all Oral History
April 27, 2015

Lois Goldberg

Lois was born in 1928 in Corsicana, Texas, but left as an infant when her family relocated for her father's work. Her father was an entrepreneur who traveled the East Texas oil fields and ran a scrap business and marble machine business in places like Brownwood, eventually making Fort Worth home. His family had come from Russia to Sioux City, Iowa, and he arrived at Ellis Island around age 13 with a brother-in-law, later serving in the Army during World War I and being stationed in South Texas. Lois's mother's family came through Galveston and settled in Ranger, Texas, before moving to Fort Worth. Lois had a sister nine years older, and because her parents traveled so often, she frequently stayed with her mother's sisters.

Because two of her mother's sisters lived in Dallas, Lois attended elementary school there while staying with an aunt, later attending Forest Avenue High School in South Dallas. She recalled a happy, easygoing childhood and remembered being in Boston visiting an aunt on Pearl Harbor day before returning to Texas. When her parents moved to Indiana, where her father delivered house trailers in towns like Elkhart and Goshen, Lois returned to Dallas to live with her aunt and continue at Forest Avenue. She went on to the University of Texas.

Lois met her husband Bob when they were schoolmates, and they grew close by graduation. He left for the Navy near the end of World War II, and his fraternity brothers looked after her while he was gone. They married in November, the same year her father died suddenly when she was 18, honeymooning at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth. Together for 68 years, they raised three children, a girl and two boys, and their family grew to include ten grandchildren and many great-grandchildren. Lois was active in Jewish life, serving as an advisor to B'nai B'rith youth and participating in community centers. A member of a congregation Jack Ruby also belonged to, she vividly remembered the Kennedy assassination and a later trip to the 1964 World's Fair in New York.