Elizabeth Hirsch
Liz Hirsch came from a family with deep immigrant roots. Her mother, born Sadie Claire Messer and later known as Sarita, grew up in New York and Cincinnati, the child of Rose and Frank, who came from a region that shifted between Austria and Poland. Her father, Levi Arthur Olin, was born abroad and came to America at age three in 1906, the son of Max and Bessie Olin from near Kiev in the Ukraine. The family name had been Ulonovsky before it was changed to Olin. Levi studied at Hebrew Union College and the University of Cincinnati, where he met Sarita. Liz was the oldest of three children, with a sister nicknamed Buzzy and a brother, David.
In January 1949 the family moved to Dallas so her father could serve as rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, then located in South Dallas. The transition was hard for the shy twelve-year-old, who had come from a small prep school to the large Highland Park Junior High. She was confirmed at the old temple on South Boulevard, graduated from Highland Park High School in 1954, and earned her degree from Cornell University in 1958. Returning to Dallas, she married Jim Hirsch, a Hungarian Jew from Transylvania who survived the concentration camps as a teenager, worked at the IG Farben plant near Auschwitz, and lost his parents and a brother. The couple entered the fur business together in 1963 and raised two children, Karen and Josh.
Liz's life was profoundly shaped by her father, a beloved and outspoken Reform rabbi who marched with Martin Luther King, hosted a widely heard Sunday radio program, and taught at SMU's Perkins School and elsewhere. He treasured Yiddish culture and books, and after his death Liz helped lead a project with Bridwell Library to digitize over a hundred of his radio sermons for the internet. She sang at Temple Emanu-El for fifty years alongside cantors and composers. After leaving the fur business, she worked at the nonprofit Child Care Group and then sold jewelry at Neiman Marcus for ten years. She counts her lasting friendships from every stage of life among her greatest joys.
Full Transcript
doing liz hirsch today my name is nancy ungerman ruth anders is on the camera and it is january the 25th 2013. 2013 very important yeah um liz were you born here no i was not born here i was born in worcester massachusetts in august of 1936 and i lived there until i was 12. what got you here well my father was the rabbi in worcester at temple emanuel and he accepted the position of rabbi at temple manual here and so we moved and how i found out that we were moving was i was at camp in maine and they called me to the phone which was a very unusual thing i figured oh my god somebody's dead and they called me to the phone and it was my parents to tell me that we were moving to dallas and i first i used to think why would they call me at camp to tell me that but then i realized that
they didn't want anyone else to tell me and people would hear about it this was a jewish camp and people would hear about it and they would tell me and they wanted to tell me so i understand that but to me it was like moving to mars you know and daddy used to say the first thing i said to them was what will i do about my piano lessons you know like that was the most important thing um but anyway that's how i learned we was it a difficult adjustment it was for me but i really think that i that i didn't have a very
good attitude i when we moved here i was going to highland park junior high and i had come from a prep school in worcester that was very small it didn't have a gym it didn't have a cafeteria it didn't have study halls it didn't have any of those things it was small you took latin in the in the i forget which great latin in french in the eighth grade i mean it was a serious school and you had to apply and i came here and i was put down in highland park junior high school which was a huge fancy school with a gym and a
cafeteria and an auditorium a big city yeah and it was like oh my god so i did have a hard time and i and i'm not a terrifically outgoing person and i had a hard time making friends and i just had a hard time adjusting particularly in highland park well i don't know since i never went anywhere else but i should tell you about the day we came because that's texas history too we came on a train from cincinnati where my mother's mother lived we had been visiting there my mother was very close to her mother and we came on the train so before i
move on can i do this i love it these are my mother's parents this is rose and frank frank died when i was six months old i never met him my sister's named for him her name is francis this is my um this was the only grandma that i knew her name was rose hauben before she married and she lived in cincinnati in a big house that was like fairyland to me it had a basement in an attic and and closets under the stairs and nooks and crannies that smelled like furniture polish and oh my god it was just a fabulous house and father's side
mothers this is all mother's side so these were her parents you know i'll tell you a funny little thing when my mother died i said to my sister let's go to austria and see where they were from because mother always said they were from austria and my sister said to me what are you talking about and i said what do you mean what are we let's go to austria and see where they're from and she said they weren't from austria they were from poland so i don't know whether where they were from was at one point austria and at another point poland because the boundaries
moved a lot or if poland wasn't good enough i don't think poland was good enough so they were from austria as as far as i knew and they came to this country i think they were married when they came and they lived in new york on the lower east side and when my i forget what year it was when my grandmother was old she was visiting us here and she got sick and she wanted to go home to cincinnati and she didn't want to fly so my parents asked me if i'd go with her on the train and i was thrilled because i was the
