Dorothy Wolchansky
Dorothy Wolchansky was born on February 24, 1942, during World War II. Her family roots were in Fort Worth, Texas, where her grandfather, a tailor who had made uniforms for the Russian army, first immigrated from the Ukraine region of Russia through Galveston before bringing over the rest of the family. Her mother, one of seven children, was a Lusky, and her father was one of ten children. Dorothy grew up in Tyler, Texas, where her parents ran a jewelry store and pawn shop on the town square. She cut her teeth in that store, waiting on customers from a young age, and grew up in a duplex and later a three-bedroom home. Though the Jewish community was small, she was active in BBYO and attended a regional convention in Fort Worth.
Dorothy attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she pursued her dream of journalism and earned degrees in both English and journalism. She met her husband Lee through a bridge game while in Fort Worth, and after a courtship of several years they married. They spent two years in Austin while Lee completed a pharmacy degree, then chose Dallas as their home because it sat between Tyler and Fort Worth. The couple raised three children, Michelle, Sandy, and Howard. Lee, who had run a pharmacy and struggled with depression, died of lung cancer at age 44, just months after his diagnosis and shortly after Howard's bar mitzvah. Dorothy credits her children as troopers and counts raising three children who married Jewish spouses and lead Jewish lives as her greatest achievement.
In 1981 Dorothy became a commercial real estate broker, drawn to the business world she had known since childhood and valuing the flexibility it gave her as a single mother. She was deeply involved in Jewish community life, first through Neighborhood Women and the National Council of Jewish Women, eventually serving as a chapter president. About twenty-two years before the interview, she saw a need for Jewish employment and unemployment support and, working with others, helped bring a monthly job support program to Jewish Family Service, a program that grew into many offerings. She received an award from the international association of vocational services for this work. A member of Shearith Israel and active with Dallas Hebrew Free Loan, she hoped to leave her grandchildren the values of compassion, education, and doing one's best.
Full Transcript
today is monday june 26 2017. i'm deborah polsky executive director of the dallas jewish historical society and i'm interviewing dorothy walchansky and let's just jump right in okay tell me a little bit about your family my mother was one of seven and my father was one of ten wow their roots are in fort worth texas my mother was a lusky which may be familiar if this goes outside a family and my father's name is and i like my maiden ways ladies i grew up in tyler texas my mother and dad had a jewelry store pawn shop as many dally sites did in those years and tyler according to them was the
bright spot at the time where you could make a living i was born in 1942 february 24th so that was in the middle of all world war ii and i remember my mother saying it's because you were born that your daddy didn't have to go to war which i how true or not i don't know but there was a camp camp famine was based in thailand and in fact i had a cousin i think it was louis luskey who was based there and he would come into the store and see my mother and dad during his breaks passes a leave that's the word okay well
i cut my teeth in that store i think i waited on my first customer at age 10. i saw the person uh brinestone moon kind of ring which was uh that ring uh ten hens were very popular then very popular you don't see them as much anymore so that's where i grew up and i used to my mother didn't drive so i would either walk home or take the bus and sometimes depending on the school where i was i would walk to town from my junior high school when i was a senior and in fact when i was in ninth grade they decided to split the junior high tyler was segregated then of course and even until i graduated high school was so
uh my that year my uh ninth grade year uh was at junior high but my 10th grade year while i went going to robert e lee and then john tyler was on the north side of town and lee was on the south so yeah of course being rebels was all natural and that's what i did i went to high school there which meant how am i going to get to heist to school the other high school my dad could drop me off because it was near town on the way to the store so i went up getting in a car pool and i had the
car like one week of three so it wasn't so bad and i had an uncle bernard bernard krasner and his wife bessie creston who was my mother's sister who lived a block away from us so daddy would go down to bernard's and bernard would take him or bernard would pick my father up or my father would even walk those couple or three miles to the store don't see that much no no you don't but that's how it was we lived in a duplex and then when i was 12 we moved to a house a three bedroom two bath house branch style which was popular then
