Jack Stoller
Jack Stoller's parents came from Europe, his mother from a small town in Poland and his father from Ukraine near Odessa. His father arrived in America around 1905 and learned tailoring from a cousin in Philadelphia before traveling west, first to Duluth and then to Kansas City, where his mother had cousins. The two met in Kansas City in 1910 and married just two weeks later, a marriage that lasted 69 years. Jack was born in Kansas City on March 28, 1924. In 1936, when he was twelve, the family moved to Dallas, where his father tried the boys' clothing manufacturing business before returning to his trade with a tailor shop on Pennsylvania Avenue.
In Dallas, Jack grew up in the vibrant Jewish community of South Dallas, along Grand Avenue, Park Row, South Boulevard, and Forest Avenue. He attended Colonial Elementary and Forest Avenue High School, graduating in 1941, then began studies at the University of Texas. After the war broke out, he enlisted and was called up in May 1943, serving three years, including a year and a half in Europe and 67 days in combat. He returned home, attended Southern Methodist University, and later worked in various cities before meeting his wife in Wichita Falls, where her family had a business. They married in June 1953 and raised three children.
Though his parents observed Jewish holidays but did not belong to a synagogue, and Jack himself was not bar mitzvahed, he remained proud of his Jewish identity and quick to defend it. The family moved back to Dallas in 1963, the week President Kennedy was assassinated, seeking a larger Jewish community for their children. One of Jack's most cherished memories came at the end of the war, when a young woman in a displaced persons camp in Germany recognized that a rabbi living near his Dallas home was her only surviving relative, a connection he helped restore. Most of all, he treasured his family, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and considered himself extremely fortunate to have lived a full and blessed life.
Full Transcript
good afternoon i'm joe reingold and i'm here interviewing jack stoller today is monday what is today january 6th thank you 2000 to new year 2020. here we go jack tell me about your family what you know about your grandparents and your parents i know nothing about my grandparents my parents came well my mother came from a very small stenton poland and my father came from the ukraine down near odessa my mother my daddy came to this country about 1905. my mother came over about 1908. they met in 1910 and were married two weeks after they met that's great where do they meet kansas city missouri how did they get there my father came over he had a cousin who lived in philadelphia and he who taught him to be a tailor and then he and some of his buddies decided they wanted to see the rest of the country and they took off west and he went up to duluth and it just got so colder he didn't like it and he came down to kansas city and started there my mother had cousins in kansas city and that's why she went there okay
and uh my father knew one of the cousins and he said who was that lady and boom they were married wow love at first sight married 69 years oh wow fabulous and did they stay all that time in kansas city no uh [Music] when he lived in kansas city until 19 they got married in 1910 and in 1936 we moved to dallas what brought them here i'm sorry what brought them to dallas my father and a friend of his who was also a tailor decided they would try the manufacturing business and they looked around they like dallas and they decided they would come to dallas
and open up a manufacturing they manufactured boys clothes from i guess two or three up to 12. and that's what they did they came to dallas and they started the factory and unfortunately in fact between the two of them they couldn't get along after a few months and the each went to separate ways and the factory floundered and that was it so what did your dad do he bought a a tailor shop and because that's what he knew and we he had a tailor shop we uh i don't know about money in those days but he had to shop he divided it one-third and two-thirds the front third was his deal in the back we lived in the other two-thirds and no running water i mean nope i'm sorry we had running water we had no hot water had a commode and that was it if i had to bathe i had to go to a friend's house i had to go to a cousin's house whatever you may do that's the way it was so you came here you weren't born here but you were young morning kansas city 19 march 28 1924 95 years old and you came here when you were 12.
