results, and they get them fast. You are dealing with extraordinarily high-quality people.”

Olson himself represented the Yahoo! Inc. board of directors in its recent merger with Microsoft.

He has represented Paramount’s chairman and the Spanish-language television Goliath Univision.

“I have a foot in Hollywood and a foot in what I would call the more traditional corporate practice,” Olson said.

Earlier in his career Olson battled in the courts for some of the men who shaped television and film — such as Norman Lear, the trailblazing creator of “All in the Family,” featuring the iconic Archie Bunker and dealing in such a raw, honest way with race and class that the show retains a relevance even in reruns today.

“These were probably the greatest television writers of all time,” Olson said.

Olson counseled Lear and other members of the creative community against Family Viewing Time in the 1970s, a period early in the evening that the Federal Communications Commission exercised tight control over — to the famous suffering of “All in the Family” and other cutting-edge programs.

“(President) Nixon and his people got it in their head that television had gotten too violent and there were too many sexual innuendos,” Olson said. “They wanted to clean up television.”

A U.S. District judge eventually ruled that the government had coerced the networks. Olson’s legal arguments literally affected the way tens of millions of Americans would spend their evenings. They could watch what they wanted.

“As a result of the case, the family hour ended,” Olson said.

If Olson had success navigating the intersections of law and Hollywood, it is in part because he excelled at choosing mentors, like Wasserman, the late Universal Studios titan, who in cutting a deal for actor Jimmy Stewart that involved a percentage of the profits in “Winchester ’73” changed the balance of power in movies to the big stars and directors.

“He was the giant,” Olson said. “There was no one bigger.”

In decades of high-profile legal work, Olson also earned an international reputation.

He represented the Republic of the Philippines against the family of deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, who left with a treasure trove of cash and other riches when they sought exile in Hawaii.

Olson helped trace the Marcoses’ ill-gotten gains. So what about the 2,700 pairs of shoes Imelda Marcos famously left behind in just one palace?

“We didn’t take those away from her,” Olson deadpanned.

Olson has a lengthy record of pro-bono work on behalf of disabled clients and Native Americans and other parties.

His firm, as the Los Angeles Times notes, also does quite well with keeping an eye on the bottom line. The firm’s revenue per lawyer increased 11 percent to $1.14 million last year, The Times reported. The firm’s total revenue was more than $200 million with 180 lawyers.

The man on the cover of American Lawyer at the top of this organization in one the nation’s largest metropolitan areas is still very much connected to the rural Iowa of his youth.

Olson not only has a 4-month-old Black Labrador, for pheasant hunting, of course, but a farm between Audubon and Kimballton, where corn and soybeans grow and cattle are raised. He returns for planting and fall hunting and on some other occasions.

Olson’s parents, Clyde “Blue” and Delpha (Boyens) Olson, were living in Aspinwall at the time of his birth, but he grew up in Manilla.

His father was a successful general broker and insurance salesman.

“My father had an especially strong presence in Manning, selling insurance to most of the major farm-to-market truckers and used Herb Kuel’s tavern as a place for receiving messages from farmers who wanted to see him,” Olson said.

Delpha Olson worked as a teacher, starting in the Great Depression, during which time she cut wood to heat the school and scooped sidewalks.

She grew up on a farm east of Irwin and for her junior and senior years of high school went to Harlan so that she could obtain “normal training.”

“That was, in those days, a way to get a teacher’s certificate without going to college,” Olson said. “There was no way for her to get back and forth between Irwin and Harlan on a daily basis for high school. Therefore, she moved into a little room above the nickel and dime store.”

Olson’s mother started teaching at the grade school then based in Aspinwall.

“She and another woman, Lucille Rowan, whose husband operated the barber chair in my grandpa’s tavern, taught all eight grades, acted as the janitors, shoveled the snow in the winter, and built the fires,” Olson said. “For all of that they were being paid $40 a month and, because this was in the midst of the Depression, mom was unable to cash the first four or five checks because the local bank holding the school district’s money had closed.

