Ben Kuhn
Ben Kuhn was born on September 13, 1901, in a small village in Slovakia, then part of Austria-Hungary. His mother's family, the Browns, came from the walled town of Levotsa, while his father's family came from Budapest. His father was a skilled machinist and gunsmith who had served in the Hungarian Army. In 1905 the family immigrated to the United States, where Ben's mother's sisters met them in New York. His father found work as a machinist in Charleston, West Virginia, and sent for the family. Ben was the third of eight children, and because his father struggled as a businessman, the four oldest went to work so the younger children could attend school.
Ben grew up in Charleston, a bustling capital city on the Kanawha River, where he sold newspapers, watched steamboats and showboats, and heard William Jennings Bryan speak. Around 1913 part of the family moved to Chicago, where Ben went to night school and worked. In 1920 he began his lifelong career as a traveling salesman, working for Schwarzschild and Company and later for J.R. Woods, a leading maker of wedding rings, for 46 years. Covering the entire South over rough, unpaved roads, he made his headquarters in Dallas in 1928, first living at the Adolphus Hotel and briefly in Fort Worth before the Depression brought him back.
In 1935 Ben married Lillian Rubin, whom he had met through a magazine, and she traveled with him constantly until her death from cancer in 1974. In 1977 he married Frances, who shared his love of travel until her death in June 1999. A member of the Reform temple, Ben was active in a lively circle of Dallas liberals led by Carl Brannon, joining efforts to break the color line at the Baker Hotel and remaining engaged in local politics. He and both wives traveled the world, favoring freighter voyages and beloved Venice, and he volunteered for over 22 years at Baylor Hospital and with the Dallas Committee for Foreign Visitors. Many of his European relatives were killed by the Germans in the Holocaust.
Full Transcript
On Friday, December 17th, 1999, a couple weeks before we start the new millennium, and we're having the pleasure of interviewing a wonderful citizen of Dallas, a longtime friend, in his 98th year, and he's going to tell us about the history of Ben Kuhn, who lives at 10542 Ravencroft Street in Dallas, Texas. Ben, I would like to start with going back many years to how your family came to the United States. And I know you made a few notes, starting with one of your grandfathers, and I'm going to let you tell us what you have written down. Now my mother's family lived in Czechoslovakia in a town called Levoltzak and their family name was Brown, B-A-U-R-N.
My father's family came from Budapest and he was one of five brothers. but I'm going to talk more about my mother's family because I know more about them I'm going to read now Brown lived in a ghetto in the town of Kazemark in Slovakia they walked after the ghetto was closed they walked to the Lijčau in 1860 Grandfather Morris married Reba Globerg in 1862. Casper the population 8 to 10,000 1862 Leichau was built in 11,000 1100 they walked all the way from the town of Leichau to the town of Levesau I feel that it's approximately approximately about 80 miles. The family lived in Levitzau which is a walled city And I understand it was built around the year 700 And the Turks invaded that part of the country around 1100 And they got as far as Vienna.
And they couldn't take Vienna, so they went back to Turkey. We came to the United States. I came to the United States. That was my next question. In 1905, we were met in New York by my mother's two sisters. There were five girls in the Brown family. And we lived with them for a few days until my father, who went to an employment agency in New York and got a job. He was an excellent machinist. He was a gunsmith in the Hungarian Army, and he obtained his job in Charleston, West Virginia. At that time, everything up to 1905 or 1906, I do not remember anything myself, but a lot of it is hearsay.
after my father got to Charleston he sent for the family I'm going to ask for your birth date I was born in 1901 September the 13th and I was born in a Dorf or a village somewhere in Slovakia at that time my father was either in the army or he worked somewhere in that neighborhood because my wife, my mother, lived in this town of Levotsa, and I do not know where my father worked. But they must have met, and they got married. So now we have you in the States, in Charleston. And were you born in Charleston? Czechoslovakia. Oh, you were born in Czechoslovakia. I was born in this little Dorf in Czechoslovakia.
So you were four or five years old when you came to the country, because you're 98 now. Yes. That very impressive And he preserved himself extremely well this I can assure you Now from Charleston where did you go to school there Went to school in Charleston up to junior high And my mother had her sister had gone to Chicago They had come from Czechoslovakia at that time, which was Bohemia, not Czechoslovakia. And they had gone to Chicago, and my mother wanted to move to Chicago, although my father was against it. But they moved to Chicago around 1913. I stayed in Charleston with my father. My father had a business.
