Lou Navius
Lou Navius descended from Lithuanian Jewish families on both sides. His late mother's father came from Lithuania by way of England, and his mother was born in Durban, South Africa. His father's family, whose name traced to a village near Panevezys, immigrated at the turn of the century and settled in Johannesburg, where his grandfather worked as a butcher before dying young. The family of ten grew up with little money, and Lou is named after his father's two eldest brothers, Louie and Coleman. Lou himself grew up in Yeoville, a lower-middle-class area, sometimes attending high school in short pants during winter because the family could not afford long trousers. A passionate reader, he walked to the library several times a week and read six or seven books each week.
After returning from a trip to Israel and taking a job as a traveling shoe salesman, Lou met Arlene, who was working as a legal secretary for his best friend. They married young and started their family in a one-bedroom apartment in Hillbrow. Deeply opposed to apartheid and worried for his four children's safety and future, Lou wanted to leave South Africa for years. After a frightening incident involving his eldest daughter and a visit to America during the bicentennial year, the family decided to emigrate. They arrived in Dallas in April 1978, drawn by his eldest daughter's wish for a big city with a small-town feel. The move devastated their relatives back home, whom Lou had been helping to support.
In Dallas, Lou chose to integrate into the broader American community, settling in the Highlands North neighborhood and building close friendships with fellow newcomers. He found Texas business dealings dishonorable at times and was cheated by partners, managers, and customers, but he eventually built a large and successful metals business, moving from distribution into fabrication with his son Craig, who later took the company to greater heights. Lou joined the JCC, area synagogues, and the Columbian Club, supported AIPAC, and became active in Congregation Beth Torah. He and Arlene devoted themselves to philanthropy for both Jewish and general causes, including the symphony, art museum, United Way, Buckner, and the North Texas Food Bank. Proud of his four accomplished children and eight grandchildren, he prepared, with mixed emotions, to leave a Dallas he had come to love in order to be nearer family.
Names/terms that look garbled by transcription and should be verified.
Full Transcript
today is tuesday march 28th i'm joan gremont and lenitra cousin is using the camera and we're interviewing lou navies lou it's nice to see you in your lovely home and let's start by talking about your life in south africa well before we get your life in south africa your family that came to south africa where they came from when they came what they did whatever you can tell us about your family well my late mother's father came from lithuania via england and she was actually born in durban south africa and so she was a native south african my late fathers and i don't know where
her father where about lithuania he came from but they were lint fox my late father's family came from lithuania as well and because the name was navious or nadiaski and i found that there were nay this is here in america they came at the turn of the century in fact my late father told me how all the streets in johannesburg were dirt roads when he came there and uh the two eldest brothers uh his two eldest brothers he was a family of ten the two elders brothers were named louie and coleman and i'm named after louie and coleman the two oldest brothers and i traced
back they and he told me they came from a village near polovis which was a major town and i found near the town of ponivers there was a little river called the river navi and so i established that were about 30 40 kilometers away i established that that's where they came from and apparently ollie's family came from a very very uh close by stettle over there as well when my father and my late mother's father he started a little grocery business whereas my father's family the father was a butcher but he died very young and my father's mother ran a boarding house and a lot
of the books you see in here my late father used to swap his canadials from his mother's soup in the boarding house and get cigarette cards and with the cigarette cards he'd collect them up and get books sent to him those books in fact are going to be selected out i'm going to give it to craig my son so that he'll have that legacy of my late father's books college was very very expensive at that time or school high school none of the kids were into high school my late father was the number one number two student in the whole of the transform and he
managed to get a scholarship to i think it was uh jeffy or park down high i'm not sure which one was the older one and just as a point of interest how wonderful the high schools were the high schools had as teachers all uh dons from oxford or cambridge teaching them so that's a very interesting fact because nobody knows how what the quality of schooling was over there but that's why the high schools were so expensive but they did they imported teachers from england so your family lived all in johannesburg okay yes okay all right so tell us about your own life growing up in
south africa your family your schooling you've taught us that about well we grew up very at a very uh lower level of we weren't uh short of food but there was little else in our household when i grew up for instance when i went to high school i couldn't afford long pants in the middle of winter i went to high school with short pants on for a couple of years in the middle of winter and i didn't even have a long sleeve sweater when i went to school i walked to primary school into high school i managed to get a bus because that stage you