i came here was it was it a hard adjustment i'm sorry no not really not really we moved when we came we had a my dad had a a room on grand avenue and we were there for two or three weeks and then we moved in with his friend that he came to dallas with and we were there for two or three weeks and then we moved to another place we were a couple of weeks and that's when we he bought the store or the shop i should say won the store right well it's okay what was the shop 1507 pennsylvania ah okay how long
was he there that location we lived there from 1936 until uh i went to new york till about 49 and that's when he bought a house off 28 2822 forest avenue and he bought the house because it had a shop that was built right next to the house and he could go from the shop directly into the house and that was his taylor shop and he lived there until about 19 somewhere in the late 50s after sean and i got married and then he finally retired and he moved out a northwest highway far north far north they retired and moved to the red brick apartments
he moved into the apartments far north and north down northwest highway and preston road and that's where they lived until the day he died so tell me a little bit about your childhood here and your schooling here what was it like in dallas i well i started out with at colonial elementary school i went there for a half a semester and then from there i went to forest avenue high school which in those days was not predominantly jewish but it had a whole lot of jewish students there and that's where i grew up and i graduated from there in may 41 and then in the
fall i went to the university of texas and while i was at the university of texas the war broke out so i finished up that year then i came back to dallas for the i enlisted and but they didn't call me until may of 43 yeah and i spent three years in service where were you stationed originally i was a camp caller and i wound up i wound up in europe it's been a year and a half in europe and 67 days in combat and that's probably you're going to ask me a question about something that i'm proud of for one serving my country was
proud in europe the war was over may the 7th and about may the 9th we were stationed in grimm of germany and my unit was given the job of guarding a displaced persons camp now i don't know if you know what a displaced person's camp is where people from concentration camps and whatnot were brought together before they were patrioted home and i was on guard duty and this girl walks up to me and asks me to come into the camp now why she picked me i do not know because the first question she asked me was do i understand yiddish and i said yes but
i can't come into the camp because i'm on duty well she waited and when i was relieved she took me into the camp and brought me into this house and i was i don't know how many girls they're sitting there and they sat me down they brought me potato supers but they had they started asking questions as as you and when they asked me where i was from and i said dallas texas this one girl comes up to me and says do you know a rabbi reebok i says i don't know him but he lives just a few blocks from me she says that's my
uncle and i wrote my mother and a few days later i get this letter from the rabbi i can't read it because it's in polish so i look up i go back to find the girl or she's gone already but i find it the the chaplain and he finds her and she comes home to the states before i come home wow and she came to dallas to visit me and spent the day here that's beautiful so that's that's a memory i don't prefer yet a small world here you are in europe and find somebody who has a relative that was her only living relative wow
the rest of her family died in the holocaust oh my god that's amazing beautiful so after the war where did you find yourself i came home and i uh spent the first couple of months with my sister just to get the army out of my system and then i went to started school at the southern methodist university and i was there i graduated in three years and after that i went to new york spent three months up there didn't like it came back to dallas and i went to work in dallas and then i went to kansas city for a wedding my niece's wedding and
her husband talked me into going into a business with him up there and that turned out to be a fiasco and then my brother came up to kansas city and asked me if i would be a uh run a office for him he was a cpa and i thought my background was in college he was going to open this office in wichita falls texas and he asked me to run it for him and i said okay and it was there that i met my wife was she from wichita falls she was originally born in dallas but her father was working in dallas and decided he
wanted his own business and he moved to wichita falls and opened it up and she was six when they moved to which cell phones okay and that's where we met had six dates that was enough right yeah it was all it took that's all it took i remember the first week of december 52 we were engaged the first week in january of 53 and married in june of 53. i've been married 67 years i take it you didn't stay very long in wichita falls well we were there for probably six months seven months and my brother decided no the office wasn't there and i came to dallas and worked in the office in dallas and then my father-in-law came to dallas and he and his associates bought a radio station in wichita falls and he asked me to become the office manager of the radio station up there so my wife and i decided okay and we went back to wichita falls and we lived there for seven years after that but i didn't like wichita falls
i never did like it it was a a nice city but a small jewish community and i didn't want that for my kids were they both were they your children born there well my son was born in our two daughters were born in wichita falls and like i said i just it wasn't for me and my father-in-law moved away and my wife had nothing there to keep her so we decided we're gonna come back to dallas to the big city to the big city with lots of jewish things to do right right so what year when was that 1963 in fact it was the week
