Billie Aronoff
Dr. Aronoff's grandfather, Pesach Aronoff, came to the United States in 1884 and eventually settled in Dallas after brief stays in Jefferson and Fort Worth, Texas, bringing over his family from Europe in the years that followed. A learned man and scholar of the Talmud, Pesach helped organize and build Shearith Israel and taught there for many years, personally teaching young Billie Hebrew on Friday evenings before his bar mitzvah. Pesach worked as a peddler, ran what may have been one of the first theaters in Texas, and later went into the merchandise business. Billie's father, Joseph, also worked in the theater business, operating vaudeville and movie theaters including the Strand, the Strand Dixie, and the Fox in downtown Dallas.
Born in 1914 on Harwood Street, Billie grew up in a heavily Jewish South Dallas neighborhood, attending Lamar Street School, another elementary school, and Forest Avenue High School, where he played saxophone and clarinet and became a band leader. His family attended Temple Emanu-El under Rabbi Lefkowitz, and his mother, Julia, was celebrated as a wonderful cook who volunteered at the temple and served veterans. He recalled the anti-Semitism of the era, including seeing a Ku Klux Klan parade as a child and encountering discrimination when seeking surgical residencies and professional society memberships. He attended the University of Chicago, finished a year at SMU, and graduated from Baylor's medical school in Dallas.
After training at Parkland, the Lahey Clinic in Boston, the Ochsner Clinic, and Memorial Hospital for Cancer in New York, Dr. Aronoff returned to Dallas in 1945 to practice at Baylor, St. Paul, and other hospitals, specializing in head and neck cancer surgery and pioneering needle biopsy techniques with radiotherapist Charlie Martin. In 1973 he traveled to Israel to learn from Dr. Isaac Kaplan and became one of the earliest users of the carbon dioxide laser and later photodynamic therapy. He lectured widely across the country and the world and served as president of a professional society. He married Valerie Rosenthal in 1942, and together they raised four children, several of whom became physicians, along with six grandchildren.
Full Transcript
it's february 26 of 2001 dallas jewish historical society is here today with roz van gett who is going to an oral history of dr billy aronoff we're at his home on 55 51 drain drive in dallas texas dr aronoff your family has been in dallas for a very long time uh could you tell us something about how they got here and where they came from and about when they arrived in the united states my grandfather pesach iron off came to this country in 1884 he brought with him one son i mean one brother i'm sorry and they stayed here until 1892 when he brought the
rest to his family his wife his sister bertha iron off his sister rebecca arnold his brother joseph farinoff and his brother uh bernie arnold he also brought with him his sister from europe um named sarah who married a fellow named morris weinstein and they all came and moved into dallas how did they did how did they select dallas well about a year before pesox came to texas he had a friend come he went to jefferson texas and stayed there and within a year he'd written pesach many times and pesach finally agreed to come he first went to down to jefferson texas and then decided that
dallas was better in fact he stayed in fort worth for a short time but finally came to dallas but be before he came to texas where where did he live well he lived in jefferson texas i came to new york ah new york from new york to jefferson didn't stay much time at all in new york but one of his brothers stayed in new york his name was solomon morris and the other one solomon came down to and where were they from in europe they were from chicago was a very learned man he wanted to go to be a doctor but his father died a
little bit too early for that and so he read a lot he was a scholar in the talmud in fact for many years after came to dallas he taught the talmud and he also organized and helped build sheriff israel and if you go into the savalosky auditorium over at sharathil's room there are five names of people that taught thomas and his prominent mother he was very nice to me when i was growing up he used to get me to come over to his house for friday evenings so that he could teach me a little hebrew and uh he'd give me a little holla and a
little sipple wine and we'd sit there and read i became bar mitzvah and his brother-in-law whose name was weinstein we called him uncle weinstein his wife was called kanthi and he he taught me him group before i was bar mitzvah and before this was before temple emanuel thought anything about bar mitzvahs i was bar mitzvah which here at israel now uh when pesach came to dallas what did he do for a living here well he was like everybody else here there were peddlers and he finally got enough credit that the old sanger sanger brothers and he got his little pack and went traveling a few
years later he opened a theater in dallas i think it must have been the queen theater it was on elm and hackard street and it stayed there for a few years after he got rid of it somebody else took it over but he really had the first theater in the texas probably and then then he decided that he was going to go in the merchandise business and he got himself a place and he bought himself some property on south harwood street i think it was about 1300 south harwood and he lived there with us his wife and his daughter primarily my last daughter was who
