Carmen Michael
Carmen Miller Michael came from a family woven into Dallas history. Her mother, Carmen Jablow, was born in a small town near Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Isaac Jablow, who fled the Russian army and made his way to America selling cane chair seats, and Hannah, who had come from Germany. The Jablow family relocated to Dallas in part to be near relatives, the Marcus family. Her father, Henry S. Miller Sr., was Dallas-born, the son of immigrants from the Suwalki area of what is now Poland. Carmen's great-grandfather, Aaron Miller, is credited in Dallas Jewish records with leading the first Jewish service in the city. She had two older brothers, Henry Jr. and Jack, who was killed as a Marine on Guadalcanal during World War II.
Carmen grew up at 2714 South Boulevard, in a neighborhood she remembered as friendly and family-like, near Forest Avenue with its bakeries and the White Theater. Her father, who had left school early to help support his family, worked at Sanger Brothers before building a respected career in real estate, entering the business on his own around 1914. Carmen attended a Temple Emanu-El kindergarten, John Henry Brown School, and later Hockaday, then went to SMU, where she double-majored in English and psychology and graduated at fifteen. Encouraged by professors, she pursued graduate study at Columbia and a doctorate at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, working closely with Rorschach expert Marguerite Hertz.
In 1951 Carmen became the first psychologist in the psychiatry department at the medical school in Dallas, a post she held for roughly sixty years, eventually being named emeritus. She married Ludwig, whom she met through her piano teacher Gertrude Mandelstam, in 1956, and they had two children, Andrew, an ophthalmologist in Richmond, and Susan, who lived with the effects of childhood encephalitis. Though she described herself as agnostic, Carmen felt strongly identified as Jewish and served as president of Temple Emanu-El, a role she took seriously despite her candor with Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman. A persistent founder, she helped start the Dallas mental health association and an epilepsy association and created a residential program, described as the High Houses, for people with disabilities.
Full Transcript
this is the oral history with carmen miller michael on january the 24th 2011. um carmen tell me about your family your parents and grandparents and all of that family history that you know well um my immediate family was my mother her name was carmen her maiden name was jablo j-a-v-l-o-w she was born in kentucky and later moved to dallas which is another whole story and my father henry s miller senior was born in dallas and stayed here and i had two brothers one jack was about five and a half years older than i am was and henry jr was about 12 years older [Music] my brother jack was a world war ii hero in the marines and was killed on guadalcanal my brother henry just died about a year ago uh let's see i guess he was 95.
i have to think that over but anyway um then as far as background for both of my parents about two years well i've always been interested in genealogy my genealogy and i've worked on it for years on and off without knowing much about it but then about three years ago i got the bug and i got into it very heavily and i could use the computer for a reunion program and so i know more if i looked at it because i can't remember it all but i know more than you want to know about the background of everyone but if you want me to go
back one more generation or two yes that would be great okay uh well my mother's father isaac jablow this is a very familiar story he ran away from the russian army you could still see scars on his back from beatings they were very anti-semitic as you've already heard a million times so he had nothing and he ran away and he came landed in new york he didn't have any money he didn't know the language and some fellow oh russian uh showed him some cane chairs you know chair seats made of cane and where he could get some and how he should try to sell them
so that's how he made a few cents because he got these canes chair seats or something but he eventually worked his way down to kentucky pedaling his way and he settled near louisville a little town and uh he met my grandmother his wife there and she her name was hannah she had come from germany she had several sisters and brothers and some of them had already come over here so she came and lived with her sister and her sister by the way was the mother of herbert marcus because i have to bring that up later as to why she came to dallas so but my
grandfather met hannah in louisville probably and uh this little little town and my mother was born there and her sister and her brother and when i the marcuses and they were very close because they all lived in kentucky at one time and eventually the marcuses went came to dallas and they wanted mother and her sister ray to visit and so first rey came i think and she met her husband-to-be and then later my mother came and when they came for a visit it was many months they stayed you know they came on the train and stayed for months that was a visit and mother met
my father here so that's then the whole family moved to dallas um her sister was already marrying someone her brother was a doctor and he went in the navy for world war one and when he was finished he moved to dallas okay so that just leaves the mother and father in kentucky am i going on too long about that not at all okay so uh they decided the parents hannah and isaac that they wanted to be in dallas all their children were here and the marcuses were here and so mother told me that grandpa just traded his house for a house here or maybe it
was dent in denton to start with that he just jumped over here sight unseen and they didn't even see the house that he traded for so they came to dallas and then of course then they lived right in dallas um let's see my uh father was born here and his father and grandfather lived here but they were immigrants his father and grandfather and they came from the section of uh now poland which has been many countries over the years but they came from the suwaki area and one year i guess it's been about 15 years now i went on a trip and i went there
i didn't know exactly where they lived uh but i thought it was a town named rachsky and so we rented a car and a driver in warsaw and drove to the suwaki area i said one more story about that and then i'll line that up um everybody thought i was on a wild goose chase so when as we approached rajski which is a little town in the silhouette i i said to the driver who understood english that i was looking to see if there were any millers there and he said oh that's crazy miller's not even a polish name and i said but their name
