Gerry Beer
Gerry Beer was born in Brooklyn on July 8, 1920, the daughter of a father who was both a doctor and a lawyer and a mother who worked as a legal secretary. Her parents divorced when she was seven, and she grew up with her younger brother in a single-parent household, attending public school in Brooklyn. She met her future husband, Bob Beer, in 1937 on a cruise through the Panama Canal, and chose to attend Barnard College in New York to be closer to him while he studied at the Wharton School in Philadelphia. They married in June 1941. When Bob served in the Navy overseas during World War II, Gerry worked in retailing in New York, training as an assistant millinery buyer.
In 1946 Bob took a position with the firm E. M. Kahn, and the couple moved to Dallas after being warmly welcomed by Lawrence and Ruth Kahn, who introduced them to a circle of young friends. Gerry, who had expected to dislike Texas, fell in love with Dallas and with Ruth Kahn, who became a mentor to her. The Beers raised three sons, Alfred, David, and Joe Allison, and joined Temple Emanu-El, where Gerry, who had little formal Jewish education growing up, deepened her connection to Jewish life through Rabbi Olan's services. She returned to finish her college degree, completing her studies through Barnard in 1965 with coursework taken at SMU.
Gerry became a leading community organizer, crediting Jack Kravitz with teaching her the skills she used throughout her career. She chaired the women's division and campaign of the Jewish Welfare Federation and traveled to Israel on an early Federation mission. Through Temple Emanu-El she helped build the Rhodes Terrace nursery school and day care demonstration project, securing HUD funding for a model child care center. In the 1970s she cofounded and led The Family Place, a shelter for battered women, working as a full-time volunteer for five years. She later helped launch an incest recovery program, cofounded the Dallas Women's Foundation, and assisted the Southwest Family Institute. Her honors included the Margaret Cohn Award, the Zonta Award, and the National Council of Jewish Women's Emma G. Solomon Award.
Full Transcript
Today is Tuesday, December the 21st, 1993. today is Tuesday December the 21st 1993 I'm Rose Biederman of the Dallas Jewish Historical Society and I'm interviewing Mrs. A. Robert Beer Jerry Beer in her home at 65 73 Ridgeview Ridgeview Circle in Dallas and Jerry I would like to start at the beginning where and when were you born I was born in Brooklyn July 8th 1920 and your parents were born in in New York right okay what kind of business was your father in my father was a doctor and also got a law degree my mother was not well my mother had been a legal secretary and but she was essentially a homemaker until I was 10 years old at which time she went out and again became a legal secretary my parents had been divorced when i was seven and my mother was a single parent did you have any brothers or sisters i had a brother who was a year younger than i was and that was all and we lived in brooklyn as kids and you attended school in brooklyn i attended public school in brooklyn And did you go to college or have any...
Yes I did I went to Bonnard College in New York I had really planned to go out of town to Cornell but when I met Bob when I was 17 and he was down in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania I decided it was closer to be in New York and that's how I made the decision to go to college where Bob was is Bob from New York yes he was but he went to school at the Wharton School in in philadelphia and i had met him in 1937 on a cruise through the panama canal oh how romantic it was three young kids or two young kids let's say um so when did you when did you get married we got married in june of 1941.
i went to school at Barnard and then I was at the end of my junior year when Bob and I married and we moved and I moved to Cleveland he had been working there and I stay I was at school until the middle of that year when I when Bob got an offer to go to work in Boston and so we decided to move to Boston I decided I couldn't live by myself in Cleveland much to my family's regret and so I dropped out I was an early dropout at the middle of my June of my senior year I had been going to western reserve to try to get my degree and then i dropped out of school and didn't resume school until 1962.
oh i went back and finished my degree but in the meantime i was out of school and we were living in Boston. So you were married just before the start of World War II. Did the war affect your life? Yeah, very much. How? Bob had gone, we were living in Boston. Bob had not been able to get into the service up to that time because of physical reasons he was classified as 4f because of something with his ears and something with his eyes but he didn't want to get into the service or do something for the war so he tried to enlist and couldn't and so then instead he decided to go in to the war production board he was offered a job with the war production board in washington and we just moved to washington waiting his confirmation unfortunately there was a freeze on civil service jobs at that time and so he never did get into the war production board and then found that he was able finally to get into the Navy as an enlisted man as a CB oh and so we went back to New York to get ready because Bob was going to be going into service it turned out that he was taken down to Camp Perry in Virginia for training for basic training and within six months he was sent overseas to New Guinea and that's where he spent two or three years so what did you do?
well in those days you know I never thought of the idea that I would live alone and independently in 1943 it was about and so I just moved back my mother had an apartment in New York and I moved in with my mother and then I got I went to work at Saks Fifth Avenue as a I started out as a sales girl and then after about three months or so a friend of mine worked in Brooklyn at Abraham and Strauss and I applied for their executive training program and I was taken on and was trained to be an assistant millinery buyer and that what I did all during the time that Bob was overseas it was several years and I had I just lived and so many of my friends did we sort of supported each other and you know wives whose husbands were overseas and I liked being in the retailing business Bob had been a merchantized manager so I was familiar kind of with that world and I lived in New York.
