Bill Dunlap remembers meeting David Souter as a child, shaking his hand.

Decades later, Dunlap found himself before Souter again, this time for a job interview. Souter sat on the New Hampshire Historical Society’s board of trustees when Dunlap was a candidate to be the organization’s next president.

During the interview, Dunlap said he made an assertion on the society’s mission. Souter leaned back in his chair and asked him to defend his statement.

“I thought to myself, what have I gotten into? I have a retired Supreme Court justice asking me to defend my thinking,” Dunlap said, laughing. It became funny after the fact, he said, but it wracked his nerves at the time.

He fondly remembered Souter’s presence during the interview and the way he asked the question.

“He was very gracious about it. He wasn’t at all argumentative or confrontational, but he just was such a powerful intellect and so experienced at having give-and-take in conversations that he was very good at asking very penetrating questions,” Dunlap said. “I guess I defended myself sufficiently, because I got the job.”

Grace, warmth and a true sense of humanity all came to mind to friends and colleagues of Souter as they recalled their interactions with him over the years. Souter died Thursday at his Hopkinton home. He was 85.

Souter grew up in Weare and returned to New Hampshire after college to practice law. He later joined the state’s Department of Justice and rose through the ranks to become attorney general in 1976. A few years later, he was appointed as a judge to the New Hampshire Superior Court, then the state Supreme Court, then a federal court before he was tapped by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 to serve on the highest bench in Washington.

The career he built in New Hampshire inspired a young Maggie Goodlander, who said she’d go to hear him talk every chance she got.

Whether he spoke about the Constitution, civic education or citizenship, said Goodlander, now a congresswoman for New Hampshire’s second district, he was “completely gripping.”

One day, for one of her college classes, she mustered up the courage to ask if she could write his biography. He declined: “Why would you ever want to buy a biography of me?”

Goodlander said she was struck by his focus on people.

“He brought common sense that was grounded in an understanding that his decisions were ultimately about people,” Goodlander said. “Each case is a story of real people, most of whom are experiencing real harm from the government, and he really understood that.”

During his tenure as a justice, he’d always look forward to coming home from Washington, D.C. to his family’s house in Weare, where he moved at age 11.

Souter’s love of New Hampshire extended to the state’s historical society, where he not only served on the board of trustees but also donated all of his personal papers to its collection. Dunlap said these types of papers often include notes and messages scribbled in the margins and “bring a historical figure to life.”

When gifting his papers to the historical society’s care, he stipulated that they must remain sealed until 50 years after his death. Some leaders at the society tried to push back at the long timeline, but Souter wouldn’t budge.

“He said, ‘It’s either my way or the fireplace for those papers,’” Dunlap recalled.

Souter wanted them preserved just for historians, Dunlap said. He speculated that’s because Souter wanted the events in them to be a distant memory by the time they’re made public.

Many also remembered Souter as a private person, but Dunlap said he knew him to be an “incredibly warm” person who was engaging and funny in smaller groups.

“Unlike most people in public life, who are constantly seeking the spotlight, he was not,” Dunlap said. “He was his own person … Absolutely wonderful sense of humor, tremendously well-read and knowledgeable about current events, really just so perceptive about people and really a fabulous person.”

People also fondly remembered Souter’s understated lifestyle, like his daily lunch of yogurt and an apple, which he was rumored to eat in its entirety, including the core.

Former governor John Lynch, who served in the corner office of the State House during Souter’s last years on the Supreme Court, often invited him for walks or to lunch in the corner office when he was in town.

Lynch said he’d always offer to get him something to eat, but Souter always declined and would tote his own packed lunch – always with yogurt – from the federal offices to the State House.

Lynch looked back on those lunches fondly, saying they’d talk about all the pressing issues facing New Hampshire and the country. Like Goodlander, he was also struck by Souter’s ability to cut through the abstractions of law and focus on real people and impacts.

“His humanity just shone through,” said Lynch. “Everything he discussed, every decision he made, it was all about people, which, to me, was just amazing. This person with an incredible intellect would always be thinking about people.”

Souter and Lynch once performed a citizenship naturalization ceremony at Strawberry Banke in Portsmouth together, where Souter would prioritize getting to know all the new citizens and their families.

“We did a receiving line where he just expressed such an interest in each person coming through the line,” Lynch said.

The other thing he remembers about Souter was his massive library. He’d had issues getting home insurance after his move to Hopkinton, and Lynch wondered why he’d have any trouble.