was born in this country was mary and then now his his uh son was your father well he was the oldest son that was born out of joseph and joseph liked to do things himself and he started off also with a theater he started in fort worth and had a vaudeville theater and then he moved to dallas and he opened a theater on on main street between saint paul and harwood and this was also of audible theater about that time some fella named hobbit cell moved in dallas and hobbit cell and my father and mother used to go see the acts of the waterfall mr
hobbit cell said joe you ought to come join me joe didn't think he had a future mr hobbit said that his what a mistake about what year would this even be about 19 17 14 that's when i was born in 14th and i had a sister born in fort worth in 1911. her name was naomi and they lived here in dallas too now um did your father continue in the theater business yeah then he went into business with um mr fox nothing he's got a brother named dave i can't think his first name but they started with the strand and the fox theater the strand was also on on packard street west of um i mean i'm sorry on commerce street up mound street but west of akron and then they'd open a store a theater across the street that was called the stran of a dixie and then there's a third one named the fox so there were
three theaters in that one block two uh on the north side of the street one on the south and they were uh vaudeville or movies no no no they had sound no sound music and my mother used to play the piano once while in australian they had mostly cowboys and many a person has told us they used to spend the afternoon watching the the good old cowboys and i can't tell you what year he quit that but finally business got pretty bad and he went into various other businesses where did you live when you were a child well i am told i was born at
1313 packard street which is right down in the little low place in the street there was a grocery store named release right next to their house and i guess a lot of the family lived there eventually my folks moved out on acrid street um at gano and that's where there was a little hill and they built the four apartment house on that street and uh lived there until i was in about the second grade so that has to be a long time about 1921 or two and i went to the lamar street school got on on street there and from there we moved out to
uh um park row and the air and also all together out there we lived on the corner of park row and myers caddy connor across the second house from the south side of the street was barney hearing off and then down on the corner of accurate in jeffers there was a pesach and his wife and behind him bertha balzer and her husband live and finally behind her they have rebecca sacks so they were all pretty close together mary lived with her old folks what was it like going to elementary school there and what kind of things did you do as child kind of activities as
you know i'm not a very belligerent sort of guy but when i was in the first grade at the old lamar street school i get called up to the principal's office he told me if i didn't behave myself he's going to throw me off the second story window so i was very happy to get out of that neighborhood pretty quick brown school was a very nice school it was a block away from my house and we attended classes had good teachers good discipline but seven years there then went to forest avenue high school for four years now were there other jewish children in your school
mostly mostly it was a strongly jewish neighborhood although on our block there it was not solid jewish they would probably work what 25 to 50 percent were jewish and the other 50 weren't but there was a big jewish neighborhood and of course temple emanuel was out on south boulevard so the whole area was pretty jewish there were also a lot of jewish people in the near north side behind where the naple terrace is today and there were also a lot of mexican people out there but there were a lot of jewish people at that point knowing what you know now about jews and education how
do you what kind of education do you think you received being in a school like this well actually i thought we got good schooling we had good teachers um we had when we got to high school we had a couple outstanding teachers one was one that you'll probably hear the name of edna rowe who taught english and with some of our classmates at the tour class at temple that she thought i was the greatest and they of course think she thought she was grace but miss rowe used to come out used to have an office over on pacific oh no lamar pacific street no anyway
gaston avenue i'm sorry and oh andre used to come by and see me and talk about the old times until she was 90 plus 95 probably but we had good teachers and in high school what kinds of activities were you involved in well i had a clarinet you know in a saxophone and uh i became part of the saxophone part of the forest and the high school band and i became finally the director of the we had an old colonel major herzog and finally decided ought to be the leader of the band so i really enjoyed my music very well uh while while i was
