Transcript of interview with Michael S. Mack by Barbara Tabach, May 20, 2015

i AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL S. MACK An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ?Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV ? University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader?s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Las Vegas businessman Michael S. Mack was born in Los Angeles, California June 6, 1937 to Lucille and Louis Mack. His father?s family were Polish immigrants who came to the United States through Ellis Island. Michael Mack arrived in Las Vegas in 1937 where he lived until he attended school at the University of Southern California. He eventually returned to Las Vegas where he has been involved in many business ventures which include, retail, liquor, and real estate. He is married to Arlene Mack, who he married June 1, 1962. She has worked in sales and medicine. In this oral history Michael Mack discusses his early memories of Las Vegas such as attending the Fifth Street School and activates him and his friends participated in. The interview also includes his memories of different members of the Mack family and their activities. He reminisces about his many visits to the Flamingo Hotel as well as being taken by his parent to floor shows. He also discusses what it was like to grow up Jewish in Las Vegas and the way Jews helped build the community. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Michael S. Mack May 20, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface??????????????????????????????????..iv Talks about where his family came from and family history; discusses how family ended up in Las Vegas; recalls fathers businesses; reminisces on how his father became a bail bondsman; early memories of being a child in Las Vegas; talks about spending time with his uncle; discusses different houses in Las Vegas his family lived in; tells about the Huntridge area; early memories of Fifth Street School. ??????????????????????????.?1 ? 10 Discusses knowing which kids were Jewish and going to services; Jewish Community Center origination; discusses going to teenage club, Wildcat Lair; growth of Las Vegas; remembers his brother being born; remembers growing up Jewish; being a part of the organization AZA. ..11? 14 Talks about growing up a Mack and his uncle Nate Mack; feelings about being a Mack; memories of hanging out at the Flamingo Hotel; remembers traveling with his Uncle Harry. ??....15 ? 20 Remembers going to floor shows with his parents; mentions different entertainers who played; going on a date to a floor show; the ways in which Las Vegas had changed since he was a boy; boarders who lived with his family; remembers his bar mitzvah. ????????.....?.21 ? 24 Reminisces about his move to Los Angeles and meeting his wife; discusses B?nai B?rith party; talks about how he moved back to Las Vegas; discusses shoe store his father owned; talks about the current temple he attends; discusses being a member of the Las Vegas Parrot Head Club; more reminisces about the Flamingo Hotel. ????????????????????.....25?27 Talks about his children and how they grew up in Las Vegas; discusses his sons involvement with Count?s Kustoms; remembers helping to get Jerry Tarkanian to UNLV; Jerry and Lois Tarkanian; describes how there had not been much discrimination towards Jews in Las Vegas. ??....28 ?34 Index. ????????????????????????????????...?35?36 1 This is Barbara Tabach. Today is May 20th, 2015. I'm sitting with Michael Mack. And Michael, if you'd spell your name for me, please? It's M-I-C-H-A-E-L; middle initial S; M-A-C-K. All right. And tell me a little bit about your family ancestry. How far back can you go? What do you know? I can't go back very far because my father [Louis] came to the United States with two brothers. They came to the United States in the early teens, in 1917. And they came from where? They came from Poland. And their names? Well, my dad came with two brothers and a sister. The oldest brother was Nathan Mack, the middle brother was Harry Mack, and the youngest brother was Louis Mack, my father. They came with a sister by the name of Jeanette, who lived in Los Angeles pretty much her entire life after coming to the United States, although that wasn't the first place that any of them lived. They came on different boats on different dates and arrived in New York, Ellis Island, and were picked up by cousins who lived in Detroit and there was always people there to greet them and help them through the paperwork and such. Turned out that my uncle Nate, when he came over...Their name was Macklowitz in Poland. But when they came over, the person that was doing his application said, "Using that name is going to create a lot of problems for you. Why don't you just shorten it to Mack?" And so he wrote down M-A-C-K and that was it and that was passed onto the rest of them that came over except my aunt who kept her original name, but was soon married five or six years after coming to the United States. So her name was not associated with the Mack family. From Detroit they went west to Albion, Michigan and then to California. All together, all three brothers