Erwin Waldman
Erwin Waldman was the youngest of six children born to Abe Waldman and Rose Perlmutter Waldman, who came from a small town in Austria-Hungary in the era of Kaiser Franz Joseph. Rose agreed to their arranged marriage on the condition that they emigrate, and the couple married in 1900 and sailed in steerage from Hamburg to Ellis Island, settling on Hester Street in New York, where they ran a small bakery. Four children were born there before Abe developed severe lung trouble. Advised to move to Arizona for his health, he boarded a train that stopped in Dallas on a Friday afternoon. Being deeply religious, he would not travel on Shabbos, and after finding a small congregation and feeling well in the dry weather, he decided to bring his family to Dallas instead.
The family lived in North and later South Dallas, where Erwin was born on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1918, during the influenza epidemic. His father, a learned and pious man, served as a baal koreh at a small synagogue and built a sukkah each year, while his mother Rose held the family together through difficult times. Abe died in 1948 and Rose in 1970. Erwin's older brothers and sister helped raise and support the family; his brother Charlie in particular became his mentor, encouraging and financing him for years. Erwin attended several Dallas schools, was expelled from some for fighting, and finally excelled at Forest Avenue High School, where he became class orator and president of the Standard Debating Society, graduating in 1935.
In 1940 Erwin married Maxine Polikov, whom he had met when she was fourteen. After years of traveling as a salesman for an auto parts firm, health troubles led him to change course, and in 1949 he and his brother Willie shook hands and founded Waldman Brothers Insurance Agency, with Charlie's financial backing. The agency became highly regarded in Dallas and eventually passed to his son Steve Waldman and son-in-law Howard Cohen. Active in Jewish community life, Erwin served as president of the Jewish Community Center from 1968 to 1970, was involved with Congregation Shearith Israel and the Columbian Country Club, and performed with his brother Willie in Yiddish-inflected charity plays for B'nai B'rith. He and Maxine raised three children and took great pride in their large extended family. He survived a 1968 heart attack and 1991 bypass surgery, and grieved deeply when Willie died in 1990.
Full Transcript
my name is erwin waldman i am the youngest and last living member of the six children of abe waldman and rose waldman my mother and father i have a story to tell and the best place to begin is at the beginning in a small town called podiats in the country of austria-hungary under the reign of kaiser franz joseph before world war one the marriage of yeta and morris pearl mutter p-e-r-l-m-u-t-t-e-r and sarah perometer produced my mother rosa together with the help correction correction let me let me start over again the morris of the marriage of yara and morris promoter and cyril from sarah perot mutter
produce my mother rosa says i'm sorry i want to have i'm going to have to start over again yeta and morris pearlmutter [Music] e p-e-r-l-m-u-t-t-e-r and cera perometer i'm going to have to begin at the beginning here again because i'm getting confused in marriages rose says was a union of the marriages of yellow and morris flowmutter and cyril promoter and nathan sass and william sass the combination of jenny and abraham conrod konrod and sarah s-a-r-a-h nanette n-a-n-e-t-t-e conrod k-o-n-r-o-d and rachel and zelig z-e-l-i-g waldman and samuel wallman produced my father abraham wallman i hope i've made that clear i'm sorry my mother please call the
receptionist my my mother was one of nine children eight girls and one boy and my father was an only child his mother having passed away during childbirth the marriage of rose says and abe walman was a basherty or arranged marriage and although my mother had another boyfriend her father would not permit her to marry him because he smoked cigarettes william sass was a very religious man and then arranged the marriage of my mother with my father my mother finally agreed to marry my father provided he would take her to the united states or as she called it the new country they got married in 1900
and took a ship in hamburg germany in the steerage and landed in new york at ellis island they set up residence at number seven hester street where they lived above a little bakery that they ran my brother morris was born in 1901 and every 15 months thereafter there was another child born of this marriage sadie wallman sam wallman charlie wallman and in 1906 the combination of baking flour in the lungs and the heavy smoking that my father had developed caused him to develop what is today known as emphysema and the doctors told him that if he did not go to arizona that he would not
make it that he would pass away so my father left my mother and four children in new york and got on the train to go to arizona on friday afternoon the train stopped in a little town called dallas texas being a very religious man my father would not ride on shabbos so he got off the train and because he had gone to night school in new york learning to read write and speak english he was able to communicate with a policeman who told him about a little synagogue called to pharah israel which at that time was located in the vicinity of cedar springs and pearl
pearl street my father found his way to the synagogue and met a group of nice people very small synagogue the weather was warm humility was low the humidity was low and my father felt very good physically and on sunday morning when the train left for arizona my father was not on it he sent from my mother and the four children to come to texas and dallas to live they set up residency in north dallas on cedar springs and feel what what is today cedar springs and field street where my brother willie was born in 1911. seven years later on thanksgiving day november the 27th 1918 i erwin wallman was born after the family had moved to south dallas on kelly avenue k-e-l-l-y avenue i was born during the flu epidemic the severe flu epidemic of 1918 while the united states was at war and the doctor told my mother quite frankly that because of the syrian seriousness of the illness she might not make it so my mother decided that if she might pass away she didn't want me to live i was born at home by the way and the doctor was dr s m friedman f-r-i-e-d-m-a-n so she put a pillow over my
face to suffocate me i am told this story by my mother when she was living she then decided that perhaps she might live so she removed the pillow and i'm here today may the 20th 1997 to tell you this story after my brother morris was born then came my sister sadie 15 months later then came my brother sam 15 months later then came my brother charlie 15 months later all of whom were born in new york as i have mentioned my brother willie was born in 1911 in and i on november the 27th 1918 in dallas the next thing that i can recall if having
been told was that my sister was pursued by a young litvac lite via litv ak harry cohn who had recently come to the united states and served in the world war one in the united with the united states army he was a very energetic young man and he and my sister finally got married in 1922. he was in the window display business and the name of this firm was standard fixture company they set up residence on cleveland street in south dallas and my niece carol gene cohen was born in 1928 i'd like to go back now to my mother and father if i may my father went to work for a bakery after coming to dallas called the dallas bakery owned by nan mained by a man named sam weinstein i would like to tell you a little anecdote at this point my father had a horse and buggy and on this horse and wagon he would deliver bread for the bakery and
he drove an old army mule one day on the corner of irvy and commerce in downtown dallas at a red light the horse balked and wouldn't move my father became very upset and he he lit a fire under the horse the horse moved forward and burned the wagon and the police put my father in jail i don't remember the year but i can imagine it must have been in the early 1920s i've heard the story many times for my brothers and every time they told it in the presence of my father he got a very tiny grin on his face as i've mentioned before my
father was a very religious man and since he became very ill in 1928 and could no longer work he was able to pursue our religion vigorously by going to the synagogue every morning and night and since he was so learned he became the bachelorea at the ramenisha shul on powhatan and browder street in south dallas and became very learned in the talmud the bachelorea by the way is a person who is able because of his hebrew learning to read the torah which is quite an accomplishment my father continued to be unwell but he was always able to make a sukkot on the jewish holiday of
sukkot by putting some sports together and building a building in the backyard of our home where he ate during the sukkot holidays he continued to suffer from his lung problem and in 1948 when we were at my parents home all of us friday night which was a weekly occasion for the sabbath after dinner he called all his children into the living room and said to us in yerish you could never get faked for garnished i never asked you for anything but yes say the cottage prayer for your father this was friday night and sunday morning he passed away with his sedur in his hand this
was on february the 1st 1948 of the four sons living in dallas since my son my sis since my brother sam was living in denver which is a story i'll relate later my brother morris was practicing medicine and could not be with us for kaddish my brother charlie went frequently but my brother willie and i said kaddish every morning and every evening for the cottage period of 11 months we loved our father he was a simple man but he was a good man worldly things were of no importance to he was in love with his religion and practice his religion but interestingly enough he never
made any demands on any of his religion wise my mother rose was the one who kept our family together and united she had a very difficult life but she always smiled and loved her children with her entire being she had a stroke at age 85 and though at the time she was living alone my sister insisted that she break up housekeeping and come to live with my sister since she was completely incapacitated she couldn't walk she couldn't talk and she could only communicate with her eyes mama passed away on march the 1st 1970 two weeks shy of her 90th birthday now i would like to
talk about the children of them of our family my oldest brother marsh as i mentioned before was born in 1901 in new york it became his obligation to help raise the family i recall during my youth that at one time he held two jobs in a center graphic capacity for the rp kincheloe company which sold x-ray machines to physicians and hospitals and in the evenings he rode a bicycle for western union giving all of his money to mom and papa so that she could raise a family in 1930 let me go back a minute when they first came to dallas and living in north dallas
the trinity river which did not have a levy in those days was only two blocks from where they lived and one summer while the children were playing my my brother morris accidentally fell into the trinity river and he was rescued by a gentleman named ed milliken m-i-l-l-i-c-a-n i didn't know this man's name i knew of the episode and many years later during a basketball game a gentleman walked over to me and said would you happen to be related to morris waldman i said yes why he said i pulled him out of the trinity river when he was nine years old and i reported this to
my brother morris who remembered him well to go further then another episode occurred to my brother mars where he caught typhoid fever as a young child perhaps in his early teens and the same dr friedman who later told my mother that that i might die of the influenza somehow or other in those days when there was no known cure for typhoid fever cured my brother morris needless to say this doctor was the hero of our family my brother march graduated from forest avenue high school in 1917 and worked for various people until one friday night when our whole family gathered for shabbos dinner my brother
mars announced that he was quitting his job as plural jobs j-o-b-s and going to college because he wanted to be a doctor and he then admonished my brother charlie my sister and my brother bill to take over the financial responsibilities of the family as he would no longer be able to do that he got his doctor's degree and in 1937 he married my sister-in-law sadie hart h-a-r-t hold it mistake sarah hart h-a-r-t during the period of the early marriage he interned at brooklyn jewish hospital in new york city or in brooklyn and returned home several years later to set up his practice there were two
children born of this robert hart waldman and nancy waldman interestingly enough during the war my brother morris was with a ccc as a physician central central conservation corps and in the small town of nancy texas this is why my niece was named nancy after the town where she her father and father lived when she was born after the war was over my mother my brother mars came back to dallas with his family and opened an active practice of ear nose and throat there was another tragedy at that particular point later on his son robert who was brilliant also became a physician specializing in infectious diseases
he developed a melanoma in his back died at the national institute of health at age 54. he was married with five children whom we still stay in touch with nancy waldman who came to dallas on the occasion of my daughter carol jean's wedding to howard coyne met howard corn's best man whose name is the laurel wild weil who is a very successful podiatrist in chicago and shortly thereafter within the year they were married she has two children this marriage has two children lowell jr and i believe andrea i'm not sure was a very successful physician who died on december 13 1995 at age 94. my sister-in-law sarah who unfortunately is not well is still with us living in dallas texas my sister sadie walman coin had a very happy life with harry my brother-in-law who treated her like a queen she could do no wrong they lived after marriage in a small apartment on cleveland street and in approximately 1928 or 29 they moved to a private home at 4217 san carlos drive in extreme north dallas in a comparatively new community in 1928 the first child constantly constance or kami as we call her cohn was born i don't recall the date of her birth but we have it written somewhere and in
1935 her sister janice was born connie later married hyman thomas h-y-m-a-n-t-o-l-m-a-s who was a physician specializing in pediatrics in new audience louisiana there are two children born of that jean ann j e a n a n n g man and alan thomas jean ann is also a physician specializing in trauma not married alan thomas is married and has two daughters his wife's name is gina g-i-n-a they are all alive and well and dr hyman thomas is now semi-retired jan the other daughter of harry and sadie coyne is married to stanley pastor p-a-s-t-o-r who is retire who is a retired orthodontist living in tulsa oklahoma there
are three children of this scott who is a physician an ophthalmologist now living in atlanta georgia andrew who is a real estate agent very successful unmarried living in austin texas and robin a daughter who is in advertising television advertising now living in dallas texas dr pastor has recently become involved in israel and digging up artifacts and is enjoying his retirement tremendously scott pastor is married and has two lovely children and thank god they are all well now the story of my brother sam sam was the tallest of the waldens waldman brothers and together with my brother charlie graduated from forest high school in 1922. he was very thin and though very athletic specifically in basketball and baseball develop tuberculosis in 1924 with the help of dr friedman he was admitted to a charity hospital in denver colorado denver colorado called the national jewish hospital where he had bed rest for two years before becoming arrested he came home let me let me back up here a minute the fact that he was away from home and in a hospital really torn my mother up so in 1927 my sister my mother my sister sadie and my brother willie and i drove to denver to spend the summer with sam we had a wonderful time
and my mother got along beautifully i believe it was the following year 1928 or 1929 my brother sam came home during the summer and we had a very large back porch on broader street in dallas and every friday night for the sabbath everybody would gather as i mentioned before with my father and while we were having dinner my brother sam turned to my mother and said mama i can't take the texas weather i'm going back to denver to make my life and my mother promptly fainted this is a real standout part of my life i remember it vividly and sure enough two days later he
returned to denver to make his life he got a job with a firm called the ligand admirers tobacco company and went to denver university at night and got a teaching degree and was the fair-haired young man in the denver public school system he first was the assistant principal at cole junior high in denver then he opened south high school in and george washington high school in and he then later opened up the john kennedy high school in denver he was the outstanding principal in denver colorado until he reached until he retired at age 65. during the period of his high school period he coached basketball and baseball and was very successful he was an avid golfer and shot in his low eighties during that period of time he met a lovely girl by the name of lee empson e-m-e-s-o-n and they got married and lived a very happy life occasionally bringing me with him to dallas and we all grew to love her as we loved him after retiring from the public school system in denver he got a job as an english professor in a catholic college where he remained for several years in 1992 sam had a prostate operation and shortly thereafter
had a stroke he died on january the 20th 1993 in his wife's arms and i greatly regret having to say that there were no children of this lee still lives in denver she has a very lonely life and lives primarily with her memories ran the family after my brother morris went away to college he was my mentor since you must recall that mama was 40 when i was born and papa was 50 when i was born and mama had a very hefty job holding a family together and raising it just became natural for charlie to take over not over not only the financial part of
the emotional part of the family i shall never forget when i graduated high school in 1935 my brother charlie came to me i'm going to pause right here for a minute red lights on as i was saying after before my pause charlie came to me when i graduated high school in june of 1934 he said bud i have taken care of the family for many years in every way financially as well as others but i have found a girl and i want to get married i'm 29 years old and i want to get married so it's not going to be up to you and willie
to finance the family and whatever help i can give you i will and i know this will help but i want you to go out and get a job and i want you to do your part so i thanked him and uh got a job uncle willie got me a job at the austin bridge company where he was the upstairs stenographer and i got the job as a switchboard operator and the downstairs stenographer charlie proceeded married ruth siegel a very lovely gal whose father had dragged its dry goods store in oak cliff as a result of that marriage there were two children there are two
dana and judy [Applause] dana married dolph simon and bo was born of that marriage dolph had been married twice previously and after several years of marriage they parted company and data went to work for the standard where uncle charlie and harry cohen were partners judy mad jules ringer r-i-n-g-e-r and that marriage produced two children jason ringer and jill ringer jules was down in texas and they lived several blocks away from us on azalea lane and then they moved to new york where he he was an attorney by profession and he made an arrangement up there and they did not get along and unfortunately they parted
company and no matter how hard she has tried he will not give her a divorce if i'm not mistaken jason is a graduate of yale university and is in the stock brokerage business and jill the younger sister is i believe in college getting back to charlie charlie worked very hard to make standard fixture company a success and the business was very successful and dana was working regularly in the business unfortunately charlie had a stroke i don't remember the exact year but he ended up with a slight limp and some confusion in his voice from then on he was really not the same he had an
