Regina Pierce
Regina Pierce was born in Bryan, Texas, in 1898, into a family with deep and colorful roots. Her father, David Selig Hart, emigrated from Berlin at age 13 to live with an uncle in Athens, Alabama, later working as a grain dealer and eventually a cotton buyer in Bryan. He was remembered as a small, debonair man who had spent time in Leadville during the silver rush. Her mother, Flora Wolf, was born in New Orleans around 1870 to Morris Wolf and Rosalie Pinsky, whose 1866 marriage contract Regina preserved as a family treasure. Regina proudly recounted a family tradition of a great-great-uncle who had been a pirate with Jean Lafitte and later died at the Alamo. After her mother died when Regina was very young, she and her sister Rose were raised by their aunt Frieda, a cultured German woman said to be among the first German women to embrace Reform Judaism.
As a child Regina lived for a time in Berlin with her aunt and grandmother before returning to Bryan, where about fifteen Jewish families built a small congregation called Temple Freedom. She was in its first confirmation class, taught by the famed Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, whom she deeply admired and would accompany by train when he lectured at Texas A&M. She graduated from high school in 1917, worked as a stenographer in the extension and architectural departments at Texas A&M, and was locally known as the first girl in Bryan to bob her hair. During World War I her family home hosted the Jewish Welfare Board, giving her the chance to meet young Jewish men stationed nearby.
In 1919 Regina moved with her family to Dallas, where she worked for the government and later as a secretary in the oil business. She began teaching Sunday school at Temple Emanu-El and remained a member there. In 1925 she married H. Lee Pierce, a former rug salesman and oilman who had been raised in a Hebrew orphanage and served in World War I. They had two children, Pauline and Leonard. Regina recalled the sharp divisions in early Dallas between Reform and traditional Jews and expressed joy at how much more united the community had later become. Active in Brandeis and the American Jewish Committee, she was celebrated for her warmth, and described herself as a lifelong Pollyanna as she looked forward to her 95th birthday.
Regina spoke fondly of the transformations she witnessed over her long life, from oil lamps and outdoor wells in Bryan to electricity and modern conveniences. She reflected candidly on the hardships faced by Black and Mexican residents of her youth and expressed admiration for the changes she had seen. Raised speaking German at home, she recalled the caution her family took not to speak it during the world wars. She treasured her family's history, including her aunt Frieda's letters, wedding gifts from Berlin, and the marriage documents of her New Orleans grandparents.
Full Transcript
today is may the 29th 1993 it's now approximately 1 30. we're here with regatta the mother of pauline revere and leonard peterson and leonard pierce um now leonard is the professor no i'm sorry he built this house he was a builder and now he's a photographer because this is a cousin mother's nephew i think he's a writer and he lives in portland oregon is that leonard no the professor sorry for the confusion but we're here as part of a continuing group of world histories taken for the american jewish committee ms pierce do you understand that this tape um may be used in the american jewish committee archives and it do you have any problem with its
um use by the american jewish committee for research or for publication or for use in its archives for any scholarly purpose or ajc purpose would it be would there be any problem with the american jewish committee making this available for no use in any form see i turned up say i was very active in brandeis and uh i turned over all the papers of brain dogs i've got some now evenly turned over and i told them all that at the time no i have nothing to hide and you've been very active with the american jewish committee oh yes i was very effective with that way
back there when it first started in dallas well i hope we're going to get have time to talk about that also but we've got a lot of ground to cover now and if if you'll be good enough i'd like to begin with the with describing all of the people in your family as far back as family memory carries you and i'm going to ask that you go through the process of assembling those names however you want let's not be rigid and i'll just mark them down on a page as we go through them and then we can go back and cover them one by one
well uh maybe when you asked your questions when you said uh go back as far as i can you know going back it's very hard to remember names but i didn't know well maybe you heard from your grandparents about their parents then it's just my father came from berlin and his mother lived to be 102. okay let's get those names your father's name well his name was david selick hart h-a-r-t from berlin yeah if it was any different there and when he came over here i don't know because you know people change their names so much because he went to live with an uncle who lived in athens alabama when he was 13 years old is it possible that his name was hertz maybe he translated it hurts it could have been i don't know well no what was his mother's name and hannah what did you know her maiden no but hannah hart we assume you know did you ever meet her
yes see it goes back to my father came to athens alabama where his uncle whose name was lerman life's name was lerman and that family is all intermarried now that we have know nothing about any of them but anyway uh then my father was very active around there in in tennessee and in alabama and there and i don't know i think he was a grain dealer there and a lot of other things but he got engaged to a girl by the name of hattie i remember that hattie hattie h-a-t-t-i-e hattie sloan s-c-h-l-o-m okay and they were to be married and she died three weeks before
they were to be married so then he wandered away from then i know he was at the in leadville at the time of the silver rush there and how he got to brian i don't know why never took it for granted you know how you do when kids you don't remember things and he married my mother now she was a whole lot younger than i am than he was and i was washing him was she a brian girl well she was the one that was born in new orleans and she is was the well it was i guess it was their wedding yeah that we
had these papers on in 1865. now that was my mother's mother and father let's what is your mother's name flora floral wolf and your mother's mother's name was what i don't know unless it's in that paper it could be i think it is and this is not a regular ketubah if you read it it you see it's not because it says in there that the the bride and groom or the in it that the couple were to get eight thousand dollars in cash which was a lot of money in those days but it says in there that the husband would have nothing to do with the spending of the money it's
in there i'm going to read this quickly so we can understand the contents the said intended wife shall have the entire and free administration their own property and the exclusive use of the revenues it may yield expenses of the said intended marriage in the maintenance and education of the children which may be born thereof shall be incurred and paid by the said intended husband out of his separate funds the said intended wife possesses and will bring into the said intended marriage personal property to the amount in money and note of eight thousand dollars the same having been acquired by her by donation from her cousin
max pinsky p-i-n-s-k-i that was the family name in in the new audience and her uncle davis wolf w o w-o-o-l-f that's david wolf do you remember in galveston paulie you met him as per the act of donation passed before that must have been another david wolf because because that was my mother's age and this is the marriage certificate of my mother's mother and father yeah your grandson yeah this document was uh executed apparently and original by j.a.s period graham g-r-a-h-a-m g-o period senas c-e-n-a-s rosalie pinsky r-o-s-a-l-i-e-p-i-n-s-k-i and andrew hero jr i don't know any of them notary public and they were filed for office in
new orleans april 12 1881. what is that 1881 well isn't this dated 1865 well let's see what that's what i do this may be a certified copyright maybe a different document what i was reading from was this was a second page of a three-page document and now i'm looking at the first page styled state of louisiana parish and city of new orleans yet known that on this 22nd day of june in the year of our lord 1866 and of the independence of the united states of america the 91st before me andrew hero jr noted republican for the parish the city of new orleans in the presence of witnesses states morris
wolf of the city party here two of the one part and miss rosalie pinsky a minor in her 21st year of her age but duly emancipated by the decree of the honorable the second district court of rendered on the 18th day of june uh of the same day as a certified copy of which is annex for reference to an act passed this day in this office she being also a resident of the city party here too the first part which said morris wolf w-o-o-l-f and rosalie pinsky that was my grandfather my mother's father declared that in view of the marriage which is about to be
solemnized between them they had contracted and agreed and do by these presence mutually contract and agree upon the stipulations and conditions etcetera that the said intended shall be separated in property and to this end in purpose they may hereby formally renounce the disposition of the civil code of the state establishing a community of uh i suppose that means assets and gains between husbands and wife as between those of all similar laws and all other place which the said husband and wife may hear and have to reside and it goes on to further explain the terms for the separation property so what you have what your
um this is your grandparents this is my yeah that was the wedding of my grandfather and grandmother on your mother's side on my mother's oh yes this is all this is up so floor wolf's parents rosalie pinsky and morris wolf and that eight thousand dollars which was a lot of money there when you see when he was this morris wolf went i'm getting i get so confused trying to think when he no they one of someone they went to england as a secretary of the commission for the confederacy he was then ordered to try to get money for the confederacy but he had a shoe
