Eileen Ray
Eileen Ray's grandparents came from Russia and Poland, and her mother was born in Russia while her father was born in Poland. Both families eventually settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where her parents met, dated, and married. The extended family spoke Yiddish, which Eileen picked up as a child during visits. Her father worked in a shoe store in St. Louis until his brother and sister, who had settled in South Texas in the scrap iron business, invited him to join them. When Eileen was five, the family moved to Harlingen, where her father opened his own scrap iron yard.
Eileen enjoyed a happy childhood in Harlingen, attending grade school, junior high, and high school and joining many organizations, including the pep squad, tennis club, annual staff, and the Rainbow Girls, an organization for daughters of Elks members. She was one of only four Jewish students in her high school. With no synagogue in Harlingen at first, the Jewish families carpooled to Sunday school in Mercedes until they built Temple Beth Israel across from the high school. The community had no rabbi, so parents led Friday night services, after which the men played poker and the women played mahjong while the children attended the football game across the street. She graduated in 1952.
After two years at the University of Texas in Austin, Eileen moved to Dallas with two sorority sisters and worked as a typist. Just before leaving Harlingen she met her future husband at a cousin's wedding, and they married nine months later while he finished optometry school. They settled in Dallas, where he opened his own optical office in Oak Cliff and joined the Lions Club and Chamber of Commerce. Eileen raised two daughters, served as a Girl Scout leader and PTA volunteer, and became a lifetime member of the National Council of Jewish Women and a member of Temple Emanu-El Sisterhood for over 60 years, where she especially enjoyed decorating for luncheons. She has always loved city life in Dallas.
Full Transcript
good morning i'm joe reingold i'm interviewing eileen ray and today is monday april 22nd 2019. hi there tell us a little bit about your grandparents and your parents that you remember where they were from where they lived what did they do for a living okay my grandparents came from russia my mother was born in russia and i think my father's parents were born in poland and my dad was born in poland and they ended up in st louis missouri and went to school there and they met when they were young maybe in high school and dated and ended up getting married in st louis my grandparents my grandfather spoke english i don't think my grandmother spoke very much english they all
spoke yiddish and my mother had three four sisters and my dad had i think four siblings one sister and three brothers and um so as a kid they all spoke yiddish when we'd go to visit and uh so i kind of picked up a little bit to understand they spoke it's so the kids wouldn't understand what they were saying right but my parents lived in st louis and then moved to texas to south texas to harlingen what was the reason for that my father's brother moved to mcallen texas and opened a scrap iron yard and then his sister married a man that then they lived
in brownsville and moved to brownsville and they opened the scrap barn yard and my dad was working in a shoe store in st louis and they said come to the valley and you'll go to harlingen so those were the three largest cities there and we'll teach you the junk business and you'll open your own scrap iron yard so daddy picked up and went there and they showed him the business and he decided he liked it and so he got my mother and i and we moved when i was five then to harlingen okay what was life like there living there it was fine i had
a great childhood went to grade school high school you know junior high made friends still have a friend that i met in junior high and a long time and joined organizations in high school he's a member of white teens youth organization there were only four jewish kids in high school myself another boy that was my age and another boy and girl that were a year older and that was that was it just the four of us but you know i participated my dad was an elk joined the oaks lodge so the um rainbow girls they had was an organization for for girls whose parents or
fathers belong to the elks lodge so i was a rainbow girl i was active in the pep squad and on the annual staff and tennis club did you have any opportunity at all for any kind of jewish learning growing up we did not have a temple or a synagogue in harlingen but there was one in mercedes which was about um 30 minutes away so we had a carpool and every sunday we would drive in a car pool the four of us and go to sunday school and then come back home and they had the holidays there also and then finally they built a temple temple
beth israel in in harlington right across from the high school so um there were 40 jewish families when i left i guess and my parents were very active and they didn't have a rabbi but they had blay rabbis so my dad would lead a service one friday night and somebody else would lead another friday night so all the parents went to the temple on friday night the kids went to the football game across the street at the high school so they could hear us cheering and all during the football game but after services after the service was over they closed off the room and they
all went to the back of that room and the men played poker and then women played mahjong on friday nights on friday nights yeah okay they'd have entered you know refreshments and then after the football game was over they'd come and pick us up can you think of something memorable that you worked on in high school that you're very proud of um i was on the annual staff so i worked on the annual getting it printed out and so forth and i think i was the typist you know what i was on the annual staff and i was on the pep squad which i enjoyed
