Herbert Shore
Herbert Shore was born in New York City, the youngest of four children with three older sisters. His parents had emigrated from what was then Russia and Poland, meeting and marrying in the United States; his father designed women's suits and coats in the garment industry. Shore received a traditional Jewish education, attending Hebrew school and celebrating his bar mitzvah, and always felt a strong commitment to working with Jewish people and the Jewish community. He attended Stuyvesant High School, earned his bachelor's degree at City College, served two and a half years in the Army Air Corps beginning in 1944, and completed his master's in social work at Columbia University. He married Selma in 1948.
Drawn to work with the elderly through his early involvement with Jewish Community Centers and the guidance of mentors, Shore entered the field in 1949 and took a position in Chicago in 1950 at the Drexel Home, where he rose to assistant administrator. A chance visit in 1952 by board member Helen Jacobs led to his recruitment to Dallas, where he arrived on March 9, 1953, at age 27 to open the new Dallas Home for the Jewish Aged. Over 37 and a half years he led its growth from a 50-bed home to a campus of 550 residents, building an addition roughly every five years and establishing Golden Acres as a national model that offered occupational therapy, a consulting psychiatrist, and a full-time social worker.
Beyond the home, Shore was a devoted teacher and public servant. He taught for decades at the University of North Texas, where he helped found a center for the study of aging, and he trained generations of professionals. He was a founding president of the North American Association of Jewish Homes and Housing for the Aging, helped create CHAI (Community Homes for Adults Incorporated) to serve Jewish adults with developmental disabilities, and was involved in the Beyer and Echad apartments that served independent seniors and later Soviet Jewish immigrants. He attended all four White House Conferences on Aging and authored writings including his beloved Abe and Becky stories. Married more than 50 years to Selma, he was the father of three children and several grandchildren.
Full Transcript
In 1999, I am in the office with Dr. Herbert Schor. This is Myrna Reese conducting an interview with Herb, who is the past Executive Vice President of the Dallas Home for the Jewish Aged, more affectionately called Golden Acres by the Dallas community. The date again is July 13, 1999. Herb, very happy to be here today with you. And you have made a significant contribution, to say the least, to the Dallas Jewish community. And before we start into those wonderful beginning years at the home, I'd like to know some of your background, starting with where were you born? Born in New York City. I lived in New York City, I guess, for the first 18 years of my life.
I was educated there. Went into the Army Air Corps in 1944. Spent two and a half years in the Air Corps. Came back to New York City. finished my college education, married, worked for a year, took my master's at Columbia University in social work, and then went to Chicago to begin my career in working with the elderly. Okay, so your education was where did you say? New York City. New York City at Columbia did you say? I went to Stuyvesant High School, City College, my bachelor's, and Columbia for my master's. Well, tell me, before we get into how you got into gerontology, because that I would assume was a very new field at that time, first tell me a little bit about your family, your siblings, and maybe a little about your Jewish background.
Okay, I came from a family of four children. I had three older sisters. My father was a designer of women's suits and coats. I had been in business with his brother work in the women garment industry for all of his life I have a traditional kind of Jewish education I went Hebrew school in Bar Mitzlid Unfortunately in those days you learned how to read Hebrew but you didn understand what you read But I've always had a very, very strong commitment. I always knew I wanted to work with Jewish people and in the Jewish community. Amen. Herb, I forgot to ask you, were your parents American born?
No, both. My parents came from what was Russia, Poland. My mother came when she was a very young girl. And my father, when he was about 18, they met in this country and married here. So, the level of its... Alright, let's get back to your education. You got your Master's in Social Work. What about gerontology? Why were you drawn to that? Well, very early in my life, I became a member of the Jewish Community Centers in New York City. I went to camps sponsored by the Jewish Community Centers and so forth. And when I was 17 or so, I began leading boys clubs. As a matter of fact, I met some in the Jewish Community Center when we were teenagers.
And I worked at Bronx House, which was a neighborhood center, a Jewish settlement house. And the man who was the executive was a brilliant, one of the really great pioneers of Jewish social, a man named Greenberger. And we would have regular staff meetings, and he would tell us what was happening in the field. He was a very innovative and creative person. When I came back from the Army, I went back to Brung's house, and at one of the staff meetings, he told us to go visit the William Hudson Community Center, which was the first day center for all the people in the United States. It was started during the war because there were men and women who were not able to go to work Those who could work had jobs But the New York City did not have as a welfare program did not have enough money to provide for their recreation So they got the bright idea of creating a day center for older people.
And Mr. Berger was the advisor to them. And he said, go see the Hudson Center. The future is in work with the elderly. And I thought that was rather interesting. Selma and I were married. She was a school teacher. She would leave the house at 7 in the morning and travel up to the Bronx and work with children. I was working in a Jewish community center in Brooklyn in Canarsie. I go to work at 3 in the afternoon, come home at 11. We left a note on the table to see who sat it in the morning if we're lucky. And the thought occurred to me that working with the elderly would be the bankers hours of social workers, because older people come to the center during the day.
