Helen Tracey
Helen was born into a family of Jewish merchants who operated grocery, dry goods, and general stores in Central Texas towns such as Brady and Menard, where her father and his four brothers ran a wide range of enterprises serving local farmers and ranchers. Her mother, part of the Stillman family of Dallas, raised the children, and Helen was the youngest, with four older brothers. She recalled a dramatic flood in Brady when she was about four years old. After her father died when she was nearly seven, her mother gradually sold the stores, and the family moved to Dallas when Helen was eight.
In Dallas the family lived in South Dallas neighborhoods, first with her grandparents and later on Latimer, Birmingham, and Grand Avenue. Helen attended Colonial Hill School, John Henry Brown School, and Forest Avenue High School, where she worked on the yearbook and newspaper and developed a passion for journalism, before going on to SMU. Her Jewish education came through Shearith Israel and Congregation Agudas Achim, where she was confirmed, taught Sunday school, and took part in community charity projects delivering food baskets to families in need. She was active in Junior Hadassah and Young Judea, while her brothers played sports through AZA and other groups, and later all four served in the Air Force.
Helen married Jerry Lane, a CPA, in 1951, and after their 1970 divorce she married Irwin Tracey of Burlington, Vermont, who ran a tabletop showroom at the Dallas Trade Mart until selling it in 1994. She remained a member of Temple Emanu-El from 1951 onward, observing the holidays with her daughter Nancy and son Robert and their families. She was active in the National Council of Jewish Women, Temple Sisterhood, Hadassah, the American Jewish Congress, and her Forest High alumni association, and volunteered at Medical City. She fondly recalled her early career at KIXL radio, a good-music station founded by Lee Siegel with backing from Hollywood stockholders and legal help from Robert Strauss, where she served as traffic manager from its ground-floor beginnings.
Full Transcript
my mother was raising the children and at that time only my brothers were born and then later they moved to brady texas where he had more grocery stores in brady and little neighboring towns which is what most of the jewish merchants did they owned either grocery stores or dry goods stores or general stores and his brothers he had four brothers and they all owned stores in various towns menard texas was one of them where one of my uncles also ran a department store or general store and a meat market and a delivery service and a grocery store so the entire city of bernard at that
time well it should have been called wilinsky dale uh because so many of the enterprises were his own so what did the dry goods stores carry at that time oh everything for farmers they had in addition to mechanical equipment like plows and rains for the horses and saddles and they also carried a very nice high quality men's clothing and boots they had like heart shafter and marks clothing and handmade had two boots and then they also had ladies wear and i know the buyers my aunts were the buyers and they came into dallas for the shows for the um apparel shows and merchandise and they
thought only fine is quality because these farmers and ranchers mostly ranchers were wealthy enough to afford uh very good quality things and they demanded it and they had the money to spend on clothing so that was and they also had children's clothing and shoes so there was just everything that a family would need and then my father had the grocery store which also included tires at one time and service station equipment and gasoline so he did like garage work had a man that did it garage work repairs plus tires plus gasoline the what was the difference between the general store and the dry goods store
would you say uh not very much except dry goods store was like piece goods and ready to wear clothing that you could wear right out of the store a general store had more farm goods they had like saddles and um in addition to groceries so there was a difference okay um now what about your jewish education what was going on when you were growing up uh when i was living in brady by then all my four brothers were born and of course they were all older than i and um i was i can remember when i was about four years old we had this big
flood in brady when the brady river overflowed and um and that was very traumatic and i remember my dad took us to the rooftop so that we could look over the whole city and see how bad the flooding was but our house fortunately was on a hill and was not damaged but we used to come to dallas on any holiday rosh hashanah yom kippur passover of course and the major holidays that we celebrated and my mother came and we stayed at my grandmother's that was hyman stillman and his family my bubbie and tatum and of course all my aunts and uncles lived in dallas my
mother's brothers and sisters-in-law and her sisters and brothers-in-law so i had lots of cousins to play with and they were all similar in age and until i was eight years old i really knew very little about the jewish religion other than what my mother could tell me about the jewish holidays and when they occurred and why they were celebrated and when we moved then we moved back to uh my father died when i was almost seven he died in my and i was going to be seven in june and so my mother continued having the grocery stores and gradually she sold them all and my
brother saw he was the oldest helped her maintain the stores and we moved back to dallas when i was eight by then i was ready for third grade and my mother enrolled me at sheriff's israel and that was where my grandparents went to school went to shul so i got my main education i suppose there then later hertz little heikel excuse me was built and um since that was closer and i could get there by walking my mother thought it would be a good idea if we all enrolled in that sunday school and hebrew school for my brothers so my brothers all went to hebrew
school and at that time girls were not uh taught hebrew unless it was by a special tutor so anyway i was confirmed out of good associate which was part of high school and um and i no longer was affiliated i really was affiliated but i maintained my friendship with my uh friends that i grew up with and lived close by uh at herzl michael tom matura that was the name of it and it got aside and then later i went to colonial hill school which everyone went to and then by the time i was in sixth grade my family moved to a different home grand
