Sue Lichten
Sue Lichten was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into a family with deep New England roots. Her mother was born in Cleveland and her father in Boston, and her paternal grandfather ran a chain of women's clothing stores called S. Rogers and Sons throughout New England. Her father graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School and served as a second lieutenant in France during World War One, but returned home to help run the family stores after his own father died. A child of the Depression, Sue attended Sunday school at Temple Israel and grew up attending Shabbat dinners at her grandmother's home, where her pious father conducted the service.
Sue met her husband Bob, an aeronautical engineer, while she was at Radcliffe and he was at MIT. They married after his graduation, and she transferred to Bryn Mawr to finish college while he worked in the Philadelphia area on early helicopter designs. Bob eventually joined Bell Aircraft, and when the helicopter division moved to Hurst, Texas, the family relocated to Dallas around 1952. They raised three sons, Tom, John, and Dave, and Bob, a skilled builder, designed a family home that they constructed largely themselves with their sons. Sue worked briefly as an interviewer at the Texas Employment Commission and later spent twenty years as an administrator at Brookhaven College.
Sue was active in Jewish life for over fifty years through her temple, its sisterhood and board, the temple choir, the music committee, and the National Council of Jewish Women, including work with Women in Community Service helping young women find jobs. In the broader community she served on the board and as president of the Friends of the Dallas Public Library, was a board member and unit leader with the League of Women Voters, and supported political campaigns and the growth of the local community college system. Inspired by her husband's commitment to civil rights, she recalled his participation in efforts to integrate a downtown Dallas cafeteria. After retiring she became a Texas Master Gardener. She spoke with deep pride of her sons and with lasting grief of losing her youngest, Dave, shortly before his wedding.
Full Transcript
Oh today is Tuesday March 18th 2014 my name is Nancy Hunger Ben and I'll be interviewing Susan Lipton and the video the video photographer is Ruth Andrus we're doing this for the Dallas Jewish Historical Society and we're at the Jewish Community Center of Dallas hello Civic demands hello Nancy I'm so glad you're here today so am i what we're gonna start at the beginning where are you from are you from are you a Dallas I I am NOT a Dallas I but I've lived here long enough I feel like an early Texas settler no I was born in Boston Massachusetts on your your parents are
they did they come from both your parents were born in this country Wow you go back my mother in Cleveland and my father in Boston your grandparents I am NOT positive my Greg my maternal grandfather I believe was born in England I do not know for sure about my paternal grandparents I'm suffering yeah what did your parents do for living well my father went to Harvard and Harvard Law School but then came World War one so he was in the army and he was a second lieutenant and in France and while the war was going on his father who had a chain of stores throughout
New England a chain maybe five or six a women's clothing stores called s Rogers and Sons my father's father passed away during the war so when the war was over and he came back he felt being the oldest in that family of age that he needed to take over so he didn't practice law then and he and his brothers ran these stores about six of them in her lab throughout oh there was one in Boston one in Nashua New Hampshire one important in Maine Providence Rhode Island in New England there were about five or six stores yeah very interesting well what got you here what
got you here to Dallas what brought me to Dallas my husband's work so you met him in bus mostly we're both in college there he was at MIT and I was at Radcliffe seeing your children carried on that tradition too didn't I think of going to Harvard what one went to Harvard and one worked at Harvard for a long time you're actually a depression child I am and that kind of changed my father's work that because that hit hard and they had to close some of the stores and so my father did practice law briefly with a firm after he left the retail business growing
up word you connected or your parents connected to any Jewish activities or participate my father came from a very pious family and we were at my grandmother's every Friday night for Shabbat dinner which was wonderful and he always conducted the service not so much with my mother's family so you were and whereas eight brothers and fathers too on the righty night dinners yes yes it was a big game as a child growing up in Boston did you experience any anti-semitism I wasn't aware of a thing most of my school friends weren't Jewish I went to Sunday school at Temple in Israel but not for long
because of the depression I think my parents were rather proud and they felt they couldn't pay the dues to belong to Temple Israel anymore so I only went to Sunday school through the third grade you met your husband in college and married after college or during not quite he was two years ahead of me and so when he graduated that summer that June we were married and that was the end of my summer year but I finished college I transferred because his job was in Philadelphia which actually was where he was from so I transferred to Bryn Mawr and at that time it was rather
unusual to be married and going to college but I finished and from there you came to well Bob my husband you probably know was an aeronautical engineer in rubbery way which means helicopters and while he was still the student at MIT he was working on the design for what it's now called the v-22 Osprey and he met fellow who also sort of had the same idea but he wasn't really an end trained engineer but he had come out of he was a single guy who had come out of the war and but before he went into the war he put his money into some investment
