Seth Meyers
Seth Allen Meyers was born in February 1947 on Long Island, New York, the son of Bernie Meyers and his mother, whose later married name was Schwiff. He was named for the third son of Adam, reflecting his father's devotion to Judaism, and his initials honored a friend of his father's from New York. When Seth was about seven, his father was promoted and the family moved directly to Dallas. He grew up with brothers Ronnie and Mitchell and a sister, Jody, and cherished memories of his grandmother Libby, whose spaghetti and meatballs, chicken, and sour cream coffee cakes marked many Friday nights.
In Dallas the family lived first near the airport, then on Edgemere and Masonvale in North Dallas. Seth attended George B. Dealey school, Arthur Kramer, Ben Franklin junior high, and Hillcrest High School, with time spent at a military academy in Allen. He was active in the Jewish community, attending Shearith Israel and becoming part of the congregation's first double bar mitzvah alongside a young man he later befriended. In 1964 he and his friends began a Christmas Day football tradition that grew over some 50 years into a beloved social gathering, eventually held at the Jewish Community Center.
Drafted in August 1967, Seth completed basic training in Louisiana and served roughly nineteen months in Germany as a document clerk. After his discharge in 1969 he took part in anti-war protests, including vigils in Washington, and later moved through Tyler Junior College, the University of Texas, and North Texas State, earning a degree in special education and a master's in reading from Texas Woman's University. He taught in Nacona, Texas, worked at camps in Mississippi and a program in Tucson, and settled into a long teaching career in the Tucson school district. He married Angela, whom he met on an airplane, and has lived in Tucson for many years, treasuring family, friendship, and the outdoors above all.
Full Transcript
so good afternoon today is friday march 6th and my name is mitchell myers and i am going to do an interview for the dallas jewish historical society i'm interviewing mr seth meyers and it's about two o'clock on friday so good job good job so seth tell me or tell us what's your full name seth allen myers and do you know why your parents selected that name for you uh he was the third son of adam i know that my father was much into the judaism and felt like that was the name that he wanted it was also when he called me seth allen myers it
was the initials of a good friend of his and from new york and that's how i picked up my name as far as i know that's a great story great story so tell me your parent's name uh i got still schwiff and then bernie myers and and tell me when and where you were born born in new york long island to be exact uh 1947 february i only stayed there for about seven years and my father got promoted our father got promoted and moved us to dallas when i was about seven and uh it was a good years when we got here from that point
to where we are today so your dad got promoted got another job and took it and that's why you moved to dallas yes directly to now directly to dallas we didn't stop anywhere in between we lived on bordeaux it was outside of the [Music] dallas fort worth airport or dallas airport left field and uh we stayed there for a few years and uh probably about a couple of years then from there we went to a place on edgemere which is in north dallas and that seemed to be our home for as long as i stayed in dallas i moved around for a little bit but
my family has been here whether it be my brother my mother is still here as well you have you have brothers and sisters yes one of the videotographer is my brother i got a sister that's now in phoenix scottsdale and another brother who's in houston texas and their name ronnie mitchell and jody so tell me about your childhood a little bit in new york i mean i know it was only seven years do you remember much of it it was very brief what i remember is my other brother ronnie and i growing up there early or late 40s the i remember my father had an
old ford with a open seat in the back rumble rumble seat and which is always pretty cool and not much that we did beyond that you know i was too young as the first seven years of my life the effect that it had on me from there was just growing up in a big city and i certainly remember being up in new york new york was a fun place uh but it was too soon within that time we moved and brought us here to dallas so tell me about a little bit about dallas childhood and you know your elementary school days that's a big one
um started going to school at uh really where i began to remember was when we were in on edgemere going to george b dealey school which is still around today i'm always amazed by that uh that was good and then my parents moved we moved to a place on mason dale's and then i went to arthur kramer with my other brother ronnie and those were very fun years they were very formative years what i liked about dallas was pretty much everything very safe place to grow up a very interesting place i got into the jewish community pretty quickly my father was probably the most religious
of the family that moved us forward with judaism my brother today mitch is certainly much more involved in the jewish community in a lot of different aspects but uh growing up here it was a good time it was very innocent it was a place of as a kid being a kid not worrying about the threats of fights or gangs or what have you because of how we lived and where we live so that was not really part of our environment and but very very safe being in dallas and growing up here nice when you moved from new york did any grandparents move with you or
my grandmother my grandfather died um probably when i was about six i believe it was and that was in new york and then my grandmother my father's mother came over with us here my other grandmother my mother's mother stayed in new york for a while and she was deaf and so but my other grandmother my father's what's what are their names yvonne and yvonne is my mother's uh mother and then my dad's mom was libby but my dad's mom was living and she was here of course when you grow up with a grandmother you tend to remember a lot of things what i remember probably
the most was her cooking and taking my brother and i ron because we were closer in age taking us over to her apartment on factory they have these huge red apartments and my grandmother was there not too far from us and being a kid being with your grandmother pretty impressive that you can do always like to cook for us it was always spaghetti and meatballs choc chicken and then of course she would throw in these sour cream coffee cakes that she would make and wow that was some pretty good stuff and but always remembering friday nights going there and spending the night watching earl flynn