And your mother was working? My mother, no, at that time I think my mother, I don't know that my mother was working at that time. Okay. There was a period when my mother was married for a second time, but that wasn't at that time. But it was a very difficult, stressful time, really, because Bob's father became very ill, and we didn't want to tell Bob while he was overseas and so I was very much involved with my in-laws trying to hold them up and finally Bob was just before the end of the war we arranged for him to have an emergency and he found out about his father's illness and then and had come home and never went back to New Guinea and so that was how I spent the time until So it was sort of before we came to Dallas, we had thought Bob was going to be looking for another job.
Excuse me both. Get my thoughts together too. So when Bob got out of the service he thought he would look for a different job or? Yeah he didn't want to go back to what he was doing in Boston. He wanted to make a change. In the same field? In the same field. would you tell? Bob wanted to make a change and he didn't know, you know, what to do and so at that time he ran an ad in, I think it was the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Anyhow, it was a blind ad and we got a reply from somebody who was representing somebody who was looking for somebody.
I see. Okay. And it turned out that it was Lawrence Kahn who wanted to find somebody to come into the firm. and so the firm being E.M.Cann right and that was how I met Ruth Kahn because when Lawrence was once talking to Bob they wanted us to meet And we were both living in New York at that time. We had already applied for an apartment. Interestingly enough, the apartment was on the street. There was a big housing development going up on the street where I had been born. and it was actually on the site of my grandparents house oh my that we had had an application and we were going to be getting an apartment there but we did have this call about somebody and I remember when I came to the phone and heard the voice who happened to be Lawrence Kahn and I heard it was I groaned and said no any place but not Texas because Texans had acquired a certain reputation in the service you know and here I was a New York girl I had lived in Boston I had lived in Cleveland but the idea of living in Texas was something I just couldn't believe I could do so So Lawrence had been talking to Bob in New York and then he arranged for us to have dinner with his wife.
In Dallas? In New York. Oh, in New York. Okay. And it was at one of these old Jewish clubs, the Harmony Club. It was sort of like a bastion of German Jews. Oh. Bob had come from that kind of background yeah so I should have realized what I was going to meet when he arranged for us to meet Ruth Cannes but I thought she was going to be something like Marjorie Main and I remembered I said to Bob I could just picture her in some print dress and saying sure honey and this is in June so we came to the Harmony Club and this beautiful little woman gets up in a lovely black dress the perfect little back black dress you're supposed to wear in New York in June and holds out her hand and said you must be
Jerry and no trace of the Texas accent just the perfect lady and I really did fall in love with Ruth from the minute I saw her and so they asked us to come down to Texas and just for a week and see how we would like Dallas and they arranged for us to meet young people that they felt would be compatible with us and it couldn't have been nicer and they did arrange for us to know people who all of whom had regrouped it was at a time and so many people were coming back from service and everybody was regrouping and getting you know forming
a whole little circle and that was how we formed our crowd Oh, I see. I see. And, you know, and I did. I just found the Texans were wonderfully hospitable. when we got off the train there was a man by the name of Jake Landau who was waiting to get a taxi and he asked us where we were going and told him well you all don't have one of the show rules to be a rock action okay And so he took us over to the Melrose Hotel where we were supposed to stay, and I couldn't get over it. Here was a stranger just offering to drive us.
Oh, he was not sent to meet you. Oh, no. He was on the train. And he then told us he was related to the Cairns. Oh really? And so, you know, it was just a very nice warm feeling that we had right from the start. And what year was this? This was in 1946. 1946. Ah, it was after the war. Yeah. and it was in June and we had this lovely week where we met the Kahn family and the Brombergs and the Weisbergs because Marie was a sister to Lawrence Kahn and so and their niece Marie Jaffe we called Newfoundland and it just everything fell into place and we decided that we would move and come down here and Ruth rented a little house on Amherst for us over the summer because you couldn't find a place to live in those days.
Right. Uh-huh. And we didn have a car and so another relative Louise Lips was going to be away for the summer and so she said well you can use our car and I couldn get over you know people we hadn even met and Louise had heard about this and so she did arrange to have Walter's car at our disposal and so that was kind of how we started our experience here in Dallas my next question is almost superfluous what was your impression of Dallas I loved it I loved Dallas from the minute I got here and but it's not what you expected oh no no it just proves what stereotypes are And was the summer very hot?
