Freda Gail Stern
Freda Gail Stern was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, where her mother traveled to give birth during a record January snowstorm because the small West Texas town where the family lived had no hospital. She was raised in Breckenridge, about 100 miles west of Fort Worth, where her father, an immigrant who had come to the United States from the Russia and Poland region at age 15, followed the oil boom as a merchant, ran a store, and later became a General Motors dealer. Her mother had come to America at age two and grew up in Shreveport. When Freda was ten, the family moved to Fort Worth so his daughters could grow up in a Jewish community. She attended Lily B. Clayton Elementary, Clayton Junior High, and Paschal High School, and had three younger siblings.
Freda studied journalism with a minor in economics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was active in campus organizations including the League of Women Voters, the orange jackets, and Mortar Board. She met her first husband, Elton, a chemical engineer from Dallas, and married in 1950, settling in Dallas as a newlywed. The couple had three children, Richard, Karen, and Harley. Her husband traveled frequently for minerals exploration, so she did much of the parenting on her own. He died suddenly when the children were young, leaving Freda a single mother at age 34 who needed to support her family.
Drawing on her journalism background, Freda built a freelance public relations practice that grew into a small agency she ran for 25 years, representing clients such as One Main Place, Chrysler, Elizabeth Arden, and Miller Brewing Company and Philip Morris. She sold the business in 1986. Throughout her life she was deeply involved in community work, serving with the National Council of Jewish Women, Hadassah, Temple Emanu-El Sisterhood, the Friends of the Dallas Public Library, the Mental Health Association, and other organizations. Guided by the values of social justice she learned in her youth, she advocated for services for single-parent families. She later married her second husband, Ed, with whom she shared 22 happy years and summers in Aspen.
Freda cited Hortense Sanger as an important mentor.
Full Transcript
Today is May 10, 2010. My name is Roslyn Benjett. I'm here with our videographer Ruth Andrus, and we are going to interview Rita Gale Stern, who's going to start by telling us about your family. You were born in Dallas? No, I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. How did your parents get to Shreveport, Louisiana? My grandparents got to Shreveport, Louisiana, and I was born there, never lived there, because the town that we lived in in West Texas was so small we didn't have a hospital, so my mother went home to give birth to me on what she said was the record snowstorm even to this day in Shreveport, Louisiana in January.
So I stayed there until I guess I was able to travel, or my mother was able to travel, and we went home to Breckenridge. And where's Breckenridge? Breckenridge is about 100 miles west of Fort Worth, and it's just the beginning, really the beginnings of West Texas. And what did your parents do in Breckenridge? How did they get there? My father got there following the oil boom. And unfortunately he didn't follow the oil boom because he was drilling for oil, but he followed the oil boom because he was a merchant, bringing things that the people who were working in the oil fields needed. He had come to the United States when he was 15 years old.
From Russia, Poland, it's sort of questionable about exactly where he came from. And he lived in New York for a while and then St. Louis for a while, and a group of young men at that time decided they would head west and follow the oil boom. So they lived in other parts of West Texas, and he settled permanently in Breckenridge and had a store there called Bomb Stash and Shop. And then he always loved cars, so he went into the automobile business and he was a general motors dealer in Reckon Ridge. And your mother? My mother came to the United States when she was two with her mother and older sister Her father had preceded her here And he had family in New Orleans who sent him to Shreveport And so that where she and her family grew up And how did your parents meet them?
They met at the crazy hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas, which was sort of the match.com of the 20s. And did you have siblings? I have a younger sister who lives in Austin named Iola Lee Berlin. And I have two younger brothers, Kenneth Baum who lives in Fort Worth and Lester Baum who lives in Dallas. So did you grow up in Creckinridge? I was there until I was 10. And at that point my father decided a couple of things that he wanted to move his business to Fort Worth. And he wanted his, then my sister was a teenager by then, and he wanted his daughters to have an opportunity to live in an area where there was a Jewish community.
So we moved to Fort Worth. From grade school on, then pretty much you lived in Fort Worth. What kind of school experiences did you have in Fort Worth? Well, let's see, I went to Lily B. Clayton Elementary School and Clayton Junior High School and Paschal High School. It was a wonderful experience. I loved Fort Worth. I loved being in a big city and a big school with a bigger library. And I really, it was always expected of us that we be good students. And so we didn't want to disappoint, so we all were. And that I left when I graduated from Paschal High School. I went to the University of Texas.