movies and eating her spaghetti and meatballs over the chicken and also going to ashburn's ice cream which is certainly no longer around and so it was it was a good time because we were very close to our grandmother and enjoyed that as kids doing that i don't think it gets better when you get to spend that kind of time absolutely with your grandparents so did you go to schule and which school did you attend uh i went to sheriff israel for the most part my younger years my father was certainly the more religious person but i always knew judaism as a as a kid it
seemed very simple to go into the way my father brought us up that's all we knew was judaism never in a bad way but in a good way going to the holidays going to shul um at the table whether it be seder or for hanukkah big gifts and what have you but growing up in judaism was was a very interesting place to be and then of course the community itself uh most of our peers were jewish and so it made the things that we did the bar mitzvah is the batman for my sister she wasn't even baptized but i don't think and the confirmation afterwards
but it was again my father made it as a positive experience i think that he would have liked us all to be more practicing didn't always happen that way but he gave us enough uh wisdom and uh thoughtfulness about it that we always knew that we were jewish it was never a doubt in our mind growing up that way were you bar mitzvahed absolutely uh at sheriff israel i was the first double bar mitzvah there with a young man by the name of toby gronzig we became friends afterwards but it was the very first bar mitzvah at the time that was doubled up because there
were so many bar mitzvahs and it was a very interesting experience but a good experience i remember the practicing how we practice for our torah portions and the readings and i remember going to florida with my dad probably the year before six months before and we were practicing and i was always yawning and my father would just always go oh he's going to do this up there and he's just he's going to embarrass everybody and then he said to me one day he said look i'll give you 25 if you don't yawn and go through the whole thing well of course with that kind of
money that's a challenge and the bar mitzvah was great didn't yawn one bit and i still got my 25 from my father from it where did you go to junior high school junior high school was ben franklin uh it was in the seventh eighth and ninth grade over there it was a good experience for the most part i was not really a good student at the time not too far down from us and but junior high was junior high it was an adolescent place it's more about your hormones probably than your academia were you part of any jewish organizations while you were in junior high
school because this is the time after your birth not really i was a participant in the bbyo organizations but never really joined any uh there i was never i was always an outsider kind of looking in and that was my prerogative to do that so tell me about some of your friends in junior high school like did they shift from elementary to junior high uh they shifted more from junior high to high school okay was the the shift but you know when you grew up with larry burke and ronnie bloom and sam kasmir those are the gentlemen that i hung out with a lot then
came the mark shores and the warren cayman and the chuck lewis's and the steve goutos and mike eisenbergs and so on steve marcus and his brother so a lot of peer group because that was our interaction was the was the jewish community it seemed that all our peers were coming from that as i got into high school um what began to change especially about our sophomore year was the fact that here you had all these jewish boys wondering what to do on christmas and so we decided to start playing football because we had nothing else to do we weren't lighting tree hanukkah bushes or christmas
lights and getting those christmas presents and so we started playing football and that became a process of 50 55 years of doing that my brother got involved his family other families the kids were playing but that was a big bonding time of growing up was was to be with all my friends and uh so that's the christmas day classic year first christmas day it started in 1965 64 64. okay and we started at preston hollow park and we seem to run out of space there and from preston hollow park we went came over to the community center the jewish community center where i am today and it just got kept getting bigger and bigger more people it became a tradition to where we did it every year again a lot of people were showing up to this and we brought in our friends brought in friends and family members and others from different parts of the world where everybody was living so it was a very big experience it brought us all together it bonded us in
our own kind of way that even if you didn't see each other for a year or two years you come back to the football classic on christmas day and everybody would be there and it was like we saw each other yesterday and so a very big part of our lives that's the biggest takeaway from the classic besides the football of courses the first goal was secondary it seemed like it was yeah we were playing football and it took us a while to get smart to stop playing tackle football before we were breaking bones and what have you and then we went to touch and but
it was more a um social event that we we all got together we all got to meet there were parties before there was parties afterwards and it was the camaraderie that brought us together and in fact over the years didn't seem to change much that we were all very close in our own sort of way no matter where we went to with families professions etc etc nice so where after junior high where did you go to high school went to hillcrest high school and uh i only went there myself my freshman my sophomore year and then my senior year in high school it got interrupted
because my parents believed that i needed some extra help and they decided unfortunately sent me to a military school that was in allen texas allen military school it's outside of texas a m wasn't a very good experience but it changed me in the sense of it was though i understood what my parents were trying to do in terms of helping my grades a little bit but as i learned later on it had nothing to do with uh what was going on in school it had to do more with my lack of understanding of school and how to work with it when i i became a
