>> My name is Adina Langer,
and I'm the curator of the Museum of History in
Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University.
Today is Thursday, April 9th, 2020.
And I'm recording this video via Zoom with
Priscilla Omega for a legacy series interview
during which we will remember her father, Ira Weiss.
First, do you agree to this interview?
>> I do.
>> Excellent. Can you please state your full name?
>> My name is Priscilla Weiss Omega.
>> And can you tell me when and where you were born?
>> I was born in Atlanta,
Georgia at Georgia Baptist in 1955.
>> Before we talk more about your life,
I'd like to go back and speak about your father.
So can you please tell me his full name?
>> Ira Weiss. No middle name.
>> I'm sorry?
>> No middle name.
And when was he born?
>> He was born in the Bronx in July 1913.
>> And what was his family like?
What did his parents do for a living?
>> His mother kept home and his father,
they came over here,
I guess about 1908 from Moldavia, his parents.
So my father was a first generation American.
His father, when he first came here,
he worked in a buttonhole factory.
He made buttonholes.
And then later, he went into the dress business.
My grandfather had a good eye
foreseeing trends in the future.
So when he was a dressmaker,
and he did contract to make
nurses uniforms in World War I.
So after that, before
the Depression and before the Crash in 1929,
he and a friend of his decided to go with Neon.
It was new, it was coming from Germany.
So they had a loft factory,
and they made solid glass neon tubing.
>> Oh, my goodness.
I don't think I knew that neon had been
around that long as a technology. That's fascinating.
>> They got in on a very early curve.
And because of his being able to see that,
they were already very well established.
Their first company, I believe,
was named Superior Lighting,
and so they survived the Depression and
the Crash because they had
invested much earlier and were already established.
So they did all right for that.
>> That's really cool. So you had told me
that your father grew up in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey.
Did the family move there from New York City or
had they already been living
there and his father worked in the city?
>> It started out as a summer home in Lake Hiawatha.
My grandfather, they lived
in not only the Bronx, but Jersey City.
He had an office in Hoboken.
They lived in Brooklyn.
They lived in different boroughs around New York.
So my father, before he went in the Army,
everybody spent summers in Lake Hiawatha.
It was in the mountains.
It was cool.
And then later they made it their permanent home.
So that's where my father was living in
Lake Hiawatha when he was inducted.
No, I take that back.
He was actually living in Dallas, Texas.
His father had suggested to him that he
go to Dallas and open up a sign company.
My grandfather and my uncle, my dad's brother,
they were together later in
the sign business, Super Lux Neon.
My dad was the youngest of four children,
three boys and a girl.
And his other brother was a glassblower in New York,
and my cousin still has
some very beautiful pieces that he blew.
My dad did not blow glass.
He sold neon supplies.
So he went from Lake Hiawatha to New York University.
He was the only one in
his family to go to and finish college.
He was the youngest, and he graduated in
1936 from NYU with a degree in business administration.
So shortly after 1936,
from there, he went down to Dallas.
He lived in Greenwich Village while he was in college.
>> Well, he was at NYU. So was
religion important to the family?
Did it play a role in your lives?
>> My grandmother was somewhat religious.
My grandfather was not
even though he'd had a bar mitzvah.
They did have Jewish values, family values.
They were charitable and they were fair minded.
And they lacked prejudice.
My father had no prejudice in him,
and apparently neither did my grandparents.
And at one time, when he was still stateside,
he was assigned to a black unit specifically because they
knew he would be fair minded and unprejudiced.
>> That's a trend that I had I've witnessed in
more than one example
of Jewish officers in African American units.
>> Really?
>> It's just an interesting commonality.
So what was his education?
What was it like to be a student at
NYU and living in Greenwich Village?
Did he ever tell you about that in the '30s?
>> Not really.
He was 43 when I was born.
I was born in '55, my brother in '53.
The war had been over for
some years and he didn't really talk about it much.
I just lost your question.
>> No, I was just wondering if he ever told you about
his college life and New York in the '30s.
>> Not really, but later on,
when I went to Pratt for a master's degree and they had
a Manhattan office in the Puck building up there,
and I would cross Washington Square from
my where I was staying to get to classes.
I would always think with my dad when I
walked across Washington Square and I'd look
around at all the buildings
in Greenwich Village and wonder,
I wonder where my dad stayed,
but I always thought of him every time because
you had the banners for NYU,
and I thought about him
every time I walked across Washington Square.
He did talk about Washington Square, but not stories.
He loved to tell stories,
but he didn't tell a lot of war stories.
>> Sure. Well, so he moved to
Texas to start this company,
and at this time, how did he get his news?
Did he listen to the radio or read newspapers?
>> He did both. Radio was very popular.
There wasn't really TV at that time,
and he loved to read.
He was always an intrepid reader,
and he was shy as a young man.
He was always very humble, and shy,
and modest, so I think reading his letters,
it really brought him out of his shell,
and I think he found
parts of himself while he was in the army.
First they tried him with baking,
cooking school, and then he went to drummers school.
He played the clarinet and he wanted to play that,
but they didn't need any more clarinets at the time,
so he learned drums.
Then he finally ended up with the corps of engineers and
running the supply depots.
