Hermine Sallinger
Hermine Sallinger was born in 1916 in New York. Her father had come to the United States from Germany at age 16, alone and knowing no one, and worked in New York garment sweatshops. Her mother, whose family also came from Germany, died when Hermine was born. She was raised in Richmond Hill, New York, by an aunt and uncle whom she knew as her parents, and she adored the man she called her uncle, who was in fact her father. Much of her extended family remained in Germany, and several relatives suffered greatly during the Hitler period, including a grandmother who was denied medical care.
At age nine, Hermine traveled by train to Texas to join her father, who had opened stores in small Panhandle towns, following the oil booms from Breckenridge to Panhandle to Borger. As the only Jewish child for miles and a New Yorker among Texas and Oklahoma children, she found it a striking change. She attended a Catholic girls school in Amarillo for six years, an experience she cherished, and finished high school in Borger, graduating in 1933. She attended the University of Texas and later Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where in 1936 she met attorney Alfred Sallinger. They married in 1938 and shared a happy marriage, raising a son and three daughters.
In Dallas, Hermine and Alfred built a full life through many homes, from apartments off Oak Lawn and on South Boulevard to a house on Beverly Drive. Alfred taught confirmation class at Temple Emanu-El, which Hermine came to regard as her second home, and she volunteered there for years. She served as a past president of Benevolent Women and was active in the National Council of Jewish Women and Red Cross work. After World War II she helped teach families in underserved communities how to use surplus goods and beautify their homes, work she treasured. In the late 1970s she began painting, and after her husband's death she continued to paint and exhibit her work. She and Alfred had seven grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.
Full Transcript
today is july 5th 2012. my name is rosalyn benjet and i am at the home of hermine salinger to take her oral history and we thank her very much i mean tell me about your family where did they live where did they come from well my father came to this country from germany when he was 16 years old by himself and he lived in new york knew no one he had i think i mean i know very little about their background what they i do know is a little bit i was told uh and he worked i guess in the uh what they call sweatshops i remember him saying he
worked for a shirt manufacturer and they slept underneath the table to where they threw all the pieces of fabric my mother i believe was born in frankfort on maine but i'm not positive the reason i because the family came from germany from from frankfurt but she died when i was born so i i never knew any of i know she went to school in this country i have one picture of her that she's in public school probably in elementary school and i know there was a my father came from a family who all lived in germany a mother and a father and four brothers and
three sisters two of the brothers were killed one died i think from the flu epidemic in germany another one was killed in one of the wars before the second before the first world war uh one two brothers came here one came soon after my father did and one came during the hitler period they were one of the last family that got out one sister went to israel with her family during just prior to hitler and one sister came here with her children and her husband my grandfather died i believe i was in high school and my grandmother died during the hitler period she was denied
going to a doctor to get insulin she was probably 70 something that was the morgan stern family my mother's family there were three girls my mother was the youngest and four boys and when they came to this country i don't know but as i said either my mother was an infant but that they were all here the whole family and that was the shift family my father when my mother died as i said he was very upset naturally looking for the doctor because he hadn't taken care of my mother properly this was in new york and my uncle who had already come to this and
was living in arizona happened to be in new york at the time from what i heard as a young woman i almost bodily picked up my father and took him to arizona and they lived there for a few years they worked for a cousin of theirs i mean my what i know their background is so limited it's a shame that you don't know your family uh anyway he had met and gone with my stepmother before he met my mother but she and her family had gone to california this was probably 1914 1913 something like that in the in that interim period he met my mother
fell madly in love and married and when she died somehow some way his being in arizona he met a relative of my stepmother who came from oh he came into oklahoma when it they it was open he came in on a horseback and limbs the whole family still lives what's the first town you go get to when you go to oklahoma from here anyway it's all over they they know this family and he told my father that tessie schumacher was back in new york the family had come back to new york so they started corresponding and in 1917 or 1918 he went to new york
