September 28, 1987

Max Landsberg

Max Landsberg was born in 1882 in a small town near Lublin, Poland, and was raised in the larger city of Lublin. He came from a long line of cabinetmakers; both his father and grandfather practiced the trade, and Max learned it as a boy, knowing his craft by age 15 and working in Warsaw by 17. The oldest boy among six children, he was close to his parents. He left Poland, then under Russian control, to avoid conscription into the Russian army. His sister had married a man who settled briefly in Dallas, which is how Max came to arrive there in 1914 after landing at Galveston on a British ship.

In Dallas, Max attended night school, where he met Roe Heckman, a young woman who had come to the city with her mother and younger brother, Philip. After courting for about three and a half years, they married in 1918 at her brother's home on Pocahontas Street, in a ceremony performed by Reverend Fromm. The couple raised three children, a daughter named Lena and two sons known as Sonny and Jerry, and lived in the same South Dallas home on South Harwood for nearly 39 years, near the Colonial School their children attended. Max and Roe were married nearly 62 years, and at the time of the interview he had many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Max found work in a Dallas cabinet shop within months of arriving and became a foreman after just three months. He later opened his own cabinet shop on East Elm in the Deep Elm area, building storefronts, showcases, and fixtures for individual stores and drugstores, and he continued working until age 82. He and his family belonged to Shearith Israel, and later to a synagogue in the Forest area and to Temple Emanuel. He was active in the Arbeter Ring (Workmen's Circle), whose members enjoyed cultural events and sick benefits. He recalled Dallas's early open streetcars, its kosher butcher shops, the Sanger Brothers store, and encounters with the Ku Klux Klan, for whom he unknowingly built a barbershop and a secretary's storefront.

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