I'm presuming that you later on, either by yourself or with your father, went to Chicago. Yes, my father sent me to Chicago after he decided that the best thing to do was to close up his shop in Charleston. I would like to say a few words about Charleston. Yeah, tell us about your life there, particularly your Jewish life, whether the family was observant at all. We were Reformed Jews, and we went to the Reformed Temple in Charleston from the time that we got there until we moved away from there. I never realized that there were other Jews in Charleston besides Reformed Jews, even though I had a lot of friends who didn't go to our Reformed Temple, until one day I discovered they had an Orthodox school, and I used to go there with my friends to visit.
but Charleston is a city that lies between the two hills of Appalachia. There's a river that runs through Charleston that ends up at Huntington, West Virginia and runs into the Ohio River. Then we have another river that's smaller than that called the Elk River. The big river is the Kanawha River. Elk River is a small river and it runs into the Kanawha River. Can I tell some experiences? Sure. As a child, a young man growing up in a city like Charleston, Charleston being the capital, it was an exciting place to live. Every election day there were turmoil in the streets and it was a small town Charleston at that time may have been 26 people But it was a fascinating place for youngsters We had a wharf where the steamboats, the rear sternwheeler steamboats, would come up the river from Cincinnati.
They unloaded at the wharf, just like they did at New Orleans years ago when they had river traffic. Then, of course, during the vacation time, we would get a job, work for somebody. And in those days, I think the regular wage was $5 a week. We worked from 8 o'clock in the morning till 6 o'clock at night. West Virginia had no child labor law. It was a town within, it was known as a COG state, coal, oil, and gas. My father was a notary public, and many of the times a group of the miners would come in, most of them were from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other places in Eastern Europe.
They would come in and he would do work for them, send tickets there, get money changed, or things like that. Sometimes it'd be five of them come in, and the next time only three of them come in, two of them were killed by a fall of shale in the coal mine. It was an exciting place because we had so many of the wonderful people. I remember William Jennings Brine. I remember him making a speech out of a wagon. And, of course, in those days, it were all horse and wagons. There were no automobiles in Charleston in those days. Nineteen hundred and seven, eight, and nine, ten.
Finally, we did get a couple of electric cars that we kids used to play with because they couldn't lock them. But we had a lot of people there. William Jennings Bryan was one I listened to. Crucified on a cross of gold. And many of the times we worked for various people like Buffalo Bill. When he brought his show to Charleston, a bunch of us kids would go there and we'd get a job carrying a placard in a parade. So we got free tickets to the Wild West show. Then we also had the showboats that came to Charleston. up the river. They were beautiful and we also got tickets for that free because we carried the placards in a parade.
It was an exciting life living in Charleston. How many brothers and sisters? I had at that time there were four of us. My older brother Oscar, my sister Margaret, myself, and brother two years younger than myself, Albert, and then came Louis was born in New York, And Freddie was born in Chicago, and Billy was born in Chicago. There were five, six boys and two girls in the family. Let's get you up to Chicago and see what you start doing then. Now, going to Chicago was a different thing. I was a small-town person, and going to Chicago, I had to go to night school because the four eldest of the family had to go to work.
My father just was not a good businessman. He was a wonderful artisan, did some wonderful things, but he never seemed to make any money. So we oldest people, four of us, had to go to work so that the four youngers could go to school. They all went to high school. We never did. We went to grammar school, graduated from grammar school, and the wonderful part of it is that all their children have gone to college. And Chicago, of course, was a good place, I guess, to live, but it seems that I never could get something to do that I liked. Going back to Charleston, I would like to tell you a story.
When I sold newspapers in the morning, two brothers, Albert and myself sold newspapers in the morning and I used to sell the newspapers in front of the Ruffner Hotel which was on the bank of the river of the Kanawha River and one day the traveling man had a team of horses with a carriage and he put his sample cases into the carriage and he looked at me he said, you want to ride with me tomorrow? I said, where are you going? He said, I'm going to Dana, that's five miles away I said, I'll go with you tomorrow Well from then on I decided I wanted to be a traveling man And we rode I went to Dana with him told my mother I sold all my papers and told my mother where I was going And we came back to Charleston from Dana five miles away and I was going to be a traveling man.
And in 1920 the opportunity came along. Tell us about that. Yeah. My brother was traveling for a firm in Chicago by the name of Schwarzschild & Company, and I had been in Sioux City, Iowa, working, and I came back to Chicago, and I wanted to see where my brother was working, and I walked into their place, and a young lady rushed up to me and said, are you the man for the job? Now, I was making a lot of money in Sioux City, and I said, I'll take the job, and I got about half of what I made in Sioux City. I worked there about three months and the young man who had charge of all the departments that we controlled, he told me to do something and I wouldn't do it.
