March 15, 2012

Anita Marcus

Anita Roman Marcus was born into a large and closely connected Dallas family. Her father came from Russia to Dallas in 1911, arriving with a five dollar gold piece and little English, and worked long hours in his uncle's business before joining his brother in the family baking business. Her mother came from Poland as a young child, and the two met and married in Dallas. Anita was one of four children, with an older brother Phil, a beautiful sister Ethel who died young at 32, and a younger brother Larry. The family lived first in South Dallas and moved to Oak Cliff when Anita was young, where her father became so respected that he won an award for outstanding community service and was known informally as the mayor of Oak Cliff.

Growing up in the fundamentalist, conservative environment of Oak Cliff, Anita attended Sunday school at Congregation Shearith Israel, to which her family remained closely aligned; her grandfather was a Talmudic scholar who led study discussions. She was often the only Jewish student at Sunset High School but recalled experiencing no overt anti-Semitism. She attended SMU and then graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1947 with a major in English. She married Charles Marcus, a World War Two veteran raised in rural Mississippi who came to Dallas to practice, and the couple were married for sixty years. They raised two children, Fraser, who lived many years in England, and Carolyn, who built a career in the food business and settled in Dallas.

Anita became a professional-caliber volunteer whose life work centered on advocacy through the National Council of Jewish Women, where she served as local section president, first Southern District president, a national board member, and public affairs chair for the state of Texas. She organized community forums such as Women on the Move, which brought together Jewish, Catholic, and African American women, and she led efforts to improve child care quality and to reform Texas juvenile justice. Over roughly a dozen years she helped create statewide coalitions, contributed to the founding of the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, and worked to remove children from adult city jails. She also served the Jewish Family Service, the Jewish Community Center, the League of Women Voters, the Women's Council, and the City of Dallas Human Resources Commission, and taught English at Vickery Meadow. Motivated by her parents' belief that one must give back to the community, she took pride in a lifetime of work aimed at changing what was not right.

Married sixty years to Charles Marcus, Anita raised two children and remained a devoted matriarch of a large Dallas family that gathers regularly.

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