Leon Harris Jr.
Leon A. Harris descended from two families long tied to Dallas retail. His paternal grandfather, Adolf Harris, came from Germany, arriving in America in 1859 before the Civil War, and eventually built A. Harris and Company. Adolf married Fanny Grumbach, whose father was a rabbi in Lorraine; a grateful refugee named Blum, who had prospered in Galveston, is said to have provided dowries that brought the Grumbach daughters to marriage. Leon's mother, Lucile Hertzfeld, was a native New Yorker from a distinguished German-Jewish family. She met Leon's father, Leon Abraham Harris, in New York and came to Texas only after their marriage, arriving by train through Greenville.
Leon was born in New York on June 20, 1926, reportedly because his mother did not trust Dallas medicine, and came to the city a few weeks later. The family lived briefly in East Dallas and then for years on Lakeside Drive. His father died in 1935 when Leon was eight, and his brother-in-law Arthur Kramer led the store. Leon recalled with pride that after the firm's early bankruptcy the family repaid its creditors in full during the prosperous 1920s. Educated at local schools, Texas Country Day, Andover, and Harvard, he graduated at 20, joined the store in January 1947, and served in charge of merchandising and advertising alongside Arthur Kramer Jr. until the business was sold to Federated around 1961.
After selling the store, Harris moved to Paris and turned to writing, producing about a dozen children's books as well as nonfiction. Among his best-known works were a Texas parody of The Night Before Christmas, a biography of Upton Sinclair, The Fine Art of Political Wit, a book on the Cabot family, and Merchant Princes, a study of Jewish merchant families such as the Filenes, the Marcuses, and the Riches. Raised at Temple Emanu-El but shaped by a complicated family attitude toward Jewish identity, he acknowledged that he was not active in Jewish charities as his father had been. His recollections offer a vivid portrait of Dallas retailing and of families including the Sangers, the Marcuses, and the Kramers.
Full Transcript
It is Wednesday, the 18th of August, and we're going to have the pleasure of taking an oral history of Leon A. Harris at his home on Fairfax. It is our desire today, Mr. Harris, to explore some of the history of your family in the United States, in Texas, and in Dallas. and some of your many accomplishments. The Harris family and the Kramer family have lent a tremendous amount to both the mercantile and the cultural life in Dallas, and we would like to have in your voice and from your viewpoint some of that history. So I'll start out by asking, do you recall who the first of your family might have been in the States where they may have come from in Europe?
My father's father, Adolf Harris, said he came from Germany. As far as I can tell, never identified. He spoke German and Yiddish and French and English. He arrived here in 59, that is to say before the outbreak of the war. I remember being ashamed as a child that he hadn't fought in the Confederate Army. and I, thank God, got old enough to realize that he hadn't come here to avoid serving in the Kaiser's Army in order to serve him. Another one, I outgrew that. His wife, you must tell me if this is too much or detail other than you want, was a woman named Fanny Grumbaugh.
Her father was a rabbi in Lorraine. I'm not sure what village, though I could look it up. It may have been Lauterboul but anyway in some tiny village in Lorraine And he had put up a number of eastern refugees Jewish refugees in his barn one of them named Blum came to Galveston and became one of the rich families in Galveston and in gratitude to this rabbi who was so foolish I think is to have had again I'd have to look it up something like ten daughters and no sons he found husbands that is to say and he put up the money for a dowry and my grandfather, I'm quite certain, didn't know his wife until Blum brought her over with a dowry and they were married.
He did this, Blum did this for all of the Grumbach girls. They were living in Galveston at that point? No, they were living in, I think, Laudra Bull, anyway, in Longhead, not in. What brought them over was plums money in gratitude for what their father the rabbi my mother's ancestors never came to Texas so I take it if that's the case you don't want well we do want to know what brought her to Texas where she met your father well she met my father in New York she'd never been to Texas she had never came to Texas until she married him he when they got to Greenville which you may remember was tiny village then with a electric sign across the main street visible from the railroad car Greenville Texas the blackest land the whitest people and when they when the train stopped in Greenville my father said well here we are and he my mother never in here looked at that village and said well I'm not getting out I'm going back to New York and he had to confess to her that he was teasing and then it was really a little bigger village But she was the only one of her family who came Was she a native New Yorker Yes and so was her mother and so was her grandmother all of whom I knew Her father was German, and he, well, maybe during the course of this, I'll think of where he came from.
It was quite a distinguished family, one of them. I guess this would have been a first cousin of my mother's, because her father's name was Hertzfeld. And he had a number of brothers, one of whom had a son who changed his name from Hertzfeld to Hartfield. because he was so outraged at the conduct of the Germans in the First World War. And he was one of the two or three or five seminal photographers in Europe. I mean, if you pick up a book about photography, I've read in such books that Hortfeld invented photomontage. I think that's about as unlikely as one man inventing the wheel.
I suspect photomontage was dreamed up by a number of people in a number of places. Anyway, he was quite a distinguished photographer. Lived here only during the war. My mother, with some embarrassment, used to say that he was socialist wasn't a socialist he was communist socialist was about as bad as my mother could confess to if you give your mother's full her name was Lucille and you C I L E Hertzfeld a G R Z F E L D and she married my father Leon Abraham Harris and they met under what circumstances in New York. For some reason that I don't know, my father knew a woman in New York named Elsa Naumberg and was fond of her and she was a cousin of my mother and brought them together She liked Leon a lot and she was crazy about her niece So that what got them together Was your dad, Leon, as part of the business at that time?
Yes. His father and mother... Well, his father died about, obviously it's on his tombstone out here at Temple Emanuel, he died about 1915. That is to say, about the same time that Bush built the, what's now called the Kirby Building, I suppose, for A. Harris. That is to say, A. Harris himself, I think, never saw the building. The same adult as Bush's who built the adult as the process. As you know, he traveled all around America in his private car, and when he went into a town... My people named Adolf, so... Well, I think what he liked was what real estate he thought would appreciate.
