Joseph Levy
Joe Levy was born in Everett, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, the youngest of three children raised by a single mother after his parents divorced when he was two. The family was poor, and his mother worked and paid for his care while his older siblings attended school. A local Jewish organization arranged for him to attend a yeshiva, where he thrived in Hebrew studies and gained a lasting connection to Jewish life, even though the rest of his family was not observant. His mother's family had emigrated from Ukraine in 1905, and a family home there is still owned by relatives today. At age 14, in 1957, the family moved to Los Angeles, where he encountered open prejudice and anti-Semitism before settling in a largely Jewish neighborhood.
In high school Joe joined AZA, becoming a chartered member and officer of two chapters, and he attended youth-run High Holiday services. In December 1960 he enlisted in the Air Force, training in San Antonio and later Biloxi, Mississippi, where he witnessed harsh segregation and was checked for freedom riders. Being Jewish was uncommon among enlisted men, so he worshipped with officers and visited the New Orleans Jewish community. In 1963 he met his future wife, Frances, through a bowling league; they married a year later and remained together for 54 years, raising three children and welcoming eight grandchildren. His careers spanned office machines, retail drugstore management, and forty years as an independent insurance broker.
Guided by a belief that life moves from learning to earning to giving, Joe devoted himself to community service, including a decade on the Selective Service board and work with the Boys and Girls Club and Kiwanis. He joined Rotary International in 2008 and has traveled abroad to deliver polio drops in India, build water projects in Jamaica, and provide hearing aids and medical support to children in Mexico, having visited some 75 to 80 countries. In 2015 he and Frances moved to Dallas to be near a daughter and son-in-law, drawn by family and a comfortable cost of living. In Dallas he joined a Rotary club and, after an encounter with a cardiologist, became part of a small congregation. He remains active in Jewish and civic life and enjoys living in a Jewish community again.
Full Transcript
we're rolling good afternoon this is joe levy and i'm interviewing him today my name is joe reingold and today is what is today wednesday january 16th 2019. hello joe good afternoon all right just to get the record straight for this recording my name is joseph levy yes and i go by joe okay i was born in a little town called everett massachusetts which is suburb of boston and i was there until the age of 14. i lived in a very mixed neighborhood came from a very poor family my mother was a single parent of three i was the youngest a mistake they got divorced two years after i was born and so i was raised in a single family home and my mother used to have to pay somebody to take care of me while the other two were already at school then the jewish receiver in town said to her no no let us pick joe up in the joseph at that time by bus and we'll take him to school every day and bring him back in the evening it will cost
you make your life a little bit easier so i got to go to yeshiva was it since and i was from a non-religious family so that was really something else i continued until i was in the second grade kindergarten before second grade and when it came time to go into the third the school told my mother they had to keep me back because my vocabulary english i was terrible but they would put him in the fourth grade in hebrew because evidently that i took to that she decided it's time for me to go to public school i'm old enough to walk home and be a
latch key kid and so that's when i went to public school and repeated the second grade public school i continued school until as i said age 14 last year of at that time was called junior high seventh eighth and ninth grade and we moved to california and we stayed with not uncle until we could find an apartment to live in and in 1957 in los angeles there was a lot of prejudice towards blacks witnesses jews and animals and we'd my mother go to apartment buildings sit for for rent and it would have a sign saying vacancy no blacks no witnesses no dogs and no jews
very out in the open nothing was hidden not like things might have been today back then everything was in the open and there was a lot of prejudice and anti-semitism in los angeles at the time unless i guess you lived in a certain neighborhood so eventually she did find an apartment for us to live into and it was a mixed neighborhood of black and white and i went to the last part of junior high and then went to a high school and at that point we moved closer to the high school and it was a jewish neighborhood it was all apartment buildings mostly jewish people
