Irving Goldberg
Irving Goldberg's family came to America from Europe. His mother, Elsa Loeb, arrived from the Rhineland of Germany when she was about six months old; her father, Morris Jacob Loeb, was a salesman, and her mother was Pauline Bernheim, from near Buchau on the German-Swiss border. The family settled among German Jews in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the congregation required its rabbi to deliver sermons in German and Hebrew. His father, Abraham Goldberg, was born in a town in Lithuania, lost his mother young, and was raised in part by relatives, including the Sachs family in Philadelphia, before making his way west as a peddler.
Abraham Goldberg and a partner named Weinstein opened stores in Texas, first near Bryan-College Station and later in Sabine, before Abraham accepted an offer from financier John W. Gates to run a store in the new town of Port Arthur. Irving, an only child, was born there on June 29, 1906, and remembered his years in Port Arthur as free and happy despite the town's rough early conditions. With only a few Jewish families nearby, his parents hired a teacher from Beaumont, and he was later confirmed at Congregation Emanuel in Beaumont under Rabbi Samuel Wozinger, whom he deeply admired. His mother, Elsa, was an able businesswoman who helped run the family store.
Goldberg attended the University of Texas, graduating in 1926, and then Harvard Law School, graduating in 1929. He married Marion, from Taylor, Texas, in December 1928. During the Depression he practiced law in Beaumont, briefly in Houston, and then in Taylor with his wife's uncle Jack Molaski before moving to Dallas in 1932, aided by Hyman Pearlstone in securing a position with the Murray Company. He was appointed a judge in 1966. A friend of Lyndon Johnson, whom he met through Taylor connections and Martin Winfrey, Goldberg served the Jewish community as president of his temple, the welfare federation, and the home for Jewish aged, and paid tribute to the pioneer Jews of Texas.
Full Transcript
To interview for an oral history our friend and respected public servant Judge Irving Goldberg in his chambers in Dallas on the 13th of July 1993. Is it running? It's running. All right. It is our pleasure to visit with Judge Irving L. Goldberg, long-time friend and wonderful public servant. We're going to ask him questions about his family history as best he remembers it. Judge Goldberg, could you tell us who in your family first came to this country, your parents? My mother came when she was six months old from the Rhineland of Germany. She was in the area of Kern and Spire. Right on the wrong works, it was actually the place of her father's birth in Worps, Germany.
And her mother was from the area that borders from a place called Buchau, B-U-C-H-A-U, on the border of Switzerland and Germany. She used to be proud of the fact that she was born within a few miles of Albert Einstein in that part of the world. They came over and settled in about 19, I'm not sure the exact year, but I think in about 18, well my mother married when she was about 16, in about in 1900, in oh I think 1923. Her maiden name A father name was Morris Jacob Lowe and a mother name was Pauline Bernheim And they lived in various places. My mother's mother and grandmother.
and they lived in Washington Square area out in Long Island for a while. And then they moved to a flat bush of Brooklyn and a very unusual thing happened, I think. They lived there in a very ethnic-oriented group of German Jews who spoke practically nothing but German among themselves. They had a rabbi by the name of I. Mortimer Bloom, B-L-O-O-M, graduate of the Hebrew Union College, born in West Virginia, because I used to talk to him a great deal. They required of their rabbi that his sermons be delivered in German, 100% German and Hebrew in that synagogue. I went by there 30 years ago. This was in Flatbush?
He moved on up into the west east side of New York, as they all would have done in that time. But my grandfather was a salesman, was not overly successful. Sweet, kind man. Not an authoritarian. very soft. And I remember the poker game the night he died. I happened to come in before midnight and they were having a poker game in Port Arthur. And this elderly man got up from one of his table and went to another and they had a large beautiful bowl of fruit. And he said, let's ladies have some fruit first. And within ten minutes he dropped dead on the floor. Anyway, I remember that like it was yesterday, and that was at about, well, I graduated university in 1926.
I was at 24 I believe That was the University of Texas before So then I was the only child Born on June 29 1906 My mother was a very young woman. Came to Port Arthur when they had no pavement on the streets from Brooklyn. And we'll resume. Resuming my father, I'll bring you back into this country first. My father was Abraham Goldberg, born in a town in Lithuania. and I'm not even certain the name of it. His mother, his only recollection of his mother was that she was a beautiful redhead and she died when he was five or six years old. And in those days, apparently in his part of the world, children deprived of complete parenthood was formed out, if you want to call the word out, to people in that area or relatives, which happened to my dad, went from first place to another.