factory in new orleans and have to be or he had nothing so they never had any of that eight thousand dollars that must have been in confederacy money but that was we're talking about 1867 so why would they talk about separate property i don't know how do you know as much as i do well it's interesting because what you have here is a document that's now very popular it's a prenuptial event so they were way ahead of their time you know at the time when mark got married dad and i sat at a table with was it mark somebody got married i sat at the
table with the relatives from new orleans and i told them about this stipulation and that they said that has a lot to do with the laws in louisiana at that time and some to this day that they acted more at that time under the laws of france instead of the united states and france always took care of women more than any other country now that's what i've been told well we have the similar kinds of laws here in texas they're community property laws and they provide for community of and they didn't and so they did not want to have their that property shared between the
husband and the wife at the beginning of the marriage that's interesting isn't it i think it is now let's you as far back as we've gone now we have rosalie pinks pinsky [Music] and morris wolf and on the other side at that level we have hannah hart but we don't know hana that is your father's mother's husband's yes his name was joseph i think i think it was children you know i left their pictures from removed from firestone i had them framed and didn't bring them with me they were in berlin but my aunt you'll see later on that my aunt my father's sister raised
my my sister and me she was one of the first jewish women in germany to become a reformed jewish now we're talking about selig hart's sister yes and what is what she was frieda freedom uh well she ended up being frieda casa but in germany she was frieda grossberg because she had been married to a doctor there who died and that's when she came back but that's the story of itself too okay do you know if joseph or hannah had any other siblings yeah they had a daughter named rosie well that was her first time rosie rutkowski and they're the ones that changed their name
to rutland here okay so you know you're talking about another one david had two sisters okay that's rosie and frieza not frida and frieda yeah okay and rosie's name was what rosie rutkoski do you know how to spell that r-u-t i think i signed out because jane can give you that jane ray that's a distant relative but the name was changed to rutland after it came to united states but rakovsky was a rabbi in liverpool england for 25 years rosie's husband what was his name rachel his first name you know i've forgotten it it'll come to me after a while it's been so long since
i even uncle i'll ask jane i'll call you and give you that that's that's very interesting did you ever meet him i think i met him when my sister and i were living in berlin for a year and a half but in 1910 auntie and papa and rosie and i sailed from galveston to new york and in new york we were to take a boat to liverpool england and we were met in new york by judas and his brother bert with the news that his name was rudolf burkowski that uncle rudolph had died so we never saw him after that so rudolph was the rabbi
from liverpool do you know where he was born no no all right so we're we're making we're making a lot of progress here so we already know about joseph and hannah we know they have three children david selighart your pet your father frieda grossberg and rosie rutkowski rutland whose husband was a rebel freda grossberg um casey because that's what everybody knew from dallas k-a-c-z-e-r she had remarried k-a-c z-e-i ain't he was well known too among we had very few jewish people in comparison now but she was a wonderful person do you have any idea when uh joe joseph and hannah were born no i don't
know anything about it well you did say something didn't you tell me you're oh that's on your mother's side though on whose side was somebody the one of the first reformed jews that's frida kaiser freda was one of the first are you talking about america or in germany in germany where the rigid you know reformed judaism originated in germany i don't know if you know that um i do and i'd be do you know what city it is that frida uh was raised in in germany no i don't it might have been berlin i just don't i was about four years old at the time
can you give me an idea when that was four years old well i'm 94 right now so that's 90 years is that right you didn't know that no i'll be 95 in october your mother knows it that's wonderful but you know what just happened to me don't you yes but you look very well now i feel sorry thank god i'm a mystery i returned from the dead a good friend of mine called me up and says hello angel and the rest of them call me their miracle because really they thought i was gone the doctor thought i was gone but how do you feel right
now outside are you happy i'm happy very happy i always say i i always had been a pollyanna all my life that's why you and my mother get along oh yes she is terrific she doesn't let anything get a diamond nothing nothing well we have we have joseph and hanno do we have any idea where they were born you know nobody even thought of taking notes but you just take i was talking yesterday to a friend of mine here who is from louisiana or somewhere and she's in the same position i am she never thought to ask any questions okay well sooner or later everybody
it's jane ray on the phone is there a name that you wanted from her yeah uh now we pauline just found out that um uh rudkowski in america was known as uh turned out not to be a rabbi he turned out to be a cantor and two his first name was not rudolph it was adolf yeah that's uncle adolf now and i'm from this right now you also told me that rosie died in childbirth with her sixth child and that um he remarried married evil stepmother do you know her name no good we don't want to slander her i never met her and uh and
also and what i heard about it was from my aunt who grew up with her and know who used to leave berlin and go over to liverpool and wash these children's clothes once or twice a year and set them food and everything else and so as a result i think of the six children they all left home as soon as that possible and here was came from a really religious family three of them married catholics way back then and this was all they stayed in uh germany no they used to all aboard and that's a rabbi excuse me they say liverpool liverpool and then most
of them came to the united states do you know when no do you think it would that would be closer to do you think would be before the civil war or after i imagine after yeah i'm sure it was afterwards do you know what kind of businesses they they got into well i know that genius i don't know what he was in because he was who was julius the son yeah one of the sons of the rabbi okay the cat the cantor of the candlestone and the other son was a top top top salesman in new york for some men's supply thing and he was
a real good friend of all the big shots that started television what was his name radio probably oh radio television i mean i mean movies of the big movie people those were his friends do you remember his name um burt brookford are you tlandy and her mother uncle was john rosenfield who was the famous critic uh for the dallas morning news oh you ought to be able to get some that's gonna be a treasure trove this is jane's uncle or yes that means there was another brother then another son of adam that's on the other side on the mother's side of the family so that's
something that has nothing to do but you're trying to find out from me no it's interesting get it from her but we're mapping out the the territory and then when you get through with that she's married her name name ray who was a richoff skin that's a big old family here in dallas too there's a sculptor in the city named rushovsky that's mort yeah martial that's all a tremendous family here okay but that's the maternal um rutkowski the maternal side of one of the rucosti children's wives no no mother brought in a red herring for you are jane's husbands side of things i'm getting him
all confused better be careful that's why i have to take notes because you see you know all this but i are you going to do all sorts of cutting and editing on this probably not i mean eventually yes but i will um i believe when he's through with me he's going to have a lot of leads to talk to that's right now uh freda grossberg kaiser do you want to mention any of her kids she never had any i see we were my sister see i have a sister well let's not talk about the sisters now but frida grossberg caser had no children do you
know when she died yes she died when pauline was just before pauline was eight years old so you chase you try sit back that's 50 years ago actually she actually became mother's mother she literally moved into the home and raised them right yeah we never knew our mother at all auntie was she was known as auntie frieda kaiser and she's buried here in dallas and so is my father and tanta she's tattlet and david salacar do you know um do you remember when he died your father he died of god before i think four years ago just a few years before i could go to
the cemetery and work on the tombstone he's in what cemetery is he in dallas which ones oh both of them frida and your father um are any of the rukovsky rutland jude disruption is buried here in the emanuel cemetery now um we said that we didn't know any um brothers or sisters for joseph and hannah is that right that's your grandparents now let's we're going to come back and we're going to talk about growing up but first i want to talk about the wolf family because there's some very interesting stories yeah i know oh yeah about that that is my claim to fame no you've
got a lot of claims when people start bragging about their ancestors i say to them i listen to i said well i've got one claim to fame i what is that i have a great great uncle who was a pirate which you know said so that's really a claim to train isn't it now that it's funny that you didn't say who died in the alamo no i i tell them that later i tell them and when they when i told it so many times and everybody is so interested well why don't you tell the story how did it tell tell us right now how you
