Buddy Leventhal
Buddy Leventhal's roots run deep in Dallas and beyond. His mother's family came from a town in Ukraine, fleeing a pogrom around 1904 when she was about four years old; she was next to the oldest of eight children. His grandfather was a cobbler who traveled between towns and was killed in a store in Camden, Arkansas, around 1927. His father's family came from Poland and settled in Dallas in the area known as Goose Valley, the early Jewish neighborhood near downtown. His grandfather, born in 1848, was very religious. His mother grew up in Corsicana, later moved to Dallas, and worked her way up from stock girl to buyer at Titche's, while his father ran a produce green grocery called the Busy Bee.
A Depression-era child, Buddy grew up on Holmes Street in South Dallas and described his education as coming from the streets, riding streetcars all over town from a young age. He carried a paper route of about a hundred papers a day in the old Cedars neighborhood, collecting from working families and saving his earnings. He graduated from Forest High School, then SMU as a pre-med student, and was accepted to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, one of only four Jewish boys admitted. After a surgical residency he became a board-certified surgeon and, lacking a place to practice, took an offer in Garland, where he stayed for 35 years, rose to chief of surgery, served as president of the staff, and sat on the hospital board of directors.
Buddy met his wife through his sister, who worked in the same office; they married in 1957, three weeks after his graduation, and were together for 49 years until her passing. They raised two daughters in a Jewish home, and he remained close to his family, including a grandson. Bar mitzvahed at Shearith Israel and later a member of the temple, he was proud of his Jewish identity even while not a joiner. He credited much of his success to a beloved uncle, whom his mother had raised, who became general manager at the Dallas newspaper, helped him find jobs, and introduced him to prominent Dallas figures. Reflecting on his life, he counted himself a lucky man with a good family and mentors, and expressed deep gratitude for his Dallas upbringing.
Full Transcript
today is wednesday august 3rd 2022 my name is joe reingle the interviewer and i am interviewing today buddy leventhal hello buddy good afternoon buddy tell us a little bit about your family your parents your grandparents whatever you know about them in their early years uh my grandparents my mother's and her mother and father came from a town called yellowstone garage in ukraine which is now called corovagrab they changed the name it was a fairly big city and in 1904 was a big program there and my uh grandmother and grandfather and an older my mother was second the oldest sister and my mother came to this country she was about four when she came here uh then the other kids there were eight kids there were six that were born in this country so my mother was next to the oldest uh my grandfather uh was a cobbler and he was went to different towns he he didn't like light much he actually was killed in a store in camden arkansas in about 1927.
and my sister was and my cousin's two oldest cousins my older cousin my sister were born just after harry died my grandmother i remember her well she uh my mother's mother she lived just a few one block from my house and we went up there every day for lunch my mother and my grandmother were very close and my mother have to raise the younger kids she died when i was about four and a half years old so my mother and my grandmother they spoke yiddish but my mother and father spoke english because they came here preschoolers so i understood yiddish when i was young but
after that lost it uh my my mother had uh there were eight kids uh five girls and three boys my father came from suici poland dallas was a walking town to pharah israel were sue walks and my father came here around 1890 he was raised in dallas he was raised in goose valley where they all live which is uh like where the l phoenix is downtown it was by highland and caroline and going north on that was was the jewish neighborhood he went to cumberland school and i don't know if he went to high school much my grandfather was born in 1848 and died around
1945 he was quite old i was about 12 when he died he was already very old and i really didn't get close to him uh my father had uh there were eight seven uh seven or six of his uh and he was the youngest my daddy's older sister was rachel levine her husband was president of fairett israel in 1913. so you could see the spread in our family my two uncles married tombalowskis who were prominent in the old days my father my my mother was lived as a child until she was graduated high school in corsicana and then she she and the family moved to dallas and they bought a house on holmes street where they lived was in south dallas my mother worked at texas and she started as a stock girl and ended up as a buyer she liked to work my mother was a very good good manager and my father they were in the produce retail green grocery my father had a busy
bee which is on irvy and commerce was back over where neiman's is but demons only went about halfway down even though they owned that whole building and uh when i was a kid i used to go to the market with him and back produce and as a kid i was a depression baby we didn't go to they quit the press grade in the schools so i didn't go to kindergarten and my education was on the streets of tough kids street kid until i graduated high school and man my mother i don't know why she turned me a loose but i was five six years old
i'd leave the house and i'd have a dime or so where i'd ride the street car downtown i'd go all over town everywhere in dallas she she didn't she let me go so i saw dallas in the raw i learned a lot of things i started high school i started grade school at columbia hill and i can remember my mother taking me to enroll and the lady said what's his name and she said milton leventhal and i looked up at him said no it's not it's i did not know my name i was from the day i was born i was on this buddy they
