Joel Schwartz
Interviewer: This interview for the Columbus Jewish Historical Society is being recorded on February 28th, 2023 as a part of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society Oral History Project. The interview is being conducted at 1175 College Avenue. My name is Cheryl Jacobs and I am interviewing Joel Schwartz. Okay. First, tell me a little bit about your family’s history in Columbus.
Schwartz: Okay. Well, my dad was actually born in Steubenville, Ohio to immigrant parents. One came from the general Kiev area like a lot of our ancestors, and I think he came here in about 1908 as a child with his parents. And, my dad’s mother was born in Latvia and came here right before, well, really when World War I started. And they were all over the Midwest, in Chicago first and then went to the Pittsburgh/Steubenville area. My dad was raised there. He moved here when he was 15 and my dad was Otto Schwartz, an accountant here in town. His brother Sam who was seven years older had come here to go to college and was married and had a baby and my dad was in the middle of high school and moved in with my uncle and his wife, Sam and Loretta, and so, my dad graduated from Bexley High School, even though technically I don’t think they lived in Bexley. They worked it out and then he went to Ohio State. He went in the service for a while, and then came back, married my mom and stayed in Columbus. My mom’s family is from Columbus. My grandfather is Ben Cowall. Ben was interviewed here back in the 80s, my grandfather, and he had a long Jewish history here in Columbus. Some people will remember that he was a promoter. He ran the Central Ticket Office. He was the show guy back in 50s and the 60s and into the early 70s. And so, my mom was raised here, down in the South End. They lived on a little street called Bide A Wee Park when she was a little girl and moved over to Whittier. Driving Park which was the hot area, believe it or not, in the late 40s and early 50s and she graduated from South High School in 1949. Then my parents were married in 1958 and I was born within a year so I’m taking their word for it on their wedding date, but who knows? No, I’m just kidding. Anyway, so I was the first of the kids and then my sisters, Toni and Steffanie were born shortly thereafter. Toni’s about a year younger than me. I was born in December of ’58. Toni was born December of ’59, and my sister Steffanie was born in June of 1962. And that’s a quick, quick synopsis of what went on, but I should say my mom’s dad, Ben Cowall, was the only Jewish fireman in Columbus before he became a promoter and I used to talk to some of the older guys, people my parents age and they would always tell me stories of how they would be on their way home from school and they would go in to visit the Jewish fireman over at, over down in the South End, back, I think he was on Fourth Street back then, down in the German Village area.
Interviewer: What did your grandparents do for a living?
Schwartz: Okay, well, as I said, my grandfather on my mom’s side was a fireman and then he got injured and left the fire department in the 1940’s and became a promoter. He started doing promotions for the fire department actually, while he was still there, bringing a roller derby to town which was a really popular thing back in the 1940’s, right after the War, and then when he got injured and left the fire department, he started his own show promotions business which, at the time, he was the only guy in town. He brought all the concerts to town and he used to host people at his house. He lived on Broadleigh, 389 South Broadleigh, right off Fair Avenue and he had people like Bob Hope and Liberace and James Brown, all these people. They’d come to his house for dinner and my grandmother was a homemaker and, you know, they would have all these people there. I got to meet a lot of them, not all of those people. I met Bob Hope once and [?] the Fair back then when I was a little kid I would go back in the trailer where the guys were and I remember meeting Johnny Cash, but the, and the Beach Boys and a couple of other people. You know, I was, like, eight to fourteen back in those days, you know, and when I was a little kid, the best was my grandfather took me to the big-time wrestling shows on Thursday nights. My mom hated it because she was afraid I’d come home and body-slam my sisters or something, but I used to meet all the wrestlers, Bobo Brazil and The Sheik and all these people and it was a lot of fun. My grandparents on my dad’s side, as I said they were immigrants. My grandfather drove a laundry truck. He was on the road from Wheeling to Steubenville to Pittsburgh during the week, and then he would be home on the weekends and he did that all through the Depression and the War and everything. The interesting thing he had an eye removed from probably what they diagnosed back then was cancer. Who knows what they would have done today? He drove a laundry truck on the road for 30 years after he had his eye removed and my dad used to say, he used to bump into everything. He had no depth perception but he was a great guy. Both my grandparents on my dad’s side died when I was very young though. My grandfather on my mom’s side, he lived to be 80, died in the late 80s.
Interviewer: So, you mentioned your sisters, what was growing up like for you?