All through his letters,
not just the Philippines,
but while he was in basic training and
then transferred all over the country,
he was drumming up business for his father,
and he would I didn't send you
any letters or if it might have mentioned it in passing,
trying to get more business for his dad.
Even in Manila, he found people
that agreed to buy supplies from his father.
So he always had business
and being industrious and
working hard in the back of his mind.
>> Sure. Leading up to the start of the war,
did he and the family have a sense
that war was brewing in Europe?
Did they still have any family in Europe?
>> No. They all got out.
They were fortunate.
Everybody got out that
needed to get out and they came over on,
my cousin looked up the ship.
It might have been the Rotterdam.
It was a Dutch ship, and I believe they were
on the manifest from 1908?
>> So when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,
did your father ever tell you where he was
or what he remembered about that particular moment?
>> Yes. My daughter had interviewed him for high school,
and he was watching a football game.
I believe he was in Lake Hiawatha,
and he heard about the war through the football game.
If he wasn't watching it on television,
I'm still unsure about the TV,
he was listening on the radio,
but it interrupted his football game.
My mother, she was also interviewed and said,
they were just in the middle of some errand,
and they were all at home doing something,
and her sister called her over and said,
you need to come see this.
So she and her sister sat together and watched.
I think just seeing that outraged
my father and he just wanted to do something about it.
Everybody was outraged.
>> Yeah, it was this invasion of American space that
felt so unfamiliar and
it was like a violation that people felt.
>> It was a violation.
>> So your father, you said,
he enlisted and the first training letters
that you shared with me were from 1945.
Do you know what he did between '41 and '45?
Was he still in business?
>> He had six months,
I believe, or less to close up his business.
He was drafted.
He didn't enlist.
He was drafted, and he was
very unhappy at having to shut down his business.
He lost a lot of money and wasn't pleased about that.
>> Did he talk about what his training was like?
You mentioned that he was trained to
be a musician, to be a baker,
and then eventually into the Army Corps of Engineers,
was that kind of a whiplash
moving from all of these different things?
>> I think he enjoyed every bit of it.
He may not have known exactly where he was going,
but from reading his letters,
there was never fear.
To him, it was just a grand adventure.
Every letter, even the ones I
didn't send to you when he was in the states,
that positive attitude was
consistent all across the board.
He always ended with his health and his spirits are
good and he has no complaints.
>> Sure. Yeah, it didn't seem
from the letters he was frustrated
until the very end when the war
was over and everybody wanted to go.
>> They were all frustrated by then
because it was taking so long to get the boats,
they waited and waited to go home.
>> Right. Well, before we get to the end,
let's talk a little bit
about his time in the Philippines.
So when he was shipped overseas,
you had told me it was on the USS General [inaudible] .
>> [inaudible] .
>> And what was that crossing leg for him?
>> Well, it took several weeks, I believe,
and one of the letters I sent you,
I don't have them in front of me,
they're on my phone.
He described with details.
I'm surprised these letters weren't censored.
He described not only the name of the ship,
but how the quarters were very close,
that there was a theater on the ship.
There was a place that a band could come.
It was a huge ship.
And I forget how many soldiers were on that ship,
but it was packed.
And he said he didn't get sick,
some of them got sick.
Either sea sick or some kind of exotic disease.
When he left, he didn't know where he was going.
He knew he was going overseas
and that he was going to a tropical island.
But it wasn't until, I guess,
he was on the ship that they actually told him.
I remember as he told about being on the ship,
and they crossed Baton to get to their destination.
And he said he saw fish that he'd never seen,
the flying sunfish or sailfish.
They saw some whales.
The weather was good, for the most part,
and they were all below deck,
but they got to come up and do things.
He didn't have anything really assigned to him.
I think I have an old picture.
I have to find all these where he was peeling potatoes.
But I guess every soldier spent some time
peeling potatoes that must have been in cooking school.
>> Yeah, I remember reading that letter as well,
and I loved the descriptions.
He mentioned at night he knows
the phosphorescent glow on the water.
>> Yes, that's right.
I've seen that in some of my travels.
>> You've seen that too?
>> In South America.
>> That's really neat.
So what were his first impressions of
the Philippines when they finally landed there?
>> Well, I don't
know if you can stop this
and I can go get the letters and find.
>> Yeah, I can certainly pause.
>> If you'll pause it for a moment,
I've actually got the letters on my phone right here.
You can start it back if you like.
His impressions of the Philippines.
She asked him a lot of questions.
She was his older sister
and she must have asked about animals,
and he said there were no dogs or
cats and there used to be many thousands of them,
and he would let her use
her imagination as to what might have happened to them.
He said they were mostly pine trees.
There weren't other trees.
He said all he saw were pine trees.
He described how crowded it was in the streets.
It was all army vehicles,
and the few cars because Filipinos were very poor.
They either rode bicycles or sometimes had
the bicycle with the little like a wagon in the front.
It was just basically a wooden box with slats.
If you hear noise, the garbage truck
is going to come around.
And that's where the people sat,
or they packed themselves into little buses.
He was very surprised that the children looked like
they were five or six-years-old because they were small,
but it turned out they were 13 or 14,
and he couldn't really get over that,
how the size of the citizens,
they were very small.
And they all went barefoot.
