Harriet Gross
Harriet Gross was born in Pittsburgh in 1934, the older of two daughters. Her grandparents were immigrants from Russia and the border regions of Eastern Europe who arrived in the 1890s, settling eventually in Pittsburgh. Her parents met in high school, where they recognized one another because their fathers, a plumber and a fruit and vegetable huckster, had been involved together in the bootleg business during Prohibition. Her father, a multi-talented man, faced antisemitism in engineering and retrained as a physician, later becoming an architectural engineer and doctor. He designed and built the family home in the Squirrel Hill area. Harriet grew up in a mixed neighborhood, attending Roosevelt School, where she contributed to the school newspaper from an early age.
A precocious student who skipped grades, Harriet graduated high school at sixteen and attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she majored in writing with minors in Spanish and social studies. She loved languages and once fought to take three at once in high school. After college she pursued graduate study in social work and married her first husband, whom she met in the program. The couple lived in Washington, DC, and then the Chicago area, including Park Forest, where Harriet raised her children, worked at local newspapers, and became active in integrated housing through the group National Neighbors. Following her divorce, she built a full life as a single mother while continuing to write and teach.
Harriet later married Fred Gross, a widower and longtime friend, and moved to Dallas around 1980. There she served three years as principal of Temple Emanu-El's religious school, taught adult writing and poetry classes at Brookhaven, and pursued a master's degree at UT Dallas. She became a beloved columnist and features writer, contributing to the Dallas Jewish Week, the Senior Voice, and the Dallas Morning News, always insisting she wanted to write rather than edit. Deeply involved in civic, interfaith, and Jewish community life, including the Dallas Jewish Historical Society, she treasured her family and cherished heirlooms passed down from her grandmother. She remained devoted to keeping her extended family connected across generations and distances.
Full Transcript
today is June 16th 2011 my name is Roslyn been jet we are at the home of Harriet gross is Ruth Andrus hi Pittsburgh tell me about your family how did they get to Pittsburgh where did they come from my grandparents were the immigrants my father's parents whom I never knew because they both my mother's mother came from Prudential Russia came from the yellow polo which he said was sometimes hungry sometimes Germany sometimes Austria you had to wake up in the morning and find out which country you lived in that name and they came here in the 1890s and met and married in this country so
all the children were born in this country and did they immediately go to Pittsburgh did they look somewhere else my father's parents came to Pittsburgh in who knows why I never knew enough to ask anybody why my grandparents on my mother's side my grandmother was in Pittsburgh because that's where she had family and my grandfather was in Cleveland where there is a big family still a Ross that was his name Roth and when they married they went to Cleveland and partly Youngstown which is between Pittsburgh and Cleveland lots of Roth's there and my grandmother got sick very sick but there was nothing wrong with her
and the doctor said to my grandfather Dave take your wife back to Pittsburgh she's homesick for her family and that's why she feels the way she does and so they moved to Pittsburgh and they were the only Roth branch to locate in Pittsburgh and she throw rived however you say and then you was your father also from Pittsburgh oh yeah and my parents met in high school they went to the same high school they were in the same year they only recognized each other they did not know each other they never had classes together but they knew each other's father's because my mother's father and
my father's father were in the bootleg business together my mother's father was a plumber so he had the skill and my father's father was a huckster he had the fruit and vegetable cart so he was the distribution who used to leave in the jars and bottles under the fruits and vegetables well they from time to time were arrested prohibition being what it was one time they were in jail at the same time and my parents not knowing each other we're visiting their parents at the same time and so the story goes like this because they knew each other's father's from business visits is that your
dad is that your dad I didn't know you were Jewish and that sealed the deal they got married right after high school my mother went to work and his father who was estranged from his mother mostly because she had no belief in higher education and thought that her son the oldest should go to work and help the two of them my mother and her father-in-law worked and put my father through college and later through Medical School that's how that happened so they got married during the Depression and they got married in 1920 and so you know they were both born in nineteen five now they
couldn't have been it must have been 25 but they got married yes you know 25 because I was born in 34 and people would say to them why don't you have any children - Tiffany told her what a given each other they didn't want any children till he was established in his practice and that's what they did so it was Depression era they did not suffer from the depression financially they suffered from the depression mentally as everybody did my father was frightened of not having enough money always no matter how much he had he was frightened and my mother was always frightened that the shelves
would be empty and she only was comfortable right after she'd done her grocery shopping some of that's an amazing phenomenon I didn't recognize until many years later but I started to have an inkling when I was in high school and I came home from shopping with a new blouse and said hey look at this dad I mean he said it's a while don't you already have a blouse oh oh now I think I understand and you were the oldest child of oldest up to my sister is just a couple of months shy of five years younger than I am so we actually were like two
different generations when kids are that far apart and then I was ahead in school we were never together on anything so we really did not become close until well after we were both married and you were living other family lived in Panama City and right in the city my dad designed and built the house he was an architectural engineer after he graduated he could not get a job because they were not hiring Jews in engineering then he got a job with the Koppers company in Pittsburgh because they forgot to ask he always hated the conference company because later they asked and he told them and
they fired him and that's when he said there's no future unless you are your own boss and my father was a multi-talented genius he really was personality not too good but brain yes and so everybody hunkered down and sent him back to school and he went to West Virginia for his undergraduate work and to Louisville for his medical schooling and at that time you could go in after three years of college so that's what he well he was able to do that without having to go back and get a fourth year of college and where did you go to elementary school Elementary systems don't run
as well as they used to my school was Roosevelt school not named for Franklin named for Theodore it was a very old school and it was K through six it was a beautiful building with a central staircase that branched out to two sides and then came together at a landing and then went up to the second floor down in the basement was the gym in the first floor in the corner was the kindergarten and then the first second and third grades and fourth grades were on the first floor the fifth grades in the sixth grade and the important things were on the second floor the
art room the library and the newspaper now the newspaper was the most important thing we had a school paper to which I contributed from the time I was in kindergarten and the name of our paper was the sahaba s a aged 80 sees all hears all tales named by a big boy in the sixth grade well they had strict rules in our school you could not use the library until you were in 4th grade but I could read when I was in first grade which is why I skipped half the 1st grade so they let me use the library that was nice and you could
not work for the newspaper until you were in fourth and I desperately wanted to work within the newspaper so I was in first grade and the teacher said well you can be our representative you can collect the subscription money and take it to the newspaper so I collected a dime from everybody put it in a little tin box like the cop drop boxes and was allowed out of class during class to take this from the first floor up to the newspaper office and I walked up those stairs and on that landing I dropped the box now I have to tell you people say there's such
a thing as a writer's memory and I have it it's like I'm there today I could live this I dropped the box I looked around what do you do when you're six years old and you I started crying there's nobody there everybody's in classics and all of a sudden my big boy the sixth grade came down the stairs he said why are you crying and I said it's for the newspaper and he said oh then you really don't have to worry because I'm the editor it was like God had come down to help me pick up the money now the story does not end there
