New York Law School’s Black Law Student Association honored General Motors vice president and general counsel Christopher Johnson Jr. last week. Mr. Johnson graduated from West Point and served in the U.S.Army from 1973 to 1978, reaching the rank of captain. He graduated from New York Law School in 1981. He currently oversees a legal staff of about 250 people and works with more than 500 outside law firms.

Addressing particularly the students and younger attorneys in the audience, he said graduating from law school brings opportunities and rewards. But, he quoted Luke 12:48 in reminding them of the responsibility to help those less privileged in society: “To whom much is given, much is required.”

He encouraged them to engage in service to their community. One way he recommended was pro bono legal work. He cited a disheartening statistic that 80% of the need for pro bono legal services goes unfulfilled.

BLSA was founded in 1968 as the Black American Law Students Association but later dropped the word “American” to include black students who were not Americans. New York Law School was founded in 1891, and it is the second oldest independent law school in America.

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SOUNDS INTERESTING At the second annual collectors’ night in Williamsburg last week, the City Reliquary hosted Allen Koenigsberg, who spoke about collecting old phonographs.

He told of the lengths to which he has gone to add to his collection. One time a tip came in at 11 p.m. concerning a phonograph in a small shop in Toronto that was closing the next morning. It takes 10 hours to drive from New York City if you don’t stop along the way, he told the audience. So he drove all night. He entertained the audience with facts about old phonographs, including one early model that that ran on water power.

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THEATRE WING TAKES FLIGHT American Theatre Wing last week honored Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, the acting duo that now rivals Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Morley Safer, Richard Thomas, and Marian Seldes were among those who came out for the evening.”To say that this is a thrill,” actor Martin Short quipped before the audience, “would be to read this off a piece of paper. Tonight, we’re not honoring Matthew and Nathan as much as the idea of Matthew and Nathan.”

The audience also laughed when Patti LuPone, in leading everyone in a champagne toast, said: “They raised the standards of the Broadway stage, and our theater is richer because of them – and God knows, they’re rich.”

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ZINSSER ANNIVERSARY The 30th anniversary edition of William Zinsser’s celebrated book “On Writing Well” (HarperCollins) will be published in early May. In his introduction, he discusses a photograph taken by Jill Krementz of E.B. White, the noted New Yorker magazine writer. The author of “Charlotte’s Web” is working at a typewriter in a boathouse on the coast of Maine.

What has and hasn’t changed from the time the photo was taken, when White was 77 years old? “Since then,” Mr. Zinsser writes, “writing has gone electronic. Computers have replaced the typewriter, the delete key has replaced the wastebasket … but nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read. That’s the point of the photograph, and it’s still the point – 30 years later – of this book.”

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RABINOW’S RETURN Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin, literary agent Steven Wasserman, and New York University sociologist Steven Lukes were in the audience Friday when cultural anthropologist Paul Rabinow delivered the keynote address at a conference on the legacy of maverick sociologist C. Wright Mills. The conference marks a return to Gotham for Mr. Rabinow, who teaches at University of California, Berkeley. He was once a student at Stuyvesant High School.

gshapiro@nysun.com