Harry Hermann
Harry Hermann was born in 1940 and raised in Newark, New Jersey, in a Jewish family whose roots stretched across Europe. His maternal grandmother came from Galicia, land that over the years belonged to Austria-Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and now Ukraine, while his father's family had ties to Romania and Austria. Harry was named for both of his grandfathers, Harry and Mark, with the Hebrew name Mordecai. His father trained as an attorney but, during the Depression, went into business instead. Harry attended Hebrew school at Temple B'nai Abraham, where he was bar mitzvahed, and held fond memories of his Newark childhood.
In the middle of his ninth grade year, Harry's family was brought to Dallas when his father became branch manager for an importing firm. Reluctant to leave his friends, synagogue, and beloved Dodgers behind, Harry was won over in part by a promise from his father's boss to fly him back to see a World Series if the Dodgers made it, a promise kept in 1955 when he watched the Dodgers win their first championship. He finished his last three and a half years at Hillcrest High School, quickly making friends through classmate Arnold Sternberg and the B'nai B'rith youth organization. He later earned a business degree with an accounting major, studying at the University of Texas at Austin and finishing at SMU, and became a CPA. He also served six months in the Army Reserve at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
Harry's lifelong passion for baseball began around age four or five, inspired by his Brooklyn-born father. As a boy he met Dodgers greats including Roy Campanella, whom he came to know through a Lionel electric train club, and through him Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, and Billy Cox. He vividly recalled Robinson's 1947 debut, which fell on the first night of Passover, and later reflected on the racism Robinson endured. Harry married in 1965 and raised two sons, David, who earned a PhD in education administration, and Jeffrey, a physician. After many years single he remarried, to Roseland. Still wearing his Dodgers cap when the team visits Texas, he treasures his memories and urges his grandchildren to get the best education and the most out of life.
Full Transcript
the Rangers were still at the old ballpark right they had an old-timers game and they had 251 Dodgers in the 51 Giants there and they played a three inning old-timers game when the game was over they reenacted the shot heard round the world Branca threw the pitch to Bobby Thomson and Thompson hit it out out of the ballpark still yep he hit it out they had two men on second and third and Branca threw him the pitch and Thompson smacked it out look it up they had another old-timers game and they had one of the Wayner brothers and that was really before my time that's
an old timers yeah well wanted what I there was little poison and big points and I don't know which was which but one of them at the age of 78 smack one out of the park yes oh yeah Harry is a kid when did you become a Dodger fan now when I was really young I would say four or five years old and what why the Dodgers over the Yankees or the Giants well my father was from Brooklyn and he was a doctor friend and so I was a Dodger fan I respected the yankees I respected the Giants but I was an adorable Dodger fan
and I still AM now when you remember the first time he was the ballpark not the first time I remember an incident when I was ten and a half years old we lived in newark new jersey and the first time I went into New York City by myself well of course what happened was my mother took me to the bus station in newark I got on the bus and when we got to the bus station in new york city i got off the bus and my father was waiting for me but that was the first time i went from newark into New York by myself
after that I did it several times who are the players back then under your team well my favorite was Roy Campanella the Dodger catcher and I knew him through the Lionel electric train Club and through him I met Jackie Robinson and then Gil Hodges Duke Snider Billy Cox I'm at the mall how was it a young kid was able to eat these players well I would go to the Dodger games and sit by the Dodger dugout or behind home plate and as I knew campy and I knew then I knew Jackie and they introduced me to the note that players would come over and sign
autographs they didn't charge at that time and i got to meet them you know as a young kid did you realize the history that you were meeting here in baseball I mean you knew Jackie Robinson was the first black player right I remember when it happened yeah yeah but what was that like I was six years old it was nineteen forty-seven april of nineteen forty-seven that afternoon he was he played his first game in the major leagues and that night was the first night of passover and yes i remember Jackie's first game the sad thing is what he had to endure that first year in
the major leagues how he stood it I don't know now as a young kid that your folks talk to you about what he was going through the wheel aware of all the battles he had not right away and I say I grew up in Newark and I had a black friend named Arthur Lewis and when Jackie was brought up to the dodgers for the first time I heard certain terms used I didn't know what they meant and I went and asked his black friend of mine why do they call him that what does it mean and he looked at me as if i was crazy
i did not know what those words meant and when I found out what them and I was not too happy about it because in the Northeast I mean we went to school together and we knew people had different skin color but that didn't make any difference to us and and I got some of the Yankees 2 there was a men's shop downtown Newark and i bought my bar mitzvah suit there and instead of the traditional blue suit my father wanted me to wear a gray flannel suit which I did and the salesman who sold it to me was Phil Rizzuto the shortstop of the New
