Morton Rachofsky
Morton Rachofsky was born at Baylor Hospital on Gaston Avenue. His father, Sol, was born in Dallas, and his mother, Ella (nee Shum), was born in Minsk, Russia, in 1898 and came to Omaha, Nebraska, at the age of three. His parents married in November 1924. The family name traces to a town Morton understood to be called Rachov in the Carpathian Mountains, with the ski added upon immigration. His grandfather, a blacksmith, ran the Pacific Horseshoeing Company in downtown Dallas around 1910. Morton grew up first on Grand Avenue near Fair Park and, from 1938, on South Boulevard, on a street that was entirely Jewish, among neighbors he has kept up with all his life.
The Rachofsky family kept kosher, observed the holidays, and belonged to Shearith Israel, Congregation Tiferet Israel, and Temple Emanu-El. Morton attended John Henry Brown school and Forest Avenue High School, participated in the Boy Scouts at Temple Emanu-El, and the family was among the last to leave South Dallas in 1955. He attended Texas A&M for four years, served thirteen months in Korea as a field artillery forward observer and later as an aide to a division artillery commander, and then earned his MBA at Wharton. After several jobs he entered real estate, joining Miller in 1959 and going out on his own in 1964, serving on numerous professional and community boards, including the Dallas Board of Realtors.
Alongside his real estate career, Morton became a dedicated sculptor, studying with teachers including Octavio Medellin and James Surls. He was a founding president of the Texas Sculpture Association in 1983 and organized its 25th anniversary celebration at the Nasher. His geometric works, inspired by children's toys such as jacks and the Soma puzzle, have been shown at the Meadows Museum and installed at civic and corporate sites around Dallas. Morton also spoke warmly of his father, Sol, a banker at the Mercantile who quietly helped many people obtain loans and was active in Congregation Tiferet Israel, Golden Acres, the Variety Club, and Masonry. Morton credited a Masonic mentor with teaching him a lifelong positive mental attitude.
He recalled a trip to Israel with his wife and other travels abroad, and reflected fondly on a Dallas Jewish community where, in his memory, Jews and gentiles alike were close friends.
Full Transcript
february 4th 2013 and ruth andres will be running the camera today and i'm speaking to morton rachawski who has been on this board and has agreed to interview with us hello martin hello nancy um i am going to start by asking you the questions were were you born or if you were born here where your your parents were born and how did they get here or perhaps your grandparents are from here too so tell us about that i was born at baylor hospital on gaston avenue my father soul rest in peace was born in dallas my mother ella shum was born in minsk russia in
1898 he came to dallas came to omaha nebraska at the age of three in the early 20s she came to visit in and my father was shown when they were married in november of 1924 where was your father's father born they came i was told from a town called richoff r-a-c-h-o-v and when they came from there they added the ski to their name i was telling somebody at this at a singles party years ago and the guy was from russia and he said that's not true i said that's the story i've always heard he says that's not true so there is a town over chav
i've looked it up on the map in the carpathian mountains and theoretically that's where they came from my grandfather was shown was a blacksmith he had pacific horseshoeing company in downtown dallas and herb shore i was shown went to an ephemeral art show where they sell paper products and he bought and gave to me a blank check on pacific horseshoeing company m rachovsky proprietor and the date was 191 with a blank so it was either 1910 to 1919 and i looked for that check to bring today to show you and i couldn't find it i know i have it but anyhow 1919. when were you bored when was i born many years ago okay no comment right no 1910 was when they had pacific horseshoeing company exactly but and wrote you a check no no this was a bank draft i've got it not filled in if you go to one of these paper shows they have documents and things and this was in a little plastic envelope i see and her of some bought it gave it to me thought i would like to have it which i was ecstatic to get it and my father ever shown used to go get horses and bring them to the blacksmith shop to
be shot that the right word shot shoot did he make house calls sure they went to pick up horses but they bring him in to the blacksmith shop what street was this on downtown uh the draft says they were on pacific avenue uh i think pacific and field but they lived at the time on the corner of caroline and cedar springs and that was in the family several years ago the old homestead and that's where you were raised well that's where the family was when i was born we lived at 2909 grand avenue within walking distance of fair park right around the corner from cowser
lumber company where the ringling brother barnum and bailey would stage their horses and animals before the circus was in town the circus would go down grand avenue on their way to coucher lumber company's parking lot and then in 1938 we moved to 2521 south boulevard and the whole street was jewish the swiss were on the corner jane rutland lived next door to them the root birds lived next door to them we lived next door to the root birds on the other side was max and lottie glazier and on the other side of them was the goronzix and across the street was the blatz rita and
marilyn blatt rita now married to mitchell ryazanskiy and maryland married to charlie crobats have you kept up with these people over the years telling marilyn a couple weeks ago saw rita yesterday at a funeral yeah we see each other all the time what was it when how old were you when you moved to south like south boulevard yeah it was in 1938 so you were basically not raised in south on grand on grand right unless there was a baby and we moved to south my three sisters and i all went to john henry brown on grand avenue we all attended forest avenue high school on