was miller and uh they owned uh some kind of a flower mill and so there was a mill and there you know all that stuff so he says oh we're getting to the city limits and we'll stop here at the river little creek there's a man fishing in there and i'm gonna ask him so he gets out of the car and he goes down to the river and he says to the man are there any millers here and he thought lord they're gonna just laugh at him and i could see the man pointing up there and talking and he came back and he said yes
that the woman who runs the store that's on the square her name was miller before she got married so we'll go to the store and you'll meet her so we went in and she opened her passport to show me that her name was miller it couldn't be funnier well she wanted us to take us to meet father and her family because she was sure we were related although she had never been told anything about any jewish background i said well if you'd been told about it and people knew about it you wouldn't be here today except they evidently converted two three generations ago or they
didn't tell the children anything so anyway i'm i'm through with that i'm just i can't get very interesting no that's very interesting um what did your uh parents do what'd your father do for a living here well my i have to say my father quit school which was a cummerlin hills school you may know the building downtown it's been made to be real spiffy now but he went to that school probably until i'll guess maybe sixth grade and then he quit because he had to he had to help the family get some money his father sam miller ran a little grocery store which was located
right well if you know downtown there's a little maze of streets near you know the old phoenix you know how the streets flying around in there that's where the grocery store was and uh so he went to work in at sanger brothers department store they let him do something in the bookkeeping department well here's this kid but he was pretty smart and he worked at sanger brothers and then he had an opportunity to join a a man who was in real estate and the story is all written i think maybe in something that the jewish archives already has but anyway he went to work for
him he liked it and i mean he had to quit singers and he worked with this other man and then after a while he decided to just go in for himself in real estate and my brother henry used to say he was pretty brave to go out for himself it was about 1914 and mother was pregnant with henry jr and they didn't have a whole lot of money and here he is going out for himself in the real estate business with pregnant wife and not much money but he did it's not mine i have to see what that is i didn't bring mine grandfather aaron
miller came to dallas from the suwaki area in about 1860 something he brought over his children except that after a few he had his wife come over she stay there until i guess he could afford to bring her over and after he brought her over she got pregnant again so there was another a child who was 20 years younger than the others or something anyway so but that great grandfather aaron is written up in the jewish archives books about dallas because he is said to have led the first jewish service in dallas that's aaron miller that would be my great grandfather right okay well now
i'm i'm ready that's interesting very interesting um let's move to your childhood where did you live as a child where'd you grow up oh well um when i was born my family lived at 2714 south boulevard and that means a lot to me because i have so many good memories associated with my childhood on south boulevard and we lived in that house until the early 50s we were among the last white people who lived there or certainly not the original group lived there they didn't live there anymore you know i can go down the street and tell you this was a jacob's house this was
the tobian's house this was the levi's this was this and that because everybody seemed to know everybody and be very friendly and family-like it was a neighborhood like no other i think um and south boulevard was the heart of it because the street on the other side which was then forest avenue which is now martin luther king had many jewish people as well as several other streets south of there and then on the north was park row which was mostly jewish too and then north of there there weren't many because the next street after park road was grand avenue which leads into fair park and
that so we didn't know anybody north of grand avenue so what was the neighborhood like you you said there were you know that your neighbors everybody knew everybody but the neighborhood physically you know what were the stores that were there ah yeah okay um well there were no stores on south or park road but there were on forest there were several bakeries there black bakery blasts bakery right well the one closest to us was the new york bakery just a block away and down the street on forest closer to temple emanuel which was maybe about five blocks away i was blatts bakery and people who
brought their children to sunday school who did not live in south dallas and there were some a sprinkling in the park cities but a bunch on swiss avenue in east dallas the swiss avenue people would always go to blatt's bakery when they dropped their kids off to bring home some good rye bread what did you do for amusement in those days well we had radio and telephones and we had movies and there was a white was called white but it had nothing to do with a race it was an owner's name white theater on forest avenue and i would always go on saturday i don't
guess the rabbi would like that but anyway and to get in it was like 10 cents or maybe it was 10 cents for adults and 5 cents for children but anyway we would go to movies and then later as i got old enough to be allowed to take the street car downtown by myself i could meet someone and we would go to the movies downtown like go out for a hamburger and go to movies but entertainment there were parties people had nice parties we had well what we didn't have was uh you know we didn't have cell phones we didn't have television it didn't have
computers but i thought it was better then than it is now so you when you were allowed to go out by yourself and sort of assuming that the kids in the neighborhood played together oh yeah what kind of games did you play that was so important about the kids in the neighborhood we would get together all the time nobody worried that we would be kidnapped as possessive and overly uh protective as my parents were especially my mother it never occurred to anybody that anyone would be kidnapped or not safe out in front of somebody's house or in the back of the house for that matter