growing up at the old carroll school uh in east dallas they brought a fella from seuss's band joseph old baluca and they invited me to get a free summer education there and mr deluca taught us so we learned very well we had the whole city behind the state man and we enjoyed ourselves funny story about that being only two blocks from forest high i led the blank band down to my house so that my young sister could see him playing and she could be proud of her father her brother yes did your family attend synagogue you talked about sheriff israel no then my my parents
always went to the farm temple there was a temple emanuel and my mother probably don't know she was the best cook in dallas in fact i've got a proof of it in some of this thing but they were they nominated her in pillsbury i think was gave her an honor and she talked she's not only taught but she fed people at the temple of emanuel at the old ymca which was down right north of city park and she used to go to the veterans hospital at least two or three times a week she'd go down and snore things from goodman produce and then she would
go by this thai place and get ties with these people but she she was very active in what she did and very active well what was temple emmanuel like during the time you were growing up well of course we grew up with a very very very reformed rabbi rabbi lefkowitz and rabbit left witch wanted discipline uh during the saturday morning service if you came here you better stay there until he finished one of our cousins byron sachs got up in the middle of the service and leftward stopped in the middle of this raise and said mr sax sit down and so uh nobody else went
i thought temple did a good job except i didn't learn anything uh we all took hebrew to say i learned in the hebrew would be a mistake uh the bible we really didn't learn that much i was very disappointed in as i've gotten older and had more time i've studied it some more and i'm kind of ashamed of myself i could read hebrew i can translate it and if you ask me about genesis i would say who is that but we had mostly volunteer teachers and finally when i was confirmed uh i taught the senior class and i found out that they really weren't interested
so i figured oh we'll try some so i got a communist come in i got a socialist come in attendance picked up beautifully and finally i've had a quick teach in the class but it was very interesting and the students were really wanting to learn but they none of us went to hater one of our cousins went to hater and i was teaching hebrew for a while and he'd ask me questions as well then i'll look it up and talk about it next week and i mean all of us would be looking at that how did your family celebrate jewish holidays well my mother loved
to have celebration we the whole family came over when we were kids later on as we grew up we came over for pesach every year we met for hanukkah gave gifts and other services from we delivered now my grandfather used to build himself a circuit and he invited us all over and we went through all the rituals and it's very good but we read the books and celebrate all the hospitalities we were jewish interactions if not in our learning did did your family anybody your parents belong to any jewish organizations other than temple well my mother was kind of active she was active in hadassah
and what else sisterhood a temple emanuel and other things that she did i can't really remember them all now do you recall being going to any kinds of functions that organizations had at the time well one of the great days was valerie was here at home with her i guess our second baby and mother had the passover dinner down at temple manual and i got a phone call during the time i was i went there and left valerie at home and just walked back in they just opened the door for elijah so rabbi left which couldn't wait to get down to the hospital the next
morning to let her know that i was elijah now we did a lot of things uh religiously we put on plays we put on automobile shows except you could not have a ford because ford was so anesthetic but we we participated in a forum ceremony all of this business what about um the community at large how did how did you feel about the community at large while you were growing up well you see back many many years ago you knew almost everybody you saw you could we left in south dallas and we either took the trolley down harwood street from grand or we walked to
town and we were entertained by the theaters and all uh but you knew everybody you passed it's not like today i don't know anybody in fact if i go to temple manual i don't know anybody so it was we were there was anti-semitism here there's no question and i've read i've run into a lot of anti-semitism because uh when i got through with medical school and they couldn't do much about in medical school because there were 20 jewish students and we did pretty well in school but then when it came to for a residency and i wanted one in surgery and i was about to