say my sister that's what she said i went to colonial school graduated there then i went to forrest high graduated there then i went to smu graduated and i went to university of texas southwest medical school and graduated when i was when i was started i had a an uncle who my mother raised worked at the dallas morning news when he was young i was too young to do it but he made me a paper round of three blocks down peabody at three by bikes up the forest to home street on forest avenue and from that day that i graduated high school i was a
newsie and i ended up when i was starting high school throwing a hundred papers a day in the old cedars i don't know if you know where the old cities were that was my paper round and i did that i threw a hundred papers a day and my uncle had fixed that up for me he was gonna i'll tell you about him later he uh that route was uh a daily round i had to collect every day because these are they were good people working people but they didn't have a lot of money and a quarter was a lot of money that was the paper
so i have to go every day and they would pay me but it'd take time and i got extra money the papers were 25 cents i paid 12 cents of paper the regular routes paid uh 13 cents so i made an extra penny of paper that i was making forty dollars a month i was going to ask you what you did with your money yeah 12 13 years ago that's great and i put it all in the bank to go anytime my mother and father gave me spending money the the seniors was a was a fairly wealthy jew that was the first jewish neighborhood after
they left goose valley and a lot of prominent people live there but there were only one left that i could think of on eckhart and uh powell had mr lowering state and this was a round of blacks hispanics and white they each had their own area and there was never i never saw any trouble i never saw a policeman there or anything and i threw that i took care of that paper route when i was graduated high school and then i i went to college and i uh then uh i was an undergraduate of high school i was a third hospital and i was never
canceled and the counselor didn't ask me about going to college or anything or did a scholarship and i always took care of myself i had good mother and father but i i took care of myself after i uh i was uh i don't graduate and i got on streetcar went to smu went to the office and man asked me what i wanted i said i want to come to smu he thought i was nuts you know everybody was already he said fill out the papers and i did and i was accepted i graduated and then only i was pre-med i only applied to one medical
school and i got in southwestern they only took four jewish boys and don't ask me how i got one up but i got one of them i graduated southwestern and i did our surgery residency in portland southwestern became a board-certified surgeon and i didn't have a place to practice and nobody asked me to join him nor was i going to ask him somebody told me that a boy who had been a medical student under me had gone to garland and built a little building and he had a place to rent and i went to we garland texas changed land as a search i knew a
couple of boys there that's all and one man the doctor there who really helped me out told me he gave me six weeks i spent 35 years there it was uh garland was 45 000 in and when i left in 96 it was 225 000. it was uh they had a small hospital there were maybe if there were half a dozen jewish people in garland would have been a lot and here i was in this this town you know but i worked in the emergency room i took call and finally this one doctor saw that that was probably the best surgeon that they had worked and started using me and everybody respected him and i built up a pretty nice practice i'm going to take you back for a minute yeah before we go on forward tell me if you and your family were involved in any jewish or civic activities growing
up my parents were raised in a kosher home in corsicana they had a shoe but she i i can't they won't be the sure but i don't know how active my mother was my father came from a very religious family knew all the stuff uh my grandfather was a psychic he lived when he moved uh south dallas he lived next door to schulte he was very religious you know when i was young they didn't take coffins into a show and what they would do to science they would take when he came from the funeral home they took his the casket up to the doors of
the pharaoh israel opened the doors closer that's what they would do then we were going to go to soccer and i was bar mitzvahed there and then later we moved and my uncle blown the temple and he used to take take my mother driving things and she joined the temple and she was in the sisterhood in hadassah my father was not active in jewish organizations 100 jewish and still am but i was i was never a joiner i was not a joiner in fraternities and things but i i bombed a temple and i still blown the temple my wife was confirmed at temple my kids
were confirmed we had a jewish home we weren't active in that and my wife were not that it was not active in the sisterhood i tried to get her to but she she went to join her okay my kids were in uh bbyl so we were pure jewish you know i was just curious if you were involved when i grew up in grade school high smear in medical school i never experienced any personal any sympathism when i went to garland i worked hard and i did good and i became chief of surgery for a period now i was president of the staff did a term
and then i was on the board of directors for six years of the hospital and here's this little little jewish boy came i got along with everybody and i was respected and i respected them when did you meet your wife how did that happen i met my wife [Applause] uh i was in medical school probably a sophomore and she was work she was from dallas where i graduated from hillcrest she originally went to her father was in the navy when they got out of the war they were building those little homes and they lived in oak cliff and then she they moved she went to