His father, it would be my grandfather, cut that off, my father and my grandfather migrated to this country before my father. it was I'm not sure of the date but he came to live with an aunt of his that had married a man named Sachs in Philadelphia and had taken care of him and incidentally for Dallas one day one evening I was discussing ancient things in Texas with a good friend of mine named Ernest Wail Well we were talking about Philadelphia or something It came out that my uncle in Philadelphia Professor Sachs who spoke five languages taught at the school that Ernest went to as a teenager In New York, there was a famous Sachs Boys' School.
Yeah, I'd say, well, this was a, I don't know, but in any way, he, the Sacks family took care of my dad in Philadelphia, and he learned English, went to schools, whatever it was, in night schools. And then he carried a sack, a pack, that they like to call it, in the oil area of Pennsylvania. And he did that. And a very distant friend of his, I don't know where he picked him up, named Weinstein, they decided to go out west. I guess they read about, really, go west, young man. I do not know, but I would suspect they had read it. And they put it on.
You can go. It's coming through wonderfully. My father and Mr. Weinstein first bore a store in the area where College Station in Bryan is now, in the central part of Texas. and they many, many years ago I cannot remember how many but when I was a very young boy there was still a sign Goldberg and Weinstein on some building on the side of it as they had in small towns in Texas all over people's names were on the side see them for good goods or something then that College Station O'Brien yeah that's together practically yeah Right. Then they heard about the development down on the Gulf Coast of a town called Sabine, which had been figured in the Civil War as one of the few naval battles in the Civil War was in Sabine and Sabine Pass.
And they had a store there. They moved, and they went very well. in the 1980s. 1890s, a man by the name of John W. Bet-A-Million Gates, one of the buccaneers of the financial tycoons of that period. He made his fortune selling barbed wire to the West to confine the holdings of the farmers and the ranchers in the Western part of the United States. John W. Gates had a fight over the ownership of dock right of port sites in the Port Arthur area and Sabine. Port Arthur would not exist. He got to let Congress of the United States to dig a canal 28 feet deep, believe me that was something in those days, from the entry of the Gulf of Mexico to Sabine.
He said he could not buy the land in Sabine that he wanted. So they built the canal for 18 miles, pretty large and joined up with the Nature River. And Mr. Gates talked to my father and Mr. Weinstein about them needing a store in Port Alpha. And Dad went, and Weinstein stayed in Sabine. And Sabine was nothing but just a mud hole on the coast. Nothing ever came of it, but my dad accepted the offer of Mr. Gates, who was going to build a big three-story building. A building he built made out the whole town. The streets are named after tycoons, Proctor Street, and Dequeen is a man he knew in Holland who was a finance, names of streets followed the names of his friends all over the United States and the world.
Anyway, my dad had this store, and he owned it until when Gates died. Before he died, he said, Abe, you better buy this store before I get mixed up in anything in the estate. Just give me a good price, and they sold it right there practically without a handshake at all. Was that the building you sent me once to see Was it 5 and 10 That right I be So then Port Arthur was a mesquite toll city It was hot, humid, bad sewage, bad education, whatever else you might read. But it had good people, good people. It had very few rich people. Most of them were poor people, middle class then.
This is before it hit the oil? That's before, yes. They were building this port for the shipping of wheat and stuff and cattle from the Middle West. But the terminal became the site of oil refineries when they discovered the oil, and they were there. They didn't get any oil, but they got a big business in connection with the development of the city. And the, I say that my years in Port Arthur were free and happy ones. I was very few, I was, maybe there were a couple of other Jewish families, I can only remember one, Kahn's, one of them, and Reba. Reba became president of Texas Company years later on.
He was, that's been sent down there to run the plant. He worked his way up, which is a nice story about him, but we're not going to. And Mr. Kahn? No, his name was Reba. Oh, Reba. Kahn had a shoe binance, but that was only Jewish family. My mother and father hired school teacher to teach them, come up from Beaumont, teach the Reba girl and me basic stories about the Jewish history and all that you get in Sunday school. When I was old enough, I went to Beaumont, where I was confirmed, and where we had the membership in the congregation, which is an old congregation in Texas in Beaumont.
Do you remember the name? Yes. congregation with congregation Emmanuel sired by the great one of the greatest men I ever knew kind sweet compassionate he was a scholar in a way but he was a scholar of human hearts and human compassion And I never had to find a person to teach me anything because anything he taught came off in the heart and the mind. You can find someone's mind. I mean, what's in a mind, but you don't find it within a heart, in my opinion. His name was? Samuel Wozinger, who incidentally, granddaughter or great-granddaughter, is married to a bankruptcy judge now in Dallas, Texas. Oh, word.
And it's a thing somehow come together. I was a, as a student, I did quite well. And my mother, as it happens, was a very fine businesswoman. And she assisted my dad in the operation of the store, which was successful, do a great part to her. But this experience where she was active in the business every morning, every day, made me an independent person that other young men of that time did not have. And she was a very vigorous, she was a charming woman and very beautiful woman. My dad is more scholarly. Her name was Loeb, of course. Morris and Old, this is my... Yeah.
