Herb Bennet
Herb Bennett's parents came from Russia and met briefly in Europe before marrying in New York in the early 1900s. His brother and sister were born there, but his mother could not tolerate the New York winters, so the family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, around 1919 or 1920 at the urging of her brother. Herb was born in Fort Worth in 1923, and when he was six weeks old the family followed his father to Breckenridge, about a hundred miles west, where his father had bought a half interest in a confectionery next to a movie theater. His grandparents remained in Europe and were killed in Poland in 1939. Growing up in a town with only about ten or twelve Jewish families, Herb had a limited Jewish education, though Breckenridge built the first synagogue between Fort Worth and Abilene in 1929.
Herb spent his first seventeen years in Breckenridge, delivering the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on a paper route, swimming and learning at the YMCA, acting in Interscholastic League contest plays, and becoming an Eagle Scout and Sea Scout. He graduated in 1940 and went to the University of Texas at Austin, where he joined the Jewish fraternity AEPi and participated in Hillel. He left school during the war years and returned to finish as an education major, hoping to teach in Austin, but instead took work as a draftsman in Houston. A three-week assignment in Venezuela turned into roughly seven years in Maracaibo, followed by two years of construction work in Turkey and two years in Israel, where he taught English on a kibbutz and reconnected with relatives.
When his father died in 1958, the family relocated from Breckenridge to Dallas, where his sister lived, and Herb made Dallas his home base after returning from overseas around 1965. He worked for Peerless Manufacturing for nearly twenty-five years, traveling widely for the company. He married in 1975 and was married for ten years. In Dallas he took part in B'nai B'rith and the social club at the Jewish Community Center and performed in the JCC's annual musicals for many years. Reflecting on his travels and different cultures, Herb credited his father's harder journey from Russia as the more remarkable one, and at the time of the interview he was the last surviving member of his immediate family.
Full Transcript
today is Thursday October 3rd 2013 my name is Clint Reisner I'm also the videographer and the interviews name is herb Bennett in the place of the interview is at the Dallas Jewish Community Center we're very happy to have you here herb and we shall start and if you would like to begin elaborating or telling us about your family your parents grandparents where where were you born and how did they happen to settle in Dallas and what did your parents do for a living well my parents are originally from Russia they came to New York in about in the early 1900s they met briefly in Europe
but they were married in New York and my brother and sister were born in New York however my mother couldn't tolerate the winters in New York and so after getting many letters from her brother who had settled in Texas in Fort Worth she convinced my father that they could make a life and a living in a warmer climate and they moved to Fort Worth Texas in 1919 1920 and I was born in 1923 in Fort Worth I don't know anything about my grandparents they stayed in Europe and were killed in 1939 in Poland when Hitler began his first push into Poland and trying to conquer
Europe my childhood was spent the first 17 years were spent in Breckenridge Texas after after being born in Fort Worth my father found work in the little town of Breckenridge and about a hundred miles west of Fort Worth and that was in 1923 when I was being born and after I was six weeks old my mother followed and I followed him to Breckenridge I grew up in the little town of Breckenridge and in 1929 they built the first synagogue that existed between Fort Worth and Abilene and maybe forth in El Paso the synagogue was a gathering place for all the little communities surrounding Breckenridge there
was always one or two families living and working in a little tiny little towns all around Breckenridge and Breckenridge was a sort of a hub a gathering place for all the Jewish community because there were only about 10 or 12 families in my hometown when I grew up this was in breckenridge breckenridge okay what was your neighborhood like there my neighborhood behind Breckenridge did you live in a sort of a Jewish neighborhood no there was no Jewish neighborhood there was just they were just scattered scattered Jews I mean very few families they were mostly merchants or junk dealers or pipe dealers it was even though
he had a synagogue we we didn't have a rabbi one of the members of the community would conduct services on Friday nights and for the High Holidays they would usually import a rabbi from Wichita Falls Fort Worth Abilene anywhere just for the High Holidays we got a variety of by one rabbi even came with a Gentile wife and it was it was not really a I did we didn't have a Hebrew school some of the families would send their children to Fort Worth to the Hebrew school but but what sometimes an older girl would teach Sunday School to the local kids and then when she