oldest of her grandchildren she had 11 grandchildren and i was the oldest and i never got her alone so i so i had her alone for a whole day on the train and we talked and talked and she told me about when they opened the subway in new york which was 1903. and she remembered that she was lovely she she kept a kosher home um but one of her sons and his wife and his five children lived with her and when the kids were growing up she allowed them to have milk with their meat at the table otherwise it was a kosher home um okay so this is my father's father his name was max olin and he didn't speak much english so we children were never very close to him because we couldn't talk much i mean i think he loved us but we had a hard time this is next they are from they were from russia
from the ukraine near kiev and my father came to this country when he was three in 1906 max was already here his wife bessie for whom i named is here i never knew her she died before i was born and they lived in rochester new york and max had a push cart and my father sold aprons door-to-door they obviously had no money this side of the family moved to cincinnati went into the building business and made a lot of money um stop it for a second so my mother was born in new york and then they moved to cincinnati i don't remember what year and
my mother was the oldest of four and all the others were boys and she outlived them all my mother did and the middle boy was her brother sam mother loved all the boys but she really loved sam sam didn't want to go into the family building business so he was kind of the black sheep but he became a movie actor and i saw him in a film the other night on turner classic movies so he was a an actor in new york and then he went to hollywood and i couldn't find my picture of him his the name that he used in the movies was
robert middleton but his real name was sam messer they told him that was more s's than they could use so they named him robert middleton um my my mother's uh let's see here is my mother and here is my father when they were younger yeah my father's name was levi arthur olin when they came to this country they were ulonovsky with a u and then somehow maybe at ellis island they became olin how did they meet well i met in cincinnati daddy went to hebrew union college in cincinnati and to the university of cincinnati and my mother lived in cincinnati and i'm sure they had
dances at the college and she probably went and they and they met she was beautiful when she was young beautiful and my and my mother was born sadie claire messer but when she was i don't know how old probably a teenager she decided that she didn't like sadie so she changed her name and her name became s-a-r-i-t-a sarita which i think was a song at the time and in the old pictures that we found after she died she was very glamorous so i think it's neat that she chose a very glamorous name um let's see here they are on their honeymoon um so we moved
here new year's day 1949. um my mother was a shy person it's very difficult to be the rabbi's wife when you're a shy person but i think she accommodated herself well and she had very good friends here i'll tell you what happened when we first moved my parents were going to the first friday night services where my dad was going to preach and they had someone come and stay with us i was 12 my sister was 8 and david was one so they had this woman come and stay with us her name was natalie baker and she was from worcester too and she had come here before we came so
my parents knew of her and they asked her to come and stay with us which she did years later many many years i was grown and old i was i was with natalie and she told me how that night that she went into the kitchen for something and there were books piled up on the floor and on the counter and on the stove and everywhere and she said i thought she thought wouldn't it be nice to have books piled up in my kitchen and she said you know last month i walked in my kitchen and there were books piled up all over and i thought
oh i have a kitchen just like rabbi owen true story anyway so we all adjusted oh we got the flu right away when we came we got sick and somebody sent dr wolfram over to see us julie wolfram so i so i met him right away anyway so we all went to school and sunday school too and the temple was in south dallas and we went on the bus on sunday mornings and i think daddy used to bring me home i don't remember going home on the bus anyway and i was confirmed there in the old temple on what south boulevard and [Music] i went
to highland park high school and was in the class of 1954 and then i after high school i went to ithaca new york to college to cordell university graduated in 58 and um all right let's go back for just a minute this is i as a young child and these are the clothes we used to wear that smock dresses with lace and velvet trim and little bows and now my granddaughters wear jeans and black t-shirts very different and this is my sister and i we used to call well we do call her buzzy and i and this is david and buzzy and this is a
picture of me that my sister-in-law who was an artist drew based on a photo of me for my 60th birthday and she gave it to me it's signed on the back and when i had my 75th birthday this picture became the cover of the invitation all right so we came here let's see i went to high school i went away to college and then i came back here married jim hirsch who was a little older than me not too much and i'll show you his picture with our son josh that's jim jim was hungarian from transylvania actually sometimes it was hungary and sometimes it was
romania depending on who had signed what treaty that year um jim was unlucky enough to be born in 1928 in hungary which made him 16 years old in 1944 when the germans came forth for the hungarian jews so that was the bad news the good news was that he was only in the camps for a year which is one of the reasons he survived he was 16 and he could work and he worked in the ig farben plant which was next door to auschwitz and i think he also survived because he was smart and he was determined he he lost his parents and a brother