apply to a hospital mention it big hospital in the middle of the country and a friend of mine who was not jewish a surgeon said bill i wouldn't i wouldn't even apply they're going to give you your job but when you get past the first year it was a four-year residency you ain't got a chance so i didn't go there i finally went to memorial hospital in new york before that i went to leahey clinic in boston and uh why they let me in i still don't know because when i went up to asked to get off for russia sean kipper the chief of surgery
said what holidays are you talking about and i said the jewish hospital holidays i thought i was going to faint because it's like i hit him face with a macro he was so surprised i saw a lot of it in fact we have a dallas society of general surgeons and a jewish boy i was the first one in there in fact i was asked to join a group called the texas surgical and they turned me down several times not that i'd applied but the name was put up and one of my friends wrote a letter that anybody votes against dr you know because he's jewish
and a christian gentleman so they finally voted me into this texas surgical and i talked about an hour with levi olin about it he said well you really ought to go in it because you'll at least break the ice and start it up they've had many jewish people since then but there was a lot of particularly in surgery and i think this still is you think it still exists well i think it is although there are a lot of jewish people in all of these things but they just don't get to a point where it's a tight draw because in many cities doctors were jewish
doctors were kept out of hospital hospitals that's right out of medical schools and medical school residencies hospitals i think that that happened here in dallas as well well i don't think so um in my freshman i went to baylor when it was here that was 1934 and we had about 16 or 18 jewish doctors in our class of 120. now of course that 120 only 80 got to the next stage a second year and some were jewish but the jews were pretty well treated i think most of them graduated but yes they had a group here well we don't need that okay um one of the things that history also tells us is that in the early twenties dallas was pretty much overrun by the ku klux klan i can't remember oh sure i remember that very well um i've gone down with my parents and we were on field street just south of commerce street and a blue place playing parade came with their masks their
flames and we sat in that car scared to death very scared and there were instances around but um none that really bothered us other than just seeing that there were the crosses flaming crosses like that was even a lot later in dallas klucker's plan never got too much a foot after that um i think after about 1923 they pretty much died out here now can you tell tell us something about your college years well um my mother god bless her was i want to be sure i went to college and i went to the university of chicago and started there which was the finest experience
anybody could have and there wasn't any anti-semitism there because these these are very well-educated people and we were there at the time that ralph maynard hutchins started the new plan of you studied and you might get an exam but you might not and then you get one at the end of the year and you either passed or failed so that was an excellent then i ran out of money and i came back and spent one year at smu to finish and then went to medical school so i was not real proud of this and you know i'll tell you after going to a school of
the elk of chicago felt like i was back in high school or lower and this can't be let known to us and then how did you decide where you wanted to go to medical school well it was a matter of where i could afford to go and and so i applied only to snu and i they admitted me immediately so say they needed the dollars to pay for the medical school because they were getting i think ten thousand dollars a year from the baptist down in fayetteville baylor citizen oh i'm china baylor and uh so they they needed a lot of people we had some
great a great school i mean it these buildings had been abandoned by the city of dallas's school buildings because they were unsafe but it's all right for the medical students and we had one fellow that was a brilliant jewish fellow but he broken his back and they wouldn't let them in which was really horrible but the buildings they were cooled cold air and hot air cold as hell in the winter hot as hell in the summer so if they they did well they had some good instructors and then from then on go get postgraduate training and learn what you need to learn and then um
you decided to after your residency to return home to practice well i started out at partly and after i finished parkland i was able to get a job as an assistant to the professor of surgery but i told him when i went to work and also my wife when we got married that i wasn't going to be happy i wanted some more postgraduate training so we stayed here about two years and i think i had 90 in the bank and went up to boston to start out with and the greetings there were kind go find a place to live and then come back and tell
us when you're ready to go to work so but it was very pleasant there were other people in the same boat hours with no money and he did well and how long were you there well it's been a little over a year at leahey clinic and i had an appointment down at memorial hospital for cancer in new york city but i had a few about four months between so i applied to and went down to the oxnard clinic for the four months they offered me a job which i was very pleased with which i didn't have to take went up to and they were pleased
