February 20, 1975

Louis Tobian

Louis Tobian was born in Dallas in December 1888, one of seven children of Jewish immigrant parents. His father, born in Kratinga (Cratinga) in Lithuania near Memel, came to America around 1882, arriving by way of New Orleans and Shreveport and working as a carpenter in Jefferson and Sulphur Springs before settling in Dallas. His mother, born in the Ukraine, followed several years later only after being assured that kosher meat was available, bringing household goods on the long journey. When his father died on Thanksgiving Day in 1895, he was buried at Sherith Israel Cemetery. Louis's widowed mother refused offers to send some of the children to an orphanage in New Orleans, and instead built a home on Hickory Street in South Dallas, where the family lived until about 1914.

Growing up in a largely non-Jewish neighborhood, Louis left school after the eighth grade to go to work. He became a messenger boy for the Postal Telegraph Company, taught himself telegraphy, and was taking election returns as a skilled operator by 1904. He later worked for a cotton firm, learned shorthand, and spent seven or eight years with the Santa Fe Railroad, transferring briefly to Galveston where he experienced the 1915 storm. Returning to Dallas, he became a traffic man for a cottonseed cake and meal concern and soon began trading in cottonseed and soybean products, a career that spanned more than fifty years. He served in World War I and afterward went into business for himself. In 1917 he married a young woman he met at a Sherith Israel dance at the old Oriental Hotel.

Encouraged by a rabbi in Los Angeles to join Temple Emanu-El and stay active, Tobian became deeply involved in Dallas Jewish and civic life. He served as president of the temple brotherhood, then as temple president around 1941-42 and again around 1951-52, and helped oversee the building of the fourth Temple Emanu-El on Northwest Highway, dedicated in 1957. He was the second president of the Jewish Welfare Federation and led a Federation campaign in the 1940s. For twenty-two years he served on the Dallas public housing authority, fifteen as chairman, and worked with Jerome Crossman on the Hamilton Park development for Black families following the South Dallas bombings. He and his wife were also active in charitable work, and he remained an outspoken commentator on civic affairs throughout his long life.

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