Harold Kleinman
Both of Harold Kleinman's parents came from the Poland-Russia region of Eastern Europe, arriving in the great wave of immigration around 1910 or 1911. They did not meet in Europe but came separately with their families and met in Dallas, where both families settled in South Dallas. His father was a well-educated man who had studied at a yeshiva and kept science and physics books in Yiddish; a quiet, academic person, he peddled goods by horse and wagon before opening a dry goods store on Elm Street. His mother worked various jobs, including at a Sears distribution center. His parents married in 1920 and lost two young children to illness before Harold and his sister Shirley were born in 1930 and 1928. The family lived on Peabody Street and belonged to Shearith Israel.
When Harold was nine, his father's business failed and the family moved to McCamey in far West Texas, an oil town, where an uncle helped arrange for them to take over a store previously run by the Steinberg family. As nearly the only Jewish family in town, Harold and his sister continued their Jewish education with their father, who taught them Hebrew and Torah and prepared Harold for his bar mitzvah, held on Rosh Hashanah at the American Legion Hall in Odessa. Harold thrived in his small country high school, becoming valedictorian and class president, then attended the University of Texas, where he completed business school and law school, graduating second in his class. There he met his wife Ruth, from Houston, whom he married in January 1955 during his Army service.
After military assignments in El Paso, Baltimore, New Jersey, Virginia, and San Antonio, Harold found that Houston's major law firms would not hire Jews, one of the few overt antisemitic experiences of his life. He came instead to Dallas in 1956 to join Thompson and Knight, the only firm he ever worked for, eventually serving as managing partner for many years. He and Ruth raised five sons and enjoyed ten grandchildren. Harold devoted himself to civic and Jewish life, helping create the Texas Equal Access to Justice Foundation, chairing the United Way board, and leading the Center for Non-Profit Management. Within the Jewish community he served as president of Temple Emanu-El and of the Jewish Federation of Dallas, and remained active in searches for clergy and in community campaigns.
Full Transcript
carol it is june 6 2002. i'm going to talk with harold kleinman today at his home 11260 leachman drug in dallas texas and i'm ruth andrews carol tell me can you trace your family's arrival in the united states yes i can go back uh three generations wonderful uh including my home both my father's family and my mother's family came from eastern europe uh they were in the mass immigrations into places before world war one they did not meet in europe but came separately with their families and then met here in dallas both came from the poland russian area we've never been quite sure where they were from and neither spoke at
all about their childhood and i don't have much information about that my mother's family came to dallas and with my grandmother and her second husband her first husband having died in europe and there were several children of four with the first husband and four with the second and uh they lived in south alice on broward street and uh their name was wolfe wlf and a number of sisters and brothers and they all grew up on brownie street my father's family uh came in two parts one part ended up in baltimore the other part was diverted in rick owens which is and ended up in dallas
so my father's family is partially in baltimore and partially here in dallas there were a number of those children as well and they also lived in south dallas a little little further south i guess they live on a peabody even stop for a minute we can edit this out what dates did you have i was wonderful a minute why don't you wait when they came back uh both both of my parents families came in 1910 or 11. uh and as i said in the great mass immigration that was taking place at that time and um um all of the uh my aunts and uncles were born in europe none more never born here um and to say they all lived in south dallas my father uh about was it was a young man uh probably 15 or 16 years old he um was the educated person in his family he had gone to the yeshiva and um was quite well educated both religiously and uh and secularly and i have books of his science books and physics books and so forth in yiddish that he used
when he studied in europe and he came here and as did everyone else got a horse and a wagon and peddled the goods between here and ferris and ennis and that's how he set out to make his living it was really a terrible thing for him he wasn't meant at all to be a businessman he was a quiet gentle academic sort of a guy that was really out of place in a commercial world but that's what happened my mother worked was really not educated in europe at all as i think was the custom um she uh and and did not further her education here uh
but she is with her sister's work they were from a rather poor family and uh oh i remember that she did all sorts of things but one thing that stands out in my mind is she worked at the sears distribution center and she said they worked on roller skates when they got an order they had a basket and they would skate around and they'll pick the order and fill it and take it to wherever you wrapped it and sent it and that was one of the jobs that she took and one of my aunts was a seamstress didn't even marcus another was a salesperson neiman
