University of South Florida Scholar Commons Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center Oral Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center Histories 8-24-2002 Dr. Samuel Proctor oral history interview by Dr. Mark Greenberg, August 24, 2002 Samuel Proctor (Interviewee) Mark I. Greenberg (Interviewer) Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/flstud_oh Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Community-based Research Commons Scholar Commons Citation Proctor, Samuel (Interviewee) and Greenberg, Mark I. (Interviewer), "Dr. Samuel Proctor oral history interview by Dr. Mark Greenberg, August 24, 2002" (2002). Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center Oral Histories. Paper 287. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/flstud_oh/287 This Oral History is brought to you for free and open access by the Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center at Scholar Commons. 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Fowler Avenue, LIB 122, Tampa, FL 33620. Carlton-Anthony Tampa Oral History Project Oral History Program Florida Studies Center University of South Florida, Tampa Library Digital Object Identifier: U11-00020 Interviewee: Dr. Samuel Proctor (SP) Interviewer: Dr. Mark Greenberg (MG) Interview date: August 24-25, 2002 Interview location: History Department Library, University of Florida Transcribed by: Lauren Dominguez Transcription date: Unknown Audit Edit by: Mary Beth Isaacson Audit Edit date: September 28, 2009 – December 2, 2009 Final Edit by: Christine Toth Final Edit date: December 16, 2009 Mark Greenberg: Well, here we are. This is Mark Greenberg, and I am the director of the Florida Studies Center at the University of South Florida, part of the USF Library system. It’s my pleasure to be with Dr. Samuel Proctor today on the twenty-fourth of August, 2002. We’re in the History Department Library in Flint Hall on the University of Florida campus. We’re going to spend the better part of a couple of days together doing a life oral history. With no further ado, let me start, please, Dr. Proctor, by asking you where and when you were born. Samuel Proctor: I was born in Jacksonville, Florida. March 29, 1919. MG: What do you know about your family’s history or heritage before they came to America, or their arrival? SP: Let me talk to you a little bit about my family, and I’m going to do it for both sides of the family. My mother’s side of the family, the Schneider—S-c-h-n-e-i-d-e-r—came from St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 1890s directly to Baltimore [Maryland]. My father’s family came from Poland. That’s the part I’m going to start with, first of all. Now, this means that both families came from Eastern Europe. That part of Jewish history is somewhat shadowy. Jews were reported according to the archival records. In Eastern Europe, probably about the year 1000, some probably came up from the Middle East. Others came from Eastern Europe, Germany, and so on. But whatever, that’s what they were. They were there in very large numbers. My father’s family came from Lomza—L-o-m-z-a—Poland, which was a sizeable city and a city of some merit, both economically and intellectually, at the time. It was also in the Lomza guberniya, which was similar—a guberniya is similar to what we would call a state here in the United States. My great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather, for whom he is named, was called Yankel Borrach. They gave him the Yiddish names. [It] would be 1 Jacob Borrach today. He never came by anything. I know very little about him, except his name. I knew nothing absolutely about his wife at all. I don’t know what his business was. I don’t know where he came from. I know that Jews had not been permitted to live in Lomza until after the end of the Napoleonic Period in 1815. So, he may not have even been born there. He may have immigrated, migrated in from some other place. But the point is, he was. I know of at least two children that he had. One, of course, was my grandfather, who once again had the Yiddish name of Yudel, but later on became Julius. His sister [was] Betsy or Bertha, and she was the one who immigrated first to the United States and settled and lived in New Haven, Connecticut. I’ll get to get later on. There probably was a third person, a third son, but I don’t even have his name. It’s just a shadowy kind of thing. My grandfather Yudel—once again, I don’t know anything about his early life. His marriage to my grandmother, Ida Esther, I’m sure was an arranged marriage. He came from Lomza. She came from what they called Makova, which is today Makow—M-a-k- o-w. She was three years older than he was. She was born in 1869; he was born in 1872. I don’t know whether she was considered an old maid or what. But anyway, he arrived in Makova, and that became his home until he migrates years later to the United States. He made his living by being, of all things, a tzitzit maker. Tzitzits, you know, are the fringes that Orthodox Jews wear on their garments under their outer garments. That’s what he did. He got the wool, he washed and combed the wool, and he made tzitzits. I think he also assembled tallits; they’re a religious artifact. He couldn’t have gotten very wealthy (laughs) from that kind of business. That was his profession. My grandmother—and they had several children together. My father was the oldest of the boys, his brother Morris and his younger brother David. There were two female babies born also to my grandparents, who did not survive, and they had no names as far as I know. Now, my grandmother had an interesting background. Her name was Ida Esther Rosenthal. Her father was a man who, in Europe, was called Tsyon—T-s-y-o-n—but in America later—I don’t know whether he adopted or whether it translated into Nathan Rosenthal. He and his wife, who was named Mirl—M-i-r-l—Hannah Rosenthal, were married. Nathan—I don’t know what his business was in Makova. By the way, his father’s name was Herman, and his mother’s name was Fanny. But the point is that he had at least two children: my grandmother and her brother, a man by the name of David Meir—M-e-i-r. We think a third child named Joseph, because one of my brothers is named Joseph and we think so, who did not come. He married a woman in Poznań, Poland, and as far as I know disappears, although they probably stayed in contact with each other. My grandmother’s father, Rosenthal, decides to come to America. He leaves somewhere around 1869, 1870. He comes to New York City. He later claimed, when he was getting his citizenship, that he’d come in 1865, but that’s impossible if my grandmother was born 2 in 1869. He comes to New York and he gets a job—I think as a peddler—and saves a little money and sends it back home to Mirl, his wife, with the understanding that she would now come to the United States with the family. She decided not to, whatever reason; we don’t know. Maybe she was afraid? Maybe the rabbi told her not to? Maybe she thought this was a good opportunity to get rid of Nathan? But whatever, she refused to come. After about a year, maybe longer than that, after he had sent money and had written these desperate letters—“When are you going to arrive,” and so on—he gave her an ultimatum. He said, “I’m too young. I can’t—” he was, by the way, born in 1847, so he was a young man. He said, “I’m not going to live alone.” So he divorced her. I was never able to find in the New York records a record of a divorce, but he must have given her a get, a Jewish divorce, because she marries again, and she would not have done that without the get. He lives in New York on the Lower East Side. He meets a woman by the name of Selma Wolfenheim—W-o-l-f-e-n-h-e-i-m. She later drops the “en;” it’s just Wolfheim. She’s [from] a Jewish family from Prussia, who had also come over some time in the 1860s. They decide to get married, and they do that on March 29, 1873. At that time, he says this is his first marriage.