avenue which was across the street from brown school john henry brown school and that was on grand avenue and i transferred to that school by then my brothers were in high school so it didn't matter to them which school i was attending as long as they were all able to go to uh to forex avenue high school so that's where we all graduated from and then later i went to smu now when you were younger before you moved to grand and when you were visiting your relatives here in dallas where did they live and where did you live they lived on cleveland street and we
bought a home on birmingham well for a while we lived on latimer and then from there we moved to birmingham and from birmingham we moved to grand admin now did you how long did you live in grant wonder in grand avenue from the time i was in sixth grade i guess i was about 11 or 12 until i graduated high school and by then the and uh uh after high school i was at cmu and uh we had to ride threes but a bus a streetcar and another streetcar to get there but we managed to get there and uh by then people were moving to
east dallas or north dallas or holland or wherever but what you're that was about in 43 because or 45 i guess yes because all my brothers were in the air force they had all enlisted all four and they were able to all come back home and so my mother was actually waiting for their return so she could sell the house and move somewhere but not in south dallas because i think it had become crime-ridden and it was not as well preserved i guess as some of the other areas in dallas well taken care of either um what was your jewish education like as far as
hebrew what was the extent of it was it just i was confirmed at a good time and uh then after i was out of school and working like at excel one of my few jobs but anyway while i was working there i um met jerry lane who was the cpa and married him and he was a member of temple emmanuel or in philadelphia there was a temple emanuel and that's where he got his jewish education so he said well let's transfer there i think we would like that and we were married at temple and rabbi lefkowitz known in dallas married us and uh after our
wedding um we retained our membership at temple emanuelle and that's where i've retained mine since 1951. what was it like going to school as far as i know my brothers attended the hebrew school that was on park row and uh i was not encouraged to go so i did but yeah and at sunday school i had wonderful experiences and i can remember as a matter of fact saul kaplan was one of our teachers and he was very social minded social economically and he had a certain feeling for the underprivileged and i can remember one time he took us for a ride some of the clients in his station wagon and pointed out areas of dallas that was so poor and so um
in bad need of a repair in need of a lot of repairs and that was sound of i'm um to think i guess you'd say it was south of sears roebuck that would be south lamar in that area and also very deep south colonia and there were homes i didn't even know about that existed and how we as better off citizens were able to or should be able to take care of our own and others as well and those who are less fortunate needed a lot of attention and help along the way and so i remember going to a lot of the commercial businesses in
our neighborhood and asking for donations to help these unfortunate people and we brought them to sunday school and then we knocked on these people's homes front doors and said we're here from the good asahim synagogue and we wanted you to have food in a basket and we would bring like a turkey or a chicken or anything we thought that they could use eggs bread and they were so they welcomed him welcome to us into the home but here we were like 11 and 12 years old and i remember being able to help these people what a wonderful feeling it was because they were so uh
thankful and so appreciative of everything we did but what year was it um let's see i would think 39 or 40. and that was you know the end of the depression area and yet world war ii had not started where after world war ii began and ended we ended up with a better economy than we have had then had during the depression that helped our economy so much now let's talk about grammar school you said you went to colombia yes i did okay tell us about that well this was very exciting to me because here i was from brady texas where i had attended for kindergarten first grade and second grade and when i came to dallas i was in the third grade and here i was
looking at this school thinking oh my gosh it is tremendous i'll never find my way around and i did and at that same day registering for her classes was another little girl and her name happened to be lorelei wilton i'm sure you know her and she later became lorelei marx and here she was from new york thinking what a little bitty school this was because she came from a tremendous school that took up two square blocks and she thought this was such a a small uh insignificant looking building and she was very disappointed in it and here i was with eyes as big as saucers
trying to take all this in and wondering how the world am i going to find my way around colonial hills school but uh i did manage and we became good friends and stayed friends until she passed on but uh i remember my classes we only had like maybe 20 children in each class they were comparatively small and that too surprised laura and at one point i started in third grade i suppose i did pretty well because by the time i was in fourth grade uh i was in a what they called a split section and that was part fifth grade and part fourth grade and
i was in the accelerated group and so we learned a lot of fifth grade work while we were in the fourth grade and then we did that again and then when we became fifth graders we learned sixth grade work and plus our own level and then when we were in sixth grade we had a split section again and learned seventh grade so that was very interesting and i remember some of my teachers this is miss copes who taught history and it was hill and miss her friends who taught us writing and drawing and we learned to make push pulls and ovals and improve our handwriting
so that was a lot of fun and i always liked school i never had a problem with that i guess i've still returned retained a quest for knowledge was brown school you said you lived in brownsville how was that that was almost the same it was about the same size and we had similar teachers and i enjoyed that mrs boone was our principal and we had there were more children i think of the jewish faith at ground school than there were at colonial i noticed that immediately because it's put in a class and that too would have an accelerated group and i was put into
that group so i had that in sixth and seventh grade and that too was it wasn't a split section but i do remember we did advanced work so that was enjoyable to me what about first well at forest everyone who graduated from [Music] brown school enrolled it as far as time because that was the neighborhood high and i actually could walk and my mother wasn't too concerned or worried as we would be today i would not let my children walk more than two or three bucks if that long and um there were no blacks in the schools but we did have more independence and everyone
