Ann Margolin

Full Transcript

this is an oral history of ann margolin on march 13th 2015 the interviewer is mae siebel good morning ann good morning we're so delighted that you have agreed to do this this will be a wonderful addition to our archive um you've done so much in the dallas area and the community we're just we're delighted to have this for our archives so tell me about your childhood where you grew up what your family was like well i grew up in cranford new jersey which is about 30 minutes outside of manhattan um i grew up in a nice middle class home went to public school have one

younger brother my mom was a teacher and education was very important and being jewish was very important so tell me about your jewish life um my grandparents my mother's parents who i grew up with my father's parents had both died before i was born so i didn't know them um but all four of my grandparents were russian immigrants and they came over to escape persecution pogroms in russia in the 1910-15 range and their commitment to judaism was very strong my grandmother used to observe shabbat every friday night and we would go there certainly not every week but often and my understanding of their background was

very central and important to my life and to my identity so what did you and your parents do you went to sunday school i'm sure tell me about your synagogue we belong to a conservative synagogue and i went to religious school two days a week after school and on sunday mornings it was a big commitment can't say i always loved it but i learned a lot i learned to read hebrew which i still know how to do so i'm grateful for that i had about mitzvah except at the time that i had it girls had theirs on friday night and were not allowed to read

from the torah so things have changed for the better since then and have you been have you read from the torah since then i actually have once yes so that's great and what what did you do for fun um as a child what are some of your memories well uh a lot of my memories have to do with theater i was in a lot of plays in high school and at summer camp and i had the lead in south pacific at camp and oklahoma and i also was an editor of the high school paper and um i was not involved in athletics um girls did

not do athletics in cranford new jersey when i was growing up that's that's really interesting um and then you went away to college yes oh one thing i forgot to tell you is i was very very active in vbyo i was uh chapter president and i was on the regional and national boards uh when i was a senior in high school i was in on the national board of benevolent girls my initial leadership experience it really was yeah that's great so where did you go to college um i went to northwestern university and i majored in communication and there was a four-year program that allowed

me to get a bachelor's degree and a master's degree simultaneously and they had just started that program and i was one of the first two people to complete it so it was a lot of work packed into four years and following that what did you do i worked for a year as a as an administrative assistant at a foundation and then i went to business school to get an mba and following that following that i went to work for standard oil of ohio in cleveland in large part because that's where fred margolin was in cleveland and so um i went there so that i could

be with him and we got married a year later um and i wasn't crazy about my job in cleveland but everything worked out in the end because uh based on some of the work that fred was doing we decided to start a business and and the business ended up being in dallas and that was happening well how did you meet fred oh we met on a blind date um we were introduced by my cousin mark my second cousin who was his best friend in high school and as it turns out it was really mark's mother who kept pushing pushing pushing for mark to introduce us

and he did and we had a very successful first date we went out for dinner and then on the way home fred asked me we were passing a bowling alley and he said you want to go bowling so we went bowling and it's the only time since i've known him that i've beaten him do you still bowl very rarely early so what what brought you to dallas what was the business it was an insurance business and there were two pieces of the business one was insurance for banks a kind of insurance that installed that insured installment loan portfolios which i won't bore you with and

the other was a program for auto dealers and so we were i mean we were both in our mid to late 20s when we got it going and we had it for about five years i was on the road a lot doing sales and servicing of accounts and then we sold the business after five years there was someone who wanted to buy it and we were fortunate to sell it it was a good thing so what you said that business brought you to dallas yes yeah so and once we sold the business at that point we were so involved and committed in dallas that there

was never a question we never even had a conversation about leaving that way never that's good but certainly to our advantage tell me about your kids um i have two children richard and jane richard is uh almost 29 he's a mechanical engineer and he builds humanoid robots so uh these right he's in business with fred they have a startup that is manufacturing robots that teach children with autism social skills as well as the robot can teach anything so it's a matter of how it's programmed so it can teach computer science it can teach languages it can do whatever you want but right now the focus

is on the skills for children with autism and i have a daughter jane who is 26 she lives in washington dc right now and she's working for a management consulting firm that does work for the federal government primarily and she hopes to follow in my footsteps and get an mba i'm sure she will for you so you sold the business after five and is that when you started getting into community work yes um i had when i was when we had the business i had joined um a couple of business organizations one of them was the north dallas chamber of commerce and there was a

group that had formed at the time executive women of dallas because at the time there weren't that many women executives or business owners and so um through those things i started getting involved in a variety of ways and um one thing led to another and it was actually largely through the north dallas chamber i got involved in local politics i supported a man named jerry bartos when he ran for city council i'm actually i did a lot more than support him he asked me to be his campaign chair so i ran his campaign which i had no idea how to do but nonetheless he won

and he appointed me to the um city plan commission which was um you know like kind of jumping into the deep end of the swimming pool i mean it really was and then a couple years later i got involved in the campaign of lee jackson when he ran for county judge and when he won he appointed me to the parkland hospital board and so um one thing led to another with parkland and i ended up after a few years becoming chairman of the board and i was the first woman chair since then there have been like every other chair or more than half have been