York Yankees Yogi Berra worked in that store and some of the other some of the giant players worked there and one of the Dodgers are remember work there it's amazing in itself isn't it yes it is if you think of the millions these guys make now yeah I remember reading the biography of Roy Campanella his best year he made $50,000 that was one heck of a salary in those days he had three years where he won the most valuable player by 1955 the year that the Dodgers won the World Series his hands had started to go he mentioned this in his biography the Dodgers had
a good backup catcher behind campy rube Walker who was a good catcher he didn't get the break he should have gotten though when the Dodgers come to Texas and play the Texas Rangers I wear this cap and I sit by the Dodger dugout Tommy Lasorda who was with the dodgy still is they came over and talked to me and he said how did you get down here and I told him who I was and that I had remembered the old Brooklyn tainment he he said do you remember some of the names and I remembered all of them people say you can't look back well there
are times I look back with some very fond memories let's go all the way back now 1940 Newark New Jersey remember life in Newark when yes yes I do tell me about it it was a good city to grow up in at that time Newark was originally founded by some of the Puritans and it was incorporated in the 1800's by there it was a ghetto y city in some ways you had the Jews that lived in the upper clinton hill and the Weequay exception and we Quakers named for the week waves Indians and the high school there was weak way high school I had one
semester there before I came to Texas the elementary schools were named for the streets they were on I went first for three years to bergen street school and then Maple Avenue School from the fourth through the eighth grade and my mother was a teacher at bragaw Avenue School the city was a good City and I have a tendency to brag that I came from there I went to Hebrew school at Temple B'nai Abraham I was Bar Mitzvah there and I have fond memories of that congregation if the congregation is now in livingston but i have real fond memories of that loser dead due by education
he was an attorney but he did not practice very long because it was the heart of the depression and this is before I was born any ran into went into the red business and did quite well with it we were brought to Texas by a firm of importers the firm's name was Victor be handled and brothers and they opened up a branch in dallas and my father was the branch manager and they transferred us here and i was in the middle of my ninth grade when it was first approached to me i was not very happy about it I thought that they were going to
take a trip to Texas and I was going to see the state of Texas but I didn't realize what they meant and then my father said well I don't mean that I mean how would you like to live there and at first I wanted no part of it I had my friends in Newark I and my synagogue had the Dodgers my father's boss so one of his boss have said to me if you'll go to Texas and if the Dodgers get into the World Series I will fly you up to see some of the games and I said okay well I'm taking a big chance
well 1955 the Dodgers won the pennant and then in seven games they won the World Series and I saw that so they made good up there yes he made good on it and I saw the dodgers win their first world series ever well what was it like when the Dodgers left town for you when they moved out to the west I was kind of shocked about it I was in some ways hurt I think when the Dodgers left Brooklyn New York took a real hit and then the same year the New York Giants left for San Francisco to continue that rivalry and that rivalry was
war I mean the dates those teams have been at it like crazy but I I've been to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles it's a beautiful ballpark I don't know the players like I did any more like I did that but there was nothing like Ebbets Field it was a small ballpark a very cozy ballpark and you could hear the players talking on the field because it stands with close up and remember when they tore that down yes I do and it was some people went and got some of the seats or some of the dirt or I remember seeing a movie on the some films
where campy got one of the seats or something unfortunately he was in that horrible accident became a quadriplegic and he just passed away about ten years ago now you'd ever from Brooklyn right where was your mom from newark new jersey from dewar you remember your grandparents at all my grandfather's had passed away before I was born I am named for for them Harry from my mother's father and Mark for my father's father my Hebrew name ists the Mordecai and that was for them also so I didn't know them I knew both of my grandmother's and I remember them my mother's mother she was from Galicia
originally the old austro-hungarian Empire then after World War one it was part of Poland after the Second World War it was part of the Soviet Union and now it's part of Ukraine so the houses that my grandparents on my mother's side were born and have been in four countries my father's people his mother was from Romania although she was German my paternal grandfather max Herman was from Austria he was born just outside of Vienna now as I say I never knew my grandfather's father's mother was highly educated I don't mean formal education but she was a brilliant woman her pride and joy was her kitchen
she was an excellent cook and this is a something about Romanian women they are good cooks don't ever ask for a recipe they don't use them the my mother tried to copy him down watching her it didn't work she was an excellent cook my maternal grandmother aged somewhat premature and by the time I was nine years old dementia had starts at in she passed away when I was about eleven and a half my father's mother passed away when I was about ten so I mean I was quite young when they passed on but i do remember them yeah yeahs was going to high school I