grew up and disappeared we were left without a teacher so it wasn't wasn't really a an organized formal education as a Jewish student my Jewish upbringing was very sparse even though my father and my mother had a much stricter Jewish education than I did mine was very in a little town in West Texas they said that a Gentile from New York was probably more Jewish than a Jew from West Texas that's interesting what was the population of Breckenridge yes it was Breckenridge had about 1 when in 1919 it was about 500 people in 1920 or 1919 they discovered oil and in six months it grew
from 500 to close to 30,000 it was an oil boomtown that was may they made a movie out of it called boomtown and it was started Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr Spencer Tracy it was a street of muddy a town of muddy streets and wooden sidewalks and it was right out of the movies because it grew so fast and then it by the time my father got there in 1923 the boom had already dissipated and he was on the tail end of the boom although there was still oil activity and pumping all the wells and a big a lot of important was in the oil
industry it was the oil boom was gone in the town when I moved when I grew up there was only about six or seven thousand and that's the town I remember and I'm going to a high school reunion this weekend I was in the class of 1940 that's 60 73 years ago when I graduated and there's a class reunion there's a classroom what year it'll be it'll be for the whole school old school yeah so maybe the only representative from the class of 1940 you're seated in the auditorium according to your class and the last time I was in a class reunion was maybe six
or eight years ago and there were only two of us there so I'm not sure that there'll be even two of us for years and years the oldest living graduate was a Jewish man named max Goldblatt and he came every year until it was in his 80s this year I'll be I'll be going and I'll be 90 so I should probably be close to the oldest one there so you saw a lot of changes in Breckenridge oh gosh did I ever the whole city the his city history was recorded by a hermit a recluse named basil Clemens then Jewish but he he recorded all the
things that happened when when the town was in its infancy and it was growing he grew up with the town and recorded it all on camera he used to take the the pictures of the high school graduating class every year and that was when his camera was one that he had a hood over his camera and he just removed the lens cover from the lens and knew what how long to expose it then put the cover back on in the flesh was a powder white powder that made a huge explosion and everybody always jumped when he made a picture you did see an incredible remarkable
change in your hometown town from 500 to 30,000 that's yeah but it's from by the time I got there in a dwindle down and it wound up being six or seven thousand so I never saw it when he was in his boom time because that was before I was okay what did you do for amusement in such a small town you had a movie theater I'm sure yeah we had three theaters at one time and I got interested in a stage and I was in something called the contest play and that was an Interscholastic League event that was we got to we didn't go to
state but we did pretty well and our judge was a playwright from Albany Texas named Robert nail who is well known in those circles as a as a and a playwright and we did we had a YMCA and I learned to swim there and I was very active in the Boy Scouts it was sponsored by a church group and I reversed my highest achievement was my Eagle Scout badge which I got when I was about 15 right that was probably the high point of my whole life from there it was downhill I R that's remarkable absolutely remarkable and they had Lakes in Italy and I
was a sea Scout we had a sailboat and we used to go out on the lake and sail and there were a lot of activities in a small town that probably I used to envy my brother and sister because the family album always had pictures of them playing in the snow in New York and I never saw snow in Texas until I was about 12 years old so I really envied them but I had a wonderful life because I could walk out my back door and in 30 minutes I was in the woods and I used to take my trusty 22 rifle and hunt rabbits
I never killed a rabbit in my whole life they both the most things I shot at work beer cans and bottles and it was it was a an interesting life because I like to hike in the woods and make-believe I was a great white hunter but really I didn't I didn't do much hunting I just did mostly hiking okay I don't recall this but what did your parents do in Breckenridge they were merchants my father came there and bought half interest in a in a confectionery next to the theater in those years movie theaters didn't sell candy popcorn drinks nothing you had to get them
out in the little stand next to the theater you could buy your popcorn or your drinks or candy and take it into the theater and so after about 10 years from 1923 to 33 my father was innocent stand in the hours were terrible they had the wait to the last movie was over at 1:00 o'clock in the morning to sell a magazine or a drink and then they had to open up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning to maybe sell a pair of work gloves to an oil field worker on his way to the oil fields to work so it was a real
hard job and if it hadn't been for two partners they probably couldn't have handled it because they took turns sharing the the weird hours and I had a paper route and and I had for four years I carried the Fort Worth star-telegram which was published morning evening and Sunday so in the morning at 4 o'clock in the morning I would get up when the papers came in and deliver my route before school and then in the after school at 3:30 the evening paper would come to Breckenridge from Fort Worth and I would deliver the evening route so for four years I delivered the morning about