that kennedy was assassinated that we moved to dallas memorable that's an interesting story we were all packed to move on the day kennedy was assassinated which was a friday sunday morning my wife gets very very sick and i have to rush her to the hospital and at two o'clock monday morning they operated on her and the truck to move us to dallas was at my house i had to call my in-laws and they came up and stayed with starting in the hospital while i was at the house loading our furniture into a truck and other people were moving into our house and that night uh
the next day i had to come to dallas to the house that we had bought and my kids stayed with well cindy stayed with her aunt in wichita falls and my other two stayed with my in-laws in dallas i went back to wichita falls to spend that thanksgiving with my wife and the following monday she came to dallas we've been here ever since but she was okay after everything um boy that's a memorable week yes it was not for now i remember it like it was i remember every detail i heard seven six seven i stayed with terry cooper's part of the time as well
i had two thanksgiving dinners i had one with my brother-in-law and one with a friend of mine well that's a good one that's really celebrating so you have an interesting take on all of it because you've been up and back a number of times different cities but always back to dallas so how have you seen the changes in this city and what the city has changed tremendously when i moved to dallas in 1936 it was a city of approximately 200 thousand maybe a shade more and a huge jewish community and and we called it south dallas i don't know if that's the it yeah all
right but there was grand avenue park row south boulevard and forest avenue where the bulk of them lived there were a few that lived south of there there were a few jewish people that lived in north dallas and east dallas but that was a predominant go ahead there's three four schools down there here temple emanuel sarath israel the good asakam to pharise israel they're all white together and we all we were just it was nice being there did your family belong to any of them no unfortunately for whatever reason i never have understood it they grew up in europe and when you grew up in
europe in those early days there was a tradition and you followed the tradition of being jewish and they follow the holidays they weren't kosher but they were very s steeply involved in their religion but when they came to the united states for whatever reason they just didn't belong to a show maybe it was freedom i don't know i have no idea we did not belong to a show but they observed the holidays and my mother killed my she couldn't read english because she could read yiddish hebrew my father darwin was the best of them and we did recognize all the holidays that they did but
they didn't go to that's okay i was never bar mitzvahed they just didn't believe in it i can't answer their why yep that's all what currently what are your contacts in the jewish community or what have you been involved in lately my wife and i have belonged to two or three sure kindergarten we four okay but we i do not deny i'm jewish i will fight to the end i'm not religious to that extent but that's the way of the world today uh the assimilation uh the the just it's hard for me to describe that everybody has their own beliefs i do it whether you're
jewish i don't deny it i will follow the all the rules regulations holidays whatever you want to call it but the idea of going to the services i never did like him i never did understand hebrew it was it to me it was more of just the the the community getting together the tradition of thousand or whatever you want to call it years ago it's kind of falling apart it's down deep in their hearts but they don't meat like they used have you had you been involved in any civic organizations in the community no i never have never have that's okay and i think that
comes because my parents never were involved this is warranted in fact i mean i was never involved i don't take that back but the only organization i was ever involved in was a social deal when i came home from service and it was just made up of guys who were in service all jewish guys we called it ourselves a dsd the alice stars of david oh and uh we all piled around together and that's when the guys were starting to get married and that was the only organization i was really in but it was mostly uh it was mostly a social deal i want to
back up for just a minute because i had a thought i forgot to ask you did you experience any type of anti-semitism in the service oh yes you did what was that like what happened uh i guess you know anti-semitism i remember that in as a child when i was in kansas city the gerald l k k steels and and and then the kkks uh i was on the edges but i saw it and i do remember it but in service the one thing that stands out to me is that oh yeah there was always a little bit of anti-semite but the biggest one i
was in england i can give you the exact date if you wanted okay it was december the 15th 1944 the only reason i remember that date that was the day glenn miller disappeared but we were in england and i was going to breakfast and there was a radio plane as we always had but i didn't like the music and i just went up and changed it to something i like and after i did that this one soldier called me a very bad name and it really upset me because he used the word jew julian and i grabbed him and i ran took him outside i
says you're bigger than i am and you can run probably beat me to a pro but before you do i want you to understand i don't know what religion you are but i respect that and i expect you to respect my religion you can call me any name in the world but on call me what you did and the guy looked at me and he says you know you're right and he and i became friends after that that's a success story but that's that did happen yeah wonderful okay that's and i you know but there was anti-semite i've i've seen anti-semitism from the day i
was born okay so now tell us where your family is your children and your grandchildren what they're doing well um i'm very fortunate i have three unbelievable kids all three live here in dallas with me but it's like everything else each one has their own family and each one has to assimilate with their family and their mother and i oh we're here they don't forget us they take care of us and i understand their their individual families come first and that's i have to respect that because that's the way i would be but you get together we're together constantly fortunately i have one daughter who