He never liked going barefoot,
and I think it goes back
to what he saw in the Philippines,
because I used to love to go barefoot as
a kid and he always wore slippers,
never ever went barefoot,
and he would comment when I would go barefoot.
I guess, to him, I was a wild little redneck,
because he married this shy southern,
little magnolia from Acworth, Georgia.
So he described the people.
He talked about the money they used.
He said, for the soldiers,
the prices of Philippine food was unaffordable.
Just a simple meal back then would cost,
in American dollars,
$5, which was a lot of money back then.
So they ate mostly at the camp.
He did say when they'd have
their sandwiches and go off and have lunch or
dinner that the Filipinos that worked with him,
they would all sit around him with great big wide eyes,
and it was very hard to resist them.
He said they were very peaceable people.
Most of them were Catholic.
That the city of Manila had been totally destroyed,
but there were a couple of
churches that were left standing,
and I think there was a general's palace
that was left standing.
He talked about the cemeteries,
and I'm guessing it's similar to Hawaii,
where they stood up the tombstones,
and they were tall and thin.
And he said he thought children would be
afraid to go where the dead are buried,
but there were a lot of families and children,
and it was very matter of fact,
they weren't bothered by that at all and they'd
leave like food and
things like little shrines
to their family that were buried.
>> So he really observed quite a bit.
>> Well, he talked to a lot of people too.
He was just so interested,
and he did say he spoke to some people and that
when the Japanese first came to the Philippines,
they were very kind to the citizens,
very conciliatory even,
because they were the similar race.
But once the Americans invaded,
he said they became very savage and
bestial and started killing the citizens,
bayoneting, shooting men, women, and children,
and they just treated them
much worse once the Americans came there.
>> And his whole role was
after the Japanese had already left the island.
They were kind of a cleanup crew.
>> Yes, it was. At one point,
he had gone hiking in the mountains with one of
his best friends and they got to a certain point,
and there were soldiers that made
them turn around and goats
a different direction because they told them there were
hundreds of Japanese that refused to surrender.
This was like the end of November or December of 1945,
when they should have all been gone by then.
So they couldn't do their hike
because they were shooting at anybody and anything.
>> Wow.
>> And at one point, he had
some Japanese prisoners work with
his unit and he said they were
even smaller than the Filipinos,
and that they were very surly.
They were glad, in a way,
to be with the Americans because they treated them
well until they sent them back to the states,
the Japanese internment camps.
But they treated them well,
and they knew they had already surrendered,
but there were those that just didn't want to give it up.
>> And with the supply depot that he ran,
I remember reading one of his letters that he
had some level of financial control.
It was his role to decide
what was purchased, or approved purchases.
Were you able to piece together
what his duties were, specifically?
>> Well, like you say, he ordered the supplies.
He had about 25 men under him.
He worked his way up to first lieutenant.
And that was pretty much that they
were shipping all these supplies and he got to
a point where he just didn't know
why they continued to ship them.
A lot came from Australia,
and the war was over,
and they just had so many supplies,
and they kept piling them away,
and they didn't know what to do with them,
and he didn't understand why they
continued to send things that they didn't need.
>> There is definitely an element of
that kind of almost like,
did you ever read the book Catch-22?
>> Long ago.
>> That's like army efficiency,
things don't always make a lot of sense.
I got that question from the end of all those letters.
>> Yes. He was very frustrated.
And at one point, he told my parents,
do not vote for Roosevelt.
>> Well, I think it was Truman at that point.
>> It may have been Truman.
>> Did he remember
the real moment of the real end of the war?
The war was almost over when he got to the Philippines,
but then they dropped the atomic bombs in August of 1945.
Did he recall that moment?
>> He did recall that moment.
They were all very happy to hear about that.
He said that they didn't really celebrate or anything.
By then, a lot of those men had already been
overseas several years and
my father was one of the later ones to come,
but he did talk about how much the men with families,
my father was single at the time,
but how the men with wives and children,
how much they missed them,
how much they so badly wanted
to come home and how you had to have
a certain number of points to be eligible to go home.
I noticed he mentioned
those points quite often in his letters.
>> That was a really interesting thing.
It was very precise.
You have to get to this level, and as a result,
had the sense that he would not be
eligible to go home until later in that process.
>> You count on that.
And towards the end,
they also offered him
a captainship and he turned it down because he just
wanted to get home and wash
his hands of the war completely and it meant
he would have had to stay in the army
had he accepted being a captain.
So he turned that down.
And that's why he never became a captain.
He just didn't want to have anything more.
He'd had enough by that time.
>> I also noticed he wrote a lot.
He sent his pay or most of it back home to his parents.
>> Yes.
>> Was that a prior arrangement
or just something he felt like it made sense to do?
>> I don't know if it was
a prior arrangement but he was very close to his family,
and they probably needed
the money and I don't know that they spent all of it.
I know he was trying to
save money up and he mentioned several
times by the time he had spent money for his laundry,
they had the Filipino women come in and do
their wash and he spent money on uniforms or extra shoes,
boots that sometimes he had very little,
if anything, to send home.
So he sent home as much as he could,
but it didn't happen all the time.
>> So what was his homecoming finally like?
When was he able to get out of the army and go home?
>> He left in February 1945,
and he sent a telegram.
First, he sent a letter
saying I've been approved to go home,
which I get send to you,
and then also the little telegram that said,
I'm on my way home.
