Gerald Ray
Gerald Ray came from a family shaped by very different beginnings. His father, Joe Ray, was born in Colorado, while his mother, Elizabeth, was born in Odessa, Russia, and survived the pogroms of her childhood, protected once by a Christian family who placed a cross in their window. She reached Ellis Island around age thirteen, traveling alone, and made her way through Chicago to Dallas to care for her ailing father, who suffered from tuberculosis. Working as a seamstress, she sent what pennies she could to bring the rest of the family, including her mother Molly, out of Europe. Joe and Elizabeth met and married in Dallas, and raised Gerald and his three sisters.
Gerald lived his whole life in Dallas, born at St. Paul Hospital and raised briefly in South Dallas on Forest Boulevard before the family moved north when he was young, eventually building a beautiful home on Hanover Street. His father was a hard-working entrepreneur with a fifth-grade education but great foresight, especially in real estate, and ran ventures including wall-box music machines in restaurant booths, a movie house near Arcadia, and a liquor store. Gerald attended University Park elementary school, walking there with his friend Harold, and graduated from Highland Park High School, where the two were known for their pranks.
At Texas A and M, one of few Jewish students, Gerald endured the demanding cadet life and came to treasure the camaraderie and respect he found there, an affection that only deepened over the years. He served as an Air Force pilot, earning his wings, then pursued a graduate finance degree at Wharton before returning to Dallas partly to be near his widowed mother. He built a successful career in investment banking and finance. Married since July 12, 1959, he and his wife raised a daughter, Julie, and a son, Joe, and have several grandchildren. The family belonged to Temple Emanu-El, and Gerald credits mentors, friends, and Texas A and M among his greatest influences.
Full Transcript
today is april 13 19 2012. i am talking to gerald ray in his office i'm nancy enderman and the videographer is ruth anders good morning gerald good morning i i've we've already heard some of your background it's amazing so this is going to be fun tell me a little bit about yourself as far as where you grew up and how long you've lived in dallas well that those that's easy um i've lived in dallas all of my life i was born here born at saint paul hospital i'm told i don't recollect that but uh let's told that and uh i come from a family of three sisters who at this time
thank the lord they're all with us and of course mother and daddy what what no joe ray and elizabeth becko your children and uh i've got children now i've got a daughter named julie hills and her husband is david fields and we've got two grandchildren from them elizabeth and andrew and then i have a son named joe ray his wife is alison ray and they have given us three girls katie becca and lexi and that order and so i've spent my whole entire life in dallas grew up in mostly in north dallas although we did live in south dallas very briefly i was probably about
seven years old when uh the folks decided to move north which was a big deal back then um where what street in south dallas we lived on which is now mlk we lived on forest boulevard and [Music] then i lived next door to my cousins and my aunt uncle your cousin yes well they passed away unfortunately uh you may have known them know gail ray and gloria ray and they were twins they too had been married and gloria and her husband both have passed away gail my cousin his wife still lives here in dallas and her name is janie ray it was jd rutledge and
she's quite active at the temple as well as her parents have been for years your parents were your parents born here well daddy was uh daddy actually was born in colorado so when you say here uh i will presume that you mean united states so daddy was was a citizen of the country and mother was not mother was born in odessa russia and uh she finally had uh made it to the united states and at that time and she tells the stories and as uh it somewhat briefed you a little bit earlier she had a exceptional mind for history and would often talk about the
pogroms that would come into these small russian villages particularly odessa yes and she told me that if it were not for a particular christian family that good probability she wouldn't have lived because what they would do is put a cross in the window and then the cossacks they would just bypass the house so i don't care to tell you exactly how long that lasts because actually mother got to new york when she was about 13 years old with her this whole thing more interesting aspect i think of her life you know they just put a tag on her and sent her to new york and
she got to new york and uh by the good grace of god uh she landed and they let her stay because back then uh if he called mother at least this is according to mother and i have read about the hell asylum because of the her one if you coughed or had any signs of any type of malady that could be passed on and they just sent you right back so he she got here and my favorite uh one of my favorite quips was i said mom what was the first thing you remembered about the united states well i thought maybe she would say the
statue of liberty and she said well she said a black person and a banana and i said well that's interesting she said yes i've never seen a black person and a banana we never saw a banana in the desert russia so what they did is they put them in what you'd call today's world holding cages they're like these uh like a jail uses to hold prisoners all immigrants yes and they would just leave you there until someone came and claimed to sort of speak here like bags and baggages if you will so they gave mother a banana to eat she said that of course everybody