And that was interesting. Nobody was interested in them. I began working with the elderly in 1949. And this year, Myrna, it's 50 years that I worked. Fate intervened, and expediency with you and Selma. Fascinating. You were newly married, about how many years had you been married at that time? I was only married in 48. Okay, and this was 49. I went to social work school in 49 and began my placement at the Hudson Center. I had two placements, both working with the old. And in early 1950, I went to Chicago. I thought... Okay. Herb, tell me about Chicago and when you came to Dallas. Well, I went to Chicago, I thought, to work with the Golden Age Clubs of Chicago.
There was a wonderful man named Peter Terrell who was in charge of the Golden Age Clubs. And I really wanted to work under supervision my first job out of school. When I got to Chicago in August of 1950, they told me that they had two jobs open, one with the Golden Age Clubs and one as a recreation worker in a home for the agent. I had never worked in a home for the agent I was quite unhappy about it I went to see the man who hired me and said he had not been fair He said well you had more experience than the other worker Try it for a year and if you don like it we take you back to the clubs So I went to work at the Drexel Home which was one of the three homes in Chicago on Drexel Boulevard near the University of Chicago, and found that a great challenge, because although some of these people may have had some disabilities, I had to learn about their capabilities, not what did they lose, but what did they have left and what could I work with.
And I was the assistant administrator, no, I was the group worker for about five months when the man who was the assistant administrator left. And one morning I came into the home, the administrator waved me into his office and he said to me, how would you like to be my assistant? And I thought I could take a joke. I said, I'd like it. How would you? He said, you're hired. I said, do you mind if I sit down? And so I sat down. He said, well, last night, Mr. Rosenthal took a position in Milwaukee, and I'd like you to be my assistant. But you also have to do the job as a recreation worker until we find them.
And so I left the field of recreation and group work and Jewish community centers, and I became the assistant administrator. And I was working in Chicago, and one day in, I guess, November of 1952, at the home there, we worked Saturdays and Sundays, there was always an administrator on duty, and I was supposed to share the responsibilities with Mr. Crosman. He was a very, very creative administrator, except that I worked three weekends and he worked one. And one of the weekends I was on duty, and at about 9 in the morning, a taxi pulled up, a very smartly dressed woman, black hat, black gloves. She really was a fashion play.
came into the building and asked Mr. Grossman. And I said, I'm sorry, he wasn't there. Could I help her? And she identified herself as Helen Jacobs. She was the wife of Mr. Jacobs, who was Leslie Jacobs, who was one of the officers of the Pollock Paper Company, and he was in town on business. And she was a member of the board and we created the board of the Dallas home. And she said, I want to see the home. I want you to tell me everything that you did right and everything you did wrong. I want a copy of all of your policies. So I was tickled with her enthusiasm.
And I said, how much time do you have? She said, three hours. I said, let's go. So we took the elevator to the seventh floor. It was a new building. And we walked down to the basement. She wanted to know about everything. Excuse me, there were seven floors in this nursing home? Yes. And how many residents? 162. And what I didn't know was, and she had a pair, she kept taking notes. In addition to her seeing what was happening, she was watching me. And, of course, I knew every resident and every employee, and they would stop me and ask questions. and she was very interested in the design of the building and the operations.
We went downstairs and I gave her all of the information she wanted and she thanked me, I called the cab. And I figured that was a nice lady and that was the end of that. She went back to the Drake Hotel, called Julia Sheps, who was president of the board. And she said, I found her executive director. And on the basis of that chance visit, I was invited to Dallas in January of 1953, had an interview at Julius' home with the officers and the board, and during the interview they said to me, well, what has to be done to open the home? when I enumerated any number of things like hiring staff and setting the policies and selecting the residents.
We had to buy the furniture and so forth. Did they have a building? The building was under construction. It was being constructed. It was outside of the city, central road. It was outside the city limits, central and shadow. And when the building was completed, they asked for incorporation in the city. So when I told them all of the things that they had to do in that brief window of time that they had, they said to me, you have to go home And they said don take your job for a week We have one other candidate and we want to see that candidate and then I let you know Irving Goldberg who later became a federal judge who was chairman of the personnel committee On Wednesday night of that week he called me and said we decided not to see the other candidate.
When can you come? I said, I'd give notice. So I arrived in Dallas March 9th of 1953, and I was with the home until June of 1990, 37 and a half years. Good story. Herb, you literally built the home, I know. One of my questions was when you asked me that and answered that. And I was going to ask you, who were the people who brought you here? Were there any others? You've named some pretty distinguished people. Are there any others that you remember who were prominent in this? Of course. a wonderful group of people and very dedicated to the home and to wanting to see that it would be successful.
You had Julie Sheps who was an unbelievable individual, really one of the most unique people I've ever met in my life. But you had Max Glaser who was a remarkable man at all heart. He loved the home. He loved the residents. Meyer Rachofsky who was with the bank. These were really the leaders of the community. And then you had people who were also very active, but interestingly enough, over the years, it was a long laborious birth for the baby, for this home to come into being. And so you had Helen Jacobs, who was really a formidable force, and her son-in-law Robert Strauss. You had... Wait, mention who's Robert Strauss.