And at that time, the corner of Maine and Anchor was not the center of town, which it became for, what would you say, 40 years? it was the center of town. It was when I came to Dallas in 46, certainly. My father then and my grandfather had maybe a 25-foot store down on Elm Street in the shadow of the great store, San Gabriel, and he agreed to run a store of five floors in the basement in this, well, I forgot myself, Bush bought first the corner on which he built Theodolphus Hotel and then Catter Corner from that. The northeast corner, main in it. My, a man named Rudolph Haas, H-A-S, who worked for my grandfather, told me that my grandfather told him his only job was to keep Bush's auditors drunk.
And he must surely have done it because I doubt that there was any record in that 25-foot store that would have justified this building. And that certainly turned out to be a good thing. That would be the case because it went bankrupt. And I suppose the thing that I was proudest of in my family was they made us there, they didn't take bankruptcy. They made a settlement with all the credit, except one, for 20 cents on the dollar. And they started again and slowly they built themselves up. We sat in one of the recessions of 1970. It was, I think, almost immediately after the... They went, within a year or two after...
I can look it up if you want. It was before the boom times of the war in 17 and 18. I think it would have been in 15 or 16 or 17. And was the firm still Feldman? No, when he moved up... Oh, I think he'd already changed the name of the store down on... from Feldman, Grumbach, and Harris to A. Harris and Company. In any event, the extraordinary thing was that beginning in 1920, after they'd made a lot of money during the war, as all merchants did, and between 1920 and 1929, which, as you know, were boom years, they made a lot of money.
and they went back to each credit and paid them what they owed them that they didn't have to pay them plus the interest and where they couldn't find them they gave whatever that sum was to one of the charities in whatever town it was and it was so extraordinary even then that A. Harrison Company always had a credit standing, a good deal better than the numbers warranted. It was something my father wanted to do, and he convinced his brother-in-law, Arthur Kramer, to do it, and it was something I'm still proud of when I think about it. Every reason to be. You tell me if you want me to go off on prejudices or on art or on what Well we sort of up to about 1929 Why don we follow the business through It chronologically true Yeah My father died in 35 at the age of 49, on his 49th birthday.
Had his brother-in-law, Arthur Kramer, been in the business? He was already the president. Oh. Kramer died about 55 when his son Arthur Kramer Jr. and I took over the business which we sold to Federated in maybe 61 certainly not later and I was enormously fond of Francis Mosk and when the store's names were put together she was a former Sanger yes she was the like yourself a writer she was surely the most distinguished writer in Della and Federated first called the store as you know Sanger-Aeran so people used to assume that we were related I always told Francis I was delighted, because that lifted me up a good deal socially.
The singers, for some reason, considered themselves rather fancier than most other folks in town, Jewish or not. Francis's mother, oh, well, you've talked to plenty of singers, so you don't need that from me, do you? Yeah. I don't think I ever saw it. But any interesting stories in relation to them, please do, David. Well, it is an interesting thing. Francis's mother was allegedly the most beautiful woman who ever lived in Dallas, and was married to Ellie Hugh Sanger. What was her main name? I don't know, Morton or somebody, Dallas Wood, but she was apparently just simply ravishing and whatever else Ellie he was he was not ravishing he was neither the brightest nor the most attractive of the singer and apparently quite a long time Lizzie Sanger had a very happy love affair with Henry Lindsley who was the mayor of town and a very distinguished rich citizen the real estate yeah and I I remember Frances told me once that she was with her mother in Vispa, and in the toy store she saw the most beautiful dollhouse she'd ever seen.
And she said she wanted it, and her mother said it was too expensive. She wouldn't buy it. And the next day it was in her room at the hotel, and Mr. Linsley had bought it for her. well I don't know when Francis told me that but 10 or 20 years later when I was writing this book I told her that the chapter on Dallas would be essentially about the sign it would be essentially about Neiman's because it was certainly the best-known story the most successful story but it would also have a good deal about signers and my family and she gave me all kinds of very useful material and her best recollections and I asked her to repeat that anecdote about the doll house in V spot and she looked me right in the eye and said I had no idea what you told me and I said when I Francis didn't mr.
Lindsley when you were a little girl buy you a dollhouse in Peace Park she said I never knew mr. Lindsley and he never bought me in well she's certainly entitled to correct history and one would have thought that so it isn't in the book, and there's a pleasant anecdote about Kramer. In those days, as you know, traffic was on Pullman Cove, and little boys like Arthur Kramer ran up and down, meeting people and generally making nuisances of themselves And on a trip to New York with his family Arthur when he was five or six or seven however old he was was asked by somebody on Pullman car within earshot of his mother little boy, what is your father doing?
And he said, oh, my dad is president. And the person just laughed. Well, it's easy to understand why Arthur thought his father was president, because he was president of Aharistock, president of Temple of Manu, president of the symphony, had been president of the museum, and he was, pertinere, the president. I mean, it was a charming story about Arthur. I can remember him once speaking in the intermission of the symphony, trying to raise money from the audience. And I don't think there was a single contribution that is that as now. There are donors of some substance who give, and there are ticket buyers. But raising it in five and ten dollars just doesn't work.
He, uh, he was in a great competition with Herbert Marcus. On bringing the opera here, Herbert brought the San Carlo, which was certainly fine opera kind. But Arthur Kramer eventually convinced the Met to come, and he considered that a great triumph over Herbert. In our archives, we have a lovely 8 by 10 photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Kramer by an awning at the entrance to the opera, and they're falling closed on one of those opening nights. So, ah, kind of proud of... Arthur Kramer used to tell a story about Herbert that he meant as a put-down of Herbert. And when I first heard it as a child, and now 60 years later, I think, it in fact is a put-down of Kramer and a tribute to it.