laughed at her because she just started trying to eat it with a skid and a hole and that didn't work too well so an uncle came and got her and then from there she spent um just a few months actually into chicago and then came to dallas because her father was here but her father was very ill with tuberculosis and back in those days there was no cure for tb and it's amazing she hadn't contracted the disease but she didn't and she took care of them she didn't keep in mind now you're talking about a 13 year old girl let me backtrack your father had
tv not my father oh your uncle her mother's father yeah oh okay okay mother's daughter okay uh he had tb and then they got together here in dallas and mother took care of them she worked as a seamstress at 13. like she was an unbelievable sister i you cannot believe she made all the girls dresses and still uh julie's got some of her clothes and and drapes and bread spreads and everything she was extremely talented tell me her name elizabeth and her last name at the time elizabeth and uh so um and your uncle was back yeah and so that's essentially what she did as a child and then my grandmother molly which was mother's mother was still in europe because she had to get the rest of her family out of there and so mother made a few pennies a week and i don't to this
day i don't understand how they did it god bless them but they did and she would send whatever she made and live with her father try to take care of him with this horrible contagious disease and uh survived in somehow some way which i am a bit uh not real clear but her daddy and her man my father was uh daddy was uh daddy was funny that he was a man of great a lot of laughter and he was from colorado and so of course he thought you know he always called her the greenhorn let me backtrack for women your your mother your mother got
to dallas because your uncle no you're here no because her father her father right i wouldn't yeah no i know because her father was sick okay and and they uh i think what you're getting a bit confused it was the uncle that finally got her from ellis island to her daddy via chicago okay but okay there was a circuitrious round back in those days yeah and i suspect they didn't try first class yeah i um i'm trying to make a direct route to why jews were in dallas texas how they got there and so okay well well that was it that she got here because
of her father being here now i'm told and i'm no historian about jury i can tell you but a little bit that i have read about is a lot of the jewish population came up through galveston right and that's why there's so many jewish uh settlements that i don't know about today's world but just uh back in the 50s let's say where there's a lot of jewish people you where you never would expected tyler and galveston and places like that in houston of course but uh hampstead was a place and you said hempstead i mean it's like nowhere so um but i'm told that a
lot of that was due to the fact that galveston was a major um port if you will yeah and so i suspect that you know the economics the laws of economics work and pulled a lot of people into these at that time dallas certainly was bigger than those other communities and they saw something here so so that's that that that's essentially how uh mom and dad met in dallas how did you what did your father do for a living daddy was great daddy was i think daddy uh i want to tell you this is daddy had about a fifth grade education i believe but he
was a very hard worker uh he had a good mind and in terms of he had a great foresight of of things about where things particularly real estate you know this doesn't sound like a big deal in ninth in 2012 but if this is circa 1945 or 1950 and i had put you on preston road which was a cattle trail as you know and you and he would have said to you nancy one day there's going to be a filling station or there'll be apartment there you said this guys so uh he he had a capacity he was he would have been one of our
highest thing in this as i'm telling the story he would have been one of our great uh speakers that are cooked for a deal because he he had this entrepreneur spirit he had a personality that when he walked in the room he took over the room and he also had which i have tried to tell my grandchildren and others the other thing that i think made daddy uh successful in in what he did he he knew no one was his enemy nobody he didn't care if they were black they didn't care it was green color meant nothing which again today's world is so well yeah
a big deal well it was a big deal this is 1940 in the south in the south and they still had you know restrooms that were segregated you couldn't drink out of the same water fountains and all that and daddy just said oh that's a bunch of hogwash so um so i guess what i'm coming to um his mind was such it was open mind he was not a guy that you could put behind the desk give him an accounting prop or something like that so he just really got into business one thing that i thought he saw and he was right there used to
be a group chain of they were called pig stands and you may remember them they were they were very good they were scattered all over here and they were they were more than just sandwich shops you could go in and get a nice steak and fried chicken but they were called pig steak stands um dr jackson was his man's name that started him he was a true an actual doctor but gave up medicine for the for this idea and he put them out and they were clean and popular and again if you see even any pictures of it you'd see what i'm talking about convertibles
it looks like something out of a 1940 movie you know um people with convertibles and they would have uh some of them they had carryout gals but most of them you walked in you sat down well daddy got the idea to put in boxes by the booths so you used to have a booth let's say seats four or five people and on the wall it was what daddy called it a wall box but it was flush with the wall and you put it back then a nickel i guess you could get here glenn miller all of that it was just fabulous and uh so he