teacher later on in life and as i got my masters in reading i realized what my deficiencies were and they were just really not understanding the classroom once i understood the classroom school became very easy for me so i was there my sophomore and senior year of high school um somewhat of a good experience there were some things that were not there was certainly a lot of young men that were anti-semitic even for high school that most people thought it was mostly all jewish but it wasn't and but i met a lot of good people there i used the negatives to build into positives and
made a lot of friends senior year was probably a little bit better i was hoping that i was going to graduate i kept thinking that i would not graduate but because i didn't have geometry and i had to take the geometry in my senior year and there's a lot of young men and women that just kind of helped me in that subject matter to get better with it and i made a c on it and certainly graduated with my class so going to allen military academy obviously impacted your life at this time were there other influences or things that impacted your life such as you
know music culture politics well certainly the politics just kind of going backwards didn't really understand the politics of life i was too much an adolescent a kid politics didn't seem important it was very distant thousands of miles away my friends were getting into different things and i did as i got older more so in college but not as much there music i stayed with the music of the 60s and 70s uh well this is the 60s right 60s right and but as i got into the 70s the 70s were part of the 60s it was a continuation of the 60s okay that way during this
time i mean there was some major things going on in the world like uh john john kennedy i was at school when john f kennedy was killed and at hillcrest high school and this was in september 22nd of 63. i was a sophomore and i remember our vice principal who was big man i forgot his name but spoke very slowly and he came on the pa system and he went ladies and gentlemen the president of the united states has been shot and we we knew that kennedy was in town we were all talking about it we were very excited that not that we were going to see him but we were going to talk about it and that was my beginning of my politics and probably about 30 40 minutes later might have been a little bit longer he comes back on the air and said
ladies been killed and so there was a hush and the teachers were crying no none of us many of us did not understand the magnitude of what he was saying and he just told us to leave the building and go home and this was on a friday and i remember the the key to that was everybody was leaving the building there was no hollering there was no screaming yay we're out here i mean it was dead silence as people were leaving we were shocked at this so that was certainly a big event uh happening uh there and that kind of began my political look on
life at that point in time so when you graduated thank you for that when you graduated high school um what was the next step for it was was it college did you go to were you drafted in the army i was drafted it took me a while though but i went to a junior college tyler junior college and somewhat interesting place you know it wasn't geared to go to a big school at that time and so my dad thought junior college would be a good thing for me and it had some benefits but i still didn't have the school mentality to be a good student
and i did my thing tyler was a dry community and i was i had a car i had my driver's license and some gentlemen asked me to take them to kilgore texas which is about 30 miles down the road it was wet and they wanted to get alcohol and the gentleman who i went with was 21 and we drove to kilgore bought a whole bunch of beer they bought a whole bunch of beer and a fifth of uh liquor and right after we came out of the liquor store they came out of the liquor store we got stopped by a campus security guard and he
wanted to check and i didn't know what he could do or not do didn't really think about it and they looked in my trunk and saw there was a case or two of beer and so i got arrested and my friend did not i kept saying it was his alcohol it's not mine but since it was a my car b i was driving i got penalized for it so they took me to jail um and uh when i went to jail i needed to post a 50 bond which i found out later was it went into somebody's pocket because that was it i never and
so from my jail cell i was in my that was the only time i'd ever been in jail i looked out and there were my friends they were laughing and i'm like yelling at them go back to tyler give me some money get me out of here and three hours later i was out and that was somewhat of a scary uh time and we were laughing and kivitzing as we went back and so we got back to the dorm at tyler and my friends decided when i went to the dorm that they were locked me out and this was about two in the morning well
in my under my left arm i had a fifth of uh alcohol that was not mine i was trying to give it back to the owner and long story short eventually the dorm leader opened the door and his mouth became very open when he saw me standing there and next thing i knew i was being kicked out of school and my father was really not going to have any of that and so he came my father was had just gotten back from acapulco he had just gotten married and he was very black in terms of his darkness because he was in the sun and my
father tanned very well and so my friends kept looking at me and looking at him of course he was much taller than i was uh they went we didn't know your father was black and i'm like well he's not he's just overly tanned and so we went in there we talked to the dean and dean said sorry you're out of here can't have this getting alcohol my father asked me to leave the meeting and i was kind of shocked but okay i'll leave and i sat outside my friends were coming by asking how it was going about maybe 30 minutes later the door opens up
they called me back in and they put me on probation i remember asking my dad what he did he just said no just talk to the man banned a man i said okay and i stayed there for about another year got off of probation got my grades up i got out of trouble but then decided to leave school because it wasn't very fulfilling for me at that and so i started trying to go to work but the draft had already been in place and not the lottery but the draft and so as i was in college my my number was 2s meaning that you were