it ends a number of years later when I am a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh and having skipped a few more semesters of the school I picked up some time my first day after our register I go to the office of the Pitt news to get a position on the staff what do I have to do see the editor they point me I go over the desk keys work and I said mm-hmm he looks up he looks at me I look at him and we both say the editor he remembered too and he was Myron cope the sports writer who invented the Terrible Towel
in Pittsburgh so that's wonderful it is there was five years between us when we were in grade school but I picked up the time so he was a senior on the paper when I was a freshman in school so a lot of streets are sort of defined by Hills first let's say the location of the street we lived right on one side of the Murray Avenue bridge the Murray Avenue bridge was a dividing line on one side kids went to Roosevelt school and that was a very mixed bag school was a mixed neighborhood on the other side kids went to the Colfax and that was
about a hundred percent Jewish were very close to it but our school was not 100% you wish you had everybody my mother had wanted my father to build a house on the other side because she thought it would be my father and he wanted the view of the law that he selected which was on top of a hill clear sight of the University of Pittsburgh the Cathedral of Learning which is really a gorgeous building and you could see it right across and also at night if you would sit outside our house you could see the glow from the slag heaps burning at the mills you
really could so we lived in this house which was very attractive my dad had designed it there were two he built bought a triple lot built two houses back back they were reverse images of each other different color brick and the other was occupied by a very dear friends of my parents who have no children so they were like aunt and uncle toss our street went down to a Main Street and it came up a hill and then straightened out and on the straight part that's where we roller skated and play games at night all the street games that kids don't play anymore but where
we were this the street branched went to the left and it was like the stopping point Jewish people live below the branch and Italians with above the branch and I found out many years later that this was the pattern of movement in a lot of cities my grandparents homes had been on the old Hill district which was where the Jewish immigrants settled and as the Jews moved out the black community moved in and the where the Jews moved there were already Italians settled so we had Italians up Jews down and it was almost like there was a wall but the wall was broken sometimes when
there was usually a funeral because everybody knew everybody so you would one of my neighbors became the mayor of Pittsburgh an Italian young man by the name of Richard kalachuri who did more for Pittsburgh in his short term because he had a strange fatal disease then a lot of mayor's have done since so but everything was it was good some are somewhere other I had the childish notion that people were either Jewish or English and I've come to learn that a lot of kids had that they equated non-jewish whites with English I have no idea you what my Aunt Rose who was a woman next
door who was I said they were like aunts and uncles and she never had children and she worked for the viewer of mines for the US Bureau of Mines they would have a party every year Christmas for the children and she wants it to take me and my folks said fine and she took me and after I sat on Santa Claus lap and told him I didn't want anything cuz I was Jewish I didn't go to any of the parties anymore and that was that's why it was what was the extent of your family's participation in my grandparents were highly religious in the old way
and they were members on the old Hill district of a small synagogue which was called the Romanian synagogue it was really of the kind of people that were my grandfather's you know mixed up from where their talents were but Romanian was sort of the group name and my grandmother who was Russia but you loved that synagogue they were very very involved with it and then the Jews started moving from the hill district and so the synagogue which was very small bought a house in another area called the East End it's for East End and my grandparents wanted to move with their synagogue where my grandmother
particularly was really important to her this coincided with World War two the move was like the move here north in Dallas after the war the Jews moved north and so did they and the move of the synagogue coincided with my five uncles my mother's five brothers all returning from the war they had served in various branches Army Air Force and Merchant Marine and when they came home they pooled their money and they bought a house for the family they say the family lore says they won the money in gin rummy they were all crackerjack gym players and so am i I learned from them so
I have no reason to doubt that this is true the house cost $6,000 in 1945 my uncle told me like two years ago that he had a new roof put on the house across $9,000 and he said his parents were probably rolling in their graves but my one remaining uncle keeps the house he's never married he lives in the house and it's like a hotel for any family members who come from anywhere we always have a place to stay and the coffee pots always on so that synagogue was their home in the best sense it was two blocks they could walk there for the holidays
which they did none of my uncle's or aunts were religious like their parents but they honored the traditions and the holidays that's about it so my parents they never belonged to a synagogue my father hated sénéchaux hated rabbis he said he had his knuckles crack too many times in Hebrew school and he would have nothing to do it but my mother was Oh butterfly and so she joined the sisterhood of two synagogues and became president but they never were members of a synagogue these were different to them and this was in a different area of the city where we lived called Squirrel Hill anybody who
knows Pittsburgh to the squirrel okay but I went to Sunday school and I and my father used to say the first generation goes away and the second comes back and I find it's true in a lot of families so there was no question that we would be confirmed there was no such thing as puppets for them so we were not his vest and the synagogue's that my mother was affiliated with one was very Orthodox and the other called itself conservative but it was really like to farad Israel and I was traditional which meant that people sat together because they had to it was in a
house and there wasn't any room to do anything else and it was a small congregation and the Sunday School we all met in the same sanctuary in little groups in different places when you got to be in high school ninth grade a confirmation you got to meet upstairs in the home of the woman who owned the building mrs. Simon and I really said I learned my Judaism in mrs. Simon's kitchen it was a wonderful wonderful experience so my other family my aunts uncles and whatever who remained in the East End neighborhood were big supporters of that congregation but again the shifts over time and within the last ten years the East End Jewish community just moved elsewhere mostly to the suburbs and a few people hung on and they started importing kids for minions and then they said this isn't going to work and my uncle who at that time was 83 was the youngest member of the board and they said we have to give it up so they did they sold the building they can
retain the cemetery which is by the way a gorgeous place and very well whatever they put their money into the cemetery because the whole history that congregation is in that cemetery and they had three tourists and they said we want them to go to places that are first related in some way to our congregation and to lots of children so that the tourists don't have to be moved for another hundred years which is how long and that's how we got one a congregation that sorry here is we have a Roth family Torah which was dedicated in honor of my grandparents by all the children when
they were all living so we had the original cover but we only had one and when I ordered a second one we hit a white one for the High Holidays so I ordered a second one and instead of saying it on Aragua put in memory all on that one so that's we have that now but I was the synagogue aware my sister was a synagogue or we both taught in religious schools and I broke with orthodoxy because I was teaching high school in one of those synagogues and I was wanting to teach comparative religion and the rabbi's said that was fine but you couldn't teach
Reform Judaism I said what i could teach cat vollis's and I could teach her I couldn't eat 3/4 No and I said I also smarted because at that time I had a very good singing voice which unfortunately has been destroyed by surgery over the years but I did a lot of choral work and of course you couldn't sing in the choir because it was only boys and you couldn't read anything and you couldn't go on the Bema I said this is you're losing a lot of talent and I left so that's up I could have been a leader in the movement except I wasn't pushy
enough but did your family celebrate Jewish holidays oh yeah but not in my house the celebration was we went to book in Sadie's my grandmother would come always on Hanukkah and give us pennies always shiny pennies for the guilt and we would play dreidel with boogie but all the holidays were really spent there and then as they got a little older my aunt's will live two doors away from us with her family and so we would have some family dinners there for holidays not so much in our house because our I told you Pittsburgh is built on Hills my dad wanted the view many streets