which balloon so he had money and with his money and Bob Springs they formed a company called transcendental aircraft company to develop this aircraft and this is until they had a little sort of shock or whatever in a room behind a bar in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania because we were living there so I could be close to campus and they've worked on that there if I ever wanted to call Bob I had to call the bartender and he would go back and hit him to come to the phone for various reasons I think mainly engineering-wise they came to some disagreement so they split up and then
went to Larry Bell for whom bill now bill helicopter although at that time it was called Bell Aircraft and it was in Buffalo New York and he said I have this design and I would like to develop it through your company so he talked Larry bill into taking him on to do that which he did but after in 1942 no excuse me 52 Bell Aircraft in Buffalo New York became Bell Helicopter and the whole division moved to Hurst Texas so this is the 50s 52 or 53 52 we came to Dallas living in Hurst or no it's interesting that you ask this is a typical
engineer solving problem we didn't know anyone when we came here so we looked at areas in Fort Worth which near fairly near the plan to live and areas in Dallas it really didn't matter we didn't know anyone here but the engineer who said well when I go to work in the morning if we live in Dallas the sun will be behind me and when i come home at night it will be behind me so we moved in down but made your decision by this time you have how many children oh well in Philadelphia our first son was born in Britain or hospital his name is
Tom when we moved to Buffalo our second son was Foreman and when we came to Dallas I third son was born did you have a career of any sort besides raising three people no I had always wanted to go to Social Work school and when we came here after Dave our youngest was getting into school I went over to UTA the University of Texas Arlington where there's a Social Work school to inquire about getting admitted and went through some papers and they said I would have to take the GRE well I hadn't taken a test for quite a while so I thought for practice I'll
take the State Merit exam that's just for practice for taking the GRE well in Texas when they hire people they looked at the listing of test results when the State Behrend exam they don't need a few people they just take them you know off the top and apparently I've got a good grade on that I got a call we'd have an opening at the Texas Employment Commission for an interviewer and we have to know in 24 hours how old are the kids well Dave our youngest I think was in kindergarten so I figured a burden a hand so I took the job and I loved
it because I enjoy working with people and these were I worked at the TEC which was down on Ross Avenue and these were people who were cut was a period of very high unemployment so people were coming in to apply for unemployment benefits and I interviewed the room that was my job full time what full-time job Oh at the time yeah I knew it was not permanent because it depended on they were just coming that wasn't a prosperous time apparently not down in Texas anyway there was a lot of unemployment then yeah where did your job what I scored did your kids go to or
what world was their high school well Tom our others went to Hillcrest but Hillcrest was already starting its downhill trend then and Tom apparently ended up teaching the history class there and and we kept saying Tom if you want to go to st. Mark's it's fine and he said no no but his good friend Jimmy Strauss was in st. Mark's and unbeknownst to us that August he lit up over to st. mark took the admissions test and took him back and told us he passed and he wanted to go to San Marcos so he left Hillcrest it's sophomore year then and then when John came along and finished junior high at Benjamin Franklin he said John better go to st.
Mark's - and then when Dave finished president hollow they both said some to st. Mark's so they all ended up which was always a very fine school though it was it was what Jewish activities have you been involved in I of course joy and sister we joined temple so our tents were having firmed there and I was involved in sisterhood I served on the temple board of course I joined Council remember if I was on the board there and was very involved in Wix with Wi CS women in community service do remember that it was helping young women prepare for and get jobs you were involved in that and I'm not sure if it was through sisterhood or council probably
council so I was involved in that but also I oh I also joined the temple wire which I am still in after over 50 years at temple also I was on the music committee for a long time and chaired it also so temple has been your mainstay for 50 years no it has not I've done a lot of I've been involved in other things in the community not Jewish and tell me about those I got involved in the Friends of the Dallas Public Library is on the board there and served as president for a term else Oh League of Women Voters League of Women Voters
for sure yes and I was on the board there and was a unit leader and I'm still a great admirer of the league but not active also active in political campaigns supporting candidates that I felt should be elected not always successful right who are your role models where you realize well my biggest role model was management not only was he brilliant in the field of science and leader he was president of the American helicopter society editor of their journal but he was also a fierce believer in civil rights and social justice and a fighter for the same and was he involved in the movement in
the 60s in Dallas very much so very much so in one way in what way well I'll give you an incident there was a place in Dallas called the Piccadilly cafeteria only downtown and he was part of an effort to try to integrate that as far as their customers went there was a young man named Ernst macmillan it was a black man very active in the snick Suton students something courtly I forget what it stands for but anyway it was a it was a group of young black people here and so they decided they would go to Piccadilly cafeteria to have lunch and they stood
in line and and Bob also and our two older sons went to for this which ended up in a big demonstration and I think a couple of the blacks including Ernest Macmillan being hauled off to jail and also Bob and our two sons and our youngest was in tears that he couldn't go be involved in this how big was he ml I don't know it was about probably seven or eight at the time but he understood what was going on anyway it it certainly hit the papers Bob brace bail to get Macmillan out al Lipscomb to marched and was sent to jail Alex our city