with the work i was offered a job there i decided i wouldn't come back to dallas so i came back to dallas set myself up with an office in the doctor's office and i won't mention his name but he was kind of hard to live with because i could only have that office after 12 o'clock and he was a jewish doctor but unfortunately some of his patients decided they wanted me and if he came in and now when i'm in the office i heard plenty about it but it was nice it was very nice to have a place and i gradually moved up the ladder
so um what would would this prox have been approximately by the time of world war ii yeah i went into world war ii yeah i was uh i always had a lot of sinus trouble and terrible trouble with this with the sandstorms so when i was in medical school you took anything you were offered and in our senior year when the colonels from the army came said any gentleman want to be first first to tell the army and hands went up that was in 1938 in 1940 we began to get in the fist cut um january about the 9th or 10th i got a letter
uh you're invited to go to um el paso texas uh from indoctrination into the army the united states to spend the one year that we owed him because we had a commission and so the next day i got a second letter you're invited to go to carlisle barracks pennsylvania as an officer in the united states army to get your indoctrination and then go from there to the part of embarkation at moffat general hospital san francisco and from there to the philippines so i got on the phone called that sport same because i'd call them and uh they said well look at the letter let's see
what the date is one was dated the seventh one was dave the eighth one from san antonio was the seventh to go to el paso said well i said you could have kind of get on the ball and said go to el paso let them examine you and then go from there carlos barron's pennsylvania and then follow the way well on the way out there i hit a bad sandstorm and i get into el paso they put me in the hospital i had 103 so you got tuberculosis and uh don't unpack your bag so i wanted to find out if it was true or not
so i called down to san antonio i had some friends down there and they said well get on a plane and come on down here so i went out to biggs field in el paso and i got on a b c d b 17b now b17b was the second model of that plane by the time the war was over they were in double letters you know double a double b and i went down there and they examined me and they said well we don't think there's anything wrong with you so i went back out to el paso and when i got back there i went
in and they said well we're not sure what we're going to do with you yet so they put me on as the officer in charge of um making people happy my main job was going across the border to juarez the soldier boys would come in and they'd have to go to juarez and make the trip down this road you know have a drink in each place it was a little problem when they went and get a drink a couple of mexican boys come up pat them on probably amigo and they'd have a couple of drinks and then walk out here our soldier boys stuck with
a check they don't pay they called the army put him in jail so i had to go get him out of jail and then after two or three months they finally called me and said well you may as well going home you're not discharged but you're on leave honorable me so then mary and i are going to get married so in may of that year i decided to go down to again a peel and i went to mineral wells colonel examining me said doctor what the hell is wrong with you and i said they said i got to break this i don't have it and
so uh he examined me and with that he splits in a tin can full of blood oh i need to turn the tape if we were continuing with your story um going out down the mineral wells yes and so uh the guy examining he says i got worse tuberculosis than you have he said uh don't don't get regular place we're going to send for you this was in may and uh i just come back to dallas going to practice and i wouldn't buy any clothes because i was going beyond me finally in september i'm honorably discharged from the army so i went to work when
i went up to the league clinic it was about 1943-44 again i'm worried what the hell am i going to tell my kids so another phone and i went to the navy recruiting and met the fellow whose father had done the first appendectomy in the united states and this guy was very nice he examined us took our histories and said look boys if you're smart pack your bags and go home forget about all this withdraw your application and he was sincere enough that i believed him and so i did the other fellow was from spokane washington and he had two children and a wife that
didn't have any money and played clinic wasn't paying them no more because he was through there he stayed up there till november and they finally discharged them so if the army had anything on your record like there's no tuberculosis whether it's right around you you've had it they didn't want you so what was dallas like during wartime then i can't say that i noticed too much different there are a few less men but it was a bustling city and again we uh came back and welcomed into dollars and got to work for the professor for a little while longer and by this time had gone