It sure was. It certainly was. And this little cottage on Amherst didn't have anything but an attic fan. And in those days I thought the way I had had a very lonely experience in Cleveland when I lived there. though we had friends who were living there I did find it was difficult for me to make friends this was my first move so and then but I was in Boston it was entirely different because I came to Boston and I met a high school friend of mine and we immediately started to have our lives together and so by the time I got to Dallas Washington was an entirely different time it was during the war and when we were waiting for this confirmation with the war production board we lived in a furnished room no air conditioning hot in the summer it was just awful and
I had, we both had gotten jobs and I was with the research department at the HEC company and Bob was also working and it was a very, it was you know one of these trying times although We did have friends living in Washington and we were young kids and so we just made do but we never really set up housekeeping in Washington as such and then after but by that time I had sort of learned that I was going to have to be the one who would make the overtures if i wanted to make friends i would learn that you had to take the initiative
so there i was in this hot un-air-conditioned house and i was having dinner parties for my new friends and i can remember they couldn't get over it that i was that energetic oh you know people like Bob Strauss and Hortense and Morton Sanger these were all part of the group that we knew because Morton was an executive with the M.Cann and so was Gene Sanger and their friends became and our friends and it was fun but it was hard and then I also became pregnant we didn't have any children at that time I had become pregnant in New York before I left to come to
Dallas and I had a miscarriage and then I came to Dallas and I became pregnant again and I miscarried during that summer so at that point I started to try Dr. Guerrero my obstetrician had said just go ahead and try again and we'll see and I can remember with his Louisiana accent, I'll get you a baby. And I did become pregnant at that time, though I went up to New York because I had an aunt, her young aunt that I was very close to, and she was dying of cancer And my mother was taking care of her and her two little children And so I came up to New York to see my aunt and then found I was pregnant and they wouldn let me come back to Dallas so I stayed in New York until I was in the middle of my pregnancy and then came back to Dallas and picked up my life our oldest son was born in 1947 and I
just became a part of the Dallas world and my involvements were mostly in the Jewish community with the Jewish Welfare Federation well how did what was that due to knowing Morton Sanger or did that just Hortense Sanger I see okay I remember Hortense was working on the publicity she was chairman of the publicity committee of the Federation of campaign and I decided I wanted to work on that and I can remember asking I had said I had such a good time to do this next year and she said I've never heard of anybody asking for a job ahead of time but I have never done
anything like that that I was in New York I didn't realize that you could become a part of a community that was what I liked about Dallas was that you could become active and make changes in the community and well did you were you prompted by your friends or did you feel that this was a little outlet rather than just being a housewife or a mother I wasn't really prompted by my friends I just thought it was wonderful to be doing these kinds of things working within the Federation they different you know things like Jewish Family Service things that I been interested in Okay And
so I took the opportunity Do you think that you would have had that opportunity in New York No. Why? Absolutely not. Why? I think in New York you never really felt that you could make a difference. Is it because Dallas is perhaps a smaller city that an individual could become more involved? I think so. I mean in New York it just never even occurred to me. I was a lot younger too when I was there. But I think also because of the people that were part of my world. Ruth was absolutely, to me, a mentor, Ruth Kan. And I saw this woman who was the chairman of the women's division, who was so involved and yet also involved in the non-Jewish world.
And she became very close to me and took on kind of my care almost. Now Ruth had her own kinds of care and I remember when I was sick and I was having this miscarriage, Ruth would come in and ask what she could do, and it was arranged flowers. Oh, okay. I was thinking, God, I need someone to cook my dinner. And so, but she was just, I never knew anybody who was more charming, more intelligent, and caring. and so she became like not a surrogate mother but almost and then of course it happened that she and my mother became very close friends Oh really Yeah my mother moved down to Texas Oh And when she was about 60 she had married and she was in the process of divorcing and she decided she would come to Dallas and she picked up the Dallas world very easily and lived with us not with us she took an apartment on Emerson but our world was part of her world she was a very charming and a very beautiful woman and so my friends were all taken with my mother and she and Ruth became very close friends traveled together and it was a very nice thing to have happen to an older woman at that point those days I considered 60 older I know that you became very involved in the Jewish Community Center also what...
Jewish Family Service was really... I don't know that I was involved in the Center Rose I think it was Bob... well I know I've seen you... right but I've seen your picture in committees so I assume that you had been active in the center you feel in a small way I don't really remember okay that kind of activity okay I was much more involved in Jewish family service all right so you're you're saying that your main involvement was Federation and at that time and family service what was your involvement with family service Jewish family service well it was the more family education I remember you were involved in those days in sex education trying to get people to be a little more realistic about their attitudes about Family and sex, sexual information.
And we had sort of like seminars on this, bringing people who were knowledgeable to speak on family relationships. It was a time when Bernie Goldstein was the chairman, was the director of the family service. And I was involved with that part of the community. But Emily's family relationships were, I guess, always important to me because my own family life had not been a happy one because of my parents divorce and in those days I was sort of it was unique to have a divorce in the family I was very uncomfortable and sad with this so I always envied people who had complete families and I didn't.
It was just my brother and my mother and me. My relationship with my father had not been a happy one and so I was sort of interested in what makes a happy family. Trying to sponsor that kind of thing. You're speaking about your interest in families and work with Jewish Family Service. I neglected to ask you what your major was in college and perhaps that was in that area or related? Yes, I was a psychology major during the three and a half years that I was in college, but But actually, I went back to school and I did complete my degree. And that was after I had been involved for many, many years in the Jewish community.
And it was the American Jewish Committee You know I just found that there was so much in Dallas that you could become involved in and we did find We were part of the activity of our lives within the American Jewish Committee and so I stayed pretty much in that area And then in 19, toward I think 61 or 62, I was a chairman of the women's division of the federation and also of the campaign. and I had been to Israel and I was went to Israel with the first group of Federation sponsored mission missions and I went with Herman Waldman was the chairman and I was the chairman of the women's I see uh-huh and on the way back we didn't have a very successful campaign I must say I was not I don't know it was a year somehow I don't think we did have as good a result as the Federation has had and I'm not sure why but it was just sometimes it happens.
