Michael Gallant
Michael Gallant was born in Dallas on September 4, 1950, and was named for his grandfather Max. His family had lived in Lynbrook on Long Island, where his father ran a grocery store with a brother before it went bankrupt. His father then became a traveling salesman covering the Southwest for a girls' clothing line, and the family, including older brothers Stephen and Herbert, known as Happy, settled in Dallas around 1949 to 1950. Michael's father died of a rheumatic heart when Michael was one, and his mother took over her late husband's sales territory, becoming a pioneering woman traveler across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas while his grandparents raised the boys. She later married Ben Elkins, a musician and salesman who died in 1965, and went on to spend 30 years as a bridal buyer for Sanger Harris.
Michael grew up in University Park and later on Northaven Road, attending University Park Elementary, John J. Pershing (in its first graduating class), Franklin Junior High, and Hillcrest High School, which was home to much of Dallas's Jewish community. He went to Hebrew school, was bar mitzvahed at 13, and was active in AZA through Kaplan chapter. A devoted sports fan, he idolized Mickey Mantle and sold programs at the Cotton Bowl for SMU and Cowboys games. He went on to the University of Texas during the era of the Vietnam War and cultural change, becoming politically active, working on the McGovern campaign, and earning a degree in journalism with a minor in advertising.
Returning to Dallas, Michael worked in advertising for about 15 years, including at Glenn Advertising and Stern Monroe. After losing his job when his client Trailways was acquired by Greyhound, he resolved never to work for anyone else again and, in 1987, bought Hillcrest High Fidelity, an audio and video retailer, which he owned for about 17 years during the boom of the digital age. He married Ann Zimmerman in 1985, a journalist who wrote for the Dallas Times Herald, the Dallas Observer, and The Wall Street Journal. They have two children, Marissa and Benjamin, both living in California, and a grandson. Michael also founded the Christmas Day Classic, a tackle football game and gathering that has united a group of Jewish friends for some 55 years.
Full Transcript
so today is wednesday september 18 2019 and my name is mitchell myers and i have the honor and privilege to interview michael gallant hello mitchell hello michael good afternoon so just some general information can you tell us your full name my name is michael gallant and why did your parents elect this name michael for you it was for my grandfather max and my mom thought that the name michael was too pretty to spoil with a middle name so that's why i do not have a middle name very nice so tell us when and where you were born i was born at st paul hospital on
september 4th 1950 in dallas texas and how did your family come to live in dallas texas let me go back to the 40s when my family lived in lindbrook on long island and my father had a grocery store with his brother this is the story that my mother tells me because i wasn't around then and apparently the uncle ran the business into the ground and the grocery store went bankrupt so my father having to earn a living for the family got a job as a traveling salesman covering the southwest territory of the united states for a little girl's line called saccone so he packed up
the family at the time there was two boys my older brothers stephen and herbert who everyone knew was happy and moved down with my grandparents and about a year they moved in 49 and then in 50 i was born and that's how we got started in dallas we moved to rosedale which was right off of schneider plaza plaza in a triplex there was uh six of them at the time and uh it was a two bedroom so it was pretty tight did your parents or grandparents know anybody when they moved here and have they choose down my uncle who was my mother's brother had moved
down here i think it was after the war and settled here and worked for different companies what have you and so since he was already here uh it helped the transition very nice and so how old were you roughly when you moved here i was not a born you sorry you were born okay tell me a little bit about your brothers uh growing up they were older brothers so tell me a little bit about them my brother stephen was uh nine years older than me and uh he lived while we lived in university park and he went to highland park high school from there he
went to ut arlington where he also played football and then after that he got a job working for sanger harris in their management training program and he they moved him all over the country and he ended up in philadelphia where he had four children uh his his wife he met here in dallas gloria who was also a transplant from new york and um then unfortunately when he was 58 he passed away from complications of diabetes and but when he died he was very successful he was executive merchandise uh vice president for john wanamaker in philadelphia and he they led a good life my other brother
herbert ralph gallant who everyone called happy his life was not so easy because happy had a port wine birthmark that covered the whole side of one side of his face and down his neck and obviously you can imagine for a young child that is uh very stressful and hard to deal with so he was always struggling in life if you will both socially and in his careers and what have you happy did end up marrying merle goldberg who has been at the jcc for years they had two children jennifer who was born a dwarf and uh heather and when jennifer was 21 years old she
died from complications of dwarfism and happy who was uh didn't take care of himself he passed away when he was 38 of a heart attack and that's when his wife merle came to work at the jcc and has been taking care of the little kids at the jcc since then which has been almost 30 years i think yeah thanks for sharing that mike sure so uh tell me about your parents uh just a little bit about your parents when growing up here in dallas when you're involved there's a story for you so when i was one year old my father died of a rheumatic heart