what is now martin luther king we all graduated from there and right around the corner from us was the very theatrical synagogue on grand avenue where all three of my sisters were married so you were raised in a religious household we were we kept kosher and observed all the holidays and we all went to sunday school at sheriff israel because there wasn't a sunday school at deferreth at the time i was born misfitted to fairth israel went to hebrew school better go to soccer and was in the boy scouts at temple emanuel because it was the only one that had a scout troop but we
belonged everything and we went to the jewish community center on pocahontas i don't know pocahontas pocahontas is just south of downtown dallas that's where sheriff israel was the community center was a couple blocks away and the freeway r.l thornton came through that area took out sheriff israel's property the town was big enough at that time to carry three places of worship that's what we had sheriff the first in the temple and we were all basically in south and then after the war i guess even before world war ii the migration started to north dallas and a lot of the people moved to park cities and
beyond and then we left we were one of the last families to leave south dallas that was in 1955 and by that time we had minorities living just about every house around us what um did you meet with any anti-semitism growing up it sounds like you were surrounded by jews during the major jewish holidays the high school was basically empty because it was so heavily predominant jewish but i don't remember anything any anti-semitic actions that i recall to this day there may have been some that i know about well the interesting thing is that when i interview people from your area some met with it
all the time some ran home from school at all yeah aaron spelling has said that he was harassed and used to tell the people beating him up stories to get them interested and stop the assault he lived on ghoul street which is uh between irving and anchorage just south of downtown uh it just takes a few bad people to create those things i guess if there was any i don't remember i mean you still didn't join the dallas country club i mean that's been forever but i don't know that in a way that's anti-semitic in a way it's uh that's their choice where did you
go to college attended texas a m for four years and when i graduated my rich uncle gave me three choices june july or august i picked august a couple months later i got an all-expense trip to the oregon he fed me clothed me houseman gave me all the bullets i could shoot and i spent 13 months in korea as a civilian in korea as a field artillery officer i was a forward observer i was later aided to general horace harding class of 1917 west point he was division artillery commander of the 40th division and i was his aide and then i went on the staff
of the 40th division artillery came home went to graduate school at the university of pennsylvania got my mba from wharton came back several jobs later ended up in real estate and one on my own i went with miller beer in 59 and went on my own in 64 and have been there ever since figured out today as 49 years ago wow and i've been on the real estate advisory committee of the federation of disd the texas a m foundation i served on the board of directors of the dallas board of realtors i was vice chairman of the commercial investment division and in 1964 i got
the ism award which is young leadership and i've been practicing sculpture in my spare time now more full-time to the point in 1983 i was a founding president of the texas culture association and a couple years ago on our 25th anniversary i was the instigator of a big celebration we had for our 25th anniversary and 08. we had a program at the nasher and brought in some outside speakers and got a lot of press out of it were you artistically inclined as a child the first piece of art i remember doing was etching a copper plate in grade school where you paint a design on a copper plate put an acid that'd eat away the background still have that plate and you moved on from there obviously i've always tinkered but making a living as an artist is very difficult and so i've stuck with real estate to support my habit and now i'm doing more and more of it i've had three salons
at the mahdi museum on boeing and carlisle one of them was filmed by a young man he was very good at it max did a great job and there's a piece of my work in front of the mighty dorothy masterson came to my house and said i like that piece in your front yard i said i'll make you a duplicate she said well we don't have any money i said i can relate to that i don't have any money either so she found some money long story short made her duplicate and it's in front of the mighty now i also have a piece at the
below mansion on ross avenue when they expanded and built the addition of their building there was a glass atrium connecting the two and they wanted the sculpture to go in that area i made a copy of one of my pieces for them it's there now it's a 16 foot tall stainless steel geometric sculpture how do you move those things from where you've crafted them to through locations very carefully i design and build wooden maquettes when i get a sale i have them made in various fabricators that have the equipment the manpower and the knowledge i can weld two pieces of metal together but it won't
look very pretty and so i yield to the craftsman they've got the equipment and the manpower and the knowledge to do it so i'll let them do it and i have a piece at the chaparral steel and midlothian that they commissioned me to do and they insisted that i use their material because they're like commercial metals they reprocess metal and so we use their metal but i had my fabricators in dallas do it it was my mistake that i didn't bring some photos of your pieces can you describe them i i can but i'd like you to what they all have in common what they're
made out of the best way to describe my work is i do things that can be done small in multiples and big children's toys the same design can be done larger outside in the monumental sculpture so if you're familiar with a child's jack i've taken that design and made it three-dimensional and blown it up and made them in different sizes where they stack one on top of the other and they're self-supporting and uh i've done variations of that and i don't know if you're familiar with a soma puzzle it's seven pieces that go together to form a cube it's a swiss invention years ago i