tell your friends well the way i tell it was if they're bragging and i'm going to brag so i said well i have one claim to fame what is it i have a great great uncle somewhere along the line who was a pirate with jean luffy what they'll say and when the pirates were chased out of new orleans they went to the isle of galveston and they were there when the cold came for volunteers to come to the alamo and to the alamo came a lot of people among them many scalawags and he was one of those that went there and he was killed at
the alamo and his name is on the walls of the alamo that's it and his name is well you tell it was his first name avram they have it printed down there as anthony i believe see and all of this is hearsay nothing is written when my mother died my i was about maybe going on anyways between four and five years of age and then i had a sister 17 months younger and then i had this younger brother well it's hard for me to and we we have no not the only thing that i from my mother's family at all is this level the rest
of the stuff their family and houston got it you know the gordinsky thing i don't see them so i can't give you any details about them what is the relationship of morris wolf anthony or alvin wolfe well all i know it's a great great uncle somewhere is way back there that's all i know i want to mention for anybody who reviews this that a discussion of this material appears in pioneer jewish texans by natalie ornish in appendix e at page 278 and one of the things discussed is um the the heart family that's that was my father alexander hart no that was david saleh are
you familiar with the jacob heart or an alexander heart no they were in 18th century um they were both born in the 18th century and they found their way to new orleans by around 1805. well that's that much that much i don't i really don't know see that was that heart you said yes well no that would be my father's son well everything else that i give you in regard to uh louisiana is on my mother's side so my father's is all german that came from germany well what natalie says in her book is that jacob hart's younger brother david hart of new orleans may have been an ancestor of jesus may have been you see right and if it was i know nothing i have never i know nothing about that in any case the heart family has nothing to
do with the wolf family and except that when my father married when david wolf married florida heart i mean uh david hart married floral wolf that was my mother and father well so nothing can nothing other than uh the marriage agreement of your grandparents on your mother's side came to you um and we don't know exactly the relationship of morris wolf to anthony or overwolf do we you don't know whether we don't know how far that goes back as i said i don't know because nothing was ever written all i know that i would hear stories as a child it seems to me it could
be a a grand uncle or an uncle yeah some ways and then we'd have to kind of see about the dates as to whether when something in new orleans whenever towards the date of the alamo and the date that we have on here did you did you ever hear anything specific about how he became a pirate or what made them come to texas nothing yeah he came to texas with the pirate from new orleans to galveston just to hide out but you don't know anything more about that who in your family told you the stories you just heard them you just happened to hear the
story i heard him talking you knew about a lot from uncle dave and galveston yeah but i don't remember much of it and you know the one who really knew that it was phil because jailbroken but uh i guess that they had they had some papers because it was phil's system sister-in-law someone who gave this to me that's how i came in possession of it this is a family from who is in houston and one of the brothers whose mother's cousin lived in fort worth so they were very close groginski none of them lived there anymore and then they live in houston some of the
greatest children and they've all changed their name to grogan no yeah all of them because phil gordinski was had something to do with the east texas oil fields being he was a geologist but his children all changed their names so i know nothing about them his siblings changed their names oh his brothers and sisters changed their names oh sealed now ross grogan phil and julian now what i want to do is go uh through each of the people that we've mentioned and collect whatever um general facts you have about them you never knew joseph your grandfather on your father's side you did know hannah hart
is that right your grandmother no you never met her not that i remember and they and both of them were german is that correct again joseph and hannah hart no they came originally some ways in england to before they came to the united states but i don't know where they came from before that i know that so that's how this one that joseph oh i don't know whether he was born in england but he lived in england and he shipped out of liverpool with a vulnerable company and as a dancer and went with this vulnerable troop from liverpool over to new york do you know
the name of the troop no did you ever hear any stories about what kind of act he had do you know if it had anything to do was it a jewish troop no i don't know i don't he stored above it illegitimately so as to get out of england that's all i stowed away that's what i was told i got this from my mother's sister now who are we talking about her mother's father your mother's father excuse me i'm sorry her father's father joseph david hart's father joseph oh no no no that's with anything germany not from england i think you better switch back i
think you better okay i've lost i think so too long i think it's so off that i can't give you who was the who is uh who was it that stowed away from england that was my mother's mother's father or grandfather i don't know which it was okay your mother uh is for a wolf and your mother's mother my mother was florida pinkus and became pimples and became flora hart see what's confusing is we're switching back and forth yeah the families well let me tell you what i have written down i have that your mother's name um was flora wolf heart right your mother's mother
was a pinsky rosalie pinsky right and that's what we we saw when we read the marriage document and what you were telling me is that on in rosalie pinsky's family um somebody came from england yeah it either i don't know whether it was her father or grandfather somebody did and that's how that branch of the family came to the united states and where did they wind up in new orleans i guess so that's all i know about them and i asked people from new orleans if there was a pinsky family but i thought that you said that the relative who went to plead the funds
from the confederacy was from another southern state not louisiana no no he's the one that was from new orleans okay excuse he's the one that was from new orleans was that a pinsky or a wolf that was a wolf now then we go to morris wolf's uh side of the family do you know any of morris's brothers do you know anything about his parents or grandparents years ago there was somebody in the wolf family living here in dallas but i never met the wolf i met his wife years ago and then she just disappeared she was not jewish and never became jewish what about uncle
dave how was he related that was my mother's brother and he laura had a brother named dave and he lived in galveston and that's an old old family he married into two old old families there but i don't know anything about i mean he married twice um can we assume that rosalie pinsky was born or grew up in new orleans that was my grandmother yes she did okay and uh morris wolfe the same i don't know where he came from in any case we know they got married we know they got mad we've got that too that's true they got married in new orleans and
then when did uh where did florey uh and where did your mother and your father meet i guess in brian because that's where they live but they went to galveston to get married and they were married by and i'm very proud of this by rabbi henry cohen did you over here yes the very very famous rabbi oh there never was and never will be another rabbi like rabbi henry coin he married my mother and father he used to come and talk at texas a m and i lived in bryan and a m was five miles away so whenever he spoke i would get on the
train in brian and ride five miles with rabbi cohen and he would say now what shall i talk about today is this is in the book about him and he would write his notes on his cuff as to what he was going to talk that day and that's what he talked and see this man is somebody to be very proud of in texas history because you were have you read any of his books no about it the man who came to texas that's the famous biography do you know was this about around world war one earlier yes around that time and so you you were
still living at home then i was living in brian are there any specific lectures of his that you remember or anything specific about his presence you just liked him very much i loved him was it because your parents loved him or was it just something that's because i loved him see we had 15 jewish families that lived in brian and we built a typical temple there and the rabbis in texas called the dal temple and the different rabbis would come so we got to know rabbi henry coin rabbi bernstein of houston rabbi faber of of tyler and dr greenberg i think from dallas but dr
henry cohen was the main one who and my sister and i were in the first confirmation class and we were taught by somebody in that and brian i forgot who it was and then rabbi confirmed us you see those shasta days is all across the front there that's what we carried on bouquets of shasta days as our flowers not so these but we cut them out of our front yard and carried them in at our confirmation what year was that well we graduated from high school in 1917 so it must have been about 19 14 or 15 something why don't you tell reed when you're