did put him in all those places and he made a nice living out of that and then he got it were you still on forest were you still no young well we were under seven i was about eight or nine then he decided he wanted to get into open up a movie house which he did with his brother the name of the movie house was down by arcadia uh it's really a good-looking place i mean it was nice and again this this doesn't sound like anything to send here today but up until that time time all movies virtually were shown downtown dallas palace majestic tower
melba back that time they had a movie house called the news reel because this world war ii was cooking and so daddy said now i'm gonna put one and um it was you know what if you go down ross it used to be a big sears store going towards greenville it was on towards greenville going down there so he did that and then he opened uh i think he opened a liquor store but he didn't much care about that so he actually was prosperous well yeah i guess when you well he was entrepreneurial you're entrepreneurial and i'm trying to think to characterize him i i
guess in a sense they were it's hard for me to kind of think about what they've did they built a gorgeous home on hanover street and again it's hard for people who don't know dallas or i don't think about the history and that was that was kind of like hitting up it may not have hit the home run but it probably hit a triple and uh it was a beautiful moment and that man that was his he loved he loved beautiful things gerald um what was his uh affiliation with the jewish community did he belong to it he didn't listen i still happen i'm laughing
because my sisters and myself we often reminisce a lot about daddy and in that particular aspect of him of his religious mother was much more religious which i believe was a result of her difficult difficult childhood in russia and being you know essentially an outcast at seven six and seven eight years old over there and i have to can you imagine being 12 years old not being able to talk and you jump aboard a steam ship and throw you in the bottom of a boat with where the animals were and to somehow survive all that and not be affected not rise yeah not be upset
but uh my father he he just he was not a religious man but um and i think sometimes people say this more of a cop-out which i don't intended to be with him they always say well but he was religious well daddy i guess i would say formal religion was not uh important to him yeah well look he was i mean he lived the golden rule oh god i mean it was if i could live if i could live if i could turn out to be half of what he was in only 51 years i figure god has given me a good game plan he
was he was you know i mean he didn't make a big deal about it him and mother i can remember as a little kid you know mother said now joe it's time we've got to go to the temple it's holidays and say oh yeah colin can go through all of that but then the irony of it is since he was such a people person you can't believe what a people person he once he got there he loved it because it carried he was like there were people in that temple not only that he he commanded knight letterman commanded he he commanded their attention i mean
he was like a pied piper because he was funny he was jovial he was not like i'm telling you he was nice to anybody in the world i don't care you could have been black orange you could have been a labor you could have been or whatever how did your mother and father meet i think they went on some kind of date and back then yeah and they had a horse and buggy back then and they lived right sort of passed okay if you're coming into if you're coming down the tollway into akron street have you seen where those bulls are on some space they
live right up in that area there's still a few houses that's exactly where they lived yeah was it instant attraction instantly well according to my father our mother i think it was but daddy was such a kidder and he just killed her unmerciful with her accent oh my gosh he says i got the only green greenhorn in the county and all of that yeah yeah but he was he wasn't he was a great cat believe me i should be so good yeah yeah well i know where you moved hannover i pass it every day every single day and of course that was uh right at
the beginning of world war ii and so my sisters and myself and daddy and mother we all lived there and even though my sisters had gotten married but the boys had gone off to the military and i don't know how mother did it she's just amazing she was the most amazing person i've ever and she um lived long enough to yeah be an influence on your children yeah well my daughter julie my daughter julie is the not in looks because julie i kid you i said julie you're about the size of a medium-sized dog she's about this high but boy is she tough holy toledo
not me not being strong strong she's gonna have a mean body in her but boy don't if she thinks she's right on on an issue or really believes in something as little as that one is she'll bite you to the nails and she does a tremendous amount of work for the community i'm really proud of her about that she's on the board of temple now and she's just an american jewish family service she teaches at some um school i can't give you the names teaches i think three days a week for a living no it's a public school and we're poor little kids you know
they don't that much so she does that temple she she started this and now it's had it's got its own life cycle actually hurry and elizabeth which is her daughter that touches at brandeis they got the idea of doing a book review for what they call the high house you know you're familiar with it i present where they have these elizabeth calls them challenged people and it started off like most things kind of a nice thing to do but knowing my daughter and my granddaughter you know they made it into a real deal yeah they do a book review they do a part of the
book review they develop crossword puzzles so these unfortunate people can go and do something and i once went one time i had to walk out of the room and about to just burst out crying i just couldn't take it i walked down the hall i couldn't i thought of my god in front in front of elizabeth i can't sit here and just cry like an idiot so i just got up off this was one job there's a half blind barely talked and she'd been in some horrible what the when what what got me is they told me that she was valedictorian or going to be