marcus my uncles drifted around and chased oil wells and that's all my mother said uh and uh just did what immigrants had to do at the time um they met uh my parents met and and married in 1920 um and uh about that time my father left the horse and wagon and uh opened a uh what we call the dry goods store on elm street and the 2900 block of elm street i believe that's where deep elm is now and i suspect it's now a tattoo parlor or restaurant or something we looked up the address once and went to see it and i i believe
it was a it's now a restaurant at any rate it was a narrow front long store um they lived in the back for a while and then bought a house at uh 2925 peabody which is in south dallas it's a couple of blocks from the high school from what was then forest avenue high and another three or four blocks from what's that were to become the fairgrounds and and now on that particular location is where the martin luther king center is located between forest avenue and peabody that's that covers the property that was once our home the store on elm street was a dragon store
clothing for the whole family my father worked there helped from time to time um they had two children a boy and a girl in the 20s both of whom unfortunately died um young ages when the little girl was three and a little boy i think was seven from uh from pneumonia and appendicitis there was a tragic thing and from which they somehow went on but i think never recovered um they uh then had a second family my sister was shirley was born in 1928 and i was born in 1930 and of course my first recollections are in our house on peabody my grandmother and two
aunts lived across the street that my mother's family my father's sister and her family lived a few blocks down the street that's where i started not growing up we were members of sheriff israel i have recollections of attending services there mostly playing outside one of my parents were inside because i was quite young and i have you know recollected collections of the neighborhood and and the people who live there my cousins whose name was siegel that's on my father's side had a pharmacy the colonial pharmacy there in south dallas and i remember going there and finding out what that was about i remember going to
our store riding the streetcar the means of transportation that was the streetcar and we rode that to town to uh that's where my father rode to go to work uh my mother also worked in the store and we always had some women in the house to to help raise um and i say i have some some limited recollections of peabody and the families around there and the opening of the state fair and a little bit about dallas but that was during the depression and in the late 30s my father's business failed when i was nine years old we left dallas and moved to a small
town in west texas called mccaine i just continue yes and continue you'll direct me well you're doing beautiful you've answered all the questions i had to ask without asking i'll just perfect yours did you tell us what congregation you went to when you were living on people yes of course you're at this role so israel and where's your did your parents uh participated yeah my my father was was as i indicated quite trained religiously uh and so he was a quite knowledgeable participant and my mother was was less trained as a woman and at that time there was not much of a role for a
woman so the family wasn't wasn't yes i have very little recollection because i said i was nine when we left dallas so i just have an early recollection of that so you can't quite remember since you were playing outside could you tell what the service was like when you were up there not i don't really have a strong recollection of it but i truly don't well how did your family celebrate jewish holidays held we we were observant my mother kept a kosher home and we again i just don't have strong recollections i recall going to the to services particularly on the high holy days i
uh went to hater uh trevor levine's uh hater i remember there was a yellow bus that picked us up and we rode around and finally got to school and had hater i remember other kids throwing rocks at the bus from time to time as we drove through the streets and i remember learning elements of hebrew as a as that as a child and certainly we observed all holidays that you would only serve and there was my family wasn't observing the family what did the bus say on the outside it had hebrew letters on it and i i don't know i mean it was it was
obviously a a a jewish bus yes and uh and once in a while it raised some animosity and we'd hear a clunk and a rock would hit it but by and large we were fine and as i recall the hater was in a home and a house and we were taught i don't have a lot of recollection about that what kind of activities were you interested in as a teenager well i have to uh to skip on then as i said when we were nine we uh my father's business failed and in one element we moved to a small town in west texas which was
called mckamey came he's in far west texas in the general area of midland and odessa but not very close to anything and it was a uh an oil boom town in the 20s uh had a very at that in the 20s in the early 30s in its heyday had a refinery and had a 15 or 20 000 people and just a great deal of activity and one of my uncles who was out chasing his fortune having to land there and that's where he was living so when my father's business failed we he arranged for us to move out to mccainey this is my mother's brother
he arranged for us to move out there and by the store there was uh owned at that time by some people named steinberg jack steinberg who was from dallas and his brother was in the dress manufacturing business i believe and jack and his family were moving back to dallas uh and my family took over that store and moved to mccain so we just switched places with the steinbergs and there's a history about them and they had a son here who uh i guess morris who i guess is passed away perhaps believe he did but anyway that's there's a connection there my uncle was married to