Arthur Kramer, Sr. Because of the efforts of his brothers and sisters, he was able to go to the University of Texas, and he had both an undergraduate degree there and a law degree. Herbert Marcus had no degree. Some doubt about how far he'd gone in grade school, in grade or high school. And so, Arthur Kramer looked down on him intellectually. I would think that was accentuated by the fact that, increasingly, Herbert ran a better store than Kramer did. But in any event, Kramer used to tell a story that when Herbert got rich enough, he bought a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica and was determined to educate himself by reading it from cover to cover.
so that when you were with him and he was talking about Pope and Pinero you know he was in volume P but that he got so rich so fast that he never got beyond the S's so that if you asked him about Tchaikovsky or Tolstoy he thought it was a cloak and suit manufacturer on 7th eddy well it's a it's a bitchy story and I must say again I think it simply shows that Kramer was jealous and I'm satisfied that it is the way Herbert educated himself and I think it's absolutely marvelous I knew it and he was a man of great dignity and great class I don't know if that's a bad anecdote or the one about Arthur or what you want.
Oh, wonderful. At least one of them. But I do want to get back to you yourself. When you came along, in what year, where you first lived, the brothers and sisters? I was born on June 20th, 1926 in New York, and came here some weeks later. We had a house then in East Dallas, and I don't remember it, but we were there I I think only a few months or maybe a year. And then we rented a house at 4704 Lakeside Drive from Elisa Blum who was married to a cousin of my father Leon Blum who had built that And we lived there for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, and then my father died when I was 8.
My mother never owned a house. I think she never quite felt. that she wanted to make a commitment. And after my sister, Fanny, who was 11 months older than I, and I were grown, she lived a good deal in London and in New York. Now, she was in New York because it wasn't, it was easier to have a child there than in Dallas, or? My, I was told, though it's on June 20th it sounds a little late that they were coming back from Europe on the old Paris and that I missed by one or two days having been born born on the Paris which would of course give me dual citizenship I've been a French citizen though I think they were coming back from Europe she may also had simply thought, you know, I think probably she didn't think Dallas Medicine was good enough because my sister was also born in New York.
She may have planned it so she would be in New York because maybe she hadn't gotten over thinking that Greenville was Dallas. That was not uncommon of going from the smaller town to larger the town to deliver, because I remember Ruth Cahen saying that when she was born a mother who was then in eastern Oklahoma with her father, they would go up to St. Louis to have the baby. Yes. And... Now, having been, where did you go to grade school and high school and college? I went to a small private school in a wooden house on Sycamore Street, run by Miss Taylor, Mrs. Taylor, through the fifth grade.
And after that went, I think, for a few months to Bradfield, and then after that to Texas Country Day which as you know is now St Mark and then to Andover and then to Harvard So you lived mostly in the Highland Park area Yes. And I graduated from Harvard when I was 20. I wanted to go to the law school because I had dreams of being Clarence Darrow and Arthur Kramer. Who did he? said no you've had enough education to come to work at Stone so I did and loved it I mean it was it was not a great sacrifice for me and it was certainly a blessing for the bar you're unkind to yourself just think like Mr.
Dershowitz you might be defending me a pharaoh yes and did you enjoy your days up there in Stanley's book do you remember minding the store I think he refers to his first meeting of anti-semitism at Amherst he hated it so that he transferred from Amherst to Harvard. I remember a fellow I loved, Zellner Eldridge, went to Amherst and said he didn't encounter any anti-Semitism and loved it. Well that may be because his name was Eldridge and Marcus's name was Marcus, I don't know. There was certainly... Jack Kravitz went and graduated from Hammersmith from a very modest background and I never heard him mentioned particularly. Well I think this, I think certainly Jews were not welcome in that generation in fraternities and Williams and Dartmouth and Amherst are all great fraternity schools.
I think Stanley said it in his book, he was one of three students, the other an Oriental and a Negro, who were not in a fraternity. And I think it... one of the reasons I didn't like Andover was there were fraternities there I wasn in one and I thought and it hurt me in anger It perfect Harvard although it had clubs private clubs students clubs even in Stanley time they weren 20 of the student population so he was with 80 who weren members rather than two or three as he been at Amherst What year was it that you moved into the store, into the mercantile?
you know what they had 40 47 January 47 and you stayed till they sold till 60 or 61 and then tell us where you went from there well I quite by accident once written a children's book I don't know you want the loan version. Well, in those days, stores, as you know, tended to have themed Christmases, a modern Christmas or a traditional Christmas, and I decided that we should have a Texas Christmas, whatever the hell that was, and so I'd asked a copywriter to write something so that the window man and the interiors man and the buyers would be able somehow to tie into a Texas Christmas.
your position in the store was kind of a creative and... Well, I was in charge of merchandising and advertising, and Arthur was in charge of everything else. And so I told a copywriter to write it, and I don't know, some weeks went by. Her name was Roz Taylor, remember? And I called her, and she said, Oh, Mr. Harris, I've written something, and it's marvelous, but it's so good I want to be paid extra for it. Of course, I was operating under the delusion that she got a weekly salary to do her very best. But she was a marvelous copywriter, and I didn't want to get in an argument with her.
So I went home that night. I remember I was going to a slipper club dance. And so in 25 minutes, I simply took Clement Clark Moore's Night Before Christmas and changed the reindeer to palomino's and the sleigh to a book board and wrote a parody of that. Well, in the first, we used it in our ads, and it was set to music first. by somebody named Miller in New York and it was recorded by eight or nine different... Who's the great cover? Gene Autry and Ernie Tubbs. I don't know they were. There were a good many records of it and then it was done as a book.