in burg the houses on one side back a hill and you have to go up to get to them the house is on the other side or on the top of the hill going down and they are street level ours was way up and you got to be hard for some people to climb those stairs so we would frequently go but yes we celebrated we did not regularly light candles on Shabbat this was not my mother's thing it was not a kosher house as mine is not a kosher house I don't change dishes neither did my mother but she would only buy kosher stuff but
then she mixed it up that was she wanted to be able to have her mother to come over and eat at our house and she wouldn't have done it if there was non kosher stuff in the house so that worked out but it's interesting that they were the typical I think of the first generation in America Jews who were looking to be more American than Jewish and they weren't tell us about your high school experiences high school Oh high school the high school drew from it was very large it was 7 through 12 at junior high and high school in one building and at the
time after the war I started there during that time there was an annex there was a veteran's school there and they would never do that today because they would never keep so his young man with all those teenage girls but nobody seemed to think a lot of it then and the guys were all GI Bill and they were ruling serious education a very big school we went from Roosevelt and Colfax and another school three schools fed into the seventh grade and then at the ninth grade more schools fed in from further out in the district it was very large a lot a lot a lot
of Jewish kids and a lot of other kids but they were sort of drowned in a sea of Jewish kids who were very active and very everything we were very much clannish with there were sororities and fraternities and nobody crossed the lines and you were friendly with people but it was first real friendly your real friends were Jewish friends or black friends or friends of whatever church you belong to we were we were integrated in name only and it said I did not make friends with non-jewish people until I went to college it's a very interesting kind of experience I think back on it and
I think that's the reason that I wanted later to move to a really integrated neighborhood I didn't want my kids to grow up like that and that by the way because people ask me or they don't ask they just look why we live here it's because I have a very very long commitment to integrated housing and I've been active with a movement called national neighbors for about 50 years already and when Fred and I got married he had a house up in Richardson but on the in Dallas but in the Richardson School District and he pizza cuz of the school because Michael his sons still
in school and I said as soon as Michael goes we go I cannot live like this it was just all white and uppity and I said I can't live like this I have to live were different people or so we moved here and we've been here ever since what were your interests when you were in high school oh you know that's it's funny I was a terrific student and I loved languages and languages were my thing and that was one of my most interesting high school experiences was I took Latin we had a very set curriculum if you were going to call it she took
two years of Latin and then you took two years of a modern language of your choice if you weren't going to college you didn't have to do that we have very stringent requirements on history math which I hated but I did good and science which I really hated and was able to get by with just a general science class because I convinced them I had no interest in this I was never going anywhere with it and I didn't but I took the two years of Latin and I loved it so when those were over I went on with Latin and picked up Spanish that was
my choice well as I went into my senior year my junior year forty-eight the State of Israel and our school located as it was in a neighborhood with a lot of Jewish decided to offer some conversational he so I signed for my Latin my Spanish and my Hebrew as a I get called to the office you can't do that I said why not they said you can't take three languages I said why not he said nobody's ever taken that I said I could take three languages he said we cannot allow you if to drop one so I said okay I'll drop Latin wouldn't what can
I take there is nothing take a study hall so I went to the study hall and signed in and then I went back to the Latin class and I got no credit for that your Latin but I was in that Latin class and my teacher was devastated what a hoot that was she said I was going to nominate you for Queen Venus the Latin students of Pittsburgh had this thing every year where they organized I said I don't want to be Queen Venus I just want to read the Virgil and we did and it was really good so but up newspaper was very very important
to me I always worked on newspaper grade school and high school but I never wanted to edit I just wanted to write I didn't want to work on yearbook a just like newspaper and then I was involved with music then with I played the piano and so then I played a little pump organ for our Spanish classes so we could sing the less money meet us others that we saw and and I sang in a couple choirs and that was what I did I also took modern dance by the way that was I was not a great dancer although I knew but I was a
choreographer I did good on I took outside lessons modern dance and we have dance programs in high school and my primary reason for signing up with them to begin with was to avoid swimming which you had to do at 8:30 in the morning and I thought oh my god wants to jump it up fully 13 so I sign for dance and it turned out to be did you belong to any Jewish youth groups at that time sorority Jewish Center we are we we met at the Jewish Center that's another part of the the Pittsburgh experience and probably the other cities of that era and that
type there was a gigantic settlement house it was called the Irene Kaufmann settlement it was named in memory of somebody whose family had given a lot of money to help immigrants like my grandparents that's how old it was and it continued on and it gave lessons done in English free milk and lunches for kids all kinds of activities and my youngest aunts my aunt Ricki who used to visit here who died just a couple of years ago and her younger sister my aunt Esther is the only one still living but she is a dementia patient in the Jewish home the two of them were so
active in that settlement and in the programs and because they were both so creative and so athletic and my aunt Esther was a super swimmer which is one of the reasons and her body some stronger than her mind she will probably live for a long time she and my father's brother and another one of my mother's sisters were members of a diving team they were fantastic they did national competitions so I mean and when the Irene Coffman settlement finally gave it up as if there were no Jews there were no immigrants there were no they turned it over to the community very much the way
they did with the synagogue in New York but this wasn't a synagogue they didn't want it not to be used and they turned it over but they pulled out all of the stuff the archives and the Hillman library at the University of Pittsburgh said they wanted that for their historic archives and my two aunts were the ones who went through all the old pictures from the Irene Kauffman's settlement and identified people and told them the stories of what was going on in these plays that they put on and listen I have some rare photos upstairs but no that's really terrific stuff you were very young
when you graduated from high school right I was 16 and I could have been 15 but my father put his foot down he put us with that on a lot of things for better or worse they helped shaped the person I am I sometimes I think about what might have happened otherwise but they were still having midterm graduations and I was in a midterm class I had entered high school in January so I wanted to move ahead and graduate in June he said no because if you do that you won't you'll be 15 he didn't want me to be 15 when I graduate so say
okay so I made up to six months in college I'm like her you know it didn't make any difference I was 19 when I graduated from college but when I was 14 and I was a sophomore in high school 14 I don't know who does IQ testing and testing and who keeps the records on these things I have no idea but the Hutchins came after me I was one of his he wanted me for his project where they were taking kids out of their sophomore year college and taking them to the University of Chicago and seeing how they would do it was something sociological education
and I thought that was great and my father said you're 14 years old and you don't even know how to wash your own socks you're not going 500 miles away to college so I said okay and I had the memory my dad didn't so I think this was lost on him but when I did graduate from college and my father I told you personality now teste yep he said to me so tell me what you learned in college and I said I learned and I couldn't learn how to wash my own socks so I didn't go but years later I went to University of Chicago