and they married and he brought this woman who had never been at a civilized california new york to bisbee arizona and to have heard her story this woman who who knew nothing they they lived up i think four flights of stairs from the road to their house she had to learn about cooking and the things she did were absolutely hysterical in his work he bought a ranch or something anyway they had a car and they went out there the car stopped and he left her in the car to go find help and she's in that car in the coyote so i mean this these were
stores i heard anyway i lived with an aunt and uncle when my mother died they took me and i think all families did things like that those years and i was raised they were my parents my father when he'd come to new york i knew him as as my uncle and i adored him there was just a deep feeling and until i was nine that was my background i was raised in richmond hill in new york and went to school there and when i was nine years old my parents my father had moved from breakfast from arizona to breckenridge texas to panhandle texas which was
a a whistle stop and he opened a store there and i was sent nine years old on a train two days traveling in in with a pullman to saint louis and that's where they were buying for the store at that time my aunt told me the story of my mother died when i was born and that uncle saul was really my father and antacid was now would now be my mother so they met me in st louis and that was my first drive to texas and i remember that to this day i remember my father we passed the lake someplace and he said you better
watch look at that lake cause this is the last water you're gonna see for a long time and it wasn't probably no this is i'm 96 years old so this is a long time ago i remember it sitting in the car and suddenly there's like an ocean in front of me and i said you know why did you tell me i wouldn't look at that ocean in front of you i mean i can remember the waves and it was a mirage i had never seen a mirage in my life and it was a mirage in the road so these were all my experiences we came
to this tiny little town of panhandle where is panhandle it's up in the panhandle of texas it's the north it's the square part of texas north of here about 600 miles north of dallas almost at the end of close to oklahoma colorado new mexico at the corners and that was quite an experience from someone who came from school dancing lessons you know the whole thing to this little town what year would that have been this was well i was born in 1916. so this was 1925. and i was there for we lived in the last house on the last street in panhandle i mean there was nothing but prairie and back of us in front of us etc i went to school there for a year elementary school and i was unique in that i didn't speak the language of these children there were children there from oklahoma who spoke differently than the children from texas and here is this new yorker with the new york accent plus the only jew for hundreds of miles around probably so it was quite an experience and but i made a lot of friends as growing up we
lived there for a little over a year and my father opened the store in burger texas which is about 30 miles north of panhandle it was an oil town a boone town my father followed the booms he went from breckenridge which was an oil boom to bronger which was snowboom and opened his store there but it was anything you see on the movie of oil towns in texas and those years could never never never tell the story that what it was actually was so he wouldn't let us live there living there was very impossible so my mother and i lived in amarillo and i went
to a catholic school because he felt i'd be she'd be easier to take care of me that she'd know where i was i wasn't a boarding student i was a day student but again needless to say the only jewish student in a catholic girls school but to this day i i preciously enjoy and appreciate anything and everything i learned in that school it made a great deal of me what i am today i had all the respect and i was never in any way did they try to change me or in fact i sang in the choir in those days i could sing but i
mean i was not catholic and it was understood and that was it i lived i went to the catholic school for a little over six years and then we moved my mother and i moved to uh borger and i finished my high school a year and a half of high school in borger texas which was another i mean my whole life was i would say from new york to texas to a little bitty farm community in texas from a catholic school where everything was you followed rules and regulations to a wide open very not very good public school where very few of the students ever
went beyond the education uh but it was again a wonderful experience the countryside all of this plus the country the the the atmosphere the openness of the land made me what i am today it's it had a great all of this had a great influence in my life did you have any contact at all with any other jewish families while you were living there not until uh well no i shouldn't say that when i was in school in amarillo at the catholic school they built a temple my mother and i were and father were practically ostracized because i was in a catholic but when the
temple was built they wanted to have a confirmation class and so i was invited no background no study no sunday school nothing we had a confirmation class i don't know if you knew minnie solomonson you did i'm sure minnie solomonson lived in amarillo jewish and we were in the same confirmation plan i was the oldest and i think the tallest there were a few boys and a few girls and we had a confirmation and when that was over that was the end of any jewish background jewish learning that i had and believe me i didn't learn anything did your family celebrate the holidays or anything