I quit counting. that was long enough ago, I think about 1950, that we could sell the book for a dollar. It cost us half a dollar. And I stopped counting at $250,000, and that was 20 years ago, and it's still in print. It's been in print now. I'll have you know that I've been reading for 18 years to first, and used to be second grade. I promoted to kindergarten at first, and I read your book at Christmas. Thank you. It is sort of sad. I once spent three years, Cindy Williams School, doing a biography of Upton Sinclair. And I'm quite certain, and it's the definitive biography of Upton Sinclair.
Nobody else has done enough to write one. I'm sure that it didn't sell five thousand copies. I'm sure every library in the country bought it, and that was about it. And to have spent 25 minutes on a book that will, I would suppose, forever is a long time, but certainly has been in print for 40 years, I suspect will be in print for a long time. No one knows in advance from whence their fame will come. Yes, and writing an ad for A. Harrison, it did me in the fame department a lot more good than anything else I've read. Reading the Murchison book was great interest, and it was dedicated, I think.
Yes, wasn't it? A wonderful dedication. It's an extraordinary thing to live 60 years in Dallas, as I had when that book came out, and then to learn that much about Dallas that I didn't know. Young Clint was a year or two older than me, and of course in high school and grade school, that's a lot. I mean, somebody his age doesn't have anything to do with a young punk, so I really didn know him until after we were both grown It a swell book She now doing a book on the Sakowitz and Wyatt family Oh boy, that's a swell. For Little Brown. And that's a pretty wild story, too.
You don't think they're so happy with each other down there? No, no, they're not. The, uh, I then went, after I sold the store, I went to Paris and I I had been in Paris before I was born as I told you so but always before either my parents paid my way or the stockholders of a Harrison company paid my way and paying my own way I found very irksome indeed so I thought what can I do about this and I thought well I'll write a children's book about parents and at the very least I'll be able to deduct the trip so greed that my ears yeah my boy did well oh goodness yeah and so I wrote a book about a mouse who lived in the loop and it was bought by athrenean and won some prizes I called Bill Garrett who's my lawyer here Kilgore Kilgore and told him about it he said you've been over there a month and a half haven't you I said yeah I'm gonna stay longer said you better write another book he says the feds ain't gonna bleed that long so I then wrote another book for Dodd Mead and and that's that's how I started I did a dozen children's books and then my sister was dying at New York Hospital.
Fanny? Fanny, yeah. What year was that, uh, yeah? That would be between 30 and 35 years ago. I didn't realize she was... She had a, She had a child of three then, who I think is now 32 or 3 or 4. And I was sent a book by a waiter at the Twin Trees restaurant. It was a pal. And his brother had written a book called The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem and it was about literary feuds And I thought it was an amusing book that you could write a considerably more amusing book about the wit and invective of politicians And so I went to Dutton with the idea.
They had published this other book, and they said yes, they'd buy it. and gave me, I don't know, a $2,000 advance or something that seemed gigantic to me at the time. And it was the most fun I ever had writing a book. Actually, tell me if it was staying. You were doing great. When I was a tiny boy, because as I say, my father died when I was eight, I remember being with him at a number of houses. One was Tom Knight, who turned in. Another was Lewis Datton. And I remember... Alton Knight, Harris, and Weisberg. Yes, yes. And I remember my father had a strong dislike for Fred Florence because he thought Florence had betrayed the Sangers, that he could have saved them, and didn't.
I don't know whether that's true or not. So he really disliked Fred. And I remember Fred's name came up. Tom Knight said something about it in Lewis Dacken. and my father said he has all of the characteristics of a dog except loyalty and I thought that was the most extraordinary sentence I'd ever heard and of course I thought it was original with my father and then I remember on another occasion I was there and Tom Knight was teasing my father and Jack Hyman, another attorney, about Frankfurt or as he said that fucking Jew that Roosevelt put on the court And Tom said about Frankfurter it was the most unfortunate political appointment since Caligula made his horse a consul.
And of course I thought that was original with Tom. Well, as I grew up, I saw that what my father had said was in fact something that Sam Houston had said in the United States Senate about Thomas Jefferson Green. And Tom's line was not originally Tom. I'd have to go get the book. What was the great, very famous United States Senator from Virginia had said it? Before Bird. Yes, oh, well, in the early 1800s. So, I had, since I was a child, been fascinated by invective and wit, and that's, and I wrote that book and it had brought in a lot of success. And then...
That title was? The Fine Art of Political Wit. I think next... You're going to have to read it. Well, I was on Johnny Carson's program. You can update it with President Reagan's... John Jefferson, I knew him. Yeah, yeah. I forget what I wrote. As I say, I did a biography about Winston Clay. Then I did a book about the Cabot family in Boston, and particularly an old scoundrel named Godfrey Lowell Cabot. And then I did... They spoke only to the Lowells. I called the book Only to God. No, no. The Lowells spoke only to the Cabots, and the Cabots spoke only to God. An editor named Mike Bessey had wanted me for years to do a book about the Jewish merchant family, like the book that Steve Birmingham did about Jewish investment back then.
Ah, Crown. Ah, Crown. Then he went on to Sephardi's. Yes. I don't think he ever quite matched that first book. No, myself. Anyway, so that was the next book I did, was about a dozen, called Merchant Princes, about a dozen merchant families. The Filings, the Marxists, the Gold Orders, the riches. and that was great fun I still have in my office something that in Dick Rich's office I saw it said Rich's credo people are more important than things and I said I've got to have one of those it's still in print and I'll see if I can find one and a week later it will get in the mail and I still keep well you know as I do what an important what a disproportional important role Jewish merchants play they were never rich always accepting the Strausses in New York they were never among the very rich never in Dallas, never in Atlanta never but they played a very large role in the arts and often in politics of town.