“Based on the many former students who have been part of my life, I think mom was a much beloved teacher. Later in life, she continued to teach Sunday school at the local Lutheran Church in Manilla and piano lessons. At her funeral, I took note of the fact that her piano students may not have progressed as far in their piano studies with my mom as they might have with others, but I was sure that nobody could have taught them more about love. She was special.”

The family lived in Manilla among a number of relatives. For his part, Olson graduated from Manilla High School in 1959.

“I did all the things you do in small-town schools — played all the sports, band, chorus, and even an opera, ” Olson said. “It was a great opportunity. It was like having the whole town rooting for you. I know Ken Macke felt the same way, and ever since I’ve had the same feeling — a feeling that the whole town has continued to root for me.”

Through the years, Olson with Manilla ties, and Macke, a Carroll native, shared western Iowa roots with success on larger professional stages.

“I think there’s a lot of what we grew up with in western Iowa,” Olson said. “Part of it is just as simple as you learn how to work. That’s an important aspect of anyone’s career. You learn how to work and you learn how to respect people. Growing up as he and I did you really didn’t have a sense of anyone being rich or poor. You didn’t have to have someone validated by some fancy credential. It’s a place of very few excesses. I think that’s wonderful.”

It’s an experience he shares with his wife.

Olson and his wife of 44 years, Jane (Tenhulzen) of Denison, have three children: Kritstin McKissick of Denver, a graduate of Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University with experience at the World Bank for which she was, among other things, the country officer for Nicaragua; Steven Olson, a Stanford University and University of Michigan Law School graduate who is in private practice in Los Angeles; and Amy Duerk of Missoula, Mont., a graduate of Carlton College (where she was captain of the soccer team) and the University of Michigan Law School. She has worked for the Environmental Protection Agency as well as a law firm in San Francisco. She now practices law in Missoula.

American Lawyer recently featured the father-son tandem of Ron Olson and Steven Olson among its “paternal powerhouses” along with such notable figures as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his son Eugene, and former Secretary of State James Baker III and his son.

Olson’s wife, a University of Nebraska graduate, started a journalism career in Denison. Olson recalls many instances in which his courted gal ran off to cover stories, leaving his plans changed for the evening.
“She was a committed journalist,” Olson said. “You know the type.”

While he was in law school she worked as a writer for the Ypsilanti Press in Michigan and, later, during his time in England she was a journalist in Oxford, England.

Ron Olson has a younger brother, Dr. James Olson, now living in Seattle, Wash.

Following high school Olson headed to Drake University — although he had an opportunity to go to the Ivy League.

“I was really the first in my family to go to college,” Olson said. “Today, I recognize the difference between Drake and Dartmouth, but in those days it looked an awful long ways away.”

At Drake, Olson played halfback and was involved with student government and debate.

Olson recalled the old-school practices of the 1950s in which two players competing for a starting job would be thrown into a pit, with the one emerging getting the spot.

“That was pretty tough going,” said Olson, who played halfback.

He remembers a strategy the two Drake friends employed to surreptitiously hydrate themselves at practice as coaches wouldn’t let players drink water in an effort to toughen them.

Olson and Macke would bury lemons in the field the night before, dig them out when coaches weren’t looking the next day and chomp on the fruit for the fluids.

Excelling at Drake, Olson was accepted at the prestigious University of Michigan Law School. He did well there and earned a Ford Foundation fellowship. Studying in Oxford, England, in 1967, Olson started a lifelong friendship with former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., a candidate for the presidency in 2000.

Olson played on an American basketball squad with Bradley, a Rhodes Scholar.

“My job was to feed Bradley,” Olson said. “I was point guard, but I wanted to be sure he did the shooting.”
It’s a strategy that’s worked well at Munger, Tolles & Olson, where Ron Olson for 30 years has worked to find the nation’s top legal talent — and get them the ball, so to speak.

His endgame: develop young lawyers into great lawyers.

“Focusing on dollars and cents wasn’t enough,” Olson said.