together? Yeah, they all went together. They arrived in California in the twenties. They had some cousins that lived there already and these cousins were in the supermarket business. They called it a supermarket in those days. It was a big open market and they had an indoor portion of it. That was in Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley. They heard about Las Vegas from some friends who said there was a dam going to be built very close to a little town called Las Vegas. They thought they would go take a look to see if there was any opportunities. So they arrived in Boulder City in 1932. The first thing they did was open a 2 shoe store because they had had one of those in Albion, a small town outside of Detroit. So they knew that business and so they opened one on the main highway in downtown Boulder City. And at the same time, someone had come into the store and mentioned to them that they had put out a bid for someone who could remove scrap from the dam after the dam was getting close to completion, in the last couple of years. And so they got a contract to remove scrap and they built a building in Boulder City, a metal building, and that's where they brought their scrap. They had an outside yard. They had trucks to take it to Southern California to the bigger scrap salvage areas there. And when the dam was completed and they were no longer needed, they moved into Las Vegas. Well, they partially lived in Vegas and in Boulder City. Two of the boys lived in Boulder City; one lived in Las Vegas. But they moved into Las Vegas and they established businesses there. Nathan and my dad opened a men's store. And your dad was Lou, you said? Lou, uh-huh, my dad, Lou, Louis. He opened a men's store. It was on Fremont Street between Main and First Street. They ran it for about four or five years, and my dad ended up with the store. Nate [father?s brother] didn't want to be in the business any longer. So he got into real estate and he met some interesting people from Southern California who gave him some ideas as to what may be good businesses to get into. So he started buying up some land parcels around Las Vegas. And then Harry [father?s brother] established a used auto parts dealership on North Main Street called Main Auto Parts. It was across from the Cashman Cadillac dealership and right next to the creek that ran through Las Vegas. Then Harry was very interested in some of the buildings that had been built in Boulder City for the dam workers. So he bought a few of those and brought them into Las Vegas and developed them into apartments. They were able to move them? Yeah, they were able to. They'd cut them in half, basically, and move them into Las Vegas. And the Flamingo Hotel; by chance, that was built in the forties, they had a bunch of single-story buildings in the rear of the hotel that were of the same ilk, the same base. They went and purchased a bunch of those buildings and refurbished them and made them into single-story hotel rooms. But as the years went by, my dad went into the liquor business. He bought a liquor store on Fremont Street called the Boulder Liquor Store. It would have been next to the liquor store, on the corner of Fifth Street, and Fremont, right next to it was a Standard Oil station and across the street from it were homes. So you were born in 1937. I was born in 1937. 3 So what was your dad doing at the time you were born? What business would he have been involved in at that moment? At that time he was still in the scrap business. They were still cleaning up after the dam at that point when I was born. So then these other businesses evolved in the later thirties or forties? This was in the late thirties and the early forties. The men's store was in 1940-1948 What was the men's store called? It was called The Toggery. It was a general store for men because he handled everything from hats that you would wear if you were going to the East Coast and suits and canes and all types of accessories, like cufflinks and jewelry that men would wear, and he had total western wear. He had wear for working people and he supplied uniforms for the sheriff and police. At that time he had an opportunity to sell that store and get another bar. He bought the Esquire Bar, which was on South Second Street next to the Safeway store. There's a story that goes with that with the kids in my childhood days, which I can tell you about. So let's see. I just want to make sure that I've got everything covered for those years. Oh, my dad had another business. When he had the men's store, one day a city judge by the name of Walter Richards, the sheriff and the chief of police, came into my dad's store. Well, he knew them all because he was outfitting them with their boots and western wear, which most of them wore, and uniforms. They kind of cornered my dad. And my dad always told this story that he put his hands up and said, "What did I do? What did I do?" And they said, "Louie, we need a bail bondsman and we understand that you've bought some property around town. You can write what is called a property bond to bail people out of jail." And my dad said, "Whoa, okay." So he said, "How do you do it?" So Judge Richards said, "Louie, I'll