assistant called ac winkler who together with he and dana ran the retail of the business and harry coin ran the manufacturing end of the business they were in the ladies display business racks to put clothes on mannequins and such items and things remain rather status quo there ruth his wife developed cancer of the liver and subsequently passed away and that situation together with charlie's own incapacity really changed his life from being a very forceful individual very successful and loving his entire family he became a sort of a vegetable and it was very sad for me to watch because i love charlie he was really like
a father to me he sustained me he advised me and looked after me not only in financial methods but as isn't as the general older brother normally would i loved him very much he was unable to really be effective in the business and continue to regress i shall never forget one sunday maxine and i went to visit him and yes he was very very moody that day and he started crying and he said to me you know there's nothing left for me to live for ruth is gone both of my daughters have had an unhappy and i'm not well and it looks like life has
passed me by well this tore me up shortly thereafter maxine and i went to california for a wedding of andy pastor and dana went with us while we were gone charlie decided to have some minor surgery and had the minor surgery and while he was in the hospital he got out of bed one night without talking to a nurse or anything went to the bathroom and fell and cracked his skull immediately thereafter since he was unable to function properly he went to live at golden acres a jewish home for senior citizens and for those incapacitated willie and i with maxine and sadie his wife and
mine visited charlie we would go every saturday to the home and willie would go every sunday and he continued to regress and finally passed away on december the twenty six nineteen eighty nine dana and ac continued running the business as best they could i might digress here a moment tell you that harry cohen died previous to that i don't have the date of his death but it was probably five to ten years previous to charlie's death and dana and judy became partners with my sister that arrangement did not work out and in the interim sis had gone to live at golden acres where she subsequently
passed away on august the 14th 1989 dana and her two cousins connie and jan proceeded to liquidate the business and sell it dana's son beau then moved to california where he became a clerk in a judge's office in san francisco and where he subsequently got married he is still living in san francisco and we haven't seen him i don't think we talked about sis at any great lengths my sister sadie coyne the years she spent taking care of my mother really took the toll with her although she had adequate help but she was she was confined she felt that she had to be confined and
be with my mother constantly and this disturbed her social life considerably but my brother never complained he was a very unusual man he always wore a tie and a jacket at home while he read the paper or watched television but he was a very good-hearted man after his death my sister became a sort of a recluse she was very close to my wife maxine and they talk together regularly on the phone one day she called maxine on the phone and she said i can't do that i can't get out of bed please come over here right away remember that her two daughters were living out
of town connie was living in new orleans and jan was living in tulsa oklahoma so maxine called me at the office and told me where she was going i said let me know if you need me so she took her to the doctor and they found out that she had a brain tumor so she went to the home golden acres jewish home for the asian where she was on one floor and my brother charlie was on another floor she couldn't speak but she couldn't communicate with her eyes as the cancer spread my lovely sweet sister passed away on august the 14th 1989 1989 and her
children subsequently sold her lovely home and as i mentioned before the business was liquidated i can't remember too much of my sister's early life i think she was 20 when she got married to harry cohen and when they got married in 1922 i was a baby four years old but i always remember her as being very kind and very solicitous of her family she was wonderful to my mother and very endearing to all of her brothers who loved her very much she had a happy life and her children saw her frequently but getting back to charlie i remember vividly when i would visit him on
saturday morning at the home he would reminisce living in the past and we would talk about the period in his life where he really was a mentor of all our family a very strange thing happened one saturday when i was visiting him he told me about the time when he and sam his young boys he was five years older than willie decided to have a fight they had a disagreement of some kind so they went out behind our house on bridal street and had my brother willie sit on the fence and they got behind the fence and willie was the lookout to watch for my
mama to be sure she wouldn't come out and get involved in the fight between the two of them he didn't remember what the fight was about but he did say that he and my brother sam who were 15 months apart very competitive with each other and always trying to outdo each other was a very unusual man very strong-minded a real tough cookie as a kid always ready to fight and always ready to protect the family his was a great loss to me because i had lost my counselor i used him quite often for his sage advice and his death created a void in my life
now let's talk about willie willie was seven years older than me and everybody loved him he had as a child i remember a a photograph of willie with long curls blonde curls sitting on a bench with a dog and the story is told that while i was being born he became frightened and ran under the house on kelly avenue because he was a he was afraid he knew that something wrong was going on but not quite what because it was only seven years old when i was born but to go on with a story willie was a disclaimer he was great at public speaking and
from 1930 to 1939 he worked for the austin bridge company and since he was really getting nowhere my brother charlie convinced willie that he ought to try another field and since we were local people and willie had a host of friends charlie convinced willie to go in the life insurance business this was in 1930 when willie got out of high school correction willie got out of high school in 1929 so when he left the company and interviewed for a job with a life insurance company whose local boss was mr thad childry c-h-i-l-d-r-e representing a life insurance company a very fine life insurance company an old
life insurance company in worcester massachusetts called state mutual life assurance company of america and he went with that children and he struggled but everybody loved willie and willie sold life insurance in 1937 the same year that mars got married willie who had been courting my sister-in-law god bless her sadie kessler for many years and they got married and of that marriage there was andrea linda and marsha who has since taken the hebrew name of my era m-e-i-r-a will he continue to be successful in the life insurance business and raised three lovely daughters in 1949 and i'll get into this later i joined willie in the
insurance business but getting back to willie and sadie andrea the eldest of the three daughters fell in love with and married lauren weinstein a native of denver colorado linda met a young man at columbia university from israel whose name is yahudah j-e-h-u-d-a abraham they fell in love and got married and i'll come back to them in a minute in my era who at this point has been married twice and divorced twice myers first husband was an ordained rabbi named mickey sills s-i-l-l-s and as a result of that marriage avraham sales was born they were not married too long and they parted company she later married
dr basil friedman f-r-w-d-m-a-n which marriage produced three two daughters rebecca and zoe my era is now unmarried and is an rn registered nurse registered midwife and a physical therapist living in eugene oregon avraham sales is a part of a band i believe he plays a drums living somewhere in california rebecca is going to a dancing school up east and zoe is still in school getting back to andrea and lauren however there were three children born of that jeffrey now dr david dr jeffrey weinstein gregory now an attorney a very active attorney at law and michael who is an executive chef jeffrey has two lovely daughters
and practices in the city of dallas gregory jeffrey's wife's name is debbie gregory whose wife's name is margie has a lovely little daughter her name is alexandra and michael is getting married this month to a lovely girl they have a wonderful family are very happy and andrea is now the president of the jewish welfare federation of greater dallas a highly honorable position and a highly regarded position in the community she has been active in local jewish civic life for most of her adult life and is a great credit to the community is married to uh abraham has two sons eitan etin and eow and they
all live in haifa israel we don't know what quite what yahooda does but he has a very sensitive position and linda is working on her doctorate in architecture also in israel all of us have been to israel to visit on occasion and they are extremely happy we had the pleasure quite recently of linda and her two sons coming to dallas for passover she's a lovely fine intelligent mother and wife i've already told you about my me about my era going back to linda however the two boys both have served in the israeli army eitan the elder of the two is going to college majoring in
marine biology and ayala is not quite out of the service yet my sister-in-law sadie is a remarkable woman she has always played a very important part and not only her children's lives and grandchildren's lives but her husband she stood beside him through all the lean years and very joyously has siblings beside him on his very successful years we love sadie she's now i think 85. enjoying life enjoying her family and it's just a pleasure being around now i come to myself i was born isadora waldman i-s-a-d-o-r-e november the 27th 1918 in dallas texas when i was seven years old and started to school my sister changed my name to erwin isabelle waldman since she felt that isadore would be a handicap to me and i've been forever grateful to her for it i now go into the name of irwin i walman i had a very uneventful life as a child i can recall or i have been told and when i was quite young i had to have my tonsils taken out
and that my brother-in-law harry and my mother took me to see the doctor on the pretense of going downtown and when i realized what was happening it was too late and they put me to sleep and take out my tonsils i was bar mitzvahed in the small shull which had then changed its name from the romanisho to the ancient shaffard synagogue where i met where i went on a thursday morning with my father and a cake and a bottle of whiskey to perform the short farm by mitzvah and my godfather an elderly gentleman by the name of label label gave me a silver dollar as
a gift under the tutelage of my brother charlie i had a short trigger and would fight at the drop of a handkerchief consequently i was expelled from two grammar schools colonial school and city park school but was finally able to get out of city park school and went to forest avenue high school where i was very active as was my brother charlie sam and willie in the standard debating society where i became president i was not a very good athlete have i ever been i am great on spectator sports and was only a passable golfer i lived on broward street with mama and papa after
willie left getting married and mama did her best to shelter me from all the problems i bought upon myself as a youngster i did some very stupid things as a young man some of which i've regretted ever since but i became very active in the aza as did willie aleph zodiacaleth a junior order of the binet breath a philanthropic jewish organization and became president or olive godol of that group and later became district chairman of the benevolent youth organization for five states let's see now if i can remember this date when i was 18 years old i had a date to go to a movie
with a girl i'd known all my life whose name is at that time who named his name was at that time mabel siegel her married name is madison m-a-s-s-i-n when i picked her up and i couldn't i didn't drive i didn't have a car we were going to walk to the movie she said to me you know there's a new girl in town her name is maxine polikov and she lives right across the street from the movie and she's having a little party to meet some friends since she just moved here to that south dallas would i like to go to the party i said
okay so we went to the party and i met maxine polikov she was 14. we started dating and i don't remember to this day whether it was charlie or her mother rose bolikov who broke us up because we were so young at that time i was a downstairs switchboard operator at charleston bridge company making 40 a month which money i gave to mama so i had very little money to go anywhere or do anything but when my brother charlie told me that i was not to go with her anymore i respected him please call the receptionist beverly and uh i did not go with her but that christmas my brother sam came in town to visit and at the last
minute before before new year's they decided not to go anywhere just to stay home and talk and my brother sam said bud why don't you get a date so i called maxine and told her that i wasn't doing anything wonder if she was busy she said no and i got the feeling that she had hoped i might call so we started going back together again on july the 22nd her birthday 1940 we got engaged at that time after having had several other jobs i went to work for her father marty pollakov who was a southwestern regional manager of a large chicago firm called line auto
parts and manufacturing company and on her birthday as i said july the 22nd we got engaged the way we got engaged was rather amusing as an afterthought her father came home from chicago and someone from chicago called my mother-in-law to be congratulating her on the get on the engagement of maxine and myself my mother-in-law was furious so she confronted my father-in-law to be and he told her what the hell let him get married they're old enough so that day i had a little money saved up and i went to fort worth with maxine and her mother to a jeweler cousin and i bought her a
engagement ring and a wedding band and on november the 10th 1940 maxine and i got married we lived not having any money we live with my mother-in-law and father-in-law maury and rose pollakov on shenandoah in dallas texas for six months but getting back my father-in-law had a new lasalle and we drove it out of the south to new orleans on our honeymoon and had a wonderful time then came back and i went back to work as an order picker in the lion auto parts warehouse in dallas texas and in order to supplement our income maxine went to work for her father in the office where
we finally ended up between the two of us making fifty dollars a week in 1941 we bought a little house a thousand square feet a new house at 3132 stanford in university park dallas which is a suburb of dallas a very fine suburb i continued to work for lion auto parts and manufacturing company and later severed my connection with them and went into a similar occupational with my father-in-law called imperial sales company in 1948 while traveling on the road for this company imperial sales i became ill in new audience and maxine flew down in new orleans and drove me back to dallas diagnosed as a
duodenal ulcer but i'm getting ahead of the story of this marriage of maxine and i that came to us a lovely doll carol jean born on november the 28th 1942 on march the 6 1946 my daughter sherry god bless her made her presence known and on december the 5th 1953 hold it 1951. 1951 my son steve made his entrance going back to my job opportunities i stayed home off the road for the rest of 1948 and in the beginning of 1949 i went out on the road again and got as far as amarillo and had to go to the hospital with the same ailment so i came back home and i discussed the situation with maxine and i decided she and i decided that all to buy an automobile parts business someplace in dallas one day in january my brother charlie called me and said let's have lunch so i was always willing and glad to have lunch with charlie
and he said willie's going to join us so we had lunch in the course of the lunch charlie said to me i've got an idea stop for me hi hey bye charlie while we were having lunch he said i've got an idea i'd like to talk to you about he says you know willie has been very successful in the life insurance business and between the two of you you know all the jewish people in the city and i'm sure you'd like to get off the road i thought maybe you and willie would farm a partnership and that you would go into the property and casually
business and you all would be a natural he said the waldman family has a great name in dallas we're known for our integrity we're known for our participation and i would like for you to consider going into the insurance business and i said to him charlie i don't think it'll work i've got to sell a commodity that can be resold this has been the basis of my entire business life and he said you can do anything you want to do if you want it badly enough so we discussed it at length and on april the 19th 1949 my brother willie and i shook hands and
waldman brothers insurance agency was born and from that point forward until my dear brother willie died in 1990. there was a there was never a crossword but getting back to that conversation with charlie i said to him how can i live i don't know how long it's going to take to make a living here he said i'll subsidize you and my brother charlie subsidized me till 1955 never once asking to be repaid never asking to look at my financial statement but always encouraging me to continue god bless us both willie and i and in 1955 i began playing charlie back i would guess that you could say history was being made and today while i no longer have my partner willie i'm still in
the insurance business although only an advisory capacity but can proudly say that my son steve wallman and my son-in-law howard cohen and my grandson scott coyne and my granddaughter kaelin pollock are all in the agency with us now let me talk about my jewels my my daughter cal gene coyne is a remarkable young lady i remember with pleasure raising her although during that period of our lives i was not home very much because i was traveling but she came to us when she was graduating high school and she said to maxine and i you know i'm going to go away to college and i probably
will marry someone and i may be gone forever let's take a trip so he packed up the car i believe this was in 1964 but i don't really remember and we headed west maxine and i cal gene and sherry and steve and our first stop was colorado screens colorado where we spent several wonderful days horseback riding visiting the garden of the gods and pipes speak mountain pike speak and the way we were driving the car was that i would drive steve would sit on a cigar box in the front seat between maxine and i and the two girls kyle jean and sherry would sit in
the back seat and cal gene will lay her head on a seat and sherry would put a pillow over carol g's head and she would lie on the pillar from colorado springs we went into and visited our brother sam and our sister-in-law lee and we spent a few days there then we headed north to wyoming and from wyoming we came into reno nevada where we spent a couple of days and from there we went into sacramento california where we spent four days and from there we drove into san francisco where we met my mother-in-law and father-in-law who had flown out to be with us from
dallas we spent a week in san really enjoying the scenery having a wonderful time together and a very unusual thing happened to us while in san francisco we were driving down the street in san francisco one day and the car behind me honked got ready to pass this i looked over and there was my old friend irving green whom i previously mentioned in this story of being the ring bearer in my sister's wedding who had been transferred to san francisco by his company and i hadn't seen him in about five we got out we visited that night we had dinner together and he told me
he was coming to dallas in three weeks and wanted to buy some life insurance a week later he died in his sleep in san francisco he was my contemporary and my very dear friend and i was greatly saddened when we got home to find out about this when we got ready to leave san francisco we arranged with our mother mother and mother-in-law and father-in-law to meet us in los angeles they were going to fly down to los angeles and visit some friends and we were going to continue driving our pontiac to san francisco from san francisco to los angeles we stopped at the pebble beach