so we all got together in an impromptu way they were not arranged because people were out and the dogs weren't tied up you knew everybody's dog and the dogs roamed around freely although most of them knew where they were supposed to be and stayed but what we we played children's games and i was a tomboy and i played football and now i hate it because now it doesn't seem like a real sport to me anymore tell me about your experiences in school where you went to school and starting with your grade school and your particular interests and then move on to high school and college
and what you studied i'll try not to go off the deep end like i have already um it's tempting when people want to talk about you yeah to keep going it's true um well to start with temple emmanuel had a kindergarten and it was just down the street and then my parents sent me a kindergarten temple manual for a couple of years before i guess i probably went when i was four certainly five and the two teachers who ran the temple sunday kindergarten lived just down the street from us so if they walked to temple they would pick me up on their way or my
father would we did have a car would drop me off at their house if he went too early and i'd stay with them until they went to temple kindergarten so anyway i liked it very much and uh i still know most of the people in my class those who are still living and uh when it was time for me to go to regular school the school in our neighborhood which is on was only two blocks away the name of it was john henry brown school but they have changed the name of it now and i can't tell you what it is but it's still there
and i like school the first day of school miss carter uh very nice saw that i could read and she said you don't need to be in the first grade we're putting you in the second grade so i started school in the second grade and then when i was in the fourth grade they said this class is too crowded too many students so we're putting you up a half a grade you will be in the high fourth they don't have the low fourth and high fourth anymore but anyway so i got promoted and then when i finished brown school it was midterm because they made
me uneven and i went to forest avenue high school which was several blocks away uh but walking certainly walking distance and my brothers had gone there uh and it's still there but it has a different name i don't think it's called forest i should know but i just can't think of it right now but anyway in order to get there you had to cross forest avenue and forest was a pretty big street and it had street car tracks on it and so forth and my mother didn't want me crossing the street by myself uh and i objected as i did everything and i said well
if i'm old enough to go to high school which i wasn't old enough because i was only 11. i am old enough to cross forest avenue so i got to cross forest avenue and then the next year i was registering at forest high school with a friend elaine levi her name is elaine landsberg you know who i'm talking about elaine lived across the street from me on south boulevard elaine and i were at forest high registering when my brother jack came in and said come on y'all you're not going to this school something like that you're going to another school so we left everything my parents and hers too her mother had decided that the character of the neighborhood had changed and there were
numerous tough boys there and that we girls would be better off at hockaday now understand her family had some wealth but mine didn't but they didn't want me in the school with a tough voice so of course this was not racist because we didn't have any black kids there at all then anyhow so i transferred to hockaday and they set me back a half a year because they didn't have mid midterm you had to just you were second form was the freshman year but anyhow so i went to hockaday i liked it very much i'm very grateful they sent me there because they saved me
from ever having to study in college everyone was tearing their hair out about freshman english that was the hardest course at smu i'd already had all that you know so i did go to smu and uh in those days you did it yourself i mean i figured out how to get there when to go for registration how to apply nowadays the parents go through such stress uh writing all the colleges finding out everything doing it for the kids because they can't do it is so complicated i guess or they never have had to do anything like that but anyway i went to smu for a
number of reasons uh first of all nobody thought about me going any place else my brothers went there the world war ii was on and uh we didn't have a lot of money to say the least but going away would be more expensive i was young how old were you when you entered smu um let's see i graduated when i was 15 from hockaday and then by over the summer i turned 16 and so i was 16 but that it was no problem it really wasn't except i was always sort of an in-betweener when it came to uh having dates and things like that i
was always too young for a lot of things but i did them anyway what did you study at smu well i had a double major it was english and psychology and psychology was the one that i really wanted to major in but i saw that i had you know a major in english too if i just took one more course in so i decided i don't think there's any advantage in having a double major but in case there was i had that and then while smu the uh or a professor of psychology dr sarton took an interest in me and he said you you really
ought to go to graduate in psychology well it never occurred to me and i didn't know what graduate school was and uh some friends of my parents my parents had a group of friends here that were very close to each other they did everything had celebrated birthdays anniversaries and same group and they played cards and i knew them all because i'd been around them a lot and one couple said to me you know you you ought to go away to now they weren't thinking that i might be good at something they thought i should get away and i the reason they thought that was that
when my brother jack was killed in the war my mother was devastated well you don't get over that i'm not over it either but if you're a mother it just continues to be a depressing thing and of course they were very close with my parents and they knew that that must have an effect on me i thought i was doing fine but anyway they thought i should get away and have some other experience and then a good friend of mine you remember miriam starr yes miriam gutman okay she was my best friend then i think and uh she told me because we finished smu at
