Sheila Rosenberg
Sheila Rosenberg's family story reaches back to Poland. Her father's parents, Sam and Rachel Wilk, immigrated through Galveston in the early 1900s and settled in Houston, where her father grew up as one of eight children and went into the scrap business with his uncles. A funny, handsome, and creative man, he ran a Houston nightclub in the 1930s, served as a mechanic and welder in World War II, and later took up oil painting and made candlesticks and wind chimes from scrap materials. He met Sheila's mother, a young woman from a Chicago immigrant family, on a 1948 trip, and the two were happily married for nearly 61 years. The family settled in San Antonio, where Sheila enjoyed what she describes as a Jewish Brady Bunch childhood full of Hebrew school, junior congregation, BBYO, Girl Scouts, and summer camp.
Sheila studied advertising at the University of Texas, graduating in 1983, and married Lanny Cooper that November. His family's work brought the couple to Dallas in February 1984. She found the city hard at first, missing her San Antonio life, but gradually made close friends among other young couples, worked in the management office at NorthPark shopping center for twelve years, and settled in. She and Lanny served as BBYO advisors and later joined Beth Torah, then Shearith Israel, and became involved with a congregation in Plano. They raised two sons, Elliot and Louis, both of whom attended religious school, celebrated their bar mitzvahs, and traveled to Israel as teenagers.
Long known for her humor, Sheila wrote a column called Stretch Marks for the Dallas Jewish Weekly and in 2003 joined the ComedySportz family-friendly improv troupe, an experience she loved and continued for years. Lanny, who joined as a sound and lighting volunteer, was diagnosed with cancer and died in March 2011. Supported by family and friends, Sheila rebuilt her life through yoga, teaching Sunday school, and returning to active involvement in Hadassah. She met Michael Rosenberg through JDate, married him in November 2014, and blended their families. Proud of building a life largely on her own, Sheila credits her parents as role models who taught her to give back and appreciate what she has.
Full Transcript
good morning my name is joe reingold and i'm interviewing sheila rosenberg and today is monday february 18 2019 good morning good morning tell us a little bit about your family what you remember about your grandparents and your parents and where do they live and where et cetera where were they born and where do they settle well my dad's parents came from selva poland and they came here through galveston they were part of that group that came in the early 1900s my grandfather sam wilk came here in 1910 his wife rachel rachel came three years later with two little babies one of whom died like three
months later when they moved came to the country and we've actually been to there are museums you can go to in galveston where we've seen their names on the manifest and she he had to sign for her when she arrived like she was luggage so you could claim her you know so anyway they settled in houston and that's where my dad grew up and my dad was i guess fifth out of eight kids they're the boys and then two girls and he um none of the boys graduated high school he went to 11th grade because they had to work i mean they wanted to work
they wanted to um and his uncle one of his uncles was in the scrap business and a lot of his uncles actually were in the scrap business and got the boys my dad started working for him when he was little and my dad was was quite the character he was very very funny very handsome guy and he had a nightclub in houston in the 30s called joe and louise and he um world war ii started and he put something in the newspaper that said the draft missed me drifting any time and then he got his draft notice so he went to world war ii and
he uh um but he was lucky he didn't see a lot of fighting he in fact on this other video that i have it almost we always tease him that he went to camp because he was he was a mechanic and he was a welder and he fixed tanks and stuff and he didn't see a lot of the you know fighting combat that kind of stuff so anyway um came back to the states after um the war and i'm getting into i guess i'm getting off on a tangent but that's okay was working with one of his brothers in san antonio who started the scrap
business and had to go to chicago to get something for the business it's 1948 and my dad also wanted a student bank for whatever reason the guy in san antonio would not give him the loan for the student baker so he takes the train to chicago and whoever picked him up from the train my dad said to him i need whatever i wish i knew what that part was but he said i need this for the company i need a student baker i need a nice jewish girl he in that order yes so he goes to this party my mom meanwhile already had a boyfriend
and her mother was like go to this party meet this you know just go and be nice you don't have to just come home after whatever so my mom buying she goes to this party she says my mom was 20 years old my dad was 31 and she sits on this couch and there's this guy doing this to her who is this guy my father and after a while they start talking my father goes into the kitchen and tells the host mazel tov there's going to be a wedding you just wait and um two weeks later they got engaged and my father sent his parents
atta western union telegram that said mazel tov got the card got the girl and they were happily married for almost 61 years wow so and that's something so so that was my dad's family my mother's family um my mom's mother um is from gordon at america poland and she came to the states when she was a teenager with her family and then her father is from regaladvia and he came by himself as a as a young man 35 cents in his pocket they met in chicago and they met at a dance or something and um you know they were also married a long time he