holland park a year or two and then hillcrest and she went to oklahoma for one year came back and i met her about then my sister she worked at the same office with my sister my sister said would you go to lunch with me today she took her lunch and she said i have a brother who's single would you like to meet him the rest is history and we met i was single during medical and we married in 57 three weeks after i graduated and i always joked that i had an old plymouth that i drove and it was just barely making it in and
they used to laugh at me by my cohorts in medical school my car she said i said we need a car she said i'll buy a car who would get married so i always joke i have a reason i got married i got a new car and we were married for 49 years and she passed away my kids i have two daughters in there uh live in dallas they're jewish 100 my younger daughter is married to arthur webster he was known pretty much in the family they have i have one grandson adam and he's going to get married next year in the summer my older
daughter her she lives here arthur and annie live in the building and she helps me and then my other daughter she's the oldest and uh she works in uh financial business but she's accounted she's the she's the head of the accounting it it was southwest securities but now it's hilltop uh is she married also no she's single she lives about six blocks down the street so i'm pretty well covered i uh i had uh i you know honors uh i was in a surgical society and i was asked to join that they blackballed people while they took me i don't know what they did i
had uh i had two real close friends there was a boy's name was millard corn he died about a year and a half two years ago we met the first grade in caleb we went to school together i altered rachel and i never was in a class with him but we were creating a hercycle type of tour and we were tight as boracay tree until he died a year ago we talked every day we saw every day we just it was they all made me not my wife they were friends but it was just us and then i had two very good friends doctors where
i practiced they were catholics i think two honors i ever had in my life when they passed away i gave their eulogies on the altar in the catholic church now a few years ago that was not allowed but i thought that was something here's his little jew born upon [Music] that's how important you were now i like i say i was on the streets i knew every street in dallas now let me tell you one of my big times when i was a kid a little kid we had still had horse-drawn milk wagon or strong garbage wagons they were contractors and they had they had
a wagon and a mule or two and they were garbage people and they came i lived on home streets which was 45 and they the dump was down about a mile or less from my house and they would come by my house and i was a kid and i would jump on the back of that bill and hold on and the guy would do like that and he you would let you sit up there and hold the rights that was cute well they knew how to gun those horses and i would walk through that garbage and sit up there and hold that right he's like
i would suck and you know i was like sit right here and get that done i'd get out walk home oh i had a life sounds like fun really a lot of fun paper i had they would have all kinds of people in there but i had there was one liquor store and he was a well-known he was a bookie and he was later they blew up the liquor store uh tell me can you think of a project or something you worked on that you're really proud of in your profession about your pressure rising to the top in the hospital when i came there that
there were no noises doctors on the staff now later they we had a number rather but but that was my my career and i i did well in it like i said something for uh for uh a street kid from south dallas i saw the top of the mountain what did you and your wife like to do together what did you say what did you and your wife do for fun for activities together well if you really want to know the truth she was a home person and i i see she was uh autodidactic she read and she read books that i wouldn't understand but
she read it she had a subscription to it that day they had been required and then she ran russian literature stuff and i understood that's like which i did i i got her to join uh the ladies artillery the medical she went to war meeting she just was and she was so i did the social i did the social uh deal it was fine and she'd go and she the people liked her and she liked them she was kind of shy i guess we she we would uh saturday nights she loved she'd dress up and we were going to nice restaurants i had a friend
up there who had a who had the legit oh we would he would say you know he rented it out if he had called me up that was one of the doctors i was he'd say i can get to play tonight you want to go to vegas let's say yeah and i'd call her up at five o'clock and say his name was teddy i said he says he wants to go to vegas you want to go yeah i'll be around hit shift back backwards she without whatever i searched whatever i planned it was all right i made the plans for the trips she was good
she was or the kid she was very good with the kids very good with the kids okay so you've you've grown up here you had a colorful wonderful childhood here so my question to you is how have you seen dallas change through the years what do you think have i seen dallas chance well let me say first i spent 25 years in south dallas about a week ago robert dynasty you know he did i said i want to go back and see downside dallas one more time we went on the total road and got off there like goose valley and we went to hell phoenix
i couldn't the caroline and holland or gone there because the street's not the same yeah you have to make downtown i couldn't imagine i hadn't been there in a long time all those buildings oh however i asked my daughter her office down there there are no more stores like we had we had those hundreds of stores and i go to look at them and do they have no stores then i went out to the real south dallas there's very few homes left now my home is still there 3109 homes nothing's left i don't know we're not my my round and the cedars there's nothing left