the same time that she was going to go to colombia and take social work well i didn't know where columbia was but i said i'll go there too that's how naive i was and i suppose i was you're in psychology so i wrote off for the application and there wasn't a problem getting in probably for almost anybody in those and now what it takes to get in is something else what did your parents think about your going so far away well that's a really good question first of all they had to be willing to afford it but then about letting their little girl go away
um oh and about going on with education because when i went to smu my father said you asked him about going to college he said if you want to go to college you can go to college but they weren't pushing me they didn't seem to care if i wanted to go they'd pay for it and they did and then when i said i to go work on a master's degree in new york they thought it was okay um my father changed his attitudes about a lot of things when i continued going to school and then when i went to work his attitude was and he
told me this a woman should not uh work certainly a married woman should not work but an unmarried woman maybe if she needs to or something but a woman should not work now he never said you have to get married because i asked him several times i don't know if i'm getting married that's all right you don't have to get married so they never pushed me into anything but as far as going away my mother was still depressed and i won't say she ignored me she certainly didn't but i think she didn't focus on me as much as she might have earlier and i had
shown i could do the work and so i went to columbia and miriam didn't she didn't go i went without her so you went by yourself yeah up there i went by myself i've never seen the place i hardly heard of it we'll get into your working career a little bit but i want to go back to your jewish affiliations during childhood i your family belonged to temple how active were they what was their extent of their participation okay well my mother's upbringing in kentucky was jewish considering that they were in a little town and her parents as everybody's parents in those had a pretty
orthodox upbringing in this sense of observing holidays knowing to read hebrew and various things and my gran her father's mother he had brought her over and she lived with them for a while and she kept kosher she had her own little part of the kitchen because my mother's parents were not any longer keeping kosher but they did observe holidays and they were not allowed to have stockings at christmas but which always bothered my mother as a child she said because they would go to the fireplace and send notes up to santa claus at the chimney because everybody else in town had christmas and they didn't
and her father told them there wouldn't be any christmas presents and there weren't so anyway so they went sometimes to louisville to the synagogue or the temple and later they moved to louisville and they knew all the other relatives and they knew jewish people and my father his family of course was traditional and kosher and all of back in poland um but when they came here my grandfather sam miller joined sheriff israel and he became the president of sheriff israel but my father didn't i'm using keeping kosher as a sign of anyway he he didn't and we didn't but um he joined temple emanuel and
later became the president at temple as i did interestingly enough which is not i wouldn't expect it of myself but uh my parents in spite of being pretty liberal in terms of judaism uh they went to temple on friday night religiously they were very devoted to judaism and the temple and yet we didn't do a lot of observances in their house um how did you your family celebrate the jewish holidays well we were very aware that they were it was a holiday when it was by i'm talking about rosh hashona young kipper passover now i never heard of some of the holidays that i now
have heard of and that reformed jews now celebrate but we didn't celebrate them particularly oh hanukkah yes temple used to send us home with a little you know thing with little orange candles okay and my folks didn't care if i used it or i didn't use it of course being a child i like to light the candles but i know any of the prayers so i i feel very strongly identified as being jewish i think of judaism and jewishness all the time you know it's definitely a part of me and yet i'll be very generous with myself i'll say i'm agnostic but i'm really an
atheist and when i fell into the business of being picked to be president of temple shelly zimmerman was the rabbi chief rabbi then and he hadn't been here very long and i only got in that chain of command because my predecessor henry schlinger whom i loved wasn't well he had a heart condition and he was afraid he'd have to be out some or even out altogether so they should have someone who knew the business over there and who could be president when he wasn't there and they never had a first vice president before but they created the office the first vice president and i henry
schlinger and edwin tavalosky and adeline harrison and probably surely tabalovsky i don't remember who else met in uh tavalosky's office and invited me to come and i didn't really know what they wanted but they glommed in on me that i had to take that position and never i'd been on the board a couple of times never expected to do that but for henry i said okay if this doesn't lead to president just do this i'll do it well you know you can't do once you're in they got you i remember you as president you were a wonderful president oh thank you well i took it
very seriously and it took a lot of time on it but i have to tell you what i told rabbi zimmerman i went to his office before i was president and i said i don't think i should be president and he said why do you say that and i said i don't believe in the kind of god you do he says well why do you say that i made some more remarks about how atheistic i am and i said i don't think it's right and he said oh you sound just like rabbi somebody and also rabbi somebody else those are the things they said and
you're not putting me off he says i want you to be the president well i said okay did your parents belong to other jewish organizations um let's see yes but my mother was not a joiner of organizations she belonged to the council of jewish women but she didn't go to many affairs that an organization would have first of all my mother never drove a car in her life so she wasn't flitting around but she wasn't the sort to float around so uh somebody would have taken her anyway she just really didn't do organizational work but she highly approved of the council and i always thought