What was your neighborhood like when you were a child in Fort Worth? Oh, it was a wonderful neighborhood. We lived on a street sort of in the middle of a very wonderful neighborhood in which my two brothers were more fortunate than I was. There were sets of brothers their age up and down the whole street. I grew up with a lot of people who now live in Dallas. The Steinberg brothers Jill and Mary were two of them The Ablins Sam and Fred lived there for a while As I said they had this incredibly wonderful situation And there were lots of good friends that lived in the neighborhood.
And the thing that I remember about it most of all is how free we were. You know, we were comfortable. It was safe. We could go anywhere. We could do anything. We lived right on the edge of Forest Park, and we'd go there to swim. They had a zoo and a train and horses, and it was just a really, really wonderful neighborhood to be in. And what kind of activities were you interested in while you were in school? Well, you know, we didn't have so many activities as we do now. I studied the piano. I was a terrible music student, but I liked it, so I kept taking lessons forever.
And I read a lot, and I don't know, we just got together with friends, and we played softball in the front yard, and we had a high school sorority, and we were always doing, part of the time, of course, were the and we were busy having victory gardens and doing things and knitting squares for Afghans for the soldiers. I think just kind of the normal things that kids did in the 30s and 40s. Let's talk about the Jewish affiliations during your childhood. Did your family belong to a synagogue? Breckenridge had the synagogue for that area of West Texas. There were four or five little towns around there, got together.
And there was a very small synagogue and we had services on the high holidays. I don't remember much else. There wasn't a lot available there. And that was one of the reasons that my family wanted to move to Fort Worth. And in Fort Worth we belonged to both Temple Bethel and to the conservative synagogue there. And we went to religious school, I was confirmed by an incredible rabbi named Eugene Lipman who was in Fort Worth very briefly, right out of college. Our rabbi had gone to serve as a chaplain in the armed service and he went on to with Albert Vorstmann to run the social justice office for the reformed Jews in Washington for many years He was an inspiration to me He was incredible How so?
Well, I think that he challenged me intellectually and that what I really learned about the part of Judaism that means the most to me, which is social justice, I learned from him. Did your family participate as well in different activities? Oh yes, my mother had a meeting every Tuesday or Wednesday, whatever it was. One week it was the Temple Sisterhood and the next week it was the National Council of Jewish Women and the next week it was Hadassah. They had a really, really active, there were active and she was very involved in them. And what did your family do to celebrate Jewish holidays? Well, the one I remember the most, we didn't do a lot of celebrating, but Passover always meant a lot to me because we went to Shreveport.
My mother was one of six siblings, and they all met in Shreveport for Passover. And what I envisioned must have been the largest dining room in the country, but when I think back on there probably wasn't. I think that was probably the holiday that I remember and look back on that had the most meaning for me. Not so much for the religious significance as that's when I got to see all my cousins and aunts and uncles and the rest of the family. Let's go back to, you said you went to the University of Texas at Austin. Yes. What did you study? I studied journalism. And with a minor in economics, I loved the University of Texas.
I thought that was the greatest place in the world. And that's where I met my husband. And I did a lot of things there. I was president of the campus league with women voters. I was a member of a bunch of service organizations. I was an orange jacket. I was a member of the mortar board. I picked one of the outstanding students at the university. And I loved the education, I loved the social life. There just wasn't much about Austin that I could find fault with. And when you had to leave, And when you graduated, what that was? Well, I did what you did in 1950.
I graduated in December and I got married in March. My husband was, at the time, considerably older than I was. He was six years older. And he had finished up his PhD in chemical engineering at the end of my sophomore year. So I went through pretty fast and got through out a semester early. And his name was? Elton Saltus, and he was from Dallas. So we came here. So his family was from Dallas. Yes. He was born here. His mother was born in Dallas. And so there you were, a newlywed? Yes. In Dallas? Yes. And what was it like for newlywed then at that time?
