Howey Watt
Howey Watt was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and lived there until age seven, when his family moved to Long Island. All four of his grandparents were born in New York, an unusual fact for his generation, and their families had come from Eastern Europe and Germany. Though his grandparents came from Orthodox backgrounds, they were highly assimilated and did not belong to a synagogue. His family joined a Conservative congregation after moving to Long Island, and Howey had a bar mitzvah, but Jewish observance was minimal, and he did not attend a seder until he was sixteen. His parents divorced when he was fourteen, a difficult period during which he became withdrawn before finding a new group of friends in high school.
At seventeen, after graduating from W.C. Mepham High School, Howey moved to Dallas when his father offered to pay for college if he came to Texas. He attended SMU, joined the Jewish fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu, and graduated with an accounting degree in 1969. During the Vietnam War era he pursued law school to secure a graduate deferment, studying at UT Austin while serving in the National Guard. He worked briefly for the State Securities Board, then settled in Denton, where his close friend Mark Shore lived. There he joined the district attorney's office in 1976 and, later that year, was appointed Denton's municipal judge, a role he held for eight and a half years and remembered as his most enjoyable legal work.
Guided by counselor Byron Medler, Howey chose to make Judaism, family, and a meaningful life his priorities. He married Maggie, who converted to Judaism, and together they raised their children, Lance, Jacob, and Sarah, in the faith. He was a founding member of a congregation in Flower Mound, active in Hillel of North Texas, the JCC, and helped underwrite Jewish studies at the University of North Texas. At 55 he earned a master's in Jewish studies from Spertus Institute in Chicago. He also volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Denton food bank, and an advocacy center. Later becoming a real estate developer, he continued part-time law work motivated by a lifelong desire to help others and leave the world better than he found it.
Full Transcript
good morning my name is mitch myers i'm with the dallas jewish historical society it is august 26th 2022 and it is my honor and privilege to introduce howie watt hello howie hi mitch i'm going to ask a few questions for dallas jewish historical society you ready to roll i'm ready all right well tell us your full name howard a meal spelled e-m-i-l-watch w-a-t-t and when were you born i was born july 14 of 1947. and tell us why with such an unusual middle name why your parents named you that and and you arrested you sure sure so uh interesting story uh back when i was about to be born no sonography and the way a pregnant woman carried a child they thought they understood uh where your uh you know what your gender was going to be so they were convinced i was to be a girl i was being named one great grandfather whose name was heschel and uh and so my name was going to be helen i uh 7 30 in the morning out props a boy uh to the
surprise of my parents about 7 30 that evening my dad's best friend came to the hospital to to meet me to see how my parents were doing went to the nursery with my dad went back to the room my mom said george my dad's name why don't you guys go out to dinner uh you know maybe we'll come up with a name because he's a boy that starts with an age after that so as the story goes my father and his best friends went out friend went out to dinner they were outside the restaurant after dinner smoking a cigarette and my father says to his
friend what are we going to call him and my father's friend looks up at the sign and says there it is george they had eaten dinner at howard johnson's and so that's where my first name came from my middle name came from my uh paternal grandmother's father whose name was emil very nice i and your nickname howie okay and how'd that be become bestowed upon you um for some reason my my grandparents started calling me howie and in fact my grandfather named me chief it was chief ponchintookis uh to this day my cousins my siblings uh call me chief and as i get to know
people real well you know i ask that they either call me howie for chief very nice well let's let's keep rolling okay so tell us where you were born born in brooklyn new york lived there until i was seven i lived in a jewish neighborhood off of king's highway which is an area of brooklyn near brooklyn college we lived there in a second floor apartment until uh i was seven it was time we moved up to long island which was the upwardly mobile place project for jewish people uh just as brooklyn was the upperly mobile uh place that people from the lower east side came
from interesting and where is your family from your parents grandparents so interestingly and unusual for my generation all four of my grandparents were born in new york uh and all four of their all eight of their parents came from either eastern europe or my mother's father family came in the 1860s from germany the lowensteins that would be the great grandparents great grandparents and we'll describe a little bit about your parents or grandparents their personalities and what's going on in brooklyn and long island sure so my grandparents all came from orthodox families but all for whatever reason were very assimilated uh so all both my parents
were jewish all four my grandparents were jewish but i grew up in a jewish world with my grandparents where none of them uh belonged to a synagogue my main connection with my grandparents or my father's parents who for a number of reasons including i was the oldest grandchild became an important part of my life i none of my grandparents went to a although my grandfather was a bar mitzvah my father was a bar mitzvah and our family when we moved to long island joined a conservative synagogue that's yeah that's interesting do you have siblings so i have a sister born of the same parents my