could get coupons for two pennies of coupon but or i used my bicycle i used to be an avid reader so i used to walk three four times a week to the library from my home which was about a mile and a half as a kid in primary school to get books and i used to read six seven books a week and where did you live in johannesburg i lived in yarville um yeovil was the very lower middle class area but in school for instance my primary school we had a token non-jew and in my high school until they took away as a co-ed we
had a couple of token non-jews the primary school was the oval boys and high school was athletic okay all right interesting so where and when did you and ali meet i met as my best friend at the time uh was a lawyer and she was working there and i was came back from a trip to israel and i was trying to find my way and i took a job as a country salesman selling shoes and i used to go and visit my friend in his office and arlene was his secretary and that's how we met okay and um just before we get on to your
children your siblings do you have brothers and sisters i had an elder brother who's since passed he went to israel as a mahal in 1948 to fight in the war of independence and lived in israel and he passed on i think it's already five years now and my sister is still living she's in east london but um she's living as a vegetable she's so doesn't understand who she is or where she is she's now got to the point where she actually smiles so being you go through those stages that's my brother as well all right so you met arlene you got married and where did
you start your family we started our family in a very very uh small building called cardiff arms in hillbrown in a one-bedroom apartment and when we came back from honeymoon which we had the best suite on the ship and my mother-in-law my mother wanted to boil some water i tell them to use a saucepan and they said haven't you got a kettle i said no they said well we'll go and buy you one i said how much it cost they said three and six and i said i've only got 25 cents to my name and that's how we started off and your children were were
born in south africa or born in south africa okay so how and why did you make the decision to leave south africa well i'll go back a few years when i was in college cheap buddha lazy came to talk to us and i was sitting in college not with white three whites i was sitting in college with one white friend one black friend and one indian friend and chief butlers he made the following statement he said i love you all all you people over here especially you white people he said but comes the revolution we're gonna kill you all that's what the moderate chief buddha
lazy of the zulus said to us that day and i was 19 years old so when we got married i was all of 24 and all in was all of 20 or so i wanted to leave straight away especially shortfall in 1960 and colin said she's never leaving her family and i used to travel a lot i got involved in a business a very uh exotic business and i helped develop it and build it i started as the storeman and finished as the president and i worked for anglo-ball which is a as you know as a huge conglomerate they employed about a half a million
people and their division they employed about a hundred thousand but at any rate uh i we traveled a lot and we bought a beautiful piece of ground in israel overlooking the bay of atlet which is right next to haifa today it's one of the most prestigious parts of easter and if not the most expensive part besides certain streets in jerusalem and everything was fine we had a wonderful life and then i was given the golden handshake of that company reasons we don't have to go into and because i was a little wild young man and i started my own business where i had a very
very very successful business and this was in johannesburg this is in joker and we traveled everywhere and arne said she's not leaving her however one day our eldest daughter was walking home and a black man started to follow her very aggressively and she had to run into our neighbor's house lived on the same street as us by the name of trocky and arlene said to me then she said that was now 1976 and she said to me well i think maybe the timing is right and we came to america on a visit bicentennial year and we came here and we traveled around america and arne
said to me you know what dog this is a country i could live in i said are you sure she said yes and that started the ball rolling and the main crux why we left was the danger to our children from my point of view the reason why i wanted to leave there was a twofold one there was no way that i was gay i hated the system i hated it with a passion but there was no way that i was going to fight for a system that i knew according to but lizzie that was afterwards again to kill me the other reason was i
saw no future we had four children and i saw no future for my children and i said i brought these children into the world they're my responsibility and i have to give them the opportunity to decide how to live for themselves if i stay here they will not be able to make any good decisions because there's no opportunity but if i put them in an environment where they can go forward on their own deletion that's what i wanted so those were our twofold things all in from a point of view looking after her chicks which i understood and mine from a more broader aspect over
there so what was your family's reaction to this decision of yours oh terrible my you must understand i was supporting my parents i was helping to support my in-laws and my parents uh and in-laws while my father passed on but my mother and my in-laws used to come to us every sunday without fail and most friday nights and my mother-in-law turned round to my mother and said mini mini it'll never ever be the same and uh they were devastated our immediate family were devastated okay but it obviously didn't deter you and how come you chose dennis how come well how come you came to dallas
very simple we'd spend time we actually came to the states and i had formed a partnership with somebody in houston we went to houston we hated houston because we went to maya land and not only if you've ever been to my land in houston which is the jewish area and we went to my land and it was terrible from the freeways the smog and that and i can't stand high humidity and the humidity was killing me and the smog over there and we then traveled all over the states we had as i said i had a very successful and we had the latitude to travel
