Arnold Sweet
Arnold Sweet's mother came from a small town near Kiev in Russia, brought to the United States one at a time by her older brother Meyer, who saved enough over years to reunite the family. His father was born in Chicago and, with his brother, ran a hat manufacturing company in Minneapolis before opening a store in Dallas. There Arnie's parents met and fell in love. The family business, Sweet Hat and Cap Company, evolved with fashion trends from caps to hats, sportswear, and ties, and was located on Commerce Street among a cluster of small Jewish-owned garment businesses across from the Chamber of Commerce.
Born in South Dallas and raised in Lakewood and later near University Park, Arnie attended William Lipscomb grammar school, junior high, and Highland Park High School. He spent six years at the University of Texas in Austin, earning a Bachelor of Business and a law degree. His first job was as an assistant district attorney, after which he entered private practice handling criminal, civil, and mediation matters. The family belonged to Shearith Israel, celebrated Passover and the High Holidays, and Arnie was tutored for his bar mitzvah by a rabbi in South Dallas after attending Sunday school. As a teenager he was active in Young Judea and BBYO.
Arnie married Janice in 1957, and together they built a home centered on Israel and Jewish observance, eventually keeping kosher. He served on civic boards, including chairing Dallas's sign control board, and received a Brotherhood Award for speaking on morals and ethics across the region. He devoted decades to Jewish causes, beginning by collecting Federation cards on a Cushman scooter, and helped found the Henry Monsky AZA chapter with Sid Stahl. He served the synagogue, the American Jewish Committee, the Holocaust Center, Legacy, and the Jewish Community Relations Council. He led and joined many missions to Israel, meeting figures such as Yitzhak Rabin. His three daughters remain deeply involved Jewishly, with the eldest having made aliyah to a kibbutz in the Negev.
Full Transcript
Today is August 23, 2004. My name is Rosalyn Benjett and I'll be talking today with Arnold Sweet at his home at 10810 Branch Oak Circle in Dallas. Our videographer is Ruth Andrus. Arne, tell us about your family. Where did they come from and how did they get to Dallas? My mother lived in Russia, in Kiev. and my father was born in the United States, actually in Chicago. My mother's family came only one at a time. She had an older brother, Meyer, who was in business in the old country, and Meyer was able to... Stop. It's gone. Start. Today is August 23, 2004. My name is Rosalyn Benjett, and we are here talking today with Arnold Sweep at his home at 10810 Branch Oak Circle in Dallas.
Our videographer is Ruth Andrus. Arnie, tell us about your family. Where did they come from, and how did they get to Dallas? My mother's family was brought up in the little town of Cherkinau, and so in Russia. And there was an older brother and three sisters, and my grandfather and my grandmother. My uncle Meyer was able to over a period of years earn enough money to bring the rest of the family to the United States The reason for the United States I think is the reason for so many It looked It was the land of bread and honey and the place that you would like to be.
He was successful bringing his father, my mother and my aunts. My dad was actually born in Chicago. Dallas was starting to mature into a real city and they somehow saw some opportunity there and settled in Houston and Dallas, some in Dallas, mostly in Houston. Approximately when do you think they arrived in Texas? Have any idea? It would be some 80 years ago. So they first went to Houston? Some went to Houston. Most of them actually went to Houston. Actually, my mother was here because that's where Dad happened to settle. He had Dad and his brother then in Minneapolis had a little hat manufacturing company. And it went into caps, sportswear and they did well in Minneapolis so they opened up a little store here in Dallas.
And that was where I got my dad here and my mother was here on a visit and they saw each other a few times and fell in love. They lived until my dad died in 1988. And did they continue in the hat business Yes Yes they did It actually followed trends For a while everyone wore a cap Everyone kept it that way. It was Sweet Cat Company. And then hats came into vogue and so it was a sweet hat and cap company. So they really were looking for something else, one of the ties, ties into sports shirts. Just kind of kept up with what was needed.