Schwartz: Okay, so growing up was fun. You know, I don’t know how kids do it today. We were outside all the time and running around and we didn’t have obviously computers and smart phones and all that kind of stuff We lived on Bernhard Road kind-of, which today would be in the Walnut Ridge area, just outside of Whitehall and there were a million kids in that neighborhood of all religions, even a couple people, couple non-White families but mostly it was probably more Catholic kids than anything else because they seemed to have all the kids, We played ball in everybody’s yard. We went in the streets. We went to the pool. My mom used to take us to the Jewish Center pool all the time in the summers. I went to public school in kindergarten and first grade and then my parents weren’t too happy with the education they thought I was going to get so they moved me and my sister Toni to Torah Academy and I went second through eighth grade at Torah Academy. There was no high school then at the Torah Academy.
Interviewer: So, tell me a little bit more about why your parents chose Torah Academy.
Schwartz: Okay. Well, I can’t quote my dad word for word but apparently, they went to a parent-teachers conference when I was in the first grade and he wasn’t too happy with the teacher and her assessment of me, although who knows? It probably was right on, but he thought that they really weren’t teaching things. Apparently, he thought I could already read and add and subtract when I was in the first grade. That might be true. I don’t know. Hard for me to remember back that far, but so he thought I wasn’t really learning quickly enough there and he thought I’d get a better education at Torah Academy and I think they wanted me to get a little bit more religious background, we, my sisters, too. And we were members of Tifereth Israel which at that time was obviously Conservative shul and it didn’t matter at Torah Academy back then. Today it may be a little different story, there’s a little more emphasis on the Orthodox. We learned Orthodox Judaism at Torah Academy but we had people of all ilks from all the different synagogues back then.
Interviewer: Did your family regularly attend synagogue?
Schwartz: Regularly, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that, but we went. As I say, my grandparents died. My dad’s parents died when I was young and he never missed a yahrzeit or anything and I always went with him even when I was a little kid and one of my great memories of going to minyan in the morning, which I still do sometimes, was when I was in the second grade and my grandfather passed away and my dad was going to minyan every morning and he used to take me and my sister Toni with him and then he would take us to school after and drop us off at school afterwards and it really has stuck with me all these years and I think it’s one of the reasons that I’ve tried to participate in minyans and still be involved significantly with Tifereth Israel. The other thing I want to say about Tifereth Israel because I’ll forget later, was my great aunt, my grandfather’s sister, her name was Lottie Cohen and then she got married later, Lottie Lieberman. She was Rabbi Zelizer’s secretary for over 30 years, from the 1940’s, well, maybe 25 years I suppose, from the mid-forties until about 1970. Interesting.
Interviewer: Wow. So, my guess is you were bar mitzvahed at Tifereth Israel.
Schwartz: So, I was bar mitzvahed at Tifereth in December of 1971 and that was a really big thing at Tifereth to have a Torah Academy kid. They had a couple other ones, as I said, from Torah Academy at Tifereth, but, you know, we did the entire parsha, and part of the other service, and of course the haftarah and everything and that was not normally done with bar mitzvahs at a Conservative shul back then.
Interviewer: Who was the rabbi then?
Schwartz: The rabbi was still Rabbi Zelizer. He had about maybe two or three years after that, I think. He was there about 40 years. I think Rabbi Berman almost caught him, but Rabbi Zelizer was there a long time.
Interviewer: As you grew older, how important was Judaism in your life?
Schwartz: Well, Judaism’s always been important in my life, and I got really good basic instruction at Torah Academy and from my parents. You know, we kept kosher in the house. We were, but we’d go out to eat or we could bring treif in on paper plates, just, you know, we were typical middle class, Midwestern Jews, and, but, it was always in my head. Now I’m going to be honest with you, from the time I was bar mitzvahed through college and law school, I didn’t go to shul that often. I went on the holidays when I was home, and I would still go with my dad sometimes for his yahrzeits and occasionally we would go help out with a minyan which again, goes back to when I was a little kid, but I didn’t go regularly on Shabbos and neither did my parents, but we always knew we were Jewish. We kept certain traditions and we always had seders and if we didn’t have seders at home we were at somebody’s house for seders and I’ll talk about that more in a minute. Some of my greatest memories are some of the seders I went to, and you know, like I said, I still to this day, do I keep strictly kosher? No, but there’s things I don’t eat. I’ve never had shellfish. I don’t eat pork products. I rarely, if ever, have had milk and meat together. Just, how I was brought up and it just stuck with me.
