Full Transcript
Charles let's speak just begin talk to me about your involvement jewish community some of your volunteer work I started Hebrew school when I was five belong to the conservative synagogue in San Antonio livin primarily a Jewish neighborhood in San Antonio join bbyo involved in a in a bbyo chapter name Herzl it was an officer and president of one time I was in a boy scout troop at the synagogue at a good as ahkam as a young boy and those are the organizations that I was involved with as a child now in Dallas tell me about your involvement with the Jewish community when we moved here
in 1977 I joined a firm whose partner who senior partner was Ronald minkoff who was very involved in the Jewish community sometime in the late 70s I think Janine and I were asked to participate in a federation young Leadership Group and I remember going to green family camp one weekend it was raining in the weather was miserable and it was muddy but that's where our involvement in the Dallas Jewish community started although for me personally a major event occurred for me in 1971 when I was in Israel adonica blitz and that bonded me to the Land of Israel and formed the basis along with my
early childhood experiences as contributing significantly to the activities and the things that I do today and how have you seen the community in Dallas your grow the community has grown both in numbers and also in the organizations and and the mix of organizations from a religious point of view there's many more orthodox and the yeshiva is much more of a concentration of the Orthodox Judaism there's also financial struggles in the community I think that the leaders of the Jewish community in the early days of Dallas were really the founders and the party's primarily responsible for the institutions that we have today and the funding of
those institutions i think is a greater challenge to date and it was then because the early then that earlier you had a small group of people i believe who were the primary backbone of the community and today it's more diverse you were born in nineteen fifty in san antonio that's smaller jewish community than that some of the major cities is it is your family originally from san antonio now my mother was born in wake up ok my father was born in st. Louis okay in what your dad did my dad owned a furniture store with his brother in San Antonio okay and what about your grandparents cream up in the middle I remember quite well my mother's parents they lived in waco died in the seventies but i knew that by will my father's father died before I was born and my father's mother I knew only as a young child because she died when I was very young and I have a very faint remembrance of prank you know what your grandparents stood for livings well my father's father actually found that the furniture store that my father and his
brother took over my mother's father owned at a bakery in wake up now the furniture store was at the something that was supposed to be something you already get involved in it was never specifically discussed what our future was although I must say that I was never explicitly encouraged right to go into the furniture business right as I mentioned it was owned by my father and his brother right my uncle and my father's brother had two girls I doubt that they would have even considered the furniture business quite frankly I never considered the furniture business is that business is it still life that I ok
the furniture business my father and his brother closed that in the early 80s ok ok what you do for fun is a little kid boy scout and the BBY oh where'd you go to high school I went to high school in San Antonio at a high school named Thomas Jefferson okay close high school life like for you it was fun i was on the yearbook as we're many of the other jewish students in high school at the time i was on the photography team so it gave me an opportunity to go to all the sporting events and all the other high school events it was
fun you remember when you got your first car I got my first car in 1968 the year I graduated from high school remember what it was the first car I had was an Oldsmobile 442 it was yellow with a black vinyl roof and black interior you know with it and it was automatic doing with that car class it costs around three thousand dollars times have changed the little cars are a little bit more expensive and I don't know if there is necessarily its powerful maybe so but the 442 was a powerful car well I wanted I don't know because then subsequently after Janine and I
got married and we were trying to survive while I was in law school which we didn't really have a problem surviving but the 442 at that time I think got six miles of the gallon and my father had a chevy impala so my father was gracious enough to swap cars with me since he got a little bit more disposable income did you became an attorney obviously now in high school were you thinking along those lines I think in high school I wasn't really focused what I would do when I grow up I knew I would go to college and knew that I would pledge a
fraternity where most of the my friends from San Antonio also pledged at UT Austin okay and then the lawyers in school became interested in law now UT Austin when you were going to college was a very turbulent time in the United States you know Vietnam War was was in full swing you know it was the hippie era you know how did those things affect you I started college in 68 the draft came in i think in 69 and it was a lottery and i remember watching television as the bingo game was being played to draw birthdays and my birthday was drawn and my lottery number
was 21 which put me in a special class of your you're eligible it actually was a time i remember when there was a big demonstration on campus against the Vietnam War it may have been after Kent State it was a very it was a very interesting time looking back on it I think that the school became more the room thinking changed attitudes changed I subsequently became less involved in my senior year and the fraternity as did many other people and in fact I think that because of the times the fraternity I was with lost membership why do you think that is it was just more
liberal people's interests were shifting although the other fraternities continued but the one I was with clothes in the mid-seventies after you graduated then where did your head I headed to st. Louis to get married now where did you meet your wife imagining at in Austin during school and she started school in 69 and I think we met in 70 then we went to Houston where I enrolled in law school at the University of Houston and then from there we went to New York where I enrolled in the New York University in the Masters of taxation program not that we already married mary we got married in 73 on jun tip where'd you get a guy to get married we got married in st.