had a schedule to follow and i took college courses and college prep courses because i knew i was going to college and so many others did that did the same thing and uh so and many of our uh john henry brown students sort of remained friends and stayed together it was a very congenial group and then we then i was fortunate enough to become reacquainted with my colonial friends and got to see them again and so i had two sets of friends that i became acquainted with would noticing you that was fun also i loved that i enjoyed it i was not a member of
a sorority but i was on the mustang staff and the rotunda staff that was the yearbook and the newspaper and i wanted to major in journalism which my mother objected to she kept saying do you know i've read that journalism is the lowest paying profession you can get into why would you want to do that why don't you become a teacher and make more money and i'd say because it's a lot more fun writing so that was how i got into journalism i was uh um i read in the paper that um k.i excel that lee siegel had been awarded a contract with fcc to
open a radio station in dallas and he was a graduate of forest avenue high school as well and i wrote him a letter and i said i detailed my experience and my education and i told him that i had been an editor of the forest echo and of the forester yearbook and so about a week or two later he called me on the phone at home and he said anyone who would admit to being an editor of the forest high echo deserves a job with me and that was how i got hired and we didn't know what i was going to do at the radio
station because it was still being built the building was not quite finished there was no heat we had little portable heaters that we plugged in everywhere and we took it with us there was one heater that i used and one that he used and we did have our engineer at that and by tripp and he also carried a little heater with him because it was december and was very cold and the building hasn't hadn't been finished and the heating and air conditioning had not been installed so wherever we went we took our little heater and then we had one telephone and when it rang you
might you might be in another studio or down the hall and you'd have to go look for the telephone but we finally got it together and the station opened so i was there literally from the ground floor up where was it located 1401 south anchorage street and almost downtown down south of downtown dallas um let's see i want to back up a little bit because you were married to richard originally yeah yes okay and then what happened i mean your name is tracy now yeah i married jerry lane and in 1970 60. let's see i married him in 1951 and we were divorced in 1970 that was it and then um in 1976 i married irwin tracy and he was from burlington vermont and as he used to say there are only 50 jews in burlington vermont but there were three synagogues and are a temple in two synagogue so that was very interesting to me and we did go there quite often in the summertime only he would not return in the winter he knew about the climate having been raised there but uh he was um he had a showroom in the dallas trademark and represented sheffield silver and irish
crystal and javelin china and those were called tabletop lines and i helped him in the showroom a lot and especially during shows and i enjoyed working with him and helping him helping him build his business were there a lot of jewish people as sales representatives how do you want to talk about that yeah yes there were a lot of salesmen in the apparel mart mainly and in the furniture and world trade center where my husband was there were fewer jewish families and jewish people but he knew most of them and he was vice president of the organization of traveling salesmen that was called tola and
that was named or was called toba because it represented men who traveled in our women who traveled in the texas oklahoma louisiana arkansas territory and irwin had that much of that was his territory plus the state of missouri so he was a little bit farther along than some of the his territory was farther along than some of the other sales people but he had four or five uh salesmen who worked for him and so uh he was able to stay in dallas most of the time and unless there was a big show like in new orleans or in st louis or little rock arkansas he
had his salesman column various stores and he did a lot of business with the zao corporation because they at that time sold silver to new brines and our registered brides and of course now brides don't select silver and china and crystal as they once did sometimes they do but very rarely so anyway he sold the business in 1994 yes and he felt that he was ready to retire and he became ill in 90 6 and passed away was that a general pattern as far as the sales people that had offices in yes so many of the countries did they maintained a home in dallas but
they um traveled in this area i know in the tabletop area they all had tola which means that they were able to sell in or represent their companies in these four states and then in the apparel business uh which was the apparel mart which was across industrial boulevard or across inward audacity from the truck the trademark all of these buildings were owned by tribal crow and he promoted showrooms and leased them to the sales and as they became larger in their sales they increased their staff and they hired additional sales people to help them and that's the way irwin's business went now let's go back
to jewish observance okay uh what are the jewish holidays you observe and how do you observe well having been a member of the temple for so long we follow every holiday that that temple emanuel celebrates and we always uh have our seats at uh rosh hashanah you know young tip one and we usually have a family get together lately it's been at my daughter and son-in-laws my daughter is nancy and she's married to eddie utah he's from a well-known family in dallas too and they attend sheriff israel since she she's of course followed his religion and his family background and i think he's about fifth
generation at sheriff israel so she's active over attend services there so it's a little difficult sometimes to arrange our um russia shown on yom kippur dinners because rosh hashanah services are different times at temple and at sheriff israel but we do manage so we all get together at that time and my son and daughter-in-law also attend and we enjoy having how many as we can get you know your son where does he go uh he lives in dallas yeah and he's a cpa and he's with the firm called elaine gorman and um playing golden tribute which was founded by jerryline but jerry lane has since
