Rosie Stromberg
Rosie was born in Dallas in 1937, the second oldest of eight children in an immigrant family that lived in a small settlement area of South Dallas, in one and a half rooms behind a little five and dime store the family ran amid the pawn shops of Deep Elm. Her mother's family had migrated from Europe to Canada, then to Pittsburgh, and finally to Texas, while her father's family fled a pogrom in Ukraine and settled in Chicago after arriving through Ellis Island. Her father, the oldest boy, came to America at 13 and taught himself English. He followed Rosie's mother to Texas after they met during a visit to Chicago, and though he scored highly on civil service tests during the Depression, he was not hired because he was Jewish, so he drove a taxi and ran the family store.
A bright student, Rosie was double promoted and finished Forest Avenue High School at 15, then earned a full four-year scholarship to SMU, graduating at 19. She moved to New York to pursue graduate study, starting at Columbia and completing her master's degree at Yeshiva University in 1959. There she met Saul Stromberg, a scientist and engineer who had served in the Navy during World War II. They married in Texas in 1959 and, after nearly a year in New York, settled in East Dallas before finding nearly three acres in what is now Addison, where they kept horses and many animals and raised their two sons in a mix of rural and cosmopolitan life. Saul worked for Bulova and later Ling-Temco-Vought, and was called back after retirement to help design magnets for the superconducting supercollider.
As an adult Rosie became deeply involved in her community, beginning with the PTA and the National Council of Jewish Women, which she credits with teaching her leadership and project development. She went on to serve with the Southwest Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Community Relations Council at Federation, and joined Thanksgiving Square downtown as a Jewish participant in interfaith gatherings. She recalls a memorable NCJW project sending privileged women out to experience the hardships of poverty in Dallas. Rosie honors her husband's immigrant parents, Pauline and Ben Stromberg, and reflects on witnessing history from the Kennedy assassination, when she briefly mistook Jack Ruby for her own Uncle Ruby, to the moon landing and 9-11. She urges the next generation to live purposefully and to make the world a better place.
Full Transcript
Let's start with your involvement with the Jewish community. Tell me some of the activities you do with that. I'm going to begin as an adult because as a child, next to the oldest of eight children, growing up in what was South Dallas, I had a lot of family duties. But as soon as I had children of my own, I became active in the larger community with my local PTA and then the National Council of Jewish Women, which taught me a lot of leadership skills, a lot of project development, and a lot of comfort levels to go out into the larger community and make the world a better place.
Yeah, yeah. What were some of the special projects you worked at? One of my most favorite projects was with a co who has passed on. She and I decided that some of our privileged Jewish women had not had exposure to some of the hardships of being poor in Dallas, Texas. So we arranged several of the locations where we thought people would encounter the system. And so we had Parkland Hospital waiting for them. We had several of the social service agencies waiting. and we gave them enough bus fare and two dollars for lunch, and we said, go out into the world and come back in about four hours and tell us what you have found.
It was a huge learning experience for them and for us. Each of the agencies knew we were coming, and they groomed them well, because until you've actually lived that situation, you really can't be of help to people who are in need. But in addition to that, now with the Jewish community, I'm on the board of the Southwest Jewish Congress, I'm off the board of American Jewish Committee. I think every large organization, including the Jewish Community Relations Council here at Federation, I've done them all, enjoyed them all. And what is it that you guys in these organizations strive to do? Well, NCJW is project-oriented. A lot of the others are education to the community-oriented, and so my big thing is connection.
So I am now on a group called Thanksgiving Square downtown and I there as the Jew in the room And we have international visitors imams and others who come and want to know how multiple faith people get together and how they are friendly. So this week, in May of this year, we'll be having a National Day of Prayer event downtown at Thanksgiving Square. And at my table will be a woman from Japan, a woman from India, various other people. and my sense of who I am as a Jew is to connect with other ethnic groups and other religious groups. Right, right. Now over the years, being originally from Dallas too, how have you seen the Jewish community grow?