all over my eldest daughter said she'd heard of a town called dallas which i'd never heard of and so we decided to visit dallas and we came to dallas in an ice storm and we drove up neandering way in the ice and we had met other south africans here some of them were still here most have left and they said one of them especially as an insurance agent said don't come to dallas it's a terrible place but we drove up neandering away went into north dallas and we met a lot of kids and my eldest daughter also said she wanted to be in a big
city with a small city field and when we arrived here north dallas was exactly that we were just south of campbell road and campbell road was a single lane road hillcrest was a single lane road when you were north of uh spring valley you've never locked your house you never locked your car it was an amazing time in dallas and we just loved dallas as flat as it was and coming in an ice storm and everything and so i used to commute i had a business set up in houston and i used to commute there and we visited all over the states but we decided
we wanted to be in a warmer place didn't realize how warm dallas was yeah but california was too wild for us again we didn't realize the drug issues that they were in junior high in dallas at the time we only found out from our children 10 or 20 years later yeah so what year was this that you came 1978 april 1978 okay so that was like the early wave of south africans so in what way were other south africans helpful to you and the the general the community in dallas other south africans not at all well why we chose that we decided when we came
here we wanted to integrate we were very fortunate we moved into a uh area called highlands north which is similar to south africa islands north johannesburg accepting for uh everybody came from somewhere else in the states everybody they were all executives of jc penney from ford from all the big companies from uh texas instruments they came from everywhere each one had the same comment they've been traveling all over the states for their companies and each and every one of them said we're not moving anything and i integrated with these people and we formed a bond and we were very fortunate also we got involved with
the colombian club which was a jewish club and that became actually our whole social life and we decided we wanted to integrate with an american society so we could feel that way and so it's no dispersion on jewish community or anything we did join the jcc of course like everybody else and we joined synagogues here but we chose that ourselves to not be in the same society that we'd left so talk about any challenges that you and your family faced adjusting to life in south africa um in south africa i'm sorry in dallas any specific things that that were very different from what your life
was like in south africa well for the children's point of view it was school it was a very very traumatic change very troubling how old were your children at the time uh my baby was seven my eldest was 16 and my two others were 13 and 14. my my baby decided straight away that she was going to become american mothers didn't but they found it's a very strange society they had the tougher time from arnie's in my perspective the only tough time we had was in business where i was cheated like i'd never been cheated before i found that the society in texas was the least honorable business society that i had ever met i also found lacking the knowledge that i had in south africa proved to be a terrible detriment to my success here and even when i became successful i found that there was no loyalty amongst customers you must understand
when i built my business in south africa the big i had helped little small greek and italian businesses grow i'd given them credit i'd done different things and you couldn't lose my business unless i tried to cheat them i was mr louis to them i was their savior i helped them grow their businesses when i came to the states first of all i was cheated by business partners and i was cheated by management i was cheated by employees everybody i try to give things to but my my worst episode was when i saved customers of mine millions of dollars and then when product became free
and easy they sold me out for a quarter penny and that's when i decided i didn't want to actually be in business in this environment anymore also dallas and texas is strange when you become part and parcel of the society yes i did find very very loyal customers but you have to be a texan otherwise it doesn't work and then there was another very big problem in texas uh to make a deal in new york you can pull your teeth out but once you've made a deal and shake hands it's a deal in texas everybody will shake your hand and say it's a deal that
means nothing so that was a very big disappointment to me and when craig took over our business my son he'd learned from me and he was ruthless and i couldn't be that i couldn't change my nature the way i had grown up doing business in south africa where people appreciated when you did something for them okay interesting so you talked about you got involved you joined the jcc you joined uh synagogues did you get involved in the jewish community at all uh not really uh the jewish community yes i did i supported everything i got involved in aipac in a big way and i supported
all the uh societies and i supported the synagogue and i worked for them uh i'm more of a loner type of person i'm not a person who's a committee person i i'm a little forceful i speak my mind good bad or indifferent and i tell it as it is and as such i'm not a very good committee person i'm a very good chairman so long as i've got good people under me but otherwise i'm a very very i don't work that well with people now i don't think there were really jewish schools for your kids when you came your kids were a little older no