uh once again this is the story that my mother tells me and so to we were down here in dallas you know in the hinterlands if you will not knowing how we're going to put mom was going to provide for the family so she convinced my father's bosses at saucony to allow her to represent them in the southwest so she became the first woman traveling if you will here in in the in the southwest traveled all over arkansas oklahoma louisiana and texas and um made a living and as because her grandparents moved down with us she was able to travel and they would raise us
boys that's three boys if you will and they were they looked after us and took care of us they were my you know immigrant grandparents who uh who talked like decent and spoke yiddish most of the time so most of the time they were yelling at us we didn't know what they were saying but you knew when they were mad and um when i was nine years old my mom married ben elkins who she had met he was also a traveling salesman and she met him on the road and so then when they got married in 1959 they then started to travel together and it
was a really it's a it was a wonderful time and uh we he was a very fun-loving full of life kind of a guy he played violin from the st louis symphony orchestra he had his own band he played for the uso during the war and just like i said he was a little bomb yvonne but uh tragically uh he passed away in 65 which was only six years after my mom married him i was 15. so my mom decided that was enough of traveling on the road certainly she didn't want to do it anymore by herself so she got a job as the bridal consultant and buyer for sanger harris and then started work there for the next 30 years as their bridal buyer and never remarried and that was uh that was her life she was pretty tough she so when she passed away when she was 93 94 excuse me she had to bury two husbands two sons and a grandchild and i don't wish that on anybody tell me where did you go to elementary school i started out at university
park elementary school and then when ben married my mom we moved out here to northaven road and then went to john jay pershing i was in the first graduating class for this brand new elementary school which back then you know this was far north dallas yeah what's up was were you religious your mom and your family religious growing up and that when you looked at persian were you very religious no i mean we weren't very religious i went to hebrew school three days a week and i uh you know i was born listening when mitzvahed was 13 my grandfather went to schule every every saturday
morning and then he would get on a bus and he would go downtown to the gurley pictures and spend his saturday afternoons as he called them the girly pictures that was your grandfather this was my grandfather uh but another really funny story about my grandfather was he got he was a tailor and he got a job at a company that was a women's clothing manufacturer here called nardis and uh so the first year that he was there he the employee the employers uh artist gave everybody a christmas ham and uh you know he didn't know what to do and so and his english wasn't all
that good so my mom had to go down there and to explain to them you know being jewish that we didn't keep ham in our house and so they certainly they said we apologize you know we won't let it happen again so the following year again everybody got a ham but he got a turkey and he looks at his bosses and he says what no ham for me he wanted both of them oh god so at this time in your life you're 12 or 13 years old you've got your you've had your bar fun did you have any heroes that you had growing up any
were they sports heroes or just well i was really big into sports and i was really big into baseball and so mickey mantle who lived here in dallas was a huge hero of mine my my stepfather ben came from st louis so i was a big fan of stan mutual and then and then in dallas we finally got the dallas cowboys and the i uh me and a bunch of other kids would uh sell programs down at the cotton bowl at for the smu games and the uh and the cowboy games and we used to make like for smu and nickel a program and the
cowboys paid us 10 cents a program but the best part was that once the game started we were allowed to go into the stadium and sit wherever there was an empty seat so we saw some very very great football games uh you know sitting on the 50-yard line and uh that was a lot of fun yeah and uh did you did you ever do that with us mitch i didn't i don't think i went down there they were too young right there but to get there and be and to make sure you got your programs they would start handing them out at 6 30 in
the morning because they knew that all the kids had to get to school but to get programmed you had to get out there at like four o'clock in the morning so you could get in line and make sure you got yours so we used to go out there four o'clock in the morning and play football in the parking lot until it was time to get our programs that was fun and so in junior high did you where did you go to school went to franklin junior high and it was called junior high back then i guess yes it was and uh that's when uh i
joined uh aza and uh joined uh kaplan aza and so i've heard about this thing called the christmas day classic is that it's probably a minor thing in your life right just minor yes can you tell us about it yeah um there was a whole group of us that loved to play football and we would play tackle football so one christmas morning we all decided that since we had nothing else to do nothing was open there was no place to go that we would play football on christmas morning and i had to say that probably at least 20 of us showed up and like i