the and on Sunday the papers were huge and it took two deliveries to make the route because the papers were so big in those years they didn't have sleeves cellophane sleeves for the papers you had to fold them and so it was a big job and I graduated in 1940 and went to school at the University of Texas in Austin which was a big first time I've ever really been out of Breckenridge for any length of time and I fell in love with Austin and I wanted to teach there and my brother had gone to Austin and my sister had gone to Austin to school
and it was natural for me to go to the University and I started out following into my brother's footsteps as an engineer but I loved Austin so much I wanted to be a teacher so I changed after the war I I went from 40 to 42 and in 42 hours left school because of a war and when I finally got back to school to finish in 46 to 48 I became a an education major thinking I would teach in Austin but I found out that everybody wanted to teach in Austin and the only way you could get a job as a teacher was to have
a PhD or a master's degree so I never didn't become a teacher instead I went to Houston and went to work in the construction business as a draftsman had twice the salary I would have gotten as a starting teacher okay so we had a very active childhood in a small town it was it was very very there there was there was a small community but it was a close-knit community everybody knew everybody else and it was a very friendly atmosphere it was much more so than growing up in the city where you sometimes don't even know who your neighbor is everybody in in the town
knew everybody else and I enjoyed my childhood very much and I probably don't regret not having the snow to play in in New York you didn't experience any and to cemento sysm in a small town in what anti-semitism there was a little anti-semitism but it wasn't over because most people in that little town had never seen a Jew before and they probably thought that Jews had horns because of a Michelangelo painting of Moses with rays of light coming from his head and everybody misinterpreted that as horns and from that day forward everybody thought Jews had horns it was a funny thing but it was it
was not it was never a problem to be Jewish in his soul town okay so your grade school high school was in Breckenridge then you went to University of Texas in Texas and from the University of Texas I settled in in Houston and in Houston I was a draftsman for a construction company and I always wanted to go overseas and work but I never had the opportunity until one day my boss leaned over my table and said we have a problem he said we have a project in South America and we need to send somebody down there to inspect it for three weeks but it's
three weeks before Christmas and so nobody wants to go and be away from their family at Christmastime he says you're single and you're Jewish you don't have those problems would you like to go so I always wanted to go overseas I said lovely I will go this was to Venezuela for three weeks what this was to go to Venezuela wrong yeah so I I was gonna go for three weeks and I went for three weeks and stayed seven years because in order to be tax exempt you had to stay out of the country 18 months and they would always send me back to Houston for
a few weeks to be briefed on my work and I would lose my accumulated eligibility and I would have to start over again when I got back to Venezuela and I was working in in Maracaibo which was a oil boom community and I I didn't have a I found a company there that was located there so I wouldn't have to be sent back to you soon and I changed jobs then went to work for the oil company and so that way I was able to stay there and be tax exempt which was a big thing for a single man so I stayed there for off
and on for for seven years and then when I finally came back to Dallas in the sick early sixties a friend of mine that met in South America called me up and said what are you doing I said I'm relaxing I'm I'm home and taking care of my house and reading the Sunday paper he said get off the couch we need you here and I said where is here he said Turkey I said is that in Texas he says no it's on the Black Sea and so being a single man I've always regretted not having a wife and family and children but there was a
big advantage in that when I had an offer like that I could drop everything and take off without worrying about wife children family and so I was off to Turkey and I worked there for two years and and when I finished working there it was a whole new world in Turkey Turkey was about 200 years behind the rest of the world they were still plowing fields there with wooden plow and an ox it was it was just of course if they hadn't been way behind the times they never would have hired my company to do the work for them so it was it was fortunate
in a way and so after working in Turkey for a couple of years I was being sent back home and I decided that I had never visited my relatives in Israel I knew I had relatives there but I had never had the occasion to go to Israel so instead of going back to America I traveled around Europe for a while and then wound up in Athens looking for a ship going to Israel as soon as I got to Greece I was picked up by the secret police because my passport showed I had worked in Turkey and I found out that Turkey and Greece had not