in the camps but a lot of his friends who were his age lived and he remained friends with them all the rest of his life they were his family really after that they lived all over the country but they were like a brotherhood and we used to go visit them they visited us how many how many friends oh i would say half a dozen anyway we married and we went into the fur business because jim had been in it he he learned it in paris after the war so we had two children karen who is where is karen so let me go back to jim's
life so we had a dinner party at our house one night and we had a bunch of friends and one of the friends was talking about his experiences in the second world war he had run away to join the army and had lied about his age and he was a very young officer and so he was talking about his experiences and he said one of the things that i remember the most about that time is when they sent me to buchenwald to this was after the liberation to take a train load of children who survived to paris the french government had an organization called jose
ose the organization for the the organization to help the children so they took the children from the camps who had nowhere to go they had lost everyone they had no homes and they took them to france and they lived in the rothschild castles all over france and jim lived in the castle in normandy at equi and somewhere there is a picture of of the kids playing outside on the lawn outside the castle and if you would see them you would think oh what a nice bunch of kids you would have no no way to see into their souls to to to see what had happened
to them anyway so this friend of ours says so i was sent to buchenwald to take a train load of children to friends and jim turned pale and said you took me i was on the train you took me so that was quite something um did he have any memory of recognizing no no but when the camps were liberated before the americans came the germans left and the prisoners were were put in rooms in the officer's quarters and jim shared a room with ellie wiesel and somewhere there's a picture of them i don't have it he hasn't or had it i'm sure um no one
in his family lived except the terrible story is that his mother he was told this after the war his mother lived through the war and was in what was a camp for women bergen-belsen and she lived to the end of the war and when the germans abandoned the camp they poisoned the food they left behind and the prisoners were so hungry they ain't and they died it was the final solution the really final solution anyway um so here's karen i see you have not brought a bigger picture that's karen in the red dress this is a picture of my parents 50th anniversary okay and here
is josh which i can hardly believe and lives in santa rosa california karen is your daughter daughter i'm sorry and she is married to offa and i'll show you offer here is here they are at their wedding with my mother they had flowers sent in from hawaii so my mother's wearing a freesia lay very nice man children sarah and sam and josh has two children also and sam sarah's 24 now sam is 21. this is sarah when she graduated from high school two years ago no no this is sarah when she graduated from college from san francisco state two years ago and this coming may she will get a master's degree from san francisco state and public health sarah is very much like my father she wants to save the world good for her josh has two children sophie who's 14 and isaac who's 12 josh is married to ruth horowitz and here they are she's from l.a she's an la girl in fact she had a birthday last week and i called her and i left a message on her phone
and i said ruth happy birthday blah blah and i hope you're sitting at the casa del mar with your girlfriends drinking wine and looking out at the ocean and the next day she sent me an email and said liz when i got your message i was sitting at the casa del mar with my girlfriends looking out at the ocean and drinking wine perfect it was just perfect anyway they have two children sophie and isaac all right so here are here are two pictures of josh and his family with ruth and the kids josh's children are very musical like josh was which is nice i also
want to show you this this is small you'll have to take that up close so that is a picture of my grandmother rose with my daughter karen so it's her great granddaughter this is this is rose and that is rose i never knew this rose um so so let's talk a little bit about my life as the rabbi's daughter which is has its good and bad aspects shall we say my father was a very liberal very outspoken rabbi who believed that his mission in life was to educate and to prod the word rabbi means teacher and that's what he was but he was also a
very committed gadfly show we say in the prophetic way and a good way to explain how he felt about that was when someone came up to him after services and said rabbi i really loved your sermon to which he replied i hope not he didn't want you to love it he wanted you to be uncomfortable and motivated to go out and change the world he did not want you to love the sermon and he he had a radio program on sunday mornings for the 50s and 60s that everyone listened to everyone jewish non-jewish whatever and after he died there was a letter to the editor
of the morning news that said i was sorry to read rabbi olin's passing he said i always listen to him on sunday mornings on my way to church and one day i asked my sunday school teacher who who he listened to on sunday mornings and he said of course rabbi olin so he was really universally admired in fact three years after he died the dallas observer in their best issue best hamburgers best restaurants best this best bet had the best rabbi and it was he and he was dead for three years so he made quite an impact here which was not always easy on my