I didn't tell you that Morris and Pauline Lowe had one girl and two boys, and the girl was my mother. So her name was Elsa, E-L-S-A Lowe, who married, as I have told you before, to Abraham Goldberg. Now, but I was not raised in penury, nor was I raised in multi-millions, but we had very adequate. If I wanted to take a trip, I could. There wasn't any question. If I had clothes, I was not impoverished in any way or deny anything that I should have received. You went through the public schools and public high school of Port Arthur. That's right. Went through the usual schooling.
And then I was thinking of going east to school, and I decided, well, I was a little bit worried about the education that I had gotten. And I used to go to Houston a great deal One of my best friends as a kid growing up was a man named Freed in Houston I died about 15 years ago named Frank Freed But anyway I went all over Texas I never got up to Dallas, but I went other parts. And my dad was well known. He was the first man, and I saw senators come in and receive contributions, and I'm perfectly nothing. He never asked for anything except what was good for the country.
But he was interested in politics, and I remember speaking to Tom Conley and Morris Shepherd as they would go through the towns and shake hands with the leading citizens. He was president of every club you could make, he said. He went through all the chairs, velks, rollery, chamber of commerce, everything you can think of. Then they built a congregation later on in Port Arthur. They had a building. That happened just as I was going to college. By then you had ten or more families. Oh yeah, and they had the population, there were more Jews, of course they had. They didn't have the money, though, even to get people, candidates to come down and talk to them.
So they just said the Hebrew in college, send us one. I said he was one rabbi that was hired, C-O-D, cash on delivery. But he became a very famous rabbi in Dayton, Ohio named Russlander, R-U-S-S-L-A-N-D-E-R. And from then I decided when I was at the University of Texas that I was going to be a lawyer and I wanted to go to Harvard. And in those days you didn't have to go through stringent examinations. If you have a legitimate degree from any legitimate college, you're admitted. But God help you after admission because they've waited you out the first year by grades. They took everybody in, but they dropped out, maybe 50% of the people they took in, which I thought was an economic sin almost, because it was not cheap to go in those days.
But it caused me to meet a lot of people in the East and get different points of view. But I decided to come back to Texas to practice law and the rest of it is. You met my mother's friend Sam Rudner at Harvard. Sure, I knew where Sam said, of course, he was in my class. Got his biography, all of us back of it. But anyway, is he still living, I wonder? That's what I was just wondering. Wasn't he a friend of Cats and Black? Yes, they were partners. Sure. And he handled the estate of his mother, Nicholas's mother. Yeah, Nicholas's mother. Well, of course, I knew that.
But anyway, that's about it. Bob, you want to ask any more questions? Well, how you came to Dallas now becomes the question after you graduated. I graduated in 1929 from Harvard. Jobs were not easy to get. That was the Depression, and nobody was hiring. I didn't want to live in New York. I probably could have gotten something up there. I didn't want that. So I came down, and it was very hard, and I started practicing in Beaumont, Texas. This was 20 miles between Beaumont and Puerto Rico, and practiced there for a year and a half. And I practiced for a short time. I tried it in Houston on my own.
But something else happened at that point. There was a small oil discovery made near Taylor, Texas, where my wife Marion comes from. And we had married, and we had married my last year. That was my next question, how you met the girl from Taylor. That's right. That's it. Marion. So anyway, we had met at Texas and got married in December of 1928, graduated in June of 29, Harvard, Wisconsin. But this oil boom didn't last but a couple of years, but Marion's uncle was a very fine lawyer in Taylor, and he really needed somebody. And I didn't have anything to do, so I went up there in Beaumont.
I got a salary, but they had a very rich firm, the best firm in the town, but they had no business. I wasn't learning anything. I established trust officer for the bank there because they didn have anything else for me to do So I got I savaged the trust department But I but anyway I went to Taylor and I was busy and I learned everything And I tried, came out, the uncle didn't like to try cases and I didn't mind. I used to try them in Taylor. But, but anyway, after that, I knew I didn't want to live in Taylor. Was Dr. Cinnamon still there?
The gentleman was there and had a store next door to Marion's father who had the drug store. And Marion's father was a grandfather, was someone you should have become, I wish I could talk about him. He built a store in Taylor on the Chisholm Trail. And they used to come with their horses and park them, and he'd have to take care of them, came from year to year, come down, drive from Kansas and all, and stop in Taylor. And Jack Molaski, very famous for him, her uncle, was the one that wanted me to come up, and we got along fine, and he was a star football player at the University of Texas, and he knew everybody, and he introduced me to a lot of people.