Well, I've seen it expand outwardly. I was a little disappointed that a lot of Jewish families ran to the hills when desegregation occurred, but some have been steadfast and stayed in the public school system to keep it good and make it good. So for those families I'm very, very grateful. We have lots of people migrating in from other places because the work environment, the cost of living and more or less the climate exception of tornadoes in the summer is very welcoming to people. It's a good place to raise children And though I met my husband in New York, we decided we'd much rather raise children in Texas than in New York.
Right. Well, let's go back now. 1937, Dallas. Yes, yes. Going back a ways. What do you remember when you were a little girl? The immigrant community of which I was a part had a little settlement area, which is now, some of it is in historic preservation. There was no such thing as television. so there was radio and there were front porches and sleeping porches and that's where the community got together on their front porch our front yard it always looked like a zoo because people were coming and going and chatting all generations we were in a neighborhood that was slowly changing so along the edges there were commercial enterprises and A&P and a safe way and cleaners down the way there was a Jewish pharmacy Friedman Pharmacy.
I just have seen the son and the grandson of those people last Friday. They get together The high school that I attended was I would say 2 or 3 percent Jewish And so the the high school was that it was called Forest Avenue High School and is now Madison High as a result of desegregation the name was changed and a lot has changed but the old alumnus get together and they are dwindling a little bit and mostly they're guys and the side is when I brought Saul, my New York bud, my husband, to their lunch meetings once a month. He was very well accepted and he adored those guys.
They were all very eager to pull in a Yankee. Tell me about your parents though. Okay. The mom was part of a family of five. I never figured out if they migrated to Canada from Poland, Russia, Romania, or somewhere because the national forces were always fighting over that same territory. They, I think, came over as middle-class families, and we found a little watch from my grandfather, who had obviously worked for the Canadian Railway and had done 25 years and was retired with his little watch. My father's family came over when my dad, who was the oldest boy, was 13. None of the family spoke English.
Where did they come from? They came from Ukraine. and they barely escaped a pogrom by the skin of their teeth really. And so my father and all of the brothers were self-made learning English and going to school. My father used to sell gum and newspapers on the corner, get beaten up routinely by the other kids who said it was their corner. Where was this now? This was in Chicago. In Chicago. In Chicago. and several of the aunts and uncles remained. My father moved to the wild, woolly Texas and he was a very honest and intelligent guy. He tried on occasion to fit into Dallas the best way he could so he took civil service tests because that was depression years.
He would always score very high but because he was Jewish he would not be hired. So he began driving a taxi. And we made a little storefront in our house and we had a little five and dime And so people could come in and buy a spool of thread for a nickel And I tried to help do the store things as having all the younger brothers and sisters at my side And so we barely scraped by That was a very complex time, and some of my aunts and uncles who had fewer children did much better than we did. Now, what impelled your dad to come down to Dallas from Chicago?
My mom. Tell me about how your folks met. Okay. My mom's family migrated from Canada to Pittsburgh, where my last two uncles were born. And then they further migrated to Texas. How and why they chose Texas? I don't know. My father's family settled from, they came through Ellis Island and settled in Chicago. during the world's fair which took place in the early 30s the parts of my family wanted to go see what was happening up there and my mom wound up visiting in Chicago where she met my dad I think it was love at first sight because he followed her down and there they settled and I'm sure his parents thought if Chicago was wild and woolly Texas had to be even crazier but that's what happened Wow, amazing.
So did your dad talk about leaving his family to follow your mom down here? He never discussed that with us because I think he was so busy supporting us. That whole chapter was left out. How did World War II affect your family? World War II affected my family because my husband was in it. And he sort of did a parallel thing. I met him in New York working on my master's degree, which I got at Yeshiva University in 1959. We were married that same year. But anyway, he heard about horses, barns, the Wild West, and he basically did what my father did. He said to his mom and dad he was leaving, and he came down to Dallas, and we were married here.