show you how to do the whole thing, set it up." Oh, I forgot, Judge McNamee was in there, too; he was a district judge. So they had the bases covered and they wanted him to be the bail bondsman. So he was the only bail bonds man in Las Vegas for a good ten-year period, or more. That's another story, just talking about that business. Why wasn't there a bail bondsman? I guess they didn't know anything much about it and they just kept people in jail until it was time for court. So then there became a need and then you needed to find somebody to do it. Well, I'll tell you where the need came from. It came from people getting arrested who were known, people who were locals, who were known businessmen who got into a little trouble and they didn't want to stay in jail overnight for the judge the next morning, or they were some famous 4 people that my dad bailed out. I to this day?my dad's picture and name should be in the new Mob Museum...What do they call it? Oh, the Mob Museum? The Mob Museum because he bailed a lot of those people out of jail. Like who? Well, I can't tell you. Well, there was some famous ones that were in there. But basically they were people that nobody knew; they were underworld characters. My dad sometimes if he bailed them out, it depends on what time it was, like if it was five or six in the morning, he'd bring them home for breakfast and then take them over to the airport to get a plane out. Or, in some cases, for money?I mean he'd charge for everything that he did. Sometimes they just wanted to go to Phoenix and he'd drive them there. In those days we didn't have airplanes that just went everywhere. If you were going to fly, you might have to go to L.A. to get a plane to go east or something like that. But the airport in Las Vegas in the early days was actually out where Nellis Air Force Base is today and it was called the Las Vegas Army Airfield at the time. TWA would fly in there. I remember being on a plane with my dad when I was quite young. It was really exciting going to Los Angeles. I'll bet. Yeah. But my dad loved businesses. So I was like six, seven, eight years old during these periods of time when he had The Toggery; I remember being in there and that's where my first bike came from. It appeared at The Toggery on my birthday. So I had this birthday party, my ninth birthday; that's where I got my bike. I have a picture of it after we brought it home. And I rode that bike all over town. Just like every kid, I guess, who had a bike, Las Vegas was a really neat town. It's pretty flat. Some streets to stay away from; Charleston goes downhill, so does Mesquite in a radical way. That's where they used to have the soapbox derby downtown, where Mesquite and Fremont meet. Boy, one day I rode down that on my bike and getting it home was terrible. Glad it was earlier in the day because it took me almost all day to get home, and the reason it did is because everything was uphill and I had to walk the bike most of the time to get it home. There was just no riding. I stayed away from there. I knew how to stay away from hills that went down, streets that went way down. But those were the main streets that went downwards; otherwise, it was pretty flat. But I could ride my bike out to what is known as the Westside. It was all mixed. It wasn't black in those days; it was mixed white-black. My dad had a lot of friends that lived out there. It was an interesting thing. Having a bicycle was one thing. But my mom and dad knew a lot of business people on Fremont and all over. There was Charleston. There was Main Street, Fifth Street. 5 But my dad knew everybody pretty much in town. He knew the lawyers because of the bail bond business. In fact, at one time he had and the justice of the peace shared a building and they had a doorway between them and my dad had a refrigerator that always had beer in it and he had a shelf in there where he had booze and glasses and stuff and a little bathroom. So the lawyers after work would come over and have a drink with my dad. They didn't hang out in bars. But there was the Elks Club and there was the Masonic Club; they were both downtown. There were no Jewish members of either of those in those days. Was there a reason for that or just the way it was? Yeah, probably. Probably. For example, for the Masons, it was probably typical of what their Masonic orders were. But if you know anything about the Masonic order, it's got a lot of things about ancient Jewish history. But anyway, my dad eventually?I belonged to the Elks Club. My dad ended up becoming a Mason and a Shriner. My Uncle Harry, on the other hand, was a single man; never got married, bought real estate and bought some apartments. He never lived in?he lived in one home that he built on Eighth Street near the high school. And my mom and dad moved in with him. It was a two-bedroom home. Excuse me. It was a three-bedroom home. Harry had a bedroom, my mom and dad had a bedroom, and I had a bedroom. I remember being in the crib in that house. I wasn't a baby; I had to be about three or four years old. But it was like a bed for me; it wasn't to hold me in. One morning I was watching my dad shave and I decided I was going to shave. So I did