a non-jew and had two children and uh was really the only other uh jewish person in mckinney it was that by the time we moved there it was just before world war ii a town of about 2500 or 3 000 it was primarily an oil town wooden sidewalks hitching posts narrow main street mostly frame houses one main street with a few buildings and that's where my family uh went and it was uh you know looking back on it in hindsight it was it was a huge culture shock to them and they they really gave up a lot to go out there and try to make
a living so that my sister and i could do something and the more i reflect on it the more i appreciate what they did well how long did you live there anyway well i lived there for the rest of my schooling uh we i i was nine at that time i started in the fourth grade went through the school uh as uh the only uh my sister and i were and my two cousins uh were the only people that had any jewish relationship so we we grew up there it was a small school 40 in my graduating class and i just grew up in a
small town it was fabulous i loved it i was well treated never ran into any sort of problem participated in everything jewishly two things happened my father who was was an indicated educator jewishly uh continued the education of my sister and i and he continued to teach us hebrew we read the torah we read it on sunday because the story had to be open on saturday but he taught us our parasha riya sunday um and he prepared me for my bar mitzvah which occurred when i was 13 on rosh hashanah at the american legion hall in odessa texas and that was during world war ii
and there was a military base in odessa between odessa and midland as well as several jewish families in that area and and as as you know all those little towns had one or two jewish families of them so while we were 30 40 50 miles from the nearest towns there was one or two jewish families and they clustered and our our family went to a cluster that met in odessa and we met in the american legion hall and had high holy day services and other holiday services and so that was where my bar mitzvah took place which i read has taught by my father and
had a little wine and cake when it was over and that was a big event i i look back on those years with a very mixed feelings i just i'll tell this morning dope because it i think it really expresses uh we used to ask my father on sunday why we were having to do this study uh excuse me excuse me uh while we were having to study hebrew and study the tour and so forth and he would say well someday sorry he would say someday you'll understand and of course we didn't understand uh we didn't understand uh but now that i do excuse me
i'm sorry now that i do it's too late to thank him but uh that was his uh that was his commitment to the door of the door and he carried it out and now i do understand anyway that's where i grew up went through high school i had got a good solid education in a country high school and uh was a valedictorian of my graduating class president of the senior class just a lot of stuff got some awards it was very nice and uh it was time to do something and at that time you did sort of what parents told you to and what i
was going to do was go to the university of texas which was fine with me since i'd never been anywhere we graduated from high school we were 40 in our class we all cried and we thought we you know the world had come because it was a it was just great it was just absolutely great growing up there yeah you talked about a village raising a child everybody knew you everybody would took the time out to tell you what you were doing right or wrong if they thought you weren't acting right and by the time you got home your mother had heard about it by
name and it was just just really wonderful and so i went to the university of texas i finished school with the university of texas i was there about a week it's really the first time i'd ever been anywhere other than having come back and forth to dallas with my father to markets at that time during the war you uh the merchants came to dallas to the markets and that's when the market center really developed here initially as you know the jobbers and everybody met in the hotels at the southland hotel in the office of the baker and you walk the halls and try to back
this for the store so we would come in so that was that was a scope of my travels we never took vacations we never did much uh when i got to austin i was there i guess about a week or two and i knew i was never going to go back to mckinney and the world just opened up and i realized what was really out there so i went to the university of texas i went to the business school i went in for three years did well and then my fourth year of business school that was my first year of law school and so i
went to law school for the three years so i had six years at the university of texas i did well and graduated second in my class had the usual awards and so forth that go along with that and that's when i met my wife ruth she's from houston she started in school a couple years after me we we met were introduced by mutual friends i had a date uh uh didn't date again for a year had a second date she remembered the first time i don't i'm not sure i did but at any rate we did start going together seriously and um right after i