Fashion. Even doing some supplying in World War II of uniforms. And where was their business located? The business was located on Commerce Street in Alice, which housed a lot of small businesses and businesses whose families emanated from very similar circumstances to my folks. It became a little of a garment area. It was Aaron Brothers clothing and other, the genocopes had pants, slacks and it became kind of a little New York. It happened to be located directly across from the Chamber of Commerce. And so you were born in Dallas? Born in Dallas, never have left Dallas. Spent six years at the University of Texas, but never really left this as a home.
Where did you live when you were a child? I was born in South Dallas, which is where the Jewish community came from. I was only there a little over a year and we moved over to Lakewood. A little unusual because there was not a heavy Jewish population there. They had like the Lakewood location because it had an empty lot so there was a lot of space It gave us a chance to have a football playground Did you have brothers and sisters I have one brother his name is Harold four years older than me And Harold continues to this day in the same business that my dad started.
Different location. Interesting, the location was taken over by the government for an office building. And all of those little merchants and manufacturers left their area to make room for the federal building that was actually built right where Monday's premises had been. Now where did you go to school then when you were a child? In Lakewood? I went to William Lipscomb, which was a grammar school. I used the usual water fountain, one for blacks and one for whites. And went through grammar school there and went to junior high, probably in the same area. And then just before I entered high school, we moved near Highland Park.
Not exactly Highland Park, but exactly University Park in that area. And I went to Long Junior High. And from there to Highland Park where I graduated high school. Did your family belong to a synagogue? Yes. There were members of Sherath Israel. And Sherath is the earliest location, and its next location on Pocahontas out in South Dallas. and then over to where it presently exists, Douglas Street in Dallas. How did your family celebrate Jewish holidays? We did some of the traditional things. Couldn't call us a very... We didn't call us a servant. We recognized the holidays. We knew Shabbat was different than the other days of the week.
We didn't go to many of the services such as Shavuos and Purim and many of the other things. always had a beautiful celebration at Passover. I always had all the family over for the Rosh Shanna and Yippur holidays. But the religious life of our family was fairly limited. And did you attend Hebrew school or Sunday school? I attended Sunday school. Unfortunately, where we lived out in Lakewood, we could never convince the bus to go that far out of the way. They had a route and we weren't on it. So my Hebrew had to come from Sunday school, which wasn't much. and I was tutored for a mitzvah by a rabbi in South Dallas.
And were you a participant then in any Jewish groups as a teenager? As a teenager I was active in two main groups, Young Judea and BBYO. Young Judea being more serious, more observant, centered around Judaism. Whereas the AJA MVBG, which is the VYO, was more social-minded, but did very good things in the community and really probably I think was the most important force in bringing Jewish kids together What kind of activities did they have then? Oh, we had a group of kids, for instance, out near Harry Hines where we coached and playing softball. These kids are maybe eight, nine years old. We did some work for the homeless, visited them.
Not to the extent that it would have been nice, and could have been to a greater extent, but enough to know that we were very fortunate that everybody didn't live in the kind of homes that we live in. And it was a good social conscience upbringing. And you said that when you went to college you went to... Went to the University of Texas in Austin. Spent six years there. Got a Bachelor of Business and Law Degree in Texas. And came from there to my first job which was as an assistant district attorney. And that's for about a year and then went into private legal practice.
And what kind of law did you specialize in? My specialty was whatever walked in the door. From criminal, civil, to mediation, just about anything you could somehow connect to being of a legal nature. That was my specialty. And if you were to look back over cases that you've had, what would be some that you found that you found really memorable We had a case of malicious prosecution And this is the charge is that the defendant in running his business kept a very sharp eye on his employees. and one particular employee, he turned in for theft. And I was always convinced that she didn't do it and really went through every, I guess, malicious prosecution case there was to be found and went to court with it and lost.
So she had to serve a little jail time. Hopefully I was able to get her a lighter sentence than she would have gotten otherwise. And then how did you and Janice meet? Blandet, a young man named Charlie Ross, said, Hey Arnie, there's someone you need to meet. His name is Janice Salley. And he says, I was not known for good corrections. I had this reputation for always going the wrong way. He says, So the only problem you're going to have is a findinger. She lived out beyond White Rock Lake in an area that just didn't jump out at you. You had to know where you were going.