So he went and told the boss. Mr. Schwarzschild came over and said, Ben, why don't you do it? I said, it's the wrong way to do it. He said, what's the right way to do it? I guess I must have been pretty stubborn in those days. And I showed him the right way to do it And they fired the other manager and made me the manager, and I was with them for six years. What kind of goods did they have? They were people who sold material for jewelry stores. They sold wrapping paper and all the equipment for watches, pieces for watches, put watches together and tools and everything that went with watchmaking and jewelry making.
And they were a large firm. They were a national organization, did a nice business. And I worked with them for a few years, and one day they came up to me and said, Ben, we can no longer pay you any more money. How about going on the road? And that's what I wanted. So I went on the road with them and I worked with them for, oh, about seven years on the road until I got a, I was going to go to work for a cousin of mine or going to buy into the business. In Chicago they had a number of vegetable and fruit stories.
I tried it for just a couple of months and I found out I didn want it I was walking down the street in Chicago in 1924 and a friend of mine approached and said Ben, what are you doing? I said, right now, nothing. He said, come to work for us, jewelry store. I said, what territory? He said, everything east of the Mississippi River. So I worked for them for 10 months until I met Mr. Schwarzschild on the street again. He said, Ben, what are you doing? And I said, well, right now I'm quitting with the firm I'm with. Well, he said, come to work for us again.
I said, what territory? He said, anything you want. So I went south, everything south of Memphis from the Atlantic Ocean to New Mexico. Now we're going to get you to Dallas. 1928, I was in, oh, I had all the territory, including Dallas, and I made my headquarters in Dallas. 1928 I was in Houston Al Smith was going to be nominated for the presidency in the Democratic Party and I got a telegram from a firm by the name of J.R. Woods established in 1850 they said how about coming to work for us I wired back and said yes so they told me to come to Chicago for a sales meeting and I was with them for 46 years they put you on temporary 46 years you're still waiting for them to put you on permanent it was a good job wonderful people and you're still a bachelor yeah and I'm coming to that then in 1930 there was an article in Benabris magazine a young lady would like to correspond with a gentleman male who's interested in art literature and music I answered that and I got a reply and she wrote a beautiful letter and I think I wrote a beautiful letter so this was in oh about 1900 and 27 26 something of that sort and anyway January 1 1930 she was in Chicago and I took her out on a date Her name was?
Her name was Lillian Rubin R Then I left for New York and the next thing I heard we kept writing Next thing she had moved to Newark to work for an uncle And I had to go to New York in 1937 35 and there were a lot of excitement there I went there for a sales meeting. A lot of excitement. The German ships were being attacked by people who were tearing down the flag and throwing things at the German ships. I called her up and told her what was going on. At that time, she was staying for the weekend with an aunt in New York.
And a few days later, I had to leave for Texas, and I was going to drive her back to Newark. And on the way, I asked her if she would marry me. She thought I was crazy and told me so. But anyway, she agreed to come to Texas with me. And I wired a friend of mine, a doctor, at Chester, West Virginia, and told him we were getting married and make all the arrangements. So when we got to Chester, he said the only place he could find a rabbi was Wyrton, West Virginia. And we were all dressed in shorts. It's a steel town. The Wharton Steel Company is located there.
And we were all dressed in shorts. And Lil was dressed in pantaloons. So we went to the rabbi's house and he looked at us. And he said, you got a wedding ring? I said, yes, I bought it in the 10 cent store today. He looked at me and said, you know what it's going to cost to get married? I said, no. He said $10. I said, all right, rabbi, I'll pay it this time. So we had to go out in the street and get four kids in this mill town to hold up the hoopa. He went down in the basement and he got three hats.
One of them was an old-time big hat with a great big ostrich feather in it that Dr. Walpert, a friend of mine, wore. And I wore a great big Shama Tander. Tander Shama, whatever it is. Anyway, Tander Shander. Anyway, we got married. and they had a party in East Liverpool, which is across the river from Chester, West Virginia, across the Mahongahaley River. So we were married for 39 years and she died of cancer. We've had some wonderful trips and I would like to tell you of one of them. There's a lot of experience. Can I tell it? Before you go into the trip, I wanted, when you established here and married, did you go to which synagogue or did you go to the synagogue?
