Betty Ann Ablon
Betty Ann "Bebe" Ablon was born in 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned her nickname as a baby unable to say her full name. She grew up in a blue-collar, lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood, in an apartment building where neighbors like the Sternberg family became a second family. Her father was born in Boston, the son of Russian immigrants; his father had worked breaking horses, and his mother was a community activist known at city hall who once led a protest over kosher butchers. Orphaned young and largely on his own, Bebe's father was a warm, deeply unmaterialistic man who worked in the laundry business. Her mother's family came from Brooklyn, where her grandmother, renamed Mary at immigration, held the family together through cleaning, babysitting, and whatever work was needed.
Bebe's childhood in Boston shaped her lasting love of Yiddish culture, kindled by her father's trips to the Lower East Side and her grandmother's rugelach and down comforters. She also encountered early antisemitism, from teachers who insisted her name must be Elizabeth to a classmate's accusation that she had killed Christ. She witnessed the changes of World War II, including blackouts and fears of German submarines off the coast, and her family briefly sheltered refugees passing through. She attended Roxbury Memorial High School for Girls and then Brookline High School. When her father's business failed, the family moved to Dallas, where he had a sister, a transition Bebe found difficult after her sheltered Boston upbringing.
In Dallas, Bebe attended SMU as one of three Jewish girls and graduated as an English major with a teaching certificate. She later earned a master's in social work and worked in a Bronx hospital setting she loved before returning to Dallas, where she reconnected with and married Samuel Ablon, an old friend whose first wife, a close friend of hers, had died. She embraced his two children and had a third, and she worked at agencies including MHMR and Hope Cottage, rising to vice president before leaving over the board's focus on status. A lifelong reader and self-described observer, she remained committed to Jewish causes and Temple Emanu-El, favoring its small, participatory service that reminded her of her grandmother's shul.
Full Transcript
BB well first how did you get the name BB when I was a baby um less than a year old and trying to talk which is sort of been my life um I couldn't say bettyanne which was like a mouthful and uh so I called myself and I guess I was trying to say baby and so it came out as B and and it it fortunately it really stuck yeah yeah so you really came out as Betty Anne you change it to beb as young age well let's go back 1938 Boston Massachusetts let's go back what do you remember when you just a little girl
oh I have a lot of memories of Boston um and um um the neighborhood that we lived in not Jewish we lived in a sort of blue column lower middle class Jewish Community um and we lived in an apartment building nothing huge like maybe six um and and I don't remember if everybody was Jewish but I suspect that they were and the sternberg's with their three boys and one daughter um lived upstairs and they were like a they were a second family my mother um had some um vision problems that um made it difficult for her um uh and and Mrs sterber God bless her
was the kind of person who just came in and did it whatever it was she came in it she was a f of Common Sense whereas in my family there was a bit of a lack of that so um she was really she's just such a wonderful human being well now tell me about your folks tell me about your dad what did he do well my father had a really fascinating uh but terribly sad history um he his father came from Russia the time of the prgrams but I think it was also an attempt to avoid conscription into the army right okay and his particular
Talent was horses so when the horses came in from the West he would meet them and he would break them to become Dre horses or you know cart horses or whatever whatever whatever and interestingly enough my father had a scar down the side of his face because he was kicked in the head by a horse when he ran into the street so that was I mean when I go to Boston and I see what Boston is like that I think oh so um his mother died we think um at the uh in the flu AC epidemic back back in Russia no here in America America
okay and she was an amazing lady in that you know I told you my father had all this wonderful raw energy well I think he got it from his mother because she was one of the ladies who was known by first name at city hall and there was a scandal that the kosher butchers weren't selling Kosher meat and my grandmother led the parade you know to protest this so um and she had I I sometimes I lose track she either had five or six children and my father was Square in the middle and um she died and then and I don't remember exactly how old
my father was but he was very young um and I don't think he ever got beyond the eighth grade um and my grandfather did what then did he married very quickly because he needed somebody to help with these children and the woman he married wanted no part of them so my father was really a Bandon at a very young age and taken in by a friend of his who lived in Connecticut and this this this friend who lived in Connecticut was in love with a woman in New York who was my mother's first cousin and so they double dated and that was that was the
story I mean that's how it happened my father was an interesting man in that he was the least materialistic person you will ever meet and my sister and I love to sort of laugh but maybe not so much that Boston during the war during World War II was um a center for for the Navy and ships were in and out and my father's company that he did not own um um had the contract to do some of the to do some of the laundry for the ships he by that time he was in the laundry business so what we love to to laugh about is