was a um grocer he was a grocer and then they had a i guess you call it an appetizer store kind of a i mean i would call it a deli but it wasn't like a restaurant deli right that kind of thing okay anything else so your family stay obviously settled in the senate your family settled in san antonio and stayed there so what was life like growing up there it was great it was great i was um i was the youngest of three and very i mean i have a brother nine years older than me and a sister seven years older than me so
i was very much the baby and babied my dad and his brother were in the scrap business and and i had a nice a nice like growing up they we grew up at the uh conservative synagogue at the time san antonio just had one of each yeah they had an orthodox at the temple they have i i i kind of had a very i guess sheltered you know looking back i mean it was it was nice i mean i had my best friends brownies and brothers and sisters my dad was uh they were involved in the synagogue but they weren't it was not important for
my dad to have his picture on the wall he was never president of this or any of that but he he built the sukkah every year for the preschool and he was always porn carnivals he was the one flipping the hamburgers i mean he was always wanted to be a worker and mom always volunteered she was very very active volunteering at the jewish nursing home and i think she was in charge of the volunteer as well she she never worked outside home she never had a professional job but always shuttling me and my buddies to our girl scouts and dance lessons and tennis lessons and
you know summer camp and all that kind of stuff what were you involved in a little bit older i was really involved in bbyo um my brother and sister were very involved so i just grew up knowing that and wanting that my brother was a beau he was in hurts lazier and he was a beau of uh david kenner bbg and then my sister was in ben nathan bbg and she was herzl sweetheart so when i joined i got into ben nathan bbg and i was hurt so sweetheart mom was really involved in the sisterhood at um at the synagogue daddy was in the brotherhood
but he was he was also a shriner he um when i finally came along he wasn't that involved but he kept his membership and it was very very important to him he always kept that membership up tell us about what he made so my dad was very creative and um when he was older uh he started taking painting lessons in fact my sister started oil painting lessons and she didn't like it and my father said i paid for it i'm going to take the lessons and he i wish i could bring his pictures he made these great oil paintings and um he made these in
the scrub we yard these were from some uh building that they threw out their chandeliers or something and they and he put this together to make candlesticks and he made them for some friends of ours and you know family members of course and he's a great gift yeah he took some of these and made wind chimes and stuff and he used to he used to do that he was very very handy very creative i always think had he had any education he probably would have been an architect or an engineer so what did you do after high school after high school i went to ut
i studied advertising i was in a delta phi epsilon [Music] and i got married right afterwards i like to joke that i advertised myself to my first husband because i never used my degree and it's still i graduated in 83. i've never taken it out of the envelope and still i've never really worked in advertising um but yeah i married i met this very cute guy that wasn't sammy named lanny cooper we graduate i graduated in may and we got married in november and we lived in austin for a few months and then that's what brought me to dallas we moved here february of 84.
what brought you here well he was working for his family they brought us here so what did you think of dallas when you first came here i did not like it i took me four years to really i used to dream every night of my neighborhood in san antonio the first four years i lived here my neighborhood synagogue and all that whole life i i kind of found it hard to make friends i i'm a pretty social person but we we found i got involved in art i made some friends with other young couples other young girls that had just moved here with their husbands
and we became good friends and you know we started working i found we found jobs and i worked i worked in the management office at north park shopping center for 12 years um that was uh that was a good place and and i'm still friends with those that group of girls to this day we're still even though a lot of them have moved on moved away we still we still keep in contact what did you guys do as a young couple here in dallas did you join anything did you feel part of anything participating we right away we became bbyo advisors which was kind of
a nice experience it was it was you know and what was also nice the other advisors were also young people our age so we hung out with them and those other people that we met through art we hang out with those people we really didn't belong to um we didn't belong to a synagogue yet it wasn't until 1986 we bought our first house and then we joined beth torre we got involved a little bit in that tour and children children yes did you have any i had my first son elliot billy adam cooper april 1988 and my second son louis drew cooper who called louie
he was born october 91 okay so let's see um that they went to preschool to jcc uh they did not go to the jewish day schools they raised the hebrew school and everything confirmation share with israel in fact elliott went all through 12th grade they had sunday school till you know we went all through and louis went yeah i think he stopped in 11th grade but they had their bar mitzvahs they both went to israel when they were teenagers for about a month in the summer they went to echo hill ranch camp which unfortunately was not around anyone it's also where lanny went too much