a student they couldn't draft you but as soon as i quit it went to 1a and i started looking for jobs nobody really wanted to hire me got a few couple of places that i worked in warehouses and but it wasn't very stimulating for me so i left work and then by that time the army was looking for me and they got and so i kind of volunteered for the draft at that point so i got drafted in august of 1967 and spent six months basic training was in louisiana it's very difficult i remember my younger brother ronnie took me downtown because we had to
go to the recruiting station so it was about six in the morning we had to be there he drove me down there said goodbye and i'm figuring within an hour or two we'd be on a bus or a plane going to louisiana well it turns out we were there until about seven or eight at night and all day they put us on a bus and we got to uh louisiana at about four in the morning 3 30. so we're all thinking again very unconsciously i guess of what the army was but we thought we were asleep for a while so we went in they gave us a meal and then at about 5 30 we got woken up i remember some of us complaining to the drill sergeant that was there saying that we hardly ever slept and he said well when'd you go to bed you said 3 30 when i slept an hour too long anyway and so of course that put a little scare in us at that point and then that next the next few days was haircuts uh getting your gear
learning how to be in the military how to make your bed how to say things to your sergeants to your lieutenants and what have you but i spent four months there in fort lee and most foreign it's in outside of bozo city louisiana and i got my basic out of the way got my ait training out of the way which is advanced individual training still didn't think i was a military person but didn't matter what i thought they they knew i was military and i had initially got orders to fort pierre alabama and that got changed uh fort record by the way was a helicopter
training program and i knew i wasn't going to be a helicopter pilot because i had no idea about flying a plane barely driving from the car and uh as it is i got that i thought okay maybe they put me into mechanics maybe they put me into gunnery kind of situations but my orders changed pretty quickly and then they sent me to germany and i got into documents i was working as a document clerk at the time the gentleman i was working with he was also drafted he signed up for an extra year so he was there for three years he had six months left
and he was feeling pretty good but then they took him out and they sent him to vietnam and i remember the army recruiters before that coming up to me all of us who were drafted and asking us to take another year and i wasn't very mathematically bright but something clicked and i kept going well okay if i'm here for two years that's 365 days per two times two and why would i want to take another year and i never took the extra year i'm glad i didn't i would have probably gone to vietnam either way but i had no control of where i was stationed
or how i was stationed so i spent my almost 19 months in germany had a great time voted volkswagen while i was there so about 13 14 countries i got to travel a lot this is why you were in the army while i was in the army i was stationed in frankfort and then six months later we were sent to darmstadt and then about maybe a year later less than a year later we were we moved to a place called munster germany which was really a guard base guarding missiles that were that we had in germany and then i got out in august of 69
august the 69 okay so what'd you do after you got out of uh the army uh from the army i didn't feel too lost but certainly i was in a very conservative environment from there there was a lot of drug use in germany i pretty much stayed away from that i didn't pretty much i did stay away from and then of course as soon as i got out i decided i want to go back to school and so i went to university of texas in austin where a lot of my friends were and then in 69 let's say i got out in august in october
november some of my friends and i went to washington for the washington memorial and moratorium on the amount of young men and women men certainly that were being killed in and that was a great experience going there we got there so this was this was the protest the protest the war and so you're a soldier and all of a sudden now you're out well i still had my army jacket uh i came out as a corporal but i noticed that one of the first things that happened was i had black armbands on my jacket kind of my protest to the war in vietnam didn't seem
like it was making sense to me we had a lot of protest in austin over that i remember getting tear gassed a bunch of times but when we were in washington we participated in the silent vigils the candlelight vigils in the march on washington did and so it was a very eye-opening experience for those who had gone over to vietnam and did not come back so your politics are now changing you're out of the war you're trying to stop the war you're part of this the hippie generation i was very freely saying the hippie generation um things changed i eventually started smoking pot like all
my friends and you know that was part of the culture of what we were doing and uh we came back from that went went back into texas going to some i remember having some great classes and over there but my politics was whether it be the drugs or what have you the politics was changing i was becoming more liberal more open about talking about it arguing about our governments policies of uh sending young men and women today to these hot spots when they should have been the ones that were going because nothing was who is they the government because they had the power to send
us to create the military the draft came in in november of uh 70 of 70. draft ended the draft no the draft started in terms of the lottery not the draft but the lottery for the draft and my number was three and i had already served my two years in the army so they couldn't really do anything but they did the lottery uh on top of the draft to increase the amount of men that were being sent into the military because when i went in might have been 100 000 by the time i left and as the war kept going on in 68 with lyndon johnson the numbers increased to half a million or more there so the protest was against