when your birthday is though we know we know he didn't know my age until i told him today let's um let's talk about your memories of your parents um i think uh yes but i i just barely remember my mother barely how how old were you when she died let's see rosie was a year and a half 17 months younger than i was and then there was another baby so you're probably four or five somebody's in there but i never did tell you paulie and i was just telling him that papa apparently was on the outs with my mother's family i don't know and he
had us living around i don't know with human brian but he had a lady a friend that he knew in houston because papa being a cotton buyer would have connections back and forth between brian and houston all the time and it was a mrs johnson had a boarding house and papa took us there and we lived at her house for at least a year before he took us to berlin to be with enki and i was mentioning that of the people that came and boarded there were the early people in movies i don't remember any of their names but i can still see them in
my mind's eye and hear them talking about that and at that time listen they weren't considered anything when they went an actor or actress they were not nice people according to people in those days that was in berlin no this is in houston ah let me read you what natalie ornish writes about your father she quotes you saying that floor wolf mary david hart she says she quotes you here my mother was born in new orleans circa 1870 my father came to america at age 13 to work for his uncle in athens alabama who had a great big old-fashioned general store and sold cotton material
and later on my father became a cotton buyer in bryan texas well he didn't buy it did she got that and and uh and so cotton material i don't know what he sold as i said he was at the silver russian library colorado and he was somewhere else and he was a gay debonarix it was a time of adelina patty and uh he he drove a a he had a uh what is it something uh had a horse and buggy with watery yeah and uh when he took when he took a date to hear adeline with heaven he always sat in a box seat never
and anything else and before the date he would send her a half a dozen elderly white kid to us this is your mother that's my father i mean your father would send that to your mother or to any somebody in not before that was before he came to texas that so this is when uh this uh singer would come to new orleans or excuse me alabama somewhere in tennessee and alabama and all around there he was a gay letharian a little bitty man he was just about my size but boy it's my anxious to say that he was little but he uh-huh [Laughter] and he
came at the age of 13. and you think that um he came from germany yes and i don't know where he landed but he did he come from berlin yeah and do you know what he was what his family did in berlin and nothing about that all i know about my father's mother and father was that the mother his mother was the main stay of the family and that he was a very learned man and all he did was to pray and study all day this is the father of hannah hart yes and that was in germany that's all i'm you are bringing out things that i haven't thought about i
bet in 50 years that's good isn't it yeah makes it fun it's fun for me is yes now david hart this debonair uh fellow who came to america at the age of 13 and who worked in in athens alabama and tennessee and he was selling cotton cloth everything in the stove but he became what's called a cotton buyer in brian that's where they bought the raw cotton and bales and they didn't actually ship it but they were the ones that bought it and sold it and it was there's nothing like it in the business today at all how old um was he before he got
into that end of the business i don't know i just know he was nearly 93 when he died and when he died in the 1950s whenever we've made police oh no not 1950s in the 19 well about 1939 i was long before you yeah pauline had just hadn't been i was a little girl very little because she was eight years you must have been about four or five when he died it's on the tombstone out here so that's all a temple manual he um do you know when he moved to brian no but it would have been some time before the turn of the century
because you you were born in britain born in 1898 so so it was before then that's where you came to bryant and we don't know whether your mother was actually living in brighton oh yes she was yeah but you don't know how she got there well her mother and father came there after the civil war but i don't know how or why or anything about it except that when they left new orleans he had had a shoe factory and when the war was over he had nothing but why he came to brian i don't know and there's nobody that i can pass i don't know
i don't know a lot of people that are reading the obituaries and i myself most of them are gone nearly everybody that i knew when i came to dallas they're all everybody's gone i am very fortunate that i have a lot of good friends like your mother yeah well i said i was always at pollyanna he said that's why his mother and i get along so good that's right we're going now uh into your growing up uh if you can re remember anything about uh the what's your home looked like uh we're here owen brian oh it was eight we had eight we had a
nine room house all on one floor with five fireplaces and a tin roof over the back hall which was a tremendous big back home we cooked with a wood stove we had a whale in the yard where we got our water you didn't have indoor water oh no did not whoever heard of something they even heard of such a thing uh when we came to that yeah we got it later on but not when i was a little girl see i graduated from high school in bryan before we came to dallas but and we had and even when we came to we used to boil
our clothes in the backyard and they were all done what year did what year did you leave uh brian and come to dallas in 1919 we came to dallas in august of 1919. well let's talk all right let's divide up the story into the bryan days and the dallas days okay and we'll start talking about the bryan days you you just described your home what kind now that was a home in bryan right now the home here was a 2925 forest avenue which now is across the street it's not there anymore it's across the street from the martin luther king martha creek luther king center santa where but it's that that's not on forest anymore oh i thought they called it uh it's on martin luther king boulevard yes yeah yeah so that they changed forest to martin luther
king nlp boulevard i see well i know i know that area pretty well and i i frankly remember i think there's some um small homes on the other side of the street oh they are there were very large homes on the other side the one that mother lived in was torn down and a clinic was put up there at private clinic that was right across the school too but i wish you would go back to what when you were a little girl and include in there about when your mother died and then you went to the boarding house and then tell about going to europe
oh that's very interesting yeah when after we went and i was saying when when uh when we were at mrs johnson in houston that's where the early movie people came all right then auntie's husband died he was a doctor in berlin and he died and papa took us over there and we lived with her and her mother who lived to be 102 that i mentioned you know you didn't use names when you said anti you meant tanta freedom yeah and you went with your father then my father took my sister and me and we took a ship from galveston to bremen germany and then went
to berlin by train when you're in bremen did you recall a lot of jewish people trying we just went through that well i was wondering if you remember anything do you remember jewish immigrants trying to come over to texas or do you see no didn't even know anything i was just four years old okay so then when you went to berlin you lived with tonta and your granddaughter yes your grandmother who she's already destroyed and i remember that crow's garden which was a big beer garden and we used to go in the evening you had a an orchestra there and a in a band shell
and i loved the dance and i would get up there and dance the whole evening all by myself when you were four or five and uh somebody came along and said that i ordered i ought to study with what was her name a real famous dancer at that time but i never did and we lived in a in a neighborhood called panko g-a-n-k-o-f-n and i had a very unhappy experience during that time i was a little black-headed gail and my had golden hair and big blue eyes and everybody talked how beautiful she was and she looked like those old pictures of keepers so where we
lived in punk hole was a photographer had his photography studio in the front and he had glass windows where he put his prized pictures and he asked to take my sister's picture and he didn't ask to take mine and it was put on there on display and it was a great hurt i can tell you did it make problems between you and your sister well i don't know i guess we disagreed like all children do is your what is your sister's name well it was rose kind mr alex stein and she lived here and she and her husband both died in california and they have
us that's the son who is the author of my aunts and then she has that's they have two sons one of whom is the historian that we mentioned earlier and the other one is a doctor in california but mother you had to have been more than four or five because you were four or five when your mother and then you went for a year i didn't say it was four or five i said well four or five when we got to germany but oh no you haven't been there a year and a half that's right people you had to be in in mrs johnson's boarding
house before you went to germany yes we were i don't know pauline i see all of that i just vaguely remember all of it but i know when we got back to brian with auntie and we lived there that i was old enough to go into school but rosie was not and she could not talk any english but i could but she cried so much that they let her go into school at the same time i did she only spoke german and then she began too because well how much younger is 17 months younger than i was very close then i mean maybe five years
maybe maybe you were about five but it happened and your mother may have died when you were maybe just turned four i i know i remember i remember i don't i vaguely remember and i remember when the little boy died because i remember there was a funeral at the house and you know so you had a brother that died well that's a child and she died of childbirth they both died and i know i remember that we had like cape jasmine's blooming all around there and for every funeral the cape gestures were cut and put at the funeral and i could never stand the order