said we played tackle and it was a lot of fun and so we thought we'd do it the next year and then the next year and this year i think it will be the 55th christmas day classic that we've played i we've lost a few along the way but still there's a hardcore of guys who still come back every christmas to to celebrate our friendships and to celebrate the the bonds that we have from growing up but also this football game that kept us together so it was more than football it sounded like it was a lot about jewish identity and something to do on
christmas but about the friendships absolutely absolutely i mean and it wasn't just the game i mean we'd have a party the night before and a party the night of and invite all of our friends uh all of our jewish friends and uh and it got to be quite a tradition yeah fantastic so tell me where did you go to high school went to hillcrest high school or back then as they called it here in dallas he grew high because that's where all the jews in dallas went to high school and i say all and there must maybe maybe there was 800 no yeah maybe there
was about 600 of us in the jews but we kind of dominated the school it's great so and this time you're growing up it's a little different error now it's uh mid 60s yes and so can you talk about your influences like what was going on like musically culturally politically that affected you or even if you took it in yeah yeah um honestly back then uh we were so into sports our group of friends that the guys i hung out with at kaplan uh we were so into sports we were so into girls um that that's pretty much that that was our life uh for
those four years uh along with um you know there was a the vietnam wars were starting to weigh heavily on us because we were all getting to be at the draft age and uh obviously it was very concerning so everybody made sure they got into a college because at that time you if you didn't go to college you were going to be drafted and one until they had the lottery about four years three years later that you know you knew one way or the other if you were going to ever get drafted but high school was a lot of fun and uh had a lot
of good memories from the aca bbg uh experiences that we that i was part of as well fantastic so uh next step i guess is going to college like you mentioned where did you go to the university of texas uh as did most of my friends so it was like a little junior hillcrest high school down there but um we it was a also during the times of the cultural revolution so a lot of us sort of as you would say would uh turn on and drop out but we didn't drop out so much we became a lot of us became activists uh i became
pretty political worked very hard on the mcgovern campaign which was a total disaster but it taught me a whole lot about life in america and politics in america and uh we were all very active against the war obviously and we all grew our hair long and it too was probably one of the greatest times of my life because i've always felt like that in college that you know unless you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer it doesn't really teach you about what you're going to do in life but what it does teach you is how to think and how to think rationally and
responsibly and from there you can then figure out the path that you know you want to take in your life so it clearly did i mean here's a vietnam war going on you're getting involved so it's teaching you how to think what you want to do and what did you study at ut i started started in the school of business but i hated statistics so bad and i hated taking a foreign language so bad that the only other school that would have that would happen is the school of journalism and i didn't have to have a foreign language for that so i went and did
got him major in journalism with a minor in advertising and so i figured i might as well do something with it so i came back to dallas and went to work for an ad agency in dallas it was called glenn advertising at the time and worked in advertising for the next 15 years very nice so during this time at university of texas were you able to keep your jewish identity i mean with your friends i mean was that part of it or was it just until you got back to dallas it was semi part of it i mean most of my friends were jewish uh
i was in a jewish fraternity uh but only for a couple of years and and then i got out but um sigma out from you by the way the finding muse but um we all would always go to high holiday services in austin we always committed a point to and so during this time this four years that you're having this incredible growth and learning how to think and being an activist how did that shape your life as an adult or did it it i think it taught me how to be a better person how to treat my fellow human beings a little bit better but
as i i don't know i think you just keep learning all the time okay you know i don't think someone can walk out of college and just say oh i've got it all figured out because it's the last thing you've got is figured out as you as you know well i guess there was some things that you took in to to instill in your family and your from that period and maybe today you're able to use it is that fair i would say so i would say that uh you know respect for others and and races and uh what have you uh i learned a
key lesson during those four years in that regard and we tried to pass that on to our kids later in life okay great so now you've after college you've moved back to dallas you've gone in the advertising business did you stay in that business or did you move into other businesses no i was i stayed in that business for about 15 years and at the time at the end of the 15th year i was in a company called stern monroe it was a mid-sized agency here in dallas and my uh major client that i worked on which was trail way trailways bus lines got gobbled
