April 22, 2015

Karen Glanger

Karen was born in 1949 in Pretoria, South Africa, and grew up in what she remembered as a warm, family-centered world of Sunday lunches, Friday night dinners, and street games like hopscotch. Her father, Phillip, ran a grocery store before joining a large retailer when supermarkets arrived, and her mother was a gifted artist and writer who exhibited her work and later designed and hung wallpaper for many parliament members. Her maternal grandparents fled the Poland-Russia border region for South Africa in the mid-1930s, arriving on one of the last boats before the war. Her mother's family carried powerful Holocaust memories, including an uncle who joined the partisan movement in the forest after his family was murdered.

After Karen finished high school, her family moved to Johannesburg, where her mother worked as a designer at a relative's jewelry manufacturing company and Karen attended business school, studying accounting, economics, and mercantile law. She reconnected with Trevor Glanger, her childhood next-door neighbor from Pretoria, and they married in Johannesburg around 1970, spending their first year in Cape Town. Trevor was deeply entrepreneurial, securing South African distributorships for electronics from Japan, and Karen ran the accounting, books, and warehouse. Their children, Gary and Terry, were born in the early 1970s. Urged by Karen's mother, who feared apartheid's future, the couple left in December 1976 to explore America.

Through a chain of introductions that began with a call to a JCC, the Glangers were led to London backers who helped them launch an electronics distributorship, and they chose Dallas for its ease and Jewish community. Karen followed with their two small children, and the family opened Video Land on Preston, one of the earliest video rental stores, with Karen buying the movies and Trevor marketing brilliantly. Their longtime accountant and dear friend Tony Abrams became Trevor's partner. Karen eventually brought her mother and much of her family to Dallas, cherishing large family holidays. Involved with charities, Beth Torah, and Rabbi Block, she reflected warmly on the freedom of America and her hopes for future generations.

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