of those are what is gardenias from that time no the only reason i say that is that if you were that old when you got when she then you went into mrs johnson i must have been i don't know i'm just trying to figure back there was me 17 months older was rosie and and the little boy named samuel must have been at least 10 months after that so okay so whatever whatever now hadn't you gone to europe at another time we went in 1910 so that was after auntie was already getting auntie and papa and rosie and i and that's when we went from
galveston new york and then went to new york and i went to liverpool when uncle adam was art had died just before we came tell about auntie when she stepped off of the train in brian she he was a cultured german woman let me tell you how cultured she was she spoke english she had come to this country when she was 16 years old to pay a visit to my father who as you know was living here and she stayed for a couple of years and went back to germany but she spoke english french and german she made all of my sisters in my clothes
and when i say clothes i mean she made our dresses our underwear our coats our hats she made it she was a fabulous cook she also she's the one that i said became the first one of the first german women to become a reformed jewish when she was so she would have her book of heineken gaither at her side and would memorize all of that so she a very closer woman here she comes from berlin which was a very civilized city to brian and we get off the train and it's pouring rain there is there are no sidewalks there are no concrete streets my father
we get off and he had hired a buggy and horse to take us to the house he had rented for us but oh and that i will never forget that horrible looking place there that's what paulie wanted to tell that's where we had whale water we had no sanitary things but she had a beautiful household and the day she died then it was six around 16. this is in dallas in dallas here they talked philosophy the day she died she was a very unusual woman and i want to tell you something i want you to know who takes after her she is talk about the the life that you led in brian and the people who would come oh yeah and the schools that were there and the jewish culture that you had well we had we had like uh um what was what was that that used to the jewish people because we had friends we didn't have any jewish hardly any jewish people there was there were no jewish young men when
we grew up except at a m and an allen academy but not in dallas but and we had friends not only my best friend was a girl named hedy edge who was made of honor of my wedding she was a methodist girl but a auntie what was it that used to always send lecturers around no it was bernoulli used to have people come and whenever anybody came they always were in our home and we had had a piano and we had people in all the time and we sit sing and talk and schmooze and it was a very wonderful way to grow up she had
the allen academy young man and then the texas a m and then through world war one where the there was a uh an army base oh yes the meteorologists were there and uh and also that's when i got to know some jewish fellows what about the tavern houses in well dr tomlinhouse was head of one of the big departments of the extension department his at texas a m his wife's sister married rabbi of the portuguese and spanish synagogue in new york new york sheriff israel was his name she married rabbi to solo pool one of the most famous rabbis of the century yes well i
knew him how did you know him well he came to bryant and he married his it was his brother-in-law now no it was let's see he married mrs tobin howard's and he was married to the uh the solar pool was married to this man i've even forgotten his name it says mary kasem he was married he married mary casa in brian and he performed the wedding ceremony in brian so that must have been a relative of frida's husband no no no no this was just a friend just no relative of ours at all there's a dr talbon house and mrs tavern house who every every
young man who went to texas a m knew because she had the she was ahead she was the head of the jewish welfare board and of hillel in as college station no relation of mine just friends i thought you had mentioned a a caser well that was freda casey that he performed the ceremony of the of the daughter of this man that painting married the second time i see he was a very interesting man doctor why don't you just say a few words what do you remember what do you remember about him i don't know i was in high school at the but you you
liked it yeah that was a long time ago honey was he very young yeah he hadn't been married very long i don't think they'd had any children at the time and i met a rabbi here who is now he came to lunch lecture at the a jewish community center who was a rabbi of that same synagogue that's mark angel i but he didn't know anything i told him i knew just so approved he wasn't very interested okay but the solar pool wrote the standard orthodox prayer book um that was in use in america from probably the 40s through the until recently and uh even at
deferred israel until recently you could still find the solar pool prayer book um he was a very influential man yes very interesting um d-e-s-o-l-a two words um double o l e yeah he was i don't know whether were they spanish or portuguese which one well they were both because the spanish jews that left spain in 1492 most of them went to portugal which did not have an inquisition then and they were permitted to stay jews for another five years and then somebody sprinkled water on them all together and made them christians immediately these people later went to northern europe places like holland antwerp hamburg and
these people are the of the founders that whatever they are the ancestors of the founders of the spanish portuguese they call them spanish portuguese because they were both spain to portugal to northern europe well now those people that you had for the jewish community when you had these people who gave that were they offsprings of that's right they were and you know i heard them twice you know you you had speaking twice one time here at the jewish community center and then at somebody's american jewish american jewish committee meeting i heard them vote i'm glad you came yeah it was very interesting to me what
else do you remember from brian mother you you went to high school there i don't know i just went well let's talk about you know we need to talk about education what kind of jewish education did you no there was no kind of uh sunday school or later well we had no no hater i had never heard a single uh um we spoke german but we did not speak yiddish yiddish as far when you say yiddish word my ant blood would crawl because that was a bastard language as far as she was concerned so we had and we observed the holidays we didn't have any
temper we didn't have any temple until the year before my sister and i were confirmed about 1914. what how would you celebrate the holidays what would you do nothing nothing would you do would you have a seder for passover yes we would have the sata and uh we knew when it was rosh hashona and yom kippur but as far as hanukkah goes we knew the story of hanukkah but whoever when i came to dallas uh jonas jamie's aunt was that's how i got to started teaching sunday school here at temple emmanuel was and she taught the kindergarten and she got me to help her and they told about the hanukkah bush who ever heard of hanukkah before that nobody nobody nobody celebrated nobody
exchanged gifts to hanukkah that's all a recent thing when did you exchange gifts um no when at what time of year did you oh and birthdays and that was no christmas no no we did around that time because when we went to school in bride rosie and i hate it when christmas came because we did not celebrate christmas we didn't and of course nobody celebrated hanukkah and we did not celebrate christmas but when and i found that same thing to happen when i taught sunday school that hanukkah and christmas came at the same about the same time and children in my class in the third
and fourth grade they tell me the gifts they got for hanukkah and then they tell me the same gifts they got for christmas so i never knew a lot of those children here in dallas whether they celebrated christmas or hanukkah that's what it used to be is very different in brian oh no we didn't celebrate it at all what about the other jewish people in brian i don't know what they did i know one holiday we observed was is it purim where you have the grapes and all right what is it that's hanukkah hold it when you say grapes you mean baskets of fruit no
i'm talking about when now now it's basket of fruit but in brian my aunt hannah had they had a arbor with a lot of grapes growing it was and you used to eat a meal out there yeah how about that so you you and tell me what you would do out there what do you remember what and well uh my mother had a sister and hannah and that was uh junius and phillips mother and they and she lived in brian your flory had a sister named hannah flora so no my mother was flora and her sister was hannah oh i didn't remember uncle dave but
you see something happened and papa had nothing to do with any of them that's why i know nothing probably about my mother's family so they had to blow up but they both lived in bryan oh but but dave lived in galveston after hannah he then moved together no he lived in all for years and years and years before hannah died he never lived in brown that i knew he always lived in gamblers well where did you go to the great harbor in bryant hanna hannah grogenski you know i told you that they had the great power at their house so y'all are bringing up things
that i haven't thought about and so good good now we won't forget hannah groginski and uh would you say prayers when you would uh sit under the grape you would just eat a meal but we went to temple every friday night and we each have each time they had their own pew and brian and bryan when we built a little temple there where all the rabbis would come and visit what year was that you said it was the year before you were concerned yeah a year or two before it was called temple freedom and i think i think that temple is still standing kind of