graduated from law school we became engaged to be married that was in 1954 the korean war was still going on and uh i entered the military service at that time as an enlisted man with a two-year commitment i was stationed first in el paso we had six weeks of basic training we married in january of 1955 during my leave after basic training and took our honeymoon by driving to my next assignment which was in baltimore maryland it was new to both of us as we were driving we started seeing a white out on the sides of the highway and one of us commented it's a
funny time of year for them to be picking cotton but the white kept getting thicker and thicker and of course it was snow and and by the time we got to richmond virginia the ground was just was covered with snow it was beautiful but we we went to baltimore i was stationed at a place called fort hall bird which was a actually it was a spy school the uh my as i mentioned earlier my father's family was from baltimore so my aunts and uncles aunts and uncles and cousins all sort of took us in we stayed initially and i had a little hotel on the
highway but then because everything couldn't find anything that looked decent and and i don't know if you've ever been to baltimore but baltimore in the early 50s was not a real happy place uh we moved in with some of our cousins a young couple that had been married not much longer than we had and we they shared that they're they're flat with us and it became wonderful lifelong friends with them and we were in baltimore just a short time and then i was transferred to fort dix new jersey uh and ruthie moved up there and and because i was on base and she couldn't live
with me she lived with her family her mother's family had was in baltimore in newark and environs in new jersey so she lived with some cousins there and i used to go in on the weekends and we that's how we handled new jersey and then from new jersey we went to fort lee virginia where we stayed a good length of time um and we had our own place there really the first time we'd had our own place um a lot of adventures there won't belabor them but one of them was that i was assigned to the dental corps of being a lawyer but i was
assigned to the dental corps and was there old a month or two when regular army colonel who was a dentist and in charge of that found out i was a lawyer he became infuriated and not at me but at the system and and that day took me literally by hand over to the staff judge advocates office and had me transferred so that i could act as a lawyer rather than the dental technician and and he just couldn't get over how they taken a lawyer and made him a dentist but that was the army so i finished up in there in the uh in the judge
advocate's office doing legal work ruthie worked at the medical college of virginia she's a bacteriologist and she work there so she would commute to richmond every day and i would go to the army in petersburg virginia and we stayed there almost a year and a half then we were transferred to san antonio to poor sam houston and stayed there a short time my father died at that time um and uh my mother continued to live in mukimi uh my sister also died about that same time they died within a year of each other so that left my mother pretty much stranded out in west texas
and me still in the army it came time to get a job i uh ruth was from houston and my first actors were in houston to find a job there i went to a number of places without much result until one of the partners of one of the large firms there told me that frankly that i was not going to be able to get a job in a firm such as what i was looking at because those firms didn't hire jews and that turned out to be the case so i had an opportunity to come to dallas um one of my classmates from the university
of texas had come to work for thompson tonight the firm that i joined and uh had me come in and procured a job here so when i got out of the service so i went then i moved to dallas um it was interesting uh that's probably the first uh and almost the last anti-semitic event that's occurred in my whole life that i'm aware of i mean i'm i'm that's not quite right obviously i'm aware of the holocaust and all that happens behind them that affected me so directly and personally and uh but that was the situation at that time dallas was mixed some of the
firms were open uh some had quotas and some were closed but the houston all the major firms were closed and just as another aside that situation continued just for a short time after that uh and then uh dean paige keaton who was the dean of the university of texas law uh called those firms together and told them that unless they stopped that policy he was not going to permit them to recruit on the university of texas campus so too at the end they did cease to practice so to his credit um he broke that uh up in houston and my cousin from mckamey my uncle's
son was one of the first jewish boys he was five years younger than me first jewish lawyers to be hired by one of those big firms in houston and he later became a very uh leading member of that very large firm so that's how those little threads run and those connections anyway we ended up back in dallas we lived in an apartment over off of lovers lane um my um we was pregnant with our first son at uh and that's bill and he was born here in 1957. uh while we were still living then we moved over here into this area and we've been in this area ever since now that gets me to dallas and with my family we've now we've been had total five boys uh four are married with their ten grandchildren um and uh here i am working for thompson knight what do you want me to do keep going or did you it was time tonight the only law firm you stayed with that law firm yes that's the only only firm i've ever worked for and i'm now retired yes retired a couple of years ago well i know you've been