siblings and i one day in high school my history teacher called me into her office and she said to me is that your father i hear on the radio on sunday mornings and i said yes and all she said was hmm i knew i was doomed but you know when he died i heard from friends that i grew up with in worcester i i heard from a man who said that he was a religious educator because of him we heard from everyone it was really very touching and my mother got the best letter of all mother got a letter from eric johnson who was the
mayor of dallas who had gotten into some scrapes with daddy they disagreed about certain things and he wrote my mother a beautiful letter at the end of which he said i did not always agree with him but i always respected him and that's a compliment daddy would have liked because that's what he wanted all he wanted was respect so i thought that was a wonderful letter wonderful um stop it so my father was a true ref classic reformed jew he was an immigrant and america was the land of milk and honey and i really believe that one of the things that motivated him in his
life to march with martin luther king and to get involved in things was because he loved america and he wanted it to be the best that he could that it could be in in the way that an immigrant loves america so i really think that his his early history influenced him a lot in that way people used to ask him why did you become a rabbi why did you go to hebrew union college the and he used to joke and he would say well my best friend sydney went and i wanted to go with cindy but another real reason was that it was free he
had no money and the national organization of temple sisterhoods would pay for poor boys and it was only boys then to go there and and he could go across the street to the university of cincinnati and study at the same time free and that's one reason why he did that because he could be educated without cost so he um he he he made friends at huc that were his friends all his life leon foyer who was the rabbi in ohio babe glazer i don't remember where babe was he died young samuel sandmell daddy was close to nelson glick who was the head of huc huc
was a tremendous influence on him tremendous he became the president of the ccar the central conference of american rabbis and he was very influential there he traveled a lot and taught it at emory university he taught in london at the leobeck school my parents lived in london twice for four months at a time my mother loved it loved it she was very happy there he loved to travel they they were in palestine before it was israel they were all over europe my father went back to russia actually to his hometown where he had a cousin this was in the 30s like mid-30s and he went
to the cousin's house and the cousin had a collection of yiddish books now my father loved yiddish kite anything anything about yiddish in fact his father max used to write to him in yiddish with hebrew characters which upset my mother terribly because she couldn't read it um anyway so he came upon this treasure of books and he said what are you going to do with these books and his cousin said i don't know why and he said because i'll send them home if you don't want them and the cousin said what do you want with that trash what are you going to do with that
trash the jews that had survived in russia were really no longer jews so my father took all the books and sent them home he loved he he loved that that world he he talked about it in his sermons forever about rabbi levy of bradychef that was his favorite character he he and my parents he and my mother spoke yiddish when they didn't want us to know what they were talking about like my husband and i spoke french when we didn't want the kids to know uh so um i have a friend now edith einsberg whose maiden name was melnick and her parents came here also
from russia i believe and her mother was a fabulous woman lily melnick she was a labor organizer and she in new york and she came here and she had a collection of yiddish books also and when she was breaking up her she she asked daddy to come over and go over the books with her which he did and then they decided what they would do with them and he loved that he loved that world that vanished world and he also um corresponded with high rockell andrus my friend ruth's mother-in-law who was a yiddish poet a very renowned woman and they corresponded in yiddish and when
kai rahul died and i went over to see ruth and dave andrus their sons came to me and said liz we have all the letters that your father and our grandmother wrote to each other which i think are now in the yiddish center in at the university of texas or in amherst anyway my point is that he loved that world at the same time he was a very modern man and he really worked to to repair the world that he lived in it was very real to him he was not interested in in cars or if you asked him what kind of car he had
he would have to think about it he wasn't interested in clothes or anything like that in fact i remember my mother saying levi you're you're having lunch with the governor you can't wear that suit it has holes in it um and my son is the same josh is is very much the same he isn't in worldly goods either he's very much like him which is very interesting because he is now writing a an an article about his grandpa for wikipedia on the internet and i sent him a package yesterday or earlier in the week with papers for him to do his research about his grandpa
so last year 2012. well let me go back daddy also taught at smu while he lived here in the perkins theology school and he had an office at smu there and that's where he would go and hide and write and last year the archivist at bridwell library in perkins was opening cartons in the basement of the archives and found over a hundred old reel-to-reel tapes of my father's radio sermons from the 50s and 60s in his voice we had always wondered where they were and there they were and they were still viable the tapes so we embarked on a project bridwell and i to digitize them so they could
