May 13, 2015

Carol Kreditor

Carol Kreditor was born in 1960 in Houston, Texas, and grew up in the then brand-new Memorial area, surrounded by wildlife and open ditches. She was especially close to her mother's family, who lived nearby. Her father was a CPA at an accounting firm, and her maternal grandfather ran Zuber Tire Company, which he founded in the 1920s and kept until retiring in his late seventies or early eighties. Her maternal grandfather was born in Houston in 1898, among the first in his family born in America after relatives arrived, likely through Galveston, from the Romania and Russia region. Her paternal grandfather was an engineer with GE, and her great-grandfather ran a grocery store and studied Talmud with her father.

When Carol was nine, her father's Houston firm merged with a Chicago-based company, and the family moved to Highland Park, Illinois. Though it was a culture shock, she came to love Chicago, appreciating its strong Jewish community and small-town feel within a big city. She attended Highland Park High School and enjoyed homecoming traditions, a kazoo band in the July Fourth parade, and trips into the city for Cubs games and Second City. She then attended Tulane University in New Orleans. When her parents moved to Atlanta during her freshman year, she decided after graduating to try Dallas, drawn by its energy, young population, high salaries, and low cost of living.

Carol arrived in Dallas in 1982 and spent two years in public accounting before joining Trammell Crow, where she worked for eighteen years in finance and asset management, including development projects across the country. She later joined former colleagues at Crow Holdings-related ventures. She met her husband Mark, who works in residential real estate, property management, and leasing, and they married in 1986, settling into a series of homes all within two miles of one another. The couple has two children who attended Jewish day school. Carol and Mark are active in the Federation, Levine and Yavneh schools, and Maccabi, and she reflected on finding contentment and appreciating each day as her guiding philosophy.

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