parents divorced when i was 14. my father married again and my two brothers became my half brothers because their father had died and my father adopted them then my father and stepmother adopted a child pretty late in life a fully blooded sister two half brothers and then by adoption adopted my other sister you know depending on your look at it i either have one sister or in my my world view have four siblings tell me their name so my closest sibling my brother jeff watt grew up in dallas actually went to high school he went to thomas jefferson high school in his last two years went to w.t white [Music] he
and i were real close he died tragically at 52 in the year 2000 my other half brother mike lives in arizona my sister marion who's my full-blooded sister lives in highland village and then my youngest sibling melissa lives in dallas very nice so went to sondheim road elementary school i know i went to p.s 199 in brooklyn in kindergarten in the first grade uh and then when we moved to long island i was i must have been i must have just turned eight because i entered second grade uh went to elementary school at a school called sawmill road then went to jerusalem avenue junior high
school and the wc mepham high school and uh yeah that's my public school education so tell me a little bit about the activities that you were doing athletics education jewish affiliations at this time sure during this formative year so um went to hebrew school three days a week belonged to a conservative synagogue you know wasn't particularly uh fun activity uh you know it was it was what it was i was like a lot of other kids of the era i was a sports junkie either i was watching it or playing it on weekends i take my duffel bag like every other kid put my baseball
bat my softball bat my hard ball bat my glove my basketball my football my mother would give me a dollar uh and you know the only instruction would be home by dark and so uh you know probably not unusual you know lived in an era in a world where you know you could trust your 9 10 11 year old kid just to disappear for the day and come back like i said went to hebrew school had a bar mitzvah um somewhat of unusual uh jewish growing up years in that my sister was not expected to go to hebrew school i did not have a bob
mitzvah nothing much was expected of me other than to have more vision just normal kid you know pretty good student growing up uh there was an exam at the end of the sixth grade for kids in new york at the time and you were put in one to three curriculum i was put was called the advanced curriculum which was about 10 of the kids for junior high school something unusual is that my family was so assimilated that until i went to high school we didn't have seders hanukkah for that generation which you like the candles you got one gift but really didn't celebrate any other
jewish holidays and it wasn't like i said till i was 16 that ever went to a seder and the reason for that was that best buddy starting in high school was orthodox and got invited to a seder the first couple of nights so there was not expected much of me jewishly and part of the reason i'm not sure how many other people have done you know this what i'm doing we're from new york but in new york and looking back our neighborhood was all jewish it was significantly assimilated jews there was only one orthodox family in the neighborhood not something uh that i realized until
i'd moved to dallas that if you grew up uh in new york or jewish you could be jewish without really having uh a lot of uh time spent thinking about your being jewish you could be jewish you know the only kind of not traumatic but the only life-changing experience that being jewish in new york was when i was five and played had had a friend in the apartment complex that i lived in when they were playing and he asked me if i was jewish and i said i think i'm jewish and so i went home and said that my friend paul uh had asked me
if i was jewish and i said we're jewish right and my parents said of course we're i'm not sure it was a day later a week later he and i are playing on the playground and he said my parents wondered if you were jewish because your last name is watt which isn't a jewish name and so i remember running home at the end of playing with my friend and i was crying are we jewish are we really jewish because my friend paul said with the name watt you really couldn't be jewish and before my parents could answer i said why didn't we have a jewish
name like apple man and my parents said no that was our name and so that was my only experience in childhood where being jewish really was a question that i didn't know the answer to or had to think about being jewish and it wasn't really until i moved to dallas when i was 17 that i realized that being jewish was something that you had to think about consciously and really uh have a life choice so tell me some of your friends your close friends while you're growing up you mentioned paul and elementary and junior high school so through your bar mitzvah so my friends uh
were all there was billy lerner and andy schiffman michael schiffman his brother and stevie koshers people who went on to become either accountants or lawyers or doctors in fact i lived in a world interestingly uh mitch where i i grew up in a neighborhood and went to a school where 90 of the people really jewish or catholic and intellectually i understood that 70 percent of the country was protestant i just didn't know anybody until i moved to dallas well enough who is protestant to be in their home so i had this intellectual understanding i just didn't know those other people do you keep up with