i think at hill press and she got involved in some kind of horrible car wreck and she's now blind and can barely speak so so you don't have any problems dude um what temple did your father sort of belong to emmanuel emmanuel how old is temple emmanuel well i don't really know it was in existence when we lived in south dallas and it was on a park boulevard i think southport southport on the corner and it even at that time i had been there quite a number of years i want to tell you back to the late 1800s were you bar mitzvah i was which
is an absolute miracle well your mother was a strong woman too yes she was yes she was my poor mother but you know i could get into those stories and you wouldn't believe how i got my message i'll never know i just can't believe it to this day first of all did your father go well and by that time he was deathly ill oh and i mean he just he couldn't have gone he couldn't walk from here to the end of that and so um but i i did it mother schlepped me back and forth this is before the tow away before central before anything
just go down preston road through downtown and finally harwood and then to the south let's turn to your education uh you went to elementary school well no you went maybe a year in south no no actually my education started in north dallas what school went to university park and i lived on hanover street in harold lived on purdue he sure did so and we're talking about harold cookford yes and so this was a bit like tom sawyer we back then of course again you've got to keep saying this sad as it is nobody worried about their children walking to school so i would walk one
block down that green to purdue and harold would be standing at the corner and the two of us would then walk about three more blocks to the university park school which is on lover's lane and captain of course it was much smaller and so that's kind of that was our modus operandi so harold cooper he how how did you hook up with them and what a combination you two must have made i don't know we just stayed friends yeah um you know you go through junior high and we did that and then we course in high school and oh my gosh what extracurricular activities did
you do other than setting fires oh well what with harold harrell was the harold was my straight man so one day we were in them and we were in the library and so i got the idea of setting an alarm clock in there and then leaving harold in there so i walk in there and i put the alarm clock i said it should go off in about like 10 minutes where harold was sitting right and then and then i left and then the thing goes on and uh i should remember because i think i gave the lady oh probably knocked off 20 years of her
life she just went crazy she first comes to harold cause she knew we were bloody season where what does your friend do that now said i don't even know what you're talking about [Laughter] the whole thing sounded like a break from what we finally found that so we got ourselves a lot of trouble there and we just stay in trouble i need to see there was always something to do i mean do you know what i mean well come on dallas texas in the 40s and 50s you had to do something to keep yourself interesting remember what precipitated this now this i shouldn't have done
remember the wrangler did you go to highland park i'm from california okay well we used to have a yard guy wore a black cat in a black outfit and he cut the bushes with back then real uh cheers yeah not electric and i had told harold i said throw me your those desk things they were real they would somehow come off because everybody would undo the screws you know for whatever reason so cool and there was no air conditioning out you need to add that there's no air conditioning back then beautiful tall windows with shades but no air conditioning so i yelled to harold to
throw me the desk top which he did and i let it go and it went outside and it messed this guy up about that foot and we got ourselves in some more trouble so we we just stayed like that um this is a question that i ask everybody and i think i already know the answer with you but did you meet up with any anti-semitism at all i feel i feel lucky about that i mean i know that it does exist it did exist and i guess it will exist but and i never ran into it in high school we still go to uh high
school functions i went to one just two weeks ago and uh you know excuse me um didn't i've never had a problem with the bible recollection at a m and i never had a problem in the air force now you know it's kind of a loaded question in the regards that you never know what somebody really thinks you could walk out of the room and the guy says all jerk but as far as ever hearing anyone say anything you know negative or nasty about anybody i i tell you what a m when i think about it is unbelievable when it comes to that because now
again i'm going back into the 50s yeah we're going to go right into your college education because i've seen because you've really been influenced um right you you went to um elementary school university elementary school then from there you went to holland high school graduated yeah and tell us a little bit about your college and your college experience because it's had a tremendous influence in your life i think well well you're you're very observant um i just was at a m with donny as a matter of fact uh donny uh wednesday and uh we we go down there uh we've been asked three times for
the past three years to talk to what they call a fellows group and these are some of their brightest students and the man who teaches it is a three-star general his name is john van olstein when he first called um he called these because he said ray and i said general van gaal yes sir so i want you and zell to come down here and talk to my group on uh leadership and whatever and i said general we'll be there but i said it's it's a little bit of an oxymoron to think that here you are a three-star general and you want us but abbott