I wanted to take some courses in philosophy and I thought that I might go into a degree program so I went through the whole interview but and I'm telling you I was very old to be going into University Chicago at that time and so I was met by this committee in the philosophy department and they didn't know they were whatever and I finally said listen I'm getting out of here I said this is silly I was supposed to come here when I was 14 years old and I finally got here and you're giving me a hard time I do not want to go through this
and I got up and I walked out and they chased me down the hall and they let me come up with something and I took only two classes and one of them was the last course taught by the guy who was the professor in zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance that guy that was written about him he was a son of a but I learned a lot in that class he made us invent a language as a language philosophy of language he made us invent a language don't ever try it while you were a piss what were your interests what did you major in
I I majored in writing that was the first thing they had a fabulous fabulous writing faculty at that time I did not major in journalism they didn't have a major they had courses I took no courses in journalism on the theory that I would go to work for a newspaper and anything I had to know that was mechanical journalism I could learn on the job I wanted to learn writing and a woman by the name of Martha Bowie who has become a legend in journalism education was teaching then and I didn't know and I never took a class from our pleasure a journalism class and
before so I had a writing major and a Spanish minor but I turned out to have enough to have a major in it and another minor in I never did get it straight whether they one thing was called social studies and the other was called something else and it's because one incorporated economics and the other didn't I took a base of course and economics it wasn't for me but I took a great course in psychometrics and I learned to test construction and when I went for a couple of years in the Washington DC area and I didn't drive and I had a small child Gallaudet
College hired me to do test construction and they brought the stuff to me and they picked it up and it was a godsend I loved it well again my father reared his rather Stern him and he said if you're going to college on my money you're gonna get a degree that's practical so yeah and I said I'm really not going on your money it was costing him a hundred always a semester for my school because I had this big scholarship which we shouldn't have needed because other people needed it a lot more but my father really was worried about money so I got the scholarship
anyway he said get your degree in education so I said okay so I took these crummy education courses which were such a waste of time but the payoff was I couldn't belong to Phi Beta Kappa because you had to be in the liberal arts school and not in the School of Education which I had to be to get that degree with the certification and there were two of us just to that the faculty the school and everybody fought Phi Beta Kappa before that we should be admitted and they lost and we lost and the other one is my son's mother-in-law my old friend the two
of us were aced out of Phi Beta Kappa because of anyway so I belonged to so many other on it didn't make any difference it was great school was great three and a half years I was in I was out and then what and then I wanted to go school social work which was payback for you know I am somebody who was very helpful to me many years before and I really I hated teaching when I did my student teaching I said I am NOT gonna do this every day for the rest of my life I hate it occasional class that's fine once a week
that's fine Sunday school I always but I'm not gonna do this I did my student teaching in English and Spanish and it was a great setting and then I taught a demonstration lesson I was offered a job by the Pittsburgh school system and I said I don't want to do this and so I go to graduate school so I applied to Columbia and I was admitted to Columbia and my father had a heart attack you know it just was not unexpected and so I was expected to stay home so I went to graduate school and that's where I met my first husband he was a
student with me I was the only one in our class who had come in right after college the rest at that time were professionals people have been out of the field working in Social Work I'm coming back to get the master's degree I learned a lot more from them than from the instructor and I married one of them it was I didn't like Social Work any better than I liked teaching and it was sort of a way out I said you know I'll get a job and I'll put you through the rest of school and I didn't want that degree anyway I did everything except
a final paper and they didn't like my proposal I proposed that I would create a plan for public relations programs for group work agencies now this was 1955 they told me the field wasn't ready for that yet and I said well you want something original this is original maybe the field will get ready no they wanted me to do something else and I said goodbye so I walked again I speak I'm walking out on things never been when I look back my life is a whole string of things that I never finished so we got married and he finished the second years old which I
hadn't walked out on and I got a job at the newspaper with the Jewish weekly and I loved it that was my home and that lasted a year and 14 15 months after we were married I had my first child and nobody from my background continued working after he had a child unless you had to and if you went to work people thought you had to and he did so I was a stable mother for a while a long walk too long my husband graduated he got a job in the Washington DC in Washington DC we lived in Silver Spring for a couple years and
then he got a job with the Jewish community centers in Chicago that's how I got to Chicago and I did not go to work writing again or wait so many years I did run a program in Chicago through United Cerebral Palsy for adults with cerebral palsy and it was my group work program and I did that because that was only once a week and I could manage with the kids that way and where were you living when Deborah was born like Deborah was born in Chicago she was born at the old Michael Reese Hospital and it was February she's born on Groundhog Day cold they
would not let me take her out I stayed in the hospital eight days it was like a vacation no newborns were going out in that cold not even from the front door to a car that was the year that it never reached zero the whole month of February so anyway eventually we got home and I don't know this to me were like lost years there's just nothing was happening I always felt like I was on my way to somewhere else we lived in Chicago from 19 let's say we left Pittsburgh in the deed I'm trying to get this 156 and have this time and was
really not two years like a year and a half in the DC area and then 57 with a young baby very young we moved to Chicago so without 57 to 63 in the city and I did nothing I don't know how I lived through it except that we had wonderful friends and they really kept me going and we had a babysitting co-op which was full of wonderful people because most of them were affiliated with the Arts in one way or another and that was great and then my husband left the community center during that period to take a job with the group work and of
mental health he worked for a private mental hospital that was trying to do some group work on-site and then he was hired by the state of Illinois to be a group worker at a large State Hospital 7,000 patients it was one of the old-style hospitals at Manteno Illinois manteno is south south south of Chicago he could not commute we decided to move as far south as we could and still be within the Chicago metropolitan area so that we can keep contact with our friends and so that's how we came to park for us and I found a home in part for us and I got
really involved in Mount human relations and community relations stuff there and I went to work the newspaper there and so I had a great life in parcours I had that sound for a long time until my husband I were divorced because we never should've been married in the first place and then I had a lot of years which were just fine I made like three attempts to go back to school and I took courses and they were all strange and I just talked telling you too many things but they are so funny I had done all this group work and all this human relations stuff
and all this whatever and they opened a new University right on our doorstep governor's state university though was at that time the newest in the Illinois system full-scale university right on our back door and I said I'm gonna go I'm gonna get the first master's degree that issue from this University so I went in and I I somebody talked me into this they were having a weekend now remember we're talking about encounter group this was by the Sociology right never having an encounter experience my husband and I by the way divorced because he got involved in the encounter movement and I didn't believe in that
movement and he said this is my life and I said this is a bunch of crap but anyway they're having this thing and they said take this so I said okay so I signed up for this thing and they say you get three credits let me write a paper on your experience in the group the group went from Friday night to Sunday knew okay so I go to the group there are two trainers for the group and one student who is working with one of the trainer's both psychologists I'm the only one who comes with a pillow so I said oh my god these people