had one semester at we quiet High School in Newark New Jersey and then we moved to Dallas and I did the last three and a half years in hillcrest high school here in Dallas that they do to melt into the community fortunately quite rapidly within the first week that i was in hillcrest high school we were sitting in a in the auditorium for some reason and a boy came over to me he became my first friend in Dallas whose name was Arnold sternberg and he befriended me you know asked me are you new here we started talking later that day when I got home I
walked into the apartment and settled out of my mom and there was another woman sitting there and I was introduced to Peggy sternberg and I said sternberg I said I met an all-star burger at Hillcrest High today she said that's my son so when he got home she called him he came in we knew each other of course we had met already and he was my first friend in Dallas and then I got into the b'nai brith youth organization and I make friends quit pretty quickly now after high school was at college or yes okay would go to school I did most of my work
at the university of texas at austin and i finished at SMU I have a bachelor's degree in business with a major in accounting I am a CPA okay okay though he also joined the reserves yes tell me about that well at that time they still had the draft I didn't want to be drafted and the reserve was a quick way to get it over with and I did and I was sent to Fort Polk Louisiana for six months I had my basic training and then they the army put me through clerk typist school and after the second week they learned they knew that I could
type so I was put on on the job training and we went from there I came out a specialist five which at that time was equal to the sergeant rank three stripes although I had a patch with a rocker on it same pay grade they wanted me to stay in the reserve they kept asking me to accept a commission but I for some reason I didn't and I got out and there were times I wish I had accepted the Commission and stayed in the reserves but I didn't so I can't look back at that where did you meet your first wife there was a live
aliens club that was the name of it at temple emanuel I didn't belong to the temple both at that time to sheriff Israel but I met her at a party there and we started dating and this was in January of 1965 we got married in the middle of August 1965 we had two sons David who has a PhD in education administration and he lives in Peachtree City Georgia my younger son Jeffrey is an MD and his specialty is OBGYN he lives down in Denison and practices at the big Hospital Sherman Denison area now that marriage ended in divorce yes I was single for 31 years
and then I got married I've been married now the second time for 11 years whatcha listening Roseanne what's the happiest time in your life as a youngster growing up that was a happy time for me being with my two sons and their families I enjoy that I really get a lot of pleasure out of that yeah now your lifetime there's been somebody meeting advancements and inventions you know and what not is there something that came along as you look wow it really took notice of knowing from top planes to jet aircraft was the main one and I flown on a lot of the newer jets
and I like that automobiles my parents got the car that was a Chevrolet and it had automatic transmission that was something then later on they came out with air conditioning and power steering and power brakes trains I've had that as a hobby off and on since I was six years old and was member of a Lionel electric train Club and that's how I got to meet Roy Campanella I'll know in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions you were at the World Series the first time your beloved Dodgers wanted yes of course the president's assassination Kennedy here in Dallas yes first time they
landed on the moon in 69 yes good of course the tragedy of 911 is there something the national scene that really stood out that affected you that you went boy I know where I was when it happened well the Kennedy assassination I was coming home on a weekend pass from Fort Polk Louisiana my father had picked me up and we were about 30 miles outside of Dallas listening to it on the radio and all of a sudden the radio went blank and about two minutes later it got came back on and we heard there were three shots fired by the time we got downtown Dallas
at the old merchandise mart we got in there and the building was like a morgue and we were then told that he was he had passed on that he was dead the weekend the city of Dallas was in a state of shock and then Sunday Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and then that night I was back on post at Fort Polk next day we watched the funeral on TV yeah that was something 911 I heard that on the radio and my wife roseland called me and said have you heard what happened I said not I was New York City the Twin Towers have been
hit by planes she said are you okay because I had dinner several times at one of the towers that big restaurant they had up there and that was and then we found out that had come down both of them came down and that was a tragedy it was shock and anger you know who would do something like that although that wasn't the first time somebody tried to blow it up before from the basement the landing on the moon for the first time that was quite a thrill the first circle the moon and didn't land and they read biblical verses that was something and then when
they finally landed and then came back and they made it safely that was really something and here you have two sons yes three grandkids yes what advice do you leave to the grandkids in the next generation get as much out of life as you can get the best education you can in the field that you want now I basis on the fact that my father while he wanted me to go to college and get a college education he never high pressured me in any way I could major in anything that I wanted as long as I completed it and then he hoped that I would
do well with it and I said the same thing to my two sons when they were going to go to college and I'll say that to my grandchildren there are two girls and a boy we did a good job today thanks for doing this well thank you you