retired and so the firm is now in the hands of dick truly's son richard truby and my son robert lane and who are descendants of the originals and several others and so um they have a very large cpa practice in the city of dallas now does he go to temple store or sheriff israel he goes to temple they recall my two children were confirmed and had their confirmation there um now how about young kipper does everybody faster do some other people fast i used to until um i guess after my mother passed away we sort of became less observant but then we became as you
get older you dependent on medication and certain medications have to be taken with food so it's a little difficult to fast so i have not fasted in quite a few years but i do remember going through the fast and observing it as everyone else did how about circus we always go to a temple for circus holiday and usually the friday night before temple has an outdoor sukkah every year and um we like oh they also have a hanukkah menorah outdoors and there's a beautiful ceremony that they do and we like the candles and say our prayers out at the it's sort of in the like
a patio outside the temple and this uh lovely menorah um is a it's a wrought iron beautiful thing that when lead uh and then the temple choir who is known worldwide they have about a hundred members um the choir always performs and sings so that's our hanukkah and quorum celebration and they're both done at them and do you like candles at home also for hanukkah or not i do for hanukkah and i do for friday night it's just a tradition and i just feel better doing it what about uh now how about peso how about a passover how do you deal with well we have
the first two nights at my son-in-law eddie utah's house the first night and his sister gloria utah has it the second night so we're all over there plus there are many many utah relatives that are invited so sometimes we've had as many as 36 people in the 30s anyway people attending passover and they rent tables and we end up with tables that are sort of u-shaped and it's like a roman banquet practically but it is a lovely service and we all enjoy that now is the seder a traditional you say it's a lovely service is it traditionalism we go through the whole haganah it's read
from cover to cover and we sing songs at the end what about you spruce uh well i don't think we really observe diana i guess we should but we don't i'm sorry to say what about eddie and your daughter do they go to synagogue oh yes uh that sheriff did you sort of very active members do you go to history services yes i always observe this current temple and honor my mother my father my four brothers now and some of my aunts and uncles whose your side i do remember and cousins and so i have their name read at temple services on friday night and
saturday morning now how long about shabbat sabbath saturdays how are you do you observe do you not observe um i did not observe those and um and my my son and my son-in-law end up working on saturday so it's a little difficult and we just we know that it is shabbat and i have attended various services on saturday in fact if i cannot attend on friday night i will go saturday morning and hear the memorial service for whichever relative or mother their father that's being honored so i always do that has your observance changed in any way from your childhood if so how has it
changed yes um of course as we grow older we i guess become less servant or sometimes more my grandparents i can remember always went to services and i used to go with them on saturday and they always had uh passover and they always had uh shashana young kipper at their house when we were living in brady as a little girl i was from four to eight years old when we lived in brady we came in for every holiday and it was just a huge service because my zeta conducted the service and with his four children eight children and their in-laws we must have had about
50 people for dinner or lunch or whatever holiday we were experiencing and so i always thought of holidays as that's when the families get together that's still the case you said you're saving conducted services they would show a good assignment was what was his title uh shyamas which okay yeah and he took care of making sure it was locked up i remember that and i stayed with him a couple of times while he locked up everything of course he opened it in an earlier hour than i was in so i didn't go to that did he ever read the torah or do we lead from
the women from here he and some of my uncles sam stillman aaron stillman um morris stillman they were all very active that's how good it was do you want to describe the synagogue on the shoulder uh well i remember that it had a balcony upstairs for women and children and uh and then downstairs men uh sad and there was a bema in the center where the rabbi spoke and where the torah was ran and i remember as a child marching in the simplest torah with a flag and a candle fruit and all the things that we had to do and it was a lot of
fun that's probably when i first met you because i was friend with friendly with your sister sarah um do you remember the location of godzilla advice and when delta that's correct yeah yeah do you held any other membership to any of the other shows other than temple now i'm not i'm not but i've attended various sisterhood things that uh sheriff israel my cousin fanny angrist was president of sheriff israel sisterhood and whenever there was a luncheon or dinner or anything that she was involved in i of course had to attend that was a prerequisite so i had to go there and i still attend some
things over there because i have many friends who attend sheriff israel and are members of the sisterhood about what years would you say some of your changes came about as far as observance and relationships and stuff groups well by the time my children were confirmed they're four years apart and so that would have been about 1970 3 and 70 and 69 i would say they were confirmed and after that my son attended sunday school at temple for maybe one year after that nancy i think attended sunday school maybe a year or two after confirmation but by then they were in green hill uh private school
private school and that school had so many activities and so many involvements for the children that they hardly had time to do anything else plus their homework and they both were good students so i felt that that was the most important thing so they weren't as active in the um jewish organizations as they could have been but as active as most of the students at greenhill were and they did have an eight breath chapter i think they had a bbg has the service changed over the years temple has become a little more observant and a more hebrew has been introduced and um we now have
