UF 318 Index Samuel Proctor Family History and Heritage. Life in St
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UF 318 Index Samuel Proctor Family history and heritage. Life in St. Augustine. Encounter with President Warren G. Harding. Life in Jacksonville. Early school life. Depression decade, first job, and night school. Relationship with grandparents. Speaking Yiddish and celebrating Jewish heritage. Close, large family unit. Mother’s and grandmother’s cooking. Relationship with brothers and age order. Growing up in Jacksonville: Jewish community, recreational activities, Depression years, growth of Jacksonville, segregation, before air conditioning, Jewish education and interest in history, movies and radio, graduation from high school. University of Florida (UF): cost, NYA (National Youth Administration) job, student population, University College, campus involvement, Gainesville, room and board, choosing a specialization, football, build up to WWII and compulsory ROTC, hitchhiking to Jacksonville. Pearl Harbor. Registering for draft. Master’s degree and thesis. 36th Street Army Depot Project. Military service: Camp Blanding and Camp Shelby, end of WWII. Teaching at UF. Growth of UF. Marriage. Earning Ph.D and writing a dissertation. History of University of Florida 1853 to 1906: East Florida Seminary, Florida Agricultural College, Buckman Act, creating Gainesville campus. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward book. Changing date on University of Florida seal. Activities on campus. Personal life: meeting and marrying Bessie, kids, building their house. Jewish Community in Gainesville: Hillel development, personal involvement. Florida Historical Society. Florida Historical Quarterly. Florida historians. Famous students. Oral history: national history, Program at Florida, Doris Duke money, Southeastern Indians project, technology, staff, black history of Gainesville project. Oral History Association. Relationship with UF Foundation. American Association for State and Local History. UF Activities: Center for Jewish Studies, Price Judaic Library, Baccalaureate for arts and sciences students, curator at museum, university archivist and historian, Gator History book, building identification, building preservation. Campus changes. Changes in history department. Samuel Proctor scholarships. Festschrift. Role of Florida history on campus. Hillel. Southern Jewish Historical Society. Tau Epsilon Phi. Mosaic: Jewish Museum of Florida. Matheson Historical Museum. Bicentennial Commission. Personal life: in Gainesville, retirement, travels, esophagus problem-1960s, Allen, Mark and families. Future and current activities. Interviewee: Samuel Proctor Interviewer: Mark Greenberg Date: August 24, 2002 G: This is Mark Greenberg. I am the director of the Florida Study Center at the University of South Florida, part of the Rosh Hashanah Library System. It is my pleasure to be with Dr. Samuel Proctor today, on August 24, 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, Dr. Proctor, by asking you where and when you were born. P: I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, [on] March 29, 1919. G: What do you know about your family’s history or heritage before they came to America, or their arrival? P: 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 Schneiders, came from St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early 1890s, directly to Baltimore [Maryland]. My father’s family came from Poland, and that’s the part I’m going to start with first of all. Now this means that both families came from Eastern Europe, and that part of Jewish history is somewhat shadowy. But 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, and they were there in very large numbers. My father’s family came from Lomza, Poland, and that was a sizable city and a city of some merit, both economically and intellectually at the time. It was also in the Lomza gubernia [an administrative territorial division of the former Russian Empire introduced by Tsar Peter I; Lomza existed until gubernia were abolished by the USSR in the 1920s], which was 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 Yonkel Bora. They gave them the Yiddish names, [it] would be Jacob Bora today, but he never came by anything. I know very little about him, except his name. I know 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 the Jews had not been permitted to live in Lomza until after the end of the Napoleonic Period in 1815. He may not have even been born there, he may have emigrated, migrated in from some other place. But the point is, he was [there]. 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, and his sister, Betsy, or Bertha. She was the one who immigrated first to the United States and settled and lived in New Haven, Connecticut. I’ll get to her later on. There probably was a third person, a third UF 318 Page 2 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 Moshava, which is today Makow. She was three years older than he was. She was born in 1869; he was born in 1872. So, I don’t know whether she was considered an old maid or what, but anyway, he arrived in Moshava, 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. And that’s what he did. He got the wool, he combed the wool, and he made tzitzits. I think he also assembled tallits [prayer shawls], they’re religious artifacts. He couldn’t have gotten very wealthy from that kind of business, but that was his profession. 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 through 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, but in America later, I don’t know whether he adopted [a new name] or whether it translated into [the name] Nathan Rosenthal. He and his wife, who was named Mirl Hannah Rosenthal, were married. Nathan, I don’t know what his business was in Moshava. By the way, his father’s name was Herman and his mother’s name was Fannie. But the point is that he had at least two children, my grandmother and her brother, by the name of David Meir, and we think a third child named Joseph, because one of my brothers is named Joseph, and we think [that he] did not come [to America], and married a woman in Posnan, Poland. As far as I know, [Joseph] disappeared, although they probably stayed in contact with each other. My grandmother’s father, Rosenthal, decides to come to America, and he leaves somewhere around 1869-1870. He comes to New York City. He later claimed when he was getting his citizenship that he had come in 1865, but that’s impossible if my grandmother was born 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 an ultimatum. He said, I’m too young. 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. Now I was never able to find in the New York records a record of a divorce. But he UF 318 Page 3 must have given her a ghet [a no-fault bill of divorce legally issued by a rabbi], a Jewish divorce, because she marries again, and she would not have done that without the ghet. So he lives in New York, on the Lower East Side, and he meets a woman by the name of Selma Wolfenheim. She later drops the “en” and is just Wolfheim. She’s [descended from] a Jewish family from Prussia, who had also come over some time in the 1860s, and they decide to get married. They do that on March 29, 1873. At that time, he says this is his first marriage. I don’t think he ever revealed to this new family that developed anything about his past, because when I began doing research in relatively recent years, the handful of descendants that still remain, all of this came as a mystery to them.