“He said, ‘Oh, I don’t care about my house. I care about my books,’” Lynch said. He estimates Souter had 7,000 titles in his collection.

When Souter retired from the court in June 2009, he gave President Barack Obama his first Supreme Court vacancy to fill. Obama, a Democrat, chose Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina justice.

In retirement, Souter warned that ignorance of how government works could undermine American democracy.

“What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough ... some one person will come forward and say, ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’ That is how the Roman Republic fell,” Souter said in a 2012 interview.

He shunned Washington’s social scene. As soon as the court finished its work in late June, he climbed into his Volkswagen Jetta for the drive back to the Granite State.

Yet for all his reserve, Souter was beloved by colleagues, court employees and friends. He was a noted storyteller and generous with his time.

“Justice David Souter served our Court with great distinction for nearly twenty years. He brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. Souter continued hearing cases on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for more than a decade after he left the high court, Roberts said.

When Bush plucked Souter from obscurity in 1990, liberal interest groups feared he would be the vote that would undo the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in favor of abortion rights. He was called a stealth nominee by some.

Bush White House aide John Sununu, the former conservative governor of New Hampshire, hailed his choice as a “home run.” And early in his time in Washington, Souter was called a moderate conservative.

But he soon joined a ruling reaffirming a woman’s right to an abortion, a decision from 1992 that is his most noted work on the court. Thirty years later, a more conservative court overturned that decision and the constitutional right to abortion.

John Broderick, a former chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, praised Souter as an ethical, smart and nuanced justice. He once argued cases before Souter as a trial lawyer, and he later testified to the U.S. Senate in Souter’s confirmation hearing. In Broderick’s mind, Souter is the “first citizen” of New Hampshire.

“He was quite humble, quite private, quite intelligent, decent and nonpolitical and non-ideological. That’s, in my view, what a judge should be,” Broderick said. “If I had a personal matter that was important to me and my family and I could pick a judge in the United States to hear the case and decide it, I would’ve picked him.”

For Broderick, New Hampshire feels like a smaller place now.

“New Hampshire always seemed like a bigger place when the Supreme Court of the United States was issuing decisions and his name was on them,” he said. “It made the court alive in a different way.”

Souter had been a federal appellate judge for just over four months when picked for the high court. He had heard but one case as a federal judge, and as a state judge previously had little chance to rule on constitutional issues.

Souter biographer Tinsley Yarbrough noted, the justice did not take “extreme positions.”

In June 2008, Souter sided with Exxon Mobil Corp. and broke with his liberal colleagues in slashing the punitive damages the company owed Alaskan victims of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Souter asked precise questions during argument sessions, sometimes with a fierceness that belied his low-key manner. “He had an unerring knack of finding the weakest link in your argument,” veteran Supreme Court advocate Carter Phillips said.

Souter was history’s 105th Supreme Court justice and only its sixth bachelor.

Although hailed by The Washington Post as the capital city’s most prominent eligible single man when he moved from New Hampshire, Souter resolutely resisted the social whirl.

“I wasn’t that kind of person before I moved to Washington, and, at this age, I don’t see any reason to change,” the intensely private Souter told an acquaintance.

He worked seven days a week through most of the court’s term from October to early summer, staying at his Supreme Court office for more than 12 hours a day. He said he underwent an annual “intellectual lobotomy” at the start of each term because he had so little time to read for pleasure.

Souter rented an apartment a few miles from the court and jogged alone at Fort McNair, an Army installation near his apartment building.

Souter returned to his well-worn house in Weare for a few months each summer and was given the use of an office in a Concord courthouse.

An avid hiker, Souter spent much of his time away from work trekking through the White Mountains.

Shortly after his retirement in 2009, Souter bought a 3,500-square-foot Cape Cod-style home in Hopkinton. It was reported, though perhaps it was just part of Souter’s lore, that he worried that the foundation of the house in Weare would give way under the weight of all of his books.

Before serving as a New Hampshire judge, Souter was his state’s attorney general for two years. He worked on the attorney general’s staff for eight previous years after a brief stint in private practice.

Souter earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, and a master’s degree from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar Washington, D.C.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has a conference room named after Souter.

“There, we are reminded daily of Justice Souter’s deep intellect, his reverence for the law, his love for our state, and perhaps most of all, his humility,” New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice Gordon J. MacDonald said. “Having reached the pinnacle of our profession, Justice Souter always remained grounded in New Hampshire. We will continue to be inspired by David Souter’s remarkable legacy.”

Michaela Towfighi and the Associated Press contributed to this report. Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.