Sharan Goldstein
Sharan was born in New York City in 1937 and spent a happy childhood in Kew Gardens, Queens, near a beautiful park where she roller skated and went sledding. Her father was a metallurgical engineer whose family business evolved from scrap metal in North Carolina to a rag business in Brooklyn and eventually to manufacturing shop towels and protective clothing. To supply their own fabric, the family bought a cotton mill in Kaufman, Texas, and operated a sewing plant in Cleburne. She had strong family ties in Charleston, South Carolina, where her mother was raised and her grandfather worked in real estate and insurance, and grandparents on her father's side were partners in the family business.
In 1951, when Sharan was a sophomore in high school, her father moved the entire family to Texas, with her mother driving from New York with Sharan and her younger brother to arrive on her father's birthday, January 18th. Congressman Sam Rayburn was said to have helped persuade her father to establish his businesses in Texas. Sharan entered Highland Park High School, an adjustment she found difficult. She began college at the University of Texas in Austin but, wanting a more disciplined environment, transferred to Mills College in Oakland, California, where she found great diversity and an enriching experience and earned a degree in English literature.
Sharan met her husband Lynn in Dallas when he was graduating from Texas A&M. He served in the Air Force, stationed in French Morocco and Turkey, and later earned a master's degree in civil engineering at UC Berkeley, where the couple married. After a year in Houston, where Lynn worked for Shell Chemical, they returned to Dallas so he could join her father's business. Their four children, three boys and a girl, were all born in Dallas. Sharan became deeply involved in the community, first with the Sisterhood of Temple Emanu-El and then for decades with the National Council of Jewish Women, launching docent programs for the downtown library and the Meyerson Symphony Center and championing programs addressing hunger, poverty, and childhood obesity.
Full Transcript
Sharon tell us you're involvement with the Jewish community here in Dallas I have been involved ever since I moved back after graduating from college and living in Houston for a year and my first involvement really was with the sisterhood of temple emanuel when I remember most about that is that they had a group that really interested me called the peace and world relations study group and I I became involved in that and stayed with it for a long time in fact I may have been there at its demise I did I hope not responsible and what were you guys doing we were each member took
a country and we researched the history and the political structure and the cultural structure of the of the country and how it related to whatever else was going on in the world and it was fascinating it was a very interesting group of women and I I really I really did enjoy it tell me about some of the other organizations you've been involved I'm very involved in the national council of jewish women and when i came to dallas my mother gave me a gift of a life membership in the National Council of Jewish women because it was very important to her and I quickly understood why
it was and so from probably 1960 on there hasn't been a year that I haven't had some major involvement and responsibilities with the national council of jewish women what are some of the accomplishments that you've really been proud of I started the docent program for the opening of the downtown library used to refer to as a new downtown library but that was in 1983 so it's not very new now and then because of that I was asked to do the same thing for the opening of the meyerson symphony center and there was some question about whether this was an appropriate thing for the National Council
Jewish women to be involved in but it was truly an educational program in education has always been critical to mcjew so you know we developed this program it was an amazing undertaking because the symphony hall belongs to the people of Dallas and so we wanted to be as inclusive as we could and we had volunteers from the the catholic church across the street the Santuario de guadalupe and we had students from skylines architecture clustered and women from links which is an african-american women's organization so we tried very very hard to make it reflect the population of the city and that was in 1989 and we
managed huge crowds I don't know I really don't know how he did it and we the program still goes on a little did we ever suspect that 20 almost 30 years later it would still still be acted very concerned about hunger and poverty and so for about the last 15 or 20 years I've been involved in one way or another with programs that address that the national council of jewish women has been very supportive and very interested in it as well so I've worked with the North Texas Food Bank in a program called Operation frontline where we teach where they teach women of very limited
means to cook in a healthy and economical way and several of us who were involved with that program realize that we have this increasingly terrible problem of obesity and there is so closely linked to poverty and hunger and so we looked at we looked at this and we studied it and we decided that maybe the best approach that we could take would be to try to deal with childhood obesity and NC JW started a program in Israel called hippy home instruction program for preschool youngsters and in that program they have women who come from that particular community who were moms that were participated in the
heavy program and they those hippy home instructors go into the homes and they they teach them others and they bring materials and teach the mothers how to be their children's first teachers and it not only is an amazing empowerment for the mothers but of course it gives the kids a great start and we thought how perfect these kids also need to learn to live a healthy lifestyle and the best way to do it is to start early and you have to start with the mothers because they are the ones in control of what goes on the table so we have we developed a program called
food + fit equals fun and it's very very gratifying we teach nutrition and and physical activity we don't call we never talk about dieting although you know most of these moms are at minimum obese many are morbidly obese so we know the likelihood of their children also being obese is very high if they're not already obese at four years old and they need to be active and we realized in the physical activity part of it we give them the moms jump ropes and balls and chalk and pedometers and this is really the only time that these moms get to play and they their kids are