there were not jewish schools and quite frankly i couldn't have afforded it when we came here when our kids came here they had hobson's choice they could go to one college and that was ut austin and they were given a fixed amount and they had to work and they had to pull their own weight and that was it i mean my son would have loved to have gone to a ivy league school or another school and my daughters didn't mind because they played well and they had a great time but no ah there was no such thing as me being able to afford when i
came here i was supporting my mother i brought her over here i was uh oren's cus uncle and wife i helped bring them here i was helping support them i was helping support my in-laws in and i was taken for a ride by business partners here through legalities so uh right through the 80 the early 80s and then management gave me a rough time i had a very very rough learning experience so even if had been a jewish school i couldn't have afforded private schools so i guess your kids went through public schools okay um you mentioned you had a home in israel did you
ever consider making aliyah and living in israel i did but arnie wouldn't have it i didn't have a home i just had this piece of property there we never built we had the plans to vote but we never uh i i actually wanted to make aliyah too my brother was there my big brother and uh i'd been a supporter all my life but we had to consider i had to consider my children as well and yeah this was a wonderful choice i mean our children bless us every day for bringing them here so you do all right tell us about your children where they are
where they live my eldest daughter is now in la jolla she has a home there she went to school at as i said of jj pierce and she made her own way there she became the mp there and she established she was in the acting group there and then she went to austin and did marketing and she played better than ever than anybody you can ever imagine but she's a smart kid so she got through in that four years uh came back worked on home made a success working in the advertising industry got married to an idiot who came to work for me and i
supported them for many many years and afterwards my first son had the obligation to support them and as soon as all of this took place and as soon as his children were grown a little bit he decided to divorce my daughter and move on on my money because i paid him out a hell of a lot of money and but she has gone forward it's been tough for her and now she's living in ohio she's got a beautiful home there and she's got a man friend our good or bad or indifferent it is that's her business she's a rotten lady and her children i'll work
her son's in boulder he's a geophysicist looking for a decent job all he can get today is a as a navi and i mean it as a navi doing field work getting paid less than a laborer and her second son is in austin he's got two more years to go in school he is a four-year recovering drug addict he unfortunately we must be honest he got himself involved in making a lot of money and dealing in drugs in boulder and went to rehab and the young man has become the most beautiful beautiful of beautiful people went through two years of what's the name school college
you know just community college in austin and now he's at uh just finishing a degree so he'll have a degree but i mean the guy is smart as attack and he's going to make it well my uh third grandson is not from that family of course he's from my uh uh well let's see let's talk about your second you talk about your eldest child my but he didn't play like his sisters he played tennis in his off time and when he was in school i said to him craig how do you do what you do he said dad i'll sit in the front row there
were 800 kids in the class he graduated lauder there were 10 kids on stage in engineering out of a thousand kids nine asians and my son uh before he came into my business he had to prove himself for his sake i said and for mine and he that he went to work for a company here to get his to get your engineering degree you have to practice as an engineer and he did that he worked for electrospace he went to uh washington he set up communication systems and the pentagon and the vice president's house and then i gave him an ultimatum i'm either going to
sell the business because i'd had it with managers and everything or he comes in and joins me and he elected to come in and join me i gave up the opportunity to join some young man who made a business that he was supposed to be involved in worth hundreds of millions and he joined me at a time when my management was pulling out of the business trying to sell it and i was in south africa and i was actually but uh we built together and that's the difference when you've got family you can bowl together so he helped me build and afterwards he really took
it to a much higher level it's due to him that afterwards the visitors took off for a more sophisticated manner and subsequently he decided to retire at the age of 49 of 50 to aspen which he's done and so that's he lives today he lives in aspen his eldest daughter at 14 decided that aspen was too small for her this is a very interesting story she then researched and she found an all-girls school in connecticut thank goodness he can afford it much more expensive than any ivy league school 200 kids there and she decided to take herself off to boarding school and she's been there
for four years and she's going to graduate graduate in may the 25th and every college she's applied to of course has accepted her i have a little printer over here and i had a this is two years ago she's uh sitting down over there and i said to she wanted to print something from the other computer and i said it doesn't work she said why i said i had an expertise already for four hours she said nonsense yeah yeah in two minutes she had it working yeah at uh her second year there she uh took graduate level five computer skills so uh just just that