Oh, it was nothing like I'm sure what it is like today for newlyweds. We were really relaxed. In the first place, none of us, except one. Only one of our group held a job outside the home. So what did we do? We shopped. We played mahjong. We just sort of, but we really, my group of friends were really a more serious group, I think, than most. And so very early in my days here, I got involved in all kinds of community activities and continued that really until my husband died very suddenly, very young, and I had to go to work to take care of those three children who were used to having a roof over their head, three meals a day.
But I was involved in the PTA and I was involved in the Jewish Community Center and I was active in Hadassin, I was active in the National Council of Jewish Women and active in Temple Binaural Sisterhood. And that really occupied almost all my time. Tell us about when your children were born. Oh, well, my oldest son, Richard, was born in 1952 at Florence Nightingale Hospital, Baylor. My daughter was born in 54, Karen, and my son, Harley, was born in 58. And you know we just been looking at some old movies that we took when they were very young We had really a wonderful life My husband traveled a lot He traveled when he was gone.
He did minerals exploration in the west, western part of the United States, but also in the Caribbean area and around there. When he would be off on a trip, he would be gone sometimes for six weeks at a time, time and really out of touch. So the children and I, at least the older two, spent a lot of time with just kind of me parenting them most of the time. They had also a wonderful neighborhood they grew up in. Many friends, kids in the neighborhood. They walked to Arthur Kramer School. Where were you living then? We lived, first we lived on Aberdeen, which on Aberdeen, which was about a half a block from Preston Hall School.
But by the time my kids got to be school age, we had moved to a house on Lavendale. And how old were the children when their father died? My oldest son was 12 and my youngest was 6. And when you went to work, what did you decide to do? Well, it was sort of a difficult thing. I had been really using my journalism background for all the time that I've been working. I did everybody's newsletter, I did press releases for everyone, and so I was sort of keeping those skills, active even though I was a stay-at-home mom and I decided what I'd always want to do is work for a newspaper and I was offered a job at the Dallas Times Herald but it was rather difficult because as we know reporters are not really the highest paid people in the world and what they offered me was 10 cents an hour less than the babysitter made so I decided that didn't seem to be a very viable option.
So I started doing freelance work, doing freelance public relations work, and I was very fortunate to find a mentor who sort of took me under its wing and helped me get clients and eventually that morphed into a small public relations agency which I ran for 25 years How many women were in the field then Interestingly, there were probably as many women in public relations as there were men. Most of them were more talented and all of them were a lot less expensive to hire so they did well. and I had a wonderful group of people who were doing the same thing I was, who were very good to kind of show me the ropes when I started off and who were still very close.
We still meet for lunch once every six months anyway. And what kind of companies were your clients? Well, when I started out, my first client was a new development in downtown Dallas called One Main Place, which was very exciting. And after that, I decided it was time to diversify because when real estate hit the skids, as it does once in a while, it was particularly hard. What evolved with my practice was that I represented mainly Fortune 500 companies who had headquarters outside of Texas, but for them Texas was a major market. So I represented Chrysler Corporation and Sheridan Corporation and Elizabeth Arden and this Miller-Burin Company, Philip Morris, in the state of Texas.
Let's step back for a minute and talk about what was Dallas like when you moved here as a newlywed? It was wonderful. Texas is friendly anyway. I had friends from the University of Texas and even some friends from Fort Worth who were here. It was wonderful. It was very easy. We had a lot of friends. We were all involved in politics. So that was the kind of cohesiveness that kept us together so that we didn't just spend our time going out to dinner. And we had groups of friends, couple friends, and then I had other friends who were just my friends that I worked with in various organizations that I was with.
It was a wonderful intergenerational time I got the best training in the world from women who could have run any major corporation in the country people like Hortense Sanger that that you know we all work together as if we were peers which I think is something that you don't find quite as much today as you did then. But the education that I got at the Temple of Emmanuel Sisterhood prepared me for anything in the world. We tackled, we didn't think anything was impossible. And we saw all the things that needed correcting and doing. We looked at our education system. We looked at children who were economically deprived who needed an education before they got to the first grade.
As I said, it was a really wonderful and exciting time to be involved in community affairs then. Now you mentioned all of the social justice projects. Did you continue with that while you were working? It was hard. I tried. I tried. Sometimes not very successfully. Periodically I would volunteer for a job and then all of a sudden find that I was so busy in my office that I had to hire somebody to do my office work while I did the volunteer work. But as soon as I sold my business, I thought, now I have time to do all the things that I owe the city for all the things the city has done for me.
