Raymond Lambert
Raymond Lambert was born in Dallas in 1934. His father, a garment cutter, had come from New York with his parents and four brothers in the early 1930s, leaving behind conflicts with the garment unions. In Dallas the family opened Sue and Manufacturing Company, named for a cousin, Sue, and Raymond's sister, Annette, which employed about fifty women making ladies' blouses. Raymond recalled that the family name had been Cohen in New York and was changed to Lambert on the journey south. His grandfather, David Birnbaum, had been an investor in the early film industry in California before selling his interest and settling in Dallas.
Raymond described a happy childhood in South Dallas, running with a group of boys, bicycling, reading comic books, and buying French bread from a neighborhood bakery. He attended Forest Avenue High School, which had a large Jewish population. He studied architecture at Texas A&M, where he was in the Corps, and had planned on Army service since childhood. After graduation and a stint with the Dallas City Planning Department, he was sent to Europe with the Ordnance Corps, serving with the 44th Ordnance Company near Mannheim, Germany, where he oversaw warehouses of supplies for the Seventh Army and traveled widely to see castles and architecture.
Raymond married Hannah, whom he had known since she was five years old, after inviting her to a ring dance in college; their son Craig was born in Aberdeen, Maryland, during his basic training. Returning to Dallas, Raymond worked in city planning before pursuing architecture, eventually opening his own firm and training many young architects. He and Hannah were active in Jewish community life, serving on the board of the Jewish Community Center, involvement in B'nai B'rith, and long ties to Akiba Academy, where his son was in an early class and Hannah worked for many years. He advised the next generation to find work and a partner they truly love.
Full Transcript
in 1934 dallas texas how do you see the jewish community in dallas how has it changed over the years i have been involved I've been on the board of directors at the the community center I've been involved in bnei breath I was a present one of the made with chapters which is now defunct the community center has grown so big that it's it's not a Jewish function anymore it's it's a it's a corporation I am active into fareth I was gone went to sheriff Israel when I was growing up and I'm not real Orthodox I'm not real conservative and I'm not real reform I'm just
sort of there I'm religious but I'm not I don't practice it like you know like the Orthodox do my wife is Orthodox Jewish I mean we keep closer and we do all the stuff that you're supposed to do her father was Orthodox and so we we do that I do that because it makes her happy I'm not that involved that I like working with the synagogues I liked working with with the with the people here but from a religious standpoint I'm not real religious you do for you while I was on the board there I did when before they moved their new campus I did
some of the buildings on the on there Oh original school and I said two kids there when that when we first thought we were Craig my son was in the second class when I keep it started and Hannah's been working there for 28 years so I was very involved in Makeba again I never thought much about the religious function I just thought they were giving it really good education so I went along with that I'm very happy with it my my son-in-law is not Jewish but he sent both of my granddaughter's there and he's extremely happy with akiba I think it's probably wanted the best
things in Dallas rain in 1934 Dallas Texas what he remembers a little kid I remember being able to walk out the front door of my house and look to downtown and see the clock on the mercantile bank until what time it was I remember on Halloween we could go downtown and there'd be thousands of kids on Main Street walking up and down in costumes it was a very nice place to live and your folks do my father was a blouse manufacturer here in Dallas he had come from New York with his parents having had a problem up there with the unions they came to Dallas
but what year was that enough the early 30s because I was born here in 34 right yeah did he ever say what the trouble was in New York or why they say my father was a cutter and they were in the garment industry in New York and it was highly unionized and they didn't like the unions so my great grant of my grandfather and my father and his four brothers just hooked him down to Dallas wow they just came here and they opened up a blast actually bad went to work for an artist sportswear as a cutter there and then he opened up his own
business here called sue and manufacturing company named for my cousin sue and my sister Annette and they had a really nice business over on irving street they had probably 50 girls working for him making ladies blouses and after about i guess when I was about 12 or 13 years old the union's came to Dallas and tried to organize here and my father's shop was one of the places they tried to organize it was a very interesting situation the the labor goons would come down and try to rest the girls and they had to walk from my father's business about a half a block to the