I'll let you know when I get back.
One thing my cousin told me this was in Lake Hiawatha.
He was sitting there,
he was still in uniform and
his Cocker Spaniel Prince did
not recognize him at first because he'd been away.
And then All of a sudden,
the dog realized who he was and he just ran up
and jumped in his lap and licked
his face for about two or 3 minutes.
So I thought that was very sweet.
I know more about the dog than I know about how
my grandparents welcomed him home.
But he was so happy to get home and he could
go back and open another business.
His father suggested Atlanta as he suggested Dallas.
It also kept his family live, either in New York,
in New Jersey and they'd spend time down in Miami.
So with him being in Atlanta,
he was geographically closer to his family,
and easier to get to them either north or south.
>> That makes a lot of sense.
So You mentioned that he roomed with his best friend.
Who was this friend and how did he meet this friend?
>> They actually went to grade school.
They went to school.
They were best friends for life.
And when they were called,
his name was Dan Geltner for years.
We all called him Uncle Dan that they looked alike.
I didn't know until I was
almost grown that he wasn't really my uncle.
He was Jewish, and again,
very quiet, very calm,
that he was from Pennsylvania
and he was stationed
in France while my dad went overseas.
So they both roomed they took
rooms at my grandparent's house on
my mother's side on Stokes Avenue not too
far from the Rensnes where Joel Chandler Harris lived.
And back then, it was not diverse.
Now ironically, we came back from
Europe in October and the
man that helped with our luggage,
we just got to talking,
and it turned out he lived on Stokes Avenue in
the last house all the others had been raised for condos.
And it was just after all those years meeting this young,
very industrious Black gentleman who lived
on Stokes Avenue with his brother.
And it's like, what a small world in the middle of
this huge international airport to meet somebody
who knew exactly where
my grandparents lived on the same street.
I've seen the house.
It was so long ago.
I don't remember the street number,
but it was Stokes Avenue and
my grandparents rented a couple of rooms,
and my mother lived at home.
She was part of the new deal
and she was a secretary
and she got transferred around before she met my father.
She was sent to Spartanburg, Columbia,
her sister also had a job
with the new deal and she went to St. Petersburg.
So my mother came back to
Atlanta and all the money she made,
she sent to her parents,
my grandparents and that's how my dad met her.
>> And what was her name?
>> Dorothy Stewart and
she was a small-town girl and it was
actually an anomaly coming from Acworth
to not only date someone from
the north but somebody Jewish.
She was very Christian as were her parents.
And my Jewish grandmother who was a little bit religious,
she did not want anyone marrying outside of the religion.
So they dated for over four years.
My grandmother died in 1949.
So he waited until
his mother had died and a year had passed,
and they married in 1950.
>> So what were some of your earliest
memories of your father?
>> He loved to travel.
He was very, very funny.
He had a ry sense of humor.
He was a big prankster.
He loved puns.
We were punished, all growing up with puns of every kind.
I mean, and just bam, bam, bam, bam,
they would come, and I do it now.
My daughter does it.
>> In the religious disagreements,
how was your father and mother's relationship?
>> Well, they were both very quiet people.
We all had dinner together every night, mother cooked.
She did not have the advantages my father did.
She grew up core and
her her grandparents ran Acworth used to be called
Northcutt Station before it
was Acworth my grandmother was
a Northcutt my great grandparents
ran a depot at the train station in
downtown Acworth and another relative
what used to be a mayor
of Acworth They were all
Northcutts and then my Granny married my grandpa,
Daniel Stewart, and then my mother
was the youngest of three children.
And they were farmers.
She grew up with chickens and donkeys,
and I remember going to Acworth as a young girl.
There wasn't much to it at all back then.
They had the lake and I
had other distant cousins that grew up there.
My parents were close.
They didn't argue, not in front of us anyway.
Like I said, my father was quiet and humble.
He worked so hard.
He worked seven days a week.
And on the weekends,
he would work at home with this huge desk.
I have that desk.
This is what the computer is sitting on,
this big metal desk.
And it's just sentimental.
It's not very practical.
I probably eventually will sell it.
So he would sit here at this desk and
run numbers and things when he was at home.
His first business in
Atlanta was on Lucky Street downtown.
And I'm sure you don't remember,
but before the varsity,
this was attached to Georgia Tech was
another little drive in called the yellow jacket.
And he would bring home
chili dogs and things on weekends.
And it was a big treat for us
too because we didn't eat out a lot,
but he would bring home chili dogs and fries.
And it was just exciting to open
up the boxes like the varsity boxes,
and Oh, there's goodies in there.
He actually hired his warehouse manager
was a car hop at the yellow jacket,
and he hired him a young Black man
and he became his warehouse manager for decades.
He just got people from around and he trained them,
and he created a lot of jobs
for people here in Atlanta early on.
>> And this was Pioneer Neon Supply Company?
>> Yes. Pioneer Neon Supply Company.
That is the business he had
here in Atlanta and the name never changed.
He had his business for 45,50 years.
>> And where in Atlanta did you grow up?
What neighborhood did you live in?
>> I grew up in Sandy Springs, unincorporated.
We grew up in a house on the edge of a cliff,
we had six acres and it went all the way down.