we knew i never knew about hanukkah and we knew passover because the delicatessen and amarilla would send us a car send my mother a card she'd order some monsters and we never celebrated as i've done with my family and it was just because we didn't know by the time i was 11 we would come my father would come to dallas anyway to buy merchandise in a store we'd come for services either for rosh hashona or for young kipper and that started some of my jewish learning as a religion i always knew i was jewish and of course i was always taught by my in german
would say to me you have to be a bigger mensch why because you're jewish you all heard it i'm sure and when they had great disturbance i said how big do i have to be and he said bigger and i remember that that's just the way bigger and but we can see after services we'd go over to we went to temple emanuel and we'd go over to rabbi left with his home which was about a block from the temple and he would give my father sunday school books that i would have if at my age if i lived in dallas well unfortunately they weren't read
that much really i became as i said inwardly and i don't know why but inwardly and from my father telling me i was jewish and you never could convince me otherwise and i would never change from that i felt it very deeply when i got married is when i learned about my jewishness but you went to high school in borga in borger graduated in 1933 and went to the university of texas and went there for two years two and a half years my father became very ill and i went home and took him down to mineral wells and i took care of the store so
that ended that part i was there home for a year and uh well i wanted to be a doctor i was going to cure the world of every illness but i realized i didn't have the mental capacity or the physical capacity to go through that so i decided i'd be a therapist and i wanted to go either to galveston medical school or to colorado college university and we there was a gentleman from dallas used to come to that to go over to willie go all over to sell insurance his name was mr flans and because he was i found out orthodox and so he'd come
to our house to eat and i remember you know know me all of that these were things i heard about from my but had never witnessed it or seen it and he told my father about this wonderful school smu in dallas and of course the jewish population how good it would be for me and i would meet young people and it would be a much better environment well i know after having been at university of texas i knew that as some you it was what they called a t-sipping it's a social school and i didn't want any part of it and but he finally saw
his way and i came to smu well i had spent the summer up in the mountains in new mexico and i told them if i don't like smu i can leave in six weeks and get my money back and i'm coming up here and spent the winter well p.s i met a young lawyer and that was the end of my going to new mexico or leaving smu so i met alfred that september was 1936 and we married in 1938 had a very good marriage had a very beautiful happy marriage for children seven grandchildren 12 great-grandchildren and both of both of us had been active in
the jewish community and in the normal community we both love you let's go back to where you met him how did you meet your husband again through this gentleman mr flans i lived on i had a room on south boulevard and mrs mr mrs flance lived about a block from me and she could call me one day and invited me to these were the days you still sat outside you know on your chairs out in the lawn and this was south boulevard where i guess a great many well south dallas is where most the jewish people lived then and so you knew everybody you knew
everything there was to know about anybody on the street good bad and different and you heard about it sitting on the wall so she had told me that to come over evening that mr salinger was coming and she'd like me to meet him and for him to meet me so this is a true story i uh i told i was sorry but i had a date which i did with the young man that i had gone with it in austin so she said well mr sally's going to be let's say 8 o'clock and being trying to be polite nice i said well my date was
at 7 30 but we'll drive around and i'll be at your house at 8 o'clock and at 8 o'clock here's mrs flans and her friends sitting around and mr sanders there yet so about 15 to 20 minutes later here he comes walking up the street suited and had it now he was from pittsburgh pennsylvania had lived in dallas already he graduated from law school in 1933 so he he was pretty well settled in dallas and we met at the usual conversation how do you like smu how do you like dallas and i finally looked at my submissive sounder you kept me waiting for 15 minutes
and i don't wait for anybody good night and i left i mean i didn't care if i ever saw him again so two weeks later mrs flance called me and invited me for sunday lunch unbeknownst to me she had invited mr salinger and i'm sure unbeknownst to miss he didn't know she invited me when we were both in this spot he had to ask me for a date and i had to accept right well this the centennial was on it was the second year of the centennial and i had not been because the summer before i spent the summer in new york we went we