hotel and um the name of the town has skipped me and we didn't stay long because maxine got sunburned and we continued to hearst castle into los angeles where we spent a week and then began going home by way of carlsbad new mexico into dallas carol jean then took a trip with maxine to new audience to sophie newcomb college where she applied for entering sophie newcomb we were not surprised she was accepted and while there she met a young man from glencoe illinois a suburb of chicago by the name of howard coyne a lady no less and they fell in love and we went down
to new orleans to meet him and he was a fine young man and he graduated before she did and returned home to glencoe only to find out that his father was dying of cancer so he called carol jane and says his father wanted to meet her so after several flight delays i landed a new audience and picked up carol jean with her car and we drove back to dallas all night long caught a plane and flew to chicago i'm sorry we put calgin on a plane and she flew to chicago where she met edward cohen howard's father and howard's mother bitcoin and his two younger
two younger children joel coyne and her sister and his and his sister they got engaged new year's eve and it was the coldest period of my life when went up for the engagement party and stayed at a hotel called the villa modern in chicago for the engagement party and i almost froze to death that november i'm ashamed to tell you that i don't remember whether it was the whether it was 11th i believe it was the 11th of november in dallas carol jean and howard got in the interim carol jean stepped into his father's cow not carol gene howard stepped into his father's business which
was a subcontractor to the luggage industry to help his mother out and they lived in a little apartment on roger williams in highland park illinois and we visited them occasionally and they were happy but in the interim his mother had remarried his her husband went into the business and the situation became untenable to howard maxine and i were very anxious to get them back to dallas to live and we constantly reminded them that there was a position over opening walnut brothers and i always told him every time we spoke long distance that no matter what the weather was outside i was going to play golf
that day one day not too long thereafter and i'm sorry i'm not very good at dates howard called me at the office one day that was when willie and i were in our own building on north central expressway in dallas and said dad you've often talked about the possibility of carol jean and i coming to dallas do you think that could work out so i said i'll call you right back and i got his number and i went into willie's office he said you have his number and i said yes he's i'll call him so he called howard he said howard can you come tomorrow
and that's how howard went into the insurance business howard and kyle jean with their daughter k ellen who was an infant stayed with us in our little home for about six months and he went to work learning the life insurance field and needless to say has been most kayla the oldest child came as a gift from god i also will not forget this situation because howard and carol jean were going to drive to dallas and morris and sarah were in chicago visiting their children their daughter who was going to fly back so they made an arrangement from mars and sarah to bring kalen who was
an infant on the plane and they would drive in well we went to the meet to meet the plane and they got off the plane kayla was crying wildly and that sarah was wearing a wig which was a skew on her head almost off because they had to carry her and the whole trip well once she got off the plane and we she stopped that but then kyle jean and kellen moved in with us then after that short period of time they rented a duplex right behind hillcrest high school and stayed there until they moved to their present home while living there however scott was
born scott ryan cohn and he was the second source of pleasure for us and thereafter wendy was born and thereafter mark was born so carol gene and howard have four they have a beautiful home they have enjoyed much pleasure in their lives for many years calging was a teacher and recently several years ago went into college into the college classification business or placement the play at the venice is called coins college connection and has also been howard has taken a very important part of dallas life he's a lifetime member of the million-dollar roundtable has had all the honors that life insurance can bestow upon a
young man and now runs our very large life department in walden brothers insurance agency now i want to tell you about my grandchildren on that side of the family kaelin a little doll a gorgeous little blond-headed girl was number one on the list as i mentioned had a pleasant life enjoyed life went through school and enrolled at texas university where she specialized in pre-law while there she met a young man from san antonio i'm sorry from austin texas whose name is jake pollock p-o-l-l-a-c-k they dated regularly and graduated from texas university and then both enrolled in lamar college in san antonio to get their law
degrees while it's still going steady let me pause here a minute and give you give you some dates that i have as i told you calging was born on november 28 1942 howard was born august the 22nd 1941. kaelin was born june 16th 1969. scott november the 13th 1970 wednesday july the 31st 1972 and mark july the 20th 1976 and carol jean and howard were married june 21 1964. after getting their degree at law school kay allen and jacob moved to dallas you know i believe i've forgotten to say that caleb and jacob got married kay allen and jacob got married november the 12th 1994 and moved into a little house on in east and jacob went to work for a law firm and kale and went to work for the city attorney in the city of dallas since that time they have purchased a lovely home two-story three-bedroom three-bath home in a lovely part of the city of dallas i'm sorry in the city of plano texas which is a city adjacent to dallas north and
about a year ago prevailed upon caitlyn who was not very happy in her work to join us at walden brothers insurance agency where she's doing quite well she and jake are two very happy people and we're very excited about them now let's talk about scott cohen in my opinion scott coyne was the greatest goof-off artist in the country while at texas university his first class was at 11 o'clock but he cut it because he wasn't out of bed his next class was at one o'clock in the afternoon but it was lunchtime and after that he had to go play golf so scott had a good
time playing around in college came out of college and asked to join waldman brothers in howard's department which is the life department well i can't begin to tell you how transformed this young man became with the advent of going into the business world he has been a tremendous success in the life insurance and allied field and i'm just as proud of him as i can be i love him as i do all my grandchildren but i particularly love him for the way he has embraced his life's work and i'm happy to report that he's engaged to a lovely young lady named barbie chrysler and they
will be married you're recording i'm not sure that i properly explained my mother and father's beginning so i'll repeat that now yeta and morris pro mutter p-e-r-l-m-u-t-t-e-r and sarah promoter together with nathan sass sass and william says were my mother's parents jenny and abraham conrod sarah and annette n-a-n-e-t-t-e conrad konrod and rachel zelig z-e-l-i-g waldman and samuel wallman were my father's parents i wanted to make that clear because it was rather vague earlier in this conversation i would now like to talk about wendy cohen the third child of carol jean and howard cohen our number three grandchild of the marriage of howard and carol gene
when he was born july the 31st 1972 and is a very vivacious very pretty young lady she got her degree from the university of arizona in tucson arizona and maxine and i together with carol jean and howard flew out for her graduation exercise she has been very busy in the business market having just changed jobs where she is going and training to be selling also she has met a very fine young man whose name is jay mellon m-e-l-l-e-n who is from chicago has a phd degree and is presently connected with texas instruments we have recently had the pleasure of meeting his parents who came down
to dallas to visit wendy is a very independent young lady and knows what she wants and goes after it the last of carol jean and howard's is mark coyne born on july the 20th 1976 who is presently in his sophomore year at texas university mark is the tallest grandchild and has a magnificent personality and worships his older brother and his two older sisters we don't know yet what field of endeavor he might undertake in his life but i do believe that with careful supervision by his mother and father wherever he decides to go or whatever he decides to do he will be successful at this
time also he has a girlfriend who is at texas university we have not met her but we've seen pictures of her and she's a very lovely jewish girl also from chicago we're looking forward to mark's progress in whatever field he would like to set his sights these are the four children of the marriage of carol jean and howard they are all a source of pleasure to us and we are really a very close family and enjoy being together sheri small sherry waldman small is our third child born march the 6th hold it that is correct one of the funny things that happened when trey was
an infant is that she loved chicken bones the pokey and would walk around the house all day chewing on a chicken bone we almost had a tragedy with sherry when she was a young girl she was riding in the back seat of the car with her mother and said to maxine mommy wouldn't it be terrible if i fell out of this car they were traveling on lovers lane a busy thoroughfare in the city of dallas and when she made that statement she promptly fell out of the car poor maxine was alone with her stopped the car got out of the car and grabbed her and
put her back in the car and she had fallen on her face maxine rushed sherry to our pediatrician dr fine and he examined her and said nothing was broken that she might have had a hairline fracture in her jaw but the good lord was really smiling at us that day and sherry emerged perfectly from that episode sherry's romance in her life was with a fine young man approximately six foot five inches in height who had aspirations to become a doctor his name is neil small and they went around together as young youngsters and then they temporarily broke up and sherry went away to washington university
in washington dc where maxine and i went to visit her in the fall of the year i don't remember exactly what year we didn't like the college at all it was full of what we call jesus freaks f-r-e-a-k-s everybody wore jesus sandals long hair and we decided that this was not the place for sherry so that christmas when sherry came home she did not go back and enrolled at university of texas in arlington texas which is a neighboring city to dallas when she got back neil called her immediately and they resumed their courtship neil graduated medical school they got married and shortly thereafter he began
serving his internship and residency and i believe the name of the hospital was at davis california in sacramento california and while they were living there justin small came into the world what a pistol neil's mother and father who are our dearest and closest friends join maxine and i in a trip to sacramento foreign particularly watching how happy sherry and neil were and how thrilled they were with their new bundle of joy and the breast was a huge success when this period of running was over well let me say that while they were in sherry took teaching jobs to supplement the income of her little family
and when that period was over they returned to dallas set up housekeeping and we were all very happy that they did decide to come back to dallas to live macy appeared on the scene a very lovely child who is now going into her junior year at texas i might also stop and add here that justin went to ithaca college in upper new york where he got his degree and is now doing a very successful job in the real estate business in addition to selling as he does he is very active in maintaining the real estate investments of his parents i might also add here that
justin has a lovely girlfriend nicole nicole ginsberg and i am hopeful that this will end up in marriage as she is a lovely young lady and a very brilliant child giving back to sherry she spent this last summer in spain and we missed her very much and she had a very lovely time and maxine and i spoke to her frequently before coming home she chatting back she backpacked her way through europe and is now interning at walmart brothers insurance agency before going back to school this fall next to appear on the scene in the neil and sherry small family was meredith small who is just
graduating from green hill school with honors in every class an officer in her senior class a track star and an all-around brilliant kid who has been accepted i'll be right back this at princeton university where she received early acknowledgement of her application it appears that meredith will pursue a medical degree perhaps to follow in the steps of her are some other medical specialty sherry and neal have been very successful with their children and their business life neil is a very active young man he is an orthopedist by profession and is an immediate past president of the national orthopedic and arthroscopic association of north america sherry
is in the advertising business and has been very successful the very fact that neil's mother and father al and helen small were good friends of ours when they first came to dallas in the early fifties really had no bearing in the fact that these two children fell in love the famous saying in our family was that neil told maxine when you see the white of my eyes you'll know that i'm asking for sherry's hand in marriage one evening neal came over to the house maxine and i were sitting in the den and he walked over and he sat down next to maxine and he said
i am looking at you look at the white of my eyes and that's how we knew that neil and sherry were going to be married neil has not only been a great success as a physician but in his private investments have been phenomenal and like all our other children we're very proud of neil and sherry the last child of the marriage of erwin wallman and maxine waldman is our son steve married december the 5th excuse me who december the 5th 1951 and whom we called the angel he was all boy full of mischief and his two sisters loved him with all their hearts he was
the apple of the eye of my mother and father and calogy and maxine's mother and rose and mary polikov to say the least maxine and i adored him and i can tell you now that everyone who has ever come in contact with steve loves him he has all of his mother's good qualities and none of mine i have none fortunately he did not learn of any of my bad qualities at a very young age maybe 11 or 12 he would come to the office on in the summertime and file papers and do odd things around the office i had hoped that he might go to
law school but that was not to be in fact when he met his wife jackie jackie yaren y-a-r-r-i-n she was going to the university of arizona and he was going to texas university and the long-distance calls were frequent and very expensive steve and jackie will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary next month in june they have three wonderful children melissa came along first and she was a picture of her mother who was a who is a very beautiful lady next came todd and following todd came michael i will give you their birth dates later on in our meeting came to uncle willie and i after being
married and after jackie moved to university of texas from arizona and let us know that he would be interested in going into the insurance we welcome him and his success in this business has been phenomenal he came initially as a trainee and is now designated as a cpcu certified property and casualty underwrite underwriter at this time this insurance agency is now owned by howard coyne my son-in-law our son-in-law and steve wallman our son each of whom have a 50 percent interest in walden brothers insurance agency i might add here that with the advent of these two young men and management this business has taken off
we are now approaching 50 employees and are recognized in the insurance profession as being one of the best best insurance agencies in the city of dallas i will say one thing these two young men have a great mutual respect for each other and show concern and interest and compassion for their mentor erwin waldman at this stage of my life that means i'm very happy and grateful watching these two young men become very successful i might also add here that they have many professional designations and howard has been on the board of directors of our synagogue president of the columbian country club and on many charitable
committees in the city is the vice president has been invited to serve on the board of directors of the jewish community center on the board of directors our board of governors of the columbia country club and is now chairman of the search committee for our new rabbi in our synagogue and has been invited to serve on the board of sheth israel synagogue so when i say to you that i fell when i think of my boys and when i talk to my boys and when i watch them in action you can understand where i'm coming from i'd like to go back now and visit with
you about the most important person in my life my wife maxine as i told you previously she was born march the 22nd 1922 in chicago illinois as a young infant her mother and father moved to houston for a business arrangement she was five years old at the time approximately seven years later in 1934 because her father had developed asthma in the climate in houston maxine and her younger brother richard and her mother and father moved to where they lived at 4224 and approximately a year later they moved to south dallas in 1935 where she attended forest avenue high as i indicated earlier we met when
she was 14 years old and i was 18 years old she graduated from forest avenue high in january of 1939 and one of her very dear close friends who went to school with her and who palled around with her was margie bless her b-l-a-s-s-e-r i am delighted to say that maxine and i now live in the same high-rise con apartment building with margie blasser levin and her husband eugene live and this old relationship has been reacquainted and we are very delighted during the years of our courtship i spent a lot of time at the conner drug store called the colonial pharmacy which was at the
corner of colonial and forest avenue and every night during the early years of my post high period all the jewish boys would meet at this corner drugstore and decide what to do that night most of the time we went out to play miniature golf during basketball season however we would all go to the ymha young men's hebrew association building on pocahontas next to city park and play basketball and a tiny gin gym gym during the summer we had a jewish softball league where we competed every sunday morning and many of these ball players and friends of my youth are my friends today but throughout this
period i was always with maxine before and after our marriage let me tell you about my in-laws and my kid brother-in-law my father-in-law amari polikov was born on march the second 1902 and passed away april 25 1993. my mother-in-law rose palakkov was born on february 21 1902 and passed away on february the 16th 1974 correction i got this backwards i'm my father-in-law maurice polikov was born on february 21st 1902 and died february the 16th 1974. my mother-in-law rose polikoff was born on march the 2nd 1902 and died on april 25 1993 my brother-in-law richard polikov was born on april 14 1926 and just celebrated his 70th birthday in florida dick polikov lives six months a year in chicago and six months here in palm beach florida we visited with him on the occasion of his birthday and they were most gracious and pleasant to be with when maxine and i got married we were together making fifty dollars a week and really could not afford to have our own place so we moved in with my mother-long father-in-law and stayed there with them for six months and the treatment that i received as their new son-in-law was beyond compare i immediately became a part of their family approximately six months later maxine and i bought a very small house at 3132 stanford street in university park that was in may of 1941.