a choir director uh who is not jewish but has very well learned in learning in a jewish religion i think he's also a conductor of the choir at one of the churches in richardson but he manages to split his time between the two that's ralph stannard and i think everyone in dallas is acquainted with him he's such a well-known choir director and then we have richard cohn he's our panther who has a lovely voice and conducts our temple choir and sings with the temple choir too and then he of course he's solos and is at every religious holiday so he's very well thought of in
temple of course i'm very fond of rabbi stern and all the new rabbis we seem to have i think impressive there must be six or eight rabbis at temple and one is younger than the other but they're all and i'm sure sheriff israel has the same thing every congregation has the younger of us and i think they're interesting and fun and i was privileged to get to know many of them i am privileged now you mentioned kendrick cohn did temple have any type of art at what point in time did he come to temple reprisal um did temple have a candor when you were growing
up oh yes they've always had one we've had um uh let's see what was his name now i can't recall it a sam adler was one of the main and first cantors and choir directors let's see following him um i can't recall his name but he was very active he still is uh on the smu faculty at um the music department at smu he retired temple about two years ago when richard cohen came and so um but they're they've always had a choir director as well as i can remember all right now i always had a choir require a different director is going to be
different than a kind cancer yes so we'll take an example just recently uh started having cancers we had a female tantra at one time and two and now we have a tag to cover now when did temple start having a danger when did the lady come to temple if she were the first one i would suppose about 15 or 20 years ago that means they would have had a canter in late 1990s yes at that time they had a female tantrum from new york city who was there i can see her face but i can't recall her name uh they had one they had two
different ones uh one followed the other and uh then finally finally and i think there were three finally got by the attacker home and they actually participated in the actual service yes the signing on rosh hashanah and yom kippur especially what about the other services sometimes on friday night i don't think that was a regular time for them to appear sometimes they did mostly it was the choir that uh performed did they also work with the choir or did this i thought that does kendra cohen work in the sink you said he didn't well he's not the choir director but he works with the choir
sings with the choir and they incorporate his um territorial recitals i guess you'd come uh with the choir but he's been there this is about his fourth or fifth year and he's very well regarded now let's talk about jewish organizations and your involvement with any of the jewish households and i have in the past a member of the council of jewish women i'm a member of temple sisterhood and what else um there's a jewish american congress and i my very good friend uh melda golden is very active in that and i've gone to many of their uh programs and um once a year i think
they have a big fundraiser at the galleria and the western galleria and uh i've attended diet were you a member of any jewish organizations growing up growing up i was in junior high school which was founded by sarah sussman and deeney siegel and that was from i guess my high school years i guess when i was better either a freshman in high school or seventh grader at um john henry brown that organization was formed and i was a member of one of the first hadassah chapters there was also a young judea chapter at a good assignment that i was a member of selma riceberg was
our leader for that one now what years old me think 37 or 38 maybe yeah that would make me about 12 years old that 38 and when you joined you know how last what years oh probably the following 39 maybe there was always a some form of jewish some organization of jewish origin that we all belong to growing up in south dallas she knew everyone and her knew most everyone and so all the females that i knew were members of junior hadassah and sarah sussman managed to recruit them all and i was i think i was president of the junior hadassah at one time was
predators involved at all not at that point in time well not as much uh the nate breath i was not aware of it until i was out of high school what about aca brothers were very active in aca chapters of course because of the athletics they played basketball baseball football and they had several jewish organizations that they belong to aza and the fhh and toyota i know my brothers sal and bill and leon were all members of that of those organizations not one two but three and they played baseball football basketball tennis anything else with the ball about jewish community center they were acted at
the jewish community center because that's where they played that was the ball field did you also go to the jewish community i did yes and during the war there were dances for servicemen and i went to those helped serve punch and cookies it was fun i think i was a little younger and my mother wasn't too thrilled about letting me go to those uh dances because she didn't uh think a 14 year old or 15 year old girl should be there she said wait until you're out of high school then you can go so i i guess i was a little on the end of
social life but i didn't get to go to some of the dances but some of my friends did when were the dances home at the jewish community center they had an upstairs reception hall i guess it was and they had a jukebox and sometimes they had an orchestra and i think i must have gone to three or four of them would not believe us on saturday night what else and that's when the holy nights you could stay out late because there was no homework now what about sunday mornings went to sunday school until i was confirmed and then by then i was about 13 or
14. so after that i did not um i think i taught sunday school at um i had to go to cycle the first year that after i'd been confirmed i helped teach class not to sell a seller icebergs club and uh this was like kindergarten in first grade six-year-olds i think but we had a good we always took the kids on a tour of something and it would end up an ice cream soda or an ice cream at friedman's pharmacy when shopped out where was that that was on hardwood and grand avenue and we had a good time doing that yeah how many years did the sunday school have to it when you were confirmed for example yeah i was then i'm 13 or 14.