a pretty decent job on my face with the shave. So you lathered yourself up and everything? Yes. Oh, my goodness. I know. And they caught me just in time. So I remember that. Just like it was really interesting, the lady next door was a schoolteacher who I later met in high school and she remembers me when I was young there in that house. But what was interesting about Las Vegas especially because we lived on?okay. Here's how everybody lived in the family. It was pretty simple. My Uncle Nate lived in a duplex on Bonneville one house from Main Street. So he lived on the east side of the duplex and my dad lived on the west side of the duplex. And were both of them married at that time? Both were married. Nate's son Jerome, Jerry, was in college when I was born; he's seventeen years older than me. I have memories in that duplex?I was probably two or three years old?when I opened the screen door and tipped over a milk bottle and it broke on the porch, and then another 6 time I remember very distinctly a babysitter that we had spilled some ink on my mom's couch as she was doing her homework. Oh, wow. I know. She turned out to be kind of a?she just died less than a year ago. I would see her all over town all these years and we would go to all these social events and everything. And she'd say, "I'm Michael's babysitter." She loved doing that and I loved introducing her, too. What was her name? Oh, God, don't ask me. Oh, I'm sorry. I'll think of it. But anyway, her husband turned out to become city manager of Las Vegas. I'm trying to think of his last name, too. Art...Oh, come on. She had a job. Oh, wait. She had a job that was all her life. She worked for the City of Las Vegas. I'm trying to remember what her position was. She was really a fantastic lady. Now, getting back to the kid thing, so when you live in Las Vegas, a very small town?when I was born there was probably like fifteen, seventeen thousand, ten thousand maybe. I mean, oh, there were houses on Fremont Street. I remember some distinctly when my dad had the Boulder Liquor Store because my mom would come to work for him on busy nights or days and then I would play in a yard across the street that a family that lived fed so that workers downtown could have a place for their kids. I remember distinctly those big trees with all the leaves on them. Oh, my God, it was shady. It was really nice over there. But my mom and dad would go to somebody's house and take me with them and I would meet their kids. Then we'd go out and play and I'd meet the kids in the neighborhood. Then they'd have some in another neighborhood and another neighborhood. My Uncle Nate's wife's brother came to Las Vegas and his family moved into an area that I was at a lot and met those kids. Oh, one of them is on that picture, Gary Voss. I forgot to point him out. Gary Voss is still in business. He had the Lil' Pardner [Lit'l Scholar Daycare & Preschool] playschool for kids; he started that. In fact, he built a lot of those places for the modern day...You know what we call them. Not schools?well, they are. Preschools and day care. They're day care. Day care, actually, yes. And he's in that picture. I met his brother in a real estate area many years later after knowing him. I've got to tell you, though, what was funny is my mom and I were looking at that picture maybe twenty years ago and she says, "Who's that kid? I can't remember him." And I said, "His father owned a market on Main Street." She said, "Oh, Voss, Voss." And I said, "Yeah, that's it; that's who that is; that's Gary Voss." Because he's the 7 same age I am; he was in my high school class. I remember going to his house and he had a lot of sisters. And was that a messy house? Oh, gosh. I went in his bedroom and it was? But what houses?you started talking about your family, where your family lived. Okay. So my family lived in that duplex on Bonneville for a couple of years. In fact, what was interesting about it is that that was when my dad was still making some trips to L.A. with salvage. Then he stopped driving the trucks and he hired some people. They always had some people hired, but sometimes they had to drive a truck. But anyway, if he was home on Saturdays and Sundays, we were up at Mount Charleston on the weekend because it was so hot in the summertime. So we spent almost every weekend up at Mount Charleston along with other people who would be up there. There were plenty of kids up there. Overnight, overnight two nights, Friday night and Saturday night, come back Sunday after moonlight. Did you camp out? Yeah, kind of, kind of a camp out. So then the next house I lived in was on Fourth Street. It was the type of a house that it was a duplex. We lived on the north side of the duplex. I remember it because by then I was like three or four. I remember it quite well. Our next-door neighbors were the Mendelsohns, Bill and Goldie and Bernard, who was five years older than me. I liked nothing better than to sneak into the house when they weren't watching and take his little soldiers that he had all stood up in his bedroom and the little guns pointed and everything like that and then I'd run back in my house and laugh. I thought it was funny. Bernard never