that my father was probably the only Jew in Boston who made nothing from this and and out of World War II came Jewish millionaires from dealing with the black market and doing all of this and what was important about that was that it it they then left roxburry right you think about roxber in Dorchester as Boston's Lowery side and so now people had money and they left except the epon didn't um and Boston um was a perfect example of something called White uh fright flight where um unscrupulous developers came in frightened people bought land bought houses at much lower rates and forgive me for this
but this is the history and and their their stick was African-Americans are coming they're coming up from uh Blue Hill Avenue so it was really very sad because this was a protected wonderful Jewish Community where children played on the streets till 67 :00 at night and it it it in some ways for a young child it was idic now did your dad ever talk to you about coming over to the United States he was born in Boston oh he was born in Boston your grandparents that came over it's my grandparents who came over and as we like to laugh my father was born on Friday
the 13th in Salem Massachusetts now you don't get better than m you know yeah um now did your grandparents ever talk about that Journey my grandparents died long long I I don't think my grandfather actually outlived his wife very long um so my father was really on his own yeah what about your um grandparents on your mom's side I have wonderful memories of my grandparents on my mother's side when my mother and father married my mother left Brooklyn and this huge family and I think she was probably delighted and moved with him to Boston well as my father would say my grandmother um who was
a remarkable human being felt that his her daughter was on loan and every now and then she would call the loan in so it it it was always a point of real uh contention between um my father and his mother-in-law who he did not love my grandmother was um as there were in many families immigrant families she was I'm not really quite sure where she was from from luthia poem because the boundaries kept changing and who knew anything but my father when he wanted to tease my mother would call her a lfu or a Gitano you know and I was never clear on what my
parents in in the house when they didn't want us to understand what was going on spoke yish and what was really sad but neither one of them had accents because they were both born here what's really sad is that gone you know I I can still recognize some of it so my grandmother was the one who held the family together and that was her job she had sisters and brothers all of whom were sort of you know doing fly well my grandmother was the rock of the family and she married my grandfather and was a very unhappy and I it was an unhappy marriage we
would go to to Brooklyn to visit my grandmother and this was during the war my grandfather would be listening to the radio and he would be listening to Gabriel heer and if you can ever hear any of those old recordings there this this man was incredible and while my grandfather was listening my sister and I were sitting behind him he was on the radio and my grandmother was berating him in Yiddish from the time the program started to the time the program ended and and my they lived in apartments in Brooklyn that that were all Jewish and so we knew all the neighbors I mean
you know we were part a little bit part of that Community too and then my grandfather died and I just want to say that my grandmother her part of the family was she cleaned houses she babysit my grandmother did whatever it took to bring money in the house there was no there was no concern about self about status or I that was so beyond wherever my grand my grandmother and her sisters reminded me very much um when um Woody Allen did Hann I guess it was Hannah and her sisters or was it Annie Hall when he goes back into the family and I was very
angry at the time because he distorts them but in their own way they were a little bizarre I mean my grandchildren would look like this who are these people um but but there was a I guess the best way I can say it I grew up with a very strong sense of yish kite yeah and it has stayed with me forever and um I'm very drawn to books about early history of Jews in America very drawn on to the Holocaust to anything that I can read and I just F my father had this wonderful he he would have been a a a marvelous comedian in
the bourch Bel and and singer and he would take me as a very young child down to the Lowry side and he would talk in yish to the pickle lady and the spartz lady and the Herring lady and we would go from that that in those days it was on the street and they would think that he was the genuine article that he had just recently come over and I was enthralled enthralled as I still am we're going to New York in two weeks we're going to L side and I'll never forget one lady he always took me as his you know side person and
one lady said it in in yish and in English it's always the daughters and the father and I love to tell the that story now because this lady never knew who Sigman Freud was now your your grandparents on your mom side were they born here or oh no they come from well I I I'm not sure where my grandfather came from that's what I said earlier something about whether or not my grandmother came from Lithuania or whatever when my grandmother came over on the ship she came with her cousin and her cousin's name was Miriam well that was my grandmother's name and the Customs or
the inspector whoever he was said no no no we're not going to have two mirams so you pointing to my grandmother are Mary so in those days a Jewish Mary was extremely un unusual but you know we we got one in in Brooklyn when my grandmother came to Boston she would come with treasures not that I thought they were because I I didn't and one of them was her rugala and she made a yeast Rising yet regular because it was kosher and it could be par and she would make me comforters um Puffs we call them made with down and all of that to this
day I have to sleep under something that has some weight and that was my grandmother's pu several years ago a long long time ago um after we I married moved to Dallas had the third child by two other children are adopted they were the children from my husband's first marriage sadly his wife died and she was a very close friend of mine so I was living in New York I had a master's in social work I was working in a hospital setting in the Bronx that I dearly loved and um I my mother said to me you know um you don't have to go to