Anyhow, on our way back from Israel, I was sitting with Jack Kravitz and Bob on the plane, and we had had this campaign, and then we'd been there, and I, of course, the first trip to Israel is always the most exciting and the most moving experience I think that you can have. And I was terribly turned on by Israel and had friends and made friends there and it was wonderful. But I sort of was groping around what was I going to do with myself I had finished as the chairman of the campaign I didn want to stay on for two years I decided I wanted to It was too much involved but actually I sort of felt that the Jewish women should be doing things outside of the community, outside of the Jewish community and my life had been totally in the Jewish community what what prompted your feeling this well maybe getting ahead of myself I think it was I felt we had a responsibility to the city and it may be I I'm not sure Rose that I didn't feel that I needed.
You know, I'm not sure if this was before I was involved in something like Rhodes Terrace, which came from the temple. But I remember saying to Jack, what am I going to do and he said you didn't ever finish college and he said if you had a degree there are a lot of jobs that you could do and I think you ought to go back to school and get that degree that's interesting so at that time I looked into the question of going back to college I had been in Bonnard for three years Western Reserve for six months and so then I said well I'll go to SMU and at this time you had how many children I I had three boys.
They were all teenagers. Oh, okay. And I tried to enroll at SMU, and they told me that I would have to take so many courses in the freshman curriculum basic chemistry or math and I had said I just can do that I know I won be able to pass those classes So I had to go up to New York on a federation meeting, a big federation meeting, and Bob had said to me, you know, So when you left Bonnard, they told you that if you were ever interested in going back to school to contact them. And he said, what? To write a letter? Dear Bonnard, you once offered me this opportunity.
It was a very serious thing, so I took a long time trying to decide what to do. and so I did write a letter and I think it was probably either to the Dean of Admissions or to the head of the Department of Psychology and I got an invitation to come up and I had to meet this man who was head of the Department of Psychology and I told him what had happened to me and why I wanted to go back to school and he said well I certainly think you should it's stupid for you to sit as he put it like a vegetable and not be able to get your degree.
And so he said, I think you should write a letter to the Dean of Admissions, but he said there is going to be certain conditions you're going to ask for. First of all, that you be allowed to take the courses at SMU. Oh, I see. and then that you go back to the curriculum of 1942, which would be when you would have graduated, and also that you wanted to have the oral exam in psychology waived, because you'd never be able to remember. and I think there were four conditions but it was basically to let me take my coursework almost like a correspondence student is that right?
And so I wrote that letter and I got a letter back from the Dean of Admissions who said he had never quite gotten that kind of request, but they would be willing for me to do this. and so I only had to complete the number of courses that I would need for the degree and I had two courses in psychology that I was required to take but the rest I could just pick courses that I wanted to take this is a wonderful arrangement yes it was because I started is out with a course in comparative literature with Lon Tinkle thinking I could start with something maybe to wet my feet and see could I study because there I was with these three kids and a household and I thought well this sounds like something I might be able to handle and it was
the most wonderful course he was a wonderful professor he was he was so marvelously you were very fortunate i was and uh long tinkle did what i always thought Levi Owen did he related classic literature to contemporary problems and i just thought it was so wonderful well that was perfect yeah and of course I really didn't know enough about the sort of the ways things were taught you know these days for instance just the details when I had my first exam I came in looking for a blue book I didn't know you bought and I went rushing down, but a great deal of what I
found, I was able to do well because I brought maturity. Right. And I did bring life experience. Right. And so I did very well I took the History of American Ideas with Paul Bowler which was such a wonderful course and really most of my coursework was fascinating Of course the kids all called me man and treated me with deference, and I almost missed my final exam because I couldn't make contact with my psychology professor to find out when my finals were. And so I finally got in and we sent my transcript right up to Barnard and I got my degree. It only took me three years in 65 from Barnard.
Oh, that's great. And then I really became sort of... Then did you take a paying job? No. I'm not until I went to Lord and Taylor. But I did get... Let me see. After I got out of Bonnard, I did get involved in some of the women's organizations. Now that was in 65? That was in 65. Okay. And I was active in the Temple, in their social action committee, things like that. Have you always been a member of Temple Emanuel? Yeah. But I had never, see, I had never belonged to an organized religious group in New York. Oh, mm-hmm. Bob had belonged to a Reformed temple, Temple Israel, a very old, his family.
In New York. In New York. And we were married by the rabbi of Temple Israel in 1941. and when we got to Dallas we felt we should become affiliated with the temple certainly. Part of it was because our children were going to be born and so we joined the temple and I was I think it was part of it was I was I had never been involved in an organized Jewish group in Brooklyn I said everybody was Jewish so you never really my brother did have a bar mitzvah but I didn't have any I didn't go to Sunday school I never really had any Jewish education and my education began when I met Rabbi Olin and I would listen to him at services and I loved it and I loved the service and I loved the music and my mother came down to Dallas and she sang and she was a member of the choir and to me everything about Temple Emmanuel was gone for I really loved that temple and the temple was also at that time suggesting that the Jewish community of Dallas had been fortunate and had sort of like a debt to pay for their good fortune and they began to look for something that they could do as a way of bettering the Dallas community.
now was this the social action committee that was it was I think Rose and here I am fuzzy okay but I think it was they formed a committee to look and see what it was they could do okay Dallas back for their good fortune and they had Carl Flaxman and Morten Sanger and a group looking for a project. I see. And they finally came to the idea that the children of Dallas from our part of Dallas were able to do well in school because they had had nursery school experience and so they chose a project where they could set up a nursery school for children living in a housing project in order to help these children succeed when they got into public school.