walked we were closed we walked and he was nice i mean he was human and he was friendly and and he was nice and on the way back we were walking down forest avenue and there was an ice cream store on the corner and he asked me if i'd like a cone i thought this guy is human so we're walking down the street and we're eating ice cream cone and having a wonderful conversation and that was that started so when thanksgiving came i was going home for the holidays and invited him to come with us with me so we of course in those days to
travel by train and that's when i had my first proposal and i turned him down because he didn't dance and i loved dancing i told him i'm sorry but i love to dance and tough you know these things happen so when christmas holidays came and i went home because i was home for two weeks and i decided i missed him i guess he meant something to me so that started the romance we married in august of 1937 38 here in dallas in dallas from 1938 on well even before that from 19 35 36 everything in our life has been here in dallas and how did
he come to live in dallas that's as far as money would take him i mean that that that that's as far as it would go and he knew about the law school here he had already he had started school in duquesne in pittsburgh and want to get away from pittsburgh and family and all he went to alabama and then was ready for law school and he really wanted to go to atlanta to alaska he had heard about they thought that would be a wonderful time to start out something new but as i said he ran out of money and from what i understand he he
did a lot of walking from smu to downtown dallas he he was a poor boy and finished law school and entered a good law firm and eventually became ahead of it so it's he was a good guy he was very special now what interests did you have at that point in when you were studying oh science although i i love psychology i loved anything dealing with people i liked history i studied a lot of i like science and you have four children when were they born my son was born in 1939 my oldest daughter in 41 and i unfortunately had to wait six years they
didn't know if i could have any more and in 1947 my third child was born in 1950 my fourth child okay so i had one son and three daughters okay and what are their names don salinger carolyn will challenge your husband joyce salinger and mary beth harrison um now these were all the years of the depression and world war ii did that affect the family at all well my husband was in service i had the two children and we lived here no i i can't the depression was on when i was at school and but it really you know when my children do you remember
the soup lines and i said no the only thing i remember is seeing it in the newspaper or hearing about it on radio it was long before tv uh it affected i'm sure business-wise was affected but no way like it was a beast and of course my father never let on things were slower which i'm sure they world war ii my husband was gone for a year i knew there were shortages and we did without it wasn't any hardship you just knew it had to be that way and that was the way it and where did you live when you first got married we lived
in well the first house was the first apartment we had was over here off of oak lawn and then we moved into a house on willis in east dallas that was an experience there was so much space between the outer doors and the windows i i had everything stuffed with towns and newspaper i mean it and we had i remember we didn't have bed tables so i got arms crates do you remember orange crates the wooden arms crates those were my end i remember alfred's first birthday which was in december and believe me i knew nothing of what i know today about having parties and
so forth and certainly couldn't afford he was a young attorney we couldn't afford you know a lot of big things so and i had never done any cooking i remember the first cookies i made the pan was a solid thing of dull that there was something i didn't do right anyway we had involved we had a lot of older friends that alfred knew when he lived with the family by the name of mittenthal and they just took him under their wing so i was brought into that most of my friends at that time were the older people who not quite my parents age but a
little bit getting in there so i had invited them off out this birthday party and for decorations and whenever i see these things you know the beaudart apples we went out in the country and picked those i just bought back maybe 25 30 and i sprayed them with shellac or something like that and then sprinkle glitter all over them and that was my table decoration so i wasn't too bad you know and her life was good i i really feel badly for the younger people today because they have everything they they don't know what it means save a little bit to wait until you have
things that it was good it was a good life and from there we moved to uh an apartment on south boulevard we lived in the second floor of a two apartment and that's where my son was born and my husband was teaching sunday at temple emanuel we lived at one end of south boulevard and of course the temple was in south boulevard and harwood and on sundays i'd get my son bathed and put him in his buggy and we'd start you heard me we'd start downtown boulevard to go meet my husband we never got more than two blocks because everybody knew us and everybody would
come out to see the baby so it was it was a wonderful life and none of us knew that i guess we were poor i don't think so we we had furniture we had a lovely apartment we weren't wanting for anything so we and we lived there until we know then we bought a cottage again in a month cello off of greenville and from there we bought our first home in university park and where did your children go to school my children what they all went to you know highland park schools they graduated from highland park high my son went to washington and lee university