My father owned Buffalo Creek,
it was at Chattahoochee River.
So we grew up facing the river.
And I have very happy memories of walking with my dad
tramping down to the creek down below.
There were little creeks all the way walking down.
It was very woodsy.
My best friend and I would play in
those creeks and play with
the mud puppies, the salamanders.
And I was very happy growing up in the woods.
And my happiest times were I loved being with my dad.
I always enjoyed being with him.
I was going down there,
down into the woods with him,
and he used to like to say
he owned part of the Chattahoochee River.
And now, the neighborhood is still there,
the house is still there.
He started off when my brother was born,
they had a little house on North Side
drive across from Bobby Jones golf course.
My brother was born in '53.
I was born in '55.
Then they bought a bigger house in Sandy Springs where
I was born at Georgia Baptist,
my brother at Crawford Long,
and that's where I was brought home to in Sandy Springs.
When I was five or six,
they added a basement and they added two more bedrooms.
It was a three bedroom house.
So we had more room.
They turned the garage into a play room for us kids.
What else about my dad?
When I was older,
like a teenager, I'd go to the library with him.
And you know, I loved going to my dad loved to read.
He was a historian.
He became so interested.
He knew everything about any war in history.
If he found a book he had not read,
That was a surprise.
He loved history.
He would often go out of town
because all of his customers were in the southeast.
I don't know if you remember.
You may have read about the roof tops on
houses and barns all around that said Sea Rock City.
Rock City in Chattanooga.
That's another whole story.
But a lot of the men that painted the tops of the roof,
you could see it with an airplane
or if they were set far back and you were driving.
It was just in big white letters.
They sell bird houses up there.
It's just an icon, C Rock City.
And a lot of them bought their paint and brushes for
my father to paint all those tops of houses.
>> Oh, that's interesting. So they
sold more than just the neon.
They sold sign supplies across the border.
>> They started off with Neon,
we sold neon tubing,
we sold transformers, fluorescent lighting,
brushes, paint, sign paint.
When I was older,
he let me come in there and select nice brushes.
I was painting myself at the time.
And he sold gold leaf.
He actually twice sold gold leaf to the Capitol.
The gold leaf on the Capitol building came from my dad.
And once occasionally, he let me have one leaf.
Because, I'd say, this is 23 carot Italian gold,
and my best friend and I would take a piece of paper
and dip a little water
and the gold leaf and paint with it.
But we didn't get that very
often because it was so expensive.
But it was like practically powder.
It came in a little square box of,
I think, maybe 24-30 leaves,
and each one was in a separate sleeve on a piece
of wax type paper, parchment paper,
and I guess to make
the gold leaf that they painted on the capital,
The dip their brush in
some formula and then dip it into the gold,
and it would attach unlike our pictures,
which when it dried, you could Oh, no.
That's my gold leaf.
But they painted the Capitol.
And he sold to Tennessee Valley Authority.
He sold to Ted Turner, Turner outdoor advertising.
He sold to Alex Cooley.
You probably don't remember him,
Alex Cooley's electric ballroom.
He sold to Hosea Williams,
who was part of the Civil Rights Movement.
He was he was a character.
He was a bit of a Jack leg.
A lot of the sign painters were,
and he drank a lot,
but he was very entertaining
and always so nice when he'd come in.
I remember because I worked there as a teenager,
one summer I worked there as a receptionist.
So I'd meet all these people.
And he knew and I'd get tickets.
If I got lucky, I'd score some tickets to
the Alex Cooley to his ballroom to see acts.
I'd get two tickets and take
my best friend who happened to
work at a radio station at
Georgia State and she would get tickets.
So between she and I,
we saw a lot of music in the 70s and 80s.
>> That's really neat. What was your education like?
>> My father helped found Pace Academy.
He was on the board of trustees and
he kicked in a lot of money.
Pace Academy started with just kindergarten.
And every year, I think a lot of schools do this now.
They would add a grade.
So my brother started in the first kindergarten,
and there were only ten people in my class.
I went through the sixth grade.
My brother graduated from Pace.
He was in their first graduating class.
I went there through sixth grade,
and then I went to James L Riley,
which is now part of Holy Innocents'.
Holy Innocents' and Sandy Springs was very small,
and they kept buying
more and more land and expanding that school.
It takes up a block now. It's huge.
But back then, there was a middle school
called James L Riley. I went there.
I went to Sandy Springs High School.
I graduated from North Fulton in 1974.
Then I met my husband in '75.
I was quite young.
I was 19.
I married when I was 20.
So we grew up in Sandy Springs.
It was a quiet street.
Now all of the old houses.
Mine has been redone, made into mansions.
But these were all ranch houses.
There were people.
There was a couple from
Sweden on our street,
it was not diverse color wise,
but there were people from other countries
that live on Riverview Road.
And now they call that area because I
saw recently they sold our house.
Now it's called Sandy Springs Palisades.
They gave it a fancy name.
I guess because a lot of the houses on our side.
We all overlook the river.
We actually watched them build
I-285 from our picture window.
Before that, there was a little wooden bridge to cross
the river before we had the highway,
and it was a one lane bridge
and there were so few people,
you'd wait at one end of the bridge,
a few cars, and then the other side would go.
And it was all very civil.
I don't think that would happen today.
There was no flight.
