..inte: Ed Korrick ..intr: Bobbi Kurn ..da: 2000 ..cp: 1989.001.058 The New York Store, ca. 1896. Sam Korrick is fourth from left. ..ca: ..ftxt: An Interview with Ed Korrick ("EK") by Bobbi Kurn ("BK"), Volunteer January 31, 2000 Log For Ed Korrick Interview Pages Category People & Places 1 Grandparents Louis Becker Anna Becker Rebecca Ezekiel Joshua 2 Jews coming from Old Country Ellis Island 2-3 Mother's Family Odessa (Ukraine) 4 Mother & Father Meeting Blanche & Charles Married in 1919 4 Touring Company Catauqua Circuit Warren G. Harding 5 Original Founder of Blanche Phoenix Musicians Club Phoenix Symphony 1946 6 Father's Older Brother Sam migrated in 1888 6 Job Opportunity in El Paso Strauss 6 Came to Phoenix in 1895 Opened store where Symphony Hall is now 7 Family in Poland Bialystaf 7 Sam died in 1903 of pneumonia Buried in Pioneer Cemetery 8 Abe came to U.S. in 1906 Leah, daughter of one of Father's sisters 8 Opened New Store 1915; 1st St. & Washington Population 20,000 9 Borrowed Money from Local Bank 9-10 Jobber in St. Louis Rice Stix Company 10 Blanche died in 1987 11 Founder of Tempe Beth Israel Charles Head of Chamber of Commerce 13 1963 Shopping Centers Christown 15 1962 Korricks Sold Out Broadway Father, Charles, died in 1972 Abe died in 1974 15 Book by Ann Birmingham Stores about Abe 16 Officiated Bar Mitzvah, 1938 Rabbi Jaffa 16 Nat Silverman filled in when no Rabbi 17-18 Resorts Restricted Jews Phoenix Country Club Camelback Inn 18-20 Growing up in Phoenix 21-22 Founder of New Temple 1950 Rabbi Krohn Rabbi Plotkin 23 First House Apartment 3rd Ave. & Roosevelt 23 Built New Home 1928 Paul Williams 7th St. & Earll 1966 Moved to Scottsdale Mountain Shadows 25 Sister Louise 25-26 Music Teacher Lived w/Them Berini Stanislav 27 Elementary School Osborn School Central & Osborn 28-29 Attorney General of the U.S. Arizona Republic Convention Gene Pulliam Camelback Inn 30-31 City Council 1969 Ed Korrick John Driggs, Mayor Milt Graham, Mayor 32 1975 Referendum Papago Freeway 32 Margaret Hance 33 Children Susan Wendy Kim 34 Grandchildren Hannah, Jeffery 35 1938 Largest High School Union High College Stanford graduate in '48 36-37 1943 Army Air Force Fox Theater Tempe Drug Store Orpheum Theater 37-39 Transportation Kenilworth Line 40 Employment Korrick's Harold Shapiro Dean Wiiter This is Bobbi Kurn for the Arizona Jewish Historical Society interviewing Ed Korrick in his home at 2225 East Marshall Avenue in Phoenix on January 31, 2000. Ed Korrick Interview BK: Good Morning. EK: Good Morning. BK: My name is Bobbi Kurn and I'm a volunteer at the Arizona Jewish Historical Society. We thank you for allowing us to come in and interview you. Tell me if you will the names of your Mother's parents. EK: My Mother's family name was Becker and my maternal Grandfather was Louis Becker and my maternal Grandmother was Anna Becker. My Father's family I never knew and never heard of really except for the fact that there's a document or plaque at Beth El that gives their names, but because my Father came from a family that was annihilated in the Holocaust , he didn't talk much about it and would not discuss his family with us. But I understand that his Mother's name was Rebecca and that his Father's name was Ezekiel Joshua. That's really about all I know about his family and about the family in Poland which is where he came from. BK: Can you spell his Father's name for us? EK: That's a good question. When Jewish people came over from the 'Old Country' and landed either at Ellis Island or in the case of my Father at the foot of the Battery before Ellis Island opened, the immigration officers tended to anglicize the spelling of their names. So that the name that they left Poland with may not have been exactly the name, certainly not the same spelling as it was anglicized when they came to this country. In this case, I have a number of relatives of my Father that are distant relatives, but we have had some contact over the last 20-25 years and some of them spell their names a little differently. So I tend to guess from that that this was because of the anglicization of these names when they immigrated to the United States. The name in Poland was probably something close to K O R K with a little diphthong on the E and another family name was...well I don't want to get into that but I'm told by some of my Israeli relatives that there was another name in the family that I had never heard before. So I'm not being very helpful because really some of the early history that goes back to the middle to the end of the 19th century is pretty obscure right now and there is not much that I could say about it. Other than the fact that the name 'Korrick' was a derivative of probably K O R E K and became K O R R I C K which is sort of Irish for Karrick. You know Karrick is an Irish name. Korrick was a Polish name that became a semi-Irish name I guess. Anyway, my Father's family I knew nothing about and still don't after all these years, because he never talked about them and didn't really want to talk about them. My Mother's family - she came originally from Odessa which is now the Ukraine and she was born, near as I can tell, about 1896 or '97in the Ukraine and they migrated to the east coast of the United Statesabout the turn the century. I would guess about 1900 and lived in Hackensack, New Jersey for a few years and then went to Seattle. So she went to public school in Seattle, graduated from high school in Seattle. Then my Father met her while she was still a young woman living in Seattle. BK: What was her maiden name? EK: Her name was Becker and that's her Mother and Father. BK: First name? EK: Her first name was Blanche. Blanche was a professional singer. She was a soprano and she sang in opera in some of these touring companies back in about the time of the First World War. In those days we didn't have television, obviously, and we didn't have a lot of entertainment for some of the small towns around the country. So they had what they call the Chatauqua Circuit and the Chatauqua Circuit was a group of singers and entertainers who moved from town to town, in small towns in the east and had lecturers and musicians and every sort of entertainment that you could imagine. So Blanche was in the Chatauqua Circuit about the time of the First World War. She use to tell me stories about having toured with Warren G. Harding, who became President of the United States about 1926, I think...and what a nice man he was and I kept arguing with her and saying he was one of the worst Presidents we ever had. Yes, she said, but he was a nice man. In any event, my Father met my Mother through a pre-arranged meeting, like most did in those days. You have to remember Phoenix in 1917/1916 was still a pretty small town and there were not too many available Jewish women in the community. BK: In Phoenix? EK: In Phoenix. And so what happened was apparently some traveling salesman told my Father about somebody in Seattle who he knew a relative of, I don't know exactly the details of it, so she contacted the family. He went up to Seattle to meet her. He met her and they started a correspondence and before you know it - she didn't want to marry because she was too engrossed in her career - and eventually-I still have letters that he wrote to her, you know, pleading with her to get off the Chatauqua and come and marry him and move to Phoenix. She didn't want to. She really didn't. I think her family felt that she was an old maid because by that time she was you know 23/24/22 and women at that age were suppose to be married. So she apparently decided that she would prefer to stay on the Chatauqua Circuit and finish her contract and all that. He eventually persuaded her through, I don't know what kind of persuasion he used, but he persuaded her to get married and move to Phoenix. So in 1919 they were married and she moved to Phoenix. I have to tell you that she felt, at the time that Phoenix was a desert in more ways than one. Because she felt there was no cultural activities at all in 1919 and 1920. She got pregnant and had her first child, my sister Louise, in 1921. She tried to start some things for the community here. She was one of the original founders of the Phoenix Musicians Club which had a building just near what is now the Westward Ho, just to the west of the Westward Ho. BK: What street is that? EK: That would have been on Fillmore and First Avenue, I guess. In any event, she started the Musicians Club, was very active in musical things and frankly she was not too enamored with the cultural activities of the town, which was understandable There wasn't much here. So she tended to travel a lot. Usually without her children and without her husband and so she was constantly going to operas. For instance, in the fall she would spend a month in San Francisco and go to the opera there because she liked the opera so much. She tended to travel on her own a lot. She was kind of an Auntie Mame at the time, you know. She occasionally would drag her kids along. I'm digressing a bit, but she would take us on long car trips sometimes. At a time when women didn't drive across country alone. She frequently drove all the way from Phoenix to New York by herself in a car. So she wanted to spend the summer in New York, she drove the car to New York. Sometimes we were with