And I decided I had to come to a big city, and they had a cousin here, by the name you've heard of him, Hyman Pearlstone. Oh, my. Hyman was a cousin of Molesky, and he helped me get a job representing a company called the Murray Company. He had left Palestine at that point? Oh, yeah. He was here running, at that time, the Depression, the bank, First National Bank had asked him to help them out in some of their problem loans, I think. Anyway, he got me this position, and from there, I met people in Dallas and so forth, and here I am. Thank goodness. And I came to Dallas in 1932, and I've been here ever since, and I was appointed a judge in 66, and I've enjoyed every minute of it.
And I would not change my life's profession, anything I've ever seen or heard about. I'm ready to adjourn. In regard to your appointment as a judge many people considered you a mentor of Lyndon Johnson and how you originally met him would certainly be of interest Well I was not a mentor of Lyndon Johnson but I met him because remember I told you that the Moulaskies were in Taylor Texas Taylor was a constituency of Lyndon Johnson when he ran for Congress in 1936 upon the death of that congressman. Marion's uncle Harris supported him, helped him out, a small contribution, and they became friends, very good friends for years.
He introduced me to it, but I also got to know Johnson through a man I worked for in Dallas by the name of Martin Winfrey, who was a great political factor in Texas. And he knew Johnson down in Austin and in other places in Texas. And he also, Johnson would come by to see him and I would meet him in connection with that. to be friends that way. So, but I was, there are a few people, and a lot of people claim to be mentors of Johnson, but I haven't met them yet, but maybe they exist nonetheless. You may recall that back in around 49, I was program chairman of the Junior Chamber, I had to get 52 programs a year, and I was struggling.
So when Johnson decided to run for senator, I called you, and I said, could you get that fellow to talk at our thing? And you said, a thousand young businessmen? I'll get them when you need them. Tell me the date. And you did arrange it. And it was a wonderful day. There was a big crowd out. and I often wonder if the 84 votes could have come out of those several hundred people. And if so, I thought you got the credit. I went to get him at the Baker Hotel to bring him over, and he had his feet up on the desk with a bottle of whiskey, and he says I got a friend here from Fort Worth I like to come with me Is that all right I said sure He says his name John Conley works for Richardson over there And that how I got to meet the two through you Well, it was a great experience.
I just wanted to know about the things, about my life, the main thing. You did so many wonderful things for the Jewish community here. I believe you were president of the temple. President of the temple. The welfare federation. And the home for Jewish ages when it was built. And the temple, when it was built, I was on the committee and also president when it was dedicated. But I also was at an American Jewish committee. used to go to some of its meetings in New York and had some people up there. But these things are interesting. I even found that you were on a committee of mine when I was president of the Jewish Community Center.
You even worked in that area. You plowed all the fields, as they say. I did. I sat on all the chairs, and some of them were rough, but most of them were comfortable, and I enjoyed being with them. So important to all of us and to the country as a whole is that, please God, you'll be able to continue for a long time to use that wonderful mind for the judicial values that you bring to it. And your SMU annual lecture there is not only a tribute to you, but again has brought some marvelous people to Dallas. I've just told you I've enjoyed everything that I've done, people I've met in my life.
I've had a good family. It's a long time ago. I'm 80. I was 87 not too long ago. And as we roll into the 88th year, I can count all of them as happy ones and very little distress. I was in the Navy and here and there. They're all part of the cosmic, the mosaic. I guess the mosaic is a good quote word for me, too, because I have been what I consider it'll be a good Jew, but it might not fit that of some of the definitions today, what I consider the important part. But the Jews of Texas have been great contributors and were in the formative years of this state, and they should be given credit for laying the groundwork for the movement of the Jews to every cultural expedition, educational, philanthropic.
They were in the forefront. And thank God for them. And it is very caring and all. But I would say that they did it in what I would call a tradition of doing for others and caring for the others in the world. And we owe these pioneer Jews from the mosquito-laden coast, Gulf Coast, in Sevilla, Port Arthur, to the upper highlands of Lubbock and Amarillo I seen them grow I seen them start And in the East Texas of Tyler and Jacksonville and Rusk and in all the places the Jews have planted their hearts and their minds for the fulfillment of the promise that we would be God chosen people But chosen not to gain but to give and to do and to bring into being the wonderful things that life can be made to produce.
Thank you. So beautifully expressed. I remember advancing this one little bit. You didn't drive back in the years I first knew you. Okay. You go to Sunday school. And you bought them some cookies? Yeah, I used to buy them cookies to keep them quiet on the way home. You were the biggest briber that I ever knew for young kids. As long as I stayed with that, unfortunately I have. You were genius at bribing young kids. Good luck, boys. Thank you so much, Jeff.