People took their turns.
Another thing my dad did was visit
his customers in the southeast when I was a kid.
And rather than eat at restaurants,
my mother would always prepare a big picnic.
There was a bakery.
It's still there in Sandy Spring.
I don't think the name is the same.
Andre's bakery.
>> I think it's still there.
>> Happy Herman's.
And actually, Mr. Herman's daughter, they lived
on our street down at the end,
and I would visit Kathy Herman and they had a pool,
which hung the moon for me we didn't have a pool.
We just had a backyard with a little playground and
a place to hang your sheets up to dry in the sunshine,
which you can't really
do that now unless you're way way out.
My subdivision wouldn't allow it now where I live.
So I have very happy memories of my father,
we'd always stop in a state park,
and he loved those homeboy sandwiches.
So she packed those chips,
maybe potato salad, sodas,
and we stop in the park and eat at a picnic bench.
And then later on after I was married because we married
young and we weren't yet very skilled.
So we worked all types of
jobs and didn't have a lot of money.
But I took after my mother and made
so many picnics and took this everywhere to parks.
We'd go to Stone Mountain and
spend the day and have a picnic.
Occasionally, we'd afford, we'd get a canoe.
They may still have that Dixie steamship looking boat.
We ride that.
We camp out there occasionally.
My father did not camp out.
I think he had enough in the Philippines.
But I did with my friends.
So he would go around
the southeast to see his friends and
collect some money and he'd bring us with him.
And so I became friends with a lot of their children.
I'd spend the night I remember to a couple in Cleveland,
Tennessee, and their daughter was my age.
And my father probably would not have approved,
but we love to watch
Sunday morning church and listen to the gospel music,
and they were very religious,
and they were some of his best customers.
But he drive around the southeast to these little towns,
and we just did a lot of that.
>> So you've described some of his clients,
and they came from all locks of life.
Did you have a sense for the battles
going on or the challenges around segregation,
integration and the civil rights movement,
or was that somewhat separate from your experience?
>> I think I lived a sheltered life.
My parents didn't really discuss those things.
The N word was never used growing up.
I never even heard it until I was a teenager and one of
his managers was a white red neck
and he would use that word.
But no, there was no prejudice at all with my father.
My mother was a little different because she grew up in
a small town and didn't have the experiences my dad had,
but she never used that word.
I actually didn't realize
it's embarrassing until I was in high school,
and I spent my last year at
an alternative high school
that Kids my age lived in apartments.
I just assume everybody had a house.
That's when I first realized I was
privileged the white privilege.
And since then,
my best friends are both clinical psychologists.
They both retired, but
we have very interesting discussions.
They live in Atlanta still,
but we get together every three months.
Well, not lately to have lunch,
and we discussed things like
white privilege and what's going on today,
and I met one of them when I
interned in a women's prison and it's African American,
and you don't say Black you don't say Black people.
But growing up, they were Black people or negroes.
Now, when I first moved
out and we lived in an apartment on Roswell Road,
the husband and wife that owned the apartments,
and she called them Negros,
which I thought was very, very offensive.
And it disturbed me hearing them being
denigrated because that's not what I was taught,
and we always got along.
My father said in the early '70s and I believe in
because he had so many diverse customers from everywhere,
if he had run for mayor,
he would have gotten the Black vote.
And I think he would have.
He was very well liked.
He was very fair in his dealings.
He could be a soft touch.
He would give people credit that
he probably shouldn't have.
And so he lost some money.
But he also made quite a bit selling.
And everybody liked him.
He was quiet, a very wacky sense of humor.
I know there's more stories.
>> What role, if any,
do you think your dad's wartime experience
played in how he lived his life after the war?
>> Well, I know being out there,
he helped come into,
he self actualized while he was there.
I think it made him a little more
liberal minded because once
you've done a lot of world travel and
spent time around other people and cultures.
It broadens your perspective.
And I know it did mine when I did a lot of world travel.
My brother is a world traveler.
My father loved to travel.
And after I guess it
was when he had time off before the war,
he hiked up and down Yosemite.
He said he almost got trampled
by some of the tourists or the donkeys.
And later, we went there, I guess I was 12,
and I did take a donkey ride down
the canyon but he hiked down there, no donkey.
He loved a canoe.
He played tennis.
When he was in his 60s,
he would beat people half his age.
Blacks liked to try to play him,
and he would beat them every one of them.
And he wore when he was younger and played tennis,
it was just the style,
that is what Tupac Shakur did later.
He would take a handkerchief and put it on
his head and tie the ends in little knots to
protect his head very much
almost exactly the way he wore his scarf on his head.
But he liked to win.
He taught me to wrestle.
But my father would take me to
the Live Atlanta Wrestling and
the old auditorium downtown.
I was all of four years old,
maybe five, and we'd always have a ring side seat.
So I was exposed to gratuitous violence at an early age.
This was before it was all
scripted and it was real wrestling.
And I remember somebody ripping a scab off of
someone's head and there was blood on the mat by me,
but I'd sit in his lap and he'd cheer
and I didn't think anything of it.
At the time, I was just so happy to be with my dad.
I look back at this and think,
I don't know what on earth did my mom think?
He would send me into
the locker rooms to get autographs for him.