You had Judge Goldberg, who later became Judge. And then you had Maureen Wolf, who was very active. Maureen sort of had a social work background, and her father was one of the people that had a contract to build the home. And Elsa Hirsch was very active. And Ben Lewis, who was a great leader in the community and in the Federation. So what you really had was people who were invested in the home, and they all had their ideas of how to run it. And when I got here, they wanted me to do it their way. So it took a while for me to work with them, to help them understand that I had the background and the training and that I appreciated their input but that we would have to resolve these issues so everybody could own the home and have a share in it That was really quite a challenge The home was the first agency of the Jewish Federation that was not a department of the Federation.
We were the first independent agency. And so that was a learning experience for them as well as for the home. Of course, in those days, they were on Pocahontas Street, and the family service and the center and the Federation were all tied together with Jack Kravitz, who was the Federation director, overseeing everything. And it was hard for for him to understand that we were going to be out on Central Road and do things a little independently. So you were in court, you were totally independent. Yes. You were going to be a recipient of funding. Right. We were one of their beneficiary agencies, but we were, we had our own board and we were independent of it.
How old were you at this time, Herb? Well, when I got here, I was 53. I was 27. 27 and you knew and had the instincts to lead these all these people I believe were older than you quite a bit. I've got a wonderful story. Good. During my job interview, Ike Zablosky was in the insurance business with Judas Sheffsson, one of the great patriarchs of the community. Ike was elderly, and he was sitting in his chair, very rotund. And he looked at me, starting with my shoes, and slowly lifted his eyes, and looked up at my face and said... So I looked over, finally looked up at me, pointed his finger at me, and said, You be good to those old people.
Wonderful. Well, you obviously were... Well, let me tell you, you know, Salman and I were Yankees, born, educated, bred, buttered, married in New York City, except that I had had a couple of years in the military. And we came to the South with an eight-month-old baby, and we were a little nervous about, would we educate our children in the South? We thought of segregation as well Texas Dallas turned out to be much more southwestern than southern I was stationed in Mississippi so I had a southern experience during the Army But we came on the five-year plan. It was a small home, and in social work you move up the ladder by moving around.
I figured I'd be here five years. If I succeeded, I'd move If I failed, I'd move on. At the end of the first five years, we built the first addition to the home, the Jacobs Wing. Okay? And virtually every five years, there was another addition. So I came to a 50-bed home. When I left, we had 550 people on the campus. So people would say to me, you know, how could you stay in one job for 38 years? And I said, it's not one job, it's not the same job. You kept growing, you kept changing, the field changing. And the other thing that was really remarkable about Dallas, and I attribute this largely to Judy Sheps, was they said to me, you came here as a professional.
I'll tell you a great story about him in a minute. Good, good. You came here as a professional, you know what you have to do. And so if I felt it was important for me to be involved in organizations and agencies and in the community, older people getting fifty dollars a month welfare when I came to Texas. If you took dollar for dollar, it hasn't changed. On welfare, if you translate what the equivalent dollar with inflation is today, we're not much better off in Texas. We're still about 48th in the nation in terms of welfare payments. but I felt that that was creating great problems and a burden for the people.
And so I got very active in the community and the council of social agencies because I felt we needed to provide some leadership and advocacy for all the people. And so consequently that began my involvement and they permitted me and that was one of the reasons that I really was happy to stay in Dallas to do the things that I felt was important and necessary. A great example of that is, I came, I drove down from Chicago. I got here on a Wednesday. I called Judy Shepson as president of the board to tell him I'm in town. They'd come in and see me Friday morning.
So I did. Julius always called me. He always referred to me as Son. That became my name. And he said to me, Son, I want to give you one piece of advice. Yes, sir. Don't play football. I could not fathom what this man was talking about. And he saw the puzzle on my face. And he said, let me tell you a story. Julius was an officer of the Mercantile Bank. He said, we hired a bank officer, vice president. He came with outstanding credentials. And every time we came to him with a problem, every time we asked him a question, he would say, let me kick it around.
And he said, we want to come to you. You're the professional. Don't kick it around. And that was great advice. Come with a professional approach. approach. And so, um, I love that. That was a great story. And there are others about him, but we'll see. Anyhow, uh, it became apparent to me that Dallas was wonderfully located, because you can get any place within three hours. You can be in New York, you can be in California, you can be in Chicago in two hours. So, in terms of geography, you couldn't beat the location. And it was the time when organizations and groups and others were emerging in terms of their representation.
So you're on a double track. You're heading toward state gerontological association and interests, and then of course you get on to the national, but you're getting also this was a rich time in the Jewish community. And I'd like for you to talk a little bit about that, because you were in on the beginnings of a lot of things, not just Golden Acres. It's a remarkable, really remarkable Jewish community, because in the years that I've been here, you stop and think what this Jewish community has built, considering how small we are in number, and that we have had such a strong commitment to Israel, which we should have, and raised so much money for Israel to think that they have built a home from 50 to a campus you know with the home and the apartments and so forth and so on And that we have the center and we have all of our synagogues and splendid buildings It's just a remarkable community, not only in what we've done with physical structures, but the leadership we've provided in the community and so forth.