At the time, I made my headquarters in Dallas. Stayed at the Adolphus Hotel, which at that time cost two dollars a night. And I adjoined the temple when Lefkowitz was a rabbi. And I had an argument with Rabbi Lefkowitz because at that time the Council for Judaism was very strong around the country. And I accused Rabbi Lefkowitz of using the temple as a place for the Council of Judaism, which was anti-Israel. but he evidently wrote me a letter about it and later of course he realized what he had done and he admitted it was a mistake now let me tell you about Texas from 1925 on when I came down here I have seen a lynching in the town of Honeygrove which is 80 miles northeast of Dallas where Sam Rayburn was born in Honeygrove?
Really? and I watched that, looked at it and I stood on the corner with other people watching what was going on. I never went back to that town because I couldn't imagine people being so brutal as to do what they did to that black man. The Klan was very strong in 1926, 27 and 28 and there were two people who were union organizers. One of them was named George Latane. George was the union organizer for the sewing trade because Dallas or Texas at that time was non-union and would not permit unions in the state. Both of them, the other one was a Jewish man. I don't remember his name.
Both of them were tarred and feathered and chased out of town. The town at that time, Dallas at that time, was not a large community. Everything was centered around Lamar and Main Street That where all the stores Neiman Marcus and everything was there Sanger Harris was there which is now a college their building And E.M. Cannes. Yeah, E.M. Cannes was there. All the stores, the good stores, were in that neighborhood. The Mercantile Bank, which is now defunct, at that time only had one room. It was a small bank when I opened a checking account there with $300. and the city itself did not amount to much.
There were two big hotels. There was the Baker Hotel, which is no longer in existence, and the Adolphus Hotel, which today is one of the main hotels in this part of the country, the big hotel. But the city has grown. It has expanded. There was no we have today. We have Richardson, which is a large community. We have Plano, which is a large community, and when I first came down here, Richardson had mud streets, and Plano was not in existence. And since then, they've both become large suburban cities. Would you tell us, Ben, a little more about what you merchandise you were traveling with, because we last left you at the company?
I traveled for the firm of J.R. Woods. They were established in 1850, and when I went to work for them, The owner, the originator of the firm, was dead, of course, and he had two sons. They were in the jewelry business. They were very fine organizations, and they never had any traveling men until I went to work for them, and they hired a few other traveling men. They did all their business through catalogs. And when I traveled through the South, these people were the largest wedding ring makers in the United States at that time. They were a wonderful diamond house also. And when I went to work for them, they had just decided to expand.
And during the Depression, they became one of the few firms that were in existence and continued to exist. And a lot of those same type firms had to go out of business during the Depression. I traveled throughout the entire South from New Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean and it was quite a strenuous thing because there were no paved roads in the entire south at that time Everything there were no buses from city to city It was sometimes taking a train, and the trains would come at four in the morning. And we used to ride on the caboose of a freight train from one town to another.
And when you got into a hotel, there were no large hotels in the smaller communities. Sometimes when you check into a hotel, or there were no motels of course, you check into a hotel with the understanding that if the hotel filled up they would put cots in your room. Sometimes I had as many as four cots in my room with four other people staying in that room. I'm the only one who had a bed at that time because I checked in early. It wasn't really a pleasure to travel in those days, but the food was good, and all the small-town hotels in those days used to have family-style dining.
In the morning, they had everything on the table, cost 25 cents for breakfast, and they would serve everything from bacon, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pancakes, eggs, and everything else for breakfast. and for dinner at night it was 50 cents for dinner. And their dinners were very good and large. But it was difficult traveling. Sometimes you would find a traveling man who owned a Ford, and he would take you with him for a few days, cover the same territory that you did. I used to carry three spare tires because there wasn't a paved road in the entire south in those days. It wasn't, everything was gravel. And I had to carry three spares with inner tubes.
I doubt whether many people remember the inner tubes in tires. Today they have those steel-plated tires. But it was quite traveling. I liked it, and it was a wonderful experience. You told me that Lil started to travel with you, but I guess not at that early stage. When I got married in 1935 to Lil, she traveled with me from the day we got married until the day she died. She died in 1974. And we were together I doubt whether we ever separated for five days during the entire 39 years Lil also managed we had a friend of ours in New York who had a line of leather watch straps And one day we were having lunch with him and he asked Lil why she doesn't travel for them.
So during the Depression, we did travel, she did travel for them. We used to carry a stock of goods in the back of a Packard and had a big, big trunk. and that's the way we lived during the Depression. She sold enough merchandise and collected cash for it and we managed to live during the Depression. Until 1937, I had $600 in the bank. $600, can I tell the story? Sure. $600 in the bank and we were in New Orleans. And Lil, before we got married, Lil said she wants to go to Europe before she gets married, but she didn't get to Europe. We got married.