Now was this before Head Start? Yeah, it was, and it was a sort of, it would be a demonstration project, and it would be funded by the temple, not out of the temple budget, but they would ask people to contribute money toward this project which Rabbi Olin gathered the money he was sort of like the fundraiser but the money was to somehow he was to get the money and he always did and they opened up they decided to open this nursery school Rhodes Terrace on a half day basis. Half of the children came in the morning and half came in the afternoon and they would have a snack and then they would have lunch and the children lived in the housing project.
So it was limited to to the Yeah, the Rhodes Terrace families. And I, and they trained volunteers to work in the project, mostly to provide lunches for the children, food for the children. The school had a director and an assistant, and then there were volunteers who came over to help. But I remember we always cooked food in the temple, and I remember Lil Zapruder was always involved in that kind of activity. and it was I worked as a volunteer in the field trip program. They would organize field trips with the children. To me it was such a wonderful demonstration project and I had never had any early childhood education, but I became involved in trying to learn about it.
Well, when we were, I think about, we had been, the project was about four years old when we decided, and I remember it was through a man who was working at SMU, black professor Irving Baker who came over to visit and saw it and he said this is just wonderful really these children should have a full daycare experience just the half day in the morning isn't enough so why don't you think about it opening up a full daycare experience and we did we took the children from breakfast through the end of the bed we used facilities that the Halloween project had had the community building that sort of thing and the temple members made equipment you know did that kind of thing and then we felt we really needed something that would be a better demonstration project more and we needed a better facility and so we began to look into the question of getting money from HUD to build a model daycare center in the middle of a housing project and I became very much involved in that trying to write a proposal that would give us the funds to build this kind of housing project.
I won't go into all the details. It was a wonderful experience for me. You were successful. Yes we did. We got the money for this model daycare building In those days we weren supposed to let anybody know it was going to be for them It was supposed to be used for housing but we did get it because the director of the regional director of HUD felt that we were doing a social program, a social action program of offering training to the mothers to take responsibility for doing things to help their children and getting them involved in the community and it became a model daycare and a model head start type of program.
Is that still a project with Temple? No it isn't. When we got the building we found we couldn't take on the financial responsibility of handling and maintaining the building and so we voted to turn that over to the Dallas Child Care Association and it became part of their association but the temple always provided volunteers and also funds toward it. What is the Child Care Action Committee that you organized in 1973? Do you remember that? I'm sure I organized it, but a group did organize a Child Care Action Committee which was to try and provide better daycare for children throughout the city. I found that in my notes that daycare funding was somehow threatened and this was to address that problem at the time.
Does that ring a bell? I do remember that we were involved with a group of city leaders a group of professionals in the child care area well when there was evidently a crisis with federal regulations regarding daycare public oh yeah well I think you said public daycare in Dallas could have been wiped out Well I think what it was was the it was during the time when they made sort of restrictions that if a mother couldn't work for 30 days they had some arrangement where they contracted with the government would contract the daycare providers for daycare then at the end of 30 days it was no longer available and so people who couldn't jobs in 30 days lost these contracts.
The Rhodes Terrace had one. So we had to place children in different nurseries, you know daycare centers, like labs there are from places like that, in order to get the kids in daycare. and that's when Rose Terrace closed it out. And I think, as I recall, Rose, and I am pretty sketchy about this, our job was attitude condition about daycare. We had this group who was fighting to provide daycare for children, decent daycare, because certainly there were places where people would dump kids that were poorly handled. It's interesting to me your comment that the thinking was that Jewish women needed to get, or Jewish people maybe needed to get involved in the community at large.
yeah Dallas there's a long history of involvement with the Dallas community maybe it was a more of a limited basis especially in nurseries there's always been Jewish women involved in free nurseries in Dallas in non nurseries oh definitely yes well I don think it was just the nurseries I do remember Rabbi Owen saying that he felt through this project Jewish people would have a window into life in the lower income community and I think we also have the feeling that low income children could not do well in the system that we had. We were trying to do it like, and I do remember we felt that Rhodes Terrace would be like a Bank Street College, where there I was, to train educators in how you worked with low-income children.