had no nothing to do with this creating but it's seven interesting parts and i have made those parts out of wood and wrapped them with vinyl tape diagonally to where each surface it touches another matches color-wise so they're easy to put together puzzles but if you don't know what you're doing they can be mind-breaking go ahead are the small models for sale as well the children's toys for sale as well they are unfortunately my costs are so heavy when i do the work this one i just finished it's going to be in the uh mary thomas gallery february 23rd it's about 14 inches all around
in the wood the vinyl tape and none of my time just the vinyl and the wood are very expensive so they really can't be done as toys i'm trying to figure out a way to get them manufactured but the problem is you have to make a lot of them to get the costs down and you make a lot of them you have to spend a lot of money and you have to be sure they're going to sell and you're up against the toy industry are you mentors a mentor to anybody there's a lot of young budding artists in this community we tried to do that
with the texas sculpture association when we started we decided there'd be no bars to membership anyone that wanted to join could join and we would have open shows where everybody could bring a piece and we would have jury shows and we had jury shows at north park um plots of the americas and uh those that are starting out that are just beginners have as much crack in getting in a show as anyone else especially the open shows and they get uh it's not a direct mentoring situation but it is a an atmosphere where they can come and be with other artists and we're having programs
now periodically educational programs so yeah it's it's a great group for for mentoring and this year we're celebrating our 30th anniversary and they're not going to do as big a deal as we had for the 25th and they asked me for my approval and i said y'all are in charge do whatever you want i spent three years helping put the 25th together and you paid your dues over and over is that a call for a sneeze and you must have some dangers who are yours i took a class from octavio median when the dma was in fair park and uh are you familiar with the
gold background in temple emanuel's main sanctuary octavio fired those tiles and installed them all each one at a different angle to give it the look of the flame and i spent a semester with him i took a semester with james searles in night school when he was at smu and uh i didn't know he was the best than you he was he was at night school teaching them and i think he may have done a day two but i took a night school course with him what was the year on this one what was the year on this one it was probably in the late
70s and james has done quite well yes he had a show at gerald peters gallery of his work and i approached him and i said james remember when i was your class you hit a couple licks on my butt arc log i was working on would you mind coming over and putting your name where you hid it a couple lakes you know to increase its value and he took took the bait he says i don't put my name on any sculpture because if anybody ever gets hurt on a piece of my sculpture i'll deny that i had anything to do with it i mean i
was kidding and he was kidding but no he's he's a good guy he's done very well he and george tomolowski are very close available ginger chestnut did a verbal with him you have that he was born in 1900 he attended cumberland hills school which is now cedco on acker street and woodall rogers he ended up working at sanger brothers on lamar street and some of the employees were unhappy and he took their complaints to management and as a result they told him he could leave so he left the employee of sanger brothers somehow he fell in with rl thornton state bank and trust which later
became the merkin deal and he and fred florence were the two main jewish bankers in dallas for a long time morton benno was r.l thorne's right-hand man but he was more of a pr manager you know him he he really wasn't a banker but he rose through the ranks and became a senior executive vice president before he retired and he was involved in the creation of golden acres he was an air raid warden in world war ii and really i still had his certificate and he was very active to pharah he was president from 1940 to 41. and after he passed away so many people came to me and said you don't know this but i went to the mercantile for money and your father took me down to the teller and i got money and i paid it back and i came back again and again and finally i came for a larger amount and he said to them it's time you start borrowing direct from the bank apparently they didn't qualify so he was covering them and he would tell a lot of stories but when we asked who that was he would say mr x because you can't write confidences but uh a lot
of people would apply for loans and he would take him to the loan committee and they would say he's got nothing he's got no collateral no background i know his family they belong to birth israel they're all right and a lot of people got loans from the mercantile that they couldn't get elsewhere you should know that a lot of people know that about your father well thank you he would not want me bragging on him because he was very non-vocal about all these things i mean he did him he was involved in them but he didn't uh didn't wear it on his chest he was
active in the variety club he was dogai which is their name for the treasure for a long time met some very interesting people through that and um he was one of the few jews involved in variety club he was also an elk and 33rd degree mason and in the early days of dallas he played poker with a lot of the city people and some of them were members of a group called kkk did you know that back in those days well it was a friendly group they were an organization and but he learned his way around city hall and they did a lot of things
for the bank in relation to the city and when i was in college one weekend up i got a call a sunday morning to my one of my friends called he was in jail i asked my father to help me go down there and get him out they wouldn't do it so i said what if it was me in jail and i called you sunday morning to get out what would you do he says you could rot i would not get you out of jail so i remembered that my friend was a mason and i told him that he said let's go so we went