we stayed in this house until july of 1953 when we moved to 7231 of zadie lane and we stayed there for 38 years one evening we happened to run into eugene and margie levin whom i mentioned earlier as maxine childhood's friend and they invited us to their condominium at the bonaventure where they had been living approximately six years this is a high-rise condominium unit and maxine fell in love with it so we decided that since there were only two of us left in our family living together that we would try to sell our house on a sailor lane and buy a condo at 5200 keller
springs road we sold our home and in june four years ago we moved into our new home the bonaventure we have since become reacquainted with margie blaster levin and her husband eugene levin and we are very close and see each other regularly that in october of 1968 i had a heart attack this was one month prior in my 50th birthday and i was away until february the 1st 1969 i had the heart attack on the golf course and a doctor friend of mine dr jack robbins put me in his car and took me home where i remained until i went to the hospital the next
day my doctor dr joe rothschild to carry me during this period and i felt that i had completely recovered on july the 26th or 27th of 1991 maxine and i were going to the races horse races in louisiana shreveport louisiana to be exact and when i got up in the morning to dress i fell down tried to get up and fell down again and finally crawled back into bed maxine was making coffee so i called her and the ambulance came and took me to i had an angiogram and the doctors indicated that i needed bypass surgery the decision was made and dr melvin platt p-l-a-t-t
performed five bypasses and thanked the good lord i came out of its fine i then became involved and very active in the rehab program i had to learn to walk again and steve and maxine would hold on to me while i went to a mall with them and started my rehab program in addition to a rehab program at the ewing health center which is part of presbyterian hospital in dallas i have always been an optimist and although i have had other problems health-wise i hope the good lord will bless me and my family and all my loved ones with long lives i have generalized many
things in this report and i'm certain that i have left out many things since i'm speaking off the cuff thank god all the surviving womans members of the waldman family are well and enjoying lives with all of our loved ones i want to give some more thought and sum up this report at a later time ah sweet wendy one is a lovable little gal who graduated from university of arizona and uh mimi and i went out there for the graduation and really enjoyed it when he has a lot of friends she has a very beautiful personality and has a very fine young man dating her
now his name is jay mellon he is a phd from chicago who is in dallas with texas instruments which is a very large company here and they seem to be getting along very wendy has a beautiful voice incidentally and sings in the choir at the synagogue and has sung in other areas she has just changed jobs and is with the cisco food company which is a very large distribution distributor of foods on a wholesale basis now i'd like to talk about my grandson mark following wendy in the howard corn calgene coin line is mark cohen mark edward coined to be exact who is enrolled at
texas university in austin and is having a great time in college studying up on his golf game no less mark like his sisters and brother has a excellent personality loves to meet people and has been specializing among among other things and learning to speak yiddish we have a lot of fun together because i can converse with him whereas actually no one else in our family can these are the products of howard and carol jean they are a very fine family and i'm delighted to say that they're very close to maxine and i occasionally you'll notice that i ramble around because i'm afraid that i might
have left someone out so if i am repetitive please forgive me it's with good intention that i want to list everybody and talk about everybody two years ago approximately k ellen coyne the eldest of the cone married her college sweetheart jake pollock p-o-l-l-a-c-k i do believe that i mentioned this previously but let me let me repeat it if i may they met in college at texas university and both studied law and received their law degrees and passed the bar and jake is in practice with a private law firm in dallas and after spending some time with the city attorney in dallas kaylin is now with
waldman brothers specializing in personal alliance insurance now let's visit with neil charles small and cheryl lynn wallman small i'm ashamed to tell you that at this moment i don't remember the year they got but neil and sherry dated each other for quite some time while neil was going to medical school and went to davis hospital and while neil was pursuing his studies sherry was teaching school neil was born on june 6 1945. sherry was born on march the 10th 1946 the weather was gorgeous in california and the first opportunity that we had to with to visit them along with neil's parents who incidentally are our nearest and dearest friends we were blessed with the entrance into this world by justin small on july 24 1973 he was and is a small all the way after returning to dallas and setting up practice in orthopedics they moved into a lovely home in far north dallas in fact it was in plano texas which is a suburb of north dallas and on watch correction on april 28 1976 macy appeared on the scene
may see allison small a bundle of joy everybody quelled and needless to say her grandparents on both sides we're very happy and excited over the advent of her appearance dr small was very successful from the almost the beginning and in addition to his practice he began acquiring real estate and to this day is quite an entrepreneur in that field things coasted along very nicely and then on june the 23rd 1979 the athlete of the family arrived meredith allison small on june 23 1979 all three of the small children have gone to a private school a very fine scholastic school called green hill justin graduated there
as did macy and meredith where meredith excelled in athletics as well as her schoolwork meredith's specialty is track she had she has won many meets is the president of her class and also plays basketball meredith will graduate from green hill next week or the week thereafter in june and has been accepted at princeton martha is a very quiet person very pleasant and loves her family as do we all love there is a possibility that she will follow medicine i certainly hope so and she as well as we are looking forward to her entering princeton next fall let me add here that our son-in-law al's small's
mother and father are our closest and dearest friends and we're our very very good friends before sherry and neal started dating we have remained close throughout our children's married life have made many trips together pray for good health for all who has not been well here of late a small family in the walman family share the happiness of all of us and there will continue to be a close relationship of all of us steve wallman and jackie yaren waldman next month and are planning to visit the western united states with their three wonderful children steve made his entrance on december the 5th 1951 and without
a question became the great white hope of our family his uncles bill and charlie thought he was the greatest thing that ever happened since they both had daughters and i remember at steve's bris when we were living at 3132 stanford in university park dallas my brother willie wore a big sign on his chest and the sign said he's just lucky meaning me having a boy steve was all all boy extroverted knew how to polish his mother and his sisters carl jean and sherry and somewhere while he was in college no proud of that somewhere while he was in high school he met a young girl
lovely child jackie yaren and although maxine didn't tell me many years later he told her that one day he would marry jackie because he went through all the child hood pranks of a boy like the time after we had had some painting done in our house he took the can of paint and a brush and went out the back alley and pain and defenses of all our neighbors including the garage of one fence of one part one neighbor and when the lady who lived there said steve you can't do that i would have to call the police steve said goody goody goody am i going
to see the police well we had to clean that mess up steve played ball like with all his friends and even organized a little band a little orchestra where he and four friends entertained and sometimes got paid for it i remember alan goldman chuck goodman david beer and i believe one other lad performed with this group and they weren't bad when steve was in high school he was in a play called my fair lady acting the part of the friend of professor higgins the play took place at high school and was a huge success who was enrolled at the university of and steve carried on
a long distance courtship by phone until they decided to get married at which time jackie enrolled at texas so that she and steve could be together shortly before his graduation from texas steve came to my brother bill and i and expressed his desire to go into the insurance business since he had work church on and off during the summer anyway so into the bid as he came and i'm proud to tell you that today stephen howard own walmart brothers insurance agency and have been a huge success during the high school years of steve willie and i performed in several plays on behalf of bernay britt
the first of which was a takeoff on cinderella called canabella where the entire cast was male and some of the players dressed in ladies dresses after that came flo weiss and the seven dwarfs dwarves they take off on on the waterfront and the last and i believe most was a play called izzy which was a takeoff on gigi and all three of these plays willie and i had principal leads and very modestly i can tell you we stole the shows during the rehearsal period for these shows steve was always listening to me rehearse so when the time for the shows came around steve knew my
part as well as i did and we're always kidding that if i had to be replaced steve could very adequately handle that part of the plays as time went by steve and jackie and now the presence announced the presence of their daughter melissa on january the 16th 1975 followed by todd on july the 9th 1977 and michael on february the 12th 1980 three children completely different disposition in talent and their approach to education we are very proud to announce that two weeks ago maxine and i joining stephen jackie and jackie's mother sarah in austin to watch melissa graduate from this was a very moving episode
in our she is a lovely child and very close to her parents and grandparents and her brothers harris waldman graduated from green hill school and is presently enrolled in duke and he too is considering following he played in many plays and had the leading part in all of them during his life at green hill was president of his class and like his cousin meredith was a member of the national honor society and drown out this lovely family here comes michael who in his own right is not only a computer expert but will be a senior at green hill next year and we don't quite know
what his ambitions are after that he is very active in the neighborhood youth organization and was olive godol which means the president of his aza chapter wonderful irwin wallman born november the 27th 1918 on kelly avenue right across the street from the fire station on irving street other than the episode that i mentioned previously about the 1918 influenza and mama's predicament about whether or not she would make it i had a rather uneventful youth in 1922 the family moved to 2208 router street a larger house with three bedrooms a screened-in side porch where willie and i did all of our sleeping until everybody was gone
but mama and papa and i when i moved off the side porch into the bedroom previously occupied by my brother charlie during this period i can remember falling off the porch the front porch in my bicep and my tricycle you see the front porch on browder street had a left turn to the side of the house and i was riding my little tricycle and i forgot to make that turn and i went off that four-foot porch damaging the tricycle and myself and my only response to my mama was that i forgot to turn that brought quite a laugh into the and when i was a
little older and not yet able to understand the differences in religion i complained that i had never gotten a christmas present it snowed that christmas i guess i was eight or nine perhaps a little younger and on christmas morning i walked into the living room of our little house on browder street and there was a beautiful red wagon my brother sam no i'm sorry my brother charlie had purchased the red wagon and i was beside myself riding that little red wagon up and down browder street in the snow the next thing that i fairly will was a trip to denver colorado i believe this was
in the summer of 1926 or 1927. mama and sis and willie and i went to denver sis drove her up mobile and we spent about a month in denver visiting with sam this was my first acquaintance with jack michaelson who was in denver with his mother visiting her family and jack and i have been friends ever since unfortunately he's not well but i hope and pray that he will completely recover the only eventful things that happened during the early years of my life was that i was kicked out of three grammar schools for fighting i always followed my brother charlie's instruction which was in yiddish that means in english hit the other
guy i really never endeared myself to the principles of the three schools that threw me out but it didn't bother me too much i also remember on my 13th birthday for my bar mitzvah papa took me by the hand and we walked to the reminiscer show which was on the corner of pocahontas and browder street and my father carried a bottle of booze and i carried a cake that mama had baked and i said the vomits were brokens the bomb is for prayers which started out with burkhu es arnold amborach i was a huge success in the little show where as i recall there were
16 men and my godfather mr label who always looked like he had a bad smell on his face gave me a silver dollar and that climaxed by my mitzvah i then entered forest avenue high school where my brothers all preceded me and had established a fantastic reputation which i promptly tore down i made reasonably good grades in high but i was never really prepared and i shall never forget in english where edna rowe was my teacher and she had taught all the brothers asked the class to learn the poem london by milton and to my chagrin she invited helen fern black the public's speaking teacher
into the room and called on me to recite the poem well i wasn't repaired i wasn't prepared because i hadn't learned it and she flunked me on that six weeks and i deserved it on another occasion i had joined the standard debating and mrs hassell the algebra teacher had decided to keep the entire class in at the school for noise that afternoon was a standard debating society meeting and i went up to her and asked to be excused and she said no and i told her that she would have to pay my 10 cent fine for not appearing at the standard debating society meeting mr
parker who was a principal at school promptly expelled me and i had to bring charlie back to to get me back in the school well needless to say i got a good thrashing from charlie whom as i mentioned previously was my mentor and that taught me a lesson and i never got in trouble again and graduated as class orator and i had the leading part in the class play at school jenny wolfe blumenthal who was my typing teacher and who of course knew all the brothers stating to me stating to me in the second half of my senior year she said everyone i'll make a
deal with you you don't show up for class for the whole second semester and i'll give you a 90 in typing and i took her up i didn't know better so i spent that particular period of every day in the library where i did my homework eleanor ratner who worked with me on my class archer speech was very kind and very patient with me and as far as i know i did rather well in my class oration in front of the graduating class and all at the school my brother willie got me a job with the austin bridge company where he had been working for