what freedom temple frida i don't know who it was made for like your auntie's name but it was not named for her so i can't bring that in me stop just for a moment we're looking now at a picture of brian texas taken in the 1860s and regina you said that this is oh i know that but you said it looked something like that when you were a girl there were wagons and that's what it looked like here in dallas too a lot when we came here tell about when you got electricity there and brian yeah my father and aunt had bought i was working
at a m college and i got all for them but i offered the streetcar it was not the streetcar named desire it was a streetcar though and i'd get off of it and then i'd always stop at the drugstore mr james had and had an ice cream soda or a malted milk i don't know how i ate and i probably didn't and then i was walking home and i was a block from home and i look up and the whole house is lighted up we've just gotten the electricity and that was the most exciting thing i think that nearly ever happened imagine that you could
just punch something and get light because we used to have to clean the oil lamps every day that was it it was a joyful occasion that was a reason i told pauline about it when did you get indoor plumbing i'm trying to think i must have been in i must have been in grade school when we got indoor fun but we were very elegant we had a double outdoor toilet and we used you know you didn't have toilet paper at that time you know what everybody used sears catalog yes was your house a sears house was it one of those sears um prefabricated homes oh
no we rented a house and then that was what i told you that my father and i bought that 11-room house all on one floor and we had seven fireplaces and we had four pouches around the house oh it was wonderful i thought you said five fireplaces maybe it was fine i know there was so many fireplaces but we also cooked with with wood and later on with cobra and we had to heat all the dishwasher to wash dishes in a kettle on stove how much german did you use in your entirely at home after until world war one we not only did we speak
german but we wrote and read in the german script but goodness we didn't dare speak a word when in world war one away from home and here we were very careful during world war ii to uh to uh speak german not to speak german not to speaking not they want to right do you still speak german i can i have not talked it in so long that i wish i wish i could remember and when i listened to it on television it's very gobbled i know some words and i can understand with the accents and the different communities see if there is a clock dutch
which is go german and then there's a heritage and i spoke whole nature we didn't talk about coach my aunt was a little uh she was a very elegant cultured person you know and she was lovely to everybody because she thought of course it used to be that the german didn't think that the polish people were as upperclass as they were which auntie was friends with all of them that she came in contact with and she thought the polish women were the most beautiful of all the women in europe that she knew but there were certain things she just didn't believe in like like yiddish
what else do you want to know well what did your was your aunt a religious person no what about your father was anybody in your family in your immediate family they were religious well i guess the one uh canto was but i didn't know him very much no i never i never and i don't know if you know it but when we came to dallas or did i mention the difference between reform and orthodox in dallas was terrible we're going to come to that in just a moment right did you did you not have any orthodox people in brian i had never heard a word
of yiddish until i came to dallas how many how many jewish people do you think lived in bronze 15 that was the total as long as you live and how how did everyone get along with their gentile neighbors no problems did you ever um have did you ever know what anti-semitism was pardoned harder so people were fairly tolerant what do you remember about black people i was going to say i know the conditions that the black people lived i know how terrible it was and what it is today and when i think back about what it was saying and what is today the black people
i don't blame the black for resenting but you know you can't change people overnight and what has transpired from the time that i was a child until now is phenomenal in what way and where we lived in our lovely house in back of what was a big open field and there was a little champion there one room no bathroom a mother and father and four children lived in that one room and even when we came to dallas hardly black people had anything at all they they were so happy to get anybody's cast off clothes so i think what has happened to the black people is
wonderful did your father do business with black people oh and they loved him now when i told you where my father was raised and the people in alabama did not consider black people human beings but he was always very good to them and as a cotton buyer he had told us that worked with him and all of them loved this dog because he was always kind to them and treated them like human beings and that's how we were raised to treat them as human beings and that's how we raised our children too napoleon and leonard my son always treat a black person with extreme courtesy
and they always had but most people didn't do it and did that did that make you upset when you would see that when you were a i didn't like it but you know and when you're a child you don't notice those things now pauline's little grandson who we think is a very precocious child well he's one of his best friends in canada as a little black boy isn't it and he doesn't know the difference at and uh so as a child you don't notice those things you know did you play with black children no they didn't come around the way we were they were certainly
not in the schools i don't know if they even went to school well it was it was bad and it's bad it's back today too but it's heaven compared to what they used to have what about mexican people i didn't know any until i came to dallas did you ever see any and brian oh yes sir it was a mexican command that sold tamales on the street on the downtown streetcars and we used to go and buy some islands and they'd wrap them up in the newspaper and take them home that was my that's what i knew about mexican people then did you ever do
people have bad feelings towards mexican people and brian was there any kind of prejudice about i don't know is it there now now the labellos they were attached one day the italian labello family here in martinez those are all italian are you talking about bilo oh the bilo family no la bella that was a la bello family in brian and then they were here in dallas well martinez isn't that martinez is spanish though their their history well that these people some they had a we had brian was laid out the business district and then it was um lower brian where this one i don't know
whether it's a mexican it was italian had a little store and he had sigs that were strung up on a string hanging in his stower and we'd go down a special treat and all the candy was in the counter you know nothing was wrapped in paper or anything so that was dished out to us and that's that's the extent of the italian and mexican people that are new in berlin what was your favorite kind of music oh well of course with piano violin any songs oh yeah we knew all the songs i don't remember what they were and more america star spangled dance music love
dancing yeah are there any teachers that you recall that you liked or you really miss ray uh she taught me in the fourth or fifth grade and i was a very supposed to be a very sensitive child and i would sometimes have a chip on my shoulder and she got me one day after class and she said i want to talk to you and i can remember that so distinctly she said you know you're a smart little girl and you have a lot of nice things to do for you but you've got to stop being so sensitive and that's what changed me to being a
pollyanna so i do remember her ray montgomery was her name miss rayne i got my girlfriend and what did what did she teach you well they taught a whole a whole room for what age were you i think i was about the fourth grade at school 10 or 11 years something like that six and around yeah at school um did you do uh did you sing christian songs and did you celebrate christian holidays and yes well you did i know leonard also had it here where they had the christmas tree in the room and we just signed all the christmas songs well did anybody say
did everybody know that you were jewish yeah but they just expected you to join a lawyer and your father and unfrieda didn't care no and i never it never worried me it never worried me but my children the reason i remember so distinctly is my son i didn't know he had all these allergies but he'd go at christmas time and they had these live cedar trees and he'd be deathly sick after that and to this day he has terrible allergies and that's what it was at that time and they sang all the christmases on i don't know we had prayer in the school we didn't
think anything it didn't affect us i know that's all that's what's going on now about yes in the school and not for the school it never bothered us all right pauline you wanted to switch over to dallas now do we yeah i can't think of anything else all right so you came to dallas what you were already a grown woman yeah i was out of high school and i've been working in brian yeah i worked at texas a m college in bryan um first at the extension department where dr taplethouse was the head of it and i also worked at the architectural department at texas
a m what did you do i was a stenographer i was one of the first in dallas i'll tell you something you all know about something about me i was the first girl in dallas to bob a hair what year was that well it was right after i got out of high school that was in 19 about 1918. that's before you came to dallas yeah you're the first girl in brian and bryan yeah to bob my hair what made you well moved to dallas ain't he married kaiser and they she thought we would be better off living here and he opened the shoe factory and went before that's a jewish word i know that's the first idiocy now it's a second yiddish expression you said schmoozer and then you said you know i never understood any jewish word until pauline married lily graveyard and his family were conservative but they spoke yiddish so to this day if i won't do something i ask her not me