yeah i was i can't remember whether i in the uh i was still in john henry brown seventh grade or maybe i was a freshman at paris time one of those two years that was when i was confirmed we had a very small class we had like four or five girls and four or five boys that was about 10 children and the as such was very much smaller but i know when my children were confirmed at temple they were about 75 and i couldn't get over the difference but it was different from what i underst what i underwent um have you been involved what other
organizations have you been in through the years have you ever been involved in a sisterhood of temple and council of the jewish women and his hadassah the jewish american jewish congress that's about yeah approximate years actually how about approximate years i'd say from about 51 52 because that was when i first married until well i'm still a member of temple sisterhood and still a member of hadassah and i'm not no longer a member of council with jewish women i just don't have time but i'm also active in our forest high alumni association and so those are not the three organizations i also volunteer at medical
city although my none of my doctors are there but i volunteer at medical city on tuesday afternoon i'm there from one to five at the information desk and i've been there for about four or five years um do you remember the addresses that you of the homes that you lived in i can remember forest uh i mean the school let's see the house that we lived on grand avenue was 2819 and we lived on birmingham it was 26-17 and i can remember some of my aunts in south dallas the coens lived in 2822 peabody and my cousins the angriest and surfers lived at um 30
45 30 25 south boulevard i think those addresses just instilled in us you probably know about that too all right where the neighborhoods how jewish were they as far as the neighborhoods in that general area and when you talk about the boundaries of that general boundaries of that i would say from about myers street on the that would be the east side to colonial or maybe even lamar on the west side that and uh on the south side maybe on that on off of colonial it went farther south there was a windalcon and panama place those streets were farther south than the ones that were
off oakland or myers or i guess it went only as far as metropolitan as far as jewish families were concerned i'd say in almost every glock there was at least one jewish family in the north i guess it was grand avenue okay now we put the family the structures of the homes that lived in really most of them were brick and uh brick and frame combination did you have anybody living in the household other than your immediate family you mean like a second generation an uncle or a cousin or anybody living or a grandparent and a grandparent usually came and lived with their families when
we first moved from brady to dallas we lived with my grandparents until my mother could find a house that she wanted to buy and we stayed with them for maybe a year when i was in third grade and then we moved to latimer when i was i guess it was in the summer of my third grade so that's been about third or fourth grade but we stayed a year with them until we realized where we wanted to live and so forth and find the house um one minute your mother one minute it's a 60-minute date okay when is our time running up it takes almost
done uh there have been any inner marriages in the family in my brother was married to hazel davidson who was not jewish but i think she was jewish by association she was a cheerleader at forest high and very well known and he was very active at school too and they became good friends and later that grew into love and they married and my mother was objection had objected to the marriage at first but she knew hazel because she was also my friend too and i used to bring her over and she spent the night with me many nights so my mother knew her very well
but um anyway my brother married her and they were married 65 years so and she celebrated jewish religion us and all our jewish holidays and we went to their house sometimes for christmas or july 4th or any other occasion that we wanted to celebrate we will have to continue because is this the end of the turn i think so are we still alone or not it's still running but i don't know well um what about kids that they had did they have kids yes uh leona and hazel you mean a married couple uh yes they had two boys and what about the kids they are
no longer jewish um she also attended saint john's episcopal which leon attended with her when he wasn't attending temple but they had a very happy healthy marriage and their two sons have become very active in the episcopal church but um they are very interested in the jewish religion and they come for seder for passover they help us celebrate that particular type of i don't know why that particular one is fun for them i think and and they like to celebrate it and as a matter of fact i used to bring my her daughter books to um leon and he conducted a service for that church
for saint john's episcopal um once a year leon would come over after passover or maybe before passover or during passover and get all those books all the regattas and uh i would make him some harossus or chopped liver or various things that he needed for the passover satyr night and he would conduct one so that members of his congress or that congregation could observe what a satyr was like so that was sort of a family tradition in addition our own seder we had leon sater which got to be kind of a joke but but it really helped and to this day his younger son diane
does that at st st john's so i know that they regard their jewish roots as something special for them and they didn't both of them have two daughters both of those sons and i know the girls are aware of the fact that they had jewish rooms how are they how old are the girls they're in their 20s they're out of school and one works for um parkland hospital she's a nurse and one one daughter works for freeman and associates that's a big organization is responsible for having um like large shows trade shows are like the republican convention that was just held that was done by
the freeman they arrange all the tables and the chairs and the drapes and the whatever is needed for a convention and that's where she works and then they have the other son has two daughters and one is employed at a bookstore and another one is trying to think what does she do she looks for a cosmetics company but i'm not certain which one are you do you have any relationship with these kids you've maintained the relationship with them hazel and i are still very good we enjoy being together so what about the kids you should see my nephews and nieces um once a year we
sort of have a reunion with our uh my nephew harold that is the son of sal walinsky who lives in austin comes to dallas um at least every four to six months and he and his wife coming and then hazel and her family and my family get together so it's kind of a wilinsky tracy reunion and we get to have a luncheon or dinner at some restaurant and that's how we stay in touch we talk to each other on the phone a lot do you have a member of briglia that you can give our gift our jewish historical society and our collection that we can