been friendly for about two or three hundred years and so they viewed me with suspicion having been working in Turkey so they just questioned me and found out that I was nothing but a dumb American tourist and they let me go and so I've stayed there until about a week and I finally caught a ship that was going to Egypt Syria and then Cyprus and Cyprus is very close to Israel so I got on the ship this Russian ship a cruise ship out of the Odessa and it was an interesting experience because nobody on the ship spoke English they were all Russian except my cabin
boy was trying to learn English so between my cabin boy and him trying to talk to me in English and me trying to understand him I got along and I wound up in Cyprus in Cyprus as a little island off the coast of Israel and there was a a week there before I finally caught a ship going to Israel and I was let off Tel Aviv in Tel Aviv which has no port so they took a launch and took me to the shore in a launch and as soon as I landed I was picked up by the Mossad the secret police it seems that my
passport showed that I'd been in Egypt and Syria and Turkey and those weren't friendly countries to Israel so they took me to a room what year was this this was in 1964 oh they took me to a room and interrogated me they just wanted to know if I had seen any military installations in any of these countries and I said no I wasn't looking for anything like that I was a tourist and so they'd let me go and they took me to a cafe and bought me a coffee and I proceeded to look up my relatives who lived in Haifa and I wound up working
on a kibbutz p'jem teaching English when they found out I had a degree in English they let me become a teacher of English where they teach I taught grades 1 through 8 they teach English to children as soon as they go to school and so it was an interesting experience they tried to teach me Hebrew while I tried to teach them English and then I met a girl there who was from Canada she had made a Lea and she settled in Israel and she introduced me to a lot of people and I one of them I always my friend from my home town who was
working on the Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel and since I was a draftsman he hired me to make sketches for the air conditioning the work that he was doing and so on the weekends I worked as a draftsman at the Hilton Hotel and during the week I was a teacher on the kibbutz and I did that for two years until I came back to the states in 65 during these years and your of your adult activities her were you active you were active in the Boy Scouts she became an Eagle Scout what about any Jewish organizations or you ever we didn't have the opportunity in BRIC
no there wasn't too much Jewish activity in our little town when I got to the University of Texas I joined a Jewish fraternity AEPi and I was participating in the Hillel and all the activities that the school offered at that time but in my hometown it wasn't very much other than the synagogue on Friday night which wasn't always geared toward young people it was always a service was in Hebrew and we never at first when they first opened the synagogue the women sat on one side in the men on the other and little by little they simulated the group and it became a more of
a reformed synagogue than it was a conservative synagogue well then I assumed that living seven years in Venezuela you became quite fluent in Spanish not really they tell us they sent us to a school they they conducted a Spanish class however the Spanish that we learned was mostly for working people in slang and it wasn't really a good Spanish and so I got a smattering of Spanish but it wasn't really a formal learning like I should have gotten but I still know a lot of the words and I can understand some of the language but I just don't I'm not able to speak Spanish okay
you live seven years of Venezuela how many years did you live in Israel two years two years yeah and that was that was a more interesting experience because Israel was a complete change from anything I was ever used to and my cousin was only 12 years old and he and I used to hitchhike from one end of Israel to the other and one time we got a ride with a truck driver and his stop was at the King Solomon's Mines the Timna mines which is no longer it's now a tourist attraction but we what we hitchhiked from Don in the north to a lot in
the south and we went to all kinds of functions and activities in the negative in Bear Sheva and in Jerusalem and and Tel Aviv and Haifa it was a it's the only way to see a country is to live there and work there if you go there as just for a few weeks you don't really know the country and so I made friends with my family for the first time and now there's only one member of the family left and he just got through with a visit of ten days here in my country and he comes from every year to to visit me from Israel
this time he brought his wife and she is from Paris so they spent five days in Paris on the way here and and she now lives in Israel and and she is a accomplished she had her own restaurant and she became an accountant to help him he's a CPA and so I used to when I visit Israel he would take me on his rounds he would have accounts of direst kibbutzim all over the country and he would take me with him on his work well you're a very international person well and what was a major reason why you came to Dallas after being all these