bus stop to catch the bus to go home when they started this the they made the mistake about four or five of the girls were dating policemen and the policemen came down here and just really beat up on the goon something never came back Wow and it was your Eames I have an article in the balance morning news where it says Dallas manufacturers Beach the unions Wow and it was a long time before they ever tried to unionize here again what was very interesting time does your folks ever talk about is that move or down here was in the depression that's correct and so that
having a difficult time now is your dad already married to your mama anemia okay so they were mayor mayor of New York the only conversation that I ever remember about my dad would when they came down here was my name is Lambert but in New York it was Cohen and the story we got was somewhere along the line coming down here they decided to change their name and but this story they gave me was that on the train they passed a barn that had a paint sign on it and part of the name was Lambert so that's what they pick to do now I have
no idea if that's true or not but that was the storyline they gave us Wow we lived with it and I was very happy being a Lambert yeah that's all you knew that was all I knew well tell me about your grandparents you remember them at all my father's power my father's father I never met my father's mother I did my grandfather was David Birnbaum here in Dallas he was a an investor partner in the movie business in California before they had talkies and when talkies came in in His infinite wisdom he decided that would never work so he sold his interest to metro-goldwyn-mayer and
moved to Dallas he got enough money to where he was basically retired he lived here we lived on Forest Avenue which is now Martin Luther King in a very nice house really a big house and all he did was get up in the morning go play the stock market he was interested in in the film industry my grandmother was just a very nice lady both of them lived pretty good lies my grandmother got the ill and was hospital and what is bedridden for probably six or seven years did I ever tell you how he got into the film industry in California no actually I think
my grandparents attitude was children should be seen and not heard and you don't really talk to him yeah I don't ever remember having a conversation with my grandfather and which is was probably all right i know that when my grandmother used to play cards they played cards at their house on Forest Avenue and they had this big round table with a glass top and they would play cards and I'd sit underneath the table and watch the cards but nobody really talked to us about the past or but happened in New York or anything like that we should do for fun as a little kid read
comic books and I bicycle I lived in South Dallas and there was probably a group of six or seven boys that we all ran together that we're all Dallasites here and we go bicycling all around town and we shoot each other with BB guns and we just do all kind of little stuff that we weren't supposed to do and we had a very good time I had a very enjoyable childhood I really did there was no conflict loop I went to forest avenue high school which had a very large Jewish population I lived close enough to where I could walk from my house to school
and realistically I didn't have to study very hard and so the school was not a problem for me and I just enjoy dad the kids we'd walk to school pitching pennies on the sidewalk all the way to school I have friend who lived near us and we would go and there was a bakery near my house blend bakery and the guy just made really great french bread rye bread and stuff like that and he would not and I would go over there and we would buy a french bread about this long about two foot long I think it was nine cents and we break it
in half and cut up break off the end and then we'd stick our arms up the bread and walk down the street eating our arm and people would almost run off the sidewalk I mean they couldn't figure out what's going on and we did little things like that you run around and we collect bottles and coke bottles and stuff and take them back for the two cents that she could get to buy more stuff and we just had a very enjoyable childhood as you remember your first car oh yes definitely I didn't get a car until I went to college and it was a ford
fairlane and it was green and green and I drove it there for I guess three years in college and then I got sent to Europe and I took it with me to Europe and I remember we paid four hundred and fifty dollars for the car he was used when i bought it and i sold it in europe for over a thousand Wow and i bought an opal record i had the first four door open record in the united states and the government brought it back for me when i went to college I went to Texas am I was in the military that was in the
Corps there and when I graduated they I worked for six months here in Dallas for the City Planning Department and then I was sent to Europe my son was born in Aberdeen Maryland when I went for basic training and Hannah stayed here for till he was three months old and that she came and met me in Europe which was an interesting experience at that time in Europe they were undergoing a massive massive building boom they were importing people from Algeria and from Morocco and from everywhere as labor because there weren't enough people to build and I didn't want to live on in the military post