into the service so i went to practice for myself and i was well accepted at baylor and st paul and the other hospitals in dallas and got into my specialty and went on to work and um do you have any experiences about your practice that you would like to share with us like which i've got a ton of those okay can you tell us a little bit more about your specialty and are you still practicing i started my specialty when i came back from new york in 1945. new york memorial hospitals for cancer and i had spent a long time learning what to do both at the leah clinic new orleans and finally at memorial and i got very interested in head neck society that's accession of the tongue the larynx the jawbone and cleaning out the neck there wasn't any anybody else doing it here the other thing we learned was what was called a needle biopsy which was to take a little fork it needle and stick it into these little knots in the neck and then there was a shield that went down over it it got a nice specimen for you to pull
it out well the minute i got back i was happy to find that charlie martin who was a radiologist radio therapist here and probably the first one he's one that brought radium needle injection inserts into texas and uh he had been doing a lot of these putting needles in the neck without a biopsy because early on he found out that if you took the note out you disturb the surrounding tissues enough that you cut the patient's chance of cure by 50 so it turned out i was a blessing for him which really helped me a whole lot and uh he would send me these patients
put a little needle in there number 18 which is very big and get a biopsy for him under the microscope we examined it and uh about three or four years later he says bill says how about coming to boston with me i said oh sure i'll be glad to come with you and we went up and he was talking to the harvard club at the big hospital there in boston and he's given he's taught the new york of the new england radiological society and he presents his paper about treating these notes in the neck and they heckled him mercilessly they just jumped up and down
all over them and they had been for years because they said oh you're treating someone that doesn't exist and so it's oh i said i forgot i've got a friend with me and i showed my paper on what happened when you took these little slivers out that they weren't cancer there wasn't any question about it so we became great friends with that and it did help me get along tell them about your laser experience yeah about uh 1973 i got a phone call from a guy from new york and he was interested in the new carbon dioxide laser and he said one of your friends
here in fellow lived down on on inward road wants to buy you a laser his relatives including one of whom was a doctor knew that i was doing this work and thought well maybe i could do something and so i said well tell me more about it as well as a matter of fact there's a fellow named isaac kaplan who came from israel and he wants to come out and talk to him so i met isaac who was a typical englishman he was born in south africa and trained in london and married a seventh day a seventh century seventh generation jewish woman uh and uh
a real character and uh he talked to me about it so i said sure so we want you to come to israel so i went and spayed with him for two weeks learning how to use the laser with we were the first and second phone name uh i think and we were his class this italian fellow was a great guy and he had been offered the job as doctor for the vatican hospital until they had a little question and he ladies i'm jewish said uh i'll be glad to be your chief of surgery but if there's a question of how we're gonna treat people forget
about it and so of course he didn't didn't get the job but um we learned over there with with isaac for a couple weeks came back to dallas and took us about six months to get the laser because i'd found somebody willing to buy but the government wanted to charge us 18 because isaac had written an article about the laser and so now it wasn't that new i don't know why finally we we buy the laser and get up in december of that year and uh the next week the government took off the tax on the laser we didn't get our money back but we
started doing all sorts of cases with a and what kind of surgery did you do with the water well in those days i did uh laryngectomies and the advantage of the laser was that it would cut down on the blood flow i mean bleeding from a space you could cut to a space we did radical breasts raising the skin flaps and the breasts cutting the muscles in the breast i did a lot of gastrointestinal surgery just to show people we could do it it didn't happen technique it was unnecessary and then we went further from that they invented photodynamic therapy which is the use of
a drug which goes to the cancer and then you use a laser of a proper wavelength and it's adheres to the cancer and within minutes after you start using it if it's a visible area it starts swelling and getting liquid looking and finally within 24 hours it's black and if the lymph node or whatever you're treating is less than a sonometer it cures it so it really we use both the photodynamic therapy it's excellent in the larynx it's excellent in the trachea and esophagus you can take a place that's sealed together and you run the laser down there and you see the tissue mount in