up by greyhound bus lines so our agency lost the account and because of that i lost my job now this happened about six months after my first child was born and i didn't know what i was going to do but i went home and i told my wife and that i was never going to work for anybody else ever again because i didn't want to be put in the situation where someone else could control my faith so i left the advertising business my client who was the director of marketing for trailways also lost his job so he and i got together and went out and
looked for a business to buy and we found a company called hillcrest high fidelity which was owned by two jewish men jack michelson and arthur rubin two brother-in-laws actually and they had owned it for like 40 years it was a at the time that i bought it it was an audio video retailer and they sold records and what have you um so that was in 1987 we closed on the wednesday after black monday of 1987 when the stock market crashed so we figured that hey all we can do is go you know but uh and then i own that business for about 17 years and
it was uh we were very fortunate because right when we bought it the digital age was just taking off so we started selling thousand dollar compact disc players and uh beta maxes and uh digital uh home theaters and everybody wanted one so it was a it was a very golden time in my career if you will fantastic anybody famous walk into that store one or two one or two yeah did you want to share the same uh well stevie wonder came in and uh he said he asked he needed a little portable system because of what he was done something he was doing in dallas
showed him this portable system and he says uh well how does it sound and i turned it on i said i said uh stevie i'm not about to tell you how something sounds i don't know why did you hear it yourself and so uh he appreciated that he ended up buying it and ross perot came into the store one day he came running on his bicycle and his sweat gear and he came in and he looked around and none of my sales people were waiting on him and it was like i said to one guy one of my salesmen would you please go help this
gentleman and he said he just he just rode up on his bike he's not going to buy anything i said you idiot that's ross perrault and he says what and all of a sudden he was all over him obviously very nice and told us she got married and your wife's name is anne but tell me a little bit about anne oh sure ann um was when i met her she was in 1983 she as a matter of fact she and her girlfriend came to the pre to a pre-christmas day classic party which was at my friend mark shore's house and that is where i i
met her and i invited her to come the next night to the post party which was at my house and she came and she never left and so we got married in 1985. she like i said she was a journalist for the dallas times herald and after several years there she left and went to go work for the dallas observer and which was the weekly local paper here and then after about five years there she then went to work for the wall street journal where she worked for about 15 years very nice and tell me her name full name and where she from oh sure it was ann zimmerman gallant and she was born and raised in eulet long island new york and the only reason i found her down here is because she took the job to at
the dallas times hero and uh do you all have children we do we have two beautiful children marissa hope gallant who is now 31 and she lives in calif los angeles california working in the industry and uh excuse me and then our son benjamin gallon who is 29 and uh he is a uh he's in commercial lending business out in california as well uh he went to the university of southern california where he met his wife got they got married and now i'm my beautiful child grandchild my first warren joseph and they also live out in los angeles so when we get to go out
there we get to see everybody so it's really nice that's fantastic thank you uh well that and that's fantastic so you get to see them often your kids and your we try as much as we can every couple months and i know they played this christmas day classic also not only have they played but my daughter marissa was the most valuable player the first year that she played she caught two touchdown passes from the immortal mitch myers um led us to victory and my son i never let him live that town because they've never been mvp that's funny so do you have can you tell
us why you named him ben and you have marissa marissa was named after anne's father mortimer and hope was marissa hope hope was for my brother herbert benjamin was obviously named after my stepfather ben and reed was for my uh for anne's uh grandmother uh rachel fantastic so we're just gonna wind it down a couple more questions and sure feel free to add anything you'd like but uh so you have one grandchild warren yes so what advice would you give to warren if you could look into the camera and say anything you want or tell me just as something interesting for him warren first of
all let me apologize for the messed up state that the world is in um we i'm sorry that we left you this mess but i'm hoping that your generation can fix it i ask you to be true to yourself to follow your heart and do what makes you the happiest and keep the gallant line going fantastic any advice you want to share with ben and marissa that you haven't already never chase after a bus there'll always be another one stay out of a ferrari or any small italian car and eat a nectarine is the best fruit you can buy and finally mike what kind of
legacy do you want to leave for the next jewish generation of young jewish boys and girls out there i want you to know that you are respected in the world that you do have a voice in what is go happens to this world and i just hope that you find it and that you help to make it a better place well that's great and i want to thank you very much for sitting and giving the dallas jewish historical society this oral video presentation for generations to come it's my pleasure i'm sure this will be used for a lot of insomnia patient jewish patients in the
coming years anything you want to add okay thank you you