the government against the policies of sending young men and women into war zones with no clear policy no clear initiatives other than we're going to stop communism which was a lie and so under that pretext that would send a lot of men and women and a lot of men and women paid a price for for for this bad policy which continues to today at this time were you able to keep your jewish identity at all during these times did that help you hurt you was it non-existent um it was always there i never lost my jewish identity it might not have always gone to shul
and what have you but you know whatever my father was doing or talking about or holidays i was part of that did my jewish upbringing have any effect on me i'm not sure about that other than i was very much of a pacifist and it was against that whether it's jewish law or what have you and probably would have done more but didn't think the policies were good that were that were harming there was nothing that was harming our country these were all things that were put out by the government so okay so just to be clear there you had a jewish identity but you
didn't practice judaism or didn't it didn't help you anyway it didn't help me in any way no so uh and you eventually did you graduated from the university of texas i did not graduate i eventually quit uh there i had most of my education out of the way i was still kind of confused as to what i wanted to do and so i moved back to dallas and started working but didn't feel like i was doing much i met a young lady through some friends her name was jerry cotton his jerry cotton and she's from birmingham and she worked with the deaf and blind kids
i would believe today that she's still doing the same thing and she kind of as we were talking and dating she was helping me with my direction because i still didn't know what i wanted to do and she's saying look you do a lot of things with kids you do little leagues you do different kinds of activities why don't you get into education well what kind of slowed me down was the fact that i wasn't a good student in high school and so i was like well that would be kind of a weird thing to do but i looked at it i was like okay
let's try it i got into special education i got a degree in my major was special education with a minor in government and history and next thing you know i graduated from north texas state with a bs education and went into a place called macona texas where i started working i was working with um probably fourth and fifth graders i was the only male at the school nakona texas is about 60 miles from here a very small town maybe three to thousand people and i got a house i was renting a house right next to the nakona boot factory and i enjoyed the process of
this elementary school but i thought maybe i needed more but i was having a good time i got to help the kids i helped build a playground kids didn't really have a playground so i got with people in the construction industries and other people to help build a quick how can i say an outdoor gym and we used old tires and we used wood and people built things where it really became kind of a nice thing to do but during that period of time since i was hated to be sexist about it but i was working with all women the principal was a male and
women were starting to complain i was too touchy with the kids not in a bad way but in a way of just a lot of emotion a lot of just that's what kids needed you know they didn't have any kind of a background and of course the women didn't really like that so i was kind of up against that kind of wall i had a bicycle club and it was i had one teacher who helped and at 90 percent of the kids that came out were all girls and i lived right next door not only to the nakona boot factory but in a huge field
there was a farm and on the other side some vietnamese people and they were great because every time these kids were coming over i had a back door and front door that was always open and you can see from front to back and you know i was certainly not aware of people's perception of what we were doing and uh again the kids always had a great time they never i never had complaints they never nothing was ever said to me in all the years that i taught about uh being inappropriate but it was a big complaint in fact my principal came up to me one
day and he said seth maybe you shouldn't be taking these kids out and my first thing was what did your daughter say oh we had a great time mr myers is this mr myers is that i said well what are you talking about he said well it's the perception i said i don't care about the perception and um i got uh anyway i kept doing what i was doing the it was more jealousy than i thought anything that was being done and uh how long did you live in dakota a year and a half when i taught there and then after nicaragua where did i
went back to denton to north texas and i got a degree in special ed there that's where i got my special ed degree along with my history and uh government and uh from north texas from north texas uh my undergraduate degree i went to uh nacona that's where i did about a year and a half i went back to denton excuse and then i started working on my masters at texas women's university and i got a master's in reading and then i realized what my academic problems were and i also saw what most of the kids were having the same issues not being able to
read a textbook not being able to understand how to take notes how to do simple things within the classroom that makes your classroom work much simpler most kids i found over the years wanted to be successful they didn't have the tools nor did i there so when i went to i got my masters it just opened up a whole door and um so tell me about jerry cotton where is i mean we were married for about three years and we would eventually move back to dallas and we separated um she went just for we were just too young it was that was all but she
really that's what always sticks with me with jerry was she got me into education she was my vehicle so to speak and you know i'd always love her for that it was just because i enjoyed what i did for 40 years there's not many problems in my academia but nakona was an interesting place to start with teaching i was unaware i remember one day i was walking down just going back to nacona because it kind of fits in that i was walking down the main street of nacona with one of my ridgebacks at the time and i got stopped by a police officer and as
soon as uh he asked me what i was doing where i'm from i was trying to explain to him that i taught and i looked at his name tag and i realized his daughter was in my class and i was trying to tell him that but he just wouldn't have any of it and because some woman somebody not a woman but somebody had complained that they saw me going into the elementary school and again i was wearing my army jacket with the black patches on and i had very long hair at the time curly hair and so he stopped me and then when i told
