Stephen Shore
Stephen Michael Shore was born in Pittsburgh to Abraham Shore and Gladys Stern Shore. He grew up in the Stanton Heights section of Pittsburgh's East End, an area with many Jewish families whose children were largely the same age, giving him a sense of growing up in a close Jewish community. His family belonged to a conservative congregation, and he attended Hebrew school for four years and Sunday school for eight or nine. His interest in photography began around age eight or nine, when he sold greeting cards to earn a camera as a prize, and it deepened when an uncle gave him a better camera for his bar mitzvah.
After deciding in high school that the working life of a photographer did not appeal to him, Shore pursued photographic engineering, then called photographic science and instrumentation, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where his strength in math and science served him well. He worked in that field for roughly a decade, including at a chemical data company holding contracts with the Air Force and NASA, where film returned from the Apollo program was processed and where he performed sensitometric characterization of film. He later moved into publishing, and in 1981 relocated to Dallas as a district sales director for CMP Publishing, covering a 22-state territory. He later ran his own company.
In Dallas, Shore became active at Temple Emanu-El, serving on the religious school committee and eventually becoming deeply involved in the Temple Emanu-El Brotherhood, where he served as publicity secretary and on both the board and executive committee. He helped organize community breakfasts with panels of speakers, co-founded a Party Expo with Dr. Wasserman, and launched an annual shofar factory for fifth graders. A passionate advocate for scouting, he served on the Dallas Jewish Committee on Scouting and the National Jewish Committee on Scouting, supporting Scout Shabbats, religious emblem workshops, and interfaith projects. He met his wife, Barbara, in Rochester, and they have two children, Sam and Tessa, both working in financial fields.
Full Transcript
okay my name is Elizabeth fader today is the June 30 2018 I am as a with Jessica Schneider the archivist for Don's durable society Stephen Michael Shore originally from Pittsburgh and my parents were Abraham Shore and Gladys Stern Shore in 1980 but but had a lot of stops in between from Pittsburgh to Rochester to Washington DC Dayton Ohio back to Pittsburgh Waffen ders Falls New York Rochester New York Tucson Phoenix New York City Houston San Diego back to New York and then here I think I think I miss Wappingers Falls in there New York Rochester Institute of Technology photographic or imaging Sciences it's now called
well just mirror the image that's okay yes when I was eight or nine I was reading a copy of boys Life magazine and they used to have these ads in the back where if you sold greeting cards you could choose a prize so I sold a couple cases of greeting cards and chose a camera as a prize and then for my bar mitzvah my one of my uncle's gave me a better camera and that really got me involved and that it just got crazy from there yes Abraham Shore and Gladys Ria's Stern Shore oh yes well we belong to a conservative synagogue in a Israel
and went to Hebrew school for four years and Sunday school for eight or nine years I don't think I did know but by the time I was involved in photography I was going to synagogue as infrequently as possible then RIT that's okay [Music] well when I was in high school I thought I wanted to be a photographer and for one of our classes we were given an assignment to do a three page paper on a vocation of which we're interested interested in and I did mine on photography and by the time I finished the paper I didn't want to be a photographer well they work
long hours they work weekends they work nights they work alone they work in dark rooms a lot and they don't make a lot of money and none of this made a whole lot of sense to me but I found out there was a program and photographic engineering that at the time was called photographic science and instrumentation at Rochester Institute of Technology and since I've always been strong in math and science it sound like a good idea to me and I did it and I worked in that field for about a decade after college I was working for a chemical Data Corporation and the company had
a contract with or contracts with both the Air Force and NASA to do precision photograph it of graphic processing so like all the film that came back from the the Apollo program was processed at our site and prints made their what I was doing there was actually doing the sensitive since centimetric characterization of the film that was supposed to be used humble inner surface Oh got more interesting in in later jobs 1981 moved down with a company I was working with and by that time I had moved into publishing and I was with a publishing company CMP publishing and was there District Sales Director for
this area this area being 22 states I'm with my own company but but I do lots of all of your work sometimes I do and sometimes I don't when when my son was about to be bar Mitzvahed we as a family Mitzvah project worked with temple mango Brotherhood once a month they do a mitzvah cooking project where they make about 2500 to 3,000 meals on a Sunday morning once a month and after I was doing this for about six months one of the guys said why don't you come to one of our meetings I was like well they said it's tomorrow I just come by