as it is now and for the rest of my life my years at home i stayed there went to high school i was in bbyo i was very active i was um we had baby wild we didn't have a uh all right bbg thank you so i was vice president one time and so therefore when we had a separate meeting i led it because i was the chairperson or if you want to call it our acting president but because we didn't do it but i never was president my mother did not want me to run for president did you go to conventions at all because
i know there was shreveport was one of the places they used to have district convention uh i went to a regional convention in fort worth texas and my father was very protective so he drove me here and luckily rd and beverly moses who we call bubbles uh were there greeting the people at the desk and my daddy was worried he said hey you don't have to worry go on believe me these are all kids there's hundreds of kids here she'll be fine go on go back to todd and that was how he had his fears l.a and i loved the convention of bbyo it was
a good experience to me because seeing all these hundreds of kids more entirely we had less than 30 kids and even less than that maybe four my age so that was jewish so i mean this was really a deal and jewish camps were not in my parents uh capabilities is what i'm guessing right in those years i went to camp fire girls camp which was at lake tyler and i did that like for two weeks and that was my parents quote vacation as well because they really didn't take a vacation right their life as in others during those years evolved around the store and my
mother would uh go to the store and take a cab and work say like 11 to three or four then she'd come home and cook therefore she could cover so the help could all go to lunch and that's and then i had a brother i have a brother named bruce slaves who lives here in dallas with his wife beverly and um younger older younger there's five years difference so it was almost like a second family for my parents i was doing my thing and got a senior in high school and went off to school to university of texas at austin and bruce had his bar
mitzvah i think during my freshman year i think it was in the may or almost yeah right after i got home if i remember right is when his bar mitzvah was scheduled and my mother was always in a dealer i was the first single bot mitzvah they had a bond mitzvah with doris gene ginsburg and sarah andrews and had a double bonnet mitzvah at that time and then i came along with a single so i was not the first but i was the first single and it was only a friday night service that's what we did in those years yeah me too who was the
rabbi at the rabbi hyman fishermen who by the way as a flash she was still living and we had in dallas larry krasner and some others of us uh greta schonbrunn herschel with spearheaded a committee so we could have a tyler reunion here in dallas and we wrote notices all the time our kids got less from everywhere and i i used to get so the new year's card from rabbi fishman so i had his address so i wrote him to find out where his girls were and one of his girls and husband came to the reunion so i mean you talked about reaching out and
it was amazing so it was just uh in fact we're trying to get the the committee here to get together again just to get together because it was such a fun project and we're not doing it again anytime soon um so there was a small jewish community so i was about 30 000 in those years maybe not maybe under and i don't know when he got to that k orleans was on the square that's where my dad's store was there was lace jewelers and there's also shift stores across the square shifts jealous was owned by my father's sister sarah sack and her husband isadorsa and
they were both partners in both businesses which i learned later on i didn't know that they didn't keep any financial stuff to the kindle that was all right right very proud and that's that we had a phone which i've never seen since but uh it had no dowel on it because the i'll turn the the dial dial was in and the phone you picked it up and it rang it rang directly to the shift store and they had one that did the same thing when you picked it up it rang directly to the glacier if they needed uh another uh diamond ring if they needed
a certain kind of watch okay you go and i mean we did our own women over there right so was it was it was your was it a great place to grow up oh wrong yeah i didn't like it because there were no jewish kids when i was a junior high there's no kids you know all of a sudden i'm a teenager with her raging hormones you know looking for kids to be with and none of them you know couldn't do this because you get data non-jewish right now my dad would have no no that was it so my parents did not keep kosher but
they went to services most friday nights and a lot of times my mother wouldn't go and i would go with my father by myself so i was the one who went more my brother went i think after was later wrong with my dad what um so your parents what took them to tyler from fort worth there was a they bought a store that's what it was okay and how did your family come to fort worth to begin with they came through galveston uh and this is my the story is and this is written in the archives in san antonio at whatever building that is and