the same friends you just mentioned or where they are um minimally minimally in fact i had a interesting situation where my best friend in high school alan smith line he was jewish orthodox was a professional museum he lived in boulder they lived in berkeley in california and i had you know we talked every six months but his world was different than my world at age 74 he's still trying to make it as a professional musician never had a wife never had kids had many many girlfriends until he turned 40 and and the women he met wanted not only somebody who was cool but somebody who
could make a living and so i went out there for another friend's friend i've made since then to his 70th birthday spent a couple days with my friend alan and for whatever reason the connection was really gone since then i've tried to call him a number of times he's never responded to my phone calls in fact reading the texas jewish post a couple of weeks ago and one of the rabbis that writes a column and he talked about jewish traits in this time of the year when we you know studied different scriptures friendship i realized and that relates to love and two types of love
love that has a connection to it uh that there's a there's a a reason that you love somebody and then there's unconditional love and how those can can kind of love with a condition can become unconditional love and unconditional love can can can end up being love that ends up with a condition and he mentions childhood friendships that don't last and i finally came to terms with my best friend in high school and for some reason we lost the connection and he no longer needed to be my friend and coming to grips that that was okay um you know and so in fact interestingly this
morning before i came down from denton uh i reread that column and i had a higher level of peace with my friend allen's fifth line and it was okay that he was not reconnecting with me like i wanted the connection to last forever i guess well that's a good learning experience yes so let's put in perspective uh what's going on in around your world events and uh by the time you're you know in your high school years before you move to dallas what what world events are impacting you or shaping your life that you can talk about a little bit sure kind of put it
in perspective yeah absolutely so i grew up and i can't fully explain it one of those people that was optimistic became attracted to politics when i was um let's see he would have ran for president right before my 14th birthday after my 14th birthday so i became a guy who door door handed out literature for john kennedy so mr optimism to this day as they oftentimes say despite what i know about the world i'm still an optimist importantly something happened during those years around my bar mitzvah is that my parents relationship was growing uh weaker and weaker and my parents uh divorced when i was
14. and so i went into a period of life um i became depressed back before we knew about drugs prescription drugs and counseling so i spent probably years at 13 right before the divorce 14 and 15 where i went from a very popular got invited to all the parties to somebody who retreated uh really didn't have any friends was depressed without knowing i was depressed my father moved to dallas my mother had to concentrate on figuring out a way of making a living she had her own depression deep depression lived a life that began to change when i was a sophomore in high school found a
new group of friends including alan smithline and my two other good buddies were artie levine lenny berlin and alan smith line you know high school graduation was no big deal and significantly because my paternal grandparents when i was a younger child my grandfather a maternal grandfather believe it or not was one of six born in the late 19th 1890s my grandfather was born on an interesting day january 1st of 1900 and his siblings he was only one of five brothers six brothers who didn't have a college degree education was a big deal to my great grandparents they managed to put all six of their sons
except for my grandfather and he didn't go to college as the story goes because he want he was a gifted high school athlete played on the first played in the first new york city high school basketball championship game was a good baseball player had he was asked to sign a professional contract his mother who is uh you know a nice jewish mother forbid him from from signing a contract so he ended up rebelling by being the only one of the boys who didn't go to college that was his way of getting back and his parents got married real young to my grandmother who was 15
and he decided knowing how well his brothers did that his grandchildren would be educated so before i ever went to elementary school i could add subtract multiply divide i could read before i even started kindergarten and it started and i got a good head start which i think served me well great so now you've moved to dallas right uh you've graduated uh high school from where from wc memphis high school in long island okay uh so after your graduation you moved to dallas yes okay i thought 17 i mean a lot of people graduated yeah i graduated 17 my parents were divorced my dad said
he would pay for college if i moved to texas okay so i moved to texas and where did you go to college so i was enrolled to go to university of texas at austin my dad had his fourth or fifth heart attack my recollection is he guilt-tripped me to applying to smu which i had no no thought of going to to college and i ended up getting accepted to summer for college at smu and enrolled at smu so tell us a little bit about your years at smu college and how it's like to be at a methodist college it is a jewish young man so