by the time that meeting was over I was a publicity secretary for the organization and started getting more and more involved in more projects and the publicity secretary is actually a one of the busier positions there because you're involved in absolutely everything that happens and so I was doing promotion for everything in newsletters and it was a little crazy and then got involved in some very specific projects like one part Richard dr. Wasserman and I started party Expo and it was a once a year gathering vendors that provide services for people doing bar mitzvahs weddings anniversaries whatever kind of party and would fill Toby in auditorium which we could put 54 booths in there and a couple of times we actually filled the entire auditorium and we'd have about 400 people show up to you know they were about to have bar mitzvahs and weddings to to look to see what was available and some of them even signed contracts during that oh we had pajama party once where the entry fee was a set of pajamas per person and was
for the kids and then the pajamas were given to Child Protective Services for the city one of the things I started is well one of the other things were involved in is scouting and at the 2010 Boy Scout Jamboree the National Jewish Committee on scouting ran a chauffer factory for the scouts which I thought was great and where you know they gave them a raw horn at the end of the of the session they ended up with the chauffeur and how to blow it gotta blow it was it was great so we started doing this at Emanuel and I was I pushed for this and
neck end of August we'll be doing our eighth annual show for factory yeah it's it's great it's we do it with fifth graders every year and it's great watching them coming and not quite knowing what's gonna happen and the end leaving with their own chauffeurs and all excited about it too Sam and Tessa yes you said you grew up in a rather conservative Jewish well I I don't know that we were all that conservative we belong to a conservative congregation and a lot of the things we did were conservative but we didn't think of it as being religious it was just the way we were
the first time ever saw a glass of milk on the table with a piece of meat at the same time I was a sophomore in college and I thought I just got y'all looking at it look just so strange temple manual about 25 26 years in in various things the first time I did any work with him oh my son must have been about seven or eight but they were looking for two people to run the end of your picnic slash party would have for the last day of Sunday school so they corralled me into doing that with another woman and and we ran that
and that went well and then somehow I ended up on the on the religious school board School Committee and tried to do as little as possible with all that but then once I got involved with Brotherhood I seemed to get involved in in everything and at one point I both sat on the board and sat on the executive committee and Emmanuel Temple Manuel Brotherhood's been around since 1922 and like like all organizations of its ilk our membership has been grown going down over the years which is true for you know almost any kind of organization like this regardless of what their religious or non-religious basis
is but we've had as many as six hundred fifty members right now we have hundred members and it was set up it was set up to be both a social services or a social support organization and to do social things we don't do that much social but we've tended to do a lot of things to help the tempo in the community we we usually run three or four community breakfasts a year where we will serve Luxembourg Hills and then have a panel of speakers and the panels have been all over the place we had we had a rabbi who was the chief rabbi for Asia
for a number of years speak with us one time when when it was announced that that peace sessions and Martin the other representative that ended up running against one another but when we had them lined up to speak and the Tuesday before they were going to speak it was announced they're gonna be actually running against one another so that was that was great we didn't want the Trinity River Project we had 385 people show off to hear that no one knew what the Trinity River Project was we've done them on religious topics on health topics on political topics you name it just a whole set
a whole selection of things I mentioned the party Expo we provide scholarships for summer camp for for kids we provide maintenance for for toys and playthings for the playgrounds we've been the Charter Organization for troop 729 it was founded in nineteen eighteen or nineteen nineteen so three or four years before the Brotherhood was founded and then when the Brotherhood was founded one of its first things was come the charter organization it was it folded about a year ago it was a Jewish troop but anybody could join and the percentage of Jewish Scouts in it would go up and down usually there were at least 50%
Jewish kids but not always well boys got theirs 11 - until they hit their they were 18th birthday cups Cub Scouts is from 7 to 11 my son was in Boy Scouts but not in that troop because he started with Cub Scouts and he started with a Cub Scout Pack that was chartered by the school he was going to like Green Hill so that when he bridged from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts he just went to the Boy Scout Troop that was at Green Hill I saw in green cards I didn't lose any one event you know it's like if you ask a poet when
they want to be when they decide they're gonna be a poet or a painter when they're gonna be a painter it's usually over a series of time finally you realize this is what I do was it two very different questions Jewish community is for me is substantially different here than what I grew up in growing up in Pittsburgh the area I grew up in Pittsburgh it was in the East End of Pittsburgh and most of the East End was very heavily Jewish there were a number of synagogues some were large some where little house synagogues the area I lived in was actually called Stanton Heights