down to the city hall on harwood street and the officer said are you a bail bondsman he says no he said well you can't make his bond he said yes i can i'm a field fee holder in the city of dallas and i can make his bond policemen say okay we got him out how did he get him how did he land there in jail the two of them had dates i think it was a football weekend up here and the two of them had days they took them home and they were on main street and the driver was a little intoxicated and got pulled
over and he said where are you going so i'm looking for the office hotel he said well it's a block away and i said we'd better drive you in so they arrested both of them unbeknownst to each other so when he came down first person came down we asked where the other one was he said i don't know he said i went to sleep in the back seat and i woke up a policeman was driving this particular man later became an attorney and a judge in south texas and uh so we asked for the other person he said yeah he's here so we got him
he got off the elevator with a bottle of bad 69 in his hand we said what's this they said whatever they bring in here we give them when they leave so anyhow there were a lot of people that were good friends of the family and always felt the you know jew and gentile alike with a lot of friends and um what else can i say you're saying it what is the most fun thing you did as a youngster hobby sport i build model airplanes like those kids at that age did moderately involved in the boy scouts scouts were not a big thing at that time
maurice beck was our scout master at temple and a m pretty well controlled four years of my life and we marched in parades in fort worth houston austin dallas and then for 10 years i was in uniform because i was in rotc in high school for four years a m for four years in the army for two years so at the end of 10 years i didn't have any clothes any civilian glove but i bought something to go to wharton and anyhow do you get to travel much because i would think you would because of your art i have traveled in the past my sister
in houston was going on a tour with a group to israel they got me to join the group and her husband led us so rest in peace got a business conflict and backed out long story short i decided to go on my own and talk to bart bernstein who had been there he says piece of cake in fact he met his wife on a bus and i was going and we always got for their anniversary and i was talking to my brother-in-law in hurlington i said why don't you let your wife go to israel with me he said okay i'll talk to her call tonight
so long story short we all met in houston for the anniversary and helen and i got on a plane and went to israel for two weeks all we had was our ticket and a plane reserve a hotel reservation the first night and we just faked it after that and just had a ball up the golan heights we got a guy that some friends had recommended and spent the night in the kibbutz and uh it was a great trip later i went on a cruise with my older sister scandinavian cruise like a year or two later i took my 16 year old nephew who because my
father had broken his hip missed out on a christmas trip and i said i'll go to europe with you long story short he and i went on that same cruise and then went to paris where he had a great uncle and great aunt and uh just had a ball so i've been about halfway around the world halfway one way or a quarter one way and quarter the other haven't gone all the way around yet so it's mainly the art in america that's influenced your well i've been exposed to a lot through pictures magazines and whatnot and for several years international sculpture center out of new
jersey had conferences and they brought in people christo was there one year and they brought in all sorts of people to to lecture and show their wares so i've been exposed i mean it's better to see the real thing but the nasher's been real great for dallas and ray was real good for the tsa he let us go to north park and he juried a show we had at plaza of the americas i called robert miller at the morning news and i told him i had two pieces juried in the show with tsa you know the positive americans i don't know if you know robert
miller he said so what i said it's a big deal he said so what you got two pieces in a show and i said well right now sure was one of the jurors he's oh wait a minute let me get a pencil and he wrote a beautiful write-up about tsa show and about who the drawer was and that i was in it so got a slow news day there we got some good press for tsa and then ray gave me a blue ribbon for one of my pieces at north park and i let it hang on the piece and when i went to pick up
the piece the blue ribbon was gone i hope you asked for another one i somehow managed to survive without it uh martin is there anything i've left out that you'd like to add i think you've been very thorough nancy i'm sure i'll think of some things tomorrow or the next day that i should have said well please call us we have some film left how long do these interviews normally run this is good this is about it it was a good interview i became a master mason right after i graduated from a m and i don't know if you know about masonry but nothing is
in writing all the ritual or is passed on verbally and they paired me up with a man cartilage pressures let itself rest in peace who lived in old cliff he had a brilliant mind he was a clerk with railway express but he taught many people the the rituals that we had to memorize and i went to his house the summer before one went in the army or actually the summer before i went overseas and he taught me the work and he said you know i went to europe in world war one and most of the guys on the ship that said i know i'm not
coming home most of those guys got killed and those that went over and said you know i'm going to go over i'm going to do this deal i'm coming home most of them came back so this was his way of teaching me positive mental attitude and he instilled in me along with teaching me the masonic work and i guess that's the first time you asked about mentors this was the first true lesson i had in political mental attitude since then i've read the books by napoleon hill and clements stone and all those but mr brashers gave it to me with that lesson on the ship
going over there and the whole time i was in korea and i wasn't in harm's way very often but when i was i just was very relaxed about it because i knew it was coming home and that was many years ago and it stuck with me and i have that basic attitude everything's going to be good