Alan Greenberg
Alan was born in Rochester, New York, on December 7, 1942, just after Pearl Harbor. His mother, Fay Mintloff, grew up in Rochester, and his father, Julius, came from New York City to work for Alan's uncle, a pharmacist. Julius later opened his own pharmacy and ran it for over 25 years, working nearly all the time, while Alan's mother kept a warm home for Alan and his younger sister. His mother's family came from Russia; his grandfather arrived first, followed by his grandmother and three of her seven children. Alan's mother, born in Rochester as the youngest, lived to age 95.
Alan's family belonged to a temple where he attended Hebrew school for five years and celebrated holidays, gathering with aunts, uncles, and cousins at his grandmother's home for Passover. His mother volunteered faithfully, including monthly visits with her sisters to help at a leper colony in upstate New York. Alan loved baseball and spent much of his free time working at his father's drugstore, in part to be near his hard-working father. He attended college, joined the Delta Sigma fraternity, and studied marketing and finance, then served roughly six years in the Army Reserve, training at Fort Dix.
Alan's career included work with a retail organization, a belt manufacturer, J.C. Penney, and Merrill Lynch, where he trained in Boston and worked in the New York area on the operations side. After marrying Susan and welcoming son Daniel in 1970, the family moved back to Rochester around 1978. Alan later worked in purchasing for a community hospital and then for Strong Memorial Hospital for about eight years before retiring at 62. In retirement he volunteers with the Humane Society's Lollipop Farm, a food bank, and other groups. He speaks with pride of Daniel's family and his two young granddaughters, Abby and Zoey.
Full Transcript
today is friday april 11 2014 my name is deborah polski with the dallas jewish historical society and i'm interviewing alan greenberg and we're going to talk a little bit about his life so alan tell me a little bit about your family history my mother's maiden name was uh fey mintloff and my father's name is julius my mother grew up in rochester new york and my father grew up in new york city and i don't even know how they meant to be honest with you i know my father came to rochester to work for my uncle my father was a pharmacist and he worked for my uncle hai and his pharmacy and then he opened up his own and he was in business for over 25 years my mother was stayed at home took care of myself and my sister have a younger sister she's three years younger what else where and when were you born born december 7th 1942.
wow you're after pearl harbor in rochester rochester right okay and do you know when your family came to the united states or how they came where they came from um [Music] my mother's side i know more about than my father's side my mother's family came from russia i believe and i guess my grandfather who i he passed away before i was ever born he was here before my grandmother and she came over with i think three children and my mother was the youngest and my mother lived to be 95 she passed away about four years ago and my father passed away about 14 years ago
so your mother was actually born in russia no no she was the baby born in new york she was born in new york okay she was born in rochester okay and hers what but her siblings were born uh in russia or three of them were okay three correct okay and she had a total of seven and did you know you said one of your grandparents was gone before you were born did you know your other grandparents just my my father's mother my grandfather also passed away before i was born and she lived with my father's sister and we didn't see her too often we generally
we're involved with my parent my mother's mother excited her family got it and do you know what um brought them to america or why they came you got through it i have no idea no i wasn't too involved in that kind of stuff yeah that's no idea pretty typical i mean most of us don't know a lot about where the you know where they came from what so you grew up in rochester in the you know obviously beginning of world war ii during world war ii you were a young child um what do you remember as a child i mean what kinds of things did
you like to do can you tell me a little about what your family life was like [Laughter] uh my mother was a great how should i put it she was a great housekeeper great cook baker took care of me and my sister my father basically worked all the time i rarely saw my father i would see him if i went when i was older to work in the drugstore but he was never home basically so my mother took care of us what um you said you have a younger sister and um what kind of what was your neighborhood like was it a mixed neighborhood was
it jewish was it no we lived uh i think when i was 12 years old we moved from the first house i recall it was on holobeck street and then we moved to runaway which was basically a jewish area and that's where i grew up went to school there for like the sixth grade until senior in high school mm-hmm and where was your family involved in the jewish community or the involvement was belonging to temple that was basically it like i said my father worked right my father really didn't take any time off until he retired which was kind of sad when you think about
it but pretty good for that generation yeah yeah especially if you owned your own business and and were responsible for it do you remember celebrating jewish holidays oh yes what was to tell me a little bit about what that was like what would passover have been like we'd go to my grandmother's house and my mother's sister and my uncle two cousins and my uncles and aunts there must be like 12 15 people there yeah we did that my grandmother gee she was i think in the early 60s i believe so uh yes it was fun i enjoyed it i went to hebrew school for five