This little girl going into these grown wrestlers,
shoving me into the locker room to get
as many autographs before they made me leave.
But they're Gorgeous George and some of the old names.
And it's funny, later on,
when Ted Turner owned the wrestling.
I don't know if it was still called
Live Atlanta Wrestling in the early 80s.
I took my father and
I took our daughter, his granddaughter.
She was about six or seven.
So this was in the early 80s.
We went downtown to the Turner Building,
and we watched wrestling.
So my daughter got in on that but it wasn't as
violent by then and it wasn't as close up.
You sat because it was being televised.
And they said, "Don't get up."
"You can cheer all you want, no food or drink."
And I just remember my daughter needed to
go to the bathroom and you weren't supposed to get up.
So I started to get up and
take her in this guard said, "You can't get up."
I said, my daughter needs to go to the bathroom.
Why don't you tell her that?
So they let us go and come back quickly.
But he loved to watch wrestling.
He taught me to wrestle and he'd always beat me
and he'd hold my arm up and he'd say,
"The loser" and he'd be the winner.
We had a badminton court.
Our yard was on a slope,
and we had a badminton net up there.
So we enjoyed playing badminton outdoors.
We had a ping pong table.
He played ping pong in
Philippines and became very good at it.
He could put the English, do any shot pool.
He was very good at that and he always won.
I think about Forrest Gump in the movie,
how he played the ping pong and nobody could beat him.
But nobody shot my dad a bunch of paddles.
>> Hope he had something of
a competitive streak which
probably helped him in business?
>> Yes, he did. It did
help him and I have that same streak.
Our daughter is probably more
like her grandfather than any of us.
She went into a business that was
mostly men and broke glass ceilings.
And now there's many more women
working in the auto industry.
But I also signed her up when she was little.
I kept that child so busy.
She played basketball, the only girl on the team.
She played softball, she danced.
She was so busy and she's still busy all the time.
She's just busy.
She works very hard for her dollars,
and she has that passion,
that drive my father did.
He also had an eye not only for the sign company,
but for real estate.
It's like he was a visionary.
He knew what to buy at very low prices and then resell.
And he would go to Florida,
he would invest in strip malls and things.
And I used to go with him
sometimes just to look at things.
So he was just very motivated and determined to succeed.
Our family lawyer told me many times that my father was
the embodiment of a first generation
American who took himself,
educated himself, assimilated, totally.
My grandfather did not want to learn English.
So he wasn't that assimilated.
But my father, he just couldn't wait
to go do this and that.
He loved this country.
He even learned to enjoy grits,
which for somebody from the north is a pretty big deal.
>> That's great.
>> He loved to swim.
We actually had,
it's not far from here in Canton.
It used to be a tiny town called Hollywood,
Georgia, and he bought a trailer,
which was like our summer home.
And there were strawberries.
He had a cow.
I have pictures of us there.
I remember being there.
There was a lake.
It's now where Town Center near there,
and it's filled in.
It's now a subdivision,
but he named it Lake Dorothy,
and that's how it was entered in the records.
And he had a canoe,
and a little outboard motor boat
and he'd take us around the lake.
My mother would get so frightened.
It had a little beach.
I don't know if he brought the sand
in or it was just there.
He loved to swim.
He would swim when it was thundering,
and my mother would really freak
out telling us all, "Get out of the water."
But he didn't want to get out of the water.
He could hold his breath.
He loved Johnny Weissmuller and Tarzan.
He could hold his breath for three or four minutes.
So he'd play dead man's float and he
just do like this on his stomach,
and he wouldn't move.
And after a minute,
my brother and I would start to get
a alarm and he did it to us every time.
He fooled us and we pushed on, dad, wake up.
Are you okay?
And he'd come up out of the water,
like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
>> That's funny.
He sounds the picture you're painting.
You mentioned that he was frustrated with
Franklin Roosevelt and Truman to a degree.
He sounds a little bit more like Teddy Roosevelt.
He's that kind of.
>> He never hunted.
He had a BB gun when he was little,
and he would shoot 10 cans,
but he accidentally shot
a bird and he never got over that.
I think he never used his gun after that.
He didn't want to cause any harm.
He always had dogs.
They were always Cocker Spaniels.
He had two, always named Frisky and Prince.
And then when something would happen to them,
he'd get two more and
they were the next Frisky and Prince.
And I remember those dogs when I was small,
when we still had the milk truck
come and the bread truck.
One of the dogs was killed by the milk truck
accidentally and I think one got poisoned.
>> So you've characterized how
your father was the embodiment
of this first generation American.
His parents were immigrants,
and the whole family got out of Europe.
Was there a moment when
you learned about what had happened to the Jews of
Europe or was there
a realization about the Holocaust
as being something that happened during World War II?
Did that become part of your family's understanding?
>> When I was in high school,
16 or 17 is when I
first really took an interest in the Holocaust,
and I read many books on
the Nuremberg trials and what had
happened and I asked my father about it.
He didn't talk too much about it.
He would just say that all our family got out.
Nobody in our family ever had
a tattoo or was ever in the camps.
But as long as he was alive,
he would not eat German food or Japanese food.
Now, my mother, if you remember Benihana Japanese,
they would give you a free meal in
November if your birthday was in November.
And my mother and I both had November birthdays.
We would beg him.