be uploaded to the internet and be available now because the message that he delivered is as as as as real now as it was then so we raised some money uh catherine bauer gave us the the initial seed money to begin and then later on lois wolf and frida gail stern also gave us money for this project and they are now finished with the digitizing and they are uploading everything to their website when they're done you will be able to click on a sermon and you will have the audio and you will have a written text that that you can look at while you're hearing
it and uh we're planning a big event for this may 2013 when they opened the website and we're we are hoping for a major event at smu and my whole family will come and it'll be very exciting so he will live again and i'll tell you a funny quote um people have said to me well will anybody be interested in this now and when i said that to one of the men at smu he looked at me and he said liz people read isaiah now which i thought was a wonderful reply let me rest a bit okay so when i married jim he was in
the fur business and i went to work there too in fact that's how i'm how i met him my mother took a fur down to be fixed and i and i met him so we went into business for ourselves in 1963. josh was born in 1962 and we went into business in the summer of 1963 and we had a place at the apparel mart no first first we were downtown opposite the merchandise mart on south irvi and that's where i was on november 22nd 1963 when kennedy came to town president kennedy and i walked up from irvy to commerce street to see the the parade my parents were at the trademart at the dinner waiting for him to come and speak and i walked back to the office and by the time i got back to the office someone said to me the president's been shocked to which
i replied that's not funny and i don't think you ought to joke like that that's not funny and they were staring at me and saying less so we all know what happened that day in fact at the sixth floor museum there's a photograph of the crowd at the trademart there waiting for him it's a big color picture on the wall and i can find my mother in it but i can't find my father he was probably up talking to somebody anyway i you know anybody who was alive especially here then remembers that day jim was doing a fur event in kansas city at a store
and we talked on the phone and i said well are you going to come home and he said the fur event is going very well we're doing very good business which i can still not believe anyway he came home the next day and of course we were all watching the television and i'll tell you that considering the life he had the only time i ever saw him cry was when was the shot on television of jacqueline kennedy with her children in the capital rotunda when he was lying in state and there was a shot of her with the kids and john john went like that
he just see i will too that was very emotional anyway and then that night that was a friday that he was killed and that night everybody went to temple everybody the place was packed and i said to someone my god look at all these people and somebody said to me we didn't know where else to go and of course my father preached a lot of wonderful sermons about after the assassination and one year after the assassination about what is our guilt what is dallas's guilt what kind of atmosphere did we have here that somebody felt free to do that there were terrible articles in the
paper a lot of demonstrations it was a hostile climate it really was the front page yes yeah so there was that and then there was a our fur business which was very we did very well jim did very well i tagged along on his coattails everyone liked him they respected him people would sell us furs that they wouldn't sell anyway anyone else and we really were not a very wealthy company but they liked him and they did business with him because of that and sometimes when we went to new york to work my parents would keep the children for and i always brought home a
gift from my father which was a yiddish joke or a jewish joke that i would hear in new york that was the favorite thing that he wanted that was all he wanted actually was being with my children whom he adored and getting a new yiddish joke from new york so one of the influences of my father and my mother in my life is that in our house growing up books were sacred objects you went to the library all the time i i remember all the libraries near where i have lived in fact daddy was one of the founders of friends of the dallas public library
and and also he was one of the founders of colophon which is the book um organization at smu so books were sacred objects in our life and i remember when i was married to jim and we had a garage sale and we were selling our furniture and stuff and somebody walked into the house and said are your books for sale and i thought what are my books for sale i am i mean it was incredible to me sell my books now i have moved on from there i'm not quite as obsessive anymore because i don't have room but books were always major in our lives
and i i still remember the books that i used to read to my children when they were young i love them and a few years ago on my birthday josh my son sent me two books that i used to read to them when they were young that he found at a bookstore they were the dare right d-a-r-a w-r-i-g-t about edith and the bears they were wonderful books and she the story was um about edith the doll and the bears and the pictures in the book were photographs that she took she posed the dolls to act out the story and so a few years ago josh
sent me two of the edith and the bear books which i just loved anyway and it's very interesting because josh is a total book person total he reads he's very particular about what he reads but he is a total book person and movies he's a of course he's a professor of film but books and movies stories it's telling stories that that he loves um oh i'm sorry ruth i'll just go the other main thing in our house was music although my father loved music he was not very talented musically although he used to sing from the bullpen he would sing everything along with with choir