it was like a little ghetto i'll say because no wall but we all lived in that area and there was two synagogues walking distance i joined aza so that i could meet other youth my age and the aza was held at one of the synagogues and so i got to meet people and i would go to synagogue because of that but my family still didn't i was the only one and i did and it was because of the upbringing that my mother sent me to hebrew school for in those days it was five days a week two hours a day monday through friday services on
saturday and two hours on sunday so that was my upbringing in the jewish religion even though nobody else did that it was really funny i had an aunt who would come to visit us on sunday morning who was a convert and she wouldn't eat anything in our because we weren't kosher she brought her own tea bag her own cup the only thing she'd take was hot water it was really something else and i'm named after her late husband that's how i so she was friendly with my mother because of that my mother's family came to america from the ukraine in 1905 and my mother was
the first one born in her family in 1907 her two older brothers were born to ukraine it turned out to be seven children finally and the house that she grew up in is still in the family and i have cousins that live there today so that house is still this many years later still on the family back into california i went to high school aza boy i i wasn't content with just one chapter so i joined a second chapter became a chartered member of the second chapter became president i was treasurer of one president of the other and in those days in los angeles the
youth groups the neighborhoods whatever category had their own services for high holidays it was all run by the youth it was all all no adults just strictly and it was really really enjoyable and so that's where i went services in those days i decided that i did not like i was there because i had to be decided that nobody in my family had ever gone to college i probably won't go to college so in december of 1960 i went enlisted in the air force with a deferment until i graduated high school which i turned 18 on a thursday graduated on friday of january 27th and
went into service that next monday and spent time in the service they sent me to san antonio which is my first time here in texas and then about two months after that basic training was over they were sending me to a technical school in biloxi mississippi i thought things were bad in los angeles for jewish people then i got to block mississippi and found out that there they didn't like jews blacks or catholics or anybody if you were a baptist you were part of the group and i hung around with some of the black troops and we went to movie theaters it was strictly for
black or restaurants it was strictly like because i could go to those even though they couldn't go to the whites and that's that was what i did and i spent a year there my first time going into mississippi was on a bus from san antonio and when we crossed the border into mississippi the bus was stopped by men with shotguns on the highway and they came on the bus to see if there were any freedom riders and if you don't know what freedom rider was in those days it was the ones that went mostly from the east coast and jewish guys and girls to sign
up to vote for blacks and they were checking for that even though we're all in uniform they still walk through the whole bus checking so that was my introduction to biloxi mississippi mississippi and then biloxi mississippi so that was the years until then and being jewish was an oddity in the sense that not many guys were jewish in the air force except officers so i went to services and i went with the officers and so i got to hang out with them and we'd go to new orleans the jewish community center and uh it was only 90 miles down the highway highway 90 actually and
that's where we'd go and and spend time and then after that they sent me i put in to go to japan and they sent me to california about 60 miles from where i'd gone to high school so i did that and the outfit they put me in was one that traveled we didn't do anything if we were on the base we had no job we traveled to other bases to do our work and so i got to see a lot of the united states by going to these other bases but since it was 60 miles when i was at the base i'd go home for
the weekend back to los angeles excuse me and so therefore i hung around with a lot of the guys and girls at azam but naper and bbg that i was in with high school but now it was my name birth youth organization in april may of 1963 i was on a bowling league sunday morning bowling week since i was there so often i could be in a bowling league but a breath and my wife had come out from detroit to move in with her brother and get away from detroit and come there started a new life here in california and i she was asked to