forgot. He in later years...we became roommates. I had just graduated from USC [University of Southern California] and he had graduated five years earlier than me and went into the Air Force and had just come out of the Air Force and I met him. We were both interviewing for jobs at USC. He was in the same fraternity I was in and I didn't know it. But the day I go over there to check to see if anyone's there, the place is locked up, but there's a car parked out front and someone looking around. I go over there and I go, "Bernie?" "Michael?" Anyway, but those were the Mendelsohns and the Mendelsohns owned a really neat store on Fremont Street?I mean on Main Street; it was called Las Vegas Mercantile. He had furniture, mostly used stuff and furniture and all kinds of gadgets and junk and things that were very exciting to look at and fun. One of the neatest guys I ever met. I'll never forget what got me to really liking him is he had a great sense of humor. I walked into his store one day and he was talking to somebody. A guy had found something and I don't know what it was. But he put it on the desk there and he said, "How much is that?" Bill said, "It's a dollar." And the guy said, "I'll give you fifty cents for it." Bill picks it up, puts it in his hands. He's looking at it, going, "Wow, I didn't know this," and, "Oh, my God, no. Uh, how 8 about two dollars?" And the guys says, "Oh, you've got to be kidding me." "Okay, I'll sell it to you for a dollar then." And I saw that. The guy walked out and he said, "What did you think of that?" And I just laughed and he laughed and we had a good time laughing about it. I never forgot that. So he didn't like to wheel and deal? Oh, he did. Oh, yeah. That was his...If someone cut something too low, then he did that. Bernie used to tell me stories about him when he worked in the store sometimes. Anyway, so now we were living on Fourth Street and it's kind of busy. It's a little busy, but from the standpoint that we're just a half block down from the high school?not high school, but from Fifth Street School. Kids are coming by all the time after school. I have some pictures of my old personal? They're not great pictures, but they're pictures of my birthday or Bernard's birthday on the front lawn there with all these big kids and little kids together. Oh, that would be good, yeah. But they're pretty much unidentifiable. I've got some of my friends to take a look at them. But those kids obviously went to Fifth Street School. So now let's skip forward to 1942. In 1942 that's when my dad had the Boulder Liquor Store and I was five years old when?oh, excuse me, I skipped a house. Oh, no, I told you about the Eighth Street house where we lived, the three bedrooms and the one where I shaved myself. Yeah. Well, that was just a half block from the high school. But my mom and dad wanted their own house. So they went and bought a house in Huntridge. Huntridge was quite an area. A guy by the name of Oakey built the place. It was built during war years, which was very unusual that he had the materials to build those houses. But evidently he didn't have any war materials that were needed. Anyway, my dad and mom were the first to buy a house there in Huntridge and they were the first to move in. It was the second house from the corner of Tenth and Charleston. They built John S. Park School. They had to put a school in, but it was during the war and they couldn't build one. So they used buildings that were from the Las Vegas Army Airfield, which was Nellis; they took some of those buildings and made them into classrooms. However, my first year of grammar school was at Fifth Street School. So from Tenth and Charleston to Fifth Street School is about five or six blocks, good-size blocks, maybe seven blocks, because Fifth Street School is only two blocks from Fremont Street. My back-door neighbor were the Waldman family and Phillip was my age. So he'd just come through the fence. Mrs. Waldman's name was Katherine; Herb was Mr. Waldman. He was in a couple of different 9 businesses and later owned the Hudson Agency. But at that time when I was in kindergarten?this was my first school year?my mom offered to walk the kids across the streets because there were Gass intersection where Charleston meets Gass. So she taught us to look both directions and run across the street and we practiced like three or four times; that was on a Sunday. And then Monday morning for school, she walked us across?excuse me?she walked us all the way to the school. She showed us which streets, how to do it. So the first day my mom followed us almost all the way to the school, but she wanted us to walk ahead of her so we'd get some idea of how to do it. And she said, "Always hold hands crossing the street and stop, look and listen, look left, look right." Okay, okay. So we walked to school if the weather was good and home at five years old. A lot of days...Now, Phillip's grandmother had a house two doors away from the school on Fifth Street. So after school all we had to do was cross one street, Bridger, and we were right at her house. So we'd have milk and cookies and then she'd walk us across Fifth Street because that was a busier street; it had