i would be a member when i grew up that was a thing you did but anyway maybe my father might have been a member of the american jewish committee and maybe some other things too maybe even on a national level i just didn't pay a lot of attention to um what kind of interactions did your family have with the gentile community here oh well their attitude was very friendly and the reciprocal attitude always seemed to be friendly and my father in particular had many friends my father in particular had a lot of gentile friends uh he i think my father was pretty highly respected in
the dallas community and in the real estate community nationwide because he my father went to the meetings and he was an officer and this and that with real estate um the realtors anyway uh and i was always sort of proud of the fact that when i walked down the street main street elm street commerce with my father everybody knew him well of course dallas was just a little town then well it's true i think when i was born it was in the about 26 000 or so anyway uh but so many people knew him and he knew them and they were very friendly some of
them did draw the line on social things but as far as i know my folks didn't care they had their little group of friends they were very happy with them and sometimes they were invited to a party someone outside of that group and maybe non-jewish but they didn't do a lot of that they didn't aspire to do a lot of that i'm sure they could have if they wanted to to some extent but i know there are lines i know when i went to hakaday i was very aware that i was a jewish girl and all the other girls were very friendly and i would
be invited to their big parties they wouldn't have a big party without having everybody but i always knew they had a life that was different from mine and you uh i didn't resent it i just knew that was a fact after you completed your master's degree at columbia what was so where did you go to work and i'd like to hear all about that and some of the projects are most memorable to you okay well i have to go back to columbia because there was one professor in particular professor of social psychology uh which wasn't my interest i have to tell you what they taught
in colombia was not what i wanted to learn uh i wanted i wanted to learn about what makes people tick i wanted to learn what i thought psychology was but what they wanted to teach was condition reflex and uh did experiments with rats and so forth and uh skinner box and all that stuff and one day and one day in class i said something about the mind and the professor said we don't use that word here well anyway i was determined to get my master's degree so i did all the things you're supposed to do and one professor who seemed to be more to my
liking was gardner murphy was his name and he was internationally known social psychologist and i did the unthinkable thing for a columbia student to do and that was i sought him out i went to his office nobody ever knew where anybody's office or ever saw any teacher outside of the classroom but i went to talk to him and he got interested in me if i told you the subject that would lead to another thing i went to talk to him about parapsychology which is telepathy and all those things i found that he was the editor of the journal i went to the library and read
the things i wanted to read and i saw the journal of parapsychology and he was the editor and i was shocked and i went to talk to him about it so he started talking to me so and he had me doing volunteer work at the american society for psychical research he said i should go to school some more reminds me of dr sarton you should go for your phd and i said well if i did it wouldn't be here so he gave me a list and the top of the list was harvard and some other big places and i said i'm not going to a
place where your friends won't tell you anything because they're afraid you'll make a better grade on the test and i said i want to go to a friendlier place so western reserve which is out case western reserve he sent so many people to case western reserve and i was one of them so i went to cleveland i then i knew what i was doing it's like i didn't know where columbia was but i knew where everything was by then and i knew what i wanted to study and i could tell whether school was going to teach the courses that i wanted i didn't just fall
into it so like i had before he must have been about the ripe old age of 20 at that point yeah let's see 47. that's oh that's right because at columbia i lived in a woman's dorm woman's dormitory and after a couple of weeks the headmistress or whatever she was called me and said i was going to have to sign out at night when i went out and signed in when i came home and i said that's not in my contract i'm not going to do that and she said okay she said because i was so young anyway well anyhow so i went to western reserve in cleveland loved it weather is terrible but cleveland people were great and uh i was out in the community as well as at
school i liked my schoolmates i liked the teachers and i liked the courses and i was in residence for three years in cleveland and then my thesis advisor my dissertation advisor and i were great friends marguerite hertz she was a world expert in rorschach and i loved the rorschach and i was her assistant for a couple of she is very compulsive which is like the pot cullen kettle blacken anyway she was never satisfied with my dissertation he always wanted me to add one more study to it and i had already done three studies or something instead of one and i had moved back to dallas
because all i had left was to finish that dissertation and i'd send her a copy of it and she'd sit on it for six months and finally i called the head of the department who was a good friend calvin hall and i said marguerite has my dissertation for six months and i can't get finished and she's never satisfied so he said let me handle it he called a meeting of the dissertation committee and he told me to come up there and stay at his house because i said i'm afraid of marguerite but she was a dear friend but i i didn't know what she was
gonna do he said it'll be all right and i did i stayed at his house and he had the committee meet and there was no problem he had marguerite fixed i don't know i finally got through so once you had your phd then i came back next well i was already really in dallas but i uh i had to decide way back there did i want to study medicine or did i want to be a psychologist and i decided i would not do well in medical school because i would not like cutting up a cadaver but even worse i would not like cutting up a