And that's what I wanted to get across in the book, and I think I did. I remember when merchants sat on the first floor. I can remember Lawrence sitting on the first floor on that raised platform at the same desk that his father had sat at. I loved Lawrence because my father loved him, but he was an actor. That first year I was here, Jerry was having our baby. In its early stages, she'd lost two before in miscarriages, and they told her she couldn't travel, particularly by train, and even air was several stops back to Dallas. So the Cairns invited me. I said Christmas Day it could have been New Year Day which you would remember but you said it was a custom in the family that you always had the Harris over that particular day Oh, and my sister and mother.
Your mother, Fanny, and you came to lunch. I remember you had a small Rembrandt in his house. Do you remember that? I wonder what the kind of thing was. What must have happened to that? I don't know. I remember my father was a man of strong and he was crazy about Ruth and he had nothing but contempt for Victor for Louis Exeter because Louis was such a relentless adulterer and remember the ad he ran the full-page ed, the village voice or something, seeking a woman companion? No, really? Oh, yeah. In his 70s or so. It seemed to me, I liked Ruth, and I thought my father was probably right, a shabby way to treat her, but he couldn't be.
It's hard when you write not to. people are well advised never to put pen to paper, I think. There are only two or three things that I really regret having written. One of them is in that book, because I said something about... Stanley? No, not about... I don't think I regret anything I said about Stanley. But I said about Clarence Lyons. that he was a relentless adulterer, and he was. But by then he was dead. And it hurt Joe, who was certainly the sweetest man I ever knew, by none. So I really regret it. But as I said, it's hard to write as much as I do and not regret some of it.
Have you had any particular activities over the years in the Jewish community, in particular certainly in the general community who are well aware No And I sorry to say that I didn My father was a Jew, proud of it, a member of Temple Emanuel. I can only remember two or three times seeing him really angry, and once was when he was talking about the Dreyfus case. and Victor Hugo and my mother I think Chacuse Chacuse yes exactly my mother I think was sorry she I think maybe ashamed isn't too strong a word. And at the end of her life, she became an Episcopalian in England.
And it gave her a lot of peace. I'm glad she did. But we were... It was an extraordinary thing. My sister and I both went to Temple Emanuel. Sunday school. It was an extraordinary thing to go to Sunday school to learn the history of the Jews and then to live in a house with a woman who clearly thought non-Jews were better than Jews. Since we were Jews, it didn't do us much good. So I was never part of any of the Jewish charities which my father had been. And I regret that. It's an interesting background, and it certainly covers how things go. Sometimes, you know, it's just the reverse.
At the very end, somebody becomes suddenly very religious when they become ill and die. My wife had a cousin who was married to a non woman and she died and at the end of his life he took on Catholicism just as he was dying He was a research doctor. Well, I was... The general assumption, I think, among non-Jews... David Albert, David Flores, Jerome Crosman, Woody Hoopkins, Jack Corbin, David Levy of Magnolia. The Cobbins were here with Buffalo Oil Company. Now, I heard mention a while ago that the supply houses, one time all the major oil companies had their own supply houses. And they'd have them, they'd have the big steel company.
They'd have them located in these little oil fields down. You'd drive down, you'd see Bethlehem and Ohio. You'd just see four or five or six of them lined up right up and down the road. The amazing thing about it is you could go in there, and they wouldn't know you from Adams-Dolph-Hockey. You'd say, I need something. They'd say, okay, here it is, sign a ticket. It's still that way pretty much today. The credit and the camaraderie in the oil patch is something that's hard to equal. It's different. Anyhow, one thing that was unique about these places is that they were all built sort of like a bungalow in the top part.
Without exception, they usually have a little room clear up on top. You'd look at them and you'd think, gee, that's unusual. They'd all have that room. That room was for playing poker. There would be a poker game going on 24 hours a day, because when you're working out in the oil fields, basically out of the drilling rig, that rig runs 24 hours a day. So somebody's always not working, or somebody's always working. But those Buffalo Oil Company, I'll mention that, the tall groups, who started in the supply business, as did many other Jewish oil people, finally sold out to Bethlehem Supply. They started Buffalo Oil Company.
They moved it to Dallas at one time. Some other men, Sam Aronson, who was a geologist for Atlantic, which is now ARCO. He's the father of Artis Kolen and Irma Grossman, Sam Aronson. David Levy, who I mentioned, has been going with Magnolia and Tone Company, my friend. He's the father of Joan Golds in Dallas. There were a lot of them. Then there were two. There were Forest Guards of them, Lee Pierce, David Feldman, Sid and Mike Gottlieb. Now, they're real close friends of mine, and an interesting story. Matt Gottlieb was with Sun Alcom, and he was He was rather high in the company. He was an executive and he was working in Philadelphia.
And his mother, who was born and raised in Corsica, a marvelous woman, Lincoln. Some around here may remember Lincoln. She talked so southern, you know, Lincoln was really a southern gal in there. He had the heaviest accent you ever heard of. She was visiting back in Philadelphia. the occasion of her trip was they were quitting Sun Oil Company was christening a tanker, an oil tanker and she's sitting in this box we've all seen this in the movie where somebody's getting ready to crown this boat with a bottle of champagne or something she's sitting there and Mrs. Pugh's sitting right next to Ms. Gottlieb and Max sitting there and she said to Ms.
Gottlieb and she said I guess you have these launches all the time but no she's never ever been to launches before to launches before I think he got to leave and said, oh yes ma'am, Ms. Pugh, we have these in Corset County all the time. And I said, mother what are you talking about? I said, well last week I was launching to Ms. Smith's house. Launching to lunch inside the scene. She used to tell, many times I rode into Dallas for Lincoln. She lived in Corset County, of course, the room in Dallas. She used to tell someone, she was a girl, they used to take them the earliest remembrance that they made it from Corsican to Endison back in one day which was about 10 miles I mean to Rice Corsican to Rice and pretty soon they got where they could make it all the way from Corsican to Endison back to Corsican one day and then Corsican to Dallas and they developed a horse and buggy to a car these are interesting things so my idea of the general interest about my company.