about five years as swiss sport operator and downstairs sonographer thank god and it was during this period that charlie came to me and to willie i think he was 29 at the time and said that he would like to get and that he felt it is he had honored his obligation to us and he said he wanted us to then begin particularly me and actively supporting mama and papa charlie got married in 1935 to ruth siegel and had two lovely daughters dana and judy wallman they both were excellent pianists and i will discuss these two girls later on to continue with myself at age 16
i joined the aza which is a junior order of rene brief a philanthropic organization and became very active in aza both in their fine work and in athletics i became a fair softball player and a fair basketball player when i was 18 years of age i had a date with mabel siegel who later married hyman madison from galveston and we were going to the movie i didn't have a car or any transportation so i took the streetcar to her house and we started walking to the movie which was about five blocks away she told me there was a new girl in town and that there
was a little party at the new girl's home and why didn't we skip the movie and go to her house i said fine and this was my first date with mabel and i met maxine pollakov i was 18 and she was 14. i liked her very much and she seemed to be interested in me so we started dating and after about a year of dating i don't know whether it was her mother rose palakkov or my brother charlie who broke it up because either one of them felt that we were too young to be going steady the following christmas our brother sam came in from denver for a visit and the family the older members of the decided to go out for new year's eve i was not invited to join him and i understand that but i became available to go out myself so on a hunch i
called maxine and told her the story that why i was available and if she didn't have anything to do i'd like to have a date with her for new year's eve she didn't have a date because she was hoping i would call i suppose so we had a very lovely time new year's eve and started dating again i left the austin bridge company at that time to go to work for austin moore who was the son of the chairman of the in the receivership of an insurance company casualty underwriters liquidating the company i decided to go to smu and i enrolled at smu and went
for a i could not continue because i didn't have any money this was in 1939. maxine had graduated high school and was going to oklahoma university she stayed one semester and i went up to see her one time with my good friend mickey rubin whose sister was also going to oklahoma and at the end of that semester she came home and would not go back her father who was the regional manager or eight states for a chicago firm called line auto parts and manufacturing offered me a job for forty dollars a month in the warehouse of this company where i was an order picker and stock boy maxine was also working for the company in the office and we were seeing
each her mother and father had purchased a in university park on shenandoah and i had acquired a 1929 model a ford which charlie bought for me so i did a lot of traveling from south dallas to university park in the summer of 1940 mr polikov went to a meeting in chicago for his company where he also had a lot of relatives when he came home from the trip one of the girls in the office who had a sister living in chicago and my mother-in-law was also working at the office at that time and the still said to my mother-in-law congratulations i understand irwin and maxine
are going to get married well my mother my mother-in-law hit the ceiling and at that and approached mr pollock off her husband and my later father-in-law and he told her he said look the kids are going together study they're not dating anybody else why the hell should they get married so it just so happened that this was on maxine's birthday on july the twenty second nineteen forty so he got into the car maxine and rose pollock off and i and drove to fort worth to see my mother-in-law's cousin barney landsman who was in the wholesale jewelry business i had saved up 240 dollars and with
that money i bought an engagement ring and a wedding band then i came home and told mama well there was a lot of excitement going on and the holocaust were very nice to me so we set a date for november the 10th 1940 to get married on that day all my brothers and sister and mom and papa walked in the wedding at sheffield synagogue on park avenue afterwards there was a reception at the palakkov home and the synagogue was packed all my brothers were groomsmen and sis was a bridesmaid and maxine's cousin fern was her maid of honor and dick polikov who was going to
be my brother-in-law walked as a junior down the aisle with jackie laser the daughter of a good friend of ours maxine and i took mr polikov's new lasalle and drove to new orleans for our honeymoon on the second day we were there charlie came to new orleans to visit some customers and took us out to dinner we had a very lovely evening and we returned after a week to dallas and mr palakkopf adjusted our salaries so that between the two of us we earned fifty dollars a week we lived with maxine's mother and father and in may of 1941 we purchased a little house at
3132 stanford the house cost if i remember correctly fifty one hundred dollars our monthly payments were 41 odd cents and that's where we set up housekeeping on our own and that's where calgene sherry and steve were born maxine and i both continued working until she got pregnant and cal dean was born one day after my birthday on november 28 and we were ecstatic maxie and howard are made if i'm not mistaken i think we paid her six dollars a week and she worked every day after work five days a week quite a few people working for line auto parts including some outside salesmen were drafted
into the army and since there was a shortage of sales people traveling suggested that i might be interested in going on the road selling automobile parts which meant that i went on a commission basis and could possibly make a lot more money well i travel steadily covering oklahoma louisiana and arkansas and west texas and on march the 10th sherry was born in order to help around the house maxine was pregnant we had to the help of a young girl to live in and share the duties of the house this also enabled maxine and i to have some free time when i was in town we
had a series of these girls some were not too hot lazy and didn't want to work at the house so we went through a period of time when we had a lot of these people with us living with us and let me say that i i can truthfully say that i really didn't watch calgene grow up during that period because i was almost never at home and the girl that we had whatever time it was was a good companion for maxine and also safe for the family to have someone there besides maxine and the children but in november of 1949 i was in new orleans
louisiana and i became very ill i remembered that a childhood friend of mine by the name of irving richmond who was a who became a physician was living in the audience and i called him from the hotel and he came to the hotel and checked me out and took me to the hospital and maxine flew down to new orleans and after i was in the hospital a week and diagnosed with having a duodenal ulcer maxine drove me home i didn't travel for the rest of that and in january of 1949 i left on the road for amarillo and got sick in amarillo and came back
it was then decided in the meeting between charlie and i that i had to do something locally that's the end of this tape so i'll i'll continue later it became very apparent that i could no longer travel on the so i had decided to look around and see if i could find a automobile parts store that i could buy and whether or not i could arrange the capital to buy a store while i was checking around charlie called me one day and said how about having lunch with me so i said okay i wasn't doing anything anyway so i went to charlie's office at 1006
commerce standard fixture company and willie was there and charlie said willie's going to join us for lunch so we're not for lunch and while we're having lunch charlie said to both willie and i i have an idea that's been playing around in my mind regarding you two and i want to throw it at you and get your reaction he said willie has been very successful and i thought perhaps you all might make an arrangement where the two of you could farm a partnership an irwin could go into the property and casually business so i immediately said to him charlie i i don't know if i
could sell any insurance uh i've always sold a an item than the commodity that could re-resold for a pro for a profit and charlie very tartly said to me you can do anything you have to do if you want to do it badly enough he said you boys think this over and let's talk about it in a couple of weeks anyway on april 19th 1949 willie and i shook hands and that's how allman brothers insurance agency was born i made arrangements with an insurance agent called perry moon to office in his office and right beneath his office as a producer rather than an agent and
this lasted until 1951 when willie and i took the train to austin and took the insurance agents exam which we both passed easily during the time that we were considering this arrangement i went to charlie and i said charlie i you know i've got a family and i'm hoping to have another child but i have to have financing i can you help me suggest where i can go to be for financing and charlie said i'll finance you so when the smoke cleared and i had a producer's contract charlie gave me money every every week never asked me to be paid back and i didn't begin
to pay the debt off until 1955. willie and i were off officing together in the merchandise mart which is the old butler brothers building on every street which also housed the ladies apparel mart and and the salesman to selling ladies ready to wear and children's wear in the same building and this was my sphere of influence calling all the people in the building things began looking real good and we were both working real hard at age 50 which was 1968 i was playing golf with charlie and willie and doug williams one of my insurance companies people and i had a golf had a heart attack on the golf course by this time
we were already in our own at 4061 north central expressway thank you i'm getting a little ahead of the story i failed to mention i think that on december the 5th stephen allen wallman appeared on the scene and i'll go into detail about him a little later on but going back to the date in 1968 i had great tightness in my chest and the doctor friend of mine who happened to be at the golf course dr jack robbins took me home and our family doctor dr joe rothschild came out to the house and insisted that i go to the hospital while at the hospital they
took a number of tests and the heart problem showed up on one of the jeans i stayed in the hospital a week then came back home and stayed home until february the first of 1969 when i came back to work at waldman brothers insurance agency during the following years our business continued to increase and its success was very gratifying we went from a small staff to approximately 20 people in our organization may the 29th 1997 we are rapidly approaching 50 in our i became very much involved in a new jewish community center in the city of dallas and strangely enough or the period of 1968
to 1970 i was president of the jewish community center and had asked to serve on the board of at the dallas at the colombian club colombian country club in dallas a jewish golf course club a jewish country club that had a golf course with it and i had been asked to serve on the board of directors of congregation sheriff israel which i accepted together with willie i attended many conventions of life throughout the united states and everyone in the city of dallas compliment us complimented us on our professional approach to the insurance industry which was very gratifying i have always been a racehorse fan and
moving along maxine and i were going to the racetrack in shreveport louisiana on july the 30th 1991 and i got up early in the morning got out of bed and fell down i tried to get up and i fell down again so maxine called the doctor and howard came over and maxie said i'm going to take her went to the hospital and howard said no you're not we're going to call an ambulance so the ambulance came and took me to the hospital and they took several electrocardiograms and put me in the room to rest that was friday the next day was it took me down
for some more electrocartigrams and our doctor at that time was dr joe who had been a partner in the rochelle and they decided that i should have an angiogram the angiogram indicated that i had blockage and on august the 1st 1991 i had heart surge at heart surgery five bypasses i then went into a program of rehab which lasted for two years during the same period willie felt something in his throat which turned out to be cancer and he underwent surgery and approximately a year later he passed away going backward in the 70s both howard and steve came into our business and we're immediately very
successful i had a most difficult time coming to the realization that willie was no longer at my side to this day i think of him often because we were a great pair you know that in all the years we were partners in business we never had a crossword during this period of time from 1968 to 1991 maxine was always by my side encouraging me admonishing me when i smoke too many cigars which incidentally i stopped smoking immediately after my heart and being the kind of a wife and mother that you dream about she had problems of her own during those during which time she had
a complete hysterectomy and other minor ailments but she never lost her capacity to smile and mimi as she has always been called by her grandchildren takes an interesting part in all their has kept our family very close together and i can truly say that i as well as our children and our love her very much i'd like to go back to my younger years before i was married when every night a bunch of my jewish friends and i would gather at the corner drug store on the corner of forest avenue and colonial and try to decide what we were going to do that evening if
it was during basketball season we usually would go to the old ymha on pocahontas street and play basketball or we would play basketball in the automobile building at fair park where we were entered in a league during the summer every sunday morning we played in a jewish softball league at silverstein school in far south where i played second base willie played first base and earlier on charlie played first base and really pitched softball willie and charlie also played hardball baseball at rivershawn park and i shall remember very well that one sunday willie was pitching and the fella laid down a butt and uncle willie went
over to field it and the other fella blockably out and put him on crutches for about four incidentally our softball team was called a standard fixture softball team the hardball team was called cone candy company and i was always a pedestrian until i got old enough to play ball on other evenings when we met at the drugstore we would all get in the car or two or three cars and go play miniature golf and have our own little tournament and speaking of golf i would say probably that sam and willie were the two best golfers in our family i came in a very poor third
and charlie was just learning golf during the older years of his life marsh never did play golf we do have other golfers among our scott coyne who is kyle jean and howard's son one of his sons has a two or three handicapped and his uncle laura wow who lives in illinois is quite a golfer howard enjoys golf as does steve so we are a golfing family now jackie is taking up golf and scott is teaching his fiancee barbie to play golf they will be married on november the ninth of this year i'm going to pause here and gather my thoughts but while i do i'd
like to give some dates to be remembered mama passed away on my on march the 1st 1970 papa passed away on february the first 1948 morris who was born in 1901 passed away on december 13 1995 so oh i've got it here somewhere passed away on august the 14th 1989 sam passed away on january 26 1993. charlie passed away on december 26 1989 and willie passed away on may the 1st 1990 and carol gene and howard's family cal gene was born november 28 1942 howard august 21st 1941 kl on june 16 1969 scott on november the 13th 1970 wendy on july the 31st 1972 and mark on july the 20th 1976 kaelin married jacob pollock p-o-l-l-a-c-k on november 12 1994 and as i mentioned previously scott and barbie plan on a wedding of november 9 1997.