So anyway, I was probably about 45 minutes late on the first day, located her, and we went together for about a year and a half. got engaged. Janice was a bride at 18. And when were you married then? September 7 1957 Oh how nice a man who remembers September 15th 1957 Yeah correct ma Okay. What was Dallas like in the late 50s or early 60s? It's harder to see it from an adult perspective and a kid's perspective, but it was a conservative little town from what I can always remember. It was a pretty segregated town at the time. Well for the years though, when things started to happen, we started getting people like the Kennedys in office, Martin Luther King, we kind of grew slowly out of our racial hatred situation, which of course exists still to some extent today.
Was there much Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement? There wasn't much in numbers, but we had very powerful people that had a very good influence on the community and were recognized as Jews and I feel as though we should have had a lot more. We should have devoted more time to teaching our people how far behind we were, little by little we've gotten to the point where we now have black judges, black mayor, black congress people. Those are the kinds of things we didn't have that early. And you've talked about the movement of the Jewish community from South Dallas to North Dallas. How do you think that affected Jewish life in the city, At that point.
Well, it was a big change. The Jewish people, for the most part, were successful, either with good jobs, secure jobs, in their own business, and started wanting to find another area of town to improve their physical situation. And so there was a movement from South Dallas to North Dallas, and put a few little detours in between, but basically that was it. Most of the Jewish population did end up in the Highland University Park and those areas. And you've been involved in both Jewish and civic organizations as an adult. Can you tell Can you tell us a little about your involvement in, well let's start with civic affairs.
I served on a couple of boards and commissions. I shared one that Dave Anders didn't like. That was the Board of Adjustment for Science. And there was a lot of complaints that Dallas was getting too cluttered with the signs, and size and number. And so this new department was created and Jack Evans, who was the mayor at the time, asked me if I would serve. And then I later chaired the sign control board. And Dave, just using him as an example, said little people ought to be able to put their signs up and advertise and they shouldn have to get anyone permission And so he didn like that A lot of people didn It was not a very effective tool As you can see we got every kind of sand there is is, everything would draw your attention away from the street and the highway and driving.
But it was a lot of work and it was plowing through some new territory. Served on another board or two, but really not a great consequence. received the Brotherhood Award and got that as a result of going around and speaking to some of the schools, say within a hundred miles of Dallas, South like Sulphur Springs, Gainesville, numerous places like that. And there was always a Protestant participant on the panels and a Catholic and a Jew. Even though we were talking about racial matters, it didn't consist of a black person. And we would go to their assemblies and speak as to morals and ethics and those kinds of things.
It was rather two-faced because the difference in going to the high school and going to the white high school and the black high school early night and day, each community was set up pretty much that way. And it was like preparing for two totally different speeches, two totally different audiences. And it was good work unfortunately that the Brotherhood Award that it was known for many many years throughout the country is either no longer active anywhere or it not active any longer And then you have an enormous list of involvement in Jewish organizations. How did you get started and what did you do? Well I think I said last time I started working Federation cars off my Cushman motor scooter.
And I had my little stack of cars and take off on my little Cushman and built up a few accounts. I could go back to another year and get a few pennies more. And I liked it. I felt that it was really good stuff. And I was coming around to my Jewishness, which came exactly where it came from. from maybe a grandfather or someone down in that family. I started, went into both Young Judea and BBYO, and then founded one of the AZA chapters for Henry Monsky. I did that along with Sid Stahl. And then I guess from there I was interested in the synagogue to some degree, continuing the BBYO.
And then the rest of it, it just seems to come. If you're doing it, it adds up. busier you are, the more you can do. And so it drew into my, I guess what you call it, an avocation. And who were your mentors as you were developing into a community leader? People like Earl Fdonsky Stanley Pearl Murray Mundus many other local Jake Feldman And then, I would say that my thinking was shaped a lot by some great speakers and rabbis like Harold Schulweis, and one of them turned out to be a really dear friend of ours, like Yitz Greenberg, and his wife Bloom is also a scholar, And one of the most powerful people I ever encountered was David Hartman.