in virginia my daughter oldest daughter sing to washington university in saint louis graduated they both graduated my oldest daughter went to arizona and she went to a private school there at high school and she was very ill and she never finished she finally finished college here at the world of brookhaven my youngest daughter they they all went to graduate from highland park high school went to oklahoma university married when she was young before she university and has two sons but they all lived here they all married and all lived here all my grandchildren were born here so it's it's been a full life and a
good one now you mentioned that your husband was teaching sunday school at temple emmanuel he taught confirmation class [Music] and were you as a family active at the temple oh yeah yeah what kinds of things did you do well until i taught one year of sunday school but basically my background my my being a teacher meant i stayed one class one book ahead of the kids my my husband had a good background of judaism and i knew that wasn't going to work good for me so it wasn't until my children started sunday school because they all started from kindergarten on up i became active in
whatever they needed in sunday school and now i've been volunteering at temple for years it's it's what i call my second home even though i don't go to services like i should every friday it's a special place for me i i feel that way and it's it's an important thing were you involved in any other organizations uh benevolence women i was active in fact i'm a past president uh i was active for a number of years in national council of jewish women i was secretary for a short time for sisterhood but i didn't care for sisterhood that was not for me so i did a
lot of red cross work during the second world war and i did a lot of outside things that developed into things i i was very aware of people who remember when after the second world war when there was an excess of staples like butter and margarine and lard and flour and and they were given this to people who had nothing but they didn't know what to do with it they didn't have the refrigeration and so forth and this bothered me so i became well for a while i was part of the uh i forget what it was called it was a state organization that looked
into daycare and i was involved in that for a while and through that i i guess i was a starter with it a pioneer in it i'd go around and teach how to use some of the things that you had that they had that they didn't know what to do with it was all through a city thing that i became involved god had a group of women that i worked with that were wonderful some of the black women i worked with were absolutely marvelous i remember this because this was the time that martin luther king was so popular so wonderful and one of the women
i worked with i loved her dearly she would get so angry with me because she said you're more black than i am oh yeah but we'd go around and we went to all these small these small communities i remember going to rock wall it was nothing but a little country farm town and mesquite the streets were still dirt i remember edie kuhn they had her was a salesman with wonderful piece goods she gave us boxes of fabric that we take with us and we taught these women these black women taught them how to make make their houses a little more beautiful we go into west
dallas which was such a property stricken area and teach them if you have a can an empty can put a little paper around it and go pick some weeds and put them on your table have a little color just anything to help improve their life it it was one of the the main things that i did today i loved doing to teach them that there was more in life than living day by day just with nothing and i'm told that you're also a painter yes how did you become interested in when i got through doing organization work i got talking tired of politics which it
became very involved and i let me do what i want to do my way and leave me alone well organizations don't run that way so i wanted to do something to give me something to do and for a while i did needlepoint i did some needle work i never knitted i did a lot of embroidery but i wanted to paint i wanted to learn to paint to paint what i hear when i hear it listen to music so i learned that they were teaching art at the j and i called some friends and you know when you call people this one want to go monday
morning and the other one couldn't go to tuesday night and so forth i i didn't know oil from water from anything else i just want to paint and finally i met a gentleman by the name of bud biggs who was a watercolorist i had classes and i joined his class well it was pretty bad i got into a class a thursday night where everyone in that class had painted for years i understood i understood later that a bed going on a pot going on with a bet that i wasn't going to last three weeks well i tell the story and it's very i'm very honest
about the only reason they let me stay they like my cooking and they liked the parties i gave we lived on beverly drive in a very big and for five years we had all the christmas parties for about 40 or 45 people and when any of the visiting artists would come at that time they started the watercolor society here and we'd always have artists from all over the country come to teach a workshop half of them we would entertain in our so i said they let me stay because they like my cooking i painted it was in the late 70s when i started and my