In 1937, she was working with a customer in New Orleans. I had finished working. And I saw an ad in a Picayune, New Orleans Picayune, said, come to Europe. Holland-American line is what went to Europe at that time. So I went to see the office in New Orleans. and they told me it was $165 a round trip. I gave them $100 deposit. I went back and told Lil we were going to Europe on the 4th of June, and from then on she couldn't sit still anymore. She was so excited. I called my firm long distance and told the boss that we were coming in, we were going to Europe.
So he says, come on in. And we got to New York, we drove, got to New York, and it was the 1st of June and the ship left on the 4th of June so I went over to pay on the 1st of June went over to pay the rest of the money for the journey and the man said where's your passport I was pretty naive I didn't know you needed a passport he said you can't go to Europe without a passport so I called up this friend of mine that Lil was traveling for and told him our problems. So he said, hold on, I'll call you back in about an hour.
Call back and says, give me all the information about yourself, where you were born and everything. And give me all of Lil's information. We did. An hour later, he called us back and said, you will have the passport on the 3rd of June. So we did get the passport on the 3rd of June. We got our pictures taken, put in the passport, and I went over to pay the rest of the money for the trip. And on the 4th of June, we left on the Stottendamm from Hoboken for Europe. I asked Meyer Rickover how he did it so quick. He was a friend of Jim Farley, who was the postmaster general, and whose brother at that time was the head of the Immigration Bureau in Washington, and he got the passport for us immediately.
and we went to Europe. We had $600 to start out with and everywhere we went, I had written a cousin of mine in Paris and he had made arrangements for us to stay at a hotel he used to live at on the left bank and it was $6 a week. And everywhere we went, we stayed at hotels for $2 a night. Good hotels, $2 a night. and we got to decide to go to Czechoslovakia so we were in Zurich and we missed the train because trains in Switzerland run on time we got there and the train pulled out for the Jungfrau I asked what time the next train left the lady said in one hour I said we want two tickets she said you don't even know where it goes I said we don't care where does it go she said Vienna so we packed real quick came back and took the train to Vienna.
And in Vienna, we were going through some of the art galleries, and we met somebody who said they had just come back on the bus from Budapest. So they told us the American Express was running the buses. So we rushed to the American Express, got the last two seats on the bus for Budapest, and then we went to Budapest. In Budapest, the bus stopped at a restaurant, outdoor restaurant. It was the destination for the bus. And of course, I was smart and wanted to use my Hungarian. And after I said I wanted two glasses of beer in Hungarian, the man looked at me and said, where are you from?
I said Texas He said where are you from He said Cleveland Ohio My uncle lived in Budapest and my aunt I showed the man the address of my uncle and he said he on this street two blocks up So we walked the two blocks up, and in those days, in most of the courtyards, in most of the places where, apartments where people lived, they had a big courtyard, and everything was built around the courtyard. Ten o'clock, they locked the big doors, so nobody could get in without ringing the bell so the consergie could open the door for you. I asked where my uncle, gave him my uncle's name, and they said he's on the third floor.
We went up to the third floor, and I looked in, and there was a man eating radberries. I told him who I was, and of course he ran out and embraced us, and we're the first people from the United States relatives of his that he had seen. We spent two days with my uncle, and then we took a train for Czechoslovakia. We stopped at the border for an hour. I had relatives living in the town where the border was, but we didn't stop to see them. We stopped at a town called Kosica. Kosica at one time was a walled city. And we went in. I had an aunt living there.
So we found out where she lived, walked over there, and as we got into this courtyard, a woman standing in the doorway yelled, Bela, I don't know how she knew who I was or anything, because she'd never seen me, but I guess my mother had written her and told her we were going to Europe. Well, we stayed with them for two days, and then we took a fifth-class train to, we were going to Levotsa. but we had to change trains at a place called Krumpach and we had dinner there at 6 o'clock and the train left at 8 for Levotsa where my mother came from and where the folks still lived so we got to Levotsa and there was a sort of a wagon with seats running along both sides of the wagon and two horses were pulling it and the man got off with us.
I asked him if he lived there, he said yes, his name was Fleischer. He said you must be Esty son Esther was her name but everybody called her Esty I said I am So I said you think my relatives are up tonight No he said I think you better go to the hotel I told him who my relatives were They were the Browns Kalman Brown And we went to the hotel checked in And the American dollar at that time was tremendous It was so strong that all the other currency was cheap compared to the American dollar The hotel was 20 kronon a night, which was 80 cents in American money.