him i was his daughter's teacher he kind of chuckled and he was really nice about it but that was the being in a small town like that of 3 thousand and uh but i did my thing there like i said i went back to texas women's university got a master's degree and from there uh looked for some jobs in dallas i thought i had a job in carrollton and i missed out on that and so one of my friends mark shore and macy hart had asked me if i wanted to go to this camp and it was in utica mississippi and i said well what
would you like me to do he said i want you to be the swimming director and i was like well i could swim but i didn't really know swimming and he looked at me and he said you got a year can you do it yeah and i just remember going full blast because texas women's university had an indoor pool i took first aid classes i took swimming classes advanced classes and i wrote up a program and when i went to this camp i would say it was about 78 77 it was one of the best experiences i had and i met a lady at the
time and she was living in tucson so i figured okay i'll just get onto those coattails and see what tucson's like and i applied for a lot of jobs got a job almost immediately it was at a school called vision quest for hardcore kids and can i cuff and uh anyway i applied to this place that vision question is really the last stop before kids uh were sent to jail and so i remember doing the interview and then they had these big huge double doors so i was standing there waiting i had interviewed with about three or four people and this kid came up to
me and just flipped me off and uh i didn't know what to do you know i didn't know the kid or anything normally i'd probably be crazy so i just put out my hand and said hi i'm seth myers and he was real impressed with that and i got the job i stayed there for a little over a year i taught during the course of the of the year in the classroom and in the summer i went their survival program and worked at the group and then that's got me into the outdoor part of my life okay so you have now moved to tucson and
what year is it then tucson that you met i was in tucson and uh night the end of 79 into the beginning of 80 that i moved to tucson and you got a you got a job in education a place called vision quest vision and it was a hardcore community i was there from about a year and a half and there was a very stressful place and but it was a good working experience during the course of the year in 79 and 80 during the school year from september to june i was a teacher from june to august i worked on their outdoor leadership programs
and this was in tucson or was this in mississippi this is in tucson yeah i left mississippi i was in mississippi just for one summer of 77. okay okay and then after vision quest what what did you do then from vision quest i applied for jobs in the tucson unified school district i got a job teaching special education and it was a middle school and very interesting i did that for probably eight or nine years i would say about nine years in special education i stayed it was at carson middle school that i was at and so i stayed in special ed for like i said about eight or nine years i got a little tired of it i was teaching i needed more stimulation but i was ld students learning disabled students
i had small classes of maybe 10 kids at a time and but it was very good i felt like i got a lot done with that but there was a time in about 86 87 i went to my principal when i was at carson middle school and i said don can i get out of special ed i'd like to teach the regular classes and he kind of teased me same way you've only had about eight kids you know to teach and he didn't think that i could do it he knew i had a history background i had a degree in history and he we talked
about it for a while and he said in march i want to say about 85. he came up to me and said seth we got an opening next yes you can teach the class the history class so i got real excited he said just remember you got about 30 kids to a class and i was excited to do it so over from march until in august i was reading i was doing research i was looking at what i had to do for the classes and i thought i put that together just a great program but special edge students in regular student classes though they're the same they're a little different academically and i remember having my my program ready to go
i go into the classroom and within a week i didn't know what i was doing because they were gobbling up everything and so but you get your feet in the water and you know what you're doing you begin to know what you're doing and you know from there i loved it because i from that point on until when i retired and i was in 2007 i was in the regular classroom um i got to teach uh not only regular classes but i got to teach gait and some real high-end classes i was doing high school and middle school i would go back and forth i
think the the people in the district in 85 on liked the way i dealt with the middle school children and i kind of liked it because i felt like i was still a middle child school child and i could relate to them the disabilities of just not knowing how to study and so it just worked out for me and i stayed there for the entire time in tucson and tucson that's great so um all this time you're teaching you're going from nacona to denton to tucson from mississippi to tucson uh talk about a little bit about your family what's going on with them at this
point uh are they in dallas i mean they're all over the place anybody everybody's still alive everybody is still alive my mother father they had divorced in i want to say 63 my dad was in dallas my mother was in dallas my brother ronnie was in houston stayed jody our sister had moved to phoenix and was working there she was working with the deaf kids she was doing real estate a lot of different things over the years and then mitchell being the youngest stayed in dallas as well and uh family seemed to like my father moved along with my grandmother to houston for a period
of um at that time my father was a traveling salesman and just until he retired he worked at maiden forum and just he traveled a lot so that's where he lived houston was his base i think that was because of my grandmother they eventually will move back to dallas at the time uh my mother was eventually will get married a man by the name of sonny schwiff and they were together about 35 years give or take before he passed away and um how did you get along with everybody i mean you're you're in tucson so kind of isolated um different you know my brother and