substitute for somebody on a bowling team that we were bowling that day and so i met her that way and asked her she wanted to have lunch and that's how our relationship started she told me later that she told her friends that she was marrying me right then from that first day uh we've old in the morning so it was some time between that lunch and we went to a friend's house at swimming pool they thought it'd be funny and they threw me in the pool but i had cowboy boots on and i didn't want to get them wet i didn't care about jeans or
whatever so i kept my boots on the edge of the the deck and i got myself out of the pool sock and went and they loaned me a pair of shorts to wear and so i took her to lunch wearing cowboy boots and shots and she still married me so it worked out okay and that was how we we got together and we got married a year later and have been married now for 54 years three children eight grandchildren uh we have still four california two of them are married we have two here in dallas one at the university of arizona in tucson one at
the university of new mexico and albuquerque no excuse me different grants out in the university of colorado and boulder then one of the the grandchildren of california he's at the university of new mexico in albuquerque and then we have three little ones two ten-year-olds and twelve-year-old the one ten-year-old and twelve-year-old live in the austin area and that's my son's children and then the young the only girl out of the 12 out of the eight lives in california the three children i was very very lucky they were all successful in their own way the two girls don't work they're stay home moms they're very lucky they're
fortunate that they married men that were very successful and they could quit work at a certain point in their their lives my son who's down in the austin area he had his own charter school that he owned in california but felt he didn't want to raise the two adopted children that he had in california he wanted to raise him somewhere else i don't know whether he just threw a dart at the map and ended up in pflugerville but he did end up there and he sold his shares of the charter and the austin school district hired him but they would only hire him as a
teacher so in august of that year he started as a teacher and by october of that year he was assistant principal at one of the at-risk schools and he dealt with children that were at risk today he writes the curriculum of math and computer science for the austin school district so he's moved his way up there not money-wise but moved his way up there title-wise so that's my children and they as i said doing well i uh i had three careers first i started out in office machines i went to work for ibm right out of the service and they sent me to school in
kentucky to learn this electric typewriter nobody even uses a typewriter today and i worked for them but i wasn't quick enough on putting some of the parts together and they let me go when i went back to california and i went to work for a car rental agency and then i met a girl that had gone to high school with and says joe you worked for ibm and my husband and his brother his brother owns an office meeting gene repair company they need somebody so i went and talked to them and they hired me and at night i went to school learning different office machines
and i did that as a career but i wanted more money so i went to work at night as a clerk in a drug am i taking too long no no i went to work as a clerk at a drugstore and found i enjoyed that more than working on office machines so i finally got hired by the drugstore company as a manager manager trainee and in 11 months i became a first assistant and in five years i was a manager of a store was this still in l.a is it still yes well yes in l.a but we had moved to the country and lived in
ventura county in that small farming community uh where the reagan library is today library and that got too big we decided it was too many people there now it's up to 100 and some people hundreds of some thousand so we moved to the next city over which was only 35 000. and when we left there and 20 some years later it was only 37 000 and that so we were there i i left the retail management after 11 years because i never saw the kids i was always at work and i decided i had more to offer so i took a job selling insurance i went to work for prudential they sent me to school to be a manager because of my manager background and i said no because i'm not a manager i make my own hours i'm a manager i'm responsible for hours so after a year i left them and went to work as an independent insurance broker okay and i did that for 40 years 40 40 years it turned out to be a good job for me i sold my company uh back in 05 kept a small interest in it and then the partnerships fell apart and so i had to come back to work to save my money and the partnership divided up we took the company to the city we were the small town that we were living in and started a new company there uh so that was in the end of 2007 and i did that until the end of 2012.