So I said yes to anybody that called me on the telephone and found myself on about five or six boards of directors and so fragmented, I didn't know if I was coming or going. I told everybody, don't retire. That's the worst thing that you can do. But I pretty much did the things that I always loved. I was always grateful to the Dallas Public Library for the assistance that we found in doing research and all the help that we got there for my business. It was really a vital part of our success. And so one of the first things I got involved with was the Friends of the Dallas Public Library.
And I continue that very much to this day. Heavens, I was on so many boards I can't even remember what I was doing. the Special Care and Career Center, which I had done some while I was still working. I had worked with them on their printed materials for their capital campaign to build their building. Mental Health Association and... Excuse me. Temple Emanuel, and I can't even think of the rest of the others. There were a lot. Let's go back to when your children were growing up. My children grew up in the most difficult time in American history, I think. They were children of the, at least the two oldest were children of the 60s.
And it was, it was very, very difficult for me. I didn't understand a lot about what was going on with them because, as I said, they I had a couple of flower children, and they really were convinced that the United States was doing some very bad things with the war in Vietnam. And it just was counter to everything that I had grown up to believe, although I agreed with them politically. It was difficult for me to agree with the methodology that they chose to protest what the government was doing. My oldest son finished school in New Haven, Connecticut, and he just sort of graduated when he got tired of going to school and he had enough credits, they let him go.
My daughter went to Hillcrest High School and she also had enough credits and when she got tired of going, she just quit. So neither one of them really stayed through their senior year. Then I had one kid that came along later, so he sort of missed all of that. My oldest son went to every kind of school there was, I think, for college. He wandered around looking for himself for a long time and finally ended up going to Southwestern Medical School starting when he was 30. My daughter went to the University of Texas. Should we turn it off for a minute? Yeah. I'm fine. I got you on pause You can call for the call Texas and majored in sociology was determined to stay in Austin as is everyone who graduates there.
And after she got tired of working three part-time jobs, she gave up and went to graduate school at Washington University and then did her post-master's work at Minninger. He's a family therapist in Washington, D.C. now. My youngest son went to the University of Texas and majored in Plan II. That was where he had the beginnings of his life as a photojournalist. He worked for the Daily Text and then did some other work at the university. Then went on to work for a couple of newspapers most of his time. It's been at the Seattle Times. And you mentioned that you were in business until you, were you in business consistently until you sold your business?
I was in business too consistently before I sold my business, which I did in 1986, when I think by that time the last child finally got out of college, they kept going back. back. Finally, I had said to them, you know, you may go to school, the most important thing in life is education, so you have a matching grant from home for anything you want to do. So finally, I said, okay, the matching grant time has ended. It's time to start graduating, because the most important thing is not education, the most important thing is work. But all of them loved school and were good students and went on to be successful in their chosen fields.
Let's talk about the Dallas Jewish community for a minute. Do you think it's changed since you first came to Dallas? Oh, that's really, oh yes, everything has changed since that was 60 years ago when I first got to Dallas. I think it changed a lot in, for me personally, and that was just a very personal thing When I was a single mother at the age of 34 I was an unusual person in Dallas And there was not only no support system for me in the Jewish community there was not even an understanding of what the needs might be. And not only I, but my children really found the things that we needed, not religiously but socially, culturally, at the First Methodist Church or the First Unitarian Church or wherever, all of whom seemed to have groups for parents without partners and single parent families.
This did not happen in the Jewish community at all. I pleaded with the Jewish Community Center to start some kind of after school programs because I had three latchkey kids and they looked at me as if I had landed from Mars and to start some kind of daycare there was nothing, absolutely nothing in that part of town. And I will never forget running into Ann Sikora one day in the parking lot of the Tom Thumb and she said, Frigal, I tell you that after all your years of trying to get this to happen we now have a daycare program at the Jewish community center. I said, Ann, that is wonderful.