don't know what they're getting into but I knew what we're getting by the first mid-morning the young guy who was helping them and had enough and he couldn't stand it and he left and they asked me if I would step in and be their assistant so I said sure when it was over they said would you write your paper on the participant as auxiliary life said I'm not writing any paper I don't want any credits I don't want to have anything to do with this school anymore that was Jenna thing but I did have a lot to do with the school in terms of writing
publicity for various things anyway so my husband I divorced it was the only divorce I ever knew that had to do with therapy when neither of us was in it because he was a great therapist by that time he had left the state hospital system because they were breaking it off and he had gone into a private practice with connections with the city of Chicago where he pioneered a counseling program for people who were being divorced and they were required to take X amount of time of counseling before the divorce was issued so that certain things could be worked out money relationships whatever children here
and his program he did it so when we came to this impasse because he had been to Esalen and he thought that was wonderful I went and I said I thought it was terrible I said you know we need some counseling and he said who this could be counsel what's that I said you're right we got the words that's so I had great life as a single and I weren't my kids were good and everything was fine I always worked near where I lived I said I could have worked in the city I could have had a great job with the daily news in Chicago
and I said if I'm gonna work my tail off I am NOT gonna do it every day and then get on a train and leave it all behind me if I do any good I wanted to be on no altruist I wanted to be where me and my family can benefit from it too so I always worked in the neighborhood and I loved it and I worked in the neighborhood until thread and I decided to get married and Fred was somebody I had known for a very long time because he and my first husband were good friends then there was this whole gang of guys
they were all friends so anyway and Fred had lost his wife he was a widower and and we were both ready to get married again but I took an interim job for the better part of a year with a social service agency in Chicago called Operation able ability based on long experience it was the first agency in the country to work on senior employment when we broke for the change of the tapes you were talking about marrying Fred how did you and he you said you knew him before how did you reconnect what I used to write letters to the wives of all the guys
in this group they had all gone to high school together and then some of them went to college together some of them who were in the Social Work mode were camp counselors together in the summer in fact a couple of them worked at the sunshine camp that's the Eddie Cantor camp in New York for kids with breathing difficulties of various kinds and some of them have gone on to a brilliant careers to work including Paul Glasser who was the Dean of the UT Arlington school from where he made oh yeah anyway he was a this man at our first wedding my first way see Fred
lost his wife she was a novice she was a powder they had a kiln in the basement off the house and she died in the fire and Fred had gone to work and Mike had gone to school and I often think what a horrible thing when you you can never say your goodbyes but so then I wrote to him and then after a number of years because this he came to Chicago on business and he said you know Kay you free for dinner but whatever and we talked and we talked and he sort of said oh yeah okay okay we know each other so well
for so long and so that was I don't know it took we decided a couple of months later that we were really gonna get married no I made plans and that's when I took I left the newspaper because I knew it would be hard to me to disconnect and I took the job with the agency in the loop because that job had a beginning a middle and an end I had to set up a program and when the program was over it was over and that was fine and it timed out so then we got married and the time we got married Fred was already
here in Dallas he after the fire and after making decisions on what was what Fred had been with Xerox for a long time he had set up so you could know how long it with always he set up their market research program he was their first market researcher that was his original field was business market research so he decided that he wanted to go to Los school he'd always wanted to go to law school never went to law school he had a master's in business but he did not go to law school so they rebuilt the house and sold it they didn't want to live
in the house anymore and he started applying to law schools and the one that had the best deal for him was in Buffalo SUNY Buffalo you say that was good because they would still be near the people they knew from in Rochester they had good friends and Rochester so he went to law school and before he did anything he was studying for the New York Bar he got a job offer here in Dallas he had nothing that was law it had to do with marketing and long-range planning and it was an executive position with Liquid Paper so Fred being thinking what the hell is he
going to do in law his agents stage and whatever it took the job and moved to Dallas looked like a good thing bought a house got Mike in school and went to work for liquid paper and then we decided to get married and then we got married and then I came to Dallas and within six months after that six months after that Liquid Paper was purchased by Gillette which was Fred had advised the firm that this was a not a business that was going to continue and if they were smart they would sell it out and they sold it out in time because still left
a lot of money would pay for them and Fred knew that this was gonna washout as computers came in and typewriters and stuff went out anyway so Gillette's in Boston and if Fred wanted to stay with Gillette was we'd have to move to Boston and he'd had enough New York winners and I'd had enough Chicago winners and we said no we're going to stay here we're not gonna bother and then he said I'm gonna do that level at my age because he attempted he and I said why don't you practice law that's what you were going to do he did when he first came down
here he studied and he took the devil's FARC the Texas bar examinee pass up his license to New York and Texas and he said I'm too old to clerk for anybody and I'm too young as an attorney to be any good I don't have the experience so I said but you know a lot of attorneys I'm very good and advice when I don't have to follow so I said ask your friends probably how do you do it what are you doing I said I'll go to work support us will you get established because I'm used to working it don't kill me so people say okay
you know we'll give you a desk in our office and you'll see how things go and we'll kick you an easy client through it and you'll get some experience and that's what happened and that's how I got to be principal of the religious school at Temple Emmanuel for three years because that was an immediate job that was open it was something I could do is something I hated doing the best part of that job for me was writing the weekly bulletin for the teachers but I could do it I knew how to do it I had my certification and as you and my certification from
spiritus I had the credentials I know I got along well with the people I hated every minute of it when proximately what you was not approximate I started I had been teaching conformation there and from baby week I came here an 80 about 82 83 83 84 I taught conformation at Emmanuel is one of the teachers and so I was already there and this was 84 so I did the 84 85 85 86 86 87 school years and then I left and I left when rabbi Zimmerman came because I think neither of us was basically happy with the other ones so I was happy that
I could go and by that time Fred had gone into practice for himself because he had the experience he had the confidence and he said I know business so I can be an attorney for small businesses not be big enough to have an attorney on staff but I could be on a retainer and I can help businesses get started in corporations and whatever well you know what happened about that period of time people started coming to him from bankruptcy to put businesses out of business that was that time in the mid late 80s and that's how Fred became a specialist in bankruptcy it's just one
of those things that happen and he was the first attorney in Texas to be set certified in both the individual and corporate bankruptcy so that's what happened and he said boy it wasn't the specialty he wouldn't show us him but he found out real fast that if you have a specialty like that if that's what you're doing you don't really have time to study up and keep up with anything else that's what it's hard enough the tax laws and the changing of things so he did that until the end of the century when everything was changing you were now beginning everything to be filing online
nobody was going to the courthouse anymore with the papers and he did not want to retool an office with all the new stuff because he said eventually sooner rather than later even want to retire so he just decided to retire at the end of 1999 and if you want the funny everything has a funny story when he his office at the time was in the bank building on the corner of Mockingbird 75 where the Angelica where the Mockingbird station is now there was a bank building at the corner the only thing they've retained from the bank is the parking but he was in that building