front of you so it's a great thing unfortunately somehow another lasers are not used as much as they were they don't know have enough champions in this type of surgery and there are a lot of so many other things that have come up to use that they're not used but we we did did you realize at the time that you were a real pioneer in this field well somebody told me that but it this photo dynamic there was really something else really interesting to see them float away billy weren't you president of the americas yeah international let's go back and talk about your wife what
did you and your wife meet well valerie and i had never met each other bauer was born in dallas stayed in dallas until she was five years old and then her father who went down to the valley to brownsville and he was a city manager there and bought porn of brownsville in there and among his other undistinguished points he had a guy named hitler coming to brownsville while he was there just to show off but uh when valor was 19 she finished she was in the university of texas they moved back to dallas and she went to university of texas and then went out with
some of the other schmoes in dallas didn't meet me but a friend of mine went for his basic training he he had the first dropped out of the ball you know into the goldfish pole and his folks gave him a big dance up at the old peacock terrace the baker hotel and if you weren't at the peacock tears you missed something it had little twinkling lights blue lights and arbors all over the place and they always had good bandstands there which uh made life really worthwhile and so i had some boy girl for a dance she was with a doctor and i think i danced
both advances with her and when she went home her day there was a doctor a friend of mine said don't go with him he's got a terrible reputation and so being a persistent jerk i called her up and said how about a date i'm busy so we finally got to where i didn't give her any out so she decided she'd marry me and what was her maiden name valerie rosenthal and when did you get married we got married in 1942 just on the week before valentine's day her name being valerie because she was born on valentine's day and we got married a week early so
i wouldn't have to buy two presents but no it was a very convenient time and we've been married 59 years i have four children two of their doctors and two women is that mutually exclusive okay no i really my older daughter actually was married to a doctor they're not married anymore but i tried to talk her into going into medicine the younger one she's smart but she couldn't stand the sight of blood there was no way our prospects we have six grandchildren the first four now the first three four none of them became doctors but the younger two are now talking about the genes getting
ahold of them and when of his graduated college and uh she's working this year but she's gonna go take postgraduate course the youngest one who's um doing very well and he's going to classic school but he's saying that he's been going medicine so he might he might be happy another that would be nice have you been involved in any civic or cultural groups well i've been in a lot of civic things i've contributed to uh talked to many of the organizations and uh i never got into a rotary or anything of that sort because i never had time right uh medicine can be a very
demanding sort of thing uh in order today to keep your certificate up you've got to go to a certain amount of postgraduate work but i was beyond that after about 10 years i started giving talks all over the country all over the world we figured out from about 15 to about 30 years of work i was gone an average of 78 days a year totally giving talks first came very interested in the american society and been on the boards and been president of this unit here in the texas unit and so my cup was full that's absolutely true what about in the jewish community did
you give any talks to any of you a lot of jewish groups yeah i worked with the board at the tampon never got on any of them like young kids they're an aesthetic no i've had many good friends of the rabbis and many good experiences tell me about your family today well right now we have four children the oldest one gail was married to harold granny and after about 25 years they decided they want fit for each other gail has well first of all gail herself is a bright woman and very involved in civic matters she lives in fort worth and she's been president of
the symphony league she's guide for the museum in fort worth and also for the auditorium she's very active with other groups there and i don't know how cause she is with jewish groups i know she isn't active she works hard at the temple they've got a brand new beautiful temple over she has two children a girl and a boy the girl is a host grandchild she's 29 years old and she went to college at penn university pennsylvania and her field is the environment and then after she got that she went into the field not the field service peace corps peace corps and they gave her