in all of these like interesting places well the truth of the matter is my family where my father died I was in working in South America in 58 and I came to the funeral and then went back to work and when I came back the family had when my father passed away the family had moved from Breckenridge to Dallas where my sister lived and so when I finished working overseas in the 60s I had no home town more the breckenridge was gone and the family was all in Dallas and so naturally I came to live in Dallas and joined them and I never thought I
would find work in my field because most of the construction and oil industry is in Houston but I found a company peerless manufacturing and they had work all over the world and I went to work for them and I worked for them for almost 25 years and they they sent me all over the place and it was a very interesting experience and I enjoyed working in different countries because they were a big company and they took care of all your expenses and I was able to live on their living allowance and posit my salary without touching my salary it was deposited for me in the
States so you've been in Dallas several years yeah I came back to Dallas in the early 60s I guess in 65 I came back to Dallas and I've been in Dallas ever since okay were you ever married yes I was married for ten years from 1975 to 1985 I married a woman that I thought was an unusual person she was working on her PhD and we had a lot in common unfortunately she wasn't Jewish and my parents were not very happy with the idea but they thought at age 52 if I didn't get married I probably never would get married so they they gave me
their blessing and I was married for ten years from 75 to 85 and uh and then and she was quite a bit younger and I guess that contributed to our separation she was 32 and I was 52 when we got married and so the marriage when it's differs when we went our separate ways after about ten years and I I've been a bachelor ever since Dallas connections when you came to Dallas what year was that you told me earlier in 1965 okay you've seen a lot of changes here in Dallas and oh yeah yeah Dallas is how has the city change well 65 you came
here in 65 tremendo that's 35 48 years I've been in Dallas and Dallas's is grown it's it's it's become a cosmopolitan city although I have worked overseas since I've been here but I pretty much this has been my home base all the time I've been here and it has a large Jewish community so I was able to participate in the B'nai B'rith and and many other Jewish activities that I didn't have the opportunity to do in my hometown yes I came to Dallas in 1970 from South America and like you yeah I have seen incredible changes here you were in Colombia next right next door
to where I was and I was in Peru I was there for a total of ten years almost and you know in when I was working in in South America people would go to Colombia to buy things cheap you could buy an arrow shirt for two dollars back in the days when Venezuela was a boomtown country and if everything was expensive but in Colombia it was poverty it was there was no oil boom in Colombia and so you you could but everything was cheaper so every holiday everybody would go to cuckoo talk Google thought on the porters yeah thrown them a very close look and
it was a place to buy things cheap of course when you came across the border there was inspectors so the way to avoid inspectors was either to put on three or four pairs of pants on two or three shirts or to take your underwear and soil it so that when they picked up the clothes to smell it to see if it was new they would get the odor of and they would put it down immediately the otherwise you had to pay a stiff tax or stiff duty on on new clothes okay you I'm sure you've been very much a part of seeing the changes in
the Dallas Jewish community here oh yeah over that period of time and how has it changed the Jewish community since you came here well it's it's but it's it's grown a lot since I was here and although I've never been very active in the Dallas Jewish community I still participate in the things that are of interest to me and and I'm particularly addicted to theater and the Jewish Community Center as being a done a musical play every year for maybe fifteen to twenty years and I've been in every one of them they did South Pacific Guys and Dolls they did all the most wonderful shows
on Broadway and we had a wonderful director who would always come and do this show and I love being in the in the in the Dallas musicals at the at the Jewish Community Center other than that my main hub of activity has been at the social club that are there's connected with the Jewish Community Center and going on trips and and participating in all the activities that I found interesting it was a things that I couldn't get in a small town we're here in Dallas okay her I'm gonna ask you some concluding questions of course you can add more to this you've had a vast
experiences living in different countries in Turkey I mean really a diversity of cultures and languages one of the interesting things about South America is that the two synagogues were side-by-side only I have a block apart one was an Ashkenazi and one was a safar Dean and we're modern archival and I used to go to the one with a safar deme although my parents are from Russia and Poland and I would really naturally be an Ashkenazi I still prefer to go to this frd community because the rabbi there was so elegant he wore a silk top-hat he wore robes his wife waited on him hand and