One of the things that I have always felt, that I carry a responsibility as a representative of the Jewish community to make a positive contribution. And so, interestingly enough, I'll tell you another wonderful story in a minute. But I've had four, maybe five parts to my career. Okay, the joke in my family is that I flunked retirement. I retired from Golden Lakers. I had taught at the University of North Texas for 38 years, and I retired from there. I was the founding president of what was called the North American Association of Jewish Homes and Housing for the Aging. And I was their voluntary executive for years.
When I retired from home, I became their executive for five years. I said I'd help them raise enough money so they could hire a professional and move to Washington, which they did. I also had a career as a public servant. because I worked with organizations. I was one of the founders of CHI. I was a founder and past president of senior citizens of Greater Dallas. I was chair of the Division of Aging of, in those days, the Council of Social Agencies. And a great many organizations, you can see all of the various awards and so forth. I'm one of the few individuals who attended all four White House conferences on aging.
So I consider myself a public servant, working with boards and the historical society. And now in my old age I'm doing some interesting work as an expert witness in cases concerning nursing homes, both for the plaintiff and for the defendant. If I think the suit is frivolous, or anybody wants to sue a nursing home, I'll work with the defendant. If the home has not given proper care I work with the plaintiff Okay So obviously an enviable and distinguished career but Herb you have a certain ability with people to I don want to say too much you tell me because the little people you worked with the leaders and the movers and the shakers but can you tell me a little bit about the volunteers at the home, the residents at the home, and the kinds of relationships you developed there?
Well, I always thought I was the most fortunate person in the world, really, because I had the opportunity every day to do something I loved, and that was to work with all the people. These were people who were in a difficult position in their life. They had illnesses, some physical, some mental, some both. They no longer could manage. They lost a spouse. They were in advancing age. And I felt that it was my opportunity to add some dignity, some quality, some meaning to their life. And we tried very hard to do that. We had the Corps of wonderful, outstanding women who were volunteers who cared about the residents and who still do.
That was one of the strengths of the movement. So we had on-hands volunteers. We had policy volunteers on the board and so forth. So on the one hand, I said I did something that I enjoyed doing every day, being with the people. And then I would say that once a week, I was challenged. I would never take a lunch hour. I had a can of Slim Fast or a cup of yogurt at the desk. And by not taking a lunch hour for five days, I was able to leave the home at noon on Thursday. and I would drive to Denton and I would teach. And because I really felt I had a commitment that somebody passed the torch to me, somebody helped train me, and that with the growing numbers of older people, we could read the demographics, that we would need trained professionals to work with the elderly.
And the board of the home was really wonderful. They felt that we had an obligation. We took interns we trained people and so forth So I said every day I work with older people and their families and with staff and with people in the community And then once a week I went up to the campus where I was challenged by young people The difference was one of the other faculty members had theoretical knowledge. I had practical. I did it. So I was talking from the experience of somebody who ran an institution. And I was not only telling them why he did things, but how he did them and the like.
And so that was really very special. He used to accuse me of hiring the best students who were RSS. And so we had many of them at the home. It was really a wonderful relationship between the university and the university. Well, that leads me to state here that Golden Acres became a model for the country. And what was the uniqueness of Golden Acres? The model was that the board was willing to invest in more than just bed and board. We were the first home in North Texas to have occupational therapy, to have a consultant psychiatrist, to have a full-time social worker. When I identified that these were things that were appropriate and helpful, The board agreed to it, and we devoted space.
I mean, a commercial facility is out to realize the profit on its investment. They would not create an auditorium. They would not create the kind of space that Golden Makers provided, a garden room, and so forth. So it's to the credit of the board and the community that they were willing to invest not only in the, day-to-day care, but in elevating the quality of integrating the residents into the community. I was going to tell you one other cute story, because it's one of the precious stories of my life. We went to a budget hearing and got some money from the Federation. It's now a million dollars a year from the Federation to the home.
In those days it was considerably less. And Mr. Sheps was there, but he was not representing the home at that time. He He was just on the committee. And the president of the Federation just won't He began, he said to me, Dr. Shore, I understand you teach at the university. How much do you earn? I'm in the middle of a budget here. So I said to him, I teach with the approval of my board. They know that I do. They want us to do that. And if the president of the board of the home wants to know what I earned, I'll be happy to tell him.
But I don't believe that it's pertinent to the home's budget. I work weekends. I do it on my time. He went ballistic. He said, your own time. What do you mean your own time? When you're an employee of a Jewish community, you're on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is no such thing as your own time. And it was a heavy fall over the moon. Nobody knew what to say. Everybody falls. And I said, Mr. Blank, I was under the impression Lincoln freed the slaves. Everybody cracked up. Julia Shep said, why don't we get to the business why we're here? Wonderful, wonderful.