believes like i do that family is everything and gosh for 40 years that i know of we're together every year for holidays she makes sure of that wonderful that's wonderful you're lucky you have your family around i am i have how many grandkids do you have got five beautiful grandkids i've got three great grandchildren and another one that's due in april oh mazel tov that's special that is special that's really special okay so now i'm going to ask you a serious question think about this for a moment is there anybody that you can think of who might have been your role model through the years
through the years my role model well that's a hard question because i've come across several several people that that like my i wouldn't call my father a role model but he was a very wise man in his way i guess the closest i could come to a role model would be my father-in-law because he was a family man i used to call him the general i did because he was a kind of matriarch for his five sister-in-laws and their family and we've all kind of fell in line with it because in his way he was a good guy he was a a great leader let
me put it that way okay that's wonderful um can you think of something that you are the most proud of or really really proud of in your life i said that deal with the with the girl but the most proud i was sorry i just you know that's the one thing i felt about was when we get together i just want to sit there and look that's all i want to do is sit there and look at the table and i'm contented i've been how fortunate extremely fortunate that i have been in my life i lived through the 20th i lived grew up during the
depression i went through the war and did not get a scratch and you have no idea how that is and i've got such a wonderful wife who's given me great children so what else can a man ask for nothing that's fantastic yes yes indeed so just to wrap up is there anything that you would like to add that you we haven't covered or that you'd like to share i don't know what it would be [Laughter] what hobbies do you have or did you have i didn't ask about that any hobbies or interests that you'd like to pursue or that you had pursued oh that's a
lot of hobby and a lot of things i like to do you know i like to travel unfortunately a doesn't do that anymore i like sports i just like to be with my family i just like to sit down and talk with them uh if i can talk with them one on one i would love it but that's a very difficult thing to do very difficult thing to do the one thing that i am very unhappy is that i have three kids or they know a lot about me but they have never sat down with me ever and really wanted to know about me from
the day i was born to today they got things here things there are spattering i'll put it that way well now they have some more they'll be able to look at this they'll have some more okay yeah whatever that's good that's a wrap unless there's anything else you'd like to add oh i could add a lot of stuff we'll add what what do you want me to add tell her about when you're running buddies all the people that you know that you're still friends with today how many people do you know that are friends today with people they went to high school with well yeah
i told you i got people in this building i graduated high school and we're still friends you know did they have have you had reunions periodically with everybody with them i i i never had we would go out with them periodically and i still call one of my sweetheart but you know after all i've not met her back in 1937 but at that day when i met her she was already in love with the man she married but you know i i guess i've had an interesting life i'll put it that way because i've done a lot of weird wild a while when i was
young extremely wild my wife doesn't know about all the things my kids don't know about all the things that i did when i was young so do you want to capture any of them on the show i don't know that's that's enough of it no you don't you know you know you know probably a little bit a little bit but i i did there are things i did is someone i'm not in jail for i'm serious i believe you i can remember oh i talk about the the depression nobody had any money and i was a kid in kansas city and there was a park
there called smoke park and it was a little section of the park it was the third largest park in the united states at that time but that was back in the days before air conditioning and i'm going back in this i'm going back in the early 30s now and it was a section that they call little israel because when you went there nothing were jews out there and why did they come there it was a hot summer time and it was hot and at night that's what to eat what we did we all went out there the families went out there the women would sit
under the the the park lights and play cards that men would play cards and us kids would run and get into mischief well nobody had any money and there was a concession stand there uh if you wanted something daddy give me a dime give me a nickel i don't have it so the concession stand in those days all soft drinks came in bottles there were no cans but he would give us two cents for every bottle to be brought back as people in well one day three or four of us we jumped the fence for the concession stamp and all the bottles he had in
the back we were thrown back over the fence and we took him around to the front and sold him back to him for two cents a piece and we would buy popcorn and popsicles that was very ingenious of you actually maybe illegal but ingenious oh boy i don't know if you like a story like this that's a great story i love it maybe you shouldn't be telling it but that's a great story another story back in those days the theaters they were the only things that were air-conditioned but to get people to come because they had no nobody had any money they would devise programs