i um as in you know we had distance and between us he was in houston tucson we were very different with the activities that we did but tried to stay in contact my younger brother had more contact than i did with most of the others jody she was also in tucson for a while and then eventually would move to scottsdale because she got married and that's where her husband was going to be so i always got along with my mom very close with my mom certainly close with my grandmother my father my father would come visit with me or i'd go visit back with him
whether it be eastern or dallas i kind of liked them being in dallas that's kind of nice but during this time you also got involved in camping and hiking and talk briefly about the the camping really began in earnest when i was working at vision quest uh there because they took me on the survival of the summer and one of one part of the program in vision quest and this was we're talking now i'm going backwards probably in 80 that i was 79 and 80 i was at vision quest before i went to tusd and in the summertime i was a like a kid and
one of the first things if you're working for the vision quest program they want to take you out in the wilderness on it's their two-week expedition so to speak but you go in as a kid you have no food you learn to navigate you learn to use the map in the compass learn to survive get along with others so one of the first trips that we took that i had to take was in a place called the gila wilderness in new mexico and there was about 12 of us 11 kids and then myself as the adult but i was the kid too because i had
everything that they had i had i didn't have anything different the only difference is i knew a little bit about the outdoors and they did not and most of the kids that we that were taking on these survival places didn't want to be there they were city kids this was tough for them and i remember we were all walking and the first day you start you have no food you have some water but you have no food and it's up to you learning to map and compass to get to point b and at point b they'd give you live chickens you had to kill them
and you had to survive and some groups took longer than others because kids would start arguing and fighting now let's do this let's go that i don't want to do this i don't want to do that so you had to learn to bring kids together or the kids had to learn to be together and going out and the kids were in the gila and we were on the gila river and i remember just remember as we were walking seeing all these blackberry and raspberry bushes and i'm just stopping and i'm picking and everything kids are keep walking and when we're hungry you know nobody's eaten
for a day maybe two days depends on how long it takes us to get to the point b and i just remember just picking up that and then the watercress was in which is a lettuce it's in the water so i was learning about the outdoors and i would finally catch up to them and in my hat my whole face was red and black from all the berries that i was eating plus in my hat they were it was just filled with lettuce with the watercress and the fruit and the kids were just starving and they're like well where'd you get that how did you
have food i told them guys i was trying to get your attention to eat and nobody was paying attention they were just crumbling and so my outdoor beginning began there tucson plus is just a haven of mountains outdoor activities to go into so that my backpacking and still hasn't stopped to this day that's great with that um so tell us uh our present day now i guess do you still live in tucson i still live in tucson i'm married been married about 26 years who are you married to angela ladani and a nice young lady from argentina met her on an airplane and i was
here visiting my family and she was on the plane and all i remember she had this hair long hair that went down to her bud and she was on the same flight that i was and which i did not know and you could smoke at the time because it was in the early mid 80s or latter part of the 80s and you could smoke in the airport and so i just remembered her smoking so i got to the counter and i and i found out i was sitting in a middle seat so i said look could you move me and yeah we'll do this and
so all of a sudden next thing i know i'm on the aisle seat she's right next to me i'm sitting with her and so i always teased her that she just talked her ear my ear off and unfortunately for her i was doing all the talking because she was going to arizona phoenix in fact to visit with some friends and this was on december the 25th i want to say 92 it was maybe 91 91 that is when i met her this is christmas day christmas day because i was what happened was is normally we play football but i came from st louis visiting my
cousins i spent a couple of days here and then for some reason i decided to go home on christmas back to tucson and so the flight that i was on she was on and it was going to phoenix by the time it was over with she knew all about arizona the mountains the places to visit the grand canyon and i had asked her my brother-in-law at the time was picking us up and i said look would you like a ride i'd be more than happy to and she looked at him and he had a huge beard and you know she thought okay this guy is
kind of nice and she said no i don't but i said here's my phone number you want to call me i'm here for a couple of days seem like a nice person and she did call me the people she was visiting were busy doing something and then so i she called me up and i said look let's go out she heard my grandmother in the and my niece and nephew they were over at my sister's house so i said look i'm here i'm staying with my sister would you like to go out and show you around phoenix for a little bit and she did and
we went back over to my sister's house and she met my grandmother and she fell in love with my grandmother and so that loosened it up and then all of a sudden her friends were busy but they were in because they were visiting and they thought she was coming in the day later and so at that point in time i was calling my friends and because they were house-sitting with my dogs i had rhodesian ridgebacks and they were house-sitting but i couldn't get in contact with them so i got a little nervous and so finally the guy calls me the husband of my friend and