it was sort of a hill above the rest of the East End and it was an interesting community because it was if you looked at households it was about half Jewish half non-jewish but it seemed like all the Jewish families moved in just post-world War two so all the kids were the same age I went to a elementary school that had eight hundred kids in it and I'm the Jewish High Holidays to behave kids there because everybody else was Jewish but if you again you looked at my street and there were lots of non-jewish families so it was it was kind of interesting but because
so many of the the kids and the families with kids that age were Jewish it was like growing up in a Jewish in a completely Jewish community and so you know what I mentioned not seeing milk and meat on the table we never really thought about keeping kosher and it was just you know you didn't eat meat both together and we eventually we started eating pork foot for years we didn't even mean it was a I remember the decision I remember the decision my parents had when they decided to start buying non kosher meat I mean these were things that we just did and but
because the community had Reform Orthodox and conservative families we did know the difference and so we knew when someone who was Orthodox versus conservative because they just had slightly different traditions that they followed but it was it was all the same it was it was very funny at an elementary school in fifth and sixth grade you got out at 3:30 in two days a week you in the parking lot was a yellow school bus you got in the yellow school bus and it took you the Hebrew lessons and nobody ever thought of complaining about it because everybody did it mana complains about when we were
there I don't think of life that way I think of life as you know what accomplishments I'm going to do not what I've done so I'm proud of lots of things that I've done but there's there's no one accomplishment it's like I had one job where we had moved floors like five years before and I had a new secretary and one day as I was leaving it to go on a trip she said where are those two boxes in the corner of your your office I said I have no idea but they've been there for years I said mom God just throw them out she
said should I look at what's in them I said no just throw them out if I don't if I haven't needed them I came back to my my office a week later and there on the wall was a wall full of sales Awards well I mean it was sort of funny to see them up there but who cares that was in the past that's that's what's what happened years ago that's not what what I'm going to do yeah I never would have put them up myself but we do have other Jews so what do you think if the most important you would remember about that
ah I see Judaism as being an integral part of what we do of who we are but who we are is we're like a jigsaw puzzle we're lots of things and to work well you've got to get all the pieces and I'm very involved in scouting because I find that scouting brings things to our lives that other things don't it's not to say we shouldn't be doing the other ones but we don't always have champions for all we have champions for all the other one so you don't always I'm champions for scouting and most people when they think of scouting and things that think it's
about something with with hiking and camping and that's like saying that that music is about cassette tapes because you play the cassette tapes well that's just the tool and it's the same thing with scouting scouting is about giving young people leadership skills they can use for the rest of their lives and the the activities done in Scouting are all to build on those leadership capabilities that the kids will develop so yeah hiking is nice but it's it's even better when you put some kid in charge of the hike so that he has to remember that you know somebody has to be assigned to bring lunch
somebody has to assign to six of them saying three tents and putting things together and knowing how to handle life's problems and when things come up that are problems knowing they can handle them and either handling themselves or assign them out to someone else and it's it's not the kind of training we get in school it's not the kind of training we get in religious school or at the synagogue or temple and so I see it being very complementary and something that I think we all need in fact I'm I'm very pleased that BSA now will have women in Scouting girls in Scouting because I
think women need the same tools the men do what advice I was actually having a discussion that relates to this last night in a meeting and I was talking with someone about how he was talking with someone from another country and he asked the guy how he was and the guys going this long explanation of how it was because in the u.s. when you say how are you somebody answers and to be honest we don't really listen we don't really care I like but in in this person's country if you're asked that question you give a complete and honest answer because you think the person really wants to know and so I was discussing my my changes in attitude about about that basically that question and in high school I realized that people really don't give a damn on how you feel and so and how you answer typically doesn't make any difference and if you're complaining they turn it off very quickly so if somebody asking how I am
the the worst answer I'll ever give is good but usually it's great spectac amazing always very up and the the reason I discussed it with this guy is because what I realized was that because my response was always very positive my attitude became positive if I kept saying I'm good I must be good and I convinced myself and consequently I tend to have a very up attitude and I if I had just analyzed this very recently and decided that I've had an up attitude all my life since since high school because that's how I respond that's a Tom used to responding I also decided that