her and sometimes we weren't. But anyway, she was somewhat adventurous and liked to travel. So she didn't spend summers in Phoenix. It was too hot. She didn't like it. So come the first of June she was gone. Very often we wouldn't see her back here until the first of October. So we'd come back and start school and she had hired a nanny or somebody to look after us for the first few years of our schooling so that if she wasn't there they would be. But I'm digressing a little bit from that. I know more about my Mother's family than I know about my Father's family. I know practically nothing abut his. I do know this - that his older brother, Sam, was the originator of the store and Sam had come to New York about 1888 as I recall. I got the figures in a thing that a friend of mine is doing. I have a friend who is doing a Master's Degree program in history and did a story on the store. He had done a lot of original research, including going back to the library to get all the early directory names, addresses and what not from the 19th century. Anyway, Sam Korrick migrated to the United States in about 1888 and worked on Canal Street in Manhattan rolling cigars for the first year or two that he was here. He then, because a family friend by the name of Strauss and I don't know any more about the name other than that - I know the name but I don't know anything about them, but apparently the Strauss family told him that there was a job opportunity in El Paso working for the Diamonds which is the old Diamonds from Phoenix. They had a store in El Paso. So Sam went to El Paso and took a job with the Diamond boys and worked for them for two or three years, four years, from about 1891 or '92 until 1895. In 1895 he was on his way to the west coast and he stopped off in Phoenix because he had heard that Phoenix was a pretty good town. So he started to open a store in Phoenix in 1895 using packing crates for fixtures and what not. A tiny little store about the size of this room, about 10 x 12, you know, 12 x 12 whatever it was. A little store front on east Washington Street. The store was immensely successful very very quickly. He opened his store in 1895 at what is now Symphony Hall. BK: Which is where? EK: The 200 block of east Washington Street. It was a small store front store, did very well, as I said. By 1898/1899, it was obvious that he had to expand and he did. He also thought that he needed some help. So he wrote to his family in Poland. He was born in a small town near Bialystuf called Yashinovka which is still in existence. Anyway, he wrote to his brother, Charles, who was my Father, to come to the United States to help him run his store. So in 1899 my Father came to Phoenix. He stopped first in Kansas City, I think, to learn English and also to go to business school. I think he spent six months in Kansas City and eventually came to Phoenix about 1900. He worked in the store with his older brother until 1903 and in 1903 Sam Korrick died of pneumonia. He's buried in the Pioneer Cemetery at 12th Avenue and Madison. So Charles was alone and was underage. He was only 19 at the time when Sam died. So he had to have a guardian to monitor him in the store. So they got a banker by the name of Oberfelder. BK: How do you spell that? EK: O B E R F E L D E R, I believe. Simon Oberfelder kind of monitored my Father for a couple years until he got to be 21 or for a year I think it was. When he was 21 he took over the store on his own and it was very very successful. By 1905 or so the store had grown immensely and was now a major retail operation in Phoenix. By the way, I might say that in 1903 when Sam Korrick died, and these are some of the things that I didn't know until I read them from my friend who did the research, all the merchants in the town closed their store for a day because they felt such great respect for Sam Korrick. So, you know, the Goldwaters closed their store and the Diamonds closed their store. Oh by the way, the Diamonds moved to Phoenix in 1898 when they saw that Sam had done so well here. So they followed him and closed their store in El Paso and moved to Phoenix. So Charles had the store in 1903 all by himself. By 1905, as I said, the store had gotten quite successful and he needed some more help. He wrote to the Old Country and asked for his younger brother, Abe, to come and help him. Abe moved to the United States in 1906. With him he brought Leah, and I don't remember her last name at the time, but Leah was the daughter of one of my Father's sisters. There were six kids in my Father's family, three girls and three boys. The three boys, as I said, migrated to the United States. The three girls were left in Poland and one of them had a child, Leah, and died in child birth. When Abe moved to the United States, everybody there wanted him to take Leah with him. Leah at the time was only about 10 or 11 years old. Leah kept house for the boys in a rooming house on 5th Avenue just north of Van Buren. I have the address 300 something North 5th Avenue. So they lived in a rooming house and she took care of them, cooked their meals for them. The store prospered. Neither of the boys were married. Leah was going to school here and learned English. By 1914 or 1915 the store had outgrown its quarters. They had acquired a whole bunch of additional space in the building and they needed more space. So they decided they'd have to build a new store. They bought a lot at 1st Street and Washington and built a new store that opened in 1915. The store was huge. There's a picture of it there on the wall, if you want to see it. The one in the very center. In 1915 Phoenix was a town of maybe, oh I don'tknow, 20,000 people. So the store for a town of that size was very very big. That's a picture of it up there on the wall. My sister did that montage. If you want to borrow it you are more than welcome to. It shows in the lower left corner the old store on east Washington Street and in the center it shows the new store and some of the pictures around it are pictures of the new store that opened in 1915. The store was tremendously successful. There's some side stories about it, but I won't go into detail about it. In any event... BK: Go ahead, tell us the side story. EK: The side story was that the boys didn't have enough money to build the store. I'm abbreviating this. So they went to the local bank and asked for a loan and in those days when you borrowed money you borrowed money for 90-day periods. There was no such thing as a 20-year loan or anything like that, you borrowed it for 90-days and if the bank liked what you were doing in paying them back, they would extend it for another 90-days. So they needed $65,000 to build a new building, sounds like a joke now doesn't it? They borrowed the $65,000 from the local bank and got the building up and got it fixtured and all the merchandise came in and some of the merchants in town, including the Goldwaters, the Diamonds and the Goldbergs, were a little bit envious of the Korrick boys for building this big monstrous new building. One of them happened to sit on the board of directors of one of the banks and decided that they didn't want to extend the loan because they weren't sure the Korrick brothers would make it. So as a result of that they called the loan and said they wouldn't extend it for the 90-day period and Charlie was fit to be tied and he didn't know what to do or where to go. So finally he decided to take the train to St. Louis. Again, digressing a little bit, in those years, merchants dealt primarily with jobbers. They didn't deal with manufacturers. Jobbers were middle men. In other words, the jobbers dealt with the manufacturers and sold to the stores. It was that way in those days. Maybe the larger stores in those days like Macy's or somebody like that dealt directly with the manufacturers, but the smaller stores didn't, they dealt with jobbers. Well there was a jobber in St. Louis called the Rice Stix Company which was a predecessor of Stix Baer & Fuller and they were all connected. The Rice Stix Company knew the Korricks very well and had dealt with them for many many years. So Charlie went back to talk with the Rice Stix Company because he said, "I don't know what to do, you know they're going to close us down if we can't get an extension on this loan." The Rice Stix Company arranged for them to get a loan to bail them out and Charlie came back with enough money to continue. The interesting side line to that was that both Charlie and Abe were so angry at the local banks for having done what they did to them and putting them through such agony, that they decided they would never again deal with local banks. So from 1915 until I got in the store in 1949, we had no dealings at all with any local banks, none whatsoever. We dealt with the Los Angeles Bank, Citizen's Fidelity Bank inLos Angeles, and we dealt with a bank in San Francisco, Bank of America, but he never dealt with a local bank because he just didn't want to be putin that position again. And that became important in later years when we wanted to expand and build branch stores. They didn't want to borrow moneyfrom the local banks, you know. So that was one of the reasons that we sold, but that's another story. So in effect, the store was successful and by 1928 they added another addition to the store and in 