all Oral History
April 29, 2008

Julius Wolfram

Julius Wolfram was born on July 25, 1912 in Brooklyn, New York, a block from Kings County Hospital. His father had been born in the mountains between Austria and the German speaking regions, and had been denied admission to medical school in Vienna, in part because he was Jewish. Coming to the United States, his father worked as a shipping clerk, put himself through pharmacy school, and opened drugstores in Brooklyn, Queens, and upper Manhattan. His mother was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish parents. Julius decided on a medical career in the ninth grade, attended Townsend Harris Hall and Columbia College, and graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1936. He interned at Lincoln Hospital, did a fellowship in pathology at Mount Sinai under Dr. Paul Klemperer, and completed a residency at Montefiore Hospital.

As World War Two approached, Wolfram joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and then the Veterans Administration, serving in Tennessee and Virginia. Stationed near Newport News, Virginia, he met Ria, a lively teacher from a large local family, and they married in June 1942. He entered the Army as a physician, first at Romulus, Michigan near Detroit. There he cared for Ed Marcus, brother of Stanley Marcus, who arranged his transfer to Dallas and gave him letters of introduction to Rabbi David Lefkowitz and others. Wolfram oversaw the closing of the Love Field medical hospital and, drawn by the city's culture and people, chose to make Dallas his home. He bought a small GI house on Southwest Boulevard, where his wife and their first son later joined him.

In Dallas the Wolframs raised three sons, Michael, Steven, and Richard, all of whom attended St. Mark's School and later Harvard, Harvard, and Trinity College. The family joined Temple Emanu-El, valued Rabbi Lefkowitz, and became active in the growing postwar Jewish community, including the Columbian Club and the Jewish welfare federation. Wolfram opened a private practice, first on Fairmount Street and later near Baylor Hospital, and taught the second year physical medicine course at Southwestern Medical School alongside Dr. Tinsley Harrison. He recalled a harrowing episode when Ria nearly died of a bloodstream infection, saved only by streptomycin he obtained from a VA hospital. He kept his office open until the fall of 1990 and watched Dallas and its Jewish population flourish over the decades.