years and a bar mitzvah and all that stuff and everything right typical did you go on after bar mitzvah tell me about your friends growing up what do you remember what kind of what kinds of things did you like to play or what kinds of things activities did you do i like to play baseball as involved in sports unfortunately i didn't study that much my friends were a lot smarter to me so i don't know if they were smarter but they applied themselves more than i did and uh school didn't mean that much to me i didn't really care i got by right and uh
later on i was sorry about that but what are you gonna do that's life but i did okay so you were interested in baseball what other kinds of things did you do for fun either with your friends or as a family family like i said was kind of difficult because of my father really working all the time i remember he'd have some a pharmacist come in to replace him say at five o'clock and he still wouldn't come home to seven or later he was that was his life he didn't know any better and my mother had to take care of us in so many different
ways this is scary uh did she have things that she was involved in like you know whether it was temple sisterhood or mahjong group or things i don't know whatever canasta whatever women played back then and this is going to sound funny but it's true up in new york state they had a leper colony and there were several jews there and i remember my mother and my two aunts they used to go up there like once a month to help out wow and she did that for years for years and years and she was involved in the tempo we when i grew up we belong
to an older temple and that's where i had my bar mitzvah and then we moved and then belonged to another temple it kept changing over the years okay um so you said you weren't that interested as a student um but were you involved in activities in in high school or you know other than sports or what kind of sports to be honest the bulk of my free time i wanted to work at my father's store maybe that was because i wanted to see him i don't know because i never saw him and that's the only time i'd get to see him so i thought about
that that could be a reason i spent a lot of time there as so what did you do after high school went to college where and where did you go well i was going to the university of miami till i was accepted somewhere else my average wasn't that great but i had friends that were accepted at writer in new jersey if he got accepted there's no reason why i couldn't get accepted so that's where i wound up and what kinds of activities were you involved in in college well is it a fraternity what fraternity you're asking delta c okay yeah that was me again i
did not apply myself but i got by i got by what what did you study marketing finance how did that lead to a career or did it a career well as soon as as i graduated from college in may i received the notice from uncle sam that he wanted me and i figured i'd be in vietnam and i wouldn't come home i never wore boots in my life never carried a weapon right so i ran down to my local reserve center and fortunately got in and i signed up actually with a couple friends and we were supposed to go down to uh fort dix in
new jersey together but somehow my paperwork got lost and they went in july and i didn't wind up going to november and it was that was a fun experience it was kind of humorous yeah we were in a unit where the bulk of the guys were college graduates the sergeants didn't like us because we and i it was just humorous they keep kept threatening me with recycling me but i knew they could only keep me for six months so they can do whatever they want it to be and just let it go very rewarding experience so you and say you were in a reserve for
seven years for six years yeah i went to all the meetings not like a lot of people right and i i moved from rochester i wound up going to boston for a training when i started to work for merrill lynch so i was there for six months and i wound up coming back to new york and was in fort totten for a couple years that was my army career i guess that's not exactly what they meant when they said join the army see the world true true i saw new jersey that was about it and more of new jersey yeah it could have been a
lot worse true absolutely true and so you went to work for merrill lynch well that was my first job my first job was with a retail organization it was called sibleys and i worked there for about a year year and a half and then i went to hickok manufacturing they made belts mm-hmm i went to uh j.c penney and during that time i married daniel's mother no one liked the job i had or the future i had there so i started looking for other work and wound up getting a job with merrell wanted training in boston because at that time the opera i was going
to operations not sales the the other end and the manager that was in rochester was being terminated so they didn't want me to train there so i wound up in boston for six months and then after that two more months in new york and then after the class you're interviewed by managers of offices you're just not given an office so i wound up in manhattan at long island and worked for a crazy man that's the way he was uh i was there for about two two and a half and then i just moved up the road to guardian city which was a much larger office
more productive more money and everything stayed with maryland about 78 and we wanted to move back to rochester daniel with that dane was born in 1970 so dan was about eight years old and we moved back to rochester susan my wife and myself we took a position with ross a division of ross and purina and what it was today you'd laugh at it but anyway it was a a party plant similar to tupperware selling plants and stones and hydroponics it was done through the party plant it was a neat idea but i wound up getting into the business end of the company and could see
