No one sent me more letters in the mail than Jon Peter Genrich. These are single-spaced, multiple-page letters banged out on a manual typewriter.

It’s not like I knew him that well. He was an assistant district attorney in Milwaukee County at the time I covered criminal courts for The Milwaukee Journal in the early 1990s. I would pop in his office, sniffing around for news, and we’d talk.

I was a reporter pretending to understand the complex workings of the justice system. He was a pro with a leakproof legal mind who shared his expertise in memos and briefs with the other, mostly younger, prosecutors.

Pete — that’s the name he preferred — was then in the twilight of his career. He often boasted that he was the first assistant hired by newly elected District Attorney E. Michael McCann. Most of his letters mention that exact date, Jan. 6, 1969, and his retirement date, Feb. 10, 1995, along with his eight-digit state bar number.

When I saw Pete’s death notice in the paper last month, I dug around in some drawers at work and found a thick folder labeled “Genrich letters.” Inside were 58 letters, and those are just the ones I saved.

He sent them between 1997 and 2001, all post-retirement. Almost none of them were actually to me. Others and I were cc’d in photocopied or carbon-paper letters to judges, fellow lawyers, politicians, professors, his grown children, the Journal Sentinel editorial board and one of his favorite pen pals, former mayor Frank Zeidler.

Notes to me were scribbled in the margins and signed “Pete” in quote marks just like that. Sometimes he’d apologize for typos or indicate “not for publication.” Once he faxed a letter to me from a printing store, but then went right back to envelopes and stamps.

His topics were many, his reasoning always sound and based on lessons from history and the wise words of his heroes like Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow.

“My lasting impression,” he wrote in a typical letter, this one on the overhaul of the criminal code, “is that Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence — in layman’s terms, history repeats itself — has validity, surely in kind if not in degree. … If we could ever learn something from history, maybe we could make some lasting fundamental changes.”

Pete held forth, for example, on politics, capital punishment, highway safety, drug policy, domestic violence, prostitution and truancy, which he saw plenty of during his years working in Children’s Court. Oh, and baseball. He loved baseball and saw the game as a metaphor for life.

Sometimes, I’ll admit, an arcane subject line like this one made me hesitant to read on: “The need for legislatively mandated impact statement in the area of child welfare law and enforcement and implementation.”

But I always admired the way he scratched his itch to be heard. His style came across as old-timey, eccentric and, by today’s standard of 140 characters on Twitter, a bit long-winded.

“The last letter he ever wrote,” said his son, David, “was single-spaced and written on the same typewriter, probably around Thanksgiving of 2013. And it was about Lincoln.”

“He saved everything he wrote, and we have all this stuff here in Minneapolis,” where David is a federal prosecutor and where Pete spent the final years of his life.

Pete, a proud native of Wausau who lived to be 77, never drove a car and, in fact, saw them as instruments of death and “multi-ton horizontal missiles.”

“He walked everywhere he went. He used a photocopier at a convenience store down the way from where he lived on Martha Washington Drive in Wauwatosa. He hand-addressed the envelopes, and he always used too much postage. He never owned a computer. He never owned a smartphone. He never entered into the digital age,” David said.

Pete didn’t see justice as winning, but rather as a search for truth, David said. He would assemble his young children in the living room to watch inspirational movies like “Inherit the Wind.” There was one great truth that Pete included on all notes and cards to his four kids: Love is eternal.

Former district attorney McCann saw Pete as the quintessence of integrity. When Pete applied to work for him, he admitted to McCann that he had written published opinion pieces opposed to the war in Vietnam. He wanted to make sure this wouldn’t be a problem for his elected boss.

McCann also received copies of numerous Genrich letters over the years.

“He had what I would call a Victorian correspondence with Mayor Zeidler. Back and forth. Serious intellectual issues. The email generation would be absolutely stupefied by those letters,” McCann said.

I remember a conversation with Pete in which he was dismayed that I knew nothing of the “sifting and winnowing” plaque on Bascom Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he went to school. When my two daughters later attended UW, I made sure they saw the plaque and understood its call for fearless pursuit of the truth.

Like you find in every letter typewritten by Jon Peter Genrich.

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or email at jstingl@jrn.com

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