So, I mean, there are interesting ideas that people have about professionals. There was one man who was a Federation president who said, The day a social worker or an agency executive earns $100,000 will be the blackest day in the history of Dallas. And I said to him, you want to swap bank accounts? Yeah, yeah. Well, there's still a problem with what you pay social workers. But getting back to how this whole concern for the quality of life for the elderly, was that a new idea at that time? Well, the religious groups, the Catholics, the Jews, and some of the other groups that ran not-for-profit facilities had a completely different orientation.
It was a mission, it was a ministry, it was a service. from the hemisphere. And I said, would you like to go? She thought I was kidding. So we got some of our volunteers Charlene Clark our occupational therapist We took 44 residents to San Antonio And that began we took all kinds of trips We went to Freeport to the races And really what my feeling was, and I believe it to this day, was that anything that interests an adult human being can interest an older person. We had the most remarkable woman. I miss her. I dearly loved her. Sylvia Stein, who was our recreation worker.
Sylvia had a gift. Before lunch every day, the residents would gather in the living room, and she would take the morning paper, and she would read about things that were happening. And she'd say, okay, you little, you're going to be Bogomair, and you're Yasser Arafat, and how would you get my peace? Well, she would read Dear Abby, the question of Dear Abby, happy, but not the answer. And she would say to the residents, well, how would we solve this problem? You see, but what she was doing was engaging them in current events and things happening around them. So they argued abortion and they argued civil rights and they talked about what was happening in Dallas and so forth.
And then when they went into the dining room, they could continue at the table and talk to each other. And that was what we tried We did not accept the theory that because you're old, you could not be creative, you could not be engaged, and so on. Well, what do you think? What has happened? All right. What do you see? You know, things are not the same. They're not the same now. I think it is. I know. One thing that's constant in life is change. Right. Looking back and knowing the home now, and probably many homes, not just with government involvement, etc., etc., can you sort of put your finger on the difference in the residence now as to when you were so involved and sort of give your take on that?
Well, medical science has changed, extended all of our lives. Okay. So, I went to a conference in Bucharest a couple of years ago. I was the American on a panel And they asked me what happening with aging in America And I said there were three things Okay good news there are more older people than there ever were They're living longer than they ever did. And they want more. We contributed to society, we want more. That's the bad news, there are more old people than there ever were. Living longer, wanting more. We haven't prepared for it. Okay. When I entered the field back in 1949, The only solution, the only crown jewel available was an institution.
People came into homes when they were in their 60s. Some of them stayed at cold knickers for 20 years. Today, they come in in their 90s. They stay for three months or three weeks or whatever. So that's a vast change, because in the interim, as medical science made all of its changes in progression, World War II, with all of its problems, gave birth to rehabilitation medicine. And we no longer looked upon broken hips as being sentenced to lying dead. So with scotch tape and spit and staples, they put bones together, and we suddenly realized that age was no reason not to do surgery on old people, cataract operations and all that sort of thing.
Then they invented the psychotropic drugs, and they emptied the state hospitals. And we suddenly realized that the home was not going to be the solution, and we needed home-based and community-based as well as institutional-based. So now there were three problems to it. And as the home-based, home health, VNA, Meals on Wheels, helped older people stay where they wanted to stay, in their own homes for longer periods of time, you see, the institution began to diminish. And what we really had was a kind of continuum where people live in their own homes or in congregate arrangements like Bayer's or Echad and then the institution. But those who didn't require 24 hours care fell off in the crevice.
And that when assisted living personal care the other kinds of things were invented And so the role of the home has changed And today people come in with much higher acuity and a greater advanced age There will always be a need for some people to have a place for care in the final stages of their life My secretary was in the hospital and they got a Golden Acres for rehab for a couple of weeks. So the home will always fill a need, but there are other things that we are doing to help people remain in the community, remain independent. The JCC has a great leisure program.
Temple has a leisure program. Family Service has gerontology workers and so forth. So that we now know there are other ways of trying to help families than just the institution. So the institution now, really it sounds to me like there's a lot of sick people. Yes. You've referred a couple of times to Echad and Byers, and for future listeners of this tape, could you quickly just summarize, explain what Byers is and Echad? Well, we began to recognize in the 70s, I guess, maybe earlier, that sometimes it was a couple where the husband or wife needed to be in the home but the spouse didn't, where they didn't have to live in an institution.
And so we built some apartments. And that was a very nice arrangement where they could come and visit their spouse or other people who could come to the home, have a meal, enjoy the synagogue and the other program, but still live independently in their own apartment. and then after a while we built more apartments but got a gift from Mabel Beyer and built the Beyer Center which was a kind of an adult day center for people who lived in the apartments or in the community or even from a home who wanted to go over to the day center so the independent living apartments carried the name of Beyer later Do you remember what year, buyer, or the years?