The battle still is going on. I don't know. Maybe we're getting closer to it, but it's been the same ongoing battle. And we did involve a group of educators like Yvonne Ewell, people like it, who worked on the board of this Institute for Early Childhood Education Center, which is what we called it, to try to develop this model that we have and to have people copy it. So, I don't know, it was an ambitious kind of thing. It was right, what we were trying to do. And we did learn, I felt, what I could do was to bring the skills that I had learned through the Jewish Welfare Federation into how you organize a community.
to do this kind of fundraising, and we were successful in getting that center. And it's still there, and I think it is being used by Head Start as their headquarters now. Well, you're probably a little bit more familiar with the Modest in your own assessment I know that you received the Margaret Cohn award. I honored you the Dallas Association for Education of Young Children honored you with this award and it was I believe your work with the Rhodes Terrace project. well it was you know working with a lot of people to do that and it was my someone someone said that you understood the politics to do these things well I think that was part of what I learned and that I must say I always give credit to get at Travis because Jack taught community organizations it wasn't politics in terms of democratic or you know but the but Jack had this marvelous facility to you couldn't get it one way went around the corner and he got it another way and i think it was Jack who took me who took Annette Strauss, who took Aveline Harrison, we were all contemporaries, all learning to work in the community, and I think we all learned community organization from Gerard.
Very interesting. I know my friend Bernice Walden went back to get her master's degree in the School of Social Work and she took a course in community organization and she went so then you you learned it from Jack and you learned it better than my professor of community education at the School of Social Work and I did of course at that time also go through this thing do I go and do I get a degree, a master's degree in social work, the way so many of my friends were. I felt if I did I would not be able to build Rhodes Terrace And I decided I really didn want to get that letter those letters next to my name I wanted that graduate so I learned it from then and then of course from that was what helped me when it came to the Family Place and how you organized and of what became family place in around 1977.
77 and I believe that this came about through a committee that you were on with NCJW they gave funds to it actually we didn't get into my working at Lord & Taylor I when I decided to leave the non-profit world oh when was this at the end of Rhodes Terrace I had been working at Rhodes Terrace and I decided I would leave that world and I had I remember I didn't know what to do and I was thinking that I I should get a paying job. In those days, the women's movement had come along and said that there was something very denigrating to women for them to work for nothing.
And so, and I had become involved in that kind of thinking, and I remember wanting to know what to do, and Bennett Miller, who was not only a friend but related to Bob, also said to me well i think you ought to get a resume and send it around to all these agencies that you've been involved with and see if you can get a job so i had a hundred copies made of a resume and i started to send them around and somehow oh i know i had heard gordon taylor was opening oh uh-huh and so i I said, well, I used to work in retailing.
I don't want to work, you know, the way I did in merchandising, but maybe I could do something in personnel. So I sent a resume to Lord Taylor his first resume and I got a call from the manager of the store who before they opened interviewed me and said would I work for them in what they called as an executive service manager where I would actually be a glorified floor walker is what it was you were supposed to sort of circulate around and if there was a problem in the store on the floor it was a service manager who was supposed to handle it and smooth things out and i thought that would be fun i'd like and i really wanted to get out i said
i'm tired of this rungy kind of world of the non-profits maybe be good for me to get into another atmosphere and i did go to work for lord and taylor and i stayed there for about three years two or three years at first i just loved it it was such to change and it was it was just a nice thing for me to do and I stayed there until the end of two and a half three years something like that and then I thought you know this really isn't very exciting and interesting the people I used to work with in the nonprofits were much more
intelligent and much more interesting to be with I don't really care about a lot of these people so I got involved instead in doing volunteer work at the Dell at the Women's Center what is the Women's Center was a group that was formed of different women to try to it was more or less a women's liberation kind of thing and it had a very bright cross-section of people who were they did training for women for job training they tried to promote child care they did all of the social things social action things that I used to like And I worked a volunteer bid to do
job counseling And then I got a call from the director one day saying that they were getting a group together to look at it was sort of initiated by the social act by the director of social services of the Salvation Army to see about a shelter for battered women because Carol Frank had found that women would be coming in in the middle of the night, bleeding and battered with their children, and they would need a place to stay, and the Salvation Army shelter, you know, was where they would go. And if the little kids, if the boy was over a certain age, he was taken from the mother, put in the men's dormitory, the women, and it was an awful, awful thing to have happen to children.
So we had a group get-together of people who said they were concerned about this. Some of them came from the Council. The Council of Jewish Women did have a representative. I was there representing the Women's Center. and there were other women from SMU and very it turned out that one of H.L. Hunt's daughters was getting a degree in psychology she wanted to come and so what we did we got together and tried to think of how we could do some sort of program to help battered women was this the domestic violence intervention alliance. We formed a group called DVIA and we were trying to see how we could get a group together to do some.
You really started at the bottom. Yeah. Right. And it was such a wonderfully conglomerate group of people who were professionals, who were college people, who were church people, and organizations like the National Council of Jewish Women, the American Association of University Women, the New We wrote women, Negro women, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful cross section. And we all met and we tried to think of how we could get some sort of support for it. And we wrote a proposal in the very early days, and I remember, well, let me think we had a group there was a group that was trying to do something about this and there was a group within the city on Commission on the Status of Women women, that the city had started, and it lasted for a very short time.