you may know what you're doing i'm talking about i don't remember the hemisphere building or something something anyhow uh they came over on the boat my grandfather came over first on the lace that my grandfather came first with couple of the boys because this is one of ten or three girls in the wrestlers and then as he earned enough money he made enough money then he could stand for my bubby ladies and she came over with the rest now my father had typhus on the way over they didn't know if he was gonna make it so things you know disease was rampant and where did
where were they coming from they were coming from russia so the ukraine is where my father was coming and that's this is a whole other interview is about my grandfather and what he did he was a tailor and he in those years he made uniforms for the russian army but you couldn't touch the russian army people so he had to go like this to measure this is i said that and the uniforms turned out perfect you had such a good honor wow and they knew about culture and the ballet or symphony they knew about all that and they wanted to participate in that in those
years and what about the other side of the family i don't know as much about the other side i think uh i really don't own the luskey side anymore about the lifestyle the last night we used to get together as cousins there were 35 of us all total and we were about 18 on the left side and we'd get together at a cousin's reunion every so often and that's when we got our kids together so the next generation one first cousins weren't removed we get to know it another right and that was really good because it formed a bonding relationship my daughter michelle uh formed
a good relationship with her cousin holly bomb edelman bomb now and and they uh their day apart they were born a day apart so that made for some good things too that's great um were your parents i mean obviously at that time the store and their children were the most important things um were they involved in the jewish community and organizations and things very much so my mother would go to hadassah and she'd go to the sisterhood i don't remember ever being president but i remember her being a chair and her becoming a chair was after i left home because she wasn't that often than
i can remember when i was at home because i was interested in narcissistically me myself and i ain't growing up and then a little bit uh that's i mean the growing up of the kitten this phone was in the kitchen or it was in the hall in the bedroom area and if i we didn't get a second line we didn't do that for the kids we just uh don't when are you going to get out the phone i want to make a call okay and i said can we get a long court so he had a long court so i could take the phone into
my bedroom and close the door because i had a brother in the house so how did you so you went to ut and what was that like it was great all these kids i was a journalism major and i wanted to be a newspaper reporter so uh and i wanted to do this since i was about the seventh eighth grade because i had a teacher mrs lowe who was very encouraging he said you are right and for punishment if i were talking or something i'd have to write a thing well writing a theme was easy for me to just use lots of adjectives and threw
it together and that's why i wasn't doing so my father really didn't like that i would be measuring that that he said don't you want to do bookkeeping i said no i had no interest in business side i wound up to pacify them getting a double degree double major i got a degree in english bachelor of arts and i got a degree in journalism and bj so which meant i had to go to summer school if i wanted to graduate in four years and because i made that decision i wound up meeting my husband lee my kid's father so uh a girlfriend of mine brenda
labovitz levine now she lives here needed a fourth for bridge i just called and let her know i was in fort worth and do you play bridge i said yes she said okay i was at my aunt my back that's who i was living with in fort worth at the time because i was working and i mean i was going to school wrong wrong situation i was staying in the dorm while i was a student at tcu and lee wound up coming to the dorm to pick me up i was at my aunt rebecca's i'd gone over there for the afternoon so they took me
back i had on shorts and i had you can't wear shorts you need to go change clothes so because of her i went back to the dorm and put on a dress a summer dress it wasn't a real fancy dress okay so that's what happened there and lee was my partner and he had all this crazy bidding bringing i'd say one thing that he would up me by another about two levels if you know anything about bridge one point and then next thing then all of a sudden he's going in for trump and i looked at him and he and i would look over the
cards and i thought gosh what's going on well he was a very good strong bridge player and he gambled at plane bridge too i laid a friend now very early though and that's how we met so then he uh had to leave town and go get his brother who was in atlanta had gone to army reserve so he had to go drive out there and pick him up and then uh my parents had come in and what are you going to do the rest of the summer i said well i thought i was going to stay here at tcu though they were ready for me