1956 a third addition, etc. etc. Enough about the store. My Mother, Blanche, died in 1987 at the age of about 90. A funny thing, for many many years most women of her time didn't like to talk about their age. You know their vanity wasvery important. She would never never tell us how old she was or when she was born and she never liked to admit the fact that she was born in the Old Country, which she was. So for years and years and years, whenever we would kid her about how old she was she would just say something coy and forget about it. But later on as she got very very old and when she was in a nursing home, I said to her one day when she seemed to be fairly lucid, "Blanche, tell me something, how old are you?" She said, "Eddie youknow the truth is I don't really know anymore, I've forgotten, and she said that's the truth." And she had, "She didn't really know how old she was at that point." So anyway, my Mother, as I say, did a lot for the City of Phoenix in terms of cultural activities. She was involved in a lot of musical activities through the 20s and 30s and was a founder of the Phoenix Symphony in 1946, right after the war ended. Did a great deal for the general community. She was not that active in the Jewish community. Again, I can't explain that. She was on the Sisterhood Board, I think at Temple Beth Israel, but generally did not go out of her way to get into Jewish activities. Unfortunately for her I'm sorry because I think she missed an opportunity. My Father on the other hand was very active in many many things. He was one of the founders of Temple Beth Israel, was active also in a lot of community activities, was head of the Chamber of Commerce for a few years. You know he was active in all the things that a downtown merchant would have to be active in. So he was a good citizen and partook of all of the activities that he should partake in. I don't know what else I could talk to you about that would be of interest to the Historical Society. Whether it has to do with their store, their enterprise, or their family. Again, I have some relatives in Israel who probably know more about my Father's family than I do. About 20 years ago we took in a son of a nephew of my Father. He lived with us for a year from Israel, went to ASU, got his degree in engineering. Ellie would often tell me about things that I didn't know. It was kind of fun to hear. I have to plead a great deal of ignorance about my Father's family. I still don't know as much about it as I would like to. BK: Tell me some of the stories you remember him telling you about the firstor second store, about the customers, or the difficulty in Phoenix... EK: I don't know. I'm going to give you something to look over that I think you might find interesting if you promise to return it to me. It was done by this man in Tempe. EK: It's a story of Korricks' New York store from 1895 to 1915. It is kind of good. BK: Can I make a photocopy of it for the Jewish Historical Society? EK: You certainly can. It's well done. It's a primary research item that this young man, Jerry Brisco, did. What got him to do it I don't know, but his Father was involved in Broadway, which took over Korrick. Korricks was, from about 1915 to about 1958 or '59, the largest department store in the state; in terms of volume, in terms of employees and everything else. We were really a full department store where a lot of them were just apparel stores. Like Diamonds was primarily an apparel store. Boston Store was primarily an apparel store in the 20s, 30s, and 40s and Goldwaters was strictly an apparel store. It was not a department store. We had furniture and you know we had all the accouterments of a department store. By 1958 it was obvious that downtown was no longer the center of commercial activity in this City. When did you come here by the way? BK: Uhm '47 to Tucson. EK: To Tucson, well when did you come to Phoenix? BK: Phoenix '63. EK: Okay. By then the die was cast. By '63 we had shopping centers opening up, Christown and Park Central and downtown was no longer the primary business center. The boys had a hard time understanding that. One of the jobs that I had was to try and convince them that we had to expand. They worried about that a lot, because again, they didn't like to borrow money and unless you borrowed money you couldn't expand, you know. So I opened Christown in 1961 and we opened it on a very very tight budget but they were still so concerned about it that they decided that they couldn't afford to build any more branch stores. That was the beginning of the end for Korricks because with the downtown store slipping and the Christown store booming, it was obvious that if we wanted to maintain our position in the market we had to expand. The boys just couldn't see fit to do it. They were both in their 80s and there was no reason for them to still be active, but you know, what can you say? BK: What was it like downtown when the stores were downtown and the City was busy downtown? EK: You know up until about the mid-50s until 56/57/58, downtown was booming, Park Central opened in the mid-50s but they didn't have all the stores until later in the 50s and Diamonds had sold out to Roberts Brothers of Portland, Oregon. Roberts Brothers built a nice store in Park Central and started to draw a lot of business from downtown. Goldwaters opened up a nice store that was an apparel store. They closed their store in 1958 as I recall or '59 when they closed their downtown store. So downtown was slipping badly. By 1960 downtown was beginning to show signs of wear & tear. So the boys were very upset about what was happening but yet they didn't want to spend money in branching out so it was a tough situation. We had an offer from Stix Baer & Fuller in St. Louis in 1960 to buy out the store. The interesting thing about it was, let's see in 1960 Dad was 78 and Abe was 76 and they were still working in the store, particularly Abe. They couldn't get them to stop. Stix Baer & Fuller made the mistake of offering to buy out the store and leave the present management in but they wanted the boys to retire. The boys didn't like that idea at all. They thought that was an insult to ask them to retire. You know at their age they didn't like the idea. So they turned it down strictly for that reason and that reason alone. So we went on. The store in Christown was a very big success from the beginning. It was kind of handwriting on the wall. We saw what was happening. I built Christown for what I thought was a very modest sum, but they were fighting about it, as I said. By 1962, I had been very ill. I had some health problems and my Father was kind of upset about it. He thought maybe I wasn't going to make it or something like that. He decided at this point that he wouldn't object to selling the store at all. I, at that point didn't object either because I figured that if we couldn't expand there was no reason for us. BK: Okay. You said they sold out to Broadway. EK: They sold out to Broadway in 1962. I was happy to see it. Broadway, however, was not the best people to sell out to. We probably should have taken the Stix Baer & Fuller offer, but Broadway at the time was opportune and so they sold out for what would be considered now a relatively modest sum. The boys did not want to retire and so Broadway paid them a salary and gave them an office with nothing to do for about four years/three years. They stayed in the store in an office and that's all they had until 1966. I had left. The day we sold out I left. They stayed and in 1966 Broadway closed the downtown store because there was nothing but declining business down there. By that time they had opened up the store at the Biltmore at 24th Street and Camelback, the Fashion Park area. They had two branch stores, the third one being built in Mesa. So they were pretty well represented in the Valley and so they closed the store and they gave the store to the Junior College District, the building. That was that. The boys kept an office downtown so they would have a place to go until about 1966, '67 or '68. By 1969 both Abe and Charlie went home. You know. My Father died in 1972. Abe died in 1974. Both of them at Kivel. Abe was the more aggressive merchant of the two. Charlie was the front man. He was the guy who was active in the community, in the Jewish community as well as in the general community. Abe on the other hand took no part in either of those communities but spent 100% of his time in the store. He was a damn good merchant but he wasn't a good business man. He was an excellent, top-notch merchant, well known all over the country and he has been talked about in a lot of books that have been written about retail business in this country, including a book by an Ann Birmingham called, "Stores," if you ever want to look it up. They described how Abe Korrick was considered one of the top merchants in the country and he was. But the business got too big for him. He was what they call a seat of the pants merchant. And a seat of the pants merchant has a lot of trouble when a business starts growing because he can't quite fathom the idea of building an organization. Instead, he still wants to have a sale on women's blouses and sportswear and what not. All he's interested in is going to New York and bargaining with these manufacturers to get good