Interviewer: So, your high school experience was Eastmoor.
Schwartz: Correct.
Interviewer: Tell me about that. How did you come from like, the Walnut Ridge area to go to Eastmoor?
Schwartz: Alright. So, my parents for some reason just thought that the area where we were was starting to decline just a little bit and I don’t really remember that being so, although that area now is terrible, from my driving through there. I’m sure there are still nice pockets but that part of Columbus, is, but back in the late 60s and early 70s, Walnut Ridge was still a good high school, but I think my parents just thought there was more, I don’t know if it was just Judaism, but there was just more of a closer knit grouping of people, mostly Jewish in the Bexley/Eastmoor area. There wasn’t quite the distinction between Bexley and Eastmoor back then. Eastmoor was an excellent high school and in fact, they even had a teacher that taught Hebrew there when I was there. I didn’t take it because I had enough Hebrew, in my mind, going 2nd through the 8th grade, but they, Eastmoor was an excellent school, produced a lot of smart kids but I think that’s kind of the area they wanted to be or where they felt we would have the best chance.
Interviewer: Tell me about your friends growing up.
Schwartz: So, I had a lot of friends, still do from childhood, Jewish and non-Jewish. As I said, when I lived out in the Walnut Ridge area, there were a lot of Jewish kids, but way more non-Jewish. As I said, there were a lot of large Catholic families in the neighborhood. Moving to Eastmoor, probably had a few more Jewish kids, and I am very close with Jewish, non-Jewish boys, girls, men, women, their parents still, the few that are still alive. We’re all still really close. We did everything together. We played ball daily. We went to ball games. We used to go to Columbus Jets games. We used to go to Reds games, Indians games, all that kind of stuff. We weren’t shomer Shabbos. We’d go to Ohio State basketball and football games and it was just a lot of fun. Like I said, it was a mix. The really interesting thing I can tell you from my childhood. I’ll never forget. I was still not at Torah Academy yet. I was at Pinecrest and – it’s an elementary school that’s no longer there on the east side – I came home for lunch one day in the first grade and my mother had taken, took my sister to the hospital and we only had one car back then, so somebody drove her and took my sister to the hospital. She’d had an accident and the neighbor was watching for me and came over and got me. I was six years old, and brought me to her house for lunch and she served me a cheese sandwich while her other kids were eating meat, and she said – I found this out later from my mom told me the story later but I remember this happening – and the lady knew not to give me unkosher meat and gave me a cheese sandwich, and they were, again, the Larges [sp?] were their last name and they were Catholics and that’s just how it was. You know, everybody got along, like, back, there was no fighting about that kind of stuff. There was other stuff, and then when I moved to Eastmoor, like I said, it was probably a little more Jewish but you know, I played baseball on the junior high team and played a little bit in high school, not much, and you know the kids were all different religions and we hung out altogether. My best friend all through high school and my best friends were the Floxes. People in this community, I’m sure, know Irvin and Barbara Flox and their son Martin, who was my age, went through Torah Academy and Eastmoor with me and his younger brother Brian, and as we got older, Brian and I became best friends. Anyway, we, what I wanted to bring up earlier was, I had, we would go there for Passover seders for years as a young adult, from college age from when my parents didn’t have seders anymore, all the way through, gosh, up until I was maybe 50, and just so much fun, and sometimes my dad would come with me and, and just a ball.
Interviewer: Wow. That’s terrific. Okay, tell me about college and law school and what made you decide you wanted to be a lawyer.