The buyer apartments in the buyer center was built in 74. Although we had had some apartments I think beginning in like 68, the first 20 units. The federal government had a program of housing for other The League with low income, it was called HUD 202 Section 8, in which they subsidized the income for people. And we felt that there were some older people who didn't belong in the HUD, who could manage in independent living. And there were some very wonderful volunteers, you knew one of them, who went out there and helped them live a good life. good life. We put in a little health screening clinic there, and then somebody helped them with their medications and took their blood pressure and so forth.
So we didn't know it at the time, but the Echad apartments in Echad comes from the Shema, we are one, later became a lifesaver for the older Soviet Jews who came to this country. There's two buildings now. Yes, Echad I and Echad II. Well, some people wanted to call Echad II, son of Echad. Very good. But I know there are a lot of Russians living in Echad. Well, going back to Federation, my question here, written here, is tell me about your continuing relationship with the community, your board, and with Federation. I think you've more or less answered some of this. Maybe you want to address Federation because fundraising has changed also in the community.
Well, I was at the home. Essentially, they believed in the concept of a central fundraising campaign, and the Federation discouraged everybody else. You had to have certain limited time zones in which you could raise funds and so forth. And the home was never permitted to raise money independently. In the 80s, with the oil crisis and real estate plummeting and the Federation not able to raise all of the money that it had previously, they began to give the Center for Scholarships for Camp and so forth and family service and the home permission to do some independent fundraising. And that's when Friends of Golden Lakers was created as a means of subsidizing needed programs, renovation and other things for which there was no money available To some extent I think that helped the Federation because we were reaching people who may not have given for special purposes And there's always going to be the issue of local services and overseas needs.
And because of the religious issues and other things in Israel, there are people who are avidly in favor of Israel and against it. So local needs will continue to receive funds. What has happened, and I think it's a significant change, is in the old days you had some wonderful people, Jake Feldman, Irvin Donsky, Maureen Wilberga, Stanley Pearl, who were staunchly, Marty Mumbus, staunchly dedicated to Israel. That was their mission, and nobody could argue with it, really. Israel had to survive. But the question was, could we be fair to both overseas and local needs in the way? And for a very long time, the people who represented UJA interests sort of controlled the Federation.
Over the years that has changed, and you have a new generation of leadership at the Federation, a new Federation executive and so forth. And I think you have a much more representative view of community needs. People like Jeff Seymour, Don Schaefer, and so forth, are, I think, more widely understanding of the total community of Jewish education and Jewish day schools and so forth than the earlier generations. It was tougher in the earlier days. I think the community has grown, and we're still remarkable. We are still remarkable. If you stop and think, the amount of money raised every year from a handful of people, it's just a fantastic community.
You find the board, I know you're not as closely connected, but the board at the home, is it still the same dedication? I mean, I know when you're starting something, there is that passion and excitement. Well there a lot of interest at the moment The gold building some assisted living You know there know there been a debate about where we be building and so forth And they have some young leaders at the home I don't think they have as many of the people who have the broad community recognition, but that may change. There are changes taking place at the home as we speak, and that may change.
The home is still considered one of the really significant agencies in the community as it should be. I hope you answered how the residents are different now. Would you talk a little bit, first of all, I'd like to go back to the personal. You still have a personal life we'd like to know about. How many children and grandchildren do you have? I have three children, two daughters and a son. My oldest daughter is Deborah. She lives in Chicago. She has one son, Ben Smith. He's 15. And Deborah is a writer, and she is the editor of an environmental magazine called Chicago Wilderness. There's a consortium of 32 organizations in Chicago that are trying to preserve the prairie, the savannah.
I never knew there was a savannah, a prairie, in Chicago, but there is. And so you're trying to find some kind of equity between the people who are only interested in trees and others who are only interested in plants and, you know, endangered species and so forth. And it's a great magazine. It's beautifully done. Very talented young lady. I have daughter Wendy who lives here in Dallas. She has two girls, Evan and Renee. Evan is 16 and Renee is 11. And my son is Andrew and he lives in California. He's a computer expert. He was one of the people who wrote the original program that turned the computer into a printer.
And at age 41 he is retired and a professional square dance caller. He was in Silicon Valley. He's done very well. I been married to someone for almost 51 years Well very interesting very gratifying life Herb Let me tell you about one other thing that I think really has some archives in my life. Great, keep talking. In the years that I was an old neighbor, I would find periodically something very, very painful. I'd get a phone call. You could tell it was an older woman. She had a tear in her voice. I said, I have to talk to you. I said, come on in. And before she was in the seat, she was pointing a finger at me.
Tears flowing. She was saying, this is a scenario every time. She was saying, promise me, promise me, when I die, you'll take care of Sarah. Or you'll take care of Abe or whoever. And what happened was she suddenly confronted her own mortality. The husband died. Now here she is with a 50-year-old mentally retarded son or daughter. In those days they didn't mainstream it. They were a closet. Now I learned later, and it took me a while to figure it out, one of the reasons nobody should know they had a child who was mentally retarded was the other children might not be able to marry if there was a damaged gene pool.