But in that group was William Castleberry, and also John Weston. I'm not sure I remember, but it was a group of women activists. And so we started to meet and to see how we could write a proposal for funds for a shelter for battered women. And Ritzi Weingarten was one of them who was helping write this proposal, and the woman who did the liquid paper. I don't remember her name. But I do remember I got to meet her. She had a foundation. I see And we did submit a proposal to her foundation for funding Yes And what were you going to do with the funding well we were going to find a place or it happened that Joan Weston was on this group and she called Bob and was asking him if he could do someplace where there was a house that battered women could be housed in and their children and i picked up the phone at the same time and i and joan said you ought to do this too because you learned how to do it at roads terrace and you should get into this kind of project and so i did the first thing i said i wanted to know was was there really a problem yeah and she said and i remember talking to vivian castleberry whom i had gotten to know through rose terrace and so i said vivian you know about these things is there a problem and she said the person you should talk to is Louise Roggio, family Laura, because she'll be able to tag you.
And so, I did call Louise, and I asked her if she felt this was a problem. She said, I'll take you to the graves of some of my clients. Oh, my. It is a problem. And so at that point, I asked if I could meet somebody who had been in this situation. And I did meet a young woman. I never, I'll let her, I remember, the Stonley Hotel we met for lunch. and I couldn't believe that this was a battered woman, or had been. Her name was Sandy Hanson. She was a very, she looked like she had gotten it together. And it turned out hers was a very typical story of a girl who married young who never really had any training and who six months after the marriage was being beaten up by her husband, and then felt she could never do anything, she couldn't get out of it, had three children, and even when she got a restraining order, her husband came in, and there was a fight and there was a gun and he shot one of the children to kill him, but the child got shot.
At that point she made up her mind she was going to leave. Somehow she did get out and then she got her life together with temporary jobs and this kind of thing. Anyhow, when I spoke to Sandy I decided I had the time and I had the community organization background and I was going to do something to help. And so that's how we formed this kind of group. And we did write a proposal for $90,000, I think it was. Well, we got, yeah, the city was at that time applying for funds. or taking applications to meet an unmet social need to put money into a project.
And that's how we got our $90,000, our first grant. and we had to use what they called CBIT employees, compensatory education training association or something. We had to take people who were unemployed and put them into jobs. But after we started it, we realized we needed some people who had had more professional expertise, and so we had to go to get funds to pay their salaries, and that's when we got our first professional director and I think we paid in those days and in those days and that was Gail Griswold who was the director of Family Place for many many years Was the first location a house?
The first location we found, Bob found for us, was a house on McKinney that looked like a country house, a rain house, and we had four bedrooms and at times we had 50 people living in that house. And just, I mean, we had to get the funds to have it fixed up we had to have our i mean it had one kitchen you know family kitchen this kind of thing it was just a really uh all you could say was it was habitable and it was safe because we did have a staff and we didn't have security from that staff nobody was to know where it was and we had people and lots of them were my friends after the first money that was put up was i got a group of my friends to give and like a thousand dollars each toward just
giving us money to have an office in bob's office pay for postage you know that kind of thing so we're a lot of nonprofit start and people getting their friends to put money in and we did and we were able to we had smart people working for us uh vivian uh you know people and gail was a wonderful administrator of uh funds she had a background of mba and also counseling to come down here from boston with her husband and so she was very very uh capable in handling this and then we started to think of applying to the United Way and we got Steve
Kahn who used to come over to Rose Terrace to help people. Oh really? Steve taught us how to set up books in the United Way kind of system. And so we were able to come to the United Way, and it was at a time when they hadn't given money to women's causes, and we became a token women's group. They did help. We got funds from them. And Rose Family Place just somehow or other always had the luck of being the cause in the right place at the right time, and it was successful. And then we had, we knew how to do public relations, get publicity, and so we did have a young woman call up who said she'd like to help.
It turned out she had a great deal of money and she put off the money for another location and done there first. Helen Hunt became involved. these kind of people just plowed and it does today I think it's unbelievable what they have done and they've done it right so I was involved with that for five years and then I decided it was time to let somebody else become chairman wasn't the i i was chairman for five years i read that you were a full-time volunteer yeah i loved it i worked 60 hours a week and that was how we got all of our grants from that was why she gave us the money because she said what do you get paid and i told her i didn And so she said if
you are doing this for nothing I will put up this money and she did um and I just loved it I always loved doing that kind of thing well you you certainly must feel a great deal of satisfaction that it turned me off well I felt wonderful when we got there and I was way of funding and I felt there would always be a place for women and their children even though we have this waiting list always and we do have three different programs we have one shelter but there are three different places where women can get help support services so I did feel you
know, it was going to be a permanent thing. There would never be a time like there had been when we started. And that even though there were waiting lyrics, there was some backup for the women. And I, I felt good about it. I never felt quite the way I did about Rhodes Terrace, though. Somehow at Rhodes Terrace, I always felt a closeness to the families there. And they became, some of them became friends. And I could see what had happened and how they had developed. We trained them for jobs and we did, you know, and they really did get out of this kind of cycle at the early days.
Did you ever hear from any of those people? I still didn't. There was one who became very much involved in the executive of the girl, Scaris, Ruby Folsom, beautiful, beautiful woman. And quite, I used to be very, I had a close friendship with Yvonne Newell. You know, I got to know a world that I never, never drank I was known And I didn feel you knew them in New York But here there was a feeling that I could become involved with them as friends And we did. And then after Rhodes, after I finished as chairman of the Family Place, I was again thinking, now what am I going to do?