being taken care of by the home instructors so this is their time so they can concentrate on learning how to help their families live a healthier lifestyle so it's been a wonderful gratifying program and we think it's making a difference at least for the ones whose lives in touch like how you seen the Jewish community grow over the years in dallas from dallas earliest days there have always been very very strong Jewish leadership in the community aside from the religious organizations Jews and Dallas have always been concerned with the quality of life in the community and they certainly continue to do so let's go back
now 1937 New York City your little girl what do you remember I smiley I yes it was a it was really a happy time and I was not happy to be leaving but we lived in an apartment house that was right next door to a beautiful park and what part of the city was and this was in kew gardens in queens and I remember roller skating down a huge hill in front of the house I still have scars on my knees to prove that I did that and there were wonderful hills in the part where we went sledding in the winter time so it was
it was a it was a great place to grow my parents do my father was was a metallurgical engineer and so his family started out in the scrap metal business in North Carolina he was born in Georgia but he his family moved to North Carolina and they were in the scrap metal business and then they moved to move the business to Brooklyn and he evolved into a rag truly rag business and they laundered shop towels and things that were used in industry and in gas stations and then they began manufacturing shop towels and they bought a cotton mill in Kaufman Texas so that they could
actually make their own fabric and then they had a sewing plant in cleburne texas so this meant that my father was not home very much and it got to be very difficult for the family and so my father announced that lo and behold the whole family was going to be moving to text my mother was determined that we were going to get here for my father's birthday on january 18th and she drove like a bat out of hell from New York in order for my it's amazing that we got here and lo and behold we ended up in Dallas on my father's birthday and I
was then a sophomore it was the middle of my sophomore year in high school you had a younger brother yeah and so the three of you drove down together uh-huh do you remember what year that was exactly yes it was in 1951 1951 was the car you were driving a DeSoto I remember well what year was it the soda Batmobile um it was probably about it three or four year old okay so the decision is made how did your father first the sign on Texas they weren't growing cotton in New York and so the cottony was being grown down here and he just started to
decide to start from the very beginning so he was going to have his product start in the ground as a cotton fortunately he didn't plant the con he just had the mill right and then it had to be made into cloth which they did in Kaufman and then I don't know why he decided there should be a sewing plant in cleburne i remember that sam rayburn was very instrumental in in talking my father into moving to texas and starting these businesses so i was here at congressman at the time sam rayburn he was I don't know that whether he was speaker of the house yet
or not but he was certainly a congressman and we have some photographs of the opening of the mill with sam rayburn and I forgot who the other Congress people so how does mom sit you and your brother down and say guys we're leaving high school and we're and what was the high school that you left I had just started at forest hills and now mom says were leaving and you said not what is a 40 year old i didn't i didn't have a lot of power right so I was um guys Franklin made for before we get down to dallas now tell me do you
remember your grandparents i did tell me but i do i had one set of grandparents who lived in charleston south carolina and actually my grandmother was born there and that's where my mother grew up and was raised and we have a huge family in charleston and i used to go down and visit as often as I possibly could because those people really knew how to have a good time and it was except for the Charleston mosquitoes it was a fabulous place what did your grandparents do for a living my grandfather was in the real estate and insurance business in Charleston my own house were also
in that business okay what about your grandparents on your dad's side well my grandfather and my father were in business together and so that was the scrap metal business to begin with and then the rag business and then manufacturing shop towels and that evolved into manufacturing protective clothing so it was sort of an evolution all right now you're pulling into dallas texas and i'm sure you're excited oh yeah pick it up where do we go to high school I asked the adjustment it was awful it was really awful i went to Highland Park High School my mother was told that that was the best school
district in the city so she was determined that her kids were going to get the best education and I walked up to Highland Park my very first day terrified of course and I had new shoes and a new outfit to wear and we always wore brown leather loafers and we had our bobby socks pulled up and i'm walking up the steps of highland park high school and somebody yells out hey Yankee we don't wear shoes and socks like that so that was that was that was my first day I thought that was day one yeah that was day one when did it start getting better
probably when I went off to college high school was still an adjustment for it it was ever and it truly was and where did you go to college um I started out at the University of Texas in Austin and Austin I had an incredibly wonderful time they're made a lot of friends had a an overwhelming social life and I decided you know I think there's probably more to college than having your calendar filled with dates all day long and so I decided I need to be at a women's college I need to be in women's college and this was in the summer between my freshman
and my sophomore year whoa and I in July began applying to women's colleges in for that September and they said you know please apply again will consider your application for the winter semester but I needed I was determined that I needed to start really buckling down and getting an education and I wasn't going to do it I knew I didn't have enough discipline to do it at UT which party it was it was a great time and so I applied to Mills College in oakland california and they said yes we would be delighted to have you start in in September I had never been west