I want to pay tribute to my husband's parents. They came over as immigrants also, also not speaking English. My mother-in-law, they're both deceased. She worked in one of those little cracker factories for little immigrants that were totally unclean, totally unsafe. She was around when that big fire happened in the garment industry in New York. She was also self-educated. She came from Vilnius, which was the intellectual center of Lithuania. of northern Russia. She became so competent in language that one of the women here in town, who is now deceased, Rachel Andrus, who is a great poetess, dedicated her poetry book to my mother-in-law, Pauline Stromberg. And Pauline was a lover of books, lover of reading.
She helped translate Yiddish poetry into English poetry. My father-in-law, Ben Stromberg, came with nothing. He was by himself. He left his whole family in Russia. They were later. His father was killed by the Germans. But he was thrilled that he got a job as a tool and dye maker in New York and worked for $5 a week. He was also self-educated. When he died, he left enough money to take care of his wife. We were able to have Pauline with us for 10 years after he passed away. She lived to nearly 100. And his honesty and what you see is what you get personality was a terrific thing for our children.
I mean, it was his grandchildren. They loved him. He was fantastic. Talk to me now about high school for you. High school was very interesting because I was very, in that system at that time, everybody was double promoted who could move ahead. I was very young. So I finished high school at 15, and I was like socially where most kids, I guess, would be when they're 9 or 10. Very slow moving. So I won a full four-year scholarship to SMU as a result of that. And SMU sort of became my high school experience, and I finished SMU at 19. And so at high school, I was a shrimpy little skinny squawny nerd.
And had to run home. We had a long distance from the high school. We had no money for fares, so we had a lot of walking to do. So we had to walk a long distance to get there and back. Right, right. Now do you remember your first automobile, your first car? My first car? Sure. I was pregnant with my second son. I was first learning how to drive because we didn't afford cars. We didn't afford bicycles. We didn't afford skates. So I learned all those things as an adult Now where did you meet your husband In New York City I had moved up there to work on my master degree I started at Columbia And I had a Phi Beta Kappa scholarship so the fees of Columbia were overwhelming And so I only lasted there one year, and then I went to Yeshiva to finish the master's.
And I was moving into an apartment that I found in the New York Times. and there were two Jewish women who were quite a bit older than me and they were giving a party as one of their roommates was leaving departing for California and I was moving in he was there with a number of his friends he was 30 years old and I was 19 so even though I had a terrific evening chatting with him and I thought he's very special I thought that's not going to be my thing so he fixed me up with a bunch of his friends and six months later I saw him again and we went out I did not knock him off his feet either obviously and we began dating and over time and I met his parents we became inseparable and we came to Texas to get married now everybody seems to keep coming to Texas I know, what is that?
now he followed you to Texas to get married And is that where you guys settled down? We settled in New York for nearly a year in Jackson Heights, a little suburb. And my husband had a very, very good job. He was a scientist and an engineer. So he had very high clearance. At the time he was working for Bulova, he had left World War II from the Navy with an honorable discharge and did very, very well and was working at Bulova and got a very fine offer in Texas after he knew we were going to move here. and he began working for Lingtemkovat, the LTV that became eSystems and then Raytheon.
He worked on a lot of projects that were very advanced. He worked in the early days before they had orbiting things on heat shields. And he finally, at the end of his life, after he retired, he was called back to work on the superconducting supercollider. Wow. Yes, helping design those giant magnets. Right right Was his career a culmination maybe from his work in the Navy during the war Well he was trained to do electronic technician work because he was a kid He lied about his age to get into the Navy to serve in the services And so when he left, I think he was barely 19 when he left the Navy and the war was over.
And all of his neighborhood kids did not make it into the Navy. They went into the Army and most all of them were killed. Where in Dallas did you guys settle down? We originally settled in a part of the city called East Dallas, and it was in a little apartment. And what's the time frame of it? That was now 1959, 1960, and we began looking for acreage because he had heard, oh, Texas, the wide open spaces, and we were lucky, and we found a place that was nearly three acres big. Wow. He built his own barn, his own fences. We had two horses. We had a compost.