to the cedars and it's all changed and there's some business uh the lamar street has got a lot of business and just nothing nothing it's all gone that i i live through they they uh i can't think of a word there's a very large hispanic community a very large african-american community it's that's all changed for years the white community ran to that town now it's everybody you know hispanics every day on sit on the city council so that's all different that it used to be they told you what what what you need to know about government not now transportation we had good transportation there's no
local transportation i could get on a street car on the bus and go anywhere i want in fact for two years until i got the car i wrote a streetcar to smu every day i could get it one block from my house it takes it all the way up to smu i did that for two years no more buses you get a transfer and get off one bus go to another what about the jewish community can you tell us some things about how the jewish community has changed also yes the jewish community i'd say 80 percent was in south dallas there were i guess five
shores of shout outs temple sheriff the ferret israel the remission the remain issue answer so foreign and then there was a good assault him a good osaka where i was born misfit and then there was a little show which was the uh became golden acres there was a little old uh home on south billboard where some elderly people lived and they had a little a little show nathan uh what was nathan nathan's who was in his latin was the rabbi golden acres kaplan no nathan chaplin his daddy was like nathan and i never natured real so when the war was over it pretty soon the
jewish community moved north and nothing was left nothing left and uh everybody like sadly sunday night they originally went to hershey chocolate they had an auditorium and they had sunday night all the kids from everywhere came and they had dance then they went to the center at city park and and we were tight and even even though you didn't live around over there you knew them and dates and stuff but i don't know the only thing i know that keeps them together now is like bbyo stuff like that but we we saw each other all the time and then uh yeah all the shows were
close you know it's not as i don't think it's they're together like they were before even the people the kids they went to temple and the kids they went we still went to the same dance on sunday night yeah you all knew each other but of course the population now is so large it's hard to get together you know yeah so the last thing i want you to tell is if you can think of anything else is there anybody that you looked up to as a role model when you were growing up yes i haven't had an uncle i had love i had three uncles
and one was next to the youngest with eight kids and my mother raised here and he stayed very close to my mother until she died i was he was like a father to me i had two fathers both good fathers that was his number one son and he was became he started working at the dallas news when he was in high school and ended up as the general manager of the dallas fort didn't do wow and i was five or six years old and i'd get off on all the streetcar and go downtown and get off and go into they were they had an office
as young guys they all and i'd go in there and see then i would when i'd leave there that was on the west end my daddy was up on me i'd go look to my dad he you know i was this little kid took care of me all not too well he's the one who got my paperwork and he became he was well known in dallas very well known when i graduated high school he took me down to dreyfus they bought me a suit blue suit it was fifty dollars dreyfus had a a brand of their own when i graduated high school they took me
down there and bought me that same blue suit uh uh out at smu 75 when i got married he took me down to drive this and told me that same blue state cause that's bliss to get married after i would have i stayed in contact and he became the executive and whenever i got a chance i'd go down to the office where they spent time and then when i was in practice every thursday i spent with him and he had he bummed up led club and he had lunch and we'd go to lunch and everybody was the mayor and all that and they would all
come to talk to him in those days newspapers were painful and they wanted to be on the good side of the paper now but so they've come to the table and i've been able to a christmas tree and then when i got married and then he had tickets to the football and all that he had a ticket for me we and he took care of my mother and father when i said took care he they didn't drive and he would take him to shule and stuff like so i looked up to him and he was he was very good to me wonderful and i he
introduced news me to all these people you know i didn't know and then he when i was going after me in my first two years it was hard to get a job because the gi guys army still had those nighttime so i was working on a unloading coco i did that for two years in the summer oh boy and i was down in his office and i said i got to find me a job he said what got on telephone made a call i got a job at mayor hospital he called call this man down there he moved he said go see him and then
he said i went up to the 55th floor operating room that had it said go up and see miss francis she put me to work and i did that until i graduated medical school on the weekends uh on summer wonderful yeah well that's how i got into surgery i worked in the operating room yeah yeah good training for you also what very lucky very much love hearing your story anything else you want to add before we finish i was just it just it was not a lot of effort it was not a lot of effort i got into smu i went down there and i
feel that's better two weeks ago i got a letter here and i got in mexico i got a residency you know those were competitors yeah i was just a lucky guy a nice family nice seeing lo or had wonderful in-laws when my kids were little my mother-in-law and father-in-law took care of my kids every weekend within the whole week you know that is good parents good at good act aunts and uncles just just a lucky guy lucky guy well we're very happy that you all grew up here in dallas happy to have you here i'm glad to meet you thank you and i'm glad i'm
from dallas yes i'm glad i'm from texas got it thank you sir i'm gonna turn it off