involved in the jewish community in so many ways especially the jewish federation of dallas and of course the temple manual can you tell us about involvement in these organizations as well as the others be glad to um the the the law firm i joined thompson and i was a was at the time a large law firm uh this 50s it had 23 lawyers it now has over 300 but one of the uh positive things about that firm was that its members had always been heavily involved in community activities and it encouraged and gave you time to do those things um so i was able to
take advantage of that and and uh and direct some of my efforts into into community activities and the couple with that is is is my wife ruth who i have to give credit for she really is the the heart side of our family and her commitment and encouragement and direction had everything to do with my being able to get involved in some of the things that i got involved in her support so that coincidence of home and business that enabled me to do those things did let me do get involved in a lot of things and i i have over the years been involved in
a number of activities both well really professionally and in the general community and in the jewish community um you mean just to talk about some of them uh professionally um you know for what it's worth i um i'll touch that briefly i i did a number of things i was fortunate to have a really great career opportunity with my firm and its growth and in the nature of his clients and his business and i did become the managing partner of that firm and was managing partners for 12 or 15 years which was a was a great honor and there was time a lot was done
i was active in bar activities and professional activities and was the um held a number of positions in the state bar and and became a chairman of the corporation banking and business law section of the bar which which is a large section which lawyers in that field uh operated that's one of several things that i got involved with um one of the best things i got involved with uh is the creation of what was called the uh equal access to justice program in texas that was a program that generated funds to help indigent people in civil cases not not criminal matters the criminal cases were
handled through court appointments and so forth but to enable people without funds to access the civil system and that could be marital work or business work or housing just anything it was very difficult and and the federal government finally established the legal services project which furnished some of that help but but the states started adopting programs and and i was one of the people that initially got involved in the state of texas we tried to get it established by our state legislature and the politics prevented that there's a there still are but at that time were heavy uh groups primarily business groups who really didn't
want poor people to have that kind of representation there were landlords who didn't want tenants to assert their rights as tenants there there were creditors who didn't want the poor people to understand what it meant to be a debtor and so that was we couldn't get that through the legislature but we had a far-sighted supreme court at that time and so they they declared it supreme court declared it and made lawyers eligible for it and that organization was to call that texas equal access to justice foundation and it was designed to raise monies and and it has raised uh well millions and millions of dollars
and still exists and raises eight or ten million dollars a year now and i was the first chairman and i was the chairman of that for several years and that's something with uh as to which i'm quite proud because i think that's a lasting contribution to making our legal system available to more people that's kind of a touching on the professional side in the in the general community i've had been fortunate to be out to be involved in a lot of things and uh many things have come along but a couple of them i've spent a lot of time in the united way uh and
come up through the ranks there and and i've been chairman of the board of united way um which was a peak of that particular activity and something that i'm very proud of i became involved with something called the center for non-profit management which is a management organization that furnishes services to not-for-profits it teaches them to operate better and i became president of that organization and acted as its president and i served on the boards of various community organizations and currently i'm on the board of green hill school it's really my second time i was on it once with one of my son's green hill school
that's right once with one of the sons and now i'm honored in connection with one of my grandchildren well there are four grandchildren there but i'm on that board and now and uh and i'm also um for many years sarah has been involved in the uh board of uh methodist hospitals of dallas which is a two hospital system here um not well known but actually quite quite extensive and i'm the chairman-elect and will be chairman of the board of methodist hospitals starting next year so those are just some of the things in that area but i'll focus now really because of where we are on
some of the jewish activities um i guess i've touched uh one way or another so many of the organizations here and have been on the board of a lot of the jewish organizations the the family service the uh the home the jcc not any of the jewish schools uh i have been involved with temple manuel when we first came to dallas ruth and i joined sheriff israel because her family is a conservative background in houston and my family was conservative background so that was the natural place for us to join and it was fine but the course of events including where you had to sit