neil small dr neil small was born on june the 6 1945 shared on march the 10th 1946 justin july the 24 1973 macy april 28 1976 and meredith june 23 1979. steve was born on december the 5th 1951 jackie july the 21st 1952 melissa january the 16th 1975 tied july the 9th 1977 and michael on february the 12th 1980. maxine's mother was born on march the second 1902 maurice polikov maxine's father was born february the 21st 1902 maxine was born july the 22 1922 and richard polikov maxine's brother was born on april 14 1926 i can give you the names and marsha's family and sarah's family but i do not have the dates as yet i will add them later morris wallman wife sarah waldman children robert wallman nancy wallman wild lowell wild junior andrea wilde gene waldman beth wallman jenny wallman michael wallman tom wallman and the new little child whose name i don't have the latter part of these were mars and sarah's grandchildren you
will remember that robert wallman who was a physician died at age 52 and his children were beth jeannie michael tom and tom sam and lee had no children but enjoyed a wonderful life together are al and helen small whom i believe i were our nearest and dearest friends jackie's mother and father were marvin yaren passed away approximately a year ago and sarah yarn her mother is a very lovely lady and we see a lot of her jackie has two sisters ellen and holly ellen will be married in august and holly is now married charlie and ruth's children are dana born april 18 1939 and judy
born 6 16 1943. dana has a son beau b-e-a-u walman gone on may 1464. she is divorced from her first husband and is now happily married to sanford bud mandel born on june 18 1915 and judy ringer is now separated from her husband living in manhattan and has a very fine position her children jason barn december the 27th i don't remember the yes i do jason was born december 27 1972. and he's with a stock brokerage firm in manhattan in powhatan and jill born april 27 1976 is now in college charlie was born on august 16 1906 and ruth was born on january 28 1916.
born on january 20th 1912 city february february the 26th 1913. andrea january the 9th 1940 lauren april the 5th 1939 gregory march the 18th 1965 margie november the 11th 1966 that's gregory's wife jeffrey july the 31 1962 he's now a debbie born 5 1663 she is jeffrey's wife michael july the 8th 1968 his wife leslie january the 14th 1971 gregory and margie's daughter november 21 1993. elizabeth for on january 16 1991 and aryan a-r-y-n on april 9 1993 are the children of jeff and debbie linda abraham of haifa israel born april 17 1942 and her husband yahudah e h u abraham a born january 19th 1939 have two sons eitan e-t-o-n i believe and ayal a-y-a-l-e-y-a-l tommy has just gotten out of the service in israel and wants to go to college and become a marine biologist ayala is still in the service in israel and has not yet decided where he wants to end up education wise we had the pleasure of land of linda and the two boys spending passover with us this year and they are two fine handsome young men and linda is now working on her phd system harry my sister sadie was born on september 19 1903 and her husband harry cohen on june 4th 1890 their daughter connie born on 8 12 28 and her husband hyman thomas a physician was born on february the first 1922.
they have two children thomas and jean ann thomas allen and gina alan thomas is married to his wife gina and they have two daughters cara c-a-r-a and shayna s-h-e-y-n-a jan and stan pastor sisa's other daughter and her husband jan was born july the 17th 1933 stand pastor a retired orthodontist was born on august 21 1931. their children are dr scott pastor born january 29 1960 an ophthalmologist robin pastor born june 4th 1965 andy pastor born march the 20th 1962 and molly pastor scott pastor's lovely wife may 28 1964. scott and molly have two children whose names unfortunately and dates of birth i do not know to be continued you know since uh i'm doing this little effort as things hit my mind and most of the time there'll be no actual continuity of events i will go back and forward with your permission and whenever it's my mind we'll talk about last night maxine and i were talking those years of the texas centennial and what we were doing during that period of time that was in 1936 and we frequently went out to fair park where all the big events were going on during the centennial and
we would dance to the big to the big bands we would listen to the big bands betty goodman freddie martin woody herman harry james the darcy brothers and this was a great period of our lives everybody was really excited about the texas centennial and the fact that it was all being held here in dallas at fair park and during this period of time a favorite saturday night experience was going to the midnight show at the majestic theater for a quarter and after that going to sammy's restaurant owned by the messina brothers and incidentally carla messina just passed away he was the last of the brothers
and he went to high school with charlie and sam but after the show would go to to on green lower greenville avenue and get a tavern special which was a big steak with french fries for 35 cents gosh those were great times i remember i remember one one night we were visiting my mama and she's asked us it was a saturday and uh she asked maxine and i where we were going so i thought so we're going to the show she said how much cost i show i said 35 cents she says well i'll tell you stay here with me and i'll tell you our
story that's worth a lot more than 35 cents and you can put the money in the bank just a little anecdote that crossed my mind mama also had a favorite expression that when she wanted to venture an opinion and you say well mama where did you hear this and she would say mention zoom this was this was one of mama's great saying to prove a part she would always say mention zoom that in english means that people say she had great pros of wisdom come out of her mouth during the same period of time in the summer of 1936 we would take a ride in
the car out to turtle creek which was a nice distance from south and the minute you hit turtle creek boulevard the air seemed to cool from the hot summer weather and there was a watermelon stand on preston road and we stopped there and there was also one at smu and we were often stopped at those places and get a slice of big quarter of a watermelon for 15 cents there were many happy occasions we had no money but we have found other ways to enjoy our lives i recall that in one summer after i graduated high school in 1935 i played a lot of tennis
one whole the reason i played tennis was that as a outgoing president's gift to the standard debating society i was given a tennis racquet and a met i spent that whole summer playing tennis with two people louis leon who by strange quirk of fate married one of jackie's aunts and after many many years that we didn't see each other we became reacquainted at a family party and the other fellow that i played with was a boy that i grew up with his name was myron schlossberg he had an older brother who worked for standard fixture company in charlie and harry who died very young and
martin sasberg also died very young we played basketball together in the aca at the old ymha on pocahontas and it was very sad attending his funeral this was an active period of time 35 36 and 37. i remember going to waco texas on an inner urban it was a streetcar that went all the way from dallas to waco 90 miles away to play in softball tournaments this was the dallas aza chapter and was the manager of the team and we would go down on friday night play softball all day saturday and sunday and get up at four or five o'clock on monday morning to come back to dallas and go to work we were young and the fact that we rough for all this period of time playing maybe eight or nine softball games didn't really bother us but it was great fun i believe that the first date i ever had with maxine i believe was on november the 14th 1936.
i just thought i'd toss that in for what it's worth in going through different dates of the i have some calls in for example i have some of the dates but not quite all of them as yet when i do get them all together i'll put them on record i think i've mentioned before i'm not sure that willie and i we're in three great plays where the dialogue was all yiddish yiddish english-speaking yiddish uh i think i mentioned that the first play we were in was called hanabella which was a takeoff on cinderella willie and i had to lead and we had a chorus group
that had danced and sung all men dressed in women's clothes this was a great hit the play was written by two very talented people ralph epstein and sonny swift ralph wrote all the lyrics sonny did all the directing shortly thereafter about a year passed and we did a takeoff on on the waterfront only the name was different it was flo weiss and the seven wars w-h-a-r-v-e-s this was a little tougher we rehearsed for for i guess maybe three or four months and since i was very heavy at the time i didn't mind because i lost a lot of weight then the last show we did
was was by quest by far our very best in fact it was so well received that we sent the sent the script to san antonio where another benevolent group did the play in san antonio and this was called izzy a takeoff on gigi and i played the part of maurice chevalier and willie played the part of gigi's grandmother these were very happy times for us maxine and sadie pitched in and did our makeup for us as just some of our other wives and all the time we were making money for the banane breath which is a humanitarian organization a jewish humanitarian organization we played our
basketball at the ymha the old gym and the ymha where if you were going in up to the basket for a crap shot you had to hold your one of your arms out so that you wouldn't hit the wall behind the basket at the old silverstein school on popular i believe was the name of the in way south dallas one on one event there when we played i sit in the third base and i remember vividly the date it was in may of 1941 after we moved into our house and he said i remember and i broke my ankle and maxine was very upset not
that i broke my ankle but that i couldn't do some work around a new house so that was the last of my softball days uh after that i became much more interested in golf and and in spectator sports when i was much younger and i don't know if i mentioned this before charlie and willie played baseball primarily charlie at the old rivershine park off of lemon avenue or maple avenue and the cone candy company which had a baseball team was a sponsor and the team that willie and charlie played for and my great thrill in going to rivershawn park was not to watch a ballgame
but i could get a free ice cream those were great days also during those those years a little earlier perhaps i had a dallas times harold paper route and was able to buy a bicycle which mama later conned me into selling promising me piano lessons well i never got the piano this is when i sold the bike but i believe that sam wrote the speech that i gave when i was class arthur in my senior year at forest high school it began with tonight the sturdy ship forest high is embarking upon the last sale that's s-a-i-l for those of us graduating tonight and continued on
i was very proud of that speech and i hope that i did well sam was class president i think it was in 1922 i'm not quite sure and charlie and willie and i were all class archers of our graduating class i shall never forget and i was quite young i think this was 1930 willie entered the dallas declaration contest high high school declaration contest and his speech was called national apostasy and we all got together that night and rode over to north alice high school and willie won the declaration contest it the streets went something like this on the battlefield of saratoga stands a towering
obelisk commemorating the battle that was fought there on this standing obelisk below the statue with these words benedict arnold hero patriot traitor i heard willie practice this speech so much as a child that almost knew it by heart and even to this day when the picture crosses my mind i get the chills because i also gave the speech in a declaration contest many years later going back to the plays we performed in steve was a youngster but he knew my part perfectly with the dialect included and on one night of rehearsal we asked steve to perform and he gave one of the speeches i made
in the play and just tore down the house i also would like to point out here that charlie was highly regarded at forest high school he was battalion adjacent in the rotc and was quite handsome in his uniform charlie and sam and willie i don't remember about morris but charlie sam and willie were highly regarded and highly respected at forest high school and i made the severe mistake of thinking that i could ride on their coattails through high school as i look back now i realize that i use surface privilege up until my senior year when i finally got religion so to speak and all
the teachers liked me only during my senior year we in 1975 we formed an alumni association of forest avenue high school the organization was farmed at sammy's restaurant on lower greenville avenue and i was the first vice president of this reunion group we meet every year and visit the attendance is getting smaller all the time and just by coincidence 1997 reunion will be held on june the seventh and if and all things me being equal maxine and i will go advancing to the first years of being in the insurance business when willie and i decided to form a willie continued officing with the life company
office his boss was a fine gentleman named thad childress c-h-i-l-d-r-e and after that stan martin who in our humble opinion willie's in mind was the greatest life insurance agent that ever lived well willie remained at the life insurance office i officed with a general insurance agency called rotor r-o-e-d-e-r and moon the owner was mr prairie moon who was a fine gentleman and was a great help to me in my learning years in this business during the beginning of our insurance experience willie only had one car and i only had one car so one week willie would take his car to work and work the outskirts
of the city of while i walked the streets of downtown and on the following week it was the offset i took my car and worked the outskirts of dallas and willie walked the streets of downtown i called on a client no cliff by the name of albert noff who was a member of the oak cliff lions club who sold me a raffle ticket for a dollar and lo and behold about two weeks later at midnight the phone rang and someone asked for me and mama and maxine said i was sleeping and hung about 10 minutes later the phone rang again and the man said you
cannot wake your husband up he just won a car on a raffle the car was an edsel what a lemon we kept it i think about a year never ran right and we finally traded it for a ford so the walmart brothers now owned a car of its own which we use for a long time charlie during the early years around 1928 and 29-30 traveled the eastern part of the united working for a firm called national military company they had a bunch of ladies had come ladies milner's stores and charlie traveled that area until harry asked him to join him and i believe this was
either 1929 or 1930 so charlie came home and did not travel for that firm any longer i've talked about mars before i don't remember whether i gave you the names of his offspring so i'll do it again i believe that i mentioned that morris and sarah got married in 1937 and of that marriage there was robert wallman their son and nancy waldman wild weil their daughter robert wallman my gene walman i don't remember her original name and they had four children beth jenny j ennie michael and tom waldman and beth later married and has a child we went to the wedding i believe it was
tom waldman in omaha nebraska and sadie and maxine and i and got to know these children very well they're all wonderful fine children well-educated and a credit to marx and sarah nancy married lowell while junior and i believe i mentioned this before law came to dallas to be howard's best when he and cal jean got married and fell in love with nancy and they got and they have two children lowell jr and andrea and lord lowell junior's right to a lovely girl whose name i'm sorry i don't know and his sister's name is andrea both lowell jr and his wife are podiatrists and i believe
that the office with their father lowell senior the years have gone past and the lord the good lord has blessed we have a great family in dallas we have great children and great grandchildren and the good lord willing we will be blessed with more great more great grandchildren not with more great-grandchildren we don't have any great grandchildren now but we hope we will be blessed by great the woman family is highly regarded and respected in this we went to the high school graduation yesterday of meredith ashley small who is the daughter of sherry wallman and neil small and she received a wonderful award for her
accomplishments and we are extremely proud of her and i think i mentioned earlier that she has been accepted at princeton university which in itself is no small deal i've run out of thoughts at this point i would like to stop and collect my thoughts so permit me to pause temporarily i thought i would mention in passing the people on browder street that were not a part of the waldman but had a great impact on my life there was helen kirschner whom i grew up with and who was my childhood sweetheart there was daughter einhorn who unfortunately passed away some years ago who lived right around
the corner in her parents grocery store who later married harold goodman there was joe bach who lived almost directly across the street from who was a little older than i i believe he's 90 whose family was in the chicken business but he was a very good friend of mine and i used to go to forest high school in his truck with him every day there was a froman family who lived further up the street their father both of the frauman families fathers were shoemakers or shoe repair people and meyer the youngest son of one of the fraudulent families was my good friend he remained a