Europe every year you could come to Dallas and the reason she sort of said it that way was because um as a Hospital employee I was eligible for hip which was a health insurance plan and we had dirt treat cheap air fears to Europe so I came reconnected with my husband who was an old old friend um love fell in love madly in love with his two children and remarried so what year was that uh we married in um 69 n yeah okay and then we had together a third child and they're all their first names all begin with m because it was cheaper that
way is how we like to say it so um and we you know worked very hard to establish a family life there we were a lot of challenges we had my mother and father his mother and father and then we had unfortunately um um his first wife who was a wonderful human being's parents and um they were not uh people who wished us well they just loveed to make life difficult for us so I went to work when my youngest was about eight or nine months several years in two or three different agencies finally two two of the agencies MHMR were part time but hope
cottage which was then an adoption child here child um Service Agency here um was um was a full-time position and I was Rose to be vice president but boards in those days were status symbols and so it wasn't a board committed to to the welfare of children it was a board committed to status so I decided I couldn't do this anymore when the president of the board said you know what a Cadillac is it's a Jewish Jeep and I thought I'm out of here I am so out of here so then I went to other agencies I was in charge of at Dallas Association for
citizens and then finally I decided I can't stand these people coming from for the Bronx in Monier Hospital which was a teaching Hospital it it it was just really too much I couldn't do it well let let's go back a little ways now um we jumped ahead where did you go to high school I went to Brookline High School Brookline Massachusetts what was what was high school life like well remember I told you about white flight well sadly enough we had we we left the neighborhood and moved to Brooklyn um and my parents my father's business had gone down the tubes and it was very
difficult that's when he came to Dallas because he has a sister here he had a sister here so I I was in the Roxbury Memorial High School for Girls which was a wonderful school and then I went to Brookline High School in my senior year and if you want a disaster happening you move a kid you know so um and it was a very different environment but the environment um it was more sort of upwardly mobile Brookline was a much more High status neighborhood and in many ways I should have commuted and gone back to yeah CU that's where all my friends were and that's
where I really felt the most comfortable I was a very shy kid now after high school did you on to college or did you go to work by that time we moved to Dallas and I had the distinct pleasure of being one of three girls Jewish girls at SMU oh I cannot even begin to tell you about the little red beanies and the sororities that didn't accept jewes um it was a it was it made Brook line look wonderful but um you know I graduated from SMU um and managed to get a really decent education I I I graduated as an English major got a
teaching certificate and was interviewed by the um head of the uh Dallas Independent School District who um I I'm very proud to say wouldn't hire me and the reason for a lot of reasons and I don't think it was anti-Semitism specifically but but it had to do with the fact that I was very I I am what is known as a yellow dog Democrat with very strong this one of the things that led me to Social Work were very idealistic um and values that I hold very dear today having to do with how I see the world and how I see people and I suspect
that I communicated that well how did World War II affect your family you were just a little girl Boston was on it was out there and there were Subs um Boston was targeted we never had enough money to own a house but we would go to Boston was so beautiful it still is the en on it's just still is and in gler which is where we went one summer and rented a little cottage there were sightings of that the submarines the German Subs were all over and so you know people was scar to let your children alone in the water like the sub is going
to come up and grab you so it it was just a fact of daily living every night the blinds came down we were in Total Blackout um in school we did all the stuff I mean we collected money we collected cans we collected everything we look like little birds you know carrying all these bundles to school Boston uh public school was also where I got my first dose of um of true anti-Semitism it came in two ways first of all um in order to teach in the Boston Public School you had to be Catholic and you had to be a maiden lady if you were
married gone so a lot of the teachers really um were kind of like nuns and with very specific beliefs so here comes this little frighten Jewish girl whose name is Betty an Epstein and the nuns say no that's not your name oh it's not my name your name is Elizabeth Betty Ann is an kind of a whatever but the formal name is Elizabeth I went home and I said well what am I am I Elizabeth or am I bettyanne so that was so my mother I'm sure trudged up to school and said no her name really is bettyanne and my name is bettyanne because I'm
named for my paternal grandmother whose name was brah Han and that was as close as they could get second time was when one of my little classmates in very early on probably before the second grade said are you Jewish I said yeah he said you killed Christ well I mean I didn't know who Christ was and so again back home and everything M what is this about it was it was the the end of it is it was enough to be very frightening to me to learn about divisions among people because I grew up in this sheltered little wonderful Community my father's closest friend was