my my evaluation of others was a little harsh I don't think it's so much that people don't give a damn what I think is that we asked that question so often and we get so many answers that if you actually emotionally responded to every answer you got you'd be crazy by the end of the day you wouldn't know how to react because you hear so many stories and and usually people respond with negative stories because that's what they're thinking about and so I think we turn it off just as a protection mechanism I do I no longer blame people for not actually listening or not
not listening with any kind of detail so but I really don't think we listen to the responses to that so I find that I get a much better response from people when I say spectacular but if I start complaining about the parking ticket I got yesterday or how my big toe hurts or whatever I say you'll cut this up and move it around her name is Barbara pillow and I met her in Rochester New York interestingly we both went to school in Rochester I went to RIT she went to the University of Rochester my senior year was her freshman year her senior year I taught
at RIT never met then a number of years later we were both in Rochester on business trips and staying at the same hotel and I'd gone down to the the dining room and an ordered dinner and with a passion I hate eating alone and I really hate eating dinner alone and right after I ordered I see this woman walk in with a book she sits down the other places are cleared at the table and I just walked over and asked if she wanted to join me for dinner and we sat that had dinner found out that our offices were blocked with halfback in Manhattan and
when we got back to my hat and started to sing one another of course it it still annoys my wife that she knows that was neither the first in the last time I did that but but she is the only person I saw after one of those dinners this month it will be 28 and 31 interesting we've always given the choice of having that having separate birthday parties or having them together they have never chosen to have them together my son works for fidelity investments he's a tremor awareness Titleist he's basically a financial advisor for people who trade options where he can't make buying decisions
for them but he helps them figure out their strategies on what they're going to be doing my daughter lives in New York works in White Plains and she's with a wealth management firm and so she's in a lot of respect she's doing something somewhat similar but she's working helping people with their their financial management plans for how they're gonna handle their money for the rest of their lives Oh was easy although I should mention that I have ended up doing a lot of things in Scouting and two of the committee's are on our the Dallas Jewish Committee on scouting and the National Jewish Committee on
scouting well they're 12 twelve points to the Scout Law and one of them is reverence and scouting supports religion very strongly but doesn't support any specific religion it's up to people to believe whatever they want most of the religions have basically committees within scouting to support them so there's there's a Jewish Committee on scouting a Catholic Islamic I mean you name it at the last Jamboree I was working on the faith and beliefs committee and there was a pavilion with representation from 28 different religious committees 20 yeah 28 there were a lot of us and and it was great cuz everyone's getting along and kids
were coming by asking interesting questions the the job of the committees whether the local Committee of the National Committee is to help integrate both scouting with Judaism and Judaism with scouting so there are some activities we typically do every year that that either local or national will sponsor like locally we do a scout Shabbat every year that's the Shabbat after the annual anniversary of scouting anniversary is scouting in the u.s. is February 8th so it would be vote this coming year will be February 9th we we typically do religious emblem workshops for each each religion you can fulfill requirements to earn an emblem and there are different emblems for different age groups there's an all of them a could be a NER Tamid and a Fame for young a little bit older Cub Scouts Boy Scouts older Boy Scouts and so we run workshops to help the kids qualify for those nationally there are camps that are run some of the local Jewish committees run kinases which are basically weekend camp outs that are religious based every every four
years when there's a National Jamboree there's at least one and sometimes several shomer Shabbat troops that are put together so that they can live together and do everything to follow all the laws of kashrut just one of the things we do locally is each year on Memorial Day and Veterans Day we work with the Jewish War veterans to put new flags on the graves of the Jewish veterans if you go to our Facebook page the the Dallas Jewish Committee has got a Facebook page you'll see photos from several years of when we've done that and we're always looking for new things one of the things
we've tried to get done this year that never happened but were you trying to do next year is we were putting together a well scouting for Cub Scouts runs Pinewood derbies where they have these little blocks of pine wood and they build race cars out of them and then race them and we were putting one to put one together that was the Jewish Committee on scouting and the Islamic committee all bringing Jewish and Islamic Scouts together for a Pinewood Derby you know if we we end up doing a lot of things with the Islamic committee that nationally there's some really good people in that committee
I have a series of of t-shirts to say the Islamic Korean scouting and you know what there was one question I was missing I'm like this is what the book was thank you so much for telling me about that I really appreciate all you do and you're welcome my pleasure