and people would just chuckle because he really didn't have a very good voice but he loved it so that he sang along with everything and when he was young he played the violin in fact after my parents were both gone we found his old violin but he used to say to us if you don't behave i'm going to take out my violin and play it that was the big threat and it worked i will say but he loved music and there was always classical music playing in our house always and my mother was a major opera lover and every saturday afternoon she would listen to
the metropolitan opera without fail she never missed she loved it and she went to the opera they went to the opera and so i grew up with all that you know it was i thought everybody did and i took my children too to the opera and the symphony josh was in several operas because he sang in the choir at st marks and they used those boys in scenes where they when they needed kids so he was in several operas and they grew up with that just like i did do they listen to any classical music no they do not none zero josh listens to rock
and karen also so and their kids also so i don't know maybe that's the end of that i i really hope not i really hope not because that was a major thing in our lives i remember that very well um one other thing you know in the temple in worcester where i grew up we had a canter and our canter was hugo adler who was a very famous cantor from germany and in the last few years i started to wonder about why we had a canter daddy was such a reformed jew why did we have a cantor and then i heard a tape that that
his son sam adler the composer made for temple in which he tells about when they when the adler family came to this country from hamburg and they were in new york and he tells how his father went to the hiring hall to look for a job and they said well there's a congregation in worcester that is looking that would like to talk to you so he went up to worcester interviewed came back to new york and the family said to him well how was it and he said well it was really odd he said there's this rabbi up there and all he does is joke
all he does is tell jokes from morning till night he said i i never saw anything like it in my life well daddy did love jokes but but anyway he became the canter there and i figured it out it was because the cantors were fleeing europe all the old cantors were coming from europe and they needed work and he hired hugo adler because because hugo either needed a job and he was a wonderful man i still remember him he was a big burly man and he he um wore a high black hat and had a very resonant voice and my mother sang in worcester she
sang in the when they had musical events she would sing and sam adler became the music person at the temple here when daddy called him after he got out of the army and said sam come here and run the music program at temple and sam said levi i already have a job he was going to be conductor of some symphony orchestra or something and daddy said well that's okay just come and visit me so he came and daddy arranged a luncheon at the temple for sam with all the women who were the rocks of the congregation at the time they were tough ladies and daddy
had them all at this lunch the names i can remember were mildred betten her sisters sadie grossman magda foles hortense pollock all these late oh elsa hirsch these old ladies who were like rocks and sam says on his tape he said sorry we went to this lunch with all these ladies and he said i don't know what happened at that lunch but when it was over i was moving to dallas daddy usually got what he wanted and of course sam was a wonderful musician and i sang at the temple for 50 years and sang with sam and sang with simon after sam left simon sargon
i loved that i loved singing that was how i worshiped i loved that that i those were happy experiences um sam's sister marion used to sit with me in worcester she was my babysitter and i haven't seen her since i've seen sam but i haven't seen mary but she was my babysitter when i was young so when i left the fur business which i left in in 1989 jim had retired and then i retired too we sold the business i didn't work for a while and i had always worked in fact my son asked me one day when he was little mom what do women
do who don't work i mean he had no idea he was ahead of his time went to work at a not-for-profit agency called the child care group where i was the i was the inside person and my friend madeline mandel who was the ceo was the outside person she was a wonderful role model for me she was a wonderful executive i learned so much from her so i ran the inside i did the things that no one else wanted to do because everybody wanted to be involved with the children and so i did the legal stuff i did the financial stuff i did the hr
stuff i did the administrative things that nobody else wanted to do and i worked there for six years and it was wonderful i i had a wonderful and i and i learned a lot from madeline a lot she was a wonderful executive after i was there for for a little while went into her office i said madeline no one ever had this job before me so i don't know what to do what help me guide me and she would say she said liz just do the next thing and i think about that often when i'm standing in the middle of my living room and i
don't know what to do first just do the next thing and the other thing that i learned from her was if you're going to make a plan for something follow the idea all the way out to the end and you have no idea how many things i've been involved in where people haven't done that and it has never worked so i she was a wonderful leader and i really learned a lot from her and we are still friends and then after that i worked at neiman marcus for 10 years and sold jewelry which i loved also and the thing that i'm really the proudest of
is that i have friends from all my work lives i have friends from the fur business i have friends from the agency where i worked and i have friends from neiman's so even though i moved here and i didn't fit in very well i have a very lovely life and very lovely friends and i'm very happy about all that that was great thank you so much this has been a very informative interview my pleasure you