schomo Ben Israel and they lived down the street from us and schomo was a reporter for the Jewish daily forward which goes down in history as the Jewish daily forits and so when the war ended he was very active and and so we took people into our house as a kind of railroad to going on to something else we had a tiny apartment so my sister and I don't remember anything I I I I just remember being frightened because there were strangers in the house and also in I remember vaguely the way they looked now you had a brother and a sister and everybody was
born already when you moved to Dallas no the the sister was born first and she was born in do in in Boston the the brother came along um I think at a critical time in the family's life I was 13 she was 18 or 19 she had gone to Israel as a very as as a 17-year-old on the ship coming back from Israel she met her then husband who was an Israeli sabber who was um at at uh MIT coming for his masters from the techon so um and my brother was born as a kind of probably a change of life baby um unfortunately was
born with a gene that wasn't um discovered until he was probably six or seven and began to have terrible headaches maybe even older and he had something called Wilson's disease which is a a genetic not specifically Jewish but it's a genetic illness um that attacks the central nervous system and does not allow the body to metabolize copper so he lived a sad complicated difficult life and he died about five years ago now coming to Dallas was that a culture shock for you from Boston oh no oh no it was just oh it was horrible it w I was so ill equipped I was I on
so many levels because um I made friends they're still friends today I had some wonderful friends but the name of the game in Boston was not ever what you owned or what you had and it still is the say it's it's how smart were you so I was very adapt at the Smart game and the rest of it was like whoo you know um and I I lived a very sheltered life now Samuel where is he from oh he's from Dallas he's is it four he fourth generation he'll tell you his great great-grandfather is buried here and what business was he in his family were
poetry processors from 1890 his grandfather went out to Tex Arana with a push card I'm not sure I'm sure he got it he had a horse because there weren't cars even then and that's and he exchanged well you'll get all of this but he exchanged um Calico for chickens and that was how um um abon poetry was established right right okay um what was the happiest time in your life oh if I had to think about that I think it was probably um as a child living you know playing hopscotch riding my bike playing on the street till dark I quite happy with care free
I love my children I loved I loved being a mother uh even though we had challenges um but the most Carefree time I described Brooklyn and how comforting that was to to have this family and I mean and I have always been my all my life an observer so I was a participant but I always observed I was always so so the 40s was your favorite decade then yeah by that time I was six or seven and now in your lifetime there's been so many inventions advancements of Technology what came along that you saw that you go wow how' we ever live you know without
that we we liveed such a simple life in some ways I remember when my father got a radio for his car it was like huge it was huge and when we got um and when we got television it was huge all these things coming out I am a lifelong reader reading is my passion and my love and I was a reader as a child and so um I I never I I was excited by these things but television never held me it doesn't hold me today unless it's something amazing I would rather read tell me about your involvement with the Jewish community that I went
to graduate school on a on a u on a scholarship from the Jewish Federation um to work in community centers um I um I I'm not a joiner I mean I belong to ncjw I you know I support I support everything I'm fervently uh concerned with Jewish causes and issues but I'm not a joiner okay so I've been again sort of more of a of an observer um very in my later years I'm become much more we're Temple Emanuel members um we're very committed to Temple but Temple has a very small service and and that's very participatory and that's the service that I'm connected to
and the reason is I'm sure because it reminds me the most of my grandma 's show with the women on one side of it but I would not be comfortable it in a in a in an orthodox Community now in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions of course you were a small child with World War II President Kennedy assassination um uh uh Vietnam War the moon landing in ' 69 something good for the first time and of course the tragedy of 911 was there something on the national scene that came along that you know exist exactly where you were the moment oh
yeah I knew exactly where I was when Kennedy was shot because you know I was a Dallas person and I was standing in our at the M Monir Community Center at the desk talking to Regina when the news came and you know 911 was exceedingly painful um and on so many levels and we don't watch very much television so we really didn't know very much about it and a daughter called and said have you turned on the news and our youngest child lives in New York and I tear up when I tell the story so here is the youngest daughter and the oldest daughter somehow
or other gets through to her and she is downtown going to her dermatologist who is like three blocks away from 91 and she called the older daughter gets through the younger daughter and says and the younger daughter is like you know what's happening where am I what's going on here and the older daughter says to her turn around turn around and go walk up town that's where you need to be and that's exactly what she did so this older daughter younger daughter relationship is really to me is pretty Spectacular Now you and Samuel have the three children two daughters and one son correct you have
four grand kids right what advice does Grandma have for the Next Generation Um live life fully um be present in your own life and in the lives of others um it can never be all about success and money it has to be about who you are build a self that will sustain you thanks for doing this today oh thank you for the opportunity