July 15, 2014

Arnie Marks

Arnie Marks was born in 1942 in Chicago during World War Two, when his father was serving stateside in the military. He grew up on the city's West Side, then in Albany Park, living for a time with his mother's parents alongside his mom, dad, and younger sister. His grandparents were Eastern European immigrants from The Pale of Settlement, and his father had come to America from Russia as a young boy of six or seven. Arnie remembered his parents as easygoing, happy people who taught him to be content with what he had, and recalled a childhood of school, baseball on gravel fields, swimming, and visits to Riverview Park.

The family moved to Evanston around 1959 or 1960, where Arnie swam competitively at Evanston Township High School. He attended the University of Illinois, discovering a passion for psychology and family dynamics while working as a camp counselor at a camp in the Lake Delavan area of Wisconsin. He met his wife Ellen, also from Chicago, when she visited the sorority house where he worked as a waiter, and they married in 1966. As an obligatory volunteer during the Vietnam era, he served three years as an officer in the Army Medical Service Corps at William Beaumont Hospital, Fort Bliss, in El Paso, working with young recruits adjusting to military life. He later held a fellowship at the Menninger Foundation in Kansas and directed outpatient services at a community mental health center in Philadelphia, where his two children were born.

Drawn back to the warmth of the Southwest, Arnie moved his family to Dallas in 1976 to become director of Jewish Family Service, a Federation constituent agency. He was recruited to help meet the challenge of resettling Soviet Jewish immigrants, offering language classes, employment help, counseling, and volunteer support, and he worked to involve the whole community rather than a single agency. He viewed the effort as helping build the Dallas Jewish community itself, and considered it deeply rewarding. He left Jewish Family Service in 1992 to pursue other work. Arnie went on to serve with the Defense Department and responded to crises including Hurricane Katrina and the Ebola situation at a Dallas hospital, and he has remained a dedicated advocate for veterans. He and Ellen were approaching their 50th anniversary, with two children and four grandchildren, and his advice to the next generation is to follow their passion and provide service to others.

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