Well, the next morning, about 6 o'clock, a knock on this big door and big room, and the party said, it's the police, we want your passport. So I said, we're tired, please go away. 7 o'clock, there was a knock at the door, and I said, we better get up, the police are here. So we opened the door, and there was all my relatives waiting. This man Fleischer had gone over and asked my uncle, how were the Americans today? My uncle said, what Americans? So they found out we were in town. We stayed a day with them. This town of Levitzau was established, as I get it, way back before the, oh, I understand, around 700.
It's a walled city. All the homes are inside the wall, and all the agriculture is outside. And their main thing that they raised was caraway seeds. You could walk outside of the city and you could smell the caraway seeds. They must have had miles of it all over. And they used to make a drink called Kimmel, which they do not make anymore. Anyway, we spent a week with them. And I told my uncle there was going to be a war and he wouldn't believe it. And they were later, all of them were killed by the Germans. My relatives in Levotsa and my relatives in Kosica and in Hungary, the only ones that were left.
The Jews in Hungary managed to, a lot of them escaped. My cousins were still there. We went there later for two years. Lil and I went to Budapest on a vacation and we met all my other relatives there. My uncle had committed suicide, the lawyer had committed suicide when the Germans came into Budapest. Then we got home and came back to Texas and we went to Europe a number of times after that I want to bring you back to Texas and get some information of your early stay when you arrived Where did you first live? The Adolphus Hotel. And you stayed at the Adolphus, and then what permanent home did you live?
Oh, yeah. I also moved to Fort Worth for about six months. And I liked Fort Worth. It wasn't as large a city as Dallas, and it wasn't busy as Dallas. Then I came back to Dallas because... What year was that? That was in 1930, 1931. It started the Depression. Yes, it started the Depression. And, of course, living at the Adolphus for $2 a night was very cheap. Later, about right after the war and during the war, Lil tried to enlist in the wax and she only weighed 100 pounds and they understood that she had to weigh 110 so she put some rocks in her pockets and they found the rocks and she couldn't enlist.
And I, of course, I was 43 at the time. I went to Camp Walters in Mineral Wells and went through the routine there, and I was rejected. And after that, they passed a law that anyone 43 or over could not enlist in the Army or could not be drafted in the Army. And then, right after the war, I brought my family down from Chicago. My sister and her husband, my mother, I bought a house on Goliad for them, and the house had a garage apartment. So Lil and I lived in the garage apartment, and the other house down had three bedrooms, and my sister, husband, and the rest of the family lived there.
And they did well. He was a good worker, did well. In Chicago, he would not have done as well. He would have been working for someone, whereas in Dallas, he got to work for someone and did very well, and then he opened his own tavern and did excellent. His name was what? His name was I-M-Y. They also had a restaurant on Poitou Street, and then they opened a tavern. Near Vincent's? Yeah, near there. Yeah, I remember that. And then he opened a tavern over near Highland Park and did well there until he retired. And he died. He was 80-some years old at the time. And the thing that he bragged about was he'd never seen a doctor in 50 years.
So he was ready to pass away. Who were some of your friends? Oh, yeah, in those days, in those days, I've got to go back because it was such an exciting period, especially in Dallas. We had a very liberal coterie of people. We are the people, Carl Brannon was the leader. Carl Brannon was one of the greatest liberals, I think, in the entire state. I would almost say he was well known all over the United States because people used to visit Carl. There was Morgan from, Judge Morgan from Philadelphia. There was Norman Thomas would come in and there was the head of the ACLU. His name was Earl, not Browder, it was whatever he was.
He came here and all the important visitors came here, Norman, Cousin. and we had the pleasure of meeting all of them. We had them all for dinner at our house. Steinberg, Gus Steinberg, who was a member of the Reichstag in Germany, he came to our house for dinner, and we finally had to tell him not to make a speech that he was going to make the next day at SMU because he was going to talk about socialism, and we told him that socialism in the United States was no good. Everybody wanted to be a boss. And then we had Otto Nathan. Otto Nathan was the executor of the estate of Einstein.
And he carried around with him a big bag full of papers. Every time he came to our house for dinner, he came here a number of times when he came to Dallas. And he always carried all the papers with him. He would never go away anywhere without that suitcase. he carried it, and incidentally, Rabbi Klein knew Otto Nathan also. And then we had people like Irving Caesar who was a songwriter He was a member of the group But we were the people who first broke the color line at the Baker Hotel or in Dallas We had a luncheon on the mezzanine of the Baker Hotel with blacks and whites.