so he went to negotiate out of his lease which was running through the following August and he came home shaking his head and said I don't know he said it was too easy they didn't even want any money it's a smart attorney if he had waited a while they would have paid him to get out so this didn't cost anything he just closed up he had just a full-time secretary and some runner type people that didn't need it you know okay Dallas was pretty used to say this is gonna be could be a first-class city in about ten years well we've been here 30 years
and I think it's okay but it was um there was still parts of it that were really contra mout of town up Montfort to see where there had dual farms the black homeowners and whatever and that was the country running right through the city and Fred was rather desperate to move south of LBJ because Hillcrest was under construction widening Hillcrest was a lane at that time and it was just different and during the first year that we were here and we were in the house it was a big house we a lot of room and everybody came all our friends and family came one after
the other a parade to see Dallas he wanted to see Dallas from the movie so we would drive everybody up to Parker to see the ranch and I had this whole array of while people were taking pictures of Dallas I was taking pictures of people taking pictures and I've got the solar array on everybody in our family and our friends up there that's what everybody wanted to see I had never watched TV the whole time I was in park forest and working but TV was in the basement it was a rec room the kids and their friends I never watched it I didn't have time
and I was not even tempted I didn't know anything about Dallas when I came to to Dallas I found out that everybody had a cat named jr. I didn't even know who jr. was by the way I won the TV set that I had in a contest in Washington DC we were there my husband was on my first husband was on his first job we didn't have any money we had a nice little apartment two-bedroom apartment a new baby a dining room table we built out of a flush door and four screw on legs bookcases out of you know the old concrete blocks a couch I bought for $40 in new I think it was made out of orange crepe wood and I enter a contest by default my husband worked for been a prett and washing in DC
a lot of night meetings and I was a bBYO leader and I didn't drive we have one car I was a knight I had to call him sad couldn't come to the meeting because he has to be somewhere else or there's no way I could get there I stayed home and that night I watched TV I did watch TV in Washington and NBC had a program my Earling they did Mayer Lane they ran a contest in Washington and you had to write a hundred words or less about my Erland and I said a hundred they was fifty I wouldn't have bothered but a hundred I
could handle that and I wrote a thing and I want the second prize the first prize was won by some Colonel at the Pentagon it was a huge freezer and the second prize was the first RC a color TV on the market so this was January when it was before January because for January we had the Rose Parade in color and everybody in our building came to see the Rose Parade boy I must have won it in November of 1956 56 and there was very little on in color they bring the set is immense and they asked me if I wanted dark wood or like
wooden I said darkness I don't know what three sets of tubes because it was a tube thing it was huge and he had to send a technician to adjust the color and yet I make an appointment for time when something would be on in color my first view of color TV was a be laying in a green sequin dress with Savior I move that was so there we are and we built ourselves a table to put it on a load thing out of a big block of wood with contact paper and for those wrought iron hairpin legs then the baby got really sick he had
roseola I called our pediatrician that doctors made house calls him he said I'll come over it can't be right too happy 57 I think was he said whatever I could figure it out dd6 know it was 56 so the doctor comes over he walks in he looks around I know what he's thinking you call this junk and you've got this ability what you know what are your values and I said I want it oh he said you know I've never seen TV I've never driven a white Cadillac he said here are the keys all baby license I was learning how to drive I saw his
white Cadillac all around he stayed all afternoon watch the baby you watched well I married Fred 1980 and by that time when you turned it on you were getting a shock and I'm really I gave it away and I'm sorry because when we came out here and you see that they have a museum at the studios at Las Colinas they would have given their eyeteeth that I would have given it to them unbelievable my TV I still don't watch much TV let's go back go back how about this was I was I was asked by a group of young Jewish women from ncj w or
Hadassah I camera up in North Plano if I would come to a meeting and speak to them I said sure what do you want me they said tell us what Dallas was like I think they were to say in the olden days but you know I said okay this is only like two years ago so I went up there and I said the first thing you have to do is you have to pretend that you're down by the JCC and everybody knows where the JC's you know you're getting your car and you drive up you drive up quit and you drive up past belt mine
and listen and then you get up to Campbell and then there's nothing they said what I said there's nothing if you continued driving on the right you will see the printing plant for the Dallas Morning News where the paper and you will see the texas a-and-m agricultural in it and you will see nothing and they thought I was making that up and I said if you go far enough you will see the hospital which doesn't look then exactly the way it looks now and across the street you will see mr. G's selling beer and wine the only place in Collin County then I think they thought I made the whole thing up that's what Dallas was like BAM Dallas was compact little city and these suburbs were just developing and now look what's happened so let's go back to when you left temple Emmanuel Oh what did you do then I started teaching adult classes at Brookhaven that's where I met sue I talked poetry and I taught writing basics and I taught in the evening adults and I didn't have to grade paper and I didn't have people who were there because they had to be and I had
wonderful wonderful students who had reasons to be wanting to learn how to write including the young woman who's not so young anymore who had a new baby and she had just inherited parents the Dallas Child magazine and she said if I have to publish a magazine I better learn something about writing now her daughter is the bubble of advocacy and so she was one of my students one of them was Adrianna Cobo that would sculpt her she wanted to learn how to write stuff about what she was doing and one man whose name I don't remember but he has been on the advisory board of
a number of senior papers since then he was retired he said I always thought I could write I said well tell me what you want to write about we have small class and everybody's talking and he said well I meet the most interesting people and he taught us a story about these people that go out every day and collect cans used to collect cans and they saved their cans and he talked to them and he found out that every year they went on a cruise with the money they made from collecting cans every day and I said that's a story right and the story we
wrote and he sold it and then he became a person who was involved in writing it's just wonderful so that's what I did and that's then when I started back to school at UT day I decided I could go to school and and it took me four years to get my masters and then I hung around for a long time and did everything for the doctor except write the dissertation and I taught a lot of classes met a lot of good people love them and then it's time to do other things and you've been involved in lots and lots of civic and cultural activities city
what are some of your favorites say what what are some of your favorites the first year that I was here in Dallas I called and asked to be put on the Human Relations Commission not the human I had Human Relations Commission I wanted to be in the JCR seat but they didn't know who I was and they put me on the JC arson and after a year they took me off the JCR sea because I had driven everybody crazy all year long all they did was talk and all I did was say is anybody ever gonna do anything and that's the way it was in
1980-81 whatever so I've been involved with other groups that do things like there's a group that has these Friday morning breakfasts once a month and these are informal groups that we just have a good speaker who wants to get up and have a breakfast at 8:30 in the morning and you'll learn something interfaith that getting involved in rotary has been just a wonderful experience with getting through all kinds of people and service close and I've been involved with neighborhood with Neighborhood Association it just but then my basic activities seem to be Jewish because I do a lot of Jewish writing and I hope I to
be involved more again with the tighter library and of course with the Historical Society and sometimes that comes back and bites you especially when you realize that your own family hasn't got a clue what you're doing I get an email from Mike Fred's son who says there's a big exhibit at the Downtown yeah at the Fair Park on Dallas Jewish history you really ought to go see it I say Mike Mike I know about that exhibit you know I am my committee and the people work with a source of much of the information for that that we got through the Jewish oh that's the way