some traffic on it; that was Las Vegas Boulevard. Now, was she a Waldman as well? No. She was a Wiener. Her last name was Wiener and her son was Louis Wiener and Valerie Wiener was her daughter. But anyway? Granddaughter. Valerie would be her granddaughter? Louis Wiener? Valerie, yeah. Yes, Valerie was her granddaughter. Louis Wiener's? Was her son. And Valerie was her granddaughter. Right. Exactly. The Waldman family...the wife of Herb Waldman, who had the Hudson dealership was Katherine and that was Kitty Wiener's daughter. So that kind of... All those pieces? That kind of comes all together. Yes. And so the Waldmans lived behind me, three boys?Phil, Billy and Herb. They were one year apart exactly, each kid. Mrs. Waldman taught piano. Well, we lived in that house for about eight years. So when I turned twelve we moved on to Park Paseo because my mom and dad sold the house because they needed the money to build a new house. They had wanted to leave that neighborhood and build a new house, and so they found a builder who will come up in later discussions. But they found a builder by the name of Mel Moss. I'll tell you that right now. That will come up later. But never had quite enough money to build 10 the house at that time. So we rented a house on Park Paseo and now I'm in the neighborhood of?well, my neighborhood on Tenth Street, the kids in those pictures, all of those kids except the Coblentz kids?the boy and the girl, one boy and girl in there?they all came off of Tenth Street or Yucca, right near in front of our house, right down that street all the way to John S. Park. So there were a lot of young families in that neighborhood. Oh, there was nothing but. Oh, boy, there was nothing but kids, hundreds, just full of kids. The fun thing about growing up in Huntridge was is you'd be in that school, young, and you knew all the older kids. There would be a lot of older kids, but they didn't bother with you. But they had younger sisters and brothers. So you would end up at their house and you'd meet these older kids. That was cool. They never picked on us younger kids. So when I moved over to Park Paseo, there was a whole bunch of other kids that I got to be good friends with. So I had a lot of friends between the two areas. When we moved in at 823 Park Paseo, Ninth Street wasn't paved yet; that first year it was gravel or dirt and some gravel. God, walking to school against the wind...by the time we'd get to school, I would go into the restroom and have to wash my face and my hair and comb my hair, just like the rest of the kids. I mean it was really bad windstorms because after John S. Park School it was desert all the way to Los Angeles. At that time Oakey was about the furthest south street and then came?well, Oakey was about three-quarters of a mile from Franklin, which was the street that the school was on. Then builders started building custom homes in those areas and some apartments. My uncle, my dad?my uncles, I should say, or my dad built some apartments off of Oakey. I want to say what street? Sixth Street. Not Sixth. It would be Fifth Place. Anyway, so we lived in that house all the way through my high school years on 823 Park Paseo. Now, interestingly enough that starts to meld into the stuff that I did regarding the John S. Park history thing. And so the kids that I knew and the families that my parents knew...It was an amazing childhood there. Let me ask you a question. I've been told there wasn't a Jewish neighborhood as such, but a lot of the names you've mentioned?there was growth of the Jewish population here at that time. Were you kids aware of who was Jewish and who was whatever? Yeah. Yeah, uh-huh, we did; we did know especially not in the early years, but once you got to be ten, twelve, thirteen and kids were going to church and we were going to Friday night services and Sunday school. The kids on the block at 823 Park Paseo, we would sit and talk about religions. So we decided to go to each other's. So we asked our parents and they said yeah. So we did. So a bunch of them came to my Sunday school and they were coloring the same pictures as they were in their Sunday school. They had almost the same Bible. It's Bible study, Bible. Yeah, Old Testament. 11 Old Testament, right. And so it was pretty interesting. Several of them came to Friday night services and they found that it was interesting. God, the Catholic Church; that was tough comparatively to everything else; it was long. I can remember when I was a kid, is this ever going to?when do we get to go home? They were long services, yes. Especially for kids it is. It is. So what was the sense of Jewish community about that time in the forties? Do you remember the synagogue opening, Temple Beth Sholom originating? No, no, no. Jewish Community Center. That's right. Okay. The Jewish Community Center originated in '45 or '46, '46 I think it was when it opened. Yeah. That was great because?well, the first rabbi was Rabbi David Cohen and he's the one that taught me my bar mitzvah. He educated me. I just didn't want to be bar mitzvahed, but Al Levy got bar mitzvahed and a couple of other kids got bar mitzvahed. And Friday night services, oh, my God, going to Friday n