then i traded my shares of that company for a starter company that i didn't have to do any work and and that's what i am today is just part of that startup company which now has uh been going on since 2012 so it's been seven years and it's been successful so that was nice so that was my career of working but back in the 80s i had said to myself we were making a decent living not rich but a decent living send our kids always to summer camp jewish summer camp called brandeis partying institute and they went there and then eventually when they got older
they became counselors and stayed with that my grandchildren also ended up going so i decided in the 80s that life is divided you have a period of time where you learn you earn and you give and by the 80s i was in the giving stage and that's when i started community service and giving back to the community first i started with the social with the selective service board for the year i lived in i was appointed by ronald reagan and i was on that wood for 10 years but that was national but i also did things for boys and girls club for the kiwanis for
the what have you uh and i did that and that was ongoing i turned 65 i'm in this new office in a new town i lived in but new office area and i got a call one afternoon from one of my competitors he says joe how about we have lunch tomorrow i said well sure be glad to you never know where business might come from and he took me to a rotary meeting rotary international local rotary club and i saw after going there i said well these are the people they do the same thing i've been doing except there's a club that does this i
said this is perfect for me and i joined them in 2008 and i concentrated on being part of that group of rotary i've since then gone to india to give polio drops to children i've gone to jamaica to work on water projects for schools that didn't have water and the one that touched me the most was hearing aids for children in tijuana mexico even though in in india i dealt with babies and i helped babies in my hand polio drops in their mouth that wasn't as moving to me because you didn't see the end result you just gave it the mother takes a child back
that's it sure you read that polio is eradicated now in india but that takes time and what have you but when i went to tijuana mexico and saw that child have the doctor put the hearing aids on and that child heard his parents voice for the first time that meant a lot to me that got to me because now you're seeing something instantaneous which we all like is vast gratification and so here was i've also worked with children oncology hospitals in mexico his regular hospitals as well i've been to mexico several times for different projects and that's what i do now i i do that
i'm very active in that i'm very active in rotary and so when i came here to dallas that was the first thing i did after we were settled is join a rotary club okay so i would like to know why did you pick dallas how did you get here i drove and did you also throw a dart and just decide no no we had been looking about retirement communities even got a magazine uh subscription about retirement areas wouldn't be a nice place to retire and the magazine was all about golf everything was golf golf golf yeah i don't play golf i tried it didn't like
it don't play golf i have a daughter here and i had the sun down on flugerville they were here before you were already here the son-in-law in california says you know what i think i'm going to be able to run the business in california in texas instead of here and i think we're going to move the family and so my wife and i heard that this was may of 2015. and we thought you know we're in our 70s we should really consider doing it now while we're young enough to be able to do this so we talked about it we came here from we've been here visits before with a daughter so we made a thing and we came and spent a little more time really looking around and we decided let's let's do it so put the house up for sale and i'm a wood turner i'm a wood hobbyist i had i had built a word shop in my backyard go on at square feet i used to do projects and give my projects a charity
to be sold they'd go anywhere from fifty dollars to a thousand so it was really worthwhile it made you feel good because you were giving things to charity and i was selling off tools that i knew i could not come and bring here because i wouldn't have the same size property i wouldn't have a workshop and some of my tools were very big and heavy so i started selling them one of the people that came to see the my shop and buy some tools said you're selling the house and the sign hadn't gone up yet i said yeah we're going to sell the house it
goes on the market next monday this was a thursday afternoon he said i show my my look house and show him the house and he calls me up on that sunday morning he says can i bring my wife by to see the house i said sure it's a good sign on tuesday we sold the house without a realtor it was very very nice very easy very easy so here we were starting to talk about it may november 20th we were in dallas my son-in-law here says you know we have a big enough house you'll come in and stay with us for six months look around
see where you want to live and we don't and i don't care that you bring the three cats and a daughter and our dog's 150 pounds so it's not a little little dog that you just fit anywhere and i said thank you it's very nice but we looked for a house on one of our visits we found a house so we stayed there only until we closed escrow i wanted my privacy i thought they should have their own privacy so that's how we really got to dallas and dallas had the economy that worked for us in fact on the news today it says it caught