doing that and um the tennis club i really wanted to join a lot of things during the four years so that when the annual came out as a senior i would have a lot of things written under my name like boy she was really active and you know um sounds like you succeeded i did that yeah that turned out okay but it was fun i had a good time in harlingen yeah it was it was nice there was a little um anti-semitic i guess there was one teacher that i remember i don't know if that's one of the questions you want to ask that's important
yeah um i think he was the math teacher and that maybe that's why my math is so bad now but um he'd go every once in a while he would just go say let's go down the aisle and everybody tell what church they go to and my stomach would just turn i mean i would get really nervous and i think oh god he's going to come to me what'll i say and right before there were maybe two or three people ahead of me and i raised my hand and he'd say yes i mean i go to the restroom and i'd go in there stay as
long as i thought it was past my chair and come back and everybody would be finished and then all of a sudden he'd say oh eileen you weren't in the room when it was your turn so now tell us what church you go to and i just say temple emmanuel i mean temple beth israel and he'd say oh what kind of church is that i never heard of that i know he did probably but anyway i'd say it's a jewish temple you know you were the only one in your class i was the only one in my class yeah and at that time probably there
was just the other boy that was my age you know that was in class but um it just was embarrassing and it just really made me mad that he would do that but i lived through it how long did you stay in harlington i graduated high school in 52 should i tell them okay i'm 52 and went to the university of texas in austin i went two years decided i had enough education and wanted to come to the big city to work so two sorority sisters and i one from fort worth and one from lufkin decided we'd come to dallas and get an apartment and
work and so i got a job as a typhus at liberty mutual insurance company okay so that's all i did was type but the day before i left um harlingen i went to my cousin's wedding this is going ahead of that's okay sure and um met my my future husband there so was he at university of texas also he had already graduated and been in the air force and now is in optometry school and six years older and i met him at the rehearsal dinner and then i was with him that evening we all went to mexico because it was in brownsville okay so we
all went to mexico to have drinks and dance and so forth and the next day at the wedding he was standing on the pulpit and looking at me and he was going and i said what my mother said is he saying i love you and i said yeah i guess so so anyway we were together that evening and then the next day i left on a train to come to dallas and he left on a train to to go to houston back to optometry school so so when did you reconnect we that was the end of september in march we got engaged and in june
we got married so nine months not even every weekend maybe twice a month he'd either come to dallas because his parents lived here okay or i would go to houston or we'd meet in san antonio and uh just kind of recorded then so he obviously he got a job here so he did he got it he graduated uh well when we got married he had one more year of optometry school and um then i had a baby nine months and three days later and so we had our little baby there in houston an apartment and then he graduated we came to dallas okay and then
he got a job here working so and did you you were working also you started working here when you came back i worked here just for the few months when i left college and worked here and then the minute we got engaged i thought good i can quit work now and plan the wedding so that was the end of my working career and then when we got married i worked in houston a little bit and another insurance company and until it was time to have my baby and i quit and that was it and work after that i worked at his office when he opened
his own office i worked there to get him started and at this point where was your family family was in harlington and um they stayed there and then when my dad retired they moved to florida oh okay yeah so we left harlan to the move to florida and um then we were here stayed here ever since and i loved living in the big city i mean to me dallas was like new york city and i loved it so um what kind of things did you and your husband get involved in uh he was in the lions club and he was in the chamber of commerce
there his office was in oak cliff and he worked for his cousin for 10 years in the optical business and then the opportunity came to open his own office and so he did and we kind of got started with that so he joined the chamber of commerce the lions club and just to meet people you know to come get their eyes examined right and i worked with him for a while i would take the kids to school go to oak cliff work leave about three pick up the kids from i was going to ask how your family grew you're in your immediate family oh we
had two daughters yes the one that i had you know after we got married and um two years later had another daughter so when that was fun i was young still so i really grew up with them and it was just fun watching them on drill team and all their high school and school activities girl scout i was a girl scout leader and just participated in pta and all of that and they were young were you all involved in anything in the jewish community i joined national council jewish women so i'm a life member and it was the evening branch and i met all my