Okay? So you kept them closeted. And as fate would have it, this lovely man, wonderful citizen, and the actor that the sheriff is running himself would die. And suddenly the wife has a 50-year-old daughter, a son who's married, who has his own family. She knows he can't take on this burden. And so she says to me, promise me, promise me. And I said to her, well, bring your daughter in and we'll see if we could train her. Oh, she couldn't work. Because what I found over the years that it was quite possible to train people with retardation and other developmental disabilities. For example, they had the patience to be bath attendants.
Or I hired a young man who was in his 20s. He is still there today. On January 1st he would bring me a calendar and I would mark off the weekend days he was off and so forth. He never missed a day. He did laundry. If a resident had hidden money or jewelry in their pillowcase, he would bring it to us. He's still there. His sister dropped him off at 7 in the morning when she went to work and his brother picked him up at 5, 5.30. When he finished work, he went into the living room and watched television with the residents. Okay. So I knew that we could train them.
There were jobs that they could do very well. And he asked, what have it? This mother was driving with her daughter. A couple of weeks later, got into an automobile accident, broke her knee, broke her head, broken ribs, and had her come into the home for kind of care. And a couple of weeks later, totally unexpected, she had a heart attack and died. Sudden. Poof. And now we have a 52-year-old woman in the home. Myrna, in six weeks, she had learned to walk like an older person, stooped over and stuff. And I said to myself, this lady could live here for 30 years. She doesn't belong anymore.
And so with Carmen Michael, has a daughter who had a birth illness, meningitis at birth. And so we went to Milton Levy, who had been president of the home, and said, we really need to create an agency that will serve adult Jewish people with retardation. And that's how Kai was born, Community Homes for Adults Incorporated. Right. And it took a while. We did a study and, you know, people very nervous about what would it be like, how would it work. So we filled one home, and we filled a second, and now we have three. It's a wonderful community enterprise. But it came about because we recognized the gold makers that there had to be a place for people who needed that level of care.
You know, I'm so glad that you told me, and we'll leave this for the Jewish community of the future. I did not know that you were involved in that and I didn know it sort of an outgrowth of the home Absolutely And that very very important very important so there are three community adult homes now 18 tell us about the Abe and Becky I had a professional colleague and we entered the field the same time about 48 he was in Minneapolis Jewish man Dr. Jerome Kaplan. And we would see each other at professional meetings, and we were big friends. And I knew his wife and family.
I worked in the Jewish field. He worked in the public field. He ran a home in Mansfield, Ohio, and was very active in state associations and so forth. And one night, 1992, Thursday night at 11 o'clock, the phone rings, and this June Kaplan, and she said, Herb, I don't know if you know that Jerome's had a major heart attack. and he had that bypass surgery he almost died and i could only see him he's in intensive care for three minutes every two hours but he wanted me to call he needs a favor i said sure anything he had to do a chapter on ethnicity and aging for a book on ethnicity and aging on the jewish agent he can't do it he wants you to write it i said i'd be happy to when is it due It's a Monday.
This is Thursday. I said, June, I'll write it over the weekend, but I can't get it typed that fast. Who's the editor? So she gave me his name. I called him. I explained what happened. And he said, sure. So by the time I wrote the chapter and the galleys of the book were ready, they sent it to Dr. Kaplan. I sent him in in his name, and he added my name as co-author. So about four months later, thank God he recovered. Four months later, Jerome called me, and he said, I'm chairman of a conference in Finland, in Uvaskila, Finland, where there was a university that did a lot of work with sports, health and aging.
He said we going to have a conference and I pay your way if you will be one of the keynotes Well I was very interested in the Russians at Goldmakers Because when I was in Russia I saw what happened They had no air conditioning So they were in the streets till 1, 2 o'clock in the morning during the summer, standing around. And they didn't have automobiles. So the men would be walking in front, and the women behind with the packages and so forth. But everybody walked. And when they came to Echan, there was no place for them to congregate, and the men needed something to do.
So we put in a walking bath, and we started a walkers club. And we gave them walking canes and jackets when they walked so many miles and so forth to encourage exercise. And so I wrote a paper about the Russians and the measured mile and the incentives and so forth, as walking was an inexpensive kind of way to exercise. Very healthy. So when I went to Finland to present the paper, I said to Jerome, you got me here, I'll take you to dinner. So there were four men and three wives. wives at one table and men at the other and we started telling stories. And I was telling them my favorite stories about old people.
And my friend Jerome says, Herb, write them down. She says, because you're mortal. And when you die, they'll die with you. So I ain't got time. But coming home on the plane, I had seven hours. I got intrigued with it. I pulled out a pad and I started writing these stories. And it occurred to me that if I'm telling the story instead of trying to think of a man's name and a woman's name if I standardized always Abe and always Becky because of Abraham and Rebecca the matriarch the patriarch it would be okay and so I wrote my stories and I had them typed and I sent them out as Monica gifts in 92 everybody loved them I said put it out in book form then the thought occurred to me gee we could make some money for Chai with the books.