kind of kid you know she's going to do so engineering absolutely interesting smu has accepted her with a watson uh scholarship that uh another money is to me it's inconceivable how much it virtually gives her more than half of schooling for nothing for four years that's an amount of money but uh his son is a juliek he loves to ski and that's it but they enjoy life they enjoy life okay so that's your second daughter son and then and then i have a daughter right who's crazy yeah my third child also was played like editing to college did a marketing highly successful worked for a
company in fort worth went to china or somewhere for them and they're all kinds of things came back met a young man they were the first j date of the jccc and got married after they had two she decided she wants to become a teacher so now she became a maths teacher and then that wasn't enough so she took her master's in mass teaching and then she took this and that and that and that and anyway she was in a cuba and really she established the maths department over there and now last year she decided to retire and what does she do she does pro
bono about that since south dallas where you wouldn't go and her spare time she makes sandwiches and hands them out to all the homeless people wonderful that's my daughter oscar whatever you want and oh by the way otherwise she's doing everything for booker t where her children went to the elder son her older son finished there two years ago younger son is graduating in june july her eldest son went with nyu to paris for his first year because that was a condition he didn't have he hated languages he was the only kid at a kibber who didn't have to take hebrew wow he just refused
he hates languages but so nyu made him go to paris and of course he's a very dedicated student so he learned french he only read french newspapers studied and only listened to french tv that's the kind of kid he is on their knees so he wants to be a political journalist i think is his latest anyway he's in new york now uh studying at nyu what he's studying i don't know but he's a barista in his spare time because he's a coffee maiden maven and he just loves the coffee scene the younger son is a semi-genius the father uh really she made a very very
very smart man from a very smart family his father is an actuary by professor by profession but he's so smart he lives on an off roof in india the father left his actuarial thing divorced his mother many many years ago like 36 or 37 years ago but they they are smart and smart or smart can the younger guy is just a lazy guy he doesn't want school but he's as smart as a whoop what he's going to do i don't know he says he wants to manage sports players which is not a bad idea very very very exciting thing so that's my third child my
daughter my youngest sharon is in san antonio and i think she's the smartest of all my children didn't finish school she had problems as a kid as i said the moon was very difficult for us yet and rexia is a young woman and she's overcome it and she's a she's a star must tend to she's a star no education she took over in our business the collections handled all the accounts receivable they're a fantastic job and she is as perceptive as anybody can imagine she's got two children uh she's not married to a jewish boy she's married to a catholic boy he comes from a
wonderful and also a very bright guy unfortunately he's hasn't really reached his potential father and very smart so between the two of them they have two children who are still babies the one is uh 13 and the other one is 11 but the 13 year old wins every he's an episcopalian school which is not an easy school but he wins every thing that's going any any classes he's not just on top he's on top of the top i mean so he's just a genius kid and the little girl of 11 is not 11 in my opinion she's 31. she was so smart and so let me give you a free instance with her she goes to an episcopalian school and she tells arlene and i she and her brother married two jews at the school two years ago when she's only nine years old she starts telling me about your skapandra right so i took outside on the patio and i thought i taught her about hashem and she listens now this is nine years old the next thing i hear she's at school nine years old at episcopalian school and the teacher's telling them things and she says not so the teacher though had character and she
got her up and this little kid went to the top of the class there and started teaching the class about hashem so uh i'm very very fortunate and arnold and i'm very fortunate we've got four very bright children we have eight very very bright grandchildren as i said the one is a is a great studies he doesn't care he's he figures out his father will support him and it doesn't matter but all of them are very bright and we have a wonderful wonderful relationship it's just a shame that everybody's moved away from dallas but that is it and that's why we're going to leave dallas
we've got no family left my niece and nephew the last of the americans here it's cynthia and simo i brought them out over here i think it's now 30 31 years ago and but they'll follow us in time to go higher okay lou you've talked about your business but you haven't told us what kind of business it was what is it that you did well i started off here uh selling product that i used to manufacture in south africa and then i through force of circumstances again i was got involved with my so-called partner in houston who was a managing partner even though i put
in all the money and the brains and all the contacts but he ruled it and he got me involved as a young immigrant and a young man in debt running to at that stage was about a half a million dollars and i didn't have a half a million dollars so i was forced into the distribution business which i hated and so i i did that for many years until i bought a very small a few years later very small fabricating business very very very small so you can understand we used to use at that stage because you can't work on the concept of numbers of