um before talking about that tell you how naive i was and how i was entering into a different spent the night i you know went to my dad's from the airport the next day he decided to drive me around dallas we were in downtown dallas we were in a red light i looked up into my right with a church that took up a whole city block and i said look dad there's the first me thinking was the first ever baptist church and he looked at me and he said howie don't ever say that again that's a denomination of one of the branches of being a
protestant is being part of the first baptist church so that was not the first ever baptist church that was the first baptist church of dallas which happened to be a very uh you know dominating religious institution in dallas at the time and to this day so i went to smu where um living in the dorm uh and before i many other jewish people realized that that everybody was protestant and at least i thought they were uh there's a jewish fraternity sigma from you which was there until uh 1975 wanting a jewish connection i joined the jewish fraternity to see malcolm young and what did you
study what were your majors in and what were you thinking about i was thinking about being pre-med but two things happened one is uh i was more i was i was the oldest of the kids i had i was the one that was always good that never made any mistakes and i'm off at college and learned about beer so my first semester i had a 2.2 which meant i had four season to be and i had joined the jewish fraternity was very social very glad i found other jewish people then i think it was my third semester after i had a good second and third
semester that i took organic chemistry worked harder to write organic chemistry than any other class i ever took i think in college or law school and made a c and was happy that i made a c but also remember the professor who knew i was pre-med saying you probably need to find something else and so um i got into the business school and became an accounting major and did you graduate with uh graduated with a degree in accounting from smu in 1969 uh what what happened at that point as far as my education was that uh we were thick into the vietnam war in the
spring of 1969 i took my physical i passed physical for grins i took the gre which i did pretty well took the lsat which i did pretty well in uh did not want to go into the army my brother it was a year younger than me jeff had gone to henderson county junior college he'd gone to unt every semester he had to leave college because he never went to class and ended up getting drafted and so my brother jeff said you don't want to be in the military he was about to be sent off to vietnam i realized even though i had no clue about
what i want to do in my life i realized that the summer of 69 they still had graduate deferments so i applied to graduate schools applied to law school got accepted to smu law school i was about to oh did not that's right smu law school didn't start till the fall so i would have been drafted looked around and sm at ut austin which is a good school had me on their waiting list so i called them up and they said it's coincidence or the question is maybe that you called because somebody just decided not to go to ut and would you like to start
summer school ut law school um but you have to be down in austin in five days i decided to go to law school and it wasn't until my friend mark shore who had transferred from smu and graduated from well i guess he was a senior uh at smu said want to come down here i know somebody that needs a roommate started law school at smu in the meantime that's me or ut i mean ut austin ut austin in the meantime i found the national guard unit and uh but went to summer school at ut law school fabulous let me just back up one second because
i try to ask this question you're at smu it's 1969. right you're watching chuck hickson and jerry levis and hayden frye right roll through most exciting period of their time i guess and jerry levias tell us a little bit about that were you interested in the football oh sure not only was i interested in football but i was manager of the football team at smu during my freshman and sophomore years so i became to be good friends with jerry lewis he was a real smart guy jerry on a couple occasions would take me down the student union to pick up his mail and he got hate mail he also got cash in the mail went to
his room and i'd help him open the envelopes i opened a couple of hate letters i would read them to them he said we're taking notes to coach fry hayden fry and the money no one knows about but you and me and so he would literally get probably a hundred a couple hundred i think the second time we did it i think he had five hundred dollars in cash in the mail nobody's known about that until right now just my closest friends and now uh my grandkids the jewish historical society and other people um that's great that's a great story um so tell me a
little bit you know how the vietnam war is shaping your politics and shaping your identity a little bit sure we touch on that and then we'll go to past law school sure so i went to uh smu which was very conservative in while i was at smu through a no vietnam protest the biggest protests were to protest uh men in the dormitory having hours because my freshman year you had to be back in the dorm at 10 o'clock during the week and at midnight on the weekends and so those were the big protests not about vietnam it wasn't until i moved to austin that i
became more politically involved because at ut you couldn't help but get involved in one way or another in in your politics about vietnam war and tell us a little bit about that how that sure affected you uh i was affected because of my political leanings of where i went to school ut and because my brother writing me these letters from vietnam talking about the horror of of being there uh how the war was so stupid and about his and most of his fellow soldiers goals were just to come to protect take care of each other and to come home alive now you've gone to law