The thought occurred to me that we could do several things. People would enjoy the humor and make some money for Chai. And since we started it we taken them or more I ordered one I need to get the sequel I think I got number one Fascinating life Quickly, I'd like to know, and then I have the major question at the end. Do you want to talk a little bit, was it North Texas State University that you taught? Now it's something else. The University of North Texas. Yeah. I became very interested in those days. We didn't call it Alzheimer's. We didn't even call it dementia. It was senility.
Okay? It was a garbage can term because anything you didn't describe was senile. And there seemed to me to be different kinds of people with mental illness and organic brain syndrome. some where it was really physical but some where it may have been a mental reaction to depression or other things and was there a way that we could give a test to determine with these people who had different kinds of behaviors whether or not it was physical or mental or both and I was looking for some psychiatric psychological instrument that we used to test and so I started going to the University of North Texas and working on a doctorate but basically to see what instruments there were that would help us measure it and there was one there is a Bendiger style test that can help you determine if it's organic or otherwise.
And I met the man who was chair of the sociology department, who was a gerontologist, he was one of five or six in the whole state of Texas. And so we became very good friends, and we would go to the Gerontological Society meetings. And in 1957, at the meeting, he said to me, I want you to come up and teach for us. Well, I thought he was being nice. I said sure. And then he calls me and said I signed you up, you're going to teach the introductory course to the field of social work. And so I began teaching at the University of Texas in 57 and I taught there for 10 years until we created the Center for Studies in 1880 and I was one of the three founders of the Center.
The federal government recognized. There were going to be so many more agents. We created 16 places in the United States where they would train professionals to work with the elderly. And then became one of the centers. And I was a member of the faculty. Oh, I did not realize that this was a gerontological center. Yes. It still is. One more question just about the friends and the leadership in the Jewish community. Your feelings about who really were the movers and the shakers or the ones with the most vision and compassion that you had great joy in working with. Can you name some of those? You've alluded to some of those.
Well, the men and women in leadership roles at the home, I've found exceptional people. Very different, very varied. For example, during my tenure at the home, I had two sets of brothers, Milton Levy and Irvin Levy. Irvin later became president of the Dallas Museum of Art and so forth. both outstanding community figures. I had both Pollock brothers, Lawrence and Robert. I had two brother Irving Goldberg and Mendel Molaski I had a father kind of arrangement where Max Glazer was the founder and later his son Robert Glazer became president of the board So we were really blessed with people who there were just so many crowns you could wear so many crown jewels okay One was to be president of the Federation, the other was to be president of the synagogue, and the third was to be president of the home.
And so people like Irving Goldberg or Tex Fagadot or Buddy Rosenthal, you see, Irwin Grossman. Irwin Grossman built the first edition to the home. He was a very young man. He says to this day that I trained him, you see. I introduced him to agency life and so forth. So to that extent, it was just rewarding to be able to work with these kinds of men and women. Betty Fishbein became interested and founded a group of people who would come out regularly to work with the residents who were impaired and the like. Your mother was one of the very early, special, wonderful volunteers. Well, Herb, it's been fascinating, and I don't know how you're going to answer the next question, but we like to ask people we interview this question what are you most proud of good question i'm very very proud of it uh although i'm proud of it say that again i don't i am very very proud of tonight and i tell you why as much as i feel i was privileged and i mean that a privilege to be at the home It was started by good citizens I just came to run it It was in process when I came here Chai, I was part of the process of creating it.
And to that extent, it doesn't have a sex appeal. You don't have the large numbers that the other facilities have. but it has met a tremendous need in the community. And so I'm proud of that. I am, needless to say, very proud of everything that happened in Colton Acres because we were doing things that set the standards and became the model. People would come from all over the world to visit Colton Acres and to see some good. I've written all of my life. But again, I felt that the things we were doing were something that had to be shared with the Jewish community, with the total community.
I was the only, I'm not bragging about this, but it's true, I was the only Jew who ever was president of the American Association of Homes and Services for Egypt. And I was one of its creators and stuff. So it was really a mutual arrangement where the community gave me the opportunity. And in turn I felt I had this responsibility to represent the Jewish community Herb I feel very privileged that I could interview you on this tape You're a very fortunate person because you had a passion in life and touched so many people. And I think your parents must have imparted that Jewish heart in you.
that we all benefited from. Thank you. Let me just say, I don't know if you were there, but when the home had its retirement party for me, I wrote a paper. And what I was trying to say to this community was that they did something very important, that they created a place that was part of a Jewish tradition of respecting and honoring and caring for the elderly. and that others do it, but nobody did it quite the way we did. And I'm very kind of that. Somebody said to me, what do you want written on the gravestone? Well, on my gravestone, they're going to write, gone to another meeting, won't be back.
But I would like them to say, you cared about it. You cared about it. Because I did. I do. It's very obvious in what you're continuing to do in your life, which you have created a, you are what they call a consultant, and the name of your consulting company is Sages. And that stands for Associates Geriatric and Elderly Services. May you continue for many more long years in good health.