sixty thousand dollars a year you can live in dallas and have a nice life well in california that same nice life you'd have to make a hundred and some thousand to do that and so it was a no-brainer as my friends get such a kick out of it when i send them the signs at the gas station at how much gas cost we're paying under two dollars they're paying over four dollars it may you know so i rub it in a little bit uh what is your daughter doing here already my son-in-law works for fedex and he got a promotion and brought to dallas okay
since then he's got another promotion he's the youngest vice president of fedex stores and he's the one who built their new building over there in the uh across from toyota so that's how we got it that's how our son wanted us to move the austin area we didn't want to be babysitters we looked at the austin area felt that was for younger people everything that goes on there is more designed for the younger couples singles we're past that where we come to the book reviews here at the jccc we're past that or like tonight because we still give back to the community we're doing food
preparation for feed the children it's dry food that gets sent to all over the world depending and we do that we're doing that this evening because that's what we do francis and i we give back to the community or the world at large it's something we believe in and that's that's what we do in life are you doing anything specific with the jewish community here uh being a member uh i am a member of a kahila is about 20 families i would got involved with them as my wife was a vegan in california i had a chest pain i knew in my i knew myself
it had nothing to do with my heart but i still went to the doctor the doctor i had here in dallas wasn't available so they sent me to somebody in the same office and he says i want to do an ekg and are you willing to see a cardiologist if i don't like what i say sure that's why i'm here so he did that and he sat down with me says see this little blip i have no idea what this is i don't know if it's serious enough but i don't know what it is he says i've already he says you said you'd go to
the cardio cardiologist i made you an appointment at one two story two floors down and i've already made an appointment come on i'm gonna take you the doctor left his office and took me two floors down to this other office sat me down said here's some paperwork to go out i'm going to go talk to the doctor he went in and spoke to the doctor uh i gave paperwork to there he left he says they'll call you i went in there and they another ekg and then the doctor came in and he just lay down and then he said never mind sit up for a
minute i want to ask you some questions so i knew right away there was nothing wrong with my heart i was fine he says what synagogue did you join when you moved to dallas then i really do i had nothing wrong with me and he says we belong to a kahila and one of my wife and i pick you guys up this is coming saturday and we take you to services well i wasn't ready for that to be honest with you i just i i didn't go to that many services in california not that there was any jewish synagogues in our city we did have
chabad but i only went high holidays or what have you or i'd go to holidays at a reform synagogue that my wife's friend belonged to her husband was on the band and what have you officer whatever you want to call it so i had no affiliations over the years when the kids were younger i was a treasurer of the synagogue so i was on the board and i'm very active and the kids went through and thinking about this and by barbara mitzvah but later on as i got older i would go less and less and so i was hesitant and i didn't go my wife
got sick later on but maybe a month later i took her to an emergency room i actually took the doctor the doctor insisted she go to an emergency room the emergency room says i think you're okay but i'd like you to go see a cardiologist okay so we already know the name of one i'll call and make an appointment and so she now went to to see joel rothman dr rothman and uh and he talked to her about and so we ended up going to the kegela and we've been going now for i guess two years we've been going to the gila it's nice it's
only about 20 families service is for two hours it's all late people afterwards it's lunch uh it's really a pleasure i in fact last year i was on their board and i decided i have nothing to offer i don't want to be on the board anymore because my feeling is in life that if you can't give there's no reason to take the time to do okay that's a good philosophy so that's that's where i am that's who i am what i am in your lifetime can you think of anybody that might have been a role model for you or a strong influence on you i
have to think on that because there was no male role model in my family and uh so i can't say that my grandparents died when i was very young so i didn't have the grandparents to do that with in fact i didn't even meet my mother-in-law until the day of the wedding uh and her father i didn't meet until maybe married for two years before a year before i met him so uh when you poor people don't travel as much i found that out one of the things that did and this is how it's probably very stupid but it's one of the things is on
sundays i used to watch this hand-me-down tv about six inches about this big and on sunday evenings it was a program called the happy wanderer and every week he went someplace else and as a poor child i thought to myself someday if i have money i'm going to do well i've now been to about 75 to 80 countries now because i finally had money and i just started doing that so as far as a role model for that yes but i don't think i had an actual role model made me who i am i think a combination of myself and my wife made me who