Carl Brennan did the work of getting this together. The blacks had to come through the back door, the cooking, the kitchen. and we of course went through the front door but they were allowed to come up to the mezzanine where we all had lunch together and that is the first time we broke the color line in Dallas there were a good bunch of liberals there was Lefkowitz he was an attorney and we attended Louis Lefkowitz the rabbi's son and we attended the county convention many times. We were always delegates to the county convention. And the fighting that went on at this convention, in those days it wasn't just you voted for somebody, there was fighting.
Some of the conservative group and the liberal group would try to telephone away from everybody, would try to make the speeches, and there was a lot of argument. Sometimes I thought they were going to get hurt. But there was a lot of activity here in those days. We had a wonderful bunch of liberals, if you're interested in liberals. And there was, what's the name of the guy that we drank with all the time? Lewis McAdams? No, no. The guy who ran the show that I was talking about, that they named the, it's up my mind. Well, we will come back. Yeah. Mention some other names.
Yeah. And we were a good bunch. We fought Ma Ferguson, who was a governor, after Pa Ferguson was convicted of some kind of crime, and Ma Ferguson ran for governor, and she was elected. And I'm not going to talk about them because I don't want to say all the bad things I thought about them. But in those days it was after the Ku Klux Klan had already broken up and we had Carl Brandon of course and Laura Brandon When Laura died the morning paper did themselves wonderful They had a full story of Laura Brannon And when Carl died, somebody wrote a book about Carl, and we have it here.
He was also a great person. We had a whole bunch of good people at that time. Even Stanley Marcus was part of our group. And Hector... Louis Hexter. Louis Hexter was part of our group. And they were all good liberals. And there was always a lot of excitement here at election time. I remember Rainey when he ran as governor. Yeah, yeah. And then the terrible things when Happy Stevenson was here. Oh yes, and I have to tell you, when Stevenson was running for president from Illinois, they had a meeting at one of the halls. and we had the Neiman Marcus Stanley Marcus gave the introduction and there were a group there who had while we were listening to the speech somebody had gone up to the balcony and unfurled a flag that said better dead than red in those days Communism was really the stronghold of the extreme conservatives.
And of course, Stanley was defeated. Eisenhower won the election. Now I've got to tell you about Eisenhower. Lil and I were in Midland, Texas at the time when a fellow from Philadelphia by the name of Patterson came to make a speech. And we attended the lecture. And he made the statement and said, Eisenhower has to be nominated for president. His name is well known. He was a general in the army and he's the only one of the Republican Party that can win and he did. He won the presidency. I don't think he was a strong presidency and I think he had a lot of scandal attached to him just like Clinton has today.
But we fought him and sometimes we won and sometimes we lost In those days a lot of people do not remember this but we had an interurban train streetcar if you will or train one car train running to Waco And we had another one going up to Sherman and Denison, and one going to Greenville. It was very easy, and one going to Fort Worth, it was very easy at that time to travel the surrounding cities near Dallas. And it was wonderful to travel by train instead of the streets that we have today that are so busy with automobiles. Fort Worth at that time was known as Cowtown.
And it was not like Dallas, it wasn't the industrial section that Dallas was. It was a sort of a homey place more than that. It wasn't, life there wasn't as quick and as fast as it was in Dallas. And it was a nice place to live. I didn't live there very long, but I liked it. What else do you want to know? As I said before, Lil and I were married 39 years and she died in 1974. We had just come back from a long trip to Europe and Turkey and Greece. We'd been gone a month. And they found out she had cancer of the esophagus and in 1974 she passed away.
way. Then she was a wonderful woman, a wonderful wife, and a very interesting person. She'd had a lot of experience, just as I did, going to various places in the world that we went to. Then in 1976, I got a telephone call from a friend of mine. I was, at that time, I was a volunteer at the World Trade Center with the Dallas Committee for Foreign Visitors. I worked there on Monday morning. I got a call to go see a friend of hers who was single, just moved to Dallas, and she thought I would like her. So I said, I've got enough widows. She said, go ahead anyway.
Go see her. So I did. And I had on a pair of red pants, real ripe red pants, a great big Panama hat, and a colored shirt. So I went over there And I walked in and she walked out, asked what I can do for her and I asked her whether she knew these people. She said yes and she knew what that was all about. So we got to talking and she said, Mr. Kuhn, I'm very busy. You got nothing to do? I've got to go to work. So as she was going away I asked her, she was at that time working for a store that sold equipment for bathrooms, faucets, bathtub equipment and all that kind of stuff.