school you graduated next steps in your career what are you thinking and what did you do so i graduated from ut law school got a job with state securities board where i worked for a year and a half still not knowing what i want to do when i grew up was in a very toxic relationship although i ended up marrying the person my first wife ended up not liking my job deciding that i needed to leave when i left my first cousin i grew up with in brooklyn robert singer so wanted to come stay with he and his his wife until i figured out what
i wanted to do on the ride up there i decided i wanted to let my hair grow long because i've been in the national guard i was about to get out serving six years i buy a volkswagen bus let my hair grow along and travel around the country in my volkswagen bus while i pondered my future i was there about three weeks my dad who my cousin worked for transferred him to um to san antonio and i found myself alone although i was about to discover that a good friend of mine from smu and then ut mark shore lived in denton and i decided to
hang out in denton for a while excellent and so tell us a little bit more about you know when you finally decided to uh i guess with a law degree when you became a lawyer yes actually working for a law firm so i found mark who we both know and to this day is one of my two best friends in the world um and decided i liked it denton was in austin but it was in a lot of ways very similar very liberal um and uh so i went into private practice had a uh not so successful first year i uh grossed fifty seven hundred
as a lawyer but i left it led a very minimalist lifestyle was a hippie without long hair and ended up without trying i got a job in the district attorney's office and um denton fit my personality gave up the dream of traveling in the volkswagen bus and decided that uh at least for the time being i was going to live in den very nice now what year is this you started your i i i moved i was supposed to move to denton on december 31st 1974. i ended up starting stopping off at a party trying too much alcohol they wouldn't let me drive to denton that night so i ended up moving to denton in 75 even though it was january 1st instead of 74 went to work for the da's office in february of 1976.
liked the job it gave me real world experience realized that i might want to be a lawyer through circumstance and coincidence and good fortune uh there was a position open to become denton's municipal judge which i applied for in june of 1976 ended up becoming dentist municipal judge where i served for eight and a half so couple things who was the d.a at the time you're working for the district attorney uh somebody named john lawhoon i guess i need to tell the story for history's sake but john had seen me around the courthouse thought i was a nice young man and said there's only one
question i have to ask you before you have the job have you ever smoked marijuana so i looked him straight in the eye and said no sir which was not a truthful answer but he said i believe you you've got the job lawyers do not lie what are we saying here i guess lawyers are like everybody else we lied well you're a hippie at heart so i was happy and hard so it was expected that's great and i was friends with mark shaw and you're friends with mark shorts so tell me a little bit about the legal eagles and their district attorney's office there's got
to be some people that are that you got along with or didn't go along with their interests yeah it was it was interesting because i was assigned to the the assistant to the district attorney at the time 19 february 1976 there were only five attorneys that worked in the district attorney's office i think now they have 75 uh and so among the memorable memorable things was on my first day i was trained by a guy named freddie marsh and freddie was a lifelong prosecutor the first day of training he looks at me and he says first thing you need to know is that probation is
for innocent people and so i became the investigator prosecutor did all the child children related stuff like the child welfare cases juvenile juvenile cases to child support cases that led to my ultimate becoming a family law specialist i stayed there until i became a municipal judge which took about 60 of my time uh i think of all the things i've done in law the thing that i enjoyed the most was being denton's municipal judge interesting you you use the word apply so can you tell us that process sure applied for immediate judgment yeah so being a municipal judge without an elected position got appointed annually
by the city council you're hiring or firing was that you know the whim of the city council uh learned how to be a political type person learn what i needed to do to get reappointed i think because i was idealistic and wanted to do a good job it became something that and i was 29 when i became a dead municipal job judge which was pretty young what was the job that i as law that wasn't necessarily lucrative but i've always been very idealistic i think that it's something that did a good job so there were i think nine other candidates uh two whom became district
judges but i think the reason i could reason i did the job i interviewed well and i was still involved in sports i played softball and i played basketball in the a-league in softball one of my teammates was one of the catholic priests and in basketball one of my teammates was the episcopalian preached in town and so that that preferences good references okay so let's move uh a little bit now into family uh is your mom and dad still alive at this point mom and dad yes my uh they both came to see me were very proud of me uh they both died at age