for suspense echo call was a great what made you switch synagogues oh my well um we were on scholarship uh beth torren told us we couldn't be on scholarship anymore really yeah they came to our house and um yeah it was a group of them so we switched to sheriff um also at the time we had gotten involved in um plano and uh the boys went to gun izzy many summers lanny and i were really involved going there for holidays and any events and and he was always helping the rabbi with computer stuff he was he was really good in computers so just this was
always helping him and i i helped with some events and i used to we used to they had a couple's classes they used to have we used to like going to those i'd go to some of their women's events sometimes so how did you get involved i know you were involved with a comedy troupe how did that happen wow um well you know kind of growing up i was always kind of funny in the clown and this and that i used to write a couple years i used to have a magazine here dallas dallas jewish weekly and i used to i wrote a humor column
for about two years for them it's called stretch remarks got two complaints which is good means people were reading it that was a lot of fun so when ellie was about 14 uh i saw this ad in the paper for something called comedy sports and it had a picture of a referee and a whistle and then i was i was in the sports bar i didn't know what it was so i called it what is it it's family-friendly improv so um i went uh we took him about you know a couple of boys about six boys and were watching this and i turned to lanny
and i said i could do this i could do this and then afterwards at the end of the show they said oh by the way we do workshops and classes and this and that so i signed up for this workshop and it was a weekend long thing and i came home and i went this is fun oh my god i felt like someone plugged me into a light socket because i was just i can do this so um i i didn't right away join the troop but they said look come and help and this and that's why we would help sell concessions and clean up
and it got me to know the people in the troop and to learn as i was taking classes learn more about it and so in february 2003 i joined the troop professionally and a few months later lanny also joined he was a sound enlightened guy and he loved that so um i'm still doing it unfortunately lanny was diagnosed with cancer and he died march of 2011. tell us from that point on what did you get involved in and how did you proceed i was uh what did i do well i mean i kind of threw myself and i did yoga i taught i taught sunday school at about havarim i was asked to be one of my girlfriends got me on the board of hadassah and that's how i got back involved in hadassah i'd been a life member for many years but i never really was involved in anything so i got involved back in i remodeled my house i mean i was i was very lucky that i had a really great
group of family and friends and i like to say they they caught me before i even knew i was falling i mean i was i was really blessed in in that sense i had a niece that lived with me for about five months so i wasn't really alone because the boys were away at school at the time so you know eventually uh i don't want to say moved on but but time heals and you just kind of wake up and you just you gotta be yourself again you know it just happens so how did you meet your second husband right um people kept telling me
oh you got a date we gotta find your mail i just i i told myself i'm gonna be alone and i'm gonna i'd better get used to it because i'm just gonna be alone then after a while i started wanting to date again i felt comfortable i got on j date and i met some nice guys i met some not so nice guys um and then uh this guy reached out to me his name on the uh his j date name was rosie tex and he sent me this message that said so when were you at ut and so we wrote back and we texted
back and not texted but on the the message thing on j day week back and forth whatever and um he kept wanting to see me and i really was busy at work and improv and yoga i do yoga a few times a week i got involved with that when lanny died i said look i've got an improv show that this coming saturday night it's family friendly bring your boys you can be so he brought his boys and later he told me later on that when i got him on stage he said see that one there you're gonna get get used to her because you're gonna
be seeing a lot more of her so that was saturday and then next wednesday he took me out to dinner and we broke all the j-date rules because i gave him my address told him where to pick me up because you're not supposed to do that we're supposed to meet at the place and that was may of 2013 and we've not been apart since we got engaged november 2013 we got married november 2014. uh his name is michael rosenberg that's where the rosie text comes from and it's been nice it's been really nice what is life like with a blended family i know a lot of people have that these days but how did it um well it's not easy it's tough he has three kids and and by the time we got together i mean our kids are grown um when we got married let's see well okay so right now we've been married four years elite is 30.
louie's 27. he has a daughter that's 25 a son that's 23 and another son that just turned 20. for a while there we did have four kids in the house louie now lives he's been in california the last couple of years before that he was in austin but yeah for a while there it was uh it was a busy household and but right now naomi is the only one at home still that she should be moving out but it's um oh my gosh you know they they were raised a certain way and my kids were raised a certain way and just got to figure out and how did they get along all right they do i mean elliot had to learn not to eat other people's ice cream in the freezer my thought is if you want it that bad you put your name on it yeah it's still a work in progress let's just say okay that's good yeah as long as you guys are happy yeah can you think of anybody in your life you could say you could point to and say it was a role model for you well i guess um my dad was a big um was a big influence i mean he passed away in 2009 he was 92.