because I would have had to enlist for another year so I lived off post I live in a five-story walk-up that was being built when I got there and it was still being built when I left but it was a very nice brand new building and when I picked Hannah up at the airport and brought her to the to the place to live we had to walk up five flights of stairs carrying my son and our luggage and we got up to the top floor where we were living and we walked in and the way the building was built the floor was made out of
concrete mixed with wood chips for insulation and when we got there they hadn't put me one only ever bound and had a walk the image to want to look at this place the kitchen had no appliances there was nothing there but a sink the windows had no screens on them because they didn't have screens there and she took one look at this place I know no closets and she sat down the middle little flourish in case and cried it was the worst experience she'd ever had but we got everything fixed up and it was a very nice place to live the German landlady was not
a Nazi she told me quite specifically that she liked Americans and she didn't know any Nazis couldn't it didn't know where they were but I'm sure they were there somewhere but she didn't know and she was really very nice to us no way what year is this around 59 back 59 so you were the service was in between the Korean conflict and then vehicle right okay the only the only interesting time that I had their the Russians decided to take Berlin back the Berlin Airlift had been going on when I got there and they decided to stop it so 7th army was put on alert
and we were told to get ready to evacuate at that time there were fourteen thousand dependence in Europe right and I was told that there were 77 airplanes and 14 ships or vice versa forget which available for evacuees and that we would be given notice and everybody was to drive to Nancy France to get on the boats well a week later there were only three airplanes and two or three ships in three days after that there were no airplanes in those ships and not one dependent had left Europe Wow and I went to the officer's club one day and I met one of my friends
there he said Lambert if you got your rocks ready and I said what I need rocks for he says well you know the order is the Standing Orders the whole Europe for 14 days for resupply from continental United States I said yeah he says well there's only three days supply of ammunition here so you better have a lot of rocks to throw at these Russian tanks because there's 37 russian divisions on the border in poland and we only have three here so it's going to be interesting and i talked to one of my buddies later on in the Intelligence Division and he told me that
not too worried the Russians won't invade my said why not he says because the Germans won't let up I says they don't want them to invade I says why is that he says because we've got atomic minds all along the border is if they try and cross it will blow him up and the Germans don't want that to happen so they'll work out something with him and they did did you always want to go to the service I went to Texas A&M I had planned to be in the army from day one the problem I had was my feet were so flat I couldn't get
me infantry and my vision was so bad they wouldn't let me fly an airplane so I ended up in the Ordnance Corps which was ok I didn't mind that I had a good time I had a I was in a company stationed in mannheim germany and we had all the supplies for 7th army i had seven warehouses i had probably an area half a mile by a mile with nothing but warehouses full of supplies and we ship stuff all over Europe and I had my company I was in the 44th ordinance company and I had I had 21 two and a half ton trucks and
48 18 wheelers and not counting my beeps and stuff like that and we would travel stuff all over Europe you know taking supplies my company officers there were seven of us and I think the oldest one was probably 30 and I with it we went everywhere in Europe um vocal orders of the commanding officer I used up none of my leave time but in the two years I was there and we saw every Castle within 600 miles and I got to see a lot of stuff architectural II that I wanted to see because my major in college was architecture I consider it a two year
vacation there was nothing bad my only problem that I had was I don't drink and there was so much good stuff to drink in Germany that I never got to take advantage of we were stationed about no 21 kilometers from Heidelberg heidelberg at that time had the largest officer's club in the world and it was just beautiful and we go there for dinners and stuff like that so not filling the home where did where do you go to I came straight back to Dallas and then what did you get into I went to work for the City Planning Department for the city of Dallas and
I worked for a gentleman named Marvin Springer who was the director of City Planning here for about 10 years and then he left and opened his own office and I went to work with him I moved and went to work with him and I worked there for about three years and he called me in when babies is Raymond do you want to be a city planner you want to be an architect I said I want to be an architect he said well then I suggest you get out of here and go get a job doing architecture because you're not going to do any architecture in