i mean it cost them some money living expenses anyhow yeah what are you going to do home at least here she's got you know some other people she can call and get together with okay so i stayed there and uh i got a call from lee and he wanted to take me out i'd seen him in the uh union or cafeteria area i had a cart that they punched when i committed things well i was eating out relatives so i had more money on the car than i would use so i said if you want you know i'll let you use my card for breakfast
and whatever so i started doing that so maybe he felt he had to ask me out to pay me back who knows the amusing thing about it is that when he asked me out it was always on a friday night uh and i i'm sorry yeah and i had plans every time i would have died plans so and he played poker so it wound up that he had to give up his poker game in order to take me out and then he said where do you want to go and i said uh without practically without hesitation i just jumped right in i said i'd like
to go to casa manana to see a play there was a dead silence on the other night and he said i'll see if i can get tickets well at that point he didn't have the money to get tickets so we talked to his mother so he would love the money to get tickets and all the other girls i'm sure wanted to go see a movie or do something else but i was in fort worth i wanted to see it that's the wizard of oz beautiful wonderful yeah and that's how we met and how long after how long did you date we dated uh three years
we broke up uh the last year in february around my birthday he was i was working in fort worth and he was at ut working on a pharmacy degree by that time anyway he came he invited me down we broke up because it was just different i wasn't ready to get married he was ready to get married i mean i thought it was a summer romance he was ready to get married practically at the end of the summer i wasn't ready another couple years in school and he had enough more so anyway that's what happened and then i went down he sent me 22 red
roses for my birthday went down to austin in may or late april for the weekend and i had a great time that time we decided to get married and uh officially artificially we i was staying with roth is louis and little legs in austin they pronounced it latest in south texas and uh his comment should we call my mother or your mother first your parents first uh so we'd better call mine first and lee was on the other phone tonight i said how would you like a wedding this summer my mother replies i wouldn't and lee said well you're gonna have one don't you ever
do that again so that was it that was so that was it i mean their big biggest objection was we're we're both still quote pictures and he didn't have a job and he had to go to school and i was out and you know what kind of work can i do whatever and you know it all worked out we got married and we were in austin for two years and as they call it phd putting hubby through i remember the pharmacy wives club and i worked in an office i worked for what was then theta sigma phi which is now i think women just communications
women in communications it became and at the time the executive director the acting executive director it was falling out because they wanted to formally have an office and the woman who was doing this was assistant to dr dewitt reddick who was the dean of the journalists in school and i had worked part-time for him too on some research so i mean at all times as six degrees of separation anyhow all came together and i worked in austin uh and he was going to school the one thing when i'm sorry i can't remember the name the shooter from the university of texas whitman that's the one
lee would have normally been crossing the campus when that happened he decided to stay home and study for an exam wow so as you say they're about the grace of god and that was it i mean it's so we had lots of sometimes very heavy stuff going on so how did you end up in dallas when he got his degree we decided do we want to go to footwork do we got to go to dallas do we want to go to tyler i said i don't want to go to town knew that was out fort worth well so so we decided to come to dallas
because it was in between we were an hour and a half from tyler at that time or an hour from fort worth uh and that sort of it did work because they would come in if we decided that morning we wanted to go in for lunch we could do it right if we say we wanted to go for dinner we could do it and we did that or my parents would come in uh that's what we do so dallas worked out very well lee died when he was 44. he had lung cancer and my kids are very aware of this it was a surprise we did not know how sick he was and they gave him six months to two years he died about six months after he was diagnosed october november and we even went down to md anderson for a second opinion and they said they could treat him here as well and that's what we did so how old were your children at the time at the time howard had a bar mitzvah in february that was the last big function or whatever he attended uh because he died june 4th so howard was 13.