option a lot of place to go one was in uh africa that she thought was too civilized so finally she did go to africa and went to the islands there right across from madagascar and the poorest islands in the world and there are five islands and uh they have rides over there all the time so she she got there she loved it though she came back from here and decided she would go get a master's degree so she went to yale and she got her master's degree and then she went to work for the world health organization guess where same dirty feeling and after a
year or so friendship she made and while she was at yale showed up so she's out of it now she's now working at smithsonian and she and her beloved i'm not married yet i will i've been probably west her younger son is a brilliant young man who went to brown and then applied for a postgraduate degree in about seven or eight places and had his choice so he went to johns hopkins and he's not in medicine because he doesn't like blood and he doesn't like working on animals but he's in biological in environmentalism and he's now at josh hopkins for a five-year program for his
phd while he was at brown he met a young lady who he likes and she followed him up to baltimore she's on university of maryland medical school where she's now junior and what their promises are i don't know but that's those and stephen my oldest son is a doctor and uh he started out by going to duke and then from there he went to southwestern here from medicine and he had an interesting little life if you want me to go into it he was part of that very plan that you had to give every near the night you stay at the army he had with
the government two years of service his teachers out of southwestern don selden uh liked them and so when he got ready to go apply for the army they found out he found out that he didn't have to he was already in the public health service and they got him sent to phoenix where there's an indian health service hospital these indians the pima indians all have diabetes and they all have gallstones and there was a big argument between fell out here i fell in washington about what was the cause of the diabetes and the blood changes and diabetes and that was steven's job so he stayed
finally came back to the phoenix and finally came home and he's practicing diabetes and other diseases the next one down is nancy who never found herself a mate but nancy's got got three or four degrees and one or two in uh cpa and also in business and so she's worked no children and we hope and last but not least is ronald aaron also a doctor he does vascular and other surgeries he's a big worker in this minimal invasive surgery and he's right now he's working with dickerman added memphis and they're decrements putting in the kidneys and ronnie's taking them out of the donors live donors
laparoscopically and they're a bunch of other problems they have two children little girl miriam little boy um matt and matt's at in santa fe at the um st john's hospital and he's he's definitely going to go medical school his older sister miriam went to um what's up in portland oregon uh read read to read college so uh see most likely it's gonna be in medicine you didn't mention stephen's two boys then i mentioned he's got two sons he's got elders one is named jason and he went to a m he's got a business major and a computer like major and he's now working for a
company theoretically he's working also for texas instruments and they're very busy and the other boy is is alex and he's also going to get him he's in this junior here on what the hell he's going to do is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to have no i just think it's nice you all to do this uh we've tried to keep a little record here of some of the stuff and i say my daughter-in-law is a big believer in knowing what happened to the families and my kids are good am i whole family very nice kids i guess my family
well thank you very much thank you been a pleasure listening my pleasure i hope i haven't given you too much bull okay we're going to go down the front row first this lady is mrs bloom here is valerie's grandmother she was eldest of 15 people um and 13 m grew to be adults next is valerie's mother esther gronik rosenthal uh she was born in shreveport louisiana and next one there's me and this one is valerie this is my mother julia rubenstein aaronov and this is my father joe iron off and this is my kid brother philip harinoff now the ernos had a big family there
was 20 years between my older sister and philip and unfortunately i am the only survivor of the four kids uh this one is louis sacks who was married to rebecca sex this fella is maury nathan who is married to mary iron off nathan this is mary right here i'm sorry this is mary who was one of the sisters of them and this is irving brooks who was married to my sister naomi they're both deceased by now this is my younger sister toby was married to bernard summer this was long before she got married and unfortunately she has passed away and next to her is mama
and noah norma this is rebecca sax the wife of this gentleman over here and uh ben balzer who is married to bertha beau and the birth is way over here and this is ray iron off this is zade rosenthal valerie's father this is uh melvin iron off and this is byron sax and last but not least barney hearing off that's it