foot he took me home to dinner one time and his wife met him at the door took off his robe and gave him another little robe and they she waited on him hand and foot she was like a servant which is traditional for the old European Way is where they they did that the women always walk behind and that's the way although I didn't approve of that it was the way he he operated and he was so elegant and then I later found out the reason he invited me home was because he had a young eligible daughter and he thought that all anybody from America
was rich he didn't know I was just a poor attachment and so he took me home to introduce me to his daughter but nothing nothing everything and I'm sure you discover that the Sephardic food was different Ashkenazi right right yes it was it was a real wonderful experience very very Orthodox you know and which is I'm not used to having grown up in West Texas we were far from being or that Orthodox but it was an interesting different view of Jewish life that I never got before I forget it you mentioned my to Cabo were you ever in cook you were in Caracas also yeah
what do you think of Caracas Caracas was a well an elegant town I mean it was so modern I remember riding up on the telephoto this is a cable car that rode up the mountainside in Caracas and it was a city that was so modern compared to the rest of the country where I worked in Maracaibo it was an oil field it was it was people were down and dirty I mean it was a worked work job and in Caracas it was it was a city of beautiful buildings and modern everything was so modern it was a dream you know people who lived anywhere else
couldn't afford to live in Caracas no it was so expensive but of course that was Venezuela and it was during the oil boom so everything was high everywhere but I love Caracas however that was only on a weekend I couldn't I never stayed in Caracas more than just a visit my whole life was in Maracaibo how did the Venezuelan straight you what how did you find the Venezuelans were they friendly to you oh yeah the people all catered to the Americans speaking of that we were called Norte Americanos and they hired so many natives that then we had the reputation of having all the money
because we were the big employers and so they treated us with a great respect and we got along splendidly okay of all the people you met your travels different cultures who are your role models in life did you have someone that you've really admired all of your life as a mentor or a role model and offhand I really I really don't have them I was a stage-struck kid you know and I idolized people like Paul Muni and John Garfield Jewish actors who had made it on the stage and made it in the movies and were so honored by their peers in the movies that and
I always aspired to be on the stage but I never there was no money in in the theatre I always took it as a sideline I worked at a job and then I my hobby was to be in a show in a play so my ideal was to be somebody who had made it big in the movies but I never did I never followed through on that I always got down to reality was where is the next meal gonna come from and it always had to be in the construction business and oilfield construction business okay her tell me about your family here in Dallas today
you got relatives here in Dallas very few let's talk about your relatives here my mother passed away at 96 my father lived till he was 70 76 my brother and sister passed away only in 98 and 99 they were my brother was 84 and my sister was 87 I'm now 90 so I'm the last living relative of my family my niece was my only mother sister's daughter was my only living relative in a year or so ago she had a stroke and she's now unable to operation she's you know in a facility that being tube-fed and she can't move she's paralyzed on one side and
that's my last close relative I have some cousins who live here but they are dwindling I have very few relatives left and I have no children I have no why my ex-wife is remarried so I'm left pretty much alone in the whole world herb is there anything you would want to add to this mystery okay okay no offend i I've had a fairly interesting life I always thought that I'd travel the world but then when I think about my father coming from Russia to New York he was supposed to be inducted into the Russian army but he the Russian army being as corrupt as it
was he was able to pay off a guard and they didn't have to go in he went down to a Hamburg port in Germany got on a ship and sailed for America in about nineteen six and escaped serving in the Russian army my father his brother served two years and became a harness maker but my father joined him in New York and and that's where the family got started so when I think of what he did he came to New York hardly knowing the English language he was a tutor in Europe and his adventures make mine looked pretty tame compared to what I went through
I had companies sending me all over the world but they paid for my passage from a living allowance they took care of me everything was handled when he came from Europe nothing was he didn't know that they didn't have a profession and he he lost all his money trying to find a job and he had to take what he could find he went to work as a as a salesman as a boy to work selling cigarettes in a store his life was very hard compared to mine I had it easy compared to his life and that's about it okay well thank you very much extremely
elated that I had the opportunity to do your oral history and what an interesting history that you have had with your travels different cultures different languages and what you have accomplishes is remarkable thank you and again I want to thank you and I hope you have a good evening thank you