live person that should have to do that too and i thought well i am not made for so uh but i did like the medical school i didn't know a whole lot about it i decided i wanted to work at the medical be a psychologist and they'd never had one before so i went over there and i spoke with don morris who was running the department he wasn't the real chief but he was running the department the real chief uh was dr whit w-i-t-t he was maybe the founder one of the founders of timberlawn and he was an old man by then and he came
over once a week for a meeting but don said he would like to hire me they'd never had a psychologist and he'd like to but he'd have to ask dr witt so he called me back and he said i talked to dr witt and he said he'd never seen a woman or a psychologist who was any good but if i want to hire you go ahead okay i'm stopping right there because we just have to either no psychologist is any good and no woman is any good but i just had a wonderful job um i was the only psychologist until i uh got somebody to
be an intern under me without paying him uh no he does stop there well i'm still there presumably because although i retired a few years ago i mean i said goodbye and i cleaned out my office uh they appointed me emeritus which i'll get back to in a minute and they tell me that i have to keep the office so somebody else is using it now and i could use it but i'm not there enough um i'm still considered a faculty member in psychiatry because my appointment was in the psychiatry department we also have a psychology department and i'm in there too but i started
in 1951 i think so it's about 60 years i've been there did you ever pursue anything with parapsychology that was your interest did you ever study that anymore it would i wouldn't i would not say that was my interest it was an interest in that i saw this esteemed professor was into that but i have to confess that one of the reasons that we got along so well and were such friends was i had had an experience myself that i have to put in that realm although i don't really believe that i had that experience can you tell me about that okay yeah um i
was at a luncheon at the adolphus hotel with some girls um when i was a teenager and world war ii was raging and my father's office was just across the and he was going to pick me up and take me home afterwards and a few of us were sitting around after the luncheon or whatever we were doing and i was waiting for my father and i said to another girl her name was grace newman you wouldn't have known her probably oh she lived in south house her father was a doctor anyway i said to grace um people always ask how how is jack knowing that
he was in combat or something and uh i said well i had up an experience uh the other day or something and i haven't told anybody yet but i'll tell you i said i had a dream that i came home and out in front of the house was a messenger's bicycle and he was in the house with my mother telling her that my brother had been killed well as far as i knew he hadn't been and uh dad picked me up we went home in front was about messenger's bicycle the the boy on the bike saw my mother when he told her that's the way
they delivered the message there was a telegram he delivered the telegram and he couldn't leave her he stayed till we got home so i was very impressed with that as an experience i mean it's something logically that you could think of but i didn't know they came on a bicycle but anyway so i told the gardener about it and he didn't make anything of it but he said would you like to do volunteer i went every friday downtown and all i did was sort papers or read things people sent i wasn't doing anything but i was there interesting now let's go off into something else
like i always do tell me about um we're going to get a little bit more more personal side how did you meet love your nice husband thank you oh well when i was between schools between western reserve i mean between columbia and western i had a few months because i finished columbia at midterm and i would because i had to take some extra courses because i didn't have all the prerequisites that smu didn't offer experimental and they were so strong on experimental so i was a few months before i would go away to school so i said to my mother that i would like to
take piano lessons because as a child i always would have loved to have played the piano but we didn't have a piano and my parents told me if i really wanted to learn piano they would get a piano and i thought um that's too heavy a burden what if i don't like it so i said no never mind so i thought this is my chance we can rent a piano now and uh i'll take lessons so i did and my teacher you might know or heard of gertrude mandel stan she was well that's who i was told to get probably well i don't know why
but anyway so it was taking from gertrude and uh ludwig she was a good friend of the sellers lyle sellers was ludwig's associate or something or other and they would have her over to dinner and they'd have ludwig over to dinner and gertrude told ludwig that she knew a girl that he should call so what would call me he's coughing um and we went out together and i liked him we went out off and on in those days you didn't just go with one person like they do now you could have dates every saturday night be somebody different so um we went out from time
to time and finally after some time ludwig's started to talk about marriage and uh i was really afraid to get married anyway afraid i wouldn't like them you so i was dragging my feet and uh finally this is years lily finally says well i'm not going to spin my wheels anymore if you're not going to get married i want to get married he said he says if you're not going to get married i'm going to just start going out with other girls or something said okay so he did and i did and then after some period of months maybe blood we had a little operation
at baylor hospital and he invited his friends to come and see him and in fact it was a cute card with a cartoon on it i could show you about him being in the hospital and come and see him so i thought about it and i had been thinking if he went out with another girl and married somebody else i wouldn't like so i went to see him in the hospital and it was nice to visit and i guess i didn't have to say it but it was obvious that since i went to see him i was still interested in him so we started going
out together again and that time i decided i don't care how scared i am how nervous i am or what i'm going through with it but so where and when were you married well the ceremony was in my parents house on coalhurst street and rabbi olin performed the ceremony and it was in 1956 august the second i think so oh and i got him to let me to promise that if i decided i wanted out he would give me a divorce and he said he would but i never wanted it did he belong to temple at the time or did you all join as a