this office we just do City Planning I said ok so I went out and I i found the gentleman by the name of Paul Bentley who was an engineer but he had a firm that worked in Texas doing public housing and he did small public housing projects in rural communities and I worked through him for about three years and with the understanding that he was an older man he was probably mislaid babies that when he died he would leave the firm to me and to another guy who was doing the promotion work and when he did finally died his wife decided that that wasn't what
she wanted to do that she and the lady secretary would take over the business and we could work for them well I told her not only no but hell no and I quit and when I quit five of the jobs that they had came with me and so I walked out of there and I had my own business and I never looked back I i worked for myself from then on I never had a jaw never work for another office that's how I went when did when did you and Hannah me when she was five years old she lived next door to my cousin sue
and I would go to see sue and they live next door and I've known her forever your whole life basically huh now when did you guys start dating realistically at that time they did you didn't date like they do now when we were growing up I mean you would go in groups and we did that for a while but I didn't really date her until I got to college what happened was I invited her down to the senior ring then to a ring dance that I am and what were there I said Hannah would you like to go steady and she said yes when are
we going to get married I'm already committed what can I do yeah and Here I am so I said anytime you want so you guys got married in dallas and one child was born before you was here he was born in Aberdeen Maryland okay she she was pregnant and I went to Aberdeen for my basic training and Craig was born there we went to the movie I dropped her off at the hospital and next morning I went back and picked up her and the baby the army does things very efficiently yeah that was your other child born Dallas so is everything that you know okay
hema and I were both born here i was born in the basement at baylor hospital she was in st. Paul but the kids aberdeen was the hospital there was a military hospital and the kids had no problem at all it's worked out fine what was the happiest time in your life Oh what do you think was the neatest invention you ever saw I read science fiction I love science fiction and so many of the things that I read the science fiction are now fact and it's hard to pick one but I would probably say that the the computer is the most it's it's changed so many things that I do I used to do all my drawing by hand right but now everything's done on
a computer and I can do one compete one computer operator can do what five draftsman used to do in the same length of time and it's just fantastic the amount of work you can produce the problem I have with it is these kids that come out of college that are learning how to supposedly be architects they're not they're learning how to be computer draftsman and it's time I've trained probably 20 architects in town they've worked for me and then open their own office but most of them are not good they're not real good designers and they some of them don't even know how to put
the building together it is know how to drive and I find that as a big fault with the universities in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions we had the president assassinated here in Dallas been landing the first time in 69 something good which I loved because that was my science patients that yeah yeah I was sitting in my office actually I was sitting in the office mr. Bentley drawing on a housing project when Kennedy came and there was another guy there drawing with us and we were both listening to the radio would have happened and we had commented and this is really true we had commented not 20 minutes earlier it's um yo-yos going to probably take a shot at him and darned if they didn't yeah well I wish nothing we could have done about it but at that point in time in my life I would he didn't think much of Kennedy because I thought we were setting up a dynasty and that bothered me as things turned out it turned out he
was a really a remarkably smart man and it was a great loss I don't think I really thought a whole lot about Kennedy coming here as as an event the event happened after he got here yeah I think that that did tremendous damage to the city of Dallas as far as construction as far as my work in architecture whip because I would talk to people about coming to Dallas maybe why come here it was very detrimental to now that's gone away but I mean for five or ten years it was a bad man you and Anika two children a son and the daughter right for
biological grandkids one step grandchild what the advice does granddad had for that next generation the non-biological grandchild went to Annapolis graduated Annapolis became a Marine officer the nuclear submarine doing what he wants to do he's happy married my oldest grandson is now in cape town working for a company bear my oldest granddaughter is just turned 21 because her birthday at my birthday are the same she was a birthday present one year and she is getting ready to go to Barnard College and the other two are in akiba and I've told all of them the think that I would best suggest that you do is find
a job that you like because the rest of it will work out if you're doing something the rest of your life that you like you'll be happy and if you can find somebody you want to live with for the rest of your life I suggest you do that I don't this little it's a great job man thank you very much fun