and what's gonna came a little later he wasn't involved in that bigger delayed thing as I recall yeah yeah he was an SMU he did it at SMU how has Dallas changed for you in the last oh well I think that hole in the years and it's changed in many ways visually it certainly but I don't think we see the segregation and that we saw them and the discrimination I think that has really improved of course the skyline is improved but Bob also was a pilot and I remember we went a you got a helicopter from Bell and we went down the expressway in this
helicopter he and I and landed on the roof of the Southland life which had a heliport and that was very exciting yeah do any of your children or grandchildren live in this area I have them from Scotland to Auckland who lives in stuff well actually Katie just moved from Edinburgh to she's now in Cambridge in the UK in England you must have great grandchildren I wish not yet only one of my grandchildren is married has the Jewish community changed for you in any way you can talk about I think some really wonderful things have come from individuals in the Jewish community leadership wise and we
are respected of course rabbi Olin and set the tone for that in his own way it's always fascinating to me I have a lot of non-jewish friends how curious they are about your ISM and interesting - what if I left out whatever I left how did you use that did you use your gardening a professional tool at all I know you were a gardener no no the first thing I did well I worked at Brooklyn in college for 20 years as an administrator and continuing in and the first thing I did after I retired which I couldn't do when I was working I wanted to
become a Master Gardener in Texas Master Gardener so I did join a Master Gardener class and became a Master Gardener which involved a good number of volunteer hours in the community and also to maintain your standing as a Master Gardener you must continue that I did drop that a few years ago but I do love gardening and and the outdoors do you travel - you have another home and how often do you get there not often enough and that's another old story because my husband was not only a wonderful aeronautical engineer but a frustrated architect and he was fascinated so he designed this house and
if his drawings to architect a couple of friends of ours who put it into working plans and he was wonderful with his hands as you know carpenter wise with tools and so with our three sons and a friend of one of theirs we did all the most of the carpentry in this building this house not-not-not the plumbing and the electrical and concrete work although we did throw around I mean the boys did but not be bags of concrete when that was going on - when the slab was being laid but you probably saw the junior college system balloon well that was one of our big
efforts in Willy the women voters actually to help get that started and it is a wonderful system Brookhaven where I worked is the youngest of the seven campuses but they all have their pluses well this has been wonderful I wonder if I left anything out you want to have well don't get me started on my kids really proud because their interest well Tom the oldest is a lawyer and he's in Chicago he does totally workman's comp and in the process has really sort of had to give it himself an MD degree because what he deals with is workers who've been hurt on the job and
that's what he does when he first went to Chicago he joined it from that did the same thing around the large well-respected firm he didn't like the way they were treating their clients so he has been in sole practice for long time as your extremely busy he's the all this and his wife Judy who's just wonderful was with him every day and runs his office he says I couldn't do it without Judy and they have three kids twins Keith who also was an MIT graduate and a graduate degree at Berkeley is an environmentalist he's a water control engineer for the California EPA so he lives
in Oakland John is the next one and he went to oh well he started out at Andy uh transferred to Oberlin and then got a graduate degree of masters in social planning at the Social Work school at Boston College and he has worked for maybe thirty years for Harvard at the School of Public Health first he was Dean of finance and administration and then the last five or six years he's been the grant manager for a large grant that Harvard got to prevent and treat AIDS in Africa so he's been back and forth to Africa for a number of years they set up clinics and
the whole idea was to train the people there and pass it on to the locals that was completed last year so he's not from harbor was he in touch with any of our presidents I know our last one who was very interested in AIDS and African bush clinton bush i don't think so i don't think so but when you ask about presidents i want to go back to a little bit of my maids lyndon johnson was the first president who campaigned using a helicopter and at that time bob my husband was president of the American helicopter Society and he was sharp on picking up on
things for promotion and he felt well the American helicopter Society should present Lyndon Johnson with a plaque or some kind of an award for doing this so he's got it set up and he went to the White House and I have some wonderful pictures presenting Lyndon Johnson with his stories I tell about giants night I certainly don't want to leave out our younger son Dave who unfortunately died at a very early age he was in Yalie and he went and got his PhD at Case Western Reserve in clinical psychology and then a postdoc at USC and he worked as a psychologist at a place in
California which dealt with you that through the courts and was apparently very respected and loved and he unfortunately died five days before his wedding of a cerebral aneurysm and this was quite a blow to our family how are you doing with that well it's been quite a while now but you never really get over it I kind of want to end on that happier understood one day when I leave such a plus well I'd be like yes there are some wonderful people here I have marvelous friends and it's really my home now