And I remember Jack Kravitz was working at that time for the Meadows Foundation as kind of an advisor. And so he said, you know, there are a lot of things that you still could be doing. There are things that need to be done. And we have people who come in. and Anna for help with our projects. And so he had a list of them. They asked me to come over and see them, and I worked with them, and I found them. There were arts groups in the 7th and 8th, and then there was one called Incest Recovery. And I said, I'll take that. and so I started working with them to show them how do you organize a project it was for victims of incest it was the very beginning so it was the very beginning yeah there was a young girl who was herself a victim and she got her friends to help her husband was a partner with Hughes and Luce and she was groping around trying to figure out how do you handle building an organization and I took Barbara and I would give her a meter every week and give her an assignment, you know, however you order her as a board, who do you get to be on your board, this kind of thing.
The very basics. Yeah, and from that they developed a very good program of involving people to help them and then enter these support groups the victims of incest And then after that a group of women got together and wanted to think about forming a foundation for women to take more of a position of power in terms of giving money to help other women to accomplish something with their own bodies and they found that women would often give money but they didn't know or they get it. Women ought to get into influencing the corporate world to do more with the money they were earning, to give money.
Women had to learn how to raise money and how do you give money and how do you make yourself heard and that was how the Dallas Women's Foundation was started. We got a group of 35 women together and we decided to form a foundation to give money to women to women's causes where they would be helped to make their lives better to teach them how to handle money to have a raise money how to handle money and how to give money. And that was the beginning of this very, very successful Dallas Women's Foundation. And I was involved on the, you know, as one of the designers with Debbie and with Women Like This, and watched it grow.
And Helen Hunt was involved in math again, and we hired a wonderful administrator, and they have been raising, you know, tremendous amounts of money for this reason. So, that is kind of, I am no longer on the board, but I am, you know, I'm always networking with them, Venkanon. And then I was asked to help with the Southwest Family Institute, which trains people to work with families who have emotional problems. And instead of doing it as therapy with just one member of the family, their whole thrust is that if one member of the family has emotional problems, the whole family has. So they train therapists to do family counseling.
But it's not like a therapist sees one person. They see the family and they have a contract with the school system where children who are I prefer to work with school problems. They get the whole family together and work with them. And that's been interesting. And that's kind of, you know, where I am, Rose. I wish I could be much more active. But the body doesn't work that way. Well I don think you need to give any excuses I want to comment that you did receive in 1980 the Zonta Award for your work with the Family Place and you have also received the Emma G.
Solomon Award from the National Council of Jewish Women I'm sure that was for all of your work in social life I would like to ask you first I guess I should ask you the names of your three sons Yeah, my oldest son, Alfred, lives in Washington. He was born in 1947. And then David was born in 1949. And Joe Allison, or Johnny, was born in 1953. And you have any grandchildren? Yep, I sure do. I have a 14-year-old girl, Emily, and then I have a 6-year-old, her brother, Jamie, James, And then I have Alfred and that is a five-year-old, Jeremy. They live in Washington. And then we have our latest.
David had a baby, his furthest, Alexander Travis Beer. He was an only scooter. He was born October 15. Oh, just these. Oh, how wonderful. I going to ask you some perhaps unrelated questions Did you ever encounter any problems with anti-semitism in Dallas? No, I really didn't. I wasn't prepared for that. I had gone out to look for a house and I remember seeing these signs on the street that said restricted and I thought that meant restricted you know to non-Jews and I said to the agent you know you're showing me these but really I can't live here because I'm Jewish he said we never we don't do that Mrs.
Beer and I I don't think I personally ever did run into anti-Semitism. I can remember I used to go on to a dialogue group with a national conference of Christian and Jews. And we were having this discussion about why Jewish women didn't get involved in school activities, PTA, things like that. And I was very timid about breaking out into anything. And then I said, well, I want to tell you something. You schedule all your activities on Saturday mornings, and my children are going to school. and I said, you know, we lost six million of my people, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let my children be lost for a football game.
And I remember Anita Marcus was in that group they were sort of horrified and she came up to me later and said God I sure I glad you look so blonde when you say that But they took it and we became very good friends and they opened it up But the only time, I mean, it can't even not have, we once went to a group, a discussion group, and somebody said to us, why do you Jews always get in the radical movements? And of course we said, because we suffered, we know. But not really an anti-Semitic. I've never had that feeling. In all your work with various people in all these different organizations, you never felt there was any...
Only I would have... I remember there was a group called Women's Help that was trying to start a shelter, and here I came along and set up this much more extensive group, and I remember one of them saying, oh, she's just a rich Jewish woman who doesn't know what she wants to work for it. You know, that kind of comment, but that's the only thing I personally ever felt. mm-hmm Jerry this has been a most interesting interview I I know we've covered a lot of territory and it's been most interesting I hope we haven't left anything else I'm sure we have but I think it's been most interesting and And you've certainly been a force in our community.
I, for one, am glad you came to Dallas. So am I. And again, I want to thank you so much for letting me come and interview you today. Oh, well, thank you, Rose. I'm very flattered.