parts we've made we used to make 50 to 100 000 of those little parts afterwards we were making 20 million of those parts when we developed it but that was a very small part of our business to understand we used to use five to ten thousand pounds of raw materials a month and afterwards we used to use 40 000 pounds to 80 000 pounds a day we had a very very uh large business and then we developed it we built this small fabricating we sold our distribution business i had a company in houston i had a distribution place in san antonio and in dallas we
used to not just sell materials but we had plate saws different kinds of saws and their water jets and then we have stripping machines we have everybody thinks that metal distribution is just selling like raw things but it's it's not like that in order to be competitive you've got to add value and so we had a plate sofia instant that cost half a million dollars within it and then we had a stripping machine slitting machines and that's what you had to do you hadn't put value onto metal so we had these uh places and i hated it because i hated the distribution business as i
explained to you because people would sell you out for quarter of a pennies in 1989 i literally made customers rich because i had product i was importing from all over i understood the business tonight i'd grown up in it in south africa and brought all my knowledge here and i made my customers wealthy people because instead of charging inflated prices like all my competitors i didn't understand that way to do it i was making a good living and i let them make a living because i said afterwards they sold me out for quarter pennies and i i hated it and so in 1998 i sold
our distribution business to reliance steel and we sold them all the facilities i owned a facility in houston i had the facility in dallas the warehouse i owned and paid for and we had a facility in san antonio which we we just leased property there but i sold them all the equipment and all the inventory and everything and 1998 we started to concentrate on just the fabrication and that was the side of the business craig was running before that we divorced it because we both hardheads he he looked after the warehouse and the uh and all the fabricating side and i looked after the buying
and after the finances of the business and after the i looked after the marketing of the bulk products he looked after the marketing of the finished goods okay and so in 1998 we started concentrating on that and uh craig became very well known because he would go into a place and see a product and the product they would be spending 75 or 80 cents to make it and he'd figure out a way to make it for 50 cents that would cost us 10 cents because we built our own machinery and equipment i never hired college graduates texans are the most remarkable innovative people they have
grown up being forced to be so they grow up on farms or in their homes and there's no way to help them they've got to fix their own automobiles they've got to do all kinds of things themselves and so all our employees what we did do we sent them for further schooling in order to be able to utilize the more exotic equipment because everything is scared now there's no such thing you can't operate a business such as house and be competitive with china unless you build your own equipment and you have everything automated because their labor costs are so cheap i've been to china i've
seen their factories they use american-made equipment and then they export it here for half the price even their raw materials come from american fabricated plants i've been there yeah so what we had to do was to build all our own and to design all our own and we did we employed people we sent them to school even my accounting guy i took him out of school i couldn't stand it everybody came to me they told me what geniuses they were in the end i hired a young man out of and used to hit six foot five i'm i'm all five foot five and he'd stick
his head around the corner and say what do i do next and i said you'll see and we sent him to school to get an mba and you know he took over the company and the same with the engineering we hired a young man and sent him to school to learn how to design and use the equipment to design cads and that's what we did so in the end of the story we became a fabricating plant and uh all the major manufacturers of air conditioning were our customers carrier rheem lenox you know it's like whirlpool type of thing uh world who makes uh washing machines
for 20 different people you know and some goodman down in houston makes air conditioning for everybody and that's what we do we we sold the facility while craig gave it away my opinion to his employees they paid us out of watson about four years ago he decided he wanted to spend since you came to dallas have any other family members come out you talked about a nephew well first we brought out we went to canada or we went to israel first and arlene's uncle was very very unhappy so he we brought him out here to dallas he and his wife and their children were in
canada and they they stayed here and until he passed on i think it was 2002 or something but in the beginning we brought him out and then we brought out my niece and nephew when they had just one little baby on his uncle of course was much older in pakistan his wife is living now very smart family very insular family very smart and my niece and nephew of celine dallas she works at the j she does one hell of a good job and he works in selling furniture for michael whatsoever he's a very very nice and smart young man and did you still have family
in south africa anybody left there yeah i have i don't have that much there ollie does ollie's got her sister and brother-in-law and their family all their kids are there their three kids well two kids one the son is in england and she has a her late brother's family are still there and their four children are there they're not too many grandchildren there therefore children only two of them had children and uh to me i've got a nephew there that's all i've already got left in south africa he's in east london and his family is everywhere is in cape town in johannesburg and one one