couple i don't know it's funny i can't remember whether he belonged i think he did i think he did but his upbringing was very orthodox in fact i remember he said to me once the only thing i can think of that would we might have trouble over is religion but i have ruined him he is very relaxed about it now do you have children yes i have two even though i didn't get started until i was well i didn't get married till i was a few days short of 30. and so we thought well if we want children we should get started because then 30 was old for having children so we decided that the next summer we would have a big honeymoon i mean the summer we got married we drove to california and by grand canyon and las vegas but we had a course to take in los angeles and i had to study for my boards i took books with me so that we decided the next year we're going to europe on a long trip and have a really good time and then we would come home and then i would get pregnant that was
the plan and you know what it worked out exactly got pregnant the month i said i was and then andrew was born in 1958 and then we decided well we better get going on the other one so susan was born in 1960 do they live here well andy lives in richmond virginia he's an ophthalmologist mainly a glaucomatologist and susan does live here susan is i guess uh she lives at one of the high houses she had a viral encephalitis when she was one and she was so perfect but left a lot of scar tissue and she's a she had a downhill of course for years
and years kept going downhill i think she's fairly stable now but she we don't use this word anymore mentally but she is and the worst thing is worse than mental retardation for her is that she has unremitting seizures so we schlepped susie all over the country about those seizures still not under control but see now you might have a bright child who is depressed and unhappy and you're tearing your hair out but i've got a child who is mentally and she's happy so i don't know you never want to trade your problems with somebody else's problems but anyway she she lives i started working on
getting group home residential for whatever you call them uh when susan was about seven or eight years old i could see the handwriting on the wall and then finally we did get it started and susie was in another group home in phoenix and i didn't move her here until we'd been in operation a couple years so you started the high house well i had a lot of people helping me right but i i was i'll take the credit because i'm the persistent stubborn motivated one and uh i had started many years before as you know but yeah i had a lot of help i wanted
it to be a part of the jewish and anyway i'm not going to take up your film on the story of high but anyway and your grandchildren yeah andy has two boys and they are in their early twenties and they live in richmond and he has a wife and they're still married that's good that's good um who are your role models you did you have any role models or you actually you're probably a lot of other people exactly thank you but i don't know i don't know how to answer that i've mentioned some people that i admired who took an interest in me usually some
teacher that i'd studied with or something but yeah i think i have a lot of role models but i don't which ones to pick out like sofia loren or something marilyn monroe could be somebody in your family you're very independent maybe you're your dad maybe you've got some of that a good dad definitely and i know i have some my mother too but maybe you're right my dad would be more in the category as a role model so i'll stick with that one i think that's right what are you most proud of in your life well you probably can answer it for me what am
i most proud of i don't know uh i mean you were the first woman to do a lot of things you've got to be very proud of that well i am i don't know what i'm most proud of i keep thinking maybe that's ugly that's great is there anything that you want to add to this i'll probably think of a zillion things after you close up shop that i should have said and i already know a lot of things i shouldn't have said no not true could i ask a question i would like to know some of the other community projects that you were involved
in oh well i'm proud of that i think i like to start things where there's a need and nobody's done anything or something okay uh because i did sort of start some organizations one thing is i was one of the ones not the one but one of the ones who started the dallas mental health association that was back in 1947 when i was between schools and i had nothing to do with play the piano um fanny khan you remember fanny khan and oh my god what's her name that has the block you're off i don't usually have i'm ready mildred and fanny millard zach and
fanny khan and maybe some others coming from the council of jewish women representing the council had decided that we should have a mental health association and here i was running around loose and they knew me and they wanted me to help them recruit members so i did and then then i went away to and they didn't have a mental health association yet but when i came back after all that time uh they did start to get organized i mean it took years but they wanted me to be the president so i was the first president i think of the mental health association i always thought
bob rabel was the first president you remember him he was the minister of the unitarian church he was a great person right i asked him once if you're a unitarian do you have to believe in the divinity of jesus and he said the last time jesus was mentioned in my church was when the janitor fell down the stairs oh have a good sense of humor yes anything else you'd like to add um yeah i would like to add that i did really start the epilepsy association here well i was starting that and maybe some other things but i don't have to go into that but
i did like to start things where there was something missing well i want to thank you for your time today this has been may siebel interviewing you and ruth andrus doing the video on monday january 24th 2011. well i'm still there presumably because although i retired a few years ago i mean i said goodbye and i cleaned out my office have a psychology department and i'm in there too but i started in 1951 60 years now i've been there did you ever pursue anything with parapsychology that was your interest did you ever study that anymore never i wouldn't i would not say that was my interest it was an interest in that i saw this esteemed professor was into that but i have to confess that one of the reasons that we got along so well and were such friends was i had had