as lenny yeah i know but you know much more than i do because they taught it to you you lived in chicago a little bit just a little yeah but at least it was more than i know so you came to dallas and did you all live together auntie and my husband and they got a divorce after a while and he left here and papa and rosie and i and we were both married at our home but that didn't come till much later oh yeah i know but what i'm talking about we had lived there from 1990 until we got 1919 and dad and i
married in 1925 and rosie married earlier so we were your parents was your father well to do by this time he he he was a cotton bar and he made three fortunes in the cotton business that was typical of the cotton business it was very speculative in those days did people actually go out to the cotton markets buy the cotton and take care of delivering it or do they buy contracts they bought cotton samples they went the cotton samples were in like the cotton and it was wrapped so it was about this big around and about this looked like a pillow that had been wrapped
and they had these samples and it was middling and high grade and all of that stuff and they would buy it according to that and i know my sister and i used to write up those contracts and that you never saw it but we used to see it because they'd be on the cotton compresses and when we went to school in brian from the first sixth grade it was on the west side of ryan and when it came after the sixth grade we went to the east side and we had to cross a cotton compress and uh a train that ran through the middle of
the town in order to get to school is this bryan street downtown dallas no oh you're not about brian back there i'm going back but now what was this about after after he came to dallas he opened up a shoe factory oh that was my my aunt frida kaiser her husband opened a shoe factory here but he went he had a lot of money and they divorced and he moved away out of the light and it was his daughter who married mrs desola brood of the solar pool's brother not that you need to write any of that up i'm just for your own information mother
what did you do when you moved here what did what did papa do what did he didn't do anything he didn't do anything he couldn't it was pretty rough but he was a very sturdy man at the age of 90. he used to walk from brian down to the national bank on commerce street and back on the same day brook forest yeah that's a long walk that's a long walk i'm showing his ability and they all knew him at the bank there he was a very very small man very small my size but you say he couldn't do anything cause he it was tough when he first came to dallas because well it was tough to he didn't just didn't do anything he had some money and somehow other other it was the bank uh wrote him or wired him it was something in the futures i
don't even remember but he lost all of his money he was manipulating that money so when you moved to dallas what happened he didn't work no and tanta did not work well they had some money but they had some money and you and auntie and rosie went out to work and what did you do i worked for the uh for the government and you were you took a short hand and you typed tell them about how fast you tight that let's say one of their favorite stories when i was in bryant and worked at texas a m college i worked the architectural department was on
the fourth floor of the main building that's up and four flights of stairs there was no elevator but anyway i would type in one day these specifications for the architectural department and a man walked in and put a bucket down next to me filled with water and i said what's that for he said when you typing so fast i was afraid the typewriter would it would get on fire that's what when i had my 90th birthday tracy was it tracy who wrote all of that up everybody wrote it but it was put in there about the story of the typewriter name and burning up and
were you um you were living at home all that time and were you donate giving your money to your family and when did you become a sunday school teacher right soon after came to dallas janie's mother and her first husband lived next door to us on forest avenue and the name was rosenberg and um through them i got acquainted with uh john rosen rosenthal that was an art critic at the dallas news with his brother and wife and she talks under school in the kindergarten and she got me to do it and also he'd he wrote articles jonas rosenfield wrote articles and i used to
take a lot of drama and speech lessons and he heard me one in those days if you knew if you could recite you were always at parties or if family came over you were asked to get up in your sight because we didn't have television or radio or anything like that and he heard me one day and he said i have a point or a speech i want you to learn and it was about the atrocities in the programs in poland and he coached me on that and had me give that at the colombian club was it about the kishnef massacres 1905 he had me
do you remember any of it no i wish i had it too it was well it was very very dramatic i don't know how the people at the club liked it or not but and through his wife she got me to teach sunday school this is about 1915 no we came here in 1919 about 1920 and then i taught sunday school until dad and i got married in 1925. now just this you said poland then i said kishnef which is russia but um i maybe you're right was it about current events or was it about something that had happened 15 years ago no that was that it happened not too long before then in poland when they had the terrible pogroms there they were just as bad if not worse than anything that had happened in russia do you remember anything about the the flu epidemic oh yes the one and that was in brian when we were living in brian was that terrible flu everyday so many people died what do you remember about it in
particular did did you take special precautions no nobody never heard of it before i know one jewish man that died harry marvel was his name in fact that was a family you know what's his sanger that just died you know his wife you know was married to procrastinate at one time oh yeah i thought her family was big and i tell you the marvel family was what's your name she's a good friend of yours lauren sparks wife that was that was a marvel family and it a great uncle of something of her who died in the flu epidemic that first flew and evidently all i
know is that all the many many people that died it was about 1914 before just before world war one yeah well see that was when we lived in brown and we came here in 1919. right you know we didn't ask anything any specific memories about world war one that you have about people going off to war or about what kind of things were done and brian i know i had a wonderful lovely very happy social life during that time that's what you talked about because of the military base and we had the jewish welfare headquarters at our house as our house they would come there and that's when i got to know really jewish men what did frida think about that did freda think that was a good idea no i mean about the setting up uh welfare board at your
house and entertainment now that raises another very important question what did freda think about the war you know i don't we just took things for granted i guess i don't remember i just because she had come from germany but she was very americanized but and i remember uh we'd go down to the train and kiss all the boys goodbye and they'd hang with their hands hanging out of the window of the train you know as they were leaving and i had a young young man not jewish who tried to get me to marry him so i could get his widow's thing but i didn't but
my father always taught us that uh date you can't help but date non-jewish boys don't ever marry him because he's always i don't care how lovely they are there is always a wall but things are different now all the whole children american non-jews tracy wasn't tracy was not yet she it could very likely be no she's not but but her pauline's daughter-in-law is was not born jewish but she became jewish she knows more about judaism than i do yes he said that's not an intermarriage she didn't marry it that's not an intermarriage she converted she converted right but lisa is married melissa is married to
you and but he has really no religion but i'm just saying but in those days oh but when i got to dallas and uh i know my sister and i dated we belong to temple emmanuel and we dated two fellows from sheriff israel and boy will we fall out that was interesting okay now it's time to talk now we're back in dallas and you wanted to talk before about the relations of uh the orthodox and the conservative and the reformed jews talking about oh goodness gracious i can tell you the people that then belong to sheriff in israel there was a rabbi that shared with
israel and his name started with a w and he would not come into the town why because it was did you go into sheriff israel oh i did and what was sheriff israel like in those days was it more traditional than it is today oh much more it was closer to orthodoxy but it's entirely i am very happy to see what has happened that the reformed temple and to share with israel now we didn't even think about the orthodox uh but these two which had nothing to do with each other and now that it is so intermingled i am tickled to them i think it's
one of the best things that ever happened to jewish people so you never went to ferret when you first came to dallas did you know about it yes there was an orthodox little orthodox temple called forest avenue but no i just didn't know and that i know of now the uh salmon family you know who are well they still are being a chair with israel aren't they i don't know jake film oh yes that's right well they big showers in israel and in the orthodox too sunny and what's the name of sheamus and i think it's wonderful i always have thought it was wonderful but