at high holy days if you could only afford the kind of a ticket we could afford and some of their attitudes about women bothered us other things bothered us and and then on the other hand the temple uh leave island uh just a superior elect was there and and we became attracted to temple and uh after a few years we moved our main activities over to temple emanuel that would probably be we came to dallas in 56 yeah 56 so that would be in the late 50s we continued our membership at sheriff israel actually over the years and and but became more or less a
contribution because our activities really focused that temple manual so anyway we ended up at temple and became active there as did ruth and and over the years i got involved with and became president of their brotherhood and then i got on the temple board in various committees and uh ultimately became president of the temple and was president for two years which was a great activity uh and uh you know a lot of what happened in that period of time that neither the new temple had been built when we came to dallas it was already opened i think in the early 50s so all of our
activities at temple were at the current location on hillcrest and northwest highway not in the earlier locations and during that time we you know had levi and and jerry and then we had the issues of other rabbis that came and went and difficulties that emerged during that and i was heavily involved in the difficulties that existed when both jack bemporad and jerry klein contact us call rabbis my own feeling on that is that that we we made a terrible error in weaving the temple and its board of which i was a member um we we didn't have a clear direction the jury thought that he
was entitled to be a rabbi levi one didn't designate a successor jerry thought he was entitled to be the successor nobody told him otherwise some hired jack demper and told him he was going to be the head guy we took two good people we brought out the worst in both of them and it was our fault uh and we just garnered them both up maybe we did run both of them but it's a terrible decision because of the indecision of not picking one and saying you're it and going forward but anyway we worked our way through that i was on the search committee that brought
shelly zimmerman here and that was chaired by henry schlinger and shirley pollock he did just a fabulous job and that was that was good and then i was on the search committee that ultimately hired david stern to be our current uh chief rabbi and i'm on the search committee now to look for a cantor which is another exciting activity that's going on at temple emanuel so although my presidency is over i'm still involved in a number of things i've also became heavily involved in the jewish federation maury newberger is the person who got me interested in that got me involved in various activities which i
worked my way through and ultimately became the president of the federation and um and feel that you know we did some good things i know some things i'm proud of is working with ann shakora a wonderful person uh we co-chaired uh the drives uh to to raise money and some of the emergency activities that were necessary in one year we in a special drive raised five or six million dollars working with ann and obviously the whole community but very proud of that and was a great leader and did a lot for the federation that she did for everything she touched and it really a pleasure
to have that opportunity but anyway work my way through the federation and and i'm still a little bit active in it not a lot but i am involved in the community building campaign that's going on now and i'm co-chair of the uh what they call the validation committee of that of that effort that's that's the 10 jewish organizations trying to raise money in a combined capital campaign the committee that i'm involved in looks at the the requests of those organizations and tries to make certain that there is a community need for what they want to raise money for and that the scope of what they
want to do is is reasonable and that is that it fits uh and that there's there's viability there that is that the money is used for those capital purposes that the organization can viably uh continue uh have the funds to operate and so forth so we're involved in that as as is the historical society so that's that's part of the activity um that's a thumbnail let me stop and see what we need to fill in would you like to just tell us i know you've seen many changes in dallas community uh would you like to comment on this but you've been here since 56 right
well um uh of course they're you know people been here multiple generations so they they've seen a lot more change than i have but but the fact is there has been a great deal of change um there's been obviously on a macro basis societal changes economic changes uh community changes world changes all of which affected dallas just like it affected everywhere so i'll kind of focus on the jewish part of it if that's okay i'd say that's several things one i'd say is the the literal growth in number of jews in dallas and their origins let's start with that i think when we first arrived
most people here were born here um we were there what had been an influx after world war ii of people who came to dallas so that that that was here a lot of them servicemen who are stationed here or in the south and who liked it so it came from the east or from the colder areas and the urbanization of the country was really just beginning so there was there were already people who had moved in and come to dallas but but still the community was quite small and clearly led by and totally influenced by people who have been here you know almost as founding