michelle was about 18 and sandy was in between so she was about 16. she i remember sandy was taking driving lessons and i had to figure out how she was going to get there whatever we we figured anyone michelle got home from school in may i told her i don't want you worrying about getting a job for the summer you're going to be like a second mother because i'm going to need you to take sandy and or howard wherever they can well when she got home lee was in the hospital so we had a cotton there and you know i tried to do it all night stay up i couldn't do it so we did get help in there
but when she came home the cop was there so she literally crashed on the con and she she was great help she really was and she just stick up and just did what she needed to do and then that's what happened sandy was supposed to go to camper ma which she did but and there was a regional convention here bbyo and hopefully that's time she was running for president uh it was just really whatever she couldn't go because her dad died and so she had to be at home so she missed that convention which i know it's probably bittersweet for her but uh she was
like a trooper i will definitely say all three of my children are troopers my youngest howard i do never call him the baby i just say he's the youngest because of all these girls it just can be really awkward he really came up too this i arranged for him to have have some counseling with somebody i thought i want you to see somebody i want you to tell me if you need help you're going to have it but i am not going to let you not see somebody you've got to be able to understand and work through this he had one session he said well
i don't think i need anything i said okay but if you do you need to tell me because you can have it and lee had been mentally ill with depression and anxiety and had seen a psychiatrist for years so we were this family was not new to depression and male obstacles but they did fine and then after that about a year later after he died i met someone uh david eastman who is was just a great shot of penicillin if you want to call it that um he wasn't jewish but i had a great time with him and we met because two jewish people i
knew husband and wife were at her work and he and she came up with he had to have a date for a progressive service a covered dish sucker for 40 plus which was a an organization some people may know and uh he they call me first would you go out with somebody who's not jewish i said sure they said explain it he's because he's active in this organization it's for helping people who aren't who are out of work uh well i didn't know you know what was going so i i went ahead and you know he and uh i think my son howard greeted him
at the door you know they're too excited they want to see what this was going on and we he brought me tea and which really impressed me because i'm a tea drinker so he brought me tea i'm a tea drinker dave was about his about eight years older than i uh but we had a great time then he asked me out later on to go out to dinner which we did and the time just flew he was a wonderful storyteller he knew all kinds of stories and he had been over you know uh europe germany after the occupation i don't know why it was still
occupied this is after war so he saw a lot of stuff and he's telling me a few of the things sometimes but he grew up in indiana on a farm and then not on farm his dad was a teacher and his mother uh got married 14. i mean this is just a whole other word so she'll say these things so it's like it really makes me feel good that the what works between those two it really does the same with the other uh four adults too that's great certainly speaks to your uh parenting skills say out loud they're awesome that is my outstanding achievement lifetime i've gotten other kinds of accolades that is that i i i raise all three of my kids they are married jewish spouses and they are leading jewish lives it's a lot to be proud of well i am very proud of it and it's amazing now sandy
my middle one he's a real estate developer she got her degree in urban planning and development from boston university and then she went to the university of washington in seattle for her master's degree in fact she's got a double masters i believe anyway she wound up back in boston because that's where she wanted to be and then she got an offer from a firm that people do work before the short of it is she worked for jpi which is a dallas firm but she was in the boston area and then she decided to leave them which she did for something else in the meantime uh
we all know what happened boom kind of hit us and went out the bubble went out of it and then she decided to go on her own what she did and she did contract work and she wound up working for a couple of former employees from jpi well they formed their own company as i said and they liked her so much they hired her full time so i mean she's men are predominant in this veil they are very dominating yeah and she wears a hard hat on site but she goes in from inception finding the property to doing the contract to buy it to doing
whatever permit he needs is roads or whatever there is she is in charge now you're also in real estate yeah i'm a commercial real estate broker i do leasing more so than buying and selling but also do something buying and selling and to do mainly office and industrial how did you get into that um actually it's very interesting i was working for the underground shopper at the time part time i was an editor of the underground pages which they published at one time this is back in the late 70s and one of the people there of the secretary was talking about her husband quitting his
job at pennies as manager with a steady paycheck and going to work as a real estate agent residential and she was all upset about this and so forth she says i don't know how are we going to live blah blah blah anyway he wound up doing it and he wasn't being successful and i heard of this and i thought well let me just check well a good friend of mine named carolyn paris and her husband bill have always been supportive through both deaths and the whole thing he is a broker she told me so i talked with him he says sure you want to be