Dana thought it might be interesting. She's asked me all the time what I'm doing. Why don't I work hard? I tell her what I'm doing. And I told her what my company does, this might be of interest to you. There are a lot of ways to be in the oil business. You can be in the equipment business. You can be in the late pipeline. You can be a chemist. You can do all kinds of things. Just whatever you want to do, there's room out there for you. We have, we tried wildcatting. For those of you who don't know exactly what a wildcatter is, a wildcatter is a man, as Herb said a while ago going out and looking for oil where there is no oil You can look as far as you want to or you can look on maps you won see any oil out there That a real wildcatter He usually drills out there for some kind of a reason.
The geologist told him, or the oil seeps, or whatever. That's a real wildcatter, so we tried that and didn't do very well. You've got to be pretty no-going good at it, or you've got to be awfully lucky, and I wasn't either. So we, years ago, we decided we would buy producing properties somebody else was producing that maybe hadn't realized the full potential out of them. Maybe it took a little more engineering than they wanted to put in, a little more work, and maybe we had a little more money or could get money. And that's why we made our living. We find somebody that's got some properties for sale, we go out and try to buy them from.
them from. If after we, or at least get permission to do some testing or we look at public records and find out that Dean Wells has some unrealized potential. And that's where we make our bucks, by going out and improving those properties. I had a very interesting thing in that regard. I followed up on some properties owned by a man in New York City by the name of George Morgan. He became a very close friend of mine. He died about two years ago at the age of maybe 82 or 83. In 1930, I guess 1939, 1938, George Morgan was the largest independent, there weren't many, but he was the largest independent producer in Poland.
He was born and raised near Krakow, and that's where the oil fields were, and he became an independent old oil. And just before Hitler moved in over there, he had sold all of his production to Mobil, Magnolia Petroleum and Mobile Oil Company about the time Hitler came in and took him away and so he had a he lost everything he had, he made his way to the states, a few of his type routes, took him forever to get here to get away from the Nazis, he started over and he became a success again in the oil business, I bought some of his properties one time his wife's still a close friend of ours my daughters Pam and Missy are both involved in oil and if they're husbands, they're both my son's husband is an independent operator in Oklahoma City.
And this, his husband runs a little oil reporting company in Austin. So we're still involved. A little about anti-Semitism. Lois asked us to mention that and I think this is interesting Anti the all business There not much outward anti except it there It has been, and I guess it always will be, no matter what you're doing. At one time, Humble Law and Company, the predecessor of Exxon, did not hire a Jewish engineer. I know that firsthand. I thought I wanted to go to work for it, but couldn't. Magnolia Petroleum Company I went to work for them I was able to get a job because I'd worked for them out of high school and I resigned and I resigned because we were tired of moving around I went by to say goodbye to Dave Levy who was the vice president he also happened to be an Aggie and I shook his hand and I told him that I enjoyed knowing him he said, Bud, have you really quit?
and I said, yes, I have resigned Mr. Levy he said, as long as you resign I want something I want to tell you. He said, I'm glad you have. Whatever you do, you're going to do better than you would with MAG. And I was doing pretty well, and I was surprised. He said, if you're a Jew with this company, or any major oil company, you've got to be twice as smart, work twice as hard to get half as far as a Gentile. So it was there. For many, many years, I had partners in Houston. They're still my partners, the Roush's. When they organized the Houston Petroleum Fund, And this is exactly what happened.
A wildcatter, a Texas wildcatter named Bob Smith, one of the most successful wildcatters in Texas, was instrumental in organizing the Houston Petroleum Club. Morris Routch, my partner's father, told him one day, Bob, he said, I was told by some of the people at this Petroleum Club that they're not going to take Jews. Bob said, we'll find out. So he called a meeting that day. He said, this is part of me that takes Jews, or I withdraw my support. So they took Jews out of that day and they had them since. It wasn't true to the Dallas Petroleum Club. The Dallas Petroleum Club only within the last couple of years started taking Jews as members.
As a matter of fact, one bad thing, when they were in the First National Bank building, they had many other people outside the oil business who were members up there. And the First National Bank used to supply, I mean, those who were tenants of the First National Bank were practically assured of membership because they wanted to, or those who were officers in the bank who were given membership, unless you were Jewish and you couldn get in up there Or people who were Jewish attorneys attorneys who were Jewish for the industry who couldn get in A group was organized here one time to go see Bobby Stewart who at that time was president trying to break down that barrier.
Of course, they did no good. But recently they have broken it down and their Jews are now in. Anybody wanted it. We started a club in North Dallas about six years ago, the Energy Club, to get out of downtown and also be sure that anybody wanted to join could join. And that club's called Energy Club. It's right across the Caval Center on the Expressway. And it's a nice club, and it's sort of, I guess, a poor boys' toilet club. It's been a good business for me. It's a unique business. You've got to have a lot of luck, and you have to have, I get your bread buttered on the right side, and I'll close this by giving you a true story that will tell you what that means, I guess.
A true story that happened many years ago in a little city in Russia. Several men went to the rabbi, where the main rabbi, and they said, Sir, we have a problem we'd like for you to help us with. We find that we butter a piece of bread, anybody does in our house or any place, that accidentally slips out of our head and falls down, always falls with the butter down. We'd like to know why that is. There must be some reason, scientific or some other reason, why it is a bread falls with the butter down. It's just a true joy. And he said, you'll come back in several days.