add to well for instance what have others done i don't know oh programs from jewish program from hadassah forget it for example or through the years would reflect is jewish community and how has it changed over the years um it's just become more spread out more difficult to get people together um i know that i was uh more active earlier because i'm mature and have health problems every once in a while as we all do and so there are a lot of times that i don't attend meetings of the dallas historical society but i maintain my membership and i enjoy some of the programs and
attended many but it is as i said a very spread out jewish community in dallas and some cities uh still maintain a little central nucleus and have a large following in one area but dallas isn't that one and i have relatives in st louis and i understand theirs is the same way that it had spread out well we thank you very much for sharing your experiences with us well thank you and i wanted to tell you a little bit more about ki excel but maybe we'll have to do that on a second i would like very much to do that yeah okay i just hope
you identify yourselves again i'm sorry identify yourselves again oh i'm helen wolenski tracy and uh at this moment i'm 86 years old i'm proud to be here and i'm ginger jacobs that we i didn't bring there was one that's called a think it over book our station was very well known for these little problems uh sort of jovial and [Applause] i just brought this and i don't want to lose it and here's some pictures i don't know whether are we on well can you get the pictures i don't know whether we can then show the pictures this is hannah weberman-rubin at the reception desk at
ki excel and she was our receptionist for several years and when this picture was taken um that's me they just brought me in from the office where i work and said we need somebody to sit at that sofa that's sitting there over to the left so i was dragged in and that was my picture and uh this is hannah answering the telephone gotta give a picture and this is lee siegel who um originated the station and owned it and here's our some of our stockholders tyrone power who came to dallas quite often and robert taylor and some of the others stockholders were art link letter
and greer garson this is robert taylor and lisa can you get a picture of this in front of the book as well that's the great okay see greg ross and william holden um i'm trying to think of some of the other stockholders uh oh goodness do you know how they got them involved i mean you've got some movie stars they're lee siegel earned his money when he um worked as a public relations officer or public relations firm in new york and he got this idea to do the dr iq show well about that time world war ii broke out and so they asked his radio
show to go to various camps where the servicemen were stationed and to do a dr iq show there well that was so successful um he they said could you bring um additional uh scripts and we'll let the armed forces man be the doctor i cues well that's how he got to me robert taylor tyrone power artly glitter william hogan um melvin douglas he was a stockholder and um trying to thank some of some of the women who carol bruce um some of these were owen hildegard these are old-time broadway and movie stars you mentioned greer garrison was she also involved yes she was a stockholder
and she lived here in dallas but she met lee when they were in new york and he used her as a um sort of an ambassador uh to speak to uh to entertain the troops and he went all over the eastern seaboard entertaining troops with his dr iq show well after that you know became kind of uh passe or after world war ii ended the show was still popular but it was like 1945 46-47 and he decided he wanted to own his own radio station and so he was married to um mildred metzger of mexico dairies and they were a very wealthy family she loaned
him the money to have a radio station that's how they got off the on the air and then you had to apply to the scc and that was when i was working there from the ground up um and we kept waiting until the fcc approved our license so that we could go on the air we thought we i worked there about a year and a half before it ever went on the air it was a programming line beautiful music non-interrupted no commercials until on the half hour and on the hour we had commercials we might play or have announced um oh seven or eight commercials
all at once but we'd get it over with and then we could pluck then we could program um 30 minutes or an hour of a symphony or a just popular broadway type musical numbers but well-known semi-classics and and that was different for dallas because dallas had nothing like that they either had and most cities the size of dallas had the same thing you either had country in western which called cowboy music or you had wasn't quite rock and roll yet but it like um what would you call it i guess almost jitterbug music and black soul music you've got a lot of black soul isn't
it well that wasn't what lee siegel wanted he wanted to be able to have dinner music and nice we had a two hour allowance of time from two to four in the afternoon and that was our real classic when we played symphonies and we employed one of the former press secretaries of the dallas symphony to program our station with classical music from that two to four period where we allotted just good music and it became the good music station of that's where the title came from and it was uninterrupted except on the half hour and that was really a um radical change from from any
radio station either in dallas or new york new york had wlr i believe and that was their only classical station and they didn't play too much broadway popular music they played popular symphonies but not popular music so this was quite an innovation for dallas especially because we were sort of in the backward stages if you uh if you were in new york you considered texas as a radical state and a rebel state and very southern so this was quite different that's why it was successful i think how did the strauss family get involved with those well uh this is kind of funny when we were
looking for our licensing um lee siegel's attorney was henry brownberg well-known dallasite and he wanted to do the fcc licensing and be the attorney for that and he was also one of the stock later became one of the stockholders but lee siegel said i want a young man who really will fight for us to get this license and he said well i know just the young man robert strauss he just opened his practice he and richard gum from the university of texas were good friends of john connelly they all went to school together and this graduated the same year i think john was a little
older one year older but anyway that's how he got uh bob's trials he got a young attorney who would fight the fcc for him and that's how we got the license you want to talk about robert strauss later and his involvement was nice jewish well he he always was our sort of up mine if we had a problem with anything that had to do with government oh he had private previously worked for the fbi that was his first job out of the university of texas he had graduated law school and went to work for j edgar hoover as an fbi investigator and so it was