76 i'm 75 so i have i'm glad i'm doing this even though i'm in great health so are you married children yes so i uh got married i had a very unsuccessful marriage was uh separated for us four years later which ended up being a real important time of my life because um my good friend mark shore who i mentioned suggested i go to counseling went counseling one of his professors in his phd program was a guy named byron medler uh byron um was very influential uh and and i've never had a mentor which is something we may end up talking about but had guides
one of my guys was byron who said let me get this straight you're 33 years old you have no baggage you've got a professional career you've got a pretty good personality you can define who you are and what you become so it got me to be thinking what was important my life judaism had not been an important part of my life he said choose three things that are non-negotiable because even though you say you'll never get married again you're going to get married again uh so one of the things i chose uh after some reflection was to be more involved in judaism which led me
to my jewish life that i wanted to get married to somebody who was jewish i wanted to have children which was a second of my priorities was a life-changing event one of my guides in my jewishness once again was mark shore who had judaism was an important part of his life and it's become an important part of my life and i'd like to talk about sure before we go there what's your third threes uh number three was i wanted to uh understood that getting married and having kids going to mean that my needs were going to be important but i wanted to marry somebody who
had a similar world view that what you did with your life was as important uh is what your career was and then so tell us a little bit about the judaism and uh you know how you came to uh help uh found a synagogue right so you know being idealistic i got involved in big brothers big sisters served on the board and as president got involved in the denton food bank which is something i was a long-time member of and and chair the advocacy center which i was a longtime board member and president of and i got involved in jewish causes i a a founding
member congregation called me in flower mound i got involved in hillel north texas which ended up becoming part of the hill elves in north texas which i was a long-term time uh and and chair of i got involved in jewish education committee of the jcc uh my wife and i helped underwrite uh the jewish studies program at the university of north texas and all things which became an important part of my identity and what my priorities were it's fabulous all of that is great and you really fulfilled that first part of the threes right the judaism and you're still working on that as well very
involved oh also i at age 55 decided that i'm trying to think what the the program is at the j uh for people in bellstone program i was involved in melbourne program for two years that wasn't enough for me and so i ended up going to spurts institute of jewish studies in chicago where after six years of study i got my master's in viewer studies fabulous fabulous so the second part of that is mary tell us your wife's name my wife maggie who was convert to judaism so i fell in love and realized that an important thing was because she already had two children and
had grown up in a has been a protestant background and so early on realizing that there was something special about the relationship you know said that this was something important to me she ended up studying under rabbi feinstein uh at sheriff israel we ended up getting married at sheriff israel my wife adopted judaism became involved herself in our synagogue we raised our children as jewish happily married 38 years later congratulations tell us your children's name uh children are lance jacob and sarah lance lives in california uh jacob uh and he's in solar energy business uh jacob works for lockheed martin where he is an aerospace
engineer i proudly can say that i'm a father of a rocket scientist and sarah who lives in portland oregon and is engaged to be married any grandchildren i have three grandchildren abigail who's 18 and about to start north texas college samuel who's a junior in high school and goes to flower mountain high school and alana who's three and lives with jacob and our daughter-in-law heather i live in north virgin hills very nice very nice no great grandchildren actually maggie is an older child pam who lives in florida and i have a great grandchild who's 11 years old there you go and so that's great that's
fantastic um so i know you get to see your grandchildren all the time because they're here do you get to see your great grandchild or not well we're not that close with maggie's oldest daughter every couple years we bring jania to texas and and uh i hope that she after she graduates from high school uh comes to texas and we get to spend more time with fantastic so tell us what do you like to do for fun what do i like to do for fun sports junkie very active and the extent that then i work out with a trainer twice a week and have some
buddies that on weekends we walk two and a half two to two and a half miles try to put in 10 000 steps a day although my wife won't believe it uh you know i'm a big follower of the stars and the rangers and the mavericks my two college teams uh smu and ut and uh you know so uh as you know in today's world and the world of espn um uh interestingly just a footnote is my sister who's a real sports junkie back in new york his kids growing up we listened to somebody who went on to become jewish she became very big in