And I asked her, I said, do you sell this kind of stuff? That ended a good friendship that we started maybe five minutes before. That just aggravated it. Anyway, I left and I went to Temple Friday night and she was there with a mutual friend. So, after I asked if they wanted to go out for coffee or something, she said no. And she told me later that this friend asked her, is that the character that you're talking about? And she said, well, that's him. So, next Friday I went to Temple again and she was there with this friend. And I said, how about going out and getting some to eat?
She said, no, I haven't had dinner, and I'm going to go out for dinner. I said, I have just made a gallon of gumbo, good gumbo. Why don't you come to my house and have some gumbo? And after a lot of talking, she agreed to come to my house. She thought this was a put-on. Anyway, we got to my house. We lived together on one part of the house, and my sister and her husband lived in another part of the house. So when she sat down getting ready to eat the gumbo, I went and got my sister and then of course when my sister came in she knew everything was kosher.
And they became very, very good friends. They really loved each other, my sister and Frances. Well one night it rained it snowed not rain it snowed and I was at her house and this other friend couple were at her house for dinner And it snowed and I knew I could never make it to where I live because I was on the hill. I knew my car wouldn't make it. So I told her, I said, I'm spending the night here on the couch. And she brought out a cot that she had for her son who lived in California. And whenever he came to visit, they used the cot.
And she told me later she locked the door of her room. She wasn't going to take any chances. Anyway, she didn't want to get married. And I wasn't too interested in getting married. But she said, I told her, if you ever feel you want to get married, tell me to stand up. When I stand up, give me a kiss and I'll know you want to get married. so after a while maybe a week or so a couple weeks later she said stand up she said I must be crazy stand up I stood up she gave me a kiss I said all right we're going to get married I said take your time this was on Sunday I said take your time I said how about Friday she said all right so I called up Jerry Klein told him we were getting married and we were coming in he said come into the studio and we got married we got married on the 28th of January and we were married and just like my life what year was that?
it was 1977 and we got married and just like my life with Lil we never parted we were together 24 hours a day except the days that I played golf and then she took up golf and so I played golf with her. But we were together all the time. She was a wonderful person and it's tragic that she had a stroke and passed away on the 13th of June 1999 And for me it was a very tragic thing We had a lot of experiences I told her that you cannot die nobody can die before they go to Venice I think Venice is the most beautiful country in the world, beautiful city in the world.
So one day we were on a freighter. Well, Well, we had taken the freighter before. I was a freighter person. We took a freighter out of California for two months, which made all the stops in for cargo, all the stops in the Orient. We stopped at Subic Bay, which was the United States base in the Philippines. We stopped at Manila, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and so forth. We were on that freighter for two months. It was wonderful. Then later we took a freighter, a Yugoslav freighter, and we stopped at some of the places in Europe. One of them was five miles from Trieste in Yugoslav. So we took the train from Trieste to Venice.
We spent a number of days in Venice, and of course, as I say, Frances fell in love with it too. and when she was in the hospital with her stroke, I told her, I said, Honey, if you ever get better, we're going to Venice for a week. She never made it. You had 20 over 20 years. I was married to her for 22 and a half wonderful years. She was a wonderful person and I've had a friend of mine come up to me. My first wife, Lil, was well liked. She traveled with me everywhere. We only worked six months a year so we had time to do whatever we wanted to travel.
We went to school, we studied Italian, we studied Spanish, we studied Russian for two years. We both liked languages. And we did a lot of things together during the time that we did not work And she was well by everybody that I called on in the trade Well, Francis, somebody walked up to me when we had a market one time at the Wyndham Hotel, and we had a room there, and Francis was going to be a sort of a maitre d' of all the people who came in because we had food for everybody. And a fellow rushed up to me, one of my customers said, Ben, I understand you got married.
I said, yes. He said, I understand you married another Lil, which was a compliment for Francis. But Francis was a different individual and a wonderful person and so well liked by everybody who ever met her. And she passed away on the 13th of June, 1999. And it was tragic. While we have to close at this point, we may come back for some additional. You can tell what a wonderful man Ben Kuhn is, because, as he's explained, with 39 years and 22 years, he has had over 60-some-odd years and spent like 24 hours a day. So you know he's very livable with and a real pleasure to be a friend of.
Thank you so much, Ben. On behalf of the Dallas Jewish Historical Society, we shall take this wonderful tape to be a part of the archives. I want you to read some of my portraits. We want to add the fact that Mr. Kuhn, I forgot to mention it, for over 22 years, I was a volunteer at Baylor Hospital. And Frances later, after we got married, she became a volunteer there. Both of us were recognized when we both retired as a volunteer. You can imagine the pleasure they gave to so many people and a renewed hope to them. I'll let you read this.