Schwartz: Okay. Well, as I said, my dad was an accountant. I don’t think he loved it. He had way too much personality for the typical accountant, and my Uncle Sam, his brother, was an accountant and he had a lot of personality too. I didn’t mean it as an insult, but he was into being an accountant. My dad wasn’t. I always had kind of a head for math and that kind of thing and my dad used to always tell me when I was a kid, “You know, you’ve got a really logical brain for a kid. You think things through.” He used to say, “You’d always be, you’ll make a good lawyer.” I don’t know if I’ve made a good lawyer. I’ve made a lawyer, okay? Anyway, so, when I was in college, they used to have one night at the high school for all the colleges from around the state and some out-of-state would come to the school and you would go around and I went around and checked, checked a few of them out and decided the one that sounded best, interestingly enough, was Miami of Ohio, which, at the time, was fairly hard to get in for a state school. I don’t know if it is anymore. I think, Ohio State’s tougher now but back then, if you could breathe, you could get in to Ohio State, and my dad didn’t want me to go to Ohio State. He thought that I needed to get away and, you know, not be so dependent on my parents and the friends I had here and his big thing about going to college was not necessarily the classroom education that you got, but that you learned to live a little bit on your own and meet people from different places and he said, “If you lived at home, you’re not going to get that experience,” and I think he turned out to be right, so, I went to Miami of Ohio. To be honest with you, not a lot of Jews down there back then. It’s a little better now but still not great, and I, made friends there. I didn’t make a lot of long-lasting friends. It’s weird, maybe one or two that I still talk to and I graduated almost fifty years ago, or forty-five years ago. Anyway, it was a good experience. I think I got a good liberal arts education and while I was in school, I really didn’t know what I was going to do when I got out so, my junior year I decided I gotta’ go to grad school and I thought I’d either be a history or political science teacher or I might want to be a lawyer and talked to my parents and they encouraged me to go to law school and I’m glad they did. I struggled mightily my first year of law school. Not sure that I liked it.
Interviewer: Where did you go to law school?
Schwartz: I’m sorry. I went to Capital Law School here in Columbus, and as I started my second year, I took a Federal Income Tax course and I kind-of thought, well, you know, I know a lot about this stuff just from hearing my dad and my uncle talk all these years. My mom worked for the Auditor’s Office for a little while here in the State of Ohio so I kind-of had an interest in that stuff and I was talking to my dad as my second year ended. I said, “You know, Dad, they have these one year or one and a half-year post-law school courses at a few law schools around the country where you could get what’s called a Master’s in Tax Law.” And my dad said, “Well, you’re going to have to borrow some money and I have no problem with that. You’ll pay it back, so where do you think you’re going to go? So, my choices were New York University and University of Miami, Florida, so I thought, well, I like the weather in Florida better, so I went there for a year, and I finished really a three-semester course in two semesters because I didn’t like it when it got really hot, so I wanted to get out of there in May and I had to do a thesis and all that kind of stuff, got my master’s in tax down there, and came back here, went to work. I went to work for a firm for a while, a smaller firm, and after about six years I joined a couple other guys and then I went out on my own and I still have a tax bent to my practice but it became mostly estate planning and probate and some business work.
Interviewer: Do you feel like that helps you give back to the community?
Schwartz: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s a great question. One of the things I’m really interested in is, both the Jewish and secular community, is helping people out, whether it’s on a small basis or, or on a larger basis. I taught for five years as an adjunct at Capitol Law School. I taught a Tax Procedure course and enjoyed that and I’ve been involved as a board member at the shul and now I’m on the, they have, our shul at Tifereth Israel, has a Financial Foundation where we manage money and we try to get people to understand the long-term need for funds in the synagogue and I love doing that and my legal background helps me tremendously in understanding and conveying that. I’m well aware of my ethical rules. I never push that on any of my clients – just thought I’d put that on the record – and I enjoy it. I also for a long time was very involved with the Jewish Community Blood Drive. I was either co-chair or chair for six years back in the 90s and think that has nothing to do with my law practice but one of the things I’m happy I was involved in and I still try to give blood occasionally.
Interviewer: Your family has a history in this community. If you say Sam Schwatrz or the Schwartz family, “everybody” knows.
Schwartz: Right.
Interviewer: How’s that to live up to?
Schwartz: Well, first of all let me say, I’m very proud of my family in, both in the Jewish community and secularly. My parents had us all going to the Jewish Center when we were kids, playing ball and doing those kinds of things, but more than the Jewish Center and the shul, and Torah Academy, they’re just all good people. They’re honest people. They’re ethical people. My father was known as the kind of guy who was a kind-of a joker and all that kind of stuff, but the kind of person that would give the shirt off his back to someone. He never made a lot of money. He kind-of told me that “You know what? There’s only a certain amount of money you need. If you make more, great, but do something with it other than just, you know, be a chazer and spend it on yourself.” And those were, those were his words and he was like that. If the client came in and was having a hard time, he spent time with him. He didn’t say, “Oh, you know, I gotta’ bill x-amount of dollars an hour,” and I’ve kind of run my practice as a lawyer that way, and I’ll never forget. My dad did my, did my taxes up until the year before he died which is now 14 years ago and he would look at me every time he handed my tax return back to me. He would say, “You know, every year you’re doing a little bit better.” He goes, “I’m really proud of you,” he goes, “but I’m more proud of you that you teach at the law school and you’re involved with in the Blood Drive and I see you at shul in the mornings helping out with the minyan.” And that’s the kind of person he was. Sam Schwartz, little different attitude and, of course, he wasn’t my dad. He was the kind of guy that was a little bit more serious, although he could tell a joke, that’s for sure, but he taught me to take pride in my work. If he would sit down in his later years and talk to me a little bit about that kind of stuff, and I’ll tell you what, they also referred me a lot of business when I was young so I appreciate that.