richard gunn and so they decided when they um when they resigned from the fbi after about three or four years of serving they decided they were going to start a law firm in dallas and so that's how they started their practice and later they enlarged it to i think william vaughnville came in he was a trial very well-known trial attorney and also um that um what just named goldberg irving goldberg um was asked to join that firm also so before long it became vanville aiken gum strauss and failed and that was the present name of the firm but anyway bob strauss was our attorney and
we had to um fight i guess the the fcc to get our licenses and at that time they were a little bit prejudiced prejudiced against lee segal because he was jewish with that name then they saw about robert strauss had a signature there and irving goldberg had a signature there so they that kind of raised a flag so uh it took a lot of uh fighting and um intervening by robert strauss to get our license so we finally did and got it and so that was in 47 and i went to work there i think in late 45 or 46. so there was a year and a half that at least where we were arguing with the fcc trying to get a license but it was fun and anyway uh by the time we got on the air uh lee siegel said well now we need a commercial manager who will be in charge of getting the spot announcements and commercial income so that we could survive and ted's and bobster i said you know my brother ted recently graduated university of texas and he's looking for another job he had in some other business and i don't even remember knowing what it was but anyway he came to work
for ki excel and lee hired him and he was going to be our commercial manager and then we found out he didn't really know enough about sales and we better hire a more experienced salesperson to be the sales manager and ted would be under him until he learned the road so to speak and gradually he did and so eventually ted became the commercial manager but not at the very very beginning he was just another salesman and but they did bring in some good responsible commercial people that could put the station over and that's really how it became successful because they had um the very elitist
of the dallas downtown businesses and automobile industries we had more chevrolet which is no longer in existence which became friendly chevrolet and we had bankston at that time as banks and oldsmobile only and that was one of the spot first sponsors and we had a woozy root beer which was the real juice company or the glazier wholesale drug company and medsco dairies of course and we had ordinaries and at that time the fcc would not let us put two commercials together of competing firms like you couldn't put a buick commercial next to a chevrolet commercial even though they were owned by general motors you could
not have them side by side as commercials and you could make you'd have to put like coca-cola in between and you couldn't put coca-cola and dr pepper they had to be separated by another and that was my that became my job i was traffic manager and i was the one who put the commercials on the log and in the proper places when we did a station break that was every 30 minutes when we were allowed to do commercials so we could not put like two department stores next to each other at that time a harrison company was one of our and neiman marcus was too
and so we would have to separate those and sank her then it was sanger brothers and so that when saver brothers or touch getting their gettinger advertised we had to make sure they were not next to each other so we'd separate them with a furniture company or or an automobile company and then maybe uh 15 or 30 minutes apart we could put it in but never closer than 30 minutes and even on our symphonies we would have um automobile companies usually sponsored the symphony and um and the operas and so we had to separate those by 30 minute intervals but those were fcc regulations now
today i've noticed and it irritates me still that during a football game you will see a commercial on tv that would be um forward and then nissan and then chrysler and then lincoln would be four different automobile companies right after another and we were not allowed to do that but anyway that's how we and then uh let's say ted strauss bobster house later after lee siegel was ready to retire uh they decided they would buy the and they formed a corporation and purchased the station and held it for i guess about five years and then they sold it to a company out of atlanta and
bob strauss back then had become very active in the democratic party and helped get jimmy carter elected and later was made ambassador to russia and world trade ambassador so he led a very important lie in washington d.c and loved the action and he still came back to dallas from time to time and when i was married to jerry lane who was a cpa and um i was able to convince bob stratz that jerry lane was the cpa he needed and got in that account um he still came back to dallas and would always call us and would go out to dinner together and he would
tell us about what sam rayburn told him or he was always bringing up various names that we were familiar with and telling us how they um decided on whatever some important political decision had just been made and he was in on it and it was uh it thrilled him to know that he here this little jewish boy from stamford texas laid it all the way to washington d.c so we always enjoy being with him and having dinner and his wife was so charming too helen strauss was just a lovely lady and these are pictures of this george leslie was with the dallas symphony he was
their pr man for a long long time as i look through all of these pictures it just triggers my memory for various things well here i am with uh charlie paine who was our program director and i was the traffic manager so i had to we programmed and made out a log together and here's ted's ted strauss and that was when he was doing sales and tom massey was the program was the station manager and these are two of our salesmen and this is part of our writing committee had gone that's the script department here is our station wagon and this is roosevelt the um
our driver and i'm trying to think of a title for him he really wasn't a janitor but he served in that capacity as well but ozil franklin was his name and he was later succeeded by another what was his name lincoln i think was his name but anyway and these are salesmen out in the halls of the various studios we were one of the first studios that had soundproof individual studios where one announcer was in a soundproof booth up until then and even even krld and wfaa did not have as modern a studio as these were and that was sort of a boon on the
lease eagle's cap because he patterned it um sort of a feather in his cab over anyway so i'll just tell you he got the idea from the new york studios but um the dallas studios didn't have anything that good