prices. So he was a damn good merchant and a damn poor administrator. I tried to fill in on that part of the business as much as I could, but it was obvious that when we sold out it was a good thing for us to get out of the business because it was just growing too big for us. BK: Let's talk about the Jewish community at the turn of the century. Any stories that you remember hearing? EK: All I remember was that when Charlie came here, they had trouble getting a minyan together. You know there weren't that many families. There were some Jewish merchants, like the Goldbergs and in those days I don't know what the Goldwaters were whether they considered themselves Jewish or not, Barry's Father and uncle. Goldwater had come to Phoenix in 1871 or '72 and then left because they thought the town did not have any promise. They went up to Prescott and opened up a store in Prescott and then by 1898 or 1899 or 1900 they decided to come back to Phoenix. So they came back to Phoenix about four or five years after Sam Korrick had opened his store. As far as the Jewish content of the town, I can't tell you very much except for what my Father told me. I gather, number one, that it was an extremely small community. That they had real trouble to get enough people - you know - it seems to me that when I was growing up in the 30s we had basically two congregations in town. We had Beth El and we had Temple Beth Israel. You could measure the number of families in the hundreds in 1937/38/39, when I was growing up. It was not a very large community and it wasn't a very important community. Who were the leaders in those days? I don't know. I think I'd have to stop and think a little bit about that, but I'm sure that the records at Temple Beth Israel will tell you who were the people, the movers and shakers, in the Jewish community in the 1930s. I did know Rabbi Jaffa very well at Temple Beth Israel who officiated at my Bar Mitzvah in 1938. Temple Beth Israel when it was on east Culver Street, I think the congregation never had more than about two or three hundred members at the very most, maybe less than that. Nat Silverman was the kind of - he was the guy that filled in when we didn't have a Rabbi at Temple Beth Israel. BK: Were your friends mostly Jewish when you were young? EK: A mix, a mix. When I was growing up in the neighborhood most of my friends were not Jewish. When I went to Sunday School, most of my friends obviously were Jewish. I would say about half and half. We had problems with a lot of anti-Semitism, even in Phoenix in the 1930s. BK: What kind? EK: Well, when I was in grammar school I remember kids talking about Jews in a derogatory way and pointing at me. I think I was the only Jew in the classroom at Osborn Grammar School in 1936/37/38. You saw a lot of anti-Semitism in the social organizations. For example, we lived right across the street, on 7th Street and Earll Drive from Phoenix Country Club. In those days there were no Jewish members of the Phoenix Country Club. Within a year or two after, I think by the early-40s they may have had one or two, - but 99% of the members at Phoenix Country Club were non-Jewish. Of course, all the resort were restricted in those days too. In the 1950s that changed, but not a great deal. It wasn't really until the 60s that things really cleared up. There was anti- Semitism in the community like there was in every American city. BK: Okay. What would you do when the kids would make derogatory comments about you? EK: Well I would either stand and fight or run, which depended on how big they were. BK: You would fight sometimes? EK: Oh yeah, you bet. I got into several battles with kids. Usually they operated in gangs. So in that case you had to flea on foot because you know if you were alone and you had six or seven guys ready to tear you apart, the best thing to do is to get the hell out of there, you know. BK: You had mentioned the Goldberg family in the early days. Who were they? EK: Yeah. Well, the Goldbergs were, I knew Chet Goldberg, Sr. and Chet Goldberg, Sr. was eventually combined with Ben Trojen to form Hannys. Goldberg ran a clothing store. It was a pretty successful store, I think until about the 30s. Chet Goldberg who was not very smart and not a very good merchant came in and ran the store until he went broke and Ben Trojen bailed him out of business. The Goldbergs were Jewish in name only. They were not what you'd call ardent participants in the Jewish community. Mrs. Goldberg was absolutely nuts. She was crazy. They lived on Catalina, just south of us. We lived on 7th Street and Earll Drive and Catalina is the next street south of Earll Drive. Yeah. Chet, Sr., beside the fact that his name was Goldberg, tended not to be involved in any Jewish organizations of any kind and his son, who was a little bit older than I, Chet, Jr., was a member of the Phoenix Country Club and as was Chet, Sr. BK: Oh. EK: Now there were a number of Jewish families which I'm sure as a matter of record who did not participate in the Jewish community in those days, in the 20s and 30s, because they felt it was just too much of a hindrance to either their business life or to their social life, I'm not sure which. And the Goldbergs were one of them. The other one were the Melczers. Now Joe Melczer, Sr. was the patriarch of the family. He became a Christian Scientist. BK: How do you spell Melczer? EK: M E L C Z E R. Now Joe Melczer, Jr. was Joe's son, who was a prominent lawyer with Snell & Wilmer for many many years. Joe died about four or five years ago, six years ago, and his son, Joe Melczer, III is still, I think, with Snell & Wilmer. I'm not sure. But anyway, they never ever took part in Jewish affairs and gradually removed themselves from the Jewish community. As did a number of other families. So the Goldwaters were not alone, you know, I mean the Melczers, the Goldbergs, and I'm sure I could name about three or four other families if I could think of them who did the same thing in the 30s and 40s, who decided that being Jewish in Phoenix, Arizona was not necessarily an asset. So they kind of hid out. What else can I tell you about that? BK: Well, tell me, did you have any social services? or family services? What if there was a Jewish need for money or services in the 20s and 30s? EK: Well, it was very rudimentary that which was available. I think they had very private, small organizations. I think Hadassah and the Sisterhood and the Men's Club, were the basic social organizations in the 30s in Phoenix. You didn't have a Jewish Family & Children's Service in the 30s and 40s. You didn't have the organizations that we have now obviously. I can't tell you an awful lot about it except that I do know that the Temple had a lot to do with taking care of indigent Jews that came to town. And also my Father occasionally would peel off cash to people who came in and needed money for something. There was no organization in this town in the 1930s. The Temple was everything. The Jewish organizations were minimal. There was no Jewish Community Center. There was no overall Jewish organization. I guess there was a community council but I can't tell you much about it, Bobbi because in the 30s I wouldn't know. BK: Was there an organized youth group. EK: Yeah, the B'nai B'rith Youth Group. What do you call it? BK: BBYO. B'nai B'rith Youth Organization. EK: BBYO yeah. BK: What was that like? EK: They met at Temple Beth Israel and I was a member of that and you know there were kids that I grew up with, Leonard Skomer and a few others like that, Devor Gordon and I can name a few of them. Kids mostly my age that I met at BBYO. It was a very small group I can assure you, 10 or 12 kids is all. This was in the 1930s. BK: What did the Temple look like? EK: You've seen it. You have a picture of it. It still looks the same way. They haven't changed it a bit. The only thing I think about 1936 or '37 or '38 they added a religious school to the west. You've seen pictures of the old Temple. And if you noticed there's a little building to the west of the main building which is where they added on in the 30s for a religious school. Otherwise, it was nothing but a simple auditorium that held maybe 400 people 300 people. BK: Tell me about Jewish holidays that you remember in the 30s 40s. EK: I don't know what I can tell you. My Father was a deeply religious man. My Mother was not. We never would celebrate the Sabbath on Friday night or anything like that. We were somewhat secular in our at-home celebrations. As I say, my Father was deeply religious and my Mother was not and as a result of that the kids were half and half also. My sister didn't live at home much after the sixth grade. They sent her away to boarding school. She was not with us. I can't tell you because we had no real Jewish functions at home. Everything was at Temple. We went to Temple religiously literally for more than just the high holidays. Occasionally, my Father would insist that we go to Friday night services if there was something that he wanted us to participate in and we did. But it was not what you'd call a deeply religious experience in those days. Are we any different than any other Jewish family at the time? I'm not so sure. There was no Orthodox community that I knew of in the 30s. Beth El was the closest thing to Orthodox that we had and that was