friends that i still have now then it's been over 60 years and i joined the neighborhood the blue bonnet chapter i think was on the bowling league there and um sisterhood at temple emanuelle my mother-in-law took me to a luncheon and i joined then so i've been a member of temple manuel and sisterhood for 63 years and what were your daughters involved in uh they were in bbg yeah in bbg in high school so they loved and we didn't have anything like that in harlingen but they did in corpus christi and um i think it was called young judea and we would go up dad
would drive up to corpus i don't know how often maybe once a month and i would go to meetings there that was about all we had nothing else in harlingen so tell me a little bit about how dallas has changed since you first got here until now well it's really grown and of course now there's dallas farmers branch carrollton richardson frisco just kind of all melds into one but at the time i think of course they didn't have central expressway or maybe they maybe they did my in-laws lived in south dallas my husband grew up in south dallas and i think central expressway came through
there but i don't think there was anything much past northwest highway i don't know just really grown but i just loved it i just love living in a bigger city so and you still feel that way oh i do yeah of course the traffic is terrible but you know more people are moving in here now and it's going to get worse but do you still have any contacts with anybody in the valley no everybody's kind of died off there i think and there is one person that lives in dallas that's from harlington that i don't see that often but i know that she's here and
then my husband's cousin married a man from the valley and moved down there and then they moved to dallas about 10 years ago i guess okay yeah she's living here but everybody that i grew up with down there i mean all my parents friends are all gone because they were older when i was a kid so now they'd be 100 years old can you think of anybody who was your role model growing up i think my mother probably she loved to cook and i love to cook i could just live in my kitchen and she was very independent and i didn't used to be independent
when i was younger or just first married but um i am now and i deal with things that have to be dealt with and it's just one of those things and my mother was kind of that way she kind of removed the roost you know daddy worked and she took care of everything else so yeah i think she's my my role model if you had to think of something what would you say you were the most proud of my family my daughters um and um my husband and just that i had a home and ran you know ran the home and took care of everybody
and i don't know i've matured a lot anything about your family that we haven't covered so far that you want to add i don't think so we just went to st louis every single year in the summer that was our summer vacation to visit relatives because they all still live there and so we'd go there and that was fun and it was of course st louis was a big city too so we had the zoo and there was a amusement ship called the admiral that had um casino and restaurants and everything in there so that was really an experience and we loved doing that and
just being in a big city they had more movie houses than one that we had and we had two i think at harlan jenner three one was first run babies one was second run and one was only westerns oh boy and they had great big movie theaters there so we'd take the streetcar and go to that so that was it was fun have they ever any of your relatives visited you here in dallas and what did they think of it well they all came for our wedding and we had the wedding here instead of in harlingen because it was one whole days of um train
ride to get here from st louis and mother didn't want to make them have another train you know another whole day to go down there so we got married in dallas and a few of them went back with my parents back to harlingen for a visit you know just maybe for a few days but um i guess they liked it here yeah it was different for them and they were all very orthodox and like during the holidays they would walk they wouldn't turn on the lights and they followed you know all the traditional things so well it was very different in texas when they came
to visit [Music] and that's what i was wondering about yeah they all kept kosher my parents started out keeping kosher i but then it was too hard to get food that was kosher so they stopped it but they would drive to corpus and buy deli things daddy would say do you want to take a run up to corpus and go shopping and they would say okay so they'd go and she'd bring back big salamis and these tins of lasko locks came in oil i remember that and all kinds of jewish foods and just she had a big deep freeze like a chest and chest and
put everything in there so she had all kinds of good deli meats that they take out and i don't think they ever sold any of that in harlingen um that you just couldn't get it there they didn't even know i'm not sure they still have it if that was they probably don't but um is there anything you'd like to add about your life here in dallas i love living here i've made wonderful friends like i say i joined council jewish women the evening branch and met wonderful ladies and we're still friends after 63 years and just everything in dallas you know the theaters the movies
the plays restaurants everything that you have here that you can do as much or as little as you want and in organizations too you know and when i joined sisterhood i did a lot of the luncheon decorations decorating the tables and all that was kind of what i like to do so that was mainly what i did but yeah just love living here yeah well we appreciate your interview and uh good luck with everything thank you very much enjoyed it