a broker i'll sponsor you you go you just go get everything you need if you need uh recommendations you go get them i said okay so i got the recommendations for my own made the application and i wanted to be a commercial broker because i've been connected with business most of my life i grew up in a jewelry store my husband had a pharmacy i'd been a secretary or something with goals for dallas so i had seen certain things and i just felt more comfortable on the business end and it's proven to give me mainly gave me the flexibility i needed that was the big
key because when did when did you do this 81 is when i got my first job and were you are any of your kids still at home or oh yeah howard was still at home so you needed that flexibility to be able to yeah and i didn't do it as much as i did after he left but yeah i needed the flexibility so i could pick him up if i needed to or whatever uh the thing is i was working for robert lee had to close our store or we did have a pharmacy for about six or seven years but it just wasn't making any
money this is when all the gibsons were coming into the area and everybody went to the big box store because they could get their prescriptions at a discount and we were a full service pharmacy so he closed the doors um and that's why he went to work for somebody else so he can make a living we've gone to a bankruptcy attorney the attorney said you let them put you in bankruptcy you can you can go get a job you're and sure enough i mean you know we didn't it wasn't probably a hip-hop so that's what we did we had a bank loan we paid off
uh out of each paycheck and you kept going and he said you're going to have to go to work so i said okay so i went on as a temporary and then later got hired by royal park quote we covered the asses of the masses of polyester house uh and then i was there and michelle had her bond mitzvah coming of that october and i was trying to figure out how i'm going to do all this and whatever and a new president had come in and i was his assistant then they let me go because a new guy needed somebody who had more of a
fabric uh textile background that i didn't have so that was fine because then i could work on the mitzvah the whole time so and i needed that i mean that was a good time you know god closes the door and then he opens up a window then that worked out so i was able to at that point i was able to you know step back tell me about your involvement in the jewish community okay when i first moved to dallas we lived in oak cliff because lee was working for a store fairville hills pharmacy in eau claire and i decided what he had erratic schedule
like on one night off of next the right so i found out there was the neighborhood women chapter that met at night and it was also a national council of the jewish women chapter what whatever organization it met at night so i attended both uh and that's how i really got started and then the neighbor's women asked me to be program chairman or i don't even remember what it was starlight and everything that it was a and that's what i did and the national council asked me and i said i'm sorry i knew i couldn't do both i said i've already accepted something else and
that so because the the die was cast right as they say i just went up the ladder with that and as an aside one of the things that was really neat i had a sister-in-law at the time she still had sister-in-law who worked for blue cross blue shield and she worked for the guy who put the messages on top of the building you remember that was any message or well we were doing the neighborhood women sponsoring six flags of texas today they let us put a message on the board because i asked after that that was it one time they didn't want to happen anymore
but anyhow we got on top of the building and i was in charge of some of the publicity and donald schnitzer was there inactive and don i said you're going to say this and here's you know your script and this is it you're going to be in front i said you're you're the showpiece so that was it was really nice to handle her in some ways we were able to put on some public service announcements on at least one of the broadcast media uh your journalism back yeah that's it i mean that's what's up and then we did audio for uh radio so we had
coverage on both uh tv and yeah we were able to talk to somebody at channel 8 they had a guy there he'd do the public service announcements all we had to pay for was the production and he did that so we had a slide for that so i mean these were inroads that was unheard of because ain't nobody did it right and i only knew to do it because you asked yeah you don't ask you don't yet whether it's money or time that's true and those are the two most valuable commodities out there for an organization the volunteer time or whatever and the money to
keep it running and pay the salary or salaries that's the case smoothly so i became president of straw at the navy's women and then about 22 years ago there was nothing in the jewish community as job support unemployment support well i knew mark shore who was in that placement and i was substituting sunday school at the time which i did for a long time at sheriff which is where i'm a member and i told mark i said i have a proposition for you he says is this a marriage proposal i said of sorts i said i want to do a program and you be the
speaker or we get speakers and if sheriffs will agree to this you know we can have one night a month and i'll take care of the publicity and whatever we need to do he agreed and for a year or longer he provided a program sometimes we get 10 people sometimes half a dozen sometimes more but it i mean just the two of us it was really in its infancy so at the end of that time he said he's going to have to back out he just had too much that he was committed to one so i decided uh he said you really should go with