Interviewer: So, tell me about your own family, your kids, your wife.
Schwartz: So, I don’t have any children. So, I’ve been married twice. I was married to a wonderful person Robin Brilliant and we just, it just didn’t work out for us. We were married for five years. Robin was the only Jewish kid from Worthington High School back in 1976 when she graduated, she and her siblings. There were no other Jewish kids back then. Her dad was a dental professor at Ohio State and they lived in Worthington. I met her when I was around 30 years old. I had never been married before and we were married for about five years. We lived in Berwick and in South Bexley and after we were divorced, I was single for another five or six years and I married Karen Dietch. Karen is Jewish. She went to Eastmoor a few years ahead of me. She was actually my dental hygienist. She worked for Mark Smilack for 33 years and I know Mark’s got a great reputation and then she left Mark after all that and worked another eight years for another dentist here in town on the east side. And, as I said, she was my dental hygienist from the time I was, she started being a hygienist when I was in college, so she was actually my hygienist and the big joke was, “I went in there to get my teeth cleaned. Next thing I knew I was standing in front of Rabbi Berman saying ‘I what?’” but that’s a joke. Karen’s great. She was a consummate professional when she was working. She’s now retired. Lucky her and that’s why I work every day.
Interviewer: So, if someone were to come up to you and ask you, “Is Judaism still a part of your life?” what would you say?
Schwartz: Judaism is still a very large part of my life. As I said, I try to help out with minyans. I read Torah at the shul a couple times a year [transcriber’s note: and haftarah.] I am involved with the Foundation. I try to get my two cents in whenever asked, I try not to butt in too much. I have a history with all the clergy that’s been there for the last forty years which is mostly Rabbi Berman, then Rabbi Ungar, ‘course and now Rabbi Skolnik and Rabbi Braver and I was good friends with Cantor Chomsky, but mostly Judaism is important to me in that I am concerned that the younger people, and I’m sure this happens in every generation, don’t see the need for it in the future. They don’t, they’re not pushing their children towards it and it’s not [recording skips] that our religion which is better or worse than any other religion, but I feel Judaism to me is something that has kept me going from an ethical standpoint and a professional standpoint and a family standpoint, all three of those things and that we take what we’ve learned in the past and we impart that on the younger people and it keeps us going as human beings and you could probably say the same thing in any religion but Judaism’s the one I know and I want to see it keep going.
Interviewer: So, you kind-of just answered my next question, but what kind of legacy would you like to leave to this community?
Schwartz: That’s a great question. I don’t care if they don’t remember my name or who I was but people have said in the past, you want to leave this place a little better off than when you came in. I really feel that way. I want people to do the good that Judaism teaches and that good lawyers teach and good people in other professions teach and that is, to do the best you can and help the next generation to make it a little bit better for them.
Interviewer: You have nieces and nephews.
Schwartz: I do.
Interviewer: Do you talk to them about the way you feel?