so like the one one theater one had a deal with it on a saturday if you were a child you come and they would have games like i know one day i went to theater and i had to hop across the stage eating crackers and they'd go all the way across with no no water well i tried to care for that or they would give away script if people walk in they would give script and once a month then you could take the script and buy products well a lot of people didn't care for the scripture my buddy and one of my buddies we would
sit by the theater every night as the people came out can i have your money you know we gathered a whole lot of money when they had the the sale for this we go there we buy a box of them footsicles a bunch of chocolate covered raisins that's very smart but that's that was my young life okay i was a paper boy through the dallas morning news in fact i had a route in south dallas on park on south boulevard in my senior year and on my route was my wife's grandfather i threw him the paper yeah grandfather he lived on south portland 28 26
20 south boulevard that was on my and he was one of my customers how much did that pay in those days in those days the the way the routes work you'd have a router have approximately 50 papers 45 to 55. anyway if the paper was 20 cents a week and and so you got seven cents of that so if you had a 50 papers you would make 350 a week if you collected from everybody not everybody paid every week you know and that was a constant thing you'd be lucky if you wound up with two dollars or two and a half dollars a week but that was my spending money was my grandfather pay did he pay well on i was fortunate that particular route was on south boulevard and it went from oakland avenue to the railroad tracks i never had to collect because everybody there
paid by the year they would send a check into the i never to collect from on that route that was the only route i had that way but very few people paid by the month by the year because nobody had any money you know and in the depression we were lucky if we could rub two nickels together were a lot of the businesses still on um like main street in that area elm the jewish businesses i mean where they once were in south dallas or in downtown dallas in downtown down when i was first moved downtown dallas you would start up on harwood with tight
and you come down to neiman's and you go to a harrison company and then sanger brothers was at the far end and in between were a lot of small jewish businesses they were they're all gone now the leaders store is gone morse menswear is gone lynn's brothers is gone you know i remember all those stores i don't know there was probably a bunch of others and the reason i asked was because um in in a book that i refer to a lot it says that there are so many jewish businesses that everything was closed during the high holy days exactly even if you weren't jewish
the stories were all closed and they knew that it was the holidays you could go downtown on russia's show right yeah you know because everybody wasn't sure that's right one of them was the winer shop that was my grandfather her grandfather was a whiner shop yeah they were next door to a harrison company and a harrison company of course merged with the sanger brothers then they sold out to completion with felines in houston i i just getting your finding clothes neiman's is the only store that's still downtown that's the only one yeah things have changed a lot and when it was amazing for me anyway
to go downtown and walk into neiman's is like walking into the taj mahal or something like i said we didn't have we couldn't rub two nickels together i don't know if any anybody else told you about the white theater white the white theater in south dallas no i don't think so on saturday afternoon the white theater in south dallas it was it was on forest and oakland and because you're dying all the jewish kids would go there you're going at one o'clock and you'd come out at six but you could go on there everybody you knew was in in from south dallas was in the
theater a good gathering and that's right that's exactly what it was the gathering i used to go with maryland sweet america well at that time my name was maryland yeah right maryland marilyn rooney marilyn rooney but uh no that was south dallas was very very unique back in the 30s and 40s when did you move further north oh i didn't move further north until we got married my like i said my parents moved on to forest avenue and then i left i was there when i went to smu but when they moved when we moved to the first house we bought was in mesquite oh
okay and then we went back to wichita and then we when we moved back to dallas we moved into the middle shower estates which is upon uh forest and militia well you were a real trooper because everybody seemed to follow you well no they were here all the time and my brother was my brother when the first time his first house in north dallas was on joyce way and we lived on forest avenue in south dallas i thought that my gosh to drive all the way out there you know you had to pack a lunch exactly exactly i remember the i was taking my mother
in 1950 i just bought a brand new 1950 dodge and i was taking my mother and dad to my brother's house and we were driving out i stopped for a light and i heard the screech of tires and i held my breath and this man back right into the back of the car my brand new car and they probably didn't have the same kind of insurance naturally right right of course oh my god i'll never forget that wow well you were forward thinking by moving there to melshire states yeah that was that was the way to go it was it was really nice there really
was yes oh my brother yeah he looked at that house for a year before he bought it he bought that house he paid i think about twenty three or four thousand dollars and the last i saw it sold for something like four hundred and thousand dollars but that's that's what's happened to dallas right what how much was our house on uh what to call it wherever we were oh i paid 30 000 for that and we sold it 300. and it's a shame an absolute shame to drive up and down south boulevard and park road today to see what has happened to those houses that all the jewish people lived in that were so immaculate so beautiful the yards the street but yeah that is attrition that's progress well you call it progress i call it a trick okay so that's it are we done i can go on for hours but i'm not going you can i can't but you can no thank you jack it's been a pleasure my pleasure