conservative synagogue. They had a tiny little place on 4th Street near the old St. Joseph's Hospital. Bobbi, I'm having trouble in trying to recapture some of the early Jewish experiences because there weren't that many. I'm sorry to say. BK: That's important to know. Was your Father involved in the Temple? EK: Oh very much so. As I said he was one of the founders of Temple Beth Israel or "the" founder, I guess. When they built the new Temple in 1950 on 10th Avenue, he and Rabbi Krohn were literally the originators of the whole thing. He was very very active in Temple. I think he had contributed a great deal of history to Temple Beth Israel. We are very proud of it as a matter of fact. I remember one little scene that occurred in 1949. I was in my Father's office when he had a phone call from Rabbi Krohn. Rabbi Krohn was very very upset, because somebody had apparently dropped a lighted cigarette on his new wood parquet floor in the new Temple, in the auditorium area of the Temple, not the chapel but the auditorium portion of it. He was fit to be tied. He wanted my Father to come out immediately to see it. He couldn't understand how anybody could be so gross as to grind out a cigarette on his new parquet floor. So my Father dropped everything, got in the car, and went out to Temple Beth Israel and held Krohn's hand and told him they would get it fixed, it won't be so bad and that sort of thing. Krohn was an interesting guy. Krohn died in 1959. He served from about 1948 to '59. He was an interesting man and was more of an intellectual than he was a Rabbi, and was therefore not terribly well understood in his community unfortunately. He was a brilliant man though. My Father thought the world and all of him and then they brought in Plotkin after that. Oh they had several Rabbis that came and went in the early '50s. BK: Krohn is the first one that you remember? EK: No, Jaffa is the first one that I remember. Jaffa was a marvelous man and he was the Rabbi at Temple Beth Israel from about (don't hold me to the dates because you can get those better than I can tell you) somewhere from the mid-30s through the War you might say. BK: What do you remember about him? EK: He was a very kind and generous man. He was a good teacher. That's what I remember most about him. Well, that's about all I can tell you about Jaffa. I thought he was a great man as I did Krohn. My Jewish education leaves a lot to be desired. Not that I don't feel a very strong and very deep feeling, but my education has lacked my commitment and as a result of that while I'm deeply Jewish and feel very strongly about Jewish things and Jewish affairs I feel a little guilty that my Jewish education has been somewhat minimal. I cannot read Hebrew. I did when I was Bar Mitzvahed but that was the last time. I feel badly about it. What I should do, especially now that I'm retired, is take Hebrew courses. It's never too late. BK: What they do at the Bureau of Jewish Education is teach the letters in one day. EK: Yeah oh yeah. The letters I know. BK: You can read that. EK: Yeah, but that still doesn't mean that I can read well. I can stumble but I can't really read. BK: They have classes where you can learn to read the prayers. EK: The thing that always bothered me about Hebrew was that I didn't want to just read the language without understanding what it meant and without that it meant nothing. BK: Conversational Hebrew. EK: Exactly. BK: Tell us about the first house of yours that you remember. Can you describe it to us? EK: That's interesting. When I was a small child we had an apartment at 3rd Avenue and Roosevelt. It's still standing as a matter of fact. It's still there. I think it's being used as an office now, but it's still there. Anyway, we moved in 1928 to (Charles and Blanche built a house) 7th Street and Earll Drive which is now an apartment house there, a big one. The house was on 2-1/2 acres and was really quite beautiful. As a matter of fact when Blanche decided that she no longer wanted to live in the house and moved out to Mountain Shadows in 1966, Charlie didn't want to move. He wanted to stay in the house. She wouldn't let him. Anyway the house was really an absolutely magnificent home. It was designed by a black architect from Hollywood named Paul Williams. When they left the house I was put in charge of trying to do something with it and I would get calls from people wanting to buy it. I would say to them you can have it. You don't have to buy it, just take it. They would say what do you mean and I said, "You're going to have to take it off the lot though." They said, "How much would it cost to do that." I said, "Quite a bit of money." BK: Okay, side three. You were saying about your... EK: Well, anyway they moved from Phoenix out to Scottsdale in 1966. My Father was never very happy out there because he was away from all the things that he was use to seeing. It was difficult for him to adjust to it. BK: What would a house look like, that first house. How many rooms did you have? EK: It was a very large house. I remember it was built in 1928. The house had 12 rooms. It was a two-story Mediterranean style and very attractive, even by today's standards. There were some houses in the Country Club that looked somewhat similar to what this house looked like. It was a beautiful home. I'm sorry we tore it down. Helen still thinks that we could have moved into that house and sold this one and we would have been far better off. BK: How did you cool it or heat it? EK: It wasn't. Heated was all right, but what happened was, my Father decided that since my Mother didn't spend summers in Phoenix that he would never put air conditioning in. I finally convinced him when I came back from the war that he ought to put air conditioning in his room up above where he slept on the second floor. He did not want to do it so I went out and bought a window air conditioner for him and put in the darn thing about 1948 or '49 so that he at least would have a comfortable place to sleep in the summertime when he was alone. One of the things about business people in Phoenix in the 20s and 30s was that the family generally moved out when it was mid-summer because they didn't have air conditioning in the homes in the 20s and 30s. As a result of that living in Phoenix was pretty uncomfortable in June, July, and August. So the families would either go up to Iron Springs and Prescott or they would go to the coast to the beach depending whether they could afford to do so. Charlie would stay home along with all the other bachelors and have a hell of a time. You know they had who knows what kind of parties they had, but the Arizona Club downtown was filled with summer bachelors, who had a great time. My Father got to the point where he was really looking forward to being alone all summer long and not having to worry about having to take care of a wife and a bunch of kids. So he would live alone in this big house and enjoyed every minute of it. I don't know how - he didn't cook anything in the house. He didn't have any help in the house. He just lived alone in this big house and that could be repeated by an innumerable number of Phoenix business men in the 30s and 40s who did the same thing. In effect they used the summer vacation for their vacation from their wives. That's hard to realize now but it was true then. So he had a good life, he had a good life. I can't say he didn't. BK: Tell me the names of your siblings. EK: I have only one sister and she lives in the Los Angeles area. She was divorced many many years ago and has two children and a couple of grandchildren. BK: Her name? EK: Her name is Louise. Louise has had a checkered life, but she isn't in good health right now. She is four years older than I am. She has had problems growing up I guess and it's still with her. We just had the two of us. What else can I tell you? BK: Well I find it kind of interesting that your Mother started the Symphony in Phoenix. EK: Yeah. Well she was very active in music. Anything musical she wanted to be a part of. As a matter of fact she had a music teacher that lived in the house. Berini was his name. Stavislav Berini. As I understand it he was an Italian Jew who was a voice teacher. I have some stuff in my file about Berini. A letter to him by George M. Cohan telling him how glad he was to have him appear before the club (what's the name of it?). A New York group. Anyway, I would come home from school in the afternoon and hear Blanche warbling away in the living room with Berini who was teaching her. He was always coaching her, you know. She sang until oh I would say actively until the mid-40s, the late-40s. By that time I think her voice was starting to depreciate a little bit. She had a good voice. She had an excellent voice. She was in a lot of productions here at the Musicians Club. She kept active that way. She had a lot of friends who were also musicians. BK: What was the Musicians Club? EK: Musicians Club was a group of men and women, primarily women, who put on musicals in those days (that's a word that you don't hear anymore). But they would have excerpts from operas. They would have piano recitals. They would have violin recitals and voice recitals. During the season from October to May, they would put on something two or three times a month. It was a pretty active group. BK: Did they charge? EK: I think so, yeah. They were semi-professionals I guess. Some of them were good and some of them were not. From that beginning I guess is where she got some musicians to form the Phoenix Symphony which was absolutely horrible when it was started because it was primarily amateurs of limited talent. You know if you went to a Phoenix Symphony concert in the late 40s you were appalled by the amateurishness of the group. As a matter of fact they often didn't have instruments covered so they had to bring somebody in from Los Angeles to fill in. They could never get a bassoon player in Phoenix. A bassoon is a difficult instrument. So they brought in a bassoonist from Los Angeles. Other instruments that were difficult to play, they brought in - oboes, French horns, things like that. They brought in from Los Angeles. Musicians would come over for a concert. They only had one concert and they would have it every couple of months sometimes, you know, at Phoenix Union High School auditorium. It was pretty bad. My sister-in-law was a fine musician. She came to town one day. Helen and I took her to a Phoenix Symphony concert. This was about 1949 or '50 and she came out shaking her head saying, "You folks deserve better than this." So it wasn't very good. Not compared to what it is now. BK: So describe yourself growing up in Phoenix. EK: Well it was very very rural. We lived at 7th Street and Earll Drive. It use to be called Pond Drive then. They changed it to Earll Drive which is half way between Indian School and Thomas. It was a rural area. It wasn't in the City of Phoenix. When I was growing up, the City of Phoenix went to Virginia on the north side. We had a lot of horses and a lot of other things around the area. When my sister left town and went to boarding school in Los Angeles, she left me with a horse that I had to take care of. So I would ride the horse to school, Osborn School at Central and Osborn. The horses name was Leroy. Leroy and I would toddle to school every morning and back in the afternoon. I kept him on a lot just east of the school where an old lady had a half acre lot and she would allow us to board our horses there for fifty cents a month. That was in the 30s. There wasn't any feed on the ground but they would graze anyway. I would take Leroy in the morning and ride bareback to Osborn School and ride bareback back home. He was so swayback he didn't need a saddle. Swimming pools were unknown. There weren't half a dozen private swimming pools in the whole City. The public pools were way the heck out. So we would sometimes swim in the canals, which was not exactly the healthiest thing to do. We never seemed to get any diseases from it. Occasionally we would see a floating animal go by. BK: Dead or alive? EK: Of course, dead. There was always glass in the canal so you would wear tennis shoes when you went swimming in it. You know I did things that I wouldn't do now, but it was fun. Phoenix was a small town. It was easy to get around. There was no traffic. You could ride your bicycle down the middle of 7th Street and didn't worry much about cars. I liked it here in the summertime, but they wouldn't let me stay because I would be alone in the house. So I would stay as long as I could and then I would have to join the family elsewhere. They would throw me in summer camp and I would go to California to summer camp. Or I would go to Boy Scout camp in the mountains of Arizona. It was fun growing up here. A lot more fun than I think it is now because pressures weren't quite the same and as I say a very rural atmosphere in the 30s. A small town. Lots of fun. It's a time that's gone. The Jewish community was very very small in the 30s. I think somewhat influential because they had a lot of well known Jewish attorneys,including Herman Lewkowitz who had a rather checkered career. I don't know if you know all the stories about Herman. BK: Probably not. EK: He represented Winnie Ruth Judd you know in the murder trial. But he also got involved in all kinds of problems. I guess his son, Burton, followed suit. Burt was a good guy. As I said it was a small community, very small. I don't know what else to tell you. BK: Well I'd like to hear about your political career. EK: Oh my. Well, my political career is also pretty checkered. I had a real fight with (it was one-sided because he had all the power), but I had a fight with Gene Pulliam who was in my mind a tyrant. Gene Pulliam was the publisher of the Arizona Republic from about 1946 until he died in 1975. He represented to me, anyway in my view, everything that was evil. He was a horrible man. Oh I have to tell you one story which I think is probably appropriate. About 1952 or '53 the attorneys general of the United States, you may have heard this story, it's been around a long time, had planned to have a convention at Camelback Inn in Phoenix. It was being run by Jack Stewart who was the owner of Camelback Inn. They had planned to have 48 or whatever the number 50 attorneys general and their wives and their associates and what not at this large convention planned for Phoenix in 1952 or '53 I'm not sure which year it was. Anyway the Jewish community, Community Council, Hirsh Kaplan and some of the others decided that the attorney general ought to be notified that Camelback Inn discriminated with their guests, which they did. They were very ardent about it. So they contacted Lewkowitz who was the attorney general of the state of New York to let him know what was going on and that they had booked a conference at a restricted resort. So Lewkowitz immediately got the trip canceled to Camelback Inn. Jack Stewart was madder than hell. His best friend was Gene Pulliam, publisher of the newspaper. So Gene Pulliam started a campaign to discredit the Jewish community for having raised their ire over this attorneys general conference. He started writing editorials and stories in the newspaper that were just horrible and unbelievably anti-Semitic and threatening and everything else to the Jewish community if you could believe that, but it's true, for interfering in Jack Stewart's ability to invite anybody he wanted to to come to his resort. He had the right to do that. So Hirsh Kaplan, Burt Lewkowitz, my Father, my uncle, and I decided to wait upon Gene Pulliam. We made an appointment to see Gene Pulliam. There the five of us are sitting or standing - we walk into his office and Bobbi, if you've ever seen a huge office with a desk at one end and then there's nothing in there. You know there's a few chairs on the side-wall, but that's it. A big office. We walk in and we stand in front of his desk. He looks up at us and in a bellicose manner says, "What the hell do you guys think you're doing?" You know words to that effect. Didn't suggest that we sit down. Didn't ask if we wanted a cup or coffee or something. Let's talk about this thing rationally. He was bellicose and that's the only description that I can think of and for the next 20 or 30 minutes he just reamed us out because of our attitude towards his friend, Jack Stewart. How Jack Stewart had every right he wanted to pick on whoever -- and then he said which was kind of interesting - "Besides everybody is bigoted in some way or another. We all are. Everybody is." Then he said, "I came from a family of preachers. My Father was a Protestant preacher. We understand what bigotry is but everybody has some bigotry in them." He was excusing Jack Stewart for doing what he wanted to do. In any event we came out of there shaking our heads because it was impossible to deal with this man. BK: Did you get any words in at all? EK: Very few. He did all the talking and was bellicose which was just incredible. In any event he said to my Father, "Charlie you come from the Old Country and you know what happened to the Jews in Europe." He said, "Now if you continue this track that you're on the same thing can happen right here in Phoenix, Arizona." Threats like that were unbelievable. And my Father who was not the most courageous man in the world when it came to dealing with the Gentile community, was shaken, literally shaken. I remember as both of them were walking out of the Republic Gazette building one of them saying to the other that if you stir up a sewer it stinks. So you don't want to stir it up. I was very taken aback by that. I couldn't believe that they would fall under that kind of intimidation, but they did. That always bothered me. I could understand it, but it still bothered me. They came from the Old Country where anti-Semitism was part of living. In Poland particularly, but for them to react the way they did was sad to me. From that moment on I hated the son-of-a-bitch, Pulliam. Then I got involved - you asked me about politics -that's how I got involved in 1963. We had a bunch of liberals that decided to run against the Charter Government group. The Charter had been entrenched and had been put there by Gene Pulliam. The way they operated was that if you wanted to be on the City Council you were automatically ineligible. So they had to pick people who would "serve" and take time from their business to serve the community by serving on the Council. They selected them. You didn't select yourself and the people that selected them were Gene Pulliam. I won't go into detail, but it was a reform movement