Schwartz: I do and I don’t. As I probably was, although not as much, when you get in to your late teens until you’re probably around early 30s, you tend to be really into yourself and so, that’s the age group where my nieces and nephews are. I have two sisters with kids. My sister Toni who lives in Powell has three children. One lives in Pittsburgh and I, unfortunately don’t get to see or talk to him, but her other two children live in Bexley and I don’t see them a lot but I do talk to them and yeah, I try to tell them some of that stuff. Unfortunately, they’re not real into Judaism but they are good kids. Actually, my niece Samantha is 40 years old now and she’s got three kids of her own that are elementary school age. My nephew Jeff who also lives in Bexley has got a pregnant wife so we’ll see what happens after they have a child. Sometimes, I think they like to see their Uncle Joel but Uncle Joel sometimes is a little bit, how shall I put it, blunt? I don’t criticize but if asked [? recording skips] I’m not afraid to answer it. I’d be telling them because these things are important. My sister Steffanie, who I think you know, Cheryl, she lives in Hilliard and she’s got two kids who I’m a little closer to in some ways. One is a graduate of, also of Miami University and she lives in Atlanta now. She’s trying to be an actress and I talk to her a couple times a year and always encouraging her and she’s a really good person. I mean, she’s got a heart of gold and I think she’s got a lot of passion for what she does and whether or not she becomes an actor or not, she will do well in life. Steffie’s other son also goes to Miami. He’s a sophomore and he’s probably the one I’ve been closest to in the most recent years because he’s got his usual struggles that young guys go through which has to do with schooling, social life and girls and I can kind-of remember all the struggles I had so I talk to him and we joke around and everything and I try to impart. Steffie is, she’s a little bit like me as far as, she’s got a more of a sentimental side and sense of humor and so she, I think, she kind of imparts that kind of stuff on her kids. So, there’s hope in our family.
Interviewer: Anything you’d like to say that I didn’t ask you?
Schwartz: I don’t think so. I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Interviewer: On behalf of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society, I want to thank you for contributing to the Oral History Project. This concludes our interview.
Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein, April 2023
Part II
Interviewer: The date is April 15th, 2025. This is Bill Cohen from the Columbus Jewish Historical Society and we’re interviewing Joel Schwartz. Now, Joel, you were interviewed three years ago by someone, one of our volunteers and you talked about a lot of things but apparently, one thing you didn’t wind up talking about and we want to talk about it now, in a part two interview, is sports and the Jewish Center and times you spent there. What do you remember about those days back at, back at the Jewish Center, I guess it would be the old Jewish Center
Schwartz: It would be the old Jewish Center.
Interviewer: What decade are we talking about here?
Schwartz: We’re talking about the mid ‘60s through the early ’70s when I was maybe eight, to 15 or 16 years old, and then some stuff later, but, yeah, gosh the Center was great. Kids from all neighborhoods were there, mostly Jewish kids but it wasn’t just Jewish kids. It started, I would say, I went to Torah Academy through the eighth grade, and we used to have gym and swimming class there twice a week after school. We would go to school ‘til, believe it or not, ‘til four o’clock, take a bus over there and either have a gym class or a swim class for an hour and then go home at six. Long days for little kids, but that was twice a week, and then, of course, in the summertime, gosh from the time I was six years old I can remember with my sisters and my older brother, going to the pool at the Center. The Center had two pools at the old Center. They had two big pools, a snack bar, and it was packed every day, and that was probably, even in high school we used to go, go hang out there on the weekends especially. It wasn’t open on Saturdays, back then, so we’d you know, we’d swim, you know, in the summertime of course. You know, you weren’t in school, and then closed on Saturday, not like it has been open part of the day, you know for the last 30 years since they built the new Center, almost 40 years, I guess, but the old Center wasn’t open on Saturday, and you know, it was great, so, the kids, like, I went to Eastmoor. We didn’t have a lot to do with the kids from Bexley back then, but at the Center we did, you know, so, you know, we’d see them over there, but aside from that, one of my earliest memories is going in the bowling alley. The bowling alley had, I think, 12 lanes, and it was run by a guy named Carl Berman and Carl was a guy, I think, in the late 40s, he had been involved in a car-train wreck, where, if I’m not mistaken, his dad was killed and he was injured badly and he walked with a limp. He had a bad arm, and, the nicest man in the world. He ran that bowling alley and everybody knew him. You know, my parents would take me over there. My mom [Fran Schwartz] kind of taught me to bowl when I was a little kid and, I think, it was, like, a quarter a game back then.
Interviewer: Now did they have, were those automatic pinsetters or did they young people back in the back resetting the pins?
Schwartz: So, I’m not that old, Bill. My understanding is that in the early ‘60s, they went from pin-boys to automatic pinsetters, but I guess, originally, they did. My mother bowled in the ‘50s before any of us were born, and I think she was on, in a travel league, believe it or not, from the Jewish Center. She, and the other person I remember being in there was Dottie Freedman, and….
Interviewer: They would travel to other…
Schwartz: They’d go to like, other Jewish, they’d go to like, tournaments with all people from all the other Jewish towns – Springfield, and Dayton and Cincinnati and stuff, and she did that for a couple years ‘til she started having kids and then, and that was the end of that, but she could bowl.