friend until he passed some eight or ten years ago the other frohman family there were four there was harry frommen who was killed going into laity during world war ii there was cedar from when he was still alive and was never there was israel from one who died about five years ago and gerald frahman julius whom we whose jewish name was young who recently retired on the other side of the street was the raskin family daddy raskin and i grew up together there was the levine family sal levine who had i believe five sisters no who was a very charitable person and some others that
just lived there and were doing importance to me i'd like to make a few remarks that come to my mind i would say that of all the children in the waldman family my brother willie was more like my than any of the rest of us willie was a religious man like my and in the later years went to synagogue every saturday and as i might have mentioned earlier i became the president of shift israel synagogue and a gabba and very much involved in the day-to-day activities of the synagogue i attended a lot of schools when i was a kid because i couldn't stand any of
them too long to kick me out i started out i believe when i was about seven years old or thereabouts going to a school called cedar lawn cedar lawn school was on irving street about five blocks away from where we and after my first year there the school closed up there was it was an old school charlie and willie both went there then i transferred to a school two blocks on the other side called lamar school excuse me lamar i stayed there until it closed and then i went to colonial for one colonial hill school which was quite a bit further away where i stayed
one year and gotten three fights and sis finally decided at the end of that year that i would make one more transfer but for my last year in grammar school so i went to cities park school and i graduated grammar school at city park after having several fights because in those days favorite expression of a non-g was you and charlie had always taught me if anybody ever insulted me was to hit him by the way that followed me all the way but i managed to get out thank you jeffrey please call our and graduated from forest high school in june of 1935. i learned a lot of poems when i was a kid from my brothers primarily my brother charlie one i remember vividly dad please call a yes one of the poems that i remember vividly that charlie taught me what's called phaneutopsis out of the night that covers me dark is a pit from pole to pole i thank whatever gods may be from my uncomfortable soul beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horrors of the shade but the years will find me and should find me unafraid it matters not how straight the gate how charged with punishment to scroll i am the master of
my faith i am the captain of my soul that poem had a great appeal to me because charlie explained it when i was a youngster and i have remembered it all these years in my life another was let me live in a house by the side of the road where the race of men go by men that are good and men that are bad as good and as bad as i i would not sit in this corner seat i hurled the cynics band let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man another for when the one
great scorer comes to ride against your name right not that you are lost but how you played the game needless to say i have remembered these poems all years of my life and had a tremendous impact on me i decided oh i guess it was in 1938-39 somewhere in that zone area that i would try to go to snu as long as the money held out and since i didn't have any transportation smu meeting southern methodist charlie bought me a 1928 model a forward which i drove to and from college for one whole year i did not have any money or enough money left to
go back to next year as i was working mornings and going to school in the afternoon so i finally sold the model a ford to another fella which left me a foot again when i was much younger i recall that morris had a franklin touring car this car looked like it belonged to the mafia it was the same kind of a touring car that they used in all the old movies when the crooks were running away from the police i don't remember what happened to that car but i sure do remember it when i was about 12 years old isaac sobel who was a good
friend of ours of the family brought over some linoleum to mama on brown street in a little truck well while he was in the house i got in the truck and started it and drove off if you're familiar with that part of of i drove the truck north to carrett east to early street south to the to the santa fe tracks and back to broward street to our house well mama was hysterical and isaac was even worse he had already pictured by having a very bad accident and since he was working for his father he thought his father might kill him well the good lord
was with me and i drove that truck all around that long four blocked area and got out and ran and hid in the backyard because i knew my was gonna meet me a spanking well that was a conversation piece for quite some time and even up to the very late dayton isaac solo's life every once in a while we would talk about it and mention it to each other and reminisce i also remember a time in dallas when i was a youngster maybe 12 or 13. on broward street a jewish family moved to dallas from europe and their oldest son was my contemporary they hadn't learned to speak english and somehow or another mama was contacted to see if would be okay for them to bring their son irving richmond over to brother street to play with me because i spoke fluent yiddish so they brought him over and we played one afternoon together and he went back home to his mother and told his mother spielt with another shakers i played with a jewish gentile it's interesting to tell you that this young man became a doctor specializing in brain surgery and many years
ago retired and moved to and i haven't heard from him since but he was a very nice young man bradder street was unpaved and we used to play ball in front of the house play catch i used to play a lot of catch with my brother willie and at night we would all play on the corner where the street light gave us some light to play i remember those days with a lot of nostalgia we were very poor as was everybody else on the street but we never went hungry and we all had something to wear my wearing was mostly hand-me-down and this reminds me
of a very interesting thing that happened to me my brother charlie had purchased a green gabardine suit after he wore it for about five years my brother willie inherited it and after he wore it for a while i inherited it and i dated maxine in that suit and one night while i had a date with her father said to me you know irwin i could almost see your face in their pants they're shining so badly well that was the end of that scene when morris began his practice he was an ear nose and throat specialist his first office was in the medical arts building downtown
dallas which incidentally is no longer there and he became very successful in a very short period of time let me tell you a story it happened i would guess in 1936 or 37. i was working at the austin bridge where willie got me a job and sis and harry i believe we're out of town and my niece jan or jack or janice was staying with us and one day mama called me at your office by the way the austin bridge company was about six blocks away from south dallas where we lived mama called me one day at the office screening and hollering he's a dog he's a dog that means janice ran out in the street completely naked and mama said she was in her nightgown and couldn't run after her and asked me to come home immediately to
get her out of the street well i got i didn't have a car so i got into willie's car because when he worked for the same company and i drove home and there was model at the door hollering jen is kill my hair kill my head come here come here and janice just ignored her well not when i drove up and parked the car and janet saw me she hot footed it back into the house because she knew she was going to get a spanking well mama was absolutely distraught and i took me about an hour to calm her down and i spanked jan's little
tush and i told her if you ever do that again i'm going to take you back to your house where you live with your mother and father you're never coming to our house needs to say there was no repeat of that situation but i thought it might bear mentioning since i'm sure jan is going to see this and probably will have a laugh out of it all through high school my girlfriend was edith ruskin r-u-s-k-i-n i learned during that period of time that charlie used to show for her mother when charlie was quite younger they had a store on ross avenue she is now living
in waco texas had several children in israel and i regret to say that i haven't seen her in many years another ritual in our family was that every year papa built a sukkah so that he could have his meals out of the house into the sucker that's s-u-k-o-t papa had had pre-fabbed this little last building and when sukkah came around it was very easy for him to nail it together and put it up and every night during the entire sukkah holiday papa had his meals in this little house and i remembered that vividly we had a very sad situation in our at age 54 my
nephew dr robert waldman passed away with the melanoma robert was a very fine young man brilliant and an excellent his specialty was infectious diseases and this had a terrible impact on all our family our hearts went out to mars and sarah and nancy i don't recall whether i mention this occasion to you or not but when i was this youngster maybe six or seven years old or maybe eight mama took me everywhere she went because there's no such thing as a sitter in those days and if there was we couldn't afford it well i recall vividly mrs goats g-o-l-t-z a matronly jewish mother in south
dallas who used to make all the funerals and one time mama took me to a funeral and right in the middle of the eulogy mrs gold stood up she was a rather heavy woman raised her hands over her over her head and hollered oy via smear oi fires me a tiger gut that meant woe is me woe is me there is a good god on the earth i never forgot that scared the hell out of me let me give you some dates that are important i'll go at it rather randomly as i have written down here was born january the twentieth nineteen twelve sadie waldman
willie's wife february 26 1913 andrea waldman weinstein january 9 1940 lauren weinstein april 5th 1939 gregory weinstein marching the 1918 1965 his wife jeffrey weinstein july 31 1962 debbie weinstein may the 16th 1963 michael weinstein july the 8th 1968 leslie weinstein his recent bride january 14th 1971 and jeffrey and debbie's two daughters alexandra hold it hold it wrong uh alexandra is uh margie's and gregory's daughter who was born november 21 1993 and jeffrey and debbie's daughters elizabeth born january 16 1991 and a-r-y-a arya april 9 1993. linda waldman abraham april 17 1942 yahooda j-e-h-u-d-a abraham born january 19th 1939 of that marriage there were two fine sons they live in israel by the way and high for israel and the two sons of that marriage were tani tian and ie and ao tani is just now getting out of the service in israel and they all are just getting ready to go into the service in israel and i'm very happy and proud to note here that linda living in israel is just about to get her masters dates with reference to sister's family sis was born september the 19th 1903 my brother-in-law harry cohen was born june 4th 1890.
my niece connie cohen told us t-o-l-m-a-s was born august the 12th 1928. her husband dr hyman thomas was born january 31st 1922. my niece janice pastor janice cohn pastor who lives in tulsa oklahoma with her husband stan was born july 17 1933 and i remember that date and time in my very vividly stan pastor bought on august 21 1931 alan thomas connie's son on april 8th 1954 1954 his wife gina thomas july the 30th 1956 two lovely little girls of that marriage cara c-a-r-a 11-193 and shayna s-h-e-y-n-a october 27 1991. the children of the marriage of our doctor scott pastor an ophthalmologist who now lives in atlanta georgia january 29 1960 his sister robin june 4th 1965 who now lives in dallas andy march 20th 1962 who now lives in austin texas molly the daughter of scott hold it molly scott's wife born may the 28th 1964 and the daughter born of the marriage of and hyman thomas jean ann thomas august the 14th let me give you some more dates please rose polikov born march the 2nd 1902 passed away april 25th 1993.
these are both of my in-laws february 21st 1902 passed away february 16 1974. vaccine my wife born july the 22nd 1922 and richard polikov my brother-in-law and her brother were on april 14 1926 and his wife raz palakoff r-o-z polkov on december the third and i don't know the year a little history on the polycarp family my mother-in-law and father-in-law moved with their children to houston in 1927 when maxine was approximately five years they moved to dallas in 1934 maxine was 12 years old and they lived at 4224 san carlos drive this is an interesting note sis and lived at 4217 san carlos drive but the two couples never knew each marty and rose polikov moved to forest so that they could be with jewish people in 1935 when maxine was 14 years old maxine graduated from forest avenue high in 1939 and maxine attended oklahoma university for one year before she came home to marry me on november the 10th 1940.
we were imagine chest is a synagogue right by city park in south dallas which synagogue was later torn down to make room for a through highway i was traveling at the time for line all the parts manufacturing company out of chicago illinois which company was owned by sam byron byron who was my father-in-law's i was in new orleans louisiana for a weekend after working all the way to new york new orleans and i became ill and had to go to the hospital and maxine flew down from dallas to drive me home i don't know what i reported this earlier but i've been traveling since 1941
and i never really got to see calgene grow up or even sherry for that matter but i stayed home from october to january 1949 and i got back on the road at that time to go to amarillo texas and i got sick in amarillo and had to come back home it was at that time that maxine and i had a long talk and i decided to quit traveling and going to some other business which later turned out thank god to be the insurance business gene our firstborn november the 28th 1942 one day after my birthday november the 27th howard cohen her husband was born on
august 22nd 1941 and they had four great children k ellen who is now k ellen pollock born june 16 1969 scott cohen born november the 13th 1970 who incidentally is getting married in november of this year wendy jill cohen on july 31 1972 and mark edwin cohen named after howard's father july 20th 1976. let me give you some other dates while i'm at it before i do let me say to you that kale and cohen is now married to jacob pollock who is a practicing attorney living in kay ellen is in business with us here at walmart brothers as is scott cohen other dates to be remembered mama passed away march 1 1970 papa february 1 1948 mars december 13th 1995.
say the august 14 1989 sam january 20th 1993 charlie december 26 1989 and willie may the first 1990. other dates to remember al small born march 24th 1919 al small of course is my in-law sherry's and his wife helen on april 7 1920. my son-in-law june 6 1945 sherry small our daughter march 10 1946 their son justin born july the 24th 1973 their daughter macy on april 28 1976 and the daughter meredith who has just and has been admitted to princeton born june 23 1979. steve's family he was born december the 5th 1951 jackie was born july 21st 1952 melissa who had just graduated from texas university in austin born january 16 1975 todd who is attending duke university and is pre-med we hope born july the 9th 1977 and michael who is going into his senior at green hill school born february 12 1980.
i don't remember whether i mentioned this previously but things are coming to my mind as i go along here i remember when i had a dallas times herald paper route that i won a second-hand bicycle by getting subscriptions to the paper we had a piano on browder street which just played beautifully and i expressed a desire to mama to take lessons to play the piano mama didn't like the bicycle was afraid i'd get hurt so she told me if i'd sell the bicycle she would take the money and give me power lessons well i think i sold the bicycle for around seven dollars i never saw the piano lessons but mama used the money which was great as an afterthought dates on mars waldman some of which i have and some of which i'm sorry i don't have morris was born february the 2nd 1901.
the oldest child in the family of mount sarah was born july the 29th 1914 robert was born december 21 1938 and nancy waldman weil was born march 31 1942 she is now married and has been for many years to laura wow junior who she met when royal came down for howard's wedding with carol gene and they subsequently got married the children of that marriage are lowell wild junior who like his father is a podiatrist and andrea weil the family of robert wallman is gene wallman his wife his daughters beth and jeannie and jenny j e n ie and sons michael and tom waldman and beth's child name is meegan m-e-g-a-n we haven't seen too much of these we did go to a wedding several years ago and really enjoyed reacquainting ourselves with morris and sarah's children and on some other information up to this point let's talk about morris and sarah wallman i've already given you well let me give you let me give it to you again morris was born february the second 1901 in on the east side of new york and passed away on december the 13th at age 93.
sarah was born july 29 1914 and thank god is still with us robert hart wallman was born on december the 21st 1938 and passed away on july the 10th 1993. he married gene hadden h-a-d-d-e-n wallman who was born september the 7th 1943 and you married gene on november the 7th 1964. of that marriage there was elizabeth waldman lane born june 17th 1995 elizabeth married michael joseph lane i'm sorry elizabeth waldman lane was born of the marriage of gene all right i've got this messed up let's go back to robert robert hart wallman robert was born on december 21st 1938 and died july the 10th 1993 on november the 7th 1964 he married gene hedden who was born on september the 7th 1943 of that marriage there was elizabeth waldman who married michael joseph lane on april 25th 1992 michael was born on february 23rd 1963.