and lou costello to come down and talk about leadership and he said no no the kids really like to hear from you guys so um getting back to your question about a m yeah it it and this is i guess why i even told you that a little bit uh one of the one of the students and there was there's about 35 of them just this wednesday when i was there said to me just virtually what you said you know like mr wright a m absolutely you can tell really had a an impact on you or worse to that effect or special meaning to you
and my response was yes and dad does to this day have a great deal in fact if the truth of the matter aside from this office the hangar where the airplane is and it gets home where i just go and regroup so to speak uh a m is where i am what got you there all the jews were going to the university in texas there was no jew yeah except for donald sale donnie was there what did i say was harold was there well when i say there was none that's been yeah dishonest yeah uh there was few maybe 75 of us but that spread
out out of four classes you know freshmen sophomores you know et cetera and your classes are not where they're all bunched up so you could go forever not see another jewish kid but you're but you were interested in service of military service i suppose i think i think i would answer you this way maybe two ways i think i'd have to say to you my interest in a m today is predicated on something different than my interest was oh gosh half a century ago what a m i think did now while you're doing it i want to be as the former president of ours used
to say i want to be perfectly clear about this it was miserable there's no fun to it you don't want to have fun until you're about your junior year there your freshman and sophomore year is not your time you're restricted you can't do this you got a yes or no sir i mean and if you're not used to all of that which no one else is you just have to accept it and and that's the rules and if you don't like it as far as they're concerned about they don't want it so i think to answer your question it's more of a work in progress
than an immediate love affair it's you know and i think that's a pretty good way of thinking of it but you stuck it up yes but i stuck it out because i i'm sort of like that i mean i figure somebody else can do it providing i want to do it now but if someone else can do it i'm going to do it providing i want to do it so i did stick it out and with all of the regulations and the core uh traditions that call for a lot of that you still have fun i mean you still there's still to it and i
think what you learn or what i learned is the camaraderie of people and that respect which i believe in uh for we had guys there that literally came off of farms and yet we also had guys there that some of their parents were the richest bartel zachary is a good case in point cartel zachary father started zachary engineering and they do these enormous dams i mean all over the world i mean you name it it was like the cooley dam and those kind of places or that massive undertaking and bartel was in my class down there and i tell this story to myself because she
was out in naive yards as a kid so he invited me to go to san for thanksgiving i said bartel i don't have a car i can't get to thanksgiving and get back to the campus you can't wander in and off that campus like you could at this you let's say you gotta be there at certain hours and he said no i don't want i want you to come in and i want you to meet your mom my father to meet you and voila and so the more i thought about it i said well a few days went by and i told him i said
bartel i could go i could get a pass to leave with campus if i could get a ride oh he said is that your problem i said yeah he said well and he he didn't mean this he just meant as a fact he said well he said the plane is going to pick me up and so you just come with us so we went there and uh he was kind of like i'm telling you he was like one of the you know the extreme uh individuals but yet you know you had guys most of them were came from agrarian areas dads and moms were just
making it through so it's i thought it was a tremendous i didn't think of it yeah yeah but it did it just really says to you man there's a lot of a lot of different people out there handling different problems different ways did you work when you were in college i didn't work at college but worked in the summers and i had great jobs i worked on a meat packing floor on the killing floor which the first morning i almost died where was this in here here dallas yeah oscar probably oh clinton it was oscar was the black man who killed the they used to
hit him right here with a big old sledgehammer and then my job then they take a uh oh it was like a chain put it around the back leg hoist is what the word i was thinking about and hoist them up and then they slipped and all the stuff came out and then my job was to get all the stuff and take it to a chilling floor so i did that and i also spend time as a helper for a of all things roofing and if you want to work your little self in the summer and the heat oh my god i thought i never
passed that so i did that and i made some money and then i worked the best job i had was ashburn's ice cream on on a lot of the lovers lane mr did this go towards paying for your education or paying for your spending money uh both but but mother didn't have that you know i i knew it wasn't just that's right your father died yeah so i i i was i think i did maybe i didn't do perfectly about that but i think i was sensitive enough and didn't have a car that's now you know so so there was with a m um you
in this community um you're known as one of the most successful when you've had a most successful career can you just start from the beginning what you did after you graduated and how you've um developed it into this well first of all i thank you for your your kindness i'm not sure it's well that deserved but i appreciate your comments anyway uh well mine was fairly direct after i finished a m all of us had to go into the military that's part barcelona so i chose the air force and this this is a kind of funny story so i've decided if i'm going to the