Louis now going to law school in New York where were the plans where we were we gonna settle in that remained to be same Oh God we went from Houston to New York i started in law school there in the master's program and really didn't get a whole lot of consideration when i started as to where i wanted to end up it would depend upon the job opportunities that presented themselves okay and where do I end up finally we round up here and down it's been so many momentous occasions in your lifetime of course you know you live through the vietnam war era kennedy assassination
something good the moon landing in 69 for the first time of course 911 is there something that really affected you in your life that you took notice so he said hey I remember exactly where I was when that happened there are two things okay one was the six-day war okay a in 1967 okay and the other was Kennedy's assassination what do you remember about the six-day war after the six they were everyone I knew non-jews wanted to be Israelis because Israel had accomplished such an unexpected feet and really put Israel on the map that's what I remember the pride of the Jewish say being able
to vanquish its enemies in such a short period of time yeah and what about the Kennedys nation Kennedy assassination I remember I was in junior high I remember I was in class and I remember when they announced the Kennedy had been assassinated events that had an effect on our daughters in addition to then we brought up the our daughters to understand who they are to appreciate who they are and we went to Israel with him several times in both were bat Mitzvahed here in thousand also in Israel our oldest daughter Alicia moved in New York in labor day 2001 and Jeanine went up with her
on that labor day weekend to help her move into an efficiency which was basically just one room and Alicia had a job and her job as placed her in an office next to the stock exchange and on September 11 2001 I was in a small restaurant having coffee and reading the paper and Jeanine called me and said that a plane had hit one of the Trade Centers and we knew that Alicia's company was moving to the to the Trade Center but we didn't know when and then subsequently I received a call from Alicia on her cell phone screaming because she had come out of the
escalator and seeing the second plane hit she was not in the World Trade Center her office was still next to the stock exchange and that was an event she subsequently survived without any physical injury but with emotional injuring her because she felt that day that she was going to die and it would had a substantial effect upon her which I had to talk about at her wedding because her middle name is opera which she was named after her uncle Abraham but that was an event that had a substantial effect upon her and help to shape her into who she is which i think is something
that we all experience that there are seminal events that affect us and mold us into who we are what area of law do you practice I practice primarily in tax law but also in business which includes real estate and partnership and corporate now over the years if you know the differences from when you started till now that kind of amazed you well one of the major differences in the practice of law between 1977 when I started and today is the speed at which law is being practiced and the rapidly changing environment both from a technological point of view and from a legal point of view
from what the law actually is when I start practicing law obviously we didn't have email right we didn't have text messaging right we didn't even have computers right we had fax machines that were just coming online right and it had the advantage of giving you more time to think about the project you were working on but it also slowed down the response time right now we live in a world where communication and responses are instantaneous who's the happiest time in your life the happiest time when I got married and when my daughters were born now you and Janine have two daughters we do tell me
a little bit about them and we have two daughters the the oldest is Alicia and the youngest is Jodi both were married in 2013 one in February one in April they both married Jewish boys which was thank God and one in fact is in Israeli and the other man grew up in and around st. Louis and in fact Janine nose and her family knows his family in jenin went to the same high school as Michael Jody's husband whose father is a year older than j'ni now what advice I know you guys don't have any grandchildren yet what advice would you like to leave to the next generation my advice would be to work hard to always know who you are to know from where you've come and to have an idea of where you'd like to go but for you as an individual to remain Jewish to maintain a Jewish household and to understand your place in the world as a do great advice well great job man thank you