painting until about 11 12 years ago was very spasmodic because when my oldest daughter was getting a divorce she had three children so she needed help and it was more important that i have her with the children than to paint so i missed a lot of classes then my middle daughter became very ill and my time was devoted to her so i painted very very little then things sort of quieted down a little bit and i was able to paint go to classes then my husband became ill in the last three years of his life i painted three paintings in three years i just i
didn't have the time i didn't want to take the time i didn't the heart of it he died about 14 years and since then i have painted and have had paintings accepted in art classes and art shows great and i'm very happy how do you think dallas changed since you live here how did dallas change yes there were street cars i remember from smu downtown you took a street car trolley there wasn't the traffic that there is today there was a central expressway you you knew where everybody lived it wasn't the formality that it is today dallas has always been a special place it's always
been a wealthy city uh park was i remember when we moved there people were amazed because it just wasn't the place where a lot of jewish people came uh downtown dallas the the main building downtown was the flying red flying horse that's how you knew you were coming into dallas uh some of the streets i remember royal lane was a two two lane road and on the corner of marsh in midway i think midway and royal lane there was a huge huge pecan tree in the middle of the road and to get around it you you drove around yeah but when you want to meet
people you say we'll meet you at the pecan tree yeah so uh smu my husband went to smu law school the law school was the top of said the dallas hall the rotunda and as he say you look out north north of what was supposedly northwest highway and two-lane road was nothing but cotton field all of this was gone with you tell us about your family today oh they're wonderful my son is an attorney all my children except one daughter lives here my grandchildren i have one granddaughter lives in maryland my oldest daughter lives in maryland in baltimore my one grandchild lives my the rest
of my gran my children live here my grandchildren i have one in chebyche maryland one in california one in austin texas and the rest live here in dallas or in the plano fairview in this area speaking of fairview i have grandchildren living up there now i remember when we drive up to fairview because there was a large nursery up and we'd go up there to buy plants there was nothing up there with cotton fields have you been to fairview go up there and look they never have to come to dallas it's every store it is marvelous it's unbelievable how mckinney texas it's a farm town
have you been up there lately i mean this i remember during the second world war when richardson texas still had some wood walkways in front of the stores so dallas has changed and has grown the thing that breaks my heart and i have talked about it and written i don't write to them anymore councilman that they have they're beginning to wake up about oak cliff and south dallas it is a beautiful beautiful area of dallas county hilly water trees it's gorgeous and that they the only reason they let that go was because a few politicians had enough money that they bought this land out north
no trees no water no hills just flat land and they sold it people bought it and left oak cliff and south dallas go its way it's it's waking up it's coming too you had your folks at business in south actually they called it north dallas then because it was pearl street where today the windspeare and the 18th for me okay that was called it was still north dallas because it wasn't anything further down yeah the same time you lived in south dallas yeah well thank you very much oh thank you it's been a pleasure talking to you i haven't talked so much and went a
long time well you did it beautifully you made it very easy for us yes absolutely i don't know what interests any of this would be to anybody well we have researchers who come in to the historical society many times they're looking for demographics where did people live in the city at what time what kind of organizations were important to the people well for various periods in bourbon there were i think five jewish families i was the oldest child but there are a lot of jewish people whose background came from some of these little bitty towns in texas that it's amazing bob strauss ted strat they
came from up that that way i didn't know that and also hermine i'll bring you one to let you read it we put together uh three years ago 200 past oral histories that had gone back to what 1914 1940. no i think she started them in the late 60s ginger yeah okay well ones that have been sitting on a shelf in our at the time we were in a small place with a closet and they were sitting on the shelf and we got volunteers thanks to cheryl bowman and uh they transcribe abbreviating it condensing it rather and then we took those and we had them printed with photos and i'll show you the book it's awesome if you're when you're going to be at eat follow yourself thank you very much it's been a wonderful interview but we i think you might enjoy reading the book