of Fort Worth in my life and as I flew into oakland by myself never having seen the college didn't know anybody who had gone there i flew into oakland thinking what are you doing what was wrong with having a good time why are you doing this and as it turned out it was an amazing experience great diversity in the student body which I certainly didn't have in Highland Park High School and hadn't had it rip well I did when I where I went to junior high school but so what brought you back after graduation what rocky rush back to Texas well I met my husband
before I graduated from high school where Jimmy oh you met him i met him in dallas in dallas was he going to highland park also know he was actually graduating from am when i met him okay and I he had a date with somebody else and he had fixed it was a football game so he brought in a whole bunch of friends and I had to date with somebody turned out who's already engaged but needed something to do that night and and he never called me for a date until this was in October he didn't get around to calling me for a date until june
and i had tried very hard to get his attention and so got his commission in the Air Force and so he left to go into the air force and I left to go to college and you know we kept up a you know a really strong correspondence what what year was this now this was nineteen fifty-four ok this is nineteen fifty know it was he involved at all with Korea well he he was in the service under the Korean War but he was actually stationed in French Morocco and then he went to Turkey which was not really part of the rotary Korean War but they
were launching what they called weather balloons from the base he was in in Turkey but in truth this was when Gary Francis powers they were really spiked length going over Russia and he was shot down and that was a whole you know big scene then but that was the base that Lynn was that and he didn't get to finish his tour of duty there because his mother was very very sick and the Red Cross had him had him come home he came home and we were married the next year I was still in college I was still at Mills College getting a degree in English
and he is a civil engineer and he decided well won't hurt I'm going to apply to the University of California Berkeley to get my master's degree in civil engineering and he was accepted and as it turned out he was just fortunate that it wasn't a superb civil engineering department at UC Berkeley so the first year that we were there we were not we were not married and then we married in June and then we both finished up the following semester and did your family's encourage you to come back home I knew that they would like that but they you know they didn't encourage us and
and we were it was a depression than as well and so it was very difficult for Lynn to find a job and I had this degree in English literature which is not terribly marketable and he was offered a job at yosemite national park and we would have lived in a trailer and if I had my life to do all over again I probably would have said yes Oh No you answer let's do that somehow or other with my monogrammed towels and it didn't seem to fit with that trailer life so as you guys do so he was offered a job in houston with shell chemical
and we moved to Houston which was probably the last place under the Sun that I wanted to live I said okay we're going back to Texas I really want to live in Austin and while there was nothing available in austin and the only job that he could find was in Houston and he said well the good thing about is it never snows in Houston and the day we got there lo and behold oh so that was our that was our solemn occasion houston we were in houston for a year and my father really wanted Lin to come into the business but he wanted him to
know that he could function on his own that he didn't need the family business but he could earn a living and support a family on his own and so he my father never said anything to learn about coming into the business until he had worked for a year and then he suggested that he you know I said what you guys did that so that's what we did and then we moved back to town okay where were your kids born they were all born in Dallas I'll born in Dallas all four of them three boys and a girl Kennedy assassination in 63 you guys are here
what do you remember about that down everything about that day because my father-in-law had died the day before so you know we were really really stressed to begin with and then I was around the house our middle son had chicken pox at the time and so I was home and heard it on the radio and of course could not believe it Lynn was on his way downtown to make funeral arrangements and I will never forget he came home and he said that he and his sister were you know down driving downtown to make these arrangements and they heard sirens and Lynn said he said to
his sister he said something has happened to the president I know it and unfortunately so and then my father-in-law's that was a father-in-law died on Thursday I thought that was a Friday so my father in laws funeral wasn't until Sunday and we were getting dressed and getting ready for the funeral and we had the TV on and there's Jack Ruby and the base the municipal building where he shot a Lee Harvey Oswald so the funeral you know there was a those it was a funeral unlike anything I've ever been to because everybody was so terribly distracted we were so disturbed about my father-in-law's death and
then President Kennedy's that it was a pat was the happiest time in your life my wedding day of course was was a you know was a wonderful day and and the birth of our our children lived a very blessed life and I've had the good fortune to not have to work and to choose the things that I'm passionate about to follow so it's very difficult you know seeing all my kids graduate from college and then you know the blessing of incredible the most incredible grandchildren anybody has are mine that's up spoken like a true Graham I absolutely absolutely absolutely what is the neatest invention you've
seen in your lifetime I love to cook and so I guess my who's an art this is probably the first thing that comes to mind if I had a lot of time to think of Anakin there's nothing but you're the first person ever tell us that like this yeah that's four that's great what's your favorite holiday oh my favorite holiday is to coat and I decorated the sukkah at temple since the year that our oldest son was born mitzvah because they had the sisterhood had talked about being economical and decorating the sukkah with plastic fruit and I said a ho no oh we're not doing
that and I said okay then you do it and so I've been doing it for about thirty nine years so you have the four children seven grandkids huh you've lived through so much in your lifetime what advice does grandma have for the next generation I guess I'm will encourage them to just get as much education as they possibly can and to find their passion and to follow it it did a great job thank you thank you you