it was terrible did the did the conservative people and the reformed people talk badly about each other no no you just couldn't and if you did if we as single girls dared to go with a non-jew we were almost ostracized from emmanuel well from the people not not the temple itself but the people that young people did you're on friday get along with uh people at emmanuel oh were there a lot of people like her a german people and very cultured yes did she have a special relationship uh with any of the rabbis there or with any of the leaders at temple emanuel oh well
you see rabbi leftwards came in after we did in the 20s while while we were while she was living she got a very bad case of arthritis and we went to mineral wells for her to take the banks and say and from there we met a lot of rabbis and they all liked her she liked all of them and they had long discourses and they wrote letters back and forth you know the chief was a very cultured person but no animosities at all she was a very busy person too the type of person she was was that she always said i hope i'll never get
so old that can i can't learn something from everybody tell about what kind of a household you had in in dallas and how people would come over from uh and gathering oh yes and hold on so many of them like i guess they he just flour shine you know and a lot of the brook sailors brook sailors we knew all of them when they first came to this country are you still friendly with miss brook i haven't seen her in a long time she's had so many terrible problems she called since i've been sick yeah we have very good friends he was a wonderful babydoctor
many people would come over though from germany and they would either live at this house on forest ebony or would gather there socially were there any famous people that you no no i was just thinking of who else came over there were so many of them but that had died or moved away where is uh do you have any of your frieda's correspondence or do you know who has it she wrote one of the letters mainly in german in english both i may you know it's terrible to say but when i moved we moved in this house it was a month before my husband died
and he was very sick and when we moved being as he was sick i moved a lot of things from a house on woodland where we lived for 29 or 30 years i brought all of it i've got stuff in this addict god goes for himself well the two pitch the two things up above you the blood in germany when her first marriage in berlin you know when she lived in berlin before we came there i guess ain't he must have been about 20 when she got married and those were weddings those were wedding presents that's right here we go i love this part we
met because i was a sunday school teacher temple manual and he was a boy scout master that was it now give me his full name no he did not like the name his first name was herman and he did not like the name so he was always known as it was herman leonard pierce so he was always known as lee so i refer myself and he always did as h lee that's how anybody in dallas would know you actually and uh talk about your talk about um your courtship well we caught it for five years because he was in and out of what was he
doing he first when i first knew he was a rug salesman with santa harris and he was a specialist in oriental roads and he would he was a very good conversationalist he had a beautiful speaking voice you know the kind of voice that roosevelt had that's a kind of a voice that he had and he said that people could he was he sold these rugs in chicago first and then came here and every rug is supposed to the eight old rugs to have a story and he'd make up these stories and tell these stories so then he did various things until he got into something
and i got a job as a secretary to an ironman and uh who was that leon russ what's his name and this was uh in the early 20s well we married in 1925 and uh lived in milwaukee for a year and came back to dallas and was after that i got into this i got to work for him and he managed to have a small oil company and they had holdings mostly in west texas and he got my to go out to west texas and try and to eastec and tried to buy leases in other words he got involved with this company this was the
first few years of the oil boom there is that right no please wait a minute wait wait wait you're skipping a lot of stuff in here i think you better drop this part because that's a very long involved history of having been in the oil fields in the early days which you'll find very interesting yeah he was a roughneck in the oil fields but just after world war one after world war one after world war one see he was in world war one he went in when he was about 18. our son was in world war ii he went in festival he was 18 too also so and then it was after the war that he gradually came and that's a story of why he i know why he came to texas but i'll tell them well that daddy's story is very involved story and i already have a lot of it on today i see so i want you to go back to their courtship days uh because i think that it's more logical at this time okay talk about how you would court and that he would go on the streetcar oh you mean how you come to
visit because you didn't own a car and he was people and we lived on fire sam room and when he got to irving street he had to change a streetcar and come down forrest avenue and the same going back my husband was a very husky athletic man built a large lot had a large frame as little frame as i had he had a tremendous frame and so one evening when he left my house he got off of the streetcar at forest and irving and as he was getting on the streetcar to take him downtown where he lived somewhere there an automobile knocked him down and
ran over him and next day he came to see me and he said i had a i had an automobile run over me last night i said no you couldn't he said i'll show you and he took his shirt off and there were tire box across his chest after they ran over he got up and got on the streetcar how long had you known him how long have i known him then yeah oh maybe three four five six months he was very powerful very powerful man he was powerful when did he do all of the traveling when he handled a line of clothes was that
before you married no actually man i said he tried to do a whole lot of things after he stopped working for santa harris and then he went out of town he went somewhere else and he came back but it was before that he was in the oil fields as a restaurant before i knew it and he did lots and lots of things he wrote he wrote that he rode the trains the rails the rails for a while he did everything he was raised in the hebrew orphan home is that right obviously fascinating and you have all that on tape i believe so okay her mother
her mother unfortunately i didn't get him yeah he dr lefkowitz that i know you're not taking that now but my husband was raised he were often home he and the brother older than you in those days i don't know if it still if one parent was dead the children were considered orphans and was there and uh but he had to wear his brothers he always had bad feet because he had to wear his brother's shoes but his mother died when he was in the service of world war one and you you'll see i don't know what is on the tape now but he tells the
story then and it's it's quite a history and he's the one whose father was a violinist in at uh france joseph's court that was his father and now my husband was born in new york but his father was born i think that was in vienna why don't you give me the family names well the name is pierce now i don't that was not the name then and you might as well tell it what one other name was god and that's a story as to why the name was changed that our people that was the name that was what his father's name was and he was
the first violinist at the waldorf astoria in new york no he was the orchestra leader yeah of the world of the story he has the court violinist but he left after world war one when franz joseph um stepped down or this is before left at the turn of the century my father was born in new york i see this was his father was a violinist and came to new york and was the first orchestra leader there and uh so my people died when my husband was four years this is all on this tape because i have this down that covers dance early life and how
you all met and your business beginnings and uh i say something commented on mother and grandfather who was a dancer who was a dancer not that question that the little of grand puzzle i don't know that's my notes on that and and and i'd like to i have a lot of the stuff that had to do which we never got into or what that did in the in the west texas auto fields he had a lot to do with the development of the through the business that he had so that's and i've got i've got those i've got pictures and letters and magazine articles about
him that'll help you yes we really really do that is another thing you know in about a month when pauline is over her operation sufficiently i want her to be in here because it's hard for me to remember all those things and you're wonderful to work with i just wish that leather had been here today because he could have asked added a lot of things too but he was out taking pictures well then we'll we'll continue this um we're now we're down to the end of the tape would you would you like to leave you any last message on the tape before we call it
a day i think i think i've talked enough don't you no i don't think so you want to know all about pauline as she grew up oh we'll get there no you're about to you know about her accomplishments mother you're about to celebrate your 95th birthday and you know the story of my family was going to give and furthermore you know she was born on my birthday really she has her birthday's the same her youngest daughter who has a child was ordered for the same day but she four days three days three days early and i i always say the reason she came three days
early is because she figured it was time because she weighed ten pounds and how five ounces when she was born and now lisa do you know lisa lisa's going to have a baby around the same time between october the 19th and the 25th or something like that so god willing we will have a party for you to celebrate your birthday whether it's exactly on your birthday or not i know we will but we can't have it in october because she will be having hers about the same and isn't that interesting me and a daughter and two granddaughters who will also be in october i think
it's telling stories about you for a long time