He's a rabbi and philosopher with human Israel, made all the art of Israel from Canada. And there was another rabbi by the name of Herb Friedman, and he took a group of us through the concentration camps and left an indelible impression. Now, you've mentioned working for a federation. What other organizations have you been involved with? I was a vice president of the synagogue for a short while and acted in the American Jewish community. I'm still serving on the boards of the Holocaust Center. And I'm on what was recently on the board of Legacy, the new home for Jews. We won't call it the new home for Jewish age, because the home for Jewish age is still there and will remain there.
Different concept. The whole concept. The whole life cycle. The elderly life cycle. And you've also been interested in projects relating to Israel. Right. And that's probably, or is, in the same place, the Jewish JCRC, Jewish Community Relations Council. But Israel was probably the mainstay of our home. It was part of our home, part of our Friday night Shabbat. We always had an inclination toward Israel, and then it started permeating our old family and was probably the moving force to get us to go kosher. And keeping up with these people like Yitz, reading about Leonard Fan, and Dreda Seward's author, also a friend. But most of our time is dedicated to Jewish affairs, both here and in the nation.
And I know you have three daughters. Right. And the oldest maid Aliyah about twenty-seven years ago, 26, 27 years ago, lives on a few bullets down in the Naga Desert. They're large producers of dates, and they're going to fish farms, and do some very interesting things. And that's her life. She's got four children. We get there as often as we can. And if we don't get there, then they'll get here. So we see each other at least every year We very close to the situation The first thing we look at in the newspaper is what's happened to Israel, who's doing it to Israel today, and what form.
Try and diligently keep up with that situation. And your other two daughters? and the other two daughters. The next is Cindy, our middle daughter. Cindy was just elected president of her shul. She and her husband and a group of about ten other couples form a new shul. It's been now almost six years they've been in existence. It doesn't play now. And then our youngest child is likewise very, very involved Jewishly. She wrote the same synagogue. Which is, the name is? Her name is Anshe Toa. And she's going to co-chair the housing division for the Maccabi team. So she'll do a very big job. Yes. And you've gone on many missions to Israel.
Right. I have no idea how many. I'll tie in our personal missions, our mission missions, I guess. 18, 15, 18, 20. For a while, it was every two years. And any of them memorable in some way? Everyone was memorable in some distinct way. I guess my most poignant one was being there just a few days after the Yom Kippur War. This is where they were still burying soldiers in temporary graves and starting to put them into proper surroundings And that was really an indication of how the country could be devastated how far someone was able to go and put in a surprise attack. Then I guess our mission that Janice and I led in 1974 was probably the penultimate.
We got a group together, about 40 of us, studied for six months and went over to Israel and had a real study mission. And with people like Adin Shansals, who is someone who's been mentioned to take Revy's position possibly. And I mentioned David Hardman before. It was beginning of major growth for a lot of the community. We met with Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin. We met many times with Yitzhak, and several times with Sharon. I think he's still doing that. Are you currently studying? Yeah, not as much as I should be. Janice is the head of me right now on that. But yes I am. I intend to study from now on.
What are you most proud of in all the different things that you done I think just taking part in a family that is made up of really good people My daughters and sons-in-law was just really remarkable. and the sign people. Whoever will play them out, I guess I'll be most proud of. Is there anything that you would like to add before we finish? You can add. I think a couple things. You know? Yes. I sit next to him. Both of them. When he was young, he became active in forming Henry Monski ACA, and he became very active, and even into his freshman year in college.
And in college he was very, had a lot of leadership roles. He was Chief Justice, spring board, president of his chapter. And in years past, when they needed someone to speak to raise funds, American Jewish Committee and ADL and lots of things like that. They always ask Garnie to get everybody fired up and write a check. I guess the other thing I didn't mention was politics. I do love politics. Most of the people are digital and support people who support digital. But I do think it's really, really critical things that we get Jewish people into politics. Those were the days. So we had Mondale here.
And the caucus. The caucus here. And lots of that was a lot of fun. Well, thank you very much. Thank you.