Interviewer: So, that was a Jewish kind of league. I thought that you were going to say, ‘Oh, the women at the Jewish Center bowling team, they would go to the West Side and play some other group,’ but what you’re saying is, no, they went to other towns specifically to play Jewish groups.
Schwartz: Right. Right, but I think they also did bowl in city-wide tournaments, too, and that kind of stuff and I asked my mom, “Were you any good?” and I was like, I was, I’ll never forget this. I was in the fifth grade and I, and I was just kind of learning to bowl which I’ll tell you that in a minute at the Center through the people that work there, and they had leagues for little kids, and she came to pick me up one time, and I was ten years old, and so, she said, “I think I’ll go down the other end of the lane and bowl, so if I was ten, she had to be about thirty-six-or-seven, and I walked down there and she had bowled, like, a hundred and eighty, and probably hadn’t picked up a bowling ball for, since before I was born, you know? And back then a hundred and eighty was a great score. It’s still a good store but it was a great score, and I asked her. I said, “ Is that how you bowled when you were younger?” She goes, “ No, I never bowled a game this high,” but she was pretty good. It was, it was amazing, but so anyway, so, she kind of taught me a little bit how to bowl when I was eight, nine years old, and when I was ten, they had a program at the Center, for junior bowlers, and a lady by the name of Ethel Weesy who used to work at the Center – she and her husband Bill kind of ran the lanes for Carl, for Carl Berman – and she took about a dozen of us into one of those rooms upstairs at the Center and showed us slides on how to bowl. It was like a slide show lesson and then we went out to bowl and I think we went through this for about a month, once a week, and then they had a little, like a league for kids, fifth grade and sixth grade and I bowled in those and all these guys I knew from Bexley and Eastmoor were there, gosh, guys I can remember, Ken Supowit, Kenny Kerstein – Kenny who actually still bowls in the Jewish Sunday Morning League – Larry Press, Martin Flox, a whole bunch of guys. There must have been about 20 guys, and we bowled at, we used to bowl on Fridays before Shabbos. We’d get out – that was the one day that Torah Academy let out early. We would go, we would go over there at four o’clock and bowl for an hour. We’d bowl two games, and then we had to, then they were closing the Center at five o’clock and our parents would pick us up and that was it or we’d walk home, depended I guess on the weather, but it was, it was a lot of fun, but that got me started in bowling, so I bowled as a kid and then I just bowled for fun for the next few years and then, when I was in my late 20s I was enticed to bowl in the Sunday Morning League, and this was an unbelievable league. Back in the ’70s, they probably had 140 bowlers in this League. Today there is maybe 40 or 44 bowlers, I think they had this year, and I was just a sub this year, but I bowled in that League for over 30 years and made a lot of friends. Lot of guys in the League I knew as kids and the ages were unbelievable, from age 21 or so, all the way up to guys in their 80s. The League is named after a great guy, named Iz Harris, who was a lawyer here in town and just a real mensch, and after he passed away about twenty-some years ago, they named the League the Iz Harris B’nai B’rith League*. Back in the day, when I first joined in the mid to late ’80s, we had, like I said, there were probably a 100 and, back that time between a 120 and a 140 bowlers still and it was four-man teams. It was five-man teams when I first joined the league, went to four-man teams. Every Sunday morning, nine o’clock and you would see these guys, gosh, the really good bowlers averaged maybe in the hundred and eighties, and there were guys that bowled under a hundred, and nobody ever got mad at anybody about how they bowled. Now, having said that, it was a Jewish league and not unlike the softball and the basketball leagues, there were arguments, and it was so much fun to watch some of the arguments. Somebody’d get mad because, you know, back then you could smoke and guys would have cigars in their mouths while they were bowling, and they might drop an ash on the lane, and somebody’d come up screaming at him. I saw, I don’t want to mention names, but I saw a guy pull a cigar out of another guy’s mouth and throw it down the bowling alley lane. It was just a lot of fun, lot of good bowling, very competitive. Every team had a sponsor and…
Interviewer: Do you remember some of the sponsors?