air i want to fly the airplane if i possibly can i don't want to be in the desk you know in may okay i can do it this is in may right before graduation a m my mother was laying down i can see it like we were talking it's about nine at night i said mom i gotta tell you something what's that i said now you know i'm graduating a m she said i know i know she you know nuts yes i know and i said but here's where the catcher i have to go into the service okay and i've already got my orders before
i even have my diploma and she said so what are you gonna do i said i'm gonna go apply to pilot training and it's dead quiet and she says is that really what you want to do i said yes ma'am she said well if that's really what you want to do then go do it or go try to do it i think was the more exact words so fast forward years after that years after that i was sitting there talking and said mom got one question to ask you remember the time i told you i was going to go to pilot training and you were
just so calm it you didn't seem upset or anything like that i said that's a mystery to me i figured you were gonna give me a real problem about that she said well to be honest with you i figured you'd wash out in about the first two weeks [Applause] a wonderful way for a mother to let you down okay so to fast forward this i go through the air force i get my wings i fly airplanes which is another great exciting venture in my life but then i also wanted to go to graduate school and i contacted a professor his name was stanley kind keim
who was at a m and i told him what i thought i wanted to do in terms of finance i'd had him as a finance professor he was really good and so he i got his letter somewhere he sent me back a list of schools to try to get to get into it and so i had made up my mind well if i could do that then in my head anyway the outline would be okay i'm about to finish my military career although i was honored by the wing commander wanting me to stay in he said that i thought i would have had a great
career but he understood it so i was kind of torn about that but i went on to graduate school and um and then after that i went to work well i went to i went to uh wharton in graduate school finance how old were you um see i was third i would have been 34. and i got up there and it was so demanding particularly the only thing that i think saved me is that the air force training is well it's not academics like academics but it's still academics it's still keeping your mind but the competition is enormous up there and and so it was challenging and uh excuse me but somehow i made it and then i decided to move back to dallas i did have some job offers in new york the mother is by herself now because my sisters had all moved out with her respective husbands and i thought to myself you know she's been a good trooper
this is what's fair if if it's if it's fair so i came back to what went to work for a small investment banking firm here then i actually went to work for sales for several years and did their finance work and then one thing led to the other you know what would you do mine or you know etc snowballed like that and there you are look okay family where'd you meet your wife uh how long have you been married okay been married how did you meet her i met her at the university park swimming pool and she was dating my cousin who is which was
well she's my second cousin martin rachovsky martin rachowski and she um what do you call that jeff was the word was he jailed what is the word yeah it was jettisoned somebody well the other person oh um um stole a stove yeah there's another one but anyway so somehow she she you know uh for whatever reason she says that my uniform at the time i had been only from the united states air force i think she liked those silver wings at the swimming pool how long have you been married how long have we been married or how long does it seem like we've been how
long have you been married well let's see july the 12th 1959. so that's about 27 years i told the guy the other day i said you realize somebody that murdered eight people is just now getting out of the same deal he served the same time uh two minutes okay two minutes uh well i think i know the answer to this question but who have been your greatest role models uh golly that's a great question well you maybe they'd have to ask me are we talking about people i knew and worked with are we talking about political characters well either one but i've been thinking uh friendships relatives okay okay well friend on friendships would need to definitely
be uh donaldson for every kind of reasons that i don't have the time for definitely a role model his father who i was fortunate enough to work around and work for was a role model told donnie this so i'm not i'm telling i worked in a sense for when you think about it worked for him ben lipschi sam bloon jake fellman those were those were really important not not not talking about their wealth now but i'm talking about insight into people wealth of knowledge of people and by the grace of the lord i was fortunate to be around an immersed with them talk to them
even every once in a while they'd ask me what did i think about something and but but the respect and loyalty that they had for other human beings and then i got to tell you quickly because i know you're your machine and then i would simply tell you working with and and staying in touch with texas a m and their the whole system down here the core cadets the business school what they've done um i take great pride in in those kids that take great pride and they go off i'm not arguing whether the war should be or shouldn't that's not even an issue in
my head the issue is that they say yes and they go do their duty to the best that they can do because you're a kick in your very interest