Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts to Armenian immigrant parents who had escaped the Hamidian massacres in the Ottoman Empire, Garry grew up in a farm town in California's Central Valley. The family name was originally Garabedian. He worked his way through law school at night at a cleaning shop and was a Great Depression-era socialist who began his legal career defending militant trade unions. Like many in his generation, Garry earned his law degree without attending college, and suffered difficulty with spelling and syntax. An avowed Marxist lawyer, Garry earned a reputation of fighting for underdogs. He insisted on a full truthful disclosure from those he represented, and had a sign on his desk that read "the only clients of mine who go to San Quentin are the ones who lie to me."