jewish family service so i talked to rabbi eliza his name i can't remember now that's it thank you so much she was wonderful i can't sing enough accolades about her and i approached her with the idea and she said jewish family service needs to do this i said why don't you take so i took it to the rabbinical council first then they said with their blessing they wanted jfs so that's how it began and then i mean that very crowded that inroad in the community very proud but that was the forerunner and the precipitating catalyst for lack of another explosion that's good explosion to get
unemployment addressed in the via jfs and because of that there are now at least half a dozen different programs whether you're 50 whether you're recently widowed whether you're getting back in the job market whether you're going to do a session on linkedin which you ever heard of them or whether you're going to do something on microsoft word or microsoft excel i mean there are all kinds of classes in our programs at no charge and you're still actively involved as a volunteer not as much uh my volunteers not formal i mean i send them job leads when i hear of them or if there's something else
that needs a dream i went in and met the president and i said i want a chance to meet you and let him know so i let him know that i had been active i haven't been active recently though but uh i mean that was a commitment one second tuesday of every month in doing that now i even wound up getting thanks to them the international association of vocational services award because camille cramer i know if you ever know her okay she's i know what happened to her but she's left she's gone and i if you know i want to talk to you about that
afterwards all right but camille is he was the plumber the staff person and i was the volunteer but what really happened is they had signed ellen loomsty i don't know if you know ellen okay ellen and i are very good friends because of jfs in this program so she was hired as a part-time person to do this with me we did 11 o'clock meetings on the phone at night figuring out the publicity what we're going to say here right to facts how to do this we spent a lot of time making this program happen i mean we literally birthed this baby into what it is
today you have a lot to be proud of it's a wonderful program yeah yeah it's it's toxic when i meet people uh and they're unemployed or they're in transition i said you need to go to jfs and now sometimes oh well i know i've been there i think they've got wonderful aha right i mean it's i didn't go seeing my praises this is something i wanted done for the community and actually because my husband was a member of uh 40 plus and i saw what it was doing i thought that's kind of what i thought well if he could do it and a good friend
of mine carol carol perry said well why don't you get it in the community i said how she said you know people talk to him that's what he did i did you know you just had to say do it and i did it all right so we're about ready to wrap up i ask you one last question um you have grandchildren yes and um i'm sure you want to leave some kind of legacy to have them know who you were and who you'd like them to be and so the last question is um what would you like to say to your next generations and the
generations to come i'm going to say it all comes down to be the best you can whatever you do and do the best you can work wise or career-wise are volunteer-wise i'm hoping that the values that i left to your parents will also become the values that they leave you and that you can take on to the next generation the values of having compassion and caring for other human beings are as dallas hebrew free one which is where i've really been active lately in the lung committee for several years and that's that's that's another story by itself and that's one of my babies too beside
jffs put a hand out not a hand up and that's that's where it all is because only by the embrace of god and what you do and what you learn are you not there on the street are off there not finishing high school and working as a laborer in a warehouse it's education is definitely prime a jewish education meaning whether it's sunday school or full-time just knowing what's going on and believe me if you live in a small town it's only a short distance for you to make arrangements for transportation to find a jewish synagogue you may not be there every week if there's a
bar about this rabbi definitely can make arrangements in today's technology there's no reason you can't do a face to face but for a lesson so the world is exciting and hopefully will still be exciting and still peaceful by the time i die and depart from this wonderful world there's a lie out there there is uh and that's why i was legion it's funny you say this because i want to grief support group for a woman's name is mary frank that's not her real name but she's not living anymore one of the things she had us do is write our quote values will what you read
in the newspaper doesn't tell you anything about the person right what is your values will what do you want to leave and this is the same question you're asking me in a different way and i wrote one and if i'd known that i needed that i would brought it but basically again do the best you can and whatever you do and if you think something's right follow your dream if you think it's not right do what you can about it and we are not in control of so many things be aware that there's some things you can control and some things you can't and that
are left not to and that's what i would leave to them okay does that help that's great thank you very much we are thrilled to add your voice to our collection of as of our oral history project and and we'll stop you you