He said, come back in about three days. I think I'll figure this out. So word got around, and by the end of the third day, he came out in a little balcony up there, and this courtyard was just full of people. and they were all waiting out and they were breathlessly anxious to know what was the answer. He said, I found out. He said, when you drop a piece of bread and it drops butter down, he said, the only one answer is buttered in on the wrong side. Thank you. Why did my contour yesterday? Mr. Sanford, better known as Tex Fagadal, owner of Fagadal Energy Company, is a geologist.
who has a PhD degree in that discipline from Ohio State University, happens to be my alma mater too. So he's a good PhD. He too represents three generations of his family in the oil business. His father was a petroleum engineer, and the family lived earlier in Wichita Falls, Texas, where Tex was born in 1928. His son, Tom, is in the business with him. His other son, Chip, or his actual name is Warren, but nobody ever calls him Warren, is an ophthalmologist in Dallas. His daughter, Leslie, an attorney in Nashville, Tennessee. Tex was the president of the board, of the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas from 1989 to 1991.
I was going to sit down and talk, but I think it's probably better to stand. But if you think Kermit, Texas is bad, try John, New Mexico. which I lived in many months over a two-year period some years ago. These guys here are better looking, but I'm a lot younger. The stories they can tell you are stories I heard when I was sitting on my father's lap. I was not there. I came to the oil business in an altogether different way than most Jewish oil men. My father was born in Romania in 1899. And in 1921, he earned a degree in civil engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France.
Prior to that, he had gone to the University of Bucharest and then spent one year at the Sorbonne in Paris. When he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute the Romanian government offered to my father and two other Romanian students neither of whom were Jewish that if they would come to the United States and study petroleum engineering at a new school or a new petroleum engineering department that had just been started at the University of Pittsburgh it was then called the Bureau of Moms that they would give them full subsidy to do this And in return, these three young men would go back to Romania and work in the celestial oil fields, which at that time were large fields in Romania.
Needless to say, they all three came. They all three graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1923 with petroleum engineering degrees. And they all three stayed in the United States. One of my father's professors was a man by the name of Ralph E. Davis, who at that time had come from a small school in North Dakota to the University of Pittsburgh because it was a new department. And he was a nationally and internationally known petroleum engineer, although in those days it was hard to know what a petroleum engineer was. you were an engineer first, you took a lot of math, took a little bit of chemistry, and maybe you took a course or two in geology, and they called you a petroleum engineering.
Remember that the oil industry really didn't get started until the early 1900s with the rise of the Rockefeller interest and other interests. So when he graduated, Ralph Davis Ralph Davis offered him a job. He thought, knew that my father was Romanian. He did not find out until many years later that he was Jewish. My father stayed with the Davis Company for five years. He traveled all over the United States and Canada and South America. He was involved in some, doing engineering on some very large oil and gas fields in the United States and involved in bringing pipelines, gas pipelines, into various parts of the country.
The pipeline from the Panhandle to Mineral Wells, Texas, the old Upham gas line was the line that he worked on before it was built. After he left Davis he went to work for a small one of his clients a fellow by the name of Martin from New York hired him to become resident manager of a small company called the Benzema Mexican Oil Company in Wichita Falls So off he moved from Pittsburgh to Wichita Falls, Texas in 1923. 19, 1928. And stayed from Wichita Falls from 1928 to 1955, 54 when he moved to Dallas. and he was manager of this company for about three years they had the Burke Burnett Field which was an old field and y'all I'm sure have heard about it if you haven't heard about it you remember the movie black gold years ago they starred Clark Cable well that was the story of Burke Burnett Field and that started I guess probably somewhere in the early 1900s so there was a lot of shallow production in and around Wichita Falls.
And when I say shallow, I mean 600 feet, 800 feet, 1,000 feet, 1,200 feet, and so on. And a lot of companies got started there, a lot of stock companies, a lot of penny stock was floating around, and that sort of thing. And Benzo Wheeler Mexican Oil Company was a small company. I don't know that they ever had any production in either Benzo Wheeler or Mexico, but that was the name they left. Actually, as a kid, I grew up in the oil industry, spent a lot of time with my father out in the field. I think Irving Mansion, the Canemone Field, that was a large field near Wichita Falls that came in sometime in the, right after the Second World War.
And I always really knew that I wanted to stay in the oil business because I did enjoy the business. I enjoyed being outside. But I didn't want to be an engineer because I really didn't like math all that much. But I did like history, so I decided to be a journalist instead. Because actually, geology is the study of the history of the earth, and it fit right in with the subjects that I like most. There were a lot of other people. Bud's mentioned a number of them that were in the oil business here in Dallas. Of course, Sam Wilson, his father, his brother Reuben, his younger brother Izzy, were active in the oil business for many years Names of people that I remember my father talking or telling me about that I can remember It was a family by the name of Taxman as I recall that had a refinery up near Berkmanet There was a geologist who lived in Westaw Falls at one time by the name of Lewis Franklin.
And Lewis Franklin is still alive today. He's over 90 years old. He lives in Abilene, Texas, and he still works on maps and he's still looking for oil. oil. I saw those about a year ago. We mentioned Lee Pierce. Lee Pierce used to travel from Dallas to Wichita Falls. Lee was working with a small oil company here in Dallas, and they had production up in that part of the country. He used to travel up there, and he became a good friend. He and Regina, and the children became good friends, and my father and mother, It was myself and my sister. And Lee contributed a very unique thing to the oil industry, which turned out to be something that's been very helpful over the years.
Lee was instrumental in starting a business that took electrical surveys that you, every time you drill a well, you run an electrical survey in the well. And that gives you a picture, sort of like a cardiogram, of what your rocks look like, whether you have limestone, sandstone, shale, and so on. And then these films, the producer pays for that, and you get these films. And Lee was involved in starting a service where he would go around and ask the producers to let him reproduce these electrical logs. And then these electrical logs were available to anybody else in the industry who wanted to purchase them. And they were able to use these electrical logs to work out prospects to build in different areas and so forth.