although i don't really believe that i had that experience can you tell me about that okay yeah um i was at a luncheon at the adolphus hotel with some girls um when i was a teenager and world war ii was raging and my father's office was just across the street and he was going to pick me up and take me home afterwards and a few of us were sitting around after the luncheon or whatever we were doing have known her probably oh she lived in south dallas her father was a doctor or something and i said well i had up an experience the other day
or something and i haven't told anybody yet but i'll tell you i said i had a dream and he was in the house with my mother telling her that my brother had been and our dad picked me up we went home he delivered the telegram and he couldn't leave her he stayed till we got home gardener about it and he didn't make anything of it but he said would you like to do volunteer work interesting now let's did more personal side how did you meet love your nice husband thank you i would uh because i had to take some extra courses because i didn't have
all the prerequisites that some of you didn't offer experimental and they were so strong and experimental anyway so i was a few months before i would go away to school piano but we didn't have a piano and my parents told me if i really wanted to learn piano they would get a piano of gertrude landel's stan she was well that's who i was told to get probably uh well i don't know why but anyway so it was taking from gertrude associate or something and they'd have ludley go over to dinner and gertrude told ludwig that she knew a that he should call someone would call
me he's coughing and i liked him and we went out off and anyway i'm afraid i wouldn't like them you know and uh finally this is years lily finally says well i'm not going to spin my wheels anymore out with other girls or something i said okay so he did and i did and then after some period of months maybe blood ludwig had a little operation at baylor hospital and he invited his friends to come and see him cartoon on it i could show you about him being in the hospital and come and see him so i thought about and i had been thinking if
he went out with another girl and married somebody else i wouldn't like that and it was nice visit so oh and i got him to ludwig to promise um the only thing i can think of that would we might have trouble over is religion but i have ruined him he's very relaxed about it now i didn't get started until i was well it short of 30. and so we thought well if we want children big honeymoon i mean the summer we got married we drove to california and by grand canyon and las vegas ludwig had a course to in los angeles and i had to study for my boards i took books with me so that we decided the next year we were going to europe on a long trip and have a really good time and then we would come home and then i would get pregnant that was the plan and you know what it worked out exactly going to and then andrew was born in 1958 susan was born in 1960.
he's an ophthalmologist mainly a glaucomatologist and she's a she had a downhill course i think she's fairly stable now but she we don't use this word anymore i started working on getting a group residential for whatever you call them when susan was about and then finally uh another group home in phoenix and i didn't move her here until we'd been in operation a couple years so you started the high house well i had a lot of people helping me right but i i was i'll take the credit because i'm the persistent stubborn motivated one and i had started many years before as you but yeah
i had a lot of help and they are in their early 20s that's good um who are your role models do you did you have any role models or you actually you're probably with or something but yeah i think i have a lot of role models but i don't know which ones to pick out like sophia loren most proud i keep thinking maybe lovely that's okay that's great is there involved in ah well i'm proud of that that was back in when i was between that has the blood you remember him he was the minister of the unitarian church divinity of jesus and he said
the last time jesus was mentioned in my church was when the janitor fell down the stairs i had a good sense of humor yes anything else you'd like to add that i was starting that mae siebel interviewing you and ruth thank you so much now is that off western medical although i retired a few years ago i mean i said goodbye they appointed me emeritus i'm still considered a faculty member but i started in nineteen 60 years now i've been there did you that was your interest did you ever study that anymore it would never i wouldn't i would not say that was my interest
friends was i had had an experience myself that i have to put in that realm after she lived in south dallas her father was people always ask how how is jack knowing that he was in combat or and i said well anybody yet but i'll tell you i said i had a dream i came home and out in front of the house was a messenger's bicycle the boy on the bike columbia midterm and so i uh said to my and my parents told me if i really of gertrude mandel's stand probably well i don't know why but anyway so it was taken from gertrude associate
or something rather so we went out from time to time anyway afraid i wouldn't like him you married somebody else i wouldn't like that and i guess i didn't have to say it but it was obvious that since i went to see him i was still interested in him but i'm so where and when were you so oh and i got him to lovely to promise very orthodox in fact i remember he said to me once ludwig had a course to take in los we decided the next year we were going to europe on a long and then i would get pregnant that was a
plan and you know what it worked out exactly they live here well andy lives in but yeah i had a lot of help um on starring hi but anyway with or something but yeah i think i have a lot of role models but i don't know uh you're very independent maybe you're your dad maybe you've got some of that a good dad definitely and i know i have some my mother too but maybe you're right my dad would be more in the category of role model um what are you most proud of in your life i would probably think of a zillion things after you
close up already know a lot of things i shouldn't have said no not true could i ask a question i would like to know some of the other millard zack and fanny khan um well yeah i would like to add that i did really start the epilepsy association here i was starting that andrus doing the video on monday january 24 2011. thank you so much