the world of sports on wabc listen to howard cossell's 12-minute radio program every evening i loved howard cosell and howard herself and it probably was called howard cosell speaking of sports nice so um just a couple of more things on your professions you've become you're in real estate also can you tell us a little bit about that if you want to share something sure in 1997 i had a friend who was a realtor who said on ryan road in denton i could buy 53 acres i had no intention of getting involved could buy it below market value to somebody that wanted to sell it and
so i bought 53 acres ended up developing that and now have become a developer in the cedar creek lake area in bay bank texas and involved in two projects as we speak and still involved with that still part-time lawyer although that's become increasingly difficult and my motivation is idealistic and a little bit to make money but love to help people and you know when i first practiced law everybody signs that attorney and counselor at law so enjoy counseling people you know legal problems but see that in a bigger perspective so i worked about 10 hours a week as a involved in in real estate development
um so just a couple more questions um looking back how is the world different today than during the early years growing up and you know just from your perspective so um you know grew up and uh new york city moved to long island i did not have central air conditioning and lived in a world where your front door was open your screen door was locked and you felt totally safe the new york that i left in 1965 was becoming increasingly more dangerous moved to dallas texas before there was an lbj freeway evening knew that it was farmer's branch because you could look across the hole
in the ground that was become lbj and there were forms where you can understand why he was louisville fighting farmers and unfortunately to some extent anyway i i lived in then long island then dallas in austin in denton everywhere i've lived i don't think it had anything to do with me became financially uh good places to live but as i often times say places i've lived places i live now are great for business and not so great for living necessarily so dallas i think living in dallas is not a lot as much like living in new york when i left new york and that is
drive on the roads and there's road rage you go into a store and not necessarily the greatest of service where it's more of a me too world then what can i do to help my neighbor is that in the last few years or is that it's got increasingly worse increasingly worse unfortunately yeah thanks for sharing that what uh accomplishments are you most proud of ellie i think i think as i look back in my life that i had this idealistic world view and i realized early on that i wanted to leave the world a better place uh because of my life and i've tried to
have that seep into every aspect of my and so um i think the things i've done in my profession the things i've done as a parent the thing that i've done as a husband as a grandparent uh in the organizat in non-profits i've been involved in um i think that what i've contributed has made a positive contribution um i hope i've been a good friend to my friends i hope that i've been a better jew and have helped judaism uh and so um i looked better back in my life there's some things i wish i would have changed but i feel proud of what i've
done with my life that's beautiful um if there was one thing that you want your friends and family to remember about you i know you'd mention your accomplishments and leaving the world a better place but if there's one thing other than that can you uh maybe expand on that i made him laugh i made him laugh when i can take my friends like mark shore and seth meyers and mitch myers and put a smile on their face guys who are funny themselves if i can put a smile on their face it makes me feel good that's great you can't see me but i have a
smile on my face just to as a note what advice would you like to leave for the next generation that watches you in your oral history your your kids your grandkids your great grandchildren um any advice you'd like to learn i think the big thing and this is kind of uh not something new that i'm saying is pass it forward you know don't don't you know it's okay that you thank me that you have a positive attitude towards what i've accomplished and how i've helped you individually but it's your job now to pass the love and the good things that i've shared with you and
pass it forward to your friends to your family and to future generations so do you have any questions that we uh or any comments you want to make that we missed that you want to say or you feel good about well let me think let me thank um i i yes a little bit elaborating on something you know i've had my share of down moments but um i realized that's all part of the plan that um that we you know that judaism a great extent studying judaism is studying a world of polar opposites that if there wasn't evil good wouldn't be so good i even
uh i wouldn't say cherish but appreciate my teenage years where i withdrew and my only solace was that i realized that in order to succeed in the world i think i got this my grandfather and grandmother he said education was going to be a positive thing i think i also realized selfishly that if the longer you went to school the more time you had before you had to grow up you know who wants to grow up you know even at this point in our lives who wants to really grow up you know i think that my good friends most of them have done a good
job at trying not to grow up even when they're grown up you know i'm i'm okay with everything that's happened in my well if there's nothing else then i want to say thank you for joining us for dallas us historical society oral history judge what chief howie my friend thank you very much well thank you mitch