women and so it was like and i've just been involved in a lot of other things since then tell me about them the the organization that i probably had the most heartfelt commitment to is girls incorporated which has after-school and summer programs for low-income girls uh it really changes lives it it takes girls out of some really difficult situations gives them structure gives them the knowledge of how to apply to college gets them scholarships girls who are in girls inc and stay with it for a number of years really end up being successful so it's something i've been involved with in one way or another

i was on the board i was board chair i was advisory board um i'm still on the advisory board and and it's really near and dear to my heart and what about uh you were founder of chiapas yeah the chapis project is an organization that raises money to provide micro loans to women in developing countries in our case it was primarily latin american countries and we didn't make the loans ourselves but we provided the funds to organizations that were on the ground there and made the loans and there's a whole process involved in evaluating somebody and making a loan but the thing that was amazing

to me about it is that a hundred dollar loan could be enough to start a business and then the loan gets paid back and so the money gets used all over again so it's really incred to me it was like oh that's magic and how how did you tell me about the founding of something like that well i it was really i was called into it by my dear friend lucy billingsley who and you know i don't even remember now how she she found out about it but she was so excited about it and she and her mom had access to a friend's plane and

they took 30 of us down to mexico to see a micro lending institution on the ground so that we would get it and we came home and it was like okay we have to do this this is important so that was how i got involved with it and then your run for the city council how did that come about um it came about because um i mean this sounds like a cliche but it was really true a lot of people suggested it to me the seat was open um when mitchell razanski's term was over and he had appointed me to the park board which was

also kind of a um aligning me up to do this and so um i j it was kind of like why not i i think this would be a great way to serve i felt that i had a lot of business background and common sense to bring to the council that i could be a voice of stability and reason and i really really wanted to look into the city finances and city budget and and understand what was going on there and so um i decided to go ahead with it and my my first campaign was um surprisingly tough um but in the end i won

and while you're on the city council what are the things you bring away from that that are the most memorable that you're most proud of yeah um i really enjoyed being chair of the arts culture and libraries committee my last two years mayor rawlings appointed me to do that and to help him raise business awareness of the importance of the arts for the economy of dallas and so we created a um kind of a series of uh gatherings where we invited business leaders and would have speakers come in and the mayor would be there to kind of pitch the arts to the business community because

as generous as our business community is it has not been overwhelmingly generous to the arts and so this was to try to kind of gear that up so that was exciting um another memorable very memorable for me uh project was the zoning of the ursuline soccer field which was probably the most contentious thing i dealt with while i was on the council and in the end we approved it and so the um the girls at ursuline now have a soccer field that's contentious um i know you've been involved in other things tell me about anything we haven't covered because i know you've been busy in

the community i know why am i drawing a blank um isn't that funny what am i missing parkland girlsing chapus those are all the main things let's go back to the parkland involvement uh what did you find the biggest challenge to be there well at the time that i was on the board the biggest challenge at parkland was the nursing shortage and uh the aids epidemic and not having the budget to handle what had to be done at the time because both of those things hit us um not entirely unexpectedly but in a way that cost a lot more than we expected to we didn't

know that we were going to have to go out and pay so much more for nurses just to get them and so our budget really went awry for a couple of years it was a big challenge the thing that i'm most proud of from when i was chairman of the parkland board was that that was when we instituted the community oriented primary care clinics so parkland had never had outpatient clinics before and we opened three clinics there are now i think 21 or 22 satellite clinics because what had happened was our emergency room was overwhelmed with people who really didn't need to be in the

emergency room who were coming in with i don't know strep throats and illnesses that should be treated out in the community and so um we put the the clinics out in the community and it has made a huge difference for parkland and for the health of the communities very good um tell me about your involvement here in the jewish community um well i've been on several boards uh after i came to dallas i was on the board of the jewish community relations and then i spent quite a few years on the adl board and when i was on that board was the first time that

i took a trip to israel it was through an adl trip it was a national trip and it was fascinating because we we went on the trip with um hispanic congressmen and we we went to spain and we went to israel and the purpose of the trip was for the hispanic congressman to lobby the spanish government to recognize israel which spain had not done and so as a result of that trip not immediately but eventually spain did turn around and recognize the state of israel and so then we went to israel and we met with a lot of dignitaries it was uh shimon peres and

oh i have all the pictures in a great photo album but anyway it was a wonderful i mean it was a wonderful trip for you know a young person to be on meeting all of these high-level people and sitting in on those meetings i've been active at temple emmanuel i'm a regular saturday morning torah study person i've been going probably most weeks for 15 to 20 years my husband fred and i have co-chaired their sustaining campaign um we're you know active members well thank you so much this has been wonderful we're so happy to have had the opportunity to do your oral history thank you

i appreciate it