that had some benefits. There is no doubt about that, but the reform movement needed reform by 1963 because it had become too ingrained and it became an old monarchy. Everything about it was unfortunate. It was not representative of the community we had at one time three or four council people that lived within a block of each other. So it was hardly very representative. Pulliam sponsored that program called the Charter Government and was the main advocate of it. So in 1963 a bunch of wide-eyed liberals decided we were going to fight him on that. So we did and we did pretty well, but we lost. We had Richard Harless who was our mayor candidate and we had a black on our slate which never had a black in Phoenix on the City Council. Even though we lost we got about 40%-45% of the vote which was considered incredible at the time. Considering Pulliam had all sorts of stories on the front page about how bad we were and how good they were and all that. It bothered me for a long time. Then in 1969 when Milt Graham was mayor and wanted to run again, he asked me if I was interested in running again. I said, "I might be." So we set up a slate of people to run with Milt Graham. We had six council people and the mayor and I managed to edge in just by the skin of our teeth. This was in 1969, and in 20 years I was the first non-Charter Government candidate to win. I served for four years at that time. At that time John Driggs was the mayor. I served for four years and decided that I would just as soon get out. I didn't want to run with Charter again. I took some time off. I took six or seven years off, eight years off and in 1981 I ran again. This time it was the last election for the at-large system - where we ran at large and I won at that time. In 1983 I ran again under the district system and won in the district. Ran again in '85 and ran in the district system and won again. So my career is kind of checkered. I lost one and won about four. I served five terms. I lost one and won five that's it. It was an interesting time. I served under three mayors. I served under John Driggs, under Margaret Hance, under Terry Goddard. Did some things that I think were good and some things that weren't so good. I was particularly involved in the freeway system here. In 1975 I initiated a referendum to put the Papago Freeway back on the back lot and we got that passed. We got the Papago Freeway in. I feel that in lots of ways I made a contribution and in some ways I may not have, but it was interesting. I had a good time. BK: How did being a Jewish person affect... EK: On the council? No. I had a couple of experiences with Margaret Hance. Margaret Hance was a country club type and was not very knowledgeable about Jews. Was never very interested in knowing more about them, but she expanded a great deal. She was very naive about Jews and Judaism and everything else which surprised the hell out of me because she was a smart lady. I found no anti-Semitism on the council at all. None. As a matter of fact we tried very hard not to be political. It's more partisan now than it used to be because of the nature of the beast, but in those days most people that served on the council did so because they wanted to contribute something to the community. They didn't feel that partisanship necessarily applied. Today a little bit more so I'm told. The City of Phoenix, if you saw in the paper this morning, has had a record of a very fine city government. Tops as a matter of fact. That's because we've kept it pretty clean, journalistically. It's been an effective city government. It's a hell of a lot more effective than the State I can tell you. The State legislature is the pits. There's another story in the paper about Barbara Brewster(?). You'll have to see that. I think working on the city council was great experience for me. In those days I could still work for Dean Witter and serve on the council. Today I couldn't do that anymore. It's not possible. City council is now a full-time job. That's about it. That's about all I can tell you unless you ask me some questions. BK: Now let's see. We also need some more names. Your wife's name. EK: Helen. BK: And her maiden name was? EK: Weinstein. BK: And children? EK: The children, I have three daughters. Starting with the youngest, Susan, who is 45. She's a doctor that lives in Boston. She's a research M.D. though. She's not a practicing physician. She works for Harvard and she's got titles. She doesn't have any money, but she gets titled. One of the ways that these big institutions like Harvard operated is that they throw around titles like crazy and are very very niggardly when it comes to the money. They tend to underpay and think that these people can live on prestige. So her title is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, but in reality she works for a laboratory as an epidemiologist and makes a salary that is disgusting considering she has a background of what she has. She has her boards in two or three specialties and she graduated from Yale Medical School and has had all sorts of high honors. Harvard Undergraduate School. Anyway - the middle daughter is Kim. Kim is a school teacher in Tucson. She teaches second and third grade at a school in Tucson. We just saw her yesterday. The oldest is Wendy who is divorced and is living in Washington, D.C. Her ex-husband worked for the State Department and still does. She has an eleven year old son. Susan by the way has a four year old daughter. BK: And their names are? EK: Well Susan still goes under her maiden name. She is married to Tom Hecht, who is an architect in Boston. They live in Newton, Massachusetts. BK: And the babies? EK: The baby's name is Hannah. Good biblical name. Jeffery is my grandson. He is eleven years old. Wendy lives in D.C. as I said. She was living in Phoenix for several years and decided she needed some help in raising her son. So she moved back to the District where her ex-husband was so that she could get some help from him in raising their son, which sounded like a good idea, but it hasn't turned out too well. So she's not too happy back there. BK: What schools did your Grandson go to here in Phoenix? EK: Jeffery went to Madison Simus(?). He loved it. He loves Phoenix and wants to come back, but his Mother is not too sure. She didn't make a lot of good connections here when she was here. She should have. She was here for about four or five years. Then she failed. My middle daughter is not married and never will. She's had a lot of emotional problems. Most families have had kids with some problems. BK: Where did you go to school? EK: I went to Osborn Grammar School in Phoenix and North Phoenix High School. Osborn Grammar School in those days was located at Central Avenue and Osborn. BK: Is it there today? EK: No. It sure isn't. When they tore it down about 25 years ago, the girls managed to salvage a brick. BK: For Dad. EK: For Dad, yeah. Then I went to North High. I went to Phoenix Union for one year from 1938 or '39 and then to North Phoenix in 1939 to '42. Graduated in '42. Went to Stanford for one year, from '42 to '43 and then went in the Army in '43. Got out in '46. Went back to Stanford and graduated in '48. Then went to New York and that's where I met Helen. We were both working for Macy's. Now we got Macy's right around the corner. That's my story. What else can I tell you? BK: What was North High like in those days? EK: It was wide open. I thought it was a kind of fun school. We had about I think 2,500 when North High opened up. The first year at Phoenix Union, I have to tell you, Phoenix Union High School in 1938 was the largest high school west of the Mississippi. We had 6,600 students. BK: Four year high school? EK: Four year high school. 6,600 students. I think Austin High School in Chicago was the only one that was larger. It was huge and for a 12 year old freshman to come in at a school that large was a bit traumatic, I can tell you. It was interesting. It took me a couple of months just to find my way around. Then anyway North High opened and it was kind of a breath of fresh air. It was a brand new campus. It was wide open with lots of room. Beautiful auditorium and all new school buildings and all new kids. It was fine. It was good. I enjoyed that. I was a little bit young for my class because I went to - you know I went to college when I was 16. It was a little overwhelming. The Army was good for me. I went into the Air Force when I was 17. Served for three years. Got back out. It really came at a good time for me. I was much too young to be in school, in college I mean. BK: Good memories of Phoenix? EK: Very good. I loved the town when it was smaller but I guess everybody says that. We can't stand it now. It's gotten too big, but you know it was a very very pleasant place to live in the 30s. BK: In what way? EK: Well, you knew everybody. At the corner of 1st Street and Washington which was the Fox Theater. It was a big theater, a beautiful theater. They tore it down about 30 or 40 years ago. The Fox had a club for kids that if you went there at 10 o'clock in the morning you could see two movies and a cartoon and a short for fifteen cents. So if your family gave you a quarter you had five cents to get down on a street car, five cents to get back and fifteen cents for the movie. If you were lucky you