of the marriage of elizabeth and michael is megan elizabeth lane m-e-g-a-n who was born february 24 1995. another child of the marriage of robert and gene is thomas delaney wallman born on july the 25th 1966 married on 10 795 to sarah giles walman who was born on august 15 1972 also of this marriage is michael david wallman born june 17th 1968 married to juliette ardonez ordon ez on april the twentieth nineteen ninety-seven she was born on december the twenty-second nineteen sixty-five also born of this marriage is jennifer louise wallman who was born on march 17 1973. to the marriage of morris and sarah also came their gorgeous daughter nancy waldman wilde weil who was born march 31 1943 married june the 20th 1965 to lowell scott weil whose birthday to september 16 1941.
of this marriage there's laurel scott wilde jr born on may the 12th 1968 who married wendy bentonweil born on january the second 1968. the marriage took place june the 4th and of that marriage there is a new little baby alexa alexandra alexa and dra seva sc v a while born july the 13th 1997 and the last of this lovely family andrea rachel weil the daughter of nancy and lowell born october the 9th 1970. in this little report that i have made a lot of the information that i have put in the report was hearsay because of the situation and our situations occurred when before either i was born or too small to know and the rest was information that i first hand on to me going through the walman family let's go back to me since i'm giving the report and reaching its final i was born on thanksgiving day november the 27th 1918 in dallas texas on kelly avenue kellui i have already reported the trauma that my mother went through as i was born during the flu epidemic of 1918
and mama had the flu and dr friedman told mama that she might not live and she decided that she didn't live she didn't want me to live so she put a pillow over my face and thinking that what would happen if she did live to my delight she withdrew the pillow my early life was very uneventful most of the things that that particular i received from other members of the one thing that bothered me later on in was that when my sister sadie coined got they didn't want me for a pallbearer because i was a wild animal so they picked irving green who in later
life was a very dear friend of mine who died very suddenly in 1963 or 1964. my first school and at this point let me stop and tell you how i got the name irwin wallman on my birth certificate that i obtained many years later i was shown as isidor waldman i-s-a-d-o-r-e but when i started going to kindergarten sis sadie coyne wasn't too hot about the name isidore so she arbitrarily changed my name to irwin it's the door walman so when i first went to school which incidentally was called cedar lawn cedar lawn grammar school which was on irve on the east and homes home street on the west this was the school that willie and had gone to mars sam and
sarah said he marched sam and sis went to cumberland hill school in north dallas before we moved to south dallas but my stay there was limited because the school was closed at the end of my first year because it was so old from there i transferred to lamar school which was approximately three blocks from where we lived on broward street the address was 2208 browder street and certainly that house has been torn down it's no longer there and i stayed in lamar school until the fifth grade when lamar school was condemned and closed and from there i attended colonial hill school which was further south
on when delkin and pennsylvania and there i got into some problems fighting at the end of the school year i can't talk now take the call okay when i got into trouble sis decided that sort of transferred me from my final grammar school experience to city spark school where i graduated preparing to go to high school i remember vividly my principal at city park mr hamilton who was passing out accolades to all the children as their names came up saying when it came to my name we pick on irwin walmart because he deserves it that was my first embarrassment that i can remember and then
in 1930 i entered forest avenue high school which was located on forest avenue approximately six blocks south and west of the the dallas fair where there was a big fair every year i must admit that my high school experience through the first three years not pleasant i was never adjusted to the discipline of school and i kept getting into trouble for the first three years that i was in high in my senior year however things kind of leveled off and i became class orator in my senior year also president of the standard debating and had the unique pleasure of coming in contact with miss edna
rowe rowe the senior class sponsor and my senior class english teacher she put me straight and canceled me throughout my senior year which turned out to be a great blast and on graduation night i made the class oration was a very very memorable occasion in my life this was june of 1935 and you will recall earlier in this that this was a time that i met with who was the prevailing factor in our whole life charlie came to me and said oh and i want to talk to you he said i have supported you all the time when you were growing up and i am
now 29 years of age so i'm asking you to start participating in supporting mom and papa willie at the time was working for the austin bridge company as a sonographer and got me a job there as the downstairs switchboard operator i stayed there about a year at which time mr austin moore who was the son of the president of the took a leave of absence to become the receiver for an insurance company that was broke and he was asked to handle the liquidation of the insurance company and he asked me to go with him as a male stenographer which i did this was called the
receivership of the casualty underwriters actually my first experience in the he then asked me to leave them and go to work for superior laws of as a claim typist also in the insurance business where he was financially interested i met maxine i think i have reported previously that and we were going to go to a movie i had no car so we had to walk when we got about halfway to the movies she said you know there's a new girl in who's having a little party to get to know some people and invited me would you like to go so i said sure so we
walked over through the house there were a small group of my contemporaries there and this is how she was 14 at the time and i was 18 and during that period while we were dating i got to know her mother and father marty and rose polikov two very lovely people who are very kind to me by the way mr polikov was a regional vice president of a national concern called lion auto company out of chicago and he was in charge of this region which included a very large parts warehouse parts for automobiles in 1939 i believe it was he invited me to come to work
there as a order picker and i was delighted to change jobs so i went to work for 12 a week maxine and i uh after a brief period when we broke up which breakup was the occasion by either charlie or maxine's mother we have never figured it out the war was rapidly approaching and i was drafted but i'm getting a little bit ahead of the story on july the 21st mr polikoff had returned to dallas from a meeting in chicago with his firm and someone who knew some other people in chicago came into the office and said to my father-in-law to be mr pollakov congratulations
i understand maxine is getting married well during that period of time mrs polikkov was working at the office and she had a fed she was so upset primarily because my father-in-law hadn't said anything about it mr polikov hadn't said anything to her about it and then he said to her very uh casually in front of maxine and i well what the heck let them get married they they've been going together they love each other let them get married so that day maxine and i and her mother went to fort worth to visit a relative of the polycost who was in the jewelry and i bought
a wedding band and an engagement ring then i had to tell mama so he came back and forth i was still living at home and i went home and i told mama about it and mama started crying with happiness thank god and joy on the 22nd of july that was maxine's birthday so we made it official that we got engaged on july the 22nd and then the wedding date was set for november the 10th 1940. there was a lot of excitement believe me charlie of course had gotten married in 1935 and i believe morris and willie got married in 1937 but i don't remember when sam got married sam and lee i don't remember but it was in that in close to that so i was the last of the family married and went to new orleans on our honeymoon my father-in-law gave us his new lasalle to drive to new orleans and while we were there charlie came to new orleans on business and took us out to dinner we had a very lovely honeymoon for a week came back and stayed with maxine's mother and till may of 1941.
at that time we bought a little house dallas for sixty one hundred dollars and our monthly famous for 41 dollars a by this time maxine was also working and together we were making fifty dollars a month a week fifty dollars a then came the terrible tragedy of december the 7th 1941 i believe and i was drafted now let me back up here matt that's not correct i had been drafted and had gotten a deferment because of my impending marriage and then on december on november the 26th i'm getting back on the track now a little gorgeous doll girl came into carol gene waldman then i
got the notice that i was to come in for my draft and maxine and i and carol team were already living on stanford in those days when you were drafted you went straight from the drafting area into the service so made arrangements to sell our house and maxine and calgen would move back in with her mother and father fortunately we didn't do anything but for some reason or other i was turned and made 4f i think they said i was a psycho well this gave maxine and i a new lease on life and because most of the people if not all the people i work
with were drafted into the service an opening became available for an outside salesman and i asked and got the job so i began traveling for line auto parts covering texas oklahoma louisiana and arkansas in 1946 sherry came along and added her joy and her great passion as a child as a little infant really was walking around with a chicken bone in her mouth a pookie and she and carol jean were just absolutely fantastic in 1948 i was in new orleans and i got sick in the hotel alone i remembered that i had many years prior to that time known as young fella by the name
of irving richmond who was a doctor at the oxner clinic ocsner clinic in new orleans so i picked up the phone found his name in the phone book and called him up and asked him if he remembered me and he said he did and i told him i was in the hospital in a in the hotel ill he came and checked me out of the hotel and took me to the ocean clinic which was a very famous clinic at that time maxine flew down to new orleans and i stayed down there an additional and was diagnosed as having a duodenal when i was discharged maxine
drove me this was in october of the year i didn't travel the rest of that year in november or december and on january the 2nd of 1949 i began a trip to west texas and when i got to amarilla that weekend i got sick again so i came home and maxine was unhappy about my traveling i wasn't with the children very much so we decided after i felt better that perhaps i ought to find something in one day visiting with charlie i wasn't working i i sent letters out to all my customers asking them to send me orders through the mail which they did so
in april of that year charlie called me one day said let's have lunch because i had been looking around for a business that i could buy into or that i could buy in the automobile parts business that was all i knew so i went to visit with charlie at 1006 standard fixture company he says have you ever considered going into the insurance business i said hell no i said i i've got to have something that i can sell that can be at a profit he's well think about it so willie called me that night and asked me if i'd like to play golf the next
day i was staying home so willie and i played golf and we chatted about it briefly and then we chatted about it more and chatted about it more and i said look i've got to have an income i don't know if i'm going to be a success in the insurance business said i'll finance you god bless charlie he said i'll finance you if you want to go in the insurance business i'll finance you as long as it's necessary so on april the 19th 1949 in charlie's office willie and i shook hands and i went into the insurance business selling property and casually as opposed to
life insurance which was willie's specialty charlie gave me 75 a week which was all i needed i was home i wasn't traveling and william and i went out on the street calling on everybody charlie's philosophy was by the way your dallas boys the woman family is highly respected and regarded you got a lot of people that you can call on by just walking into their place and charlie was right i went to work for rotor and moon in their office and willie stayed at the life insurance company which was taking mutual life of america in their office and since i only had one car willie
only had one car we alternated every week one week we would take his car the next week we would take my car little by little things began coming through and in 1951 two things happened willie and i left the two places we were and opened up our own office and called it wallman brothers and the muzzle that went with that announcement also created another birth in the family stephen allen wallman december the 5th 1951 steve appeared on the scene and it was like a good omen charlie sent me money every week never questioned about when he was being paid never even mentioned it but finally
in 1955 i started paying charlie back by this time william and i were pretty well entrenched in the business and things were looking very good willie became very active in the and i became very active in the jewish community center willie was president of the synagogue when they opened their new facility and i come on in papa come on in set garden schwartz is here in approximately 1952 if i remember correctly a new jewish country club was opened in called the columbian country club it had been a sitting club for many many years prior to that time but willie and i joined and over the
years both of us have been on the board of governors of the club i still belong as do all my children and many happy events have taken place in our family at this club as i mentioned i became active in the jewish community center and in 1968 while we were building a new building i became president and remained as president until 1970 i have been on the board at the jewish ever since including today august 12 19 97 our business continued to prosper from the beginning in 1952 when willie and i sat after each other in a one room office and had one helper till
today when waldman brothers insurance agency has 47 employees and occupies a large part of the top floor i'm getting ahead of myself a little because in 1960 something else happened while on the golf course well with charlie and two company insurance men this happened several days before my 50th birthday and i didn't come back to the office until february of the following year i fully recovered i think and got back into the swing of things in the entrance business i believe it was a 1960 but i'm not sure willie and i built a building on the central expressway at 4061 north central expressway and moved
into the building to continue the increase of our staff until three years ago when we had to leave because we had run out of space and in 1990 i recall properly willing got sick and after having had surgery for cancer of the esophagus regretfully passed away this formed a terrible void in my life willie and i had been in business all the years with never a crossword we were a great team by that time my son-in-law howard corn and our son steve waldman had both come into the business and became primarily involved in the running of the agency i believe it was the first of
august i awakened to get out of bed one morning and i got out of bed and fell down i got up fell down again and i called to maxine who was in the kitchen making coffee she ran back and helped me back into bed and she called the doctor and he he suggested that if i felt well enough for her to take me to the in the meantime howard who lived very close to us had come over and he said no dice we're not going to take you to the hospital you're going to get an ambulance so he sent for an ambulance and he took
me to the hospital that was on a friday morning my doctor was already there they took an ekg and it found nothing so dr summer said well let's go put you in a room take your dkg again tomorrow on saturday morning it took another ekg and all hell had broken loose they then took an angiogram and on august the second i had bypass surgery thank god everything was fine we had a great physician a great surgeon by the name of platt p-l-a-t-t and after a reasonable length of time i went into a rehab program where i went to rehab three mornings a for approximately two
years during which period of time i learned how to walk again and all during this period as it was with all other periods of my married of our married life my wonderful wife was right at my side i don't believe i could have made it without her permit me to say that i love her with all my heart and we are still sweethearts she has been a fantastic wife a wonderful mother and a very gracious and happy grandmother i hope and pray to the good lord that he will give us many years of being together and enjoying each other and all of our friends and
all of our children and grandchildren as i mentioned previously it is august the 12th 1997. i am 78 years of age and maxine just celebrated her 75th birthday we've had a wonderful life god has blessed us in many ways and perhaps one of the most rewarding rewarding parts of our entire married life has been the respect and affection we have received from all of our friends clients and relatives and i want to also say that maxine always smiled when she was crying within when i was sick and when our children in different periods of their lives have not been well maxine loved her mother and father they were very kind people and she has a wonderful brother dick who spends six
months of every year at his home in chicago and the other six months at his home in palm beach florida we speak to them often and i'd like to talk a little bit about maxine's family maxine's parents after living for a period of time in houston and i think maxine was 12 years old when they moved to dallas she lost her father if i recall it was either 71 or 72 and her mother passed away several years ago in her early 90s i believe that maxine's personality came from her mother and father who were happy people and i believe a lot of that spread out
on me for whatever success i have enjoyed and the happiness i have received from all those around me i have to thank maxine my wife doing this audio and video has been very emotional to me it has brought back many happy occasions and sad occasions like mama having a stroke and living in sista's house for five years in bed before she passed away and papa passed away in 1948 with a lung problem the sadness of charlie's passing away and sits following very closely and then willie leaving us have all had a terrible effect on me i'm the last of the waldman family meaning the six
children of my mother and i hope and pray that the good lord keeps us well and happy and blesses all of us remembering so many events in the existence of the waldman family has caused me to be humble and i hope that those of you who listens and sees this report will understand the effect that it's had upon me and with this point i want to say goodbye