i am today okay and tell me something that you feel that you're very proud of in the course of your lifetime giving back to the communities as well as the world at large that to me is very important i'm helping eradicate polio i'm helping clean water i'm helping uh health for for for women who don't have it in countries that it's third world countries they don't even have that and i'm working on that so those are the things that make me very proud of what i am and who i am yes everybody says they're proud because they raise their children they do that well yes
that but that's just part of life that's what you're supposed to do but giving back is something that you do because you want to did you say you're part of a rotary club here in dallas not only am i part of a rotary club i'm a member but i'm also on the district level where i'm the assistant i was an assistant governor last year this year i'm the governor's aide and who knows where i'll go from here i'm not being governor because it takes up too much time and i'm to be honest with you i'm too old to be doing that where you have to
go visit 64 clubs and drive all over i'm not ready to do that i'll never be ready to do that okay i'd rather save my energy to travel overseas to do projects instead has your family increased it all since you've been here no your immediate family well i shouldn't say that two daughter two granddaughter-in-laws so yes in that respect but no no great-grandchildren just that's okay so granddaughter-in-laws is good daughter-in-law so that's uh granddaughter was that's the only growth to the family at this point and i just want to ask you i know you've only been here a short while but i'm still i'm always
interested in hearing have you seen any changes since you've been since you've been to death i have found that the right way we subscribe to the newspaper because i always like reading newspaper in the morning but i've had to cancel the newspaper because i'm different than a lot of jewish people i am very conservative not very oh what's the other word liberal i'm not very liberal i believe in charity because i had charity as kid i give back so i believe in all that but i believe that it has to go to places that it should go to and not just oh it's cherry let's
go do that so because of that i cancelled the paper because they became so so liberal and so opposite of the way i think and not only did i cancel it but my neighbor next door canceled so many people that i've met have canceled the paper for the same reasons uh i was not a republican when i came here to texas i was an independent to me i grew up as a democrat because that's what my mother was and i think that's what happens in life is you just follow in the suit of your parents and what have you my mother was very active in
the polls she always worked now part of it was it was extra money for the family and part of it because she felt civic duty to do it uh during the clinton i decided to become an independent and i'm not trying to be political here it has nothing to do with politics but during those years i felt they did things that i just couldn't live with and i became an independent and i stayed independent until i moved to texas all of my children have been republicans since they learned to vote none of them followed me even though i was a democrat and then became independent
so we moved here and i had a re-sign up i look back at who i voted for over the which party did i vote for more often and i decided i voted for more republicans so i decided i'd be a republican not because i like a title but you have to do one of them and i want to be able to be able to use the ballot so i i chose to be a republican for that reason because i don't spout politics and i don't march in groups and i don't do any of i keep a very open mind but here i am in texas
now so that the fact that i believe in guns and i don't have a gun with me but i believe in guns and i have a permit where if i wanted to carry a gun i can carry a gun there's no reason for me to so i don't but i still have that permit because i know i can if i want to and that's one of the things i like about texas is they don't say no no you can't do something they say do it wisely so learn be wise and then determine what you're going to do from there very good is there anything else
joe that you'd like to add to the interview i'm very happy with the jcc uh we've joined the jcc unfortunately we don't take advantage of a lot of things because we live far enough away where it's a actually a pain to just come here like going to the gym so i belong to a gym instead it's a half block half mile from the house much easier um and also it's free we're here i have to pay do you remember the gym there i get it for free is silver slippers my silver sneakers excuse me uh but we still like to go we go to the
book reviews all the time we've become friends with mona allen and with uh arty so that was kind of a plus for us is to meet them and become friends with them in fact they just moved to the neighborhood we live in where do you live we live in what they call preston highlands which is north east of the corner of frankfurt and preston okay so when we walk in the morning and we take a long walk we end up in plano and then back into dallas because we walk every morning we try to walk two to three miles a morning before breakfast wonderful so
we're trying to stay young and healthy well it doesn't always work that's the key young and healthy well we're happy to have you here and hope that you continue to enjoy your life here in dallas i find dallas to be a lovely place to live first time i've lived in a jewish community in eons since uh high school was the last time i lived in a jewish community so it's very nice living here in dallas it's nice having jewish neighbors not every neighborhood but it's nice having jewish neighbors very good well thank you very much