it is what else tell us about your family today today yes well I got married young so I had my kids young I was 20 when I got married my son was born when we were married like 14 months so he didn't get married as young as I did he was 25 and but they wanted kids and they had a baby within 14 months and that's my oldest granddaughter and she's now married but that's nothing with the baby then three years later they had the twins twin girls they call this the Jewish compromise Margie wanted three children because she was from a family of three
and Saul wanted to because he was from a family - so they had one single a new twins said you know three children two pregnancies everybody's happy two girls not identical is just different as night and day was very good friends different everybody is different the older one is a teacher that's all she's ever wanted to do her specialty is Japanese one of these days she may go to Japan to teach ESL but right now she's getting a master's in education and we'll see that Molly well let's go throws she see older of the two twins by ten minutes and the family story is that
she was only born first because her sister was in a hurry to get out so she kicked her Rose is very blessed she's very accepting she's very she's wonderful her sister is hyper that's Rose has got his master's in psychology Molly's got her master's in biology and now we have Molly's little boy so that's the first grade Fred's son my Alexander Alexander I said Alex she said Lex powerful I said Lex law I didn't take four years old admin for nothing this kid will be a lawyer see what happens anyway fred has the one son Mike and Mike has never married and which is a
shame because he's the only one in Dallas and none of the grandchildren here in Dallas and but he has so now a steady girlfriend see what happens now my daughter lives in Champaign Illinois where they moved when her husband who started out as an auto mechanic because he hated school got into teaching mechanics at one of the places would like to bribe before it became a little instant Technical School loved teaching went back to school got what he needed never did get a fancy degree but he got and then was offering a job as the director of a junior college automotive program in the Champaign
area and they grandfathered him in I mean as a tenured person and he remade the program which they had and it was it's all still a wonderful program but unfortunately he died he died a young man from an overdose of pain medication he had severe nerve pain problems and they never were able to pin down just what the cost was and what to do about it and my daughter said it took a toll on their family like because he gave everything he had to his work he had to and when he came home it was like collapsed it was just and he was a good
father but it was very very difficult for him anyway he died this will be it's about two and a half years ago and they had moved to Champaign which is near where he worked and where lots of his family lived so there's lots of family there his parents were there and sister and her family another sister and her husband Springfield so there's lots of family and my daughter is a ward administrator in hospital and she was the one who always wanted to be a nurse but she said the math will kill me and she's just like me she's right the math woulda killed her she
never would have made it so instead she went into the administrative and she works board though so she's with the people the doctors the patient's tell-tell and she has two boys and the older boy is just finished his junior year and Vandercook School of Music which is the music college affiliated with the Illinois Institute of Technology they do they are primarily educating music teachers and Roberts ambition is to get his get his advanced degrees and eventually lead a band or an orchestra at the college university level and he's basically a percussionist but as he told me by the time he graduates from his program he
will be proficient at least basically in 21 different instruments that's what you need when you are going to lead a band or an orchestra and he's very good they he's had many many summer job offers and plays with bands and he does all kinds of things now he has a brother who's 18 who doesn't know what he wants to do and but he's gonna start he just graduated from high school and he has a summer job and he's going to start the junior college in the fall where his dad was and they have a program in tech music no Ben has no interest in the
music in but he's been working with his brother for years on the amp and the wiring and whatever and they have a whole program on that but your your colors so that looks like what he also is a great cook and he he's never really been serious about being a chef but he toys with the idea of getting some training he's very good very creative and for the last three years or so he's done all the cooking for the family he cooks for his mother so there's someone she comes home and Robert who Debra says she had to teach him how to fry an egg
before he went off to college because he didn't know how to do anything except make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich Robert will come home and say been thick so thing so that's the kids and that's it mommy is hopeful that her older sister and she said I think that thinking of starting their family and I hope they do soon because Alex will need Alexander who need cousins yes they're a very family-oriented no Harriet you know our famous how did all that come about well I believed since I have been here in 1980 that Dallas Jewish community deserves the good paper and when I came
here it did not have a good paper it had the Texas Jewish Post and it was terrible it was Jimmy wishes paper was his personal sheet and I I could not believe this I mean they charged for things that are real newspaper doesn't charge for like if you wanted to have a picture of an event most papers if they cover an event they'll take pictures now you had to take the pictures bring it to them and they would charge you to put it in the paper I said this is not real and the only writing I was doing then I think the stuff I did
around temple and whatever else and I did stop for the synagogue her bets are we've been members of its horror since we've been here and everybody knew I could write so one day we had just moved here and we moved here 27 years ago so figure out 84 it was January of 84 and it was the first phone call I got was Jimmy wish and he wanted to know if I would write Dallas doings they still have that and I said no I said I would have a hard time writing for a paper that I have a hard time reading I really said Jimmy that's
the same deal the National Enquirer offered money with the National Enquirer then with the Texas Jewish both and I really did turn down stuff with him so that was it that was my connection with the tjp and then we went through a series of attempted newspapers here the first one was this kid from Portland Oregon came here to start a newspaper very sincere on a model of a paper they had in Portland and Harvey Winer offered him off the space and a building down this Hardy had an office I don't know Lillith at Hillcrest and LBJ and and planned out a whole I think I
was involved very involved in with Jewish Family Service I was on the board for years I was their first volunteer of the year I was in I have the paper and I guess it was sue Sayer who was on staff as the volunteer trades said there's got to be a newspaper you have to be in touch so I got in touch with Harvey Harvey is and I meet this kid and he plans a whole gonna kick off at Russia Shana and he he had some technical problems they could and he saw that the issue would not get out in time and he couldn't handle it
and he just it was like he folded up his papers and he snuck out of town in the middle of the night he paid us all for months afterwards who ever done any work for him we got postal money orders until he paid us when he owed us but that was it so that was the end of that paper and then we had the Dallas Jewish life which was a very good monthly but a monthly it's not a newspaper you cannot be current with the monthly you can't really run obituaries once a month except everybody knows everything already and so it was more magazine than
paper and it was good quality and I don't know what happened but it was he and I think they couldn't sell enough advertised I don't know I do not get involved with business or the advertising end of any because I just want to write that's all so when I worked for the paper in the south suburbs of Chicago it was a big outfit with a headquarters in Chicago Heights and had a dozen papers in the various suburbs around there and I worked from an office very nearby home and I worked part time when my kids were small and after I was divorced I went to
the managing editor told him I was ready to work full time and he was thrilled and he gave me such a big raise and I said this only tells me how you've been under paying me that's a part time for so for so many years so he gave me more money which so you know I know that and I he'd then he wanted to make me an editor and I would you know and I said Vernon I don't want to be an editor it would make me crazy I want to be a writer I will be more valuable to you as a writer leave me
write and pay me as an editor and he said fine so that was very good anyway I don't know what happened with that Dallas Jewish life but it was good and then came the other paper Dallas Jewish week okay now that was the one that was a couple of people in the community push to have a paper the Abram was the head of the Federation at the time and he did not would not want the Federation to have any involvement with the newspaper at all now in a lot of cities the Federation is the publisher of the paper and they have some arrangements with so