And I'm so glad to hear my youngest child graduated from college this week. So it was very soon in coming. And it alienated me somewhat. I mean, we kept our affiliation, and my children went to religious school, except when they were going to a unitarian church where they really felt more home from the acceptance point of view. After I sold my business, I had been on the ladder to be president of Temple Sisterhood when my husband died and that was something I just could not continue. The first place I went back to was Temple Manual and I went back on the board and did some things.
It was It was hard to pick up the pieces after that, I think. I'm still involved with NCJW. If they call me, whatever they want me to do, I do and I really enjoy it and I like it. Most of my civic work and most of my volunteer work has really been out in the secular world And as I said I don know that it so much that the Jewish community changed which it did as that my life changed And let's talk about some of your working experiences. Which client do you remember most as being most interesting to you or most challenging? The most interesting, I had two that were the most interesting and the most challenging.
One was my first, and that was One Main Place, which was a huge and very important development in Dallas. And how I acquired that client was very interesting. I knocked on doors and been told no for every reason you can imagine. One company told me at the age of 35 that I was too old. In those days they had no walls so they could say, we're not going to hire you because you're a woman or we're not going to hire you because you knew exactly why you didn't have to take it personally. But I found someone at the Dallas Texas Corporation, a man there, who said, I need to hire somebody not to work for me but to be a freelancer, which is how I really got into being an entrepreneur.
and I'm willing to train you if you're willing to learn. And I said, my mind is a clean slate. It'll take me less time to learn. Would you want to teach me then? It'll take somebody else to unlearn the way they did it and relearn the way you want it done. And he was wonderful. He said, I'll help you find clients. And he did. And as a result, I have a lot of clients who are involved in commercial real estate development, engineering, architecture, that kind of thing. It was an exciting project and it was an exciting time to be in Dallas and it was wonderful and I pretty much had free reign to develop a program from the ground up.
It's still important to me and he is still a very good friend of mine. But the one I think I had the most fun with was Miller Brewing Company and Philip Morris. They called, they were looking for someone. they had this big plant in Fort Worth to do some PR community relations with. Nobody even knew they were there and they were the second largest employer in Fort Worth. They said we need a community relations program, we need to get involved. Our plant city was a 50 mile radius of Fort Worth so you can imagine it involved Arlington and Grand Prairie. In all directions and everything.
And they said, do it. And so then they had money to spend and they wanted to spend it wisely and they wanted to spend it doing good. And so I was able to develop programs with all sorts of minority groups which were very important to them. And as I said, it was just, you just do what it is you think that we need. And I love the people that I worked with, and I always think back with great fondness about that, and particularly the people that I reported to who are still my very close friends. One question that probably comes out of nowhere, but Ruth and I talked about it on the way over.
Are you related to Freida Stern from the Freida Stern way? I never, you know, I always knew I wasn't, but I never, everyone always said, you know, people would call me, I knew a lot of reporters, and one morning Dick Hill, who was on the radio, called me at six o'clock in the morning, he said, I want to talk to you on air, and I said, about what? He said, I want you to tell me how you got his street named after you. I said, it's too early in the morning, called John Stimmons and asked him that question. And actually, I never knew who that was named for until I answered for the same man.
So, of course, told me one day I finally found out who Frida Stern was. That was Gerald Frankel's mother-in-law. And he gave a contribution to the center and they named the street after him. But it spelled the same way I spelled my name. My children knew it wasn't instantly because no one calls me Frida. Everybody calls me Frida Gayle. We knew it wasn't named after you, but we thought it may have been a relative. Well, I learned from a friend of mine named Dorothy Kimpler. She said, if you don't want to answer a question, just smile your Mona Lisa, smile and shrug your shoulders. And you don't really have to laugh.
So when people ask me who was named after me, that's what I do. Tell us about your family today. Do you have grandchildren? I have four grandchildren. and if they moved any further away from me they would fall in different oceans My daughter lives in Chevy Chase Maryland and she has two children Theo who is a junior at Guilford College in North Carolina and Sarah who is named after her grandmother Sarah Soltis is starting in the fall and will be going to a school called Juniata in Pennsylvania Have you ever heard of it I haven't. I haven't. I'm from Pennsylvania. You have? I've heard of you.