had an extra dime for an ice cream cone. The Orpheum had the same thing. So the Fox and the Orpheum had these clubs for kids. They would keep you for God knows three hours. At one o'clock in the afternoon you would get back on a street car and go home. We spent our time as kids usually riding our bicycles through the neighborhood. Taking our bikes on trips. We'd occasionally ride our bikes to Tempe. It was a long way but it was fun. The ride out Thomas Road. It was an empty street. We could ride in the middle of the street all the way to Tempe. We went swimming in the canals, as I told you. Occasionally, we'd get invited to some private person's house. Harry Rosenzweig's Mother, their house on Monte Vista and 3rd Street, he had one of the first swimming pools in town. So Anna who was an old - she was a witch and the worse kind, but you know she was noisy and she was the old school. You know she was a Russian lady with lots of temperament. In any event, she would let us use the swimming pool. So I would bring my friends over to Harry Rosenzweig's house and we'd use their swimming pool. That was usually on a Saturday afternoon. Especially as it got warmer in the spring. There were a lot of things to do. BK: Were you friends with the Rosenzweig boys? EK: No. They were much older than me. Harry was at least 15-20 years older than I was and so was Newton. I liked Newton. His brother, Harry, and Newton never got along you know. They were like cats and dogs and they openly fought you know. Harry would say terrible things about Newton. Newton never said very much bad about Harry, but Harry was constantly fighting with his brother. BK: Now you said you went to Tempe. What did Tempe have? EK: Well, they had a drug store in Tempe. We use to go there and have a soda. It was a big experience. We would ride our bikes to Tempe and ride back. BK: What was the name of the drug store? EK: It was right on Mill Avenue and 5th Street or 5th Avenue, I can't remember which. It was at the - I can tell you exactly where it is and the building is still there. Jeez, I can't remember the name of the drug store. It will come to me probably in the middle of the night and I will call you. BK: Okay okay. EK: You know that is some of the things - you asked me what we did. We rode our bicycles. We rode horses. We went swimming and we went down to the Fox Theater Club on a Saturday morning or the Orpheum Boys Club. BK: Boys Club? EK: Well it wasn't boys. It was boys and girls club. We were active. Kids moved around a lot in those days. BK: Get into trouble at all? EK: Oh sure. You bet. BK: Like what? EK: Well, let's see what kind of trouble did we get into? Mostly it was trouble not with the law, but there was a pasture just to the north of our house in which they kept some donkeys and they were mean. We would get out there and taunt them. Occasionally they would come running after us and knock us over and break an arm or leg or something like that. It was great fun. You know kids did things a little crazy. Another time was that my Father had an old lawn mower and I found out that you could hitch a go-car to the back of the lawn mower and ride down the street in it. I know it sounds terrible but this was a powerful old lawn mower. I would start up the lawn mower and hitch this cart behind it and I would go down the street standing on the cart running the lawn mower. These are things you know that eventually a policeman would stop us and say you can't do that. So things like that. One time I got - I won't go into that... BK: Oh please do. EK: Well I had a friend that I played with and he said, -AJ Bayless used to have a contest every six months or so and give away a small little motorized vehicle, a little motorized car, you know if you shopped at Bayless you got a free ticket for the drawing. Well apparently this friend of mine, George Spencer, knew of a kid that lived near Emerson School who won the award. He didn't want the little car because he couldn't afford to keep it. It wasn't running right and he was willing to sell it for $15. Well he wanted a bicycle instead. So my sister had left a bicycle in the garage. I decided that maybe he would take a girl's bike. So I asked George, "Do you think he would take a girl's bike?" He said well you can ask him. I went over to visit with him and I said, "Will you take a girl's bike?" And he said, "Yeah, but you gotta give five bucks extra, on top of it." So I wheedled $5 from my family. With $5 and my sister's bike I bought this little motorized car. I hauled it back to the house and it didn't work. So George and I spent weeks trying to get the thing working. We finally got it so it ran fairly well but not real well, And we used to ride that thing around the neighborhood. It was a pretty little car. It held two people, one in the front and one in the back. We occasionally get into trouble with that. But that was the way it was growing up. The main thing I can say was that streets in Phoenix were so unpopulated and untransitted that you could do things that you wouldn't dare to think of doing now. You know 3rd Street was a dirt street with the trolley tracks running down the middle. You know no cars ever went on that street at all. So you could use that as a play area if you wanted to. BK: That's what you would take downtown to the movies? EK: Downtown yeah to the movies. That's about it. You know I can think of a lot of things that we did that were really kind of scary but today I look back on them and in those days they weren't so scary. BK: How far north would that trolley go? EK: It went to Indian School. It was called the Indian School Line. There were basically three lines of trolleys in Phoenix. One was the Brill Line which went on the east side and the other was the Kenilworth Line that went on the west side. Also the University Line which went out to the State Capitol on Washington Street. It was pretty good. The Brill Line terminated at 10th Street and Brill near where Good Samaritan Hospital is now. The Indian School Line went down 3rd Street and terminated at Indian School Road. The Kenilworth Line terminated at Thomas and 7th Avenue I think or 5th Avenue yeah. Then they had another line, University Line, that went all the way up and down Washington from 16th Street on the east to the State Capitol on the west. They were great you know for a nickel you could ride anywhere. BK: So not that many people had cars? EK: No. I could only tell you that cars were expensive for most people in those days. In the 30s people didn't have a lot of money. Cars were not expensive by today's standards but they were expensive for somebody to own so the trolley service was very important. Working people generally used the trolley to get downtown to work or to get to their jobs. A two-car garage was very unusual. Nobody had two cars. One car was the maximum. What else can I tell you? BK: You ended up working here in Phoenix, You said Dean Witter? EK: No I started out in the store and I stayed in the store until 1962. I was the first one out of the store. I didn't want to work for Broadway. Broadway eventually went bankrupt. They were just not merchants. They were finance people. They weren't merchants. Anyway I worked for Korricks until 1962 and then I got into the savings and loan business in '63 and stayed in it for five years, until '68. And then in '68 my friend, Harold Shapiro enticed me to come with Dean Witter. I went with Dean Witter in the summer of '68. Never dreamed that I would stay with them for 32 years. I'm glad I did because they've been very good to me. I can't object. My kids used to tease me about the fact that I had a five year plan, I would never stay in a job for more than five years and I ended up staying for 32. BK: The store name was Korricks? EK: Korricks. It was originally called the New York Store. In those days as you'll see from that thing I gave you. People liked to call their stores based on the big cities in the country where the fashions were. BK: Really? EK: So it was the Philadelphia Store, the New York Store, the Boston Store. It made women feel like they were getting the latest fashions, if you don't mind me saying so. It was a kind of a put-on but people liked the idea of thinking that everything was current merchandise coming from the eastern stores, the fashion stores. So it was first called the New York Store when we opened. If you'll look up there on the panel there, you'll see that it says "The New York Store The Cheapest Place In The City". Take a look at it. They called it the New York Store until really oh the 1930s/1920s when the new store was built it was called Korricks' New York Store. They still carried the New York Store logo. And then gradually they eliminated the New York Store and made it all Korricks. That picture tells a lot. BK: Yeah. I wonder if we can make a copy of that picture. EK: Oh you could, but you'd have to do it in sections, I guess. My sister put that together for me. It's kind of fun. There's a picture of my Father sitting out in front of the New York Store, the lower left corner there. BK: That's our history. EK: Pardon me? BK: That's our history. EK: Yeah. There's a picture of Charles and Sam in the middle to the left there. BK: The boys? EK: The boys. Yeah. That wasn't Abe, that was Charlie and Sam. BK: Thank you! [end of transcript]