it wasn't going to last because people were stealing hundreds of dollars from the company and it didn't last it lasted maybe four years then what happened okay still in rochester and susan uh got involved with this financial organization and she really did well she loved it traveled a lot really enjoyed it and i wound up with a position with the county working for the community hospital in community functions uh supplies ordering products stuff to that effect that's a was not a very difficult job in about 90 95 96 that position was eliminated through the and i wound up after a couple months going to the
working for the largest hospital rochester strong memorial hospital and wound up there for about eight years basically in purchasing for all that time which i really enjoyed when i retired when i was 62 i just decided to retire so you have your son dan daniel that's it that's it and you talked a lot about the fact that your father worked all the time typical of his generation did you find yourself how did you find yourself being as a as a different kind of father well daniel was not easy growing up he was kind of a difficult kid to work with he he was more involved
with his mother than he was with me and he became very involved with computers when he was about nine ten years old wow because we bought a computer and whatever and he basically lived in a room on the first floor with his computer until he finished icebook and he's always loved computers and i don't even know what he does do you know what he does today i have no idea i know it's in the computers but what that means who knows but he's done that for so many years he really loves it i think we're closer now than we were years ago not that we're
that close but we're closer than we were he's he's kind of difficult to get close with but he's i'm proud of him he's not okay and so what have you been doing since retirement you said your father was more available after he retired did he take up hobbies or did he do other things since he had really just been a warp person who worked well the problem is that i have to be honest about this we moved back to rochester in 1978 lived with my parents till she was in her 40s and my parents really had nothing to do with daniel that always always and
to this day which is stupid bothers me my sister in my mind was afraid that my parents would show attention for daniel their only grandchild and forget about her so daniel was he was there and that was it they never knew him grandparents-wise he spent his time with my wife's parents it still hurts still hurts but what are you going to do that's the way it was right and my sister to this day thinks she did everything the right way i mean it's whatever right and so obviously you have a relationship with your grandchildren and how old are they three three they have three and
a half and their names abby and zoey abby and you so you come down to visit not as much as i should come down like twice a year should be more as i get older oh it's amazing the difference i've seen from october the way they've changed it's just dramatic what do you um what if i said to you what are you most proud of in your life what would you what would you say i don't know i have a problem i didn't do anything it was anything to be proud of i can't think of anything it's just what an average life that's all yeah
all right well we'll let that one just do a little who who would you say were your role models we'll pass that one too okay we have no idea where there yeah there weren't you know teachers or scout leaders people like that as i said previously i i didn't take advantage of school i did as little as possible to get by when i had to i could but i just there was no pushing on my parents part or anything to that effect so whatever i did was so now that you're retired what are your interests what are the things that you like to do well
i volunteer at uh three different organizations i'm going to be doing more that's great tell me about the organizations well one was uh meals on wheels which i basically gave up because i moved from one part of rochester to another and it just became a pain now i'm working in a place it's humane society it's called lollipop farm doing that the food bank in rochester and town of brighton which is actually run by the jewish family service which i don't understand how that works do you know how hard what what do they really do what's their involvement it's more of a central location um you
know generally the jewish family service here has a food bank it's just you know another place where people can come they try to kind of spread them out most of them are funded by united way at some level and is there any funding from the jewish family service that's what i can't figure out sure there is funding [Applause] yeah is there a local food bank in dallas yeah we have the north texas food bank there's lots of food banks around but one of them is that jewish jewish family service has their own as well you know they try to meet all kinds of different needs
i guess and you said so you spend some time volunteering what else are you interested in i don't play bridge starting to learn how to play canasta which is all right it's no big deal but in college played euchre and other games that i've totally forgotten about but you can play that all over the place that's about it do you still have are you still in touch with friends that you knew growing up or in college unfortunately most of my friends have passed away yeah it's kind of sad but that's the way it is what else would you like to tell us about either your
family or your your life your history what what would you like your children and grandchildren to know well i guess i'm very happy that daniel met leah and that he has two children to see their way they're progressing and i know it's leah's hard work because daniel daniel's not around either he's there but he's not there that's that's what i guess i'm the proudest of that's a lot anything else you'd like to share this has been very difficult no no i i'm generally a quiet guy and like i said to leah if i knew this was going to be like this over the time but
anyway you're going to love it it's done it's over with absolutely all right well thank you so much thank you we really appreciate it and um we will make a copy of this and