he calls and says look colleen my good friend was in the hospital she was having surgery and i was like okay gotta go so i told angela i said look i'm going to tucson she'd like to join me you know come on and she was kind of hesitant she called her friends and she came with me to tucson she met my friend who was in the hospital and then she saw her friends didn't spend much time with them and while she was there i said look because i was off it was during the christmas holiday of 1991 and i said hey would you like to
go to the grand canyon you know take you to sedona these places and she was a little hesitant and sure because i was talking about it she and that's how we really got together she went on the with me for about a week and we went northern arizona next thing i know she went back to florida where she was living her parents were older her father was very sick and so she eventually by may of 92 she moved to tucson to be with me and we started living together but then her father got real sick and she had to leave and she was gone for
about nine months taking care of her dad and i just asked her i said do you still want to come back and she said sure and she brought her mom her mom had alzheimer's her father had passed away and i went up there to visit with him and her about two weeks prior to his death i didn't want to go for the funeral but i wanted to let him know that all was going to be good and i told him i said look i'd like to marry your daughter you know would you have any problem with that and he had a big grin he said
no i said i'll take good care of her of course it was 10 years later when i decided to get married with her and um but you know we've been together ever since and that was my journey uh with her then her mother came here with us and she lived with us for a while she's just a neat neat lady but she developed alzheimer's she lived with us for about a year and then it just got too difficult and for my wife it was her mother was her daughter her friend her mother her she was everything to her they were that close she was an
only child and um so eventually she lived she would live with us for a while and then eventually uh we had to put her in her home and she was about seven years in the bed didn't even know us at all before she passed away and but she and i are still together angela angela yeah that's good that's a good story that you met on an airplane is right you know you meet people in some of the best places i guess yeah different places for sure so just winding down the interview um what advice do you have for your family that you'd like to leave
you're leaving a video for your family it could be the younger generation of kids coming up is there anything any advice you want to share with them enjoy the journey enjoy the road to where you are make sure you're moving forward can't take everything too seriously whatever you think you want to do do it because you're not going to have a second chance at it appreciate your family appreciate those around you the politics of life as important as it might be at the time just doesn't change your life you have to move on with your life you got to be content you got to be
you got to go after whatever you want to do don't putt around if you think you want to be a teacher or an engineer do it you should never stop believing in yourself because if you don't believe in yourself nobody else is going to believe in you enjoy and appreciate your family your friends to me those are the most important things in my life as much as i taught politics with my brother that ain't nothing compared to the journey of where you want to go to because everybody has a different journey a different we all have a different path that we take and you got
to make the most of that path goes very quickly and just appreciate what you have because a lot of people don't have nothing of what what some of us have and some of us don't have that much to begin with but we have a house we have food we have a family you have a job and and watch your health because it comes out on you pretty fast yeah well it's about quite a journey you've taken i appreciate you sharing that with us today uh any legacy or any advice to the next generation of young jewish boys and girls that may look at this video
and again it's about the journey it's about the discovery of life and what it is appreciate everything around you don't you know get rid of the stress as much as that you can but to me the most important thing is your family your friends your happiness and your own happiness comes from within it doesn't come from others and you know if you're into your religion if you're into your culture you know keep going with it go as strong as you can and because you know one day yesterday we were 17 today all of a sudden i'm 70 plus it goes that fast and uh and
just again you have to enjoy the journey you have to enjoy each step that you take that that makes your life happy not the things that don't make you happy because those are the things that hurt us the most and you find ways to give back to your community through your religion again through your culture through your donations through the work as my brother does in his jew in the jewish community those are very important things because they they bring life to us the sharing and and that's another thing share your journey with others it's pretty important thing so they don't have that rough road
even though each person like i said earlier takes a different journey different path to where we're going well you've taken quite a journey just by sitting and talking to us and i appreciate that if you have anything else to say or want to impart again probably my best part of my journey is appreciating my friends my family if i kicked off tomorrow to me i enjoy the whole damn thing it was all good the camaraderie the love the friendships that's what pulls us along and the sharing those are the most important things in life you look out for your brothers your sisters your community outside
try to help others you you give back to what you have uh there's many people out there that don't have anything just got to take advantage of everything that you have and i appreciate it that's great well seth meyers i appreciate you sitting and giving this oral history to the dallas jewish historical society and just a big thanks and for the record nobody wants you to kick off tomorrow i don't plan on that most people are not where i am at this stage of my life too so i'll have to thank my brother for being the the person who asked any of the questions and
whatever it's all good well thank you very much