families go back in the late 1800s or certainly early 1900s all the merchants politicians the professionals were old and established people and then they they really ran the community and did it very well there was a huge influx of people from all over the country uh the country was wide open economic times were good people could come here there's room for everybody you could succeed there was a huge inflow of business people visionaries and everything and so that changed the nature of the community it uh it increased uh the influence of jews in the community which is always strong here but but it increased that
it uh multiplied geometrically the number of jewish organizations uh the the congregations initially just got bigger the ones that were here just got bigger but then that proliferated into multiples that we have today of congregations and public relations and service organizations and schools so forth that that all that all grew so i'd say one of the big changes was just the number of jewish people here and the growth of organizations that they associated with another big change i think was change in attitudes that that growth brought with it um uh dallas um as i saw it was a pretty assimilated uh and uh there were
obviously there were jewish organizations and synagogues and so forth but but the jewish people melted in pretty much with everybody else and as the community grew there were as there were more more jews there was more and more associated with each other there's a sort of a second level of rose where where most a lot of people so contacts were mostly with other jewish people as opposed to other people generally and and i think there's sort of a re-segregation almost of of jews it's of some of some others though were totally uh assimilated and and we ran into what i thought was an interesting dichotomy
you had uh simultaneously uh jews who were either getting on the periphery or or uncommitted or leaving judaism or that children and so forth believing judaism and simultaneously other jews were becoming more and more committed to their judaism or judaism as they saw it a lot of it just ritual but anyway whatever they were doing and re-segregating themselves and so you had a people going off in both directions and i think maybe that's happening all over the country i don't know but i see it here and and so uh it's always been amusing to me to see that simultaneously you have both of those things
going on at the same time and you see it even within families uh where one set goes one direction one set goes the other and um leaving less in the middle where i have always planted myself and where i feel most comfortable i've never felt so good about being on the extreme anywhere my own judgment is is that if you stay in them in about the middle ninety percent of anything and and off the ten percent periphery everything will work just fine and most of the problems are the issues and so forth are caused by the by the ten percent that on the periphery and
and so i've always planted myself in the middle now the problem with that is that it's that ten percent that are the visionaries and the great artists and the great professionals and and the troublemakers and the disaffected uh so uh you don't want to really trim them off because if you do you'll you'll find yourself stagnant and uh and lost but but it's it so you gotta have those people they're they're important but they're they're usually not happy because they are working against the the tide and so i admire those people who have those talents but but since i'm not one of them i i
sell them join them on the edge out there but anyway be that as it may i see see those things going on i see the uh the attitudes of the jewish community changing greatly i think this this teaching of sadaka and charity was so deeply ingrained in my parents my observation of their peers survived only partially in my generation and is weakened even more in the next generation i think the pressures of the living and opportunities and so forth have distracted people from thinking of others and and that there is just less of a willingness to devote their themselves to to thinking about and helping
others and more of a tendency of those who do care simply to write a check rather than become personally involved and unfortunately even more of a tendency of them not even to write the check or to make it minimal and non-priority so that the community has a harder harder time to to address issues of those who are in need and and deal with them and i wish we could find a way to re-attract people into giving of themselves or at least of their resources to help others but i see that moving another way and maybe we just warn people out by asking for too much
i don't know and i don't want to generalize because obviously we have very very dedicated and wonderful young people who are totally committed to the same idea or even more so than all of us had but i think their numbers relative numbers are shrinking you have so many projects and things to be proud of could you narrow it to one thing that you're most proud of i don't know i i never articulated it but i always thought in about four spheres uh as to how like my life conducted and one and the paramount was was my family and so i guess if i think i'm