son is there but very little possibility of them to meet jewish people down in east london so the one son who's an adolescent i mean he's an adonis you can't begin to believe how beautiful marries a girl from mexico she had he had the opportunity the wealthiest jewish families in new york were looking for me because he was an au pair over there for a while with one of these fancy families who we met on the ski slopes of aspen and the other guy is a very smart young he's got a nice hottest girlfriend who is now marrying he's been living with her for 10
years they're getting married in mauritius next month and his daughter believe it or not is embanky and works in standard bank in johannesburg in the middle of town and she's of course only got non-jewish boyfriends there but um you must understand it's a different world and that's all i have there so and i have absolutely this much interest in going anywhere my next question what do you miss about life in south africa nothing nothing absolutely have you have you been to visit recently we took our whole family for my our 50th anniversary seven years ago we took them right all to such an extent that
each place we visited they said why are we leaving and when we got to the next place they said wow because we went to only the best game parks and then we went to the cape to the watson we went to victoria falls so we spent a couple of weeks over there right we came we had a party of 22 all in and i took and we had what they call it it was a wonderful wonderful visit but that to me was all it was it was a visit i never found my lifestyle there to be a satisfactory one i have never ever tried to
utilize anybody of a lesser station than i am in other words if you were to tell me to sell this to somebody for five dollars and i figured it was only worth three dollars i couldn't do it and so employing black people there as i was forced to and employ them some of them who were much smarter than the white people that i was employing and having to put them in a much more basic position went completely against migraine and i felt also as a jew that it was completely against my upbringing and religion and my heritage that i should do such a thing so
now i never felt good about it i made i had a life there you must understand before we left when i went into business on my own i used to work maybe two days a week and i used to work maybe six to eight months or nine months no i've worked about nine months of the year but when i was working i was working two days a week and i made more money than i could ever count so you know just cut you i did it money was never my objective money has always been a tool to enjoy life even today i feel the same
way and that's what i try to teach my and my grandchildren the value of work because one must work but one must do what one enjoys to achieve and creating beauty has always been what i prefer to see so you asked me if i'd been involved in the jewish society now i've been more so involved in the non-jewish not non-jewish but rather in the uh general uh thing whether it's united way or whether it's the symphony or whether it's the nf3 or in the arts and the art museum and these are being rather our focus because the border spectrum of life is what we really
focused on i presume you're a u.s citizen i have been at the first opportunity i came here on an h1 and of course that was only a way i could get here as fast as i wanted to i employed a high-powered lawyer in washington very very expensive and very smart guy and within your my h1 became a green card i became a citizen here in 1984. right so i presume you're glad you made the move you're happy or you have been happy in dallas are you ready for your next the next stage of your life it is a very traumatic thing for us to leave dallas the shul is really part of our lives as we belong to that torah uh when i walk into bethora everybody knows i know everybody and when i go to california we also belong to their it's very difficult when i go to symphony here i see all the same faces when i go to opera everybody knows me yeah you know wherever i am but as i
said when i was at the columbian club it was a wonderful wonderful wonderful social place when i joined it in the 80s and the 90s jewish club and it was wonderful and so for all in like to leave dallas we're not leaving the house easily it's a very difficult and dramatic thing and anybody and i have a lot of well i have a cousin who runs down dallas and i i get mad i get really mad because he made his fortune here and now he's living a you know wonderful life in la jolla only because he was involved in the scheming roulette over there with
with the housing business he was the engineer he didn't do the crooked stuff but he made the money out of it right and that started him and how do you run down the place where you've made your money and that's why our whole focus on even mine has been on philanthropy to give back to the community and we do we make sure i know a lot of people just give they say if you don't give to the jewish communities who else will but we give to everyone they're part of the community that's what i said we're involved in the community whether it's buckner or north
palace food bank or whoever it is we support them and we support the arts and we support everybody so it's a community thing as far as we're concerned sure our main thing is on focus was on jewish but uh and the show we you know but not that i'm a very odd and sure girl we're not right but i believe in it and we support it and we do that because it's part of the community that we've worked there is anything that you have at a very sentimental value that you'd like to show us anything from south africa from lithuania special books you know book
collection my main thing is as i said i've got fans those books on the top there at the center there were books at the top over there of books that my late father accumulated from should we should we try and focus on it well if on those right on top there the top you