my mom thank goodness is 91 and where does she live she's in san antonio she lives in an independent living place but she's very active still goes to synagogue goes and works out line dances she volunteers so i mean mom they both taught me give back it's not just enough i mean it's good to have but i remember when i was a little girl and i'd seen um that we belong to the jcc and we really didn't go very often and i was daddy why why are we members of the gcc and he said it's a jewish organization and we need to support it i
remember a really little girl and they used to they used to have these bagel breakfasts at the jcc for the servicemen i mean this is back in like the 1960s and he would take me with him and i don't remember if he even knew anybody but i remember this feeling that this was important that he ate a bagel with a guy in uniform because he was a serviceman but you know he was in the army back in the war um but and mom they both spoke they grew up so mom when when in the 70s when the russian immigrants came over mom would take them
to the doctor or the social security office to translate for them she helped them and she would come home and tell me you and your girls you should see all these people live and you know because even your spoiled little girlfriend whatever so you can appreciate them right right so i would appreciate it uh do your two siblings live near your mom are they spread out uh my sister lives in san antonio and so she has to deal with a lot of moms but my brother's in houston okay and so i mean we're all in texas so that's good that is good if you can
think of something what would you be the most proud of you can say your family but think of and you can but then something else besides that i'm i'm very proud of the fact that i came here not really knowing anybody um and made my life here i mean i got jobs and i always worked and i figured things out here on my own i mean i made a lot of mistakes but i was able to figure it out with a not a lot of help i mean i wish i had had a little more guidance or you know lanny and i came here and
we made a life and then when he passed away i was i'm very proud of that that i was able to go on and create chapter two just out of curiosity how have you seen dallas change since you've gotten here well besides it it's just grown i mean there are what four synagogues temples when i moved here um the growth of that i think it's more welcoming i think i did not feel welcome when i first came here and then elliot had some special needs he at the time adhd but now we've realized he has aspergers and there was not much here for him um
there were some things for kids with more serious problems which thank goodness he did not have but he it was it was very hard for him it was really hard for him growing up in the jewish community but he uh he was bar mitzvahed like i said he got information he uh he still considers himself i mean he's jewish my boys are jewish and um anybody knows nice jewish girls to fix them up with so we're at that part um but uh and now there's more there's seems to be more inclusion there's um they're aware of these other kids and don't leave them out and
how can we bring them in and make them be part of what's going on long did you teach sunday school oh well let's see i taught for two years about torah years later i taught for about two years at a dot coloring so did you see any changes there i'm just curious as far as the way sunday school was run not not really um one really well at best where i taught um second graders and then adot i taught seventh and eighth graders which yeah those are two different animals one was well it a dot it was it was really helpful um now they have
the uh i hope i did this right um it's base of jackson mississippi the uh jewish new curriculum yeah that yeah whatever ihl or something yes yeah so um when i the first year i taught it was really make up what you actually at bethura as well it really wasn't it was kind of just figure it out yourself so i was thrown into and i didn't know what to do and i figured well i'll do life cycle things so i mean we had a class you know the jewish wedding and i brought my wedding books and taught him about a wedding and i ate wedding
cake we learned about kosher and we learned about i mean i brought the videos of my boys brisses which i'm sure they appreciated but you know what they didn't know and we um i brought in somebody to talk about the jewish way of death and i just just figured out but but then the um that curriculum came and that that really helped a lot that i didn't have to do work to prepare prisons they handed me a book and there were the lesson plans well sheila is there anything else that we haven't covered or anything else you'd like to add to the interview oh my
well um i don't know just uh um getting back growing up i just had this really great i guess if you had a jewish kind of brady bunch a childhood you know i mean i was i just hebrew school twice a week and junior congregation on saturday sunday school on sunday i went to camping judea um and uh it was just just so much a part of who i was that i never thought to it was just so much of my world i mean i remember being in brownie scouts and me and my little girlfriends it was passover we're doing this camp out and they're
making not bunsen burners but you know you get the coffee cans and all the other girls are making popcorn and my girlfriends and i were doing mozzarella and i i never heard any anti-semitic thing until i came to dallas i'd never been called anything um so that was that was a real awakening to me and i moved here you had an incident with that about a couple yeah yeah um but um but it's my home i've been here 30 plus years this is where i am my kids are dallasites i mean this is uh my my current husband so michael grew up in israel you
know he was born in the bronx his family made aliyah when he was 12 and he lived there until he moved here in 1986 but all his family is there in the four years we've been married we've been to israel twice we're planning to go again yeah so well we're happy to have you here thank you so much for this interview appreciate it good okay