This was not a typical Dallas Jewish lifestyle. We raised the kids in what is now Addison, Texas, because at that time it was huge fields, 90-acre properties, cotton fields, people who were doing agriculture. And we took the boys in to the city for musical events. every kind of musical event. And my husband had studied classical guitar in New York with a gentleman named Emmanuel Gaior. And so we started, I think, every major group, the Classical Guitar Society and everything. We were part of those charter groups, theater and everything. So our kids had a very cosmopolitan and rural combination. we had pet ducks pet geese pet dogs pet cats anything that moved was part of our lifestyle what was the happiest time in your life?
I suppose the happiest times have been either with my own children or now with my grandchildren where I have a bundle in your lifetime there's been so many momentous occasions you know you were a young girl during World War II of course lived through a Kennedy assassination here in Dallas Yes. Moon landing in 69, something good, of course the tragedy of 9-11. Is there something that really affected you that you really remembered and took notice of Well the Kennedy assassination occurred while I was pregnant with Danny my second son And it was hugely shocking The other piece of that was that I had an uncle whose name is Honest Joe.
His oldest daughter, Shirley, my cousin, and I were friends. and he had told me through Shirley because I had attended actually her wedding that he was friends with every detective in the force because people used to come into his place and pawn guns, limbs, every kind of thing you could imagine. And so my husband and I were watching the news with Mark, our son, who was at that time two years old and we see this big burly guy who looked just from behind like my Uncle Ruby. go into the underground and shoot Oswald. And I said, oh my God, that's Uncle Ruby. It turned out to be not.
But it was a similar situation. And I thought, oh, heavenly days. This was Jack Ruby. But my uncle was Ruby Goldstein. And he was very friendly. He could have gone in and out all the time with any of the police detectives. My gosh, that must have really been a shock to you. It was scary until they identified who that was. Yes. Wow. Did you ever tell this to Uncle Ruby? No. No. But Shirley knew about it. Uncle Ruby had two other brothers. All three of them were from Brooklyn and they all had pawn shops. So one of the other brothers, Uncle Isaac, was the guy whose pawn shop sold the gun to the idiot who tried to kill President Reagan.
Wow. Yeah. So it was a very colorful history down on Deep Elm. In those days it was Deep Elm. It was one pawn shop after another. My dad and mom had a little store in the midst of all the pawn shops. And we lived in the back in one and a half rooms. And that is now a night spot where our house used to be. What do you think was the greatest invention in your lifetime? Some things have a greater impact. The small things that were hysterically funny was the use of throwaway diapers. That happened in my lifetime. We didn't even know they existed until we did a cross-country trip with a new baby and we found them.
Oh, that's a major change, and it has been. But the computer era has made a humongous difference in everybody's manner of communication, sometimes not wonderful. Right, right. And that's made a difference for me professionally, too. Right. Seven siblings. Rivalries? I have an older sister, 15 months older than myself. She's not feeling very well right now. If there was any, it wasn't rivalry, but if there was any like sibling awareness, it was between my older sister Sonia and I. She got married first. She did everything first. But we love each other madly. We have one sister that's in the high program. She was the fourth in line, and my mother developed from having four kids and five years, Ricketts.
and my sister, Alea, who is the fourth in line, still lives in the sheltered environment Wonderful lady I always brag that I her older sister when I see her and she very happy about that Two kids two boys that you talked about seven grandkids What advice does grandma want to leave to the next generation? Well, I think being purposeful is the most important gift you can have. If you have a reason to get up every day and make the world a better place, your head, your head all right from the beginning. My elder boy is an attorney. He lives that through his activities at Temple Shalom.
The younger boy, Danny, is a pediatric cardiologist intensivist. He lives that through every day saving lives. Their wives are all purposeful people. One teaches Spanish at Green Hill. One of them was a speech therapist. They've both been in producing fabulous children. I wish them all long life and good health, and of course the energy that it takes to always be purposeful. You did a great job. Thank you.