Oh, you're the first person I've ever found. And my son Harley, who lives in Seattle, has a daughter who's a senior in Los Angeles Arts Center, and a son, Wiley, who is 10 years old. And the only child that I have who lives in Dallas, my oldest son, Richard, naturally doesn't have any children. and so that's where they all are. They're unfortunately farther geographically away from me than I would like for them to be. Right. And let's talk about a typical day now that you're retired. What do you do? Oh, it's exhausting. I keep telling people don't retire, it's a very bad idea. First thing, when I get up in the morning, I go over to the Landry Center and either swim or go to an exercise class for an hour.
Monday is my freest day and I stay home and try to get the desk cleaned off. Tuesdays I have board meetings, I'm still on board with friends at the Dallas Public Library and Mental Health Association. and I do a few projects for whatever, whatever organization is doing something at the time that needs a press release written or a version written or an invitation written, and I still do a lot of that. I have quilt. I knit. I sew. I don't spend nearly as much time doing those things as I thought I would be doing at this stage in my life. I very much enjoy music, so I go to the symphony and a lot of other musical things.
I enjoy the theater, and I do that. I have a wonderful group of friends, some of them live in my building with me. I have a next-door neighbor, Ann Foles, who I've known since I was in high school, which is kind of nice. And in the summer I leave in the middle of June and I go to Aspen and I don come home until it gets cool which sometimes is about the middle of October And that wonderful That is an absolutely incredible life We started doing that when my second husband was alive The first summer we were married, he said, you know, I've never been to Colorado.
And I said, you have to correct that right away. and we spent a weekend in Aspen and he absolutely fell in love with the music festival and hiking and the outdoors and beauty and climate and everything else and we went there at least for a few days every summer throughout his whole life and in the last few years he was lovely and started spending the summers there. Tell us about him. Oh, well he was wonderful actually. I was single for a long time and I had known Ed for a long time he and his wife were very close friends of mine and his sister-in-law Shirley Davalosky was one of my very close friends and actually we tell the story that he was always crazy about my youngest son and they were very close and after he divorced, I said the reason he married me was he really wanted Harley, but he couldn't have him without me.
It was a package deal. So, and he came into our lives at a time that would probably be pretty difficult age-wise for my kids. Harley was 13, 14. Karen had just started college. Richard was here but not in college at the time. He dropped in and out of college a lot. And they adored Ed. And I always remember that the first Mother's Day after we got married, I got a Mother's Day card from Karen that said, you know, we hung in there with you all these years because we always knew you were going to do something good and you finally did you gave us it.
So he was probably as different from me personality wise as anybody but we loved the same things, music and reading and the outdoors and he at the time when we got married he was a manufacturer rep for texture and then he left there and And after a couple of years he became executive director of North Texas Taping and Radio for the Blind where he had done volunteer work since the day it opened. He had a beautiful voice, and he taped books for us, for my grandchildren, for me. It was wonderful, and we had this wonderful, wonderful library of things that he recorded for us. And how long were you together?
Twenty-two years. And what achievement are you most proud of? I don't know that I have a whole lot of achievements. I think getting the kids raised was probably under what were not the most ideal of circumstances. probably that. And I think after that, managing, well that also goes in with raising the children, managing to be able to support them and take care of them and to get them educated. That was my real goal. If I could get them through college I was going to be alright. But I am I'm really proud of the work that I did. I had a very small firm, but it was probably the best in Dallas.
We enjoyed a fine reputation. I really loved the work that I did. I think part of what I used to say is I don't have to get too excited about it because the worst thing that can happen in my business is if one of my clients sells a few fewer products than they might have. Nothing terribly dramatic. I can't do anything really too bad. So it was, there was a kind of a light heartiness about it. We really enjoyed what we did. I don't think anybody dreaded going to work in my office. Thank you so much. Is there anything that we didn't think of that you would like to add?
Well, I'm trying to think. In light of all the people that I know that have been recorded this way, I step back and we were talking about Hortense Sanger and I think now that was a person, that was my, she really was the person, my mentor and the person that I most of all I think that Dallas has been very good to me in many, many ways, and it's been a wonderful and pleasant place to live. I don't think I ever felt any restrictions on me, either as a Jew, as a woman, that it was a place of tremendous opportunity. And I think my father would be proud of me.
I would think so. Thank you very much. Thank you. One other question.