most proud of this my family uh i'm i'm terribly proud and dedicated to ruth she's she's just outstanding and she she gets she should be sitting here she gets the credit because she's the heart of this operation uh she's just a terrific wonderful sensitive intelligent person and it's been encouraging to me and and it's really helped me think clearly on so many things so i'm very proud of that and i'm proud of our children and our daughter-in-laws and grandchildren and family who've been fortunate have a nice family and hopefully uh they're they're all doing okay and are in their own way have some have some
commitments which i will show up some have shown up already uh more so than others but they're all committed and i think that maybe we've transferred some of our commitment to them so family is is one professionally i'm very proud of the association that i've been fortunate enough to make with my law firm which is really has been outstanding in which i was treated so fairly and wonderfully and i'm very appreciative of that and i'm proud of having been involved in the development of this organization that i mentioned earlier that basically helps poor people access the legal system uh i think that was a long
long lasting accomplishment which i'm very proud so that's professionally in the community i'm proud of both my jewish and my non-jewish activities i've just been lucky enough to have have been able to get involved in a lot of things because over over 50 or 60 years it was time to get involved in a lot of things but you know i like everything i've done very few things that i haven't enjoyed and appreciated some i felt a little bit more than in others it's hard to choose it's hard to choose but i i'm pleased that i've been able to to do some of the things that
my parents imbued me with and maybe done some things that had they been able they would have done themselves i'm happy about that and so you know i don't know i'm pretty happy with things i'm wonderful i'm still worried about my kids and grandkids i'm still worried about the world i'm so worried about poor people and i i look back and wonder after after all this time flying the air whether we're really any better off for all the effort that's gone into social issues whether we're any better off today than we were 50 years ago i don't know that single issue that's when i reflect
on it they weren't any better off maybe seniors are better off i think women certainly are better off in the sense of their rightful place and recognition i think minorities are as well uh but in both instances we've got so much more to do so and we're still so far behind that uh i'm in trouble you know i think we're just on the road we're gonna take we'll stop talking one last question you certainly have contributed so much to make it a better world could you possibly tell us who are your role models um well you know certainly my father's mother and ruthie um i
uh i have focused on on people in the community that have influenced me i've always you know i don't know why i had an affinity to people like murray memphis for example or erwin donsky bernie shane and fanny i didn't have the privilege of knowing jake feldman or julia sheps or fred florence but those are names that are role models to me um i i they're there there are people who uh god bless you who you know did very well from an economic standpoint but didn't let that distract them at all from caring about others and stepping up and doing what it took to make
it right and in doing so not grudgingly but actively and so when they ask you to join them there's no way to tell them no and there there's a whole cadre of people of that generation that i've always admired because they've taken the good fortune that they had and tried to share it and and tried to lead and never sought any kind of personal aggregation or or anything else there their satisfaction was just seeing it done they had great optimism uh they were the great optimists there you know they came out of world war ii with no way to go but up and and that
was always their goal it's just that we can always do better and their optimism has always influenced and so they've been role models um you know teachers have have been role models that who not not not teachers of narrow specifics but teachers of the great scope of the world and what's in it and to open your eyes and look and see and and gather in all that you can and urge others to look even bigger and broader and and and enjoy and appreciate the wonders that that we have people like that have influenced me because i i think it's it is just such a wonderful
place that it's just a shame that so many people for personal reasons or because they have to uh or have to shut that out and become narrow and limited and want to draw others in with them and close the doors all around them i've always thought what a shame that was and i don't want to get off where i shouldn't be here but it's always to me be ashamed that people close their vision or narrow narrow their vision and then try to narrow the visions of others to some cause or or attitude that shuts out the rest of the world so i've always admired people
like that well the dallas jewish historical society really thanks you harold for sharing your time and your life with us today thanks again photographer my ruth and i and our five sons and four daughter-in-laws and 10 grandchildren taken in the park here in dallas let's take this picture here this one on the top this is a picture that's uh of my five sons uh at an early age uh that's the white jacket is bill and then to the left sitting down his lead to his right his mark then the second one sitting down is j and then it's max in the front on the tricycle
and this the bottom picture and then this is of course a later picture of ruth and i and our five sons uh uh bill lee mark j and max taking in our home okay you