We were so curious to go and he would
just no Japanese food end of story.
So we never got any Japanese free meal.
He liked Chinese food,
but Japanese he would not eat nor German.
So he knew about it and did
his own quiet way showed his displeasure at it.
But no, we didn't have discussions about the Holocaust.
His mother died, like I said,
1949, before I was born.
My grandfather, his father died
when I was about five or six.
And my mother's parents died
when I was three and about seven.
So I didn't really have
the grandparents to tell me stories.
By the time I was old enough,
they were all gone because
my parents were older when they married.
Scotch English Cherokee.
So she had that thrifty scotch in her.
They knew how to make things last.
She taught herself to sew.
She had to sneak away because
my father would have noticed one of his old shirts,
took it apart and put it back together.
She happened to get a beautiful singer cabinet machine.
My father would barter.
So he traded a debt for this 1940s machine,
and I used it for years after
they moved and we lived in their old condo,
and it was just a wonderful thing.
My mother sewed clothing for herself and myself.
Her nephew, Richard had sent a lot of
cloth from Taiwan, beautiful silk brocade,
and she made herself a sheaf dress and
a little vest like a jackio type thing,
and then she made me a matching dress.
It was like indigo, beautiful color.
And my best friend liked it so much.
She made her a dress, too,
so we could wear our dresses together.
So she was very industrious.
She taught me to sew when I was eight.
And I've always loved learning.
I think my father,
he was very curious and he loved learning.
I don't know if you've heard of the novelty gene,
where it's just people that always want to be
on an adventure or doing
something, learning something new.
My dad was like that. I'm like that.
My brother is like that.
My daughter is like that.
>> That's great. So to conclude,
what do you think that your father would want students
of history to understand learning about his life?
What do you think that he'd want them to take away?
>> Don't give up, be determined,
find your passion, get educated,
educate yourself, work hard.
That was instilled in us,
the poverty mentality to pay your bills first.
For years, I was so nervous
and we went without much of anything,
but our bills were always paid on time.
So that was instilled in us.
Treat people fairly.
Family comes first, family before.
He wasn't a patron of the arts,
but he was very good to his family,
including my cousins, his nieces.
He had five nieces.
And to be brave.
He was very brave.
And one of his trucks caught fire.
It had chemicals in it,
and he ordered people to go drive the truck,
go away from the building because if it exploded,
the supplies would have burned up.
And nobody wanted to.
So he would do it.
He got in the truck, was almost overcome by the fumes,
but he drove it over to a fire hydrant.
So he didn't see wartime,
not from a stance of being a prisoner
or being in the actual fighting,
but he saw enough where he thought it was,
of course, very unfair what the Japanese did.
He thought they did the right thing in dropping the bomb.
It was a horrible thing that that happened,
but I think I agree that it was the right decision,
even though it was a moral decision,
and they had to end that war.
And that's what did it.
>> So what do you think then are
the most important things for
people to know about
World War II and the Holocaust Era now?
Your opportunity just philosophize.
[LAUGHTER].
>> Well, I was a moderate
liberal until maybe 15 years ago.
My father was a Democrat,
but he was a Reagan Democrat,
and he also voted for George Bush Senior.
But my mother and I were what you
call yellow dog Democrats.
Didn't matter who it was, had the D.
That's who you pulled the lever for.
And I think there's still a lot of people like that.
But as I got older and wiser and I looked back and
sometimes I'm sorry that
we had such a long war and so many lives were lost,
and it was hard on everybody here.
But as Americans, we pulled together,
and I think America is so unique and
the determination to keep our country free.
He was fighting for freedom.
He didn't like knowing
that the Filipinos that
all their livelihood had been destroyed.
I think it gave him a greater appreciation
for what he had,
and what we all have over here.
Never forget what we went through,
what all those souls
during the Holocaust, how they suffered.
I think Steven Spielberg was one.
He got a list and named every single person
that he could find and didn't survive the Holocaust.
Simon Wiesenthal, he's
done a wonderful thing with the Wiesenthal Center.
All the books I read in high school,
the trials, these criminals,
the horrible things they did,
the human suffering,
what they did to children to mothers and fathers.
Gassing them, really?
That's putting them on trains
and saying they were going somewhere,
but not telling them where they were really going.
My husband when he was in the French Army,
he was drafted and he served in Berlin.
And ironically, back then,
the English, the French,
the American and Russian took three month tours guarding
the one inmate at Spandau Prison, Rudolf Hess.
He was one of the war criminals.
And my husband had a three month tour doing that.
And he was the only prisoner
there and he had lost his head.
He would talk to the leaves.
They didn't allow him anything.
They were just in guard towers watching him.
But I found it ironic that
my husband ended up guarding one of those war criminals.
But I think it's just a shameful part of our history.
Although we didn't do any.
It was Pearl Harbor.
It was aggression towards us.
In Germany, I'm sorry
that somebody like Hitler could come into power,
and he started off with the speeches.
My husband knew people and my cousin also,
her best friend, who's
about 90 was part of the Hitler Youth.
They didn't know any better.
It was a normal thing.
But then ratting out their neighbors and how
he kept getting stronger and
stronger and people believing him,
that was a horrifying thing.
And I hope nothing like that ever happens
again in any country and especially not here.
>> Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.