they don't duplicate a lot of outreach to the community Abram would have none of it I don't know I said to him once you know some paper must have bit you a long time ago he had some bad experience it is very nervous about newspapers but in fact I did a story on him for the Morning News one time because his hobby was being a motormen on the McKinney Avenue trolley and we ran it on the religion page it was just something that I was a real activist in the religious community does for and he had to have somebody from the staff sit in with
me when I interviewed him because he was so nervous that something bad would go into the paper so I said like I say to a lot of people you have to know who your friends are you have to know who your friends are if you can't trust me by now we have a lot of problems I would never do anything to hurt the Jewish community of Dallas never so anyway that paper I knew would be a problem from the beginning because they announced themself there were a couple of big shots in our Jewish community who pushed for this particular paper she came out of headquarters
and published the Washington Jewish week which is a good paper and publishes other papers which are not Jewish papers but they're all weeklies and so these people thought that this would be a good paper for us so a guy from the Washington came here as the director of this operation he did not live here he was and he they set up a table and it was at the Jewish Arts fest this was my first and I will not be able to tell you the year but the way it can find out the years to ask Moe when he got his doctorate that was the year
that they set up and he was trying to sell subscriptions and sell people interest in the paper which had even started yep and I said to him when you're ready let me know I'd like to write a column for your paper uptime column for this and column business he said the last thing I need right now is of columnist what I need is an editor do you want to be the editor and I said you're asking me to be an editor you know nothing about me and you don't know anything about papers this was really scary so he got Dave shorter to be the editor
Dave shorter had been with us at the dal he freelanced you he was with the Dallas Jewish life and he was primarily a sports writer but he was a monk raker he wanted he didn't want feel-good stories he wanted to know the worst things about everybody and then publish them and so I said no I don't do that I do call him so he said okay you go you know I like to alternate your column with somebody else in the community who's a very good writer but she has trouble with deadlines so I know her we talked and I said she's not gonna stick with
it she's not gonna write a column every other week I know that but okay I'll start every other week and within two weeks it was every week because she couldn't meet a deadline I knew it and that lasted they started big and they dwindled rapidly and finally I got called into a meeting and he was back Craig was his name and the guy who was then editing here Dave was long gone and I didn't know why I was there but they were talking about you know what they would have to cut down on this and kind I said I quit I'm leaving and I said
good luck because I knew that was the end and that evening I had a call from a woman from the Washington Jewish week and she said why are you quitting and I said because that ship is going down and I'm not gonna be the last person standing on the deck and she remembered that she remembered me because she brought it up to me the next June at the American Jewish Press Association conference so after that I talked to Sharon about something and I said hey I've been writing columns and don't you want if I said I couldn't do it for your father but the paper
looks good now you're doing a lot of good and she said sure so that's how that started was all very it was and that's how it started and then it ended for a while because she was she still does too much she knows it takes on too much can't keep up with a lot of things and I ran into some real professional problems so I said I have to leave and then after the Cuba thing I wrote the story on Cuba she wanted me to come back I wanted to go back I said I missed it I missed that weekly connection with my community I
also do a column for the senior voice but that only comes out every other month and I told Sharon we have to change the name of the picture because I willed them to the senior voice they're using it now I will call a name my old picture it was fine with her so I write for that senior voice I write for that was and I do a lot of stuff sometimes more than I like sometimes not as much as I like but for the Morning News primarily features stories I interviewed for a job with the Morning News at right before I went to work for
a bully manual and they wanted to hire me and at that time fred was not established and I said I have to work too and I said I can't in all good conscience take it because I was afraid that he was looking at some stuff in Fort Worth and there was a possibility that we would have moved and I said I I can't start a job thinking I might be moving within a very short period of time but I started freelancing with them and that's just been going on when we were another all that time and I liked it better because if I had been
there full-time I'd have been on a buyout a long time ago in this way I can write for as long as I want it's just fun and that's this is my mother on the right Rose Roth and her sister on the left really Lee Roth known as lil they were the oldest two of a dozen children a dozen children my Bubbe paid more money she said that they had to have this picture hand colored and it hung in her bedroom because nobody else in the family liked it but I liked it it's from the time I was little I wanted to know about the girls
in that picture and she told me about their short hair because they had something or other and when kids ran a fever then they would shave their heads or cut their hair very short and then funny polka dot material which she bought in quantity because it was cheap and good and the earrings I never just just with my mother my mother never wore pierced earrings so I don't know what happens that she wore clip-on earrings I think that earrings went out of fashion and now they're back in fashion so when my bubby died she left a few wise words her wisest words were adopted by
the family my buddy went to sleep one night and didn't wake up in the morning but she must have been up in the middle of the night it was definitely her heart and she left a note and the note said please no eulogy if they don't know me by now it's too late there has not been a eulogy at a funeral in my family since and I will not have one when I die even people can come to the Shiva and tell all the stories which is what we've done it all the family she was but no eulogy say the right prayers and I would
you go so she also left directions that when she went harriet should get this picture because harry it was the only one who appreciated it who understood why she liked it so much now i guess i get a lot of this from my father my bubby used to do crochet she crocheted all the time in fact when she started crocheting only with cut-up socks of making rugs that's what everybody said we better have her eyes examine and indeed she didn't need cataract surgery but she never stopped crocheting but she could not read english so she did what you call fillet work charted and you count
the squares and that's how you do the pattern inc you don't have to read instructions but she counted wrong on this and instead of saying home sweet home says home sweet home that's an end nobody ever told her she had made a mistake and for years this was on the back of a couch in the living room which is what people crocheted these things for and once a week it got washed then it got put back and nobody ever told her but when she died during the Shiva the fight was on for this piece everybody claims this piece and when they were all done all
her children fighting I the oldest living grandchild there was another one I said I'm taking it just stop fighting I'm taking it and they all looked and said how dare you and I said because I am the only one who will take it have it framed and hang it on the wall I said you clowns will take it stick it in a drawer and none of us will ever see it again and they all said you're right and I said you can come and see it in my house and they do and this is where it is I came brought it home and immediately had
it brand and it's a good memory my Bobby also crochet tablecloths for her seven daughters and I have the one she crochet for my mother and my aunt Pauline I got hers after shoes and gave it to my sister so my sister would not be angry that she had one of Bobby's tablecloth and I used that once a year and then I put it away but I used to have it cleaned and now I started washing it I found that I do better washing it than the cleaner that's cleaning so I don't worry about it anymore that's why I put on the table when we
have brisket bash in the day after Thanksgiving is my Bubbe stay with what family means a lot to me and I wish it meant a lot to everybody because there are people in our family to whom it means very little to of my first cousins monstrous fight and they're not talking to each other I say brother and sister how can you not talk to each other so when I go back to Pittsburgh which is in a week I'll make sure we get together for dinner thank you thank you so much