It was a very valuable service. It was not until his business was started that we had that in the industry. When I went to school, I ended up at Ohio State University, which is sort of a long story, but anyway, coming from Wichita Falls, that was a very far piece to go. But they had an outstanding geological department there, but it was not related to oil geology, it was related to general geology. And after I graduated, I accepted a job with Atlantic B Mining Company Bud mentioned that, this company which is now ARCA. And by the way, I had an experience with mobile because I went to one of the national conventions in Detroit and interviewed with mobile.
And about the fourth question into the interview, they asked me what my religion was, and I told them I was Jewish. And the man who interviewed me said, well, the only reason we asked that question is we don't want any atheists. We go 180, Atheist. Needless to say, that interview lasted about three or four more minutes. I never heard back from you. But I did take a job with Atlantic, and Gene and I had been married two years while I was still in graduate school. And I came home one day from the department of geology and I said, Jean, I just received notice of where we're going to go for our first assignment.
And she asked me, Warren, I said, Shreveport, Louisiana. She says, oh gosh. I said, well, it could be worse. We couldn't go to Los Angeles, New Mexico. Anyway, we went to Shreveport. Of course, you can imagine this was quite a cultural shock for someone who was born and raised in Ohio, lived near the big cities, and now to come south with the the kind of atmosphere that you had back in the early 50s in the street and it was so hot there we were there only one year it was so hot that i used to come home from the office and the varnish of our second floor apartment would be coming off and jeannie would either be crying i should either be in the bathtub I was smashed up full of water with a cold glass of vodka.
My first job with Atlantic was as a scout, and that's what junior geologists were asked to do. What that meant was that every Sunday night or every Monday morning, I would get the company car and I would drive from Shreveport, Louisiana to Natchez, Mississippi, and on the way I would stop by various oil producers and find out if they were doing any drilling and if so where they were drilling and have they had any oil shows or any gas shows or so on and then i come back on tuesday and tuesday a whole group of us would get together somebody from pure Oil Company from Sinclair from Noble from Texaco Atlantic and so on And we all exchanged information on what was going on in the area Of course, scouts now are long gone.
They've disappeared. And now you have such instant communication that there's no need for a scout. But the scout was a fun job, and it was especially a fun job for me coming out of school after about six or seven years of school, and it gave me an opportunity to meet a lot of people, and some who I still don't transfer today. After about a year of this, I came home one day, and I said, Jeannie, guess where we're going. She said, where? I said, Roswell, New Mexico. So off we went to Roswell, New Mexico, where we stayed two years. and we enjoyed that. And I spent, during that two-year period, the only problem with that period was that for two years, I was in charge of, I was actually, not in charge of the drilling, but I was what they called a drill site geologist.
And I would stay on the location where Atlantic was drilling wells. And most of the wells were 10,000 to 12,000 to 14,000 a week. And I would go out on a well and I would be there for a three-month period, sometimes a four-month period. And the only time I would get home is when we pulled the pipe out of the ground to change the bids and go back in. Sometimes that would be 3 o'clock in the morning, and sometimes it would be 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Well, after about two years, I knew I was going to leave anyway because I knew I wanted to be an independent producer.
And finally we left. They told me when I was getting ready to go that I was just getting ready to be assigned to offshore Texas. offshore. I knew that would be a better sign. They weren't anti-Semitic, though. Anyway, I came to Dallas, and my father, after my 30s, had been a consultant engineer, and that's where he spent most of his working life. And I decided, I had longer go decided that if If I could consult with somebody, I could certainly do it for myself. So I became an independent let know as independent person And actually formed my own company in 1961 Been looking ever since The business is a unique business.
It's an exciting business. Unfortunately, if y'all had read the paper in recent months, past year and so forth, the domestic industry has been really totally devastated in the last six years. and the industry has lost somewhat over 400,000 jobs, which is substantially more jobs than the automobile industry has lost, and yet all you hear about in the paper is the automobile industry and how many jobs they've lost. To be exact, the oil industry has lost 437,000 jobs over the last six years. And what's incomprehensible to me is the fact that this is a country that uses an inordinate amount of energy. And we run on energy.
And we've gotten so used to cheap energy that without political leaders, statesmen like leaders, which we unfortunately don't have too many of them, we're just taking ourselves down the garden path because our domestic production is declining rapidly. We have fewer drilling rigs working today than we've had in history. And our production, domestic oil and gas production in the United States, is less than it was after the Second World War. It's unbelievable that we're allowing this to happen. And unfortunately, it's possible that we have not us serving our children. Because Saudi Arabia, while they can supply the oil to this country, they can do so now, but should the Islamic fundamentalist ever take over, which someday they undoubtedly will, then we're going to be in a different situation than we are.
One thing about the oil business, my dad used to always tell me over and over, When things get real dark and real bad, which as Bud said many times they do, it's one of the few businesses or industries in the world where you can go out and spend money and create something that has not existed before Every time you drill an oil well or a gas well you producing a natural resource that was not here before and that natural resource is created wealth not only for your country, but also for yourself. Thank you. I'd like to mention other oil men that have not been mentioned this evening.
There are a number of them. Of course, you've all heard Sam Wilson's in this audience. And at one time, I had hoped to get hold of him to participate in this, but his wife said he's back. However, we've got your name down for next year, maybe. However, the other two oil men that I want to mention that I personally know of is Mr. Seymour Hukins and, of course, the colorful Mr. Duke Rudman, who is not in the country, as well as I'm sure you've also heard of, you know of Malcolm Brockman. I believe his name was mentioned. and he is carrying on his father, what, Saul Brockman.
Am I correct or not? And Faye, are you here from? Faye Brockman is here from Fort Worth, and she, her husband, was a member of that family. But, of course, we confine this mainly to those living in Dallas. Now, there were several of these people could not be here this evening for a variety of reasons. Duke was out of town, out of the country, still wildcatting. And as you know, he was a very colorful person. It was written up in Forbes magazine in September of 91. We have a reprint of that article and we're going to have it in the archives.