Schwartz: Well, I gotta’ think about the old sponsors. A lot of the law firms would sponsor teams back then. There were two or three, a guy that just died – Art Kamlet. He had Art Tees and he used to sponsor a team. Westside Pharmacy sponsored a team. Let’s see. Oh gosh, of course, the Holiday Lanes where we bowl now had always sponsored a team. Oh, that’s another thing. Because the Jewish Center Lanes were so small with only 12 lanes, and there were 30 teams, we had to bowl other places, so we always bowled at either Main Lanes or Holiday Lanes, and it, it, it was a big deal. I think a lot of the guys used to like it because it, it was all men, and you know, they got out of the house on a Sunday morning. You know, in the summertime, there was big Sunday morning softball, was a big thing back in the ’60s and ’70s, and, so, in the wintertime they, they bowled. I guess in the summer if they didn’t play softball, maybe they golfed or something, too, but anyway, it was a lot of fun. So, anyway, after a while, yeah, I got involved. I was an officer in the League for a long time. I was president of the League for a while. We, we had, we traveled to tournaments, but between COVID and the shrinking of the leagues around the country, there’s not as much interest in it as there used to be. There aren’t very many tournaments but there used to be national tournaments, regional tournaments, state tournaments. I remember going to Las Vegas, one time, Toronto, gosh, Detroit was always a big trip, not a lot of fun in Detroit but, it was always a big trip. In the dead of winter going to these places.
Interviewer: Now were these, again were these where you played all Jewish teams?
Schwartz: Yes, so, it was all B’nai B’rith, and back then you had to be actually had to be a member of B’nai B’rith. That’s not the case anymore, and these tournaments were all weekend long. You would get there on a Friday afternoon. Very Jewish. They would have Shabbos services. They would have a dinner on Friday evening. On Saturday, you were free to kind-of do what you wanted because it was Shabbos. Bowling always started after Shabbos and if the tournaments were, you know, after Daylight Savings Time began, that meant that Saturday night you didn’t start bowling ‘til after nine o’clock in some, in some of these cities.
Interviewer: Now was this, was this rule because bowling was viewed as work…
Schwartz: Yes.
Interviewer: …and therefore, forbidden on Shabbos?
Schwartz: …on Shabbos. Correct.
Interviewer: You have lifting a bowling ball.
Schwartz: Well, I don’t know if it, actually, was the that, the act of lifting a bowling ball, but, you know, Shabbos is meant for a time, you know, to be more reflective, prayer. You didn’t do the things that you did during the week until after sundown, and so we would bowl from like 9:30 until midnight, get up the next morning, be back at the bowling lanes at nine in the morning…
Interviewer: Sunday.
Schwartz: …on Sunday morning, and bowl another set of games and then leave around noon or wherever from wherever we were and head for home, and, and it was great. You’d stay in smoky hotels and motels and the bowling lanes were just full of smoke and everything. It was, and it was like that until 20 years ago.
Interviewer: Now talking about smoking…
Schwartz: Yes.
Interviewer: The original Jewish Center Bowling Lanes, there was a lot of smoke in there.
Schwartz: Oh, my gosh. So, my parents were both heavy smokers. In fact, it’s probably what did ‘em both in, but you would go to the lanes and literally, there’s, you know it takes guys our age to remember how there were ash trays everywhere. They had built-in ash trays on the lanes, you know, at the table where you kept score, and we used to keep score with a pencil and paper. You know, now it’s all automated and all that kind of stuff, so, even at the tournaments it was like that, and you would, you never thought about it, you know, how bad your clothes smelled and all that kind of stuff because you used to, you went. The hotels were smoky, the lanes were smoky. There was, there was a haze in there and, and nobody thought about second-hand smoke or any of that kind of stuff, but it was fun. So, anyway, so, that was how it was. It’s gotten less and less. There are, there are no out-of-town tournaments since COVID and it had got to the point where there was usually only one a year anyway, since the early 2000s but before that, there were two, three, four, tournaments and guys would go and you’d know the people from the other cities after a while and catch up and they’d have a beautiful banquet on Saturday evening before, right when Shabbos ended. It was about an hour long, a beautiful banquet and then you’d bowl, so, like, I was saying we didn’t start ‘til after nine, it was really about ten o’clock, and you’d have a great time. The League here in Columbus, I wouldn’t say it is thriving. It is surviving. Leagues in many of the other cities are gone and it’s a shame, but, you know, bowling, like other things, is, you know, is being given up for kids’ soccer and whatever else people do. I have to brag about one thing. I was one of the better bowlers until I went to sub-status a couple years ago. In 2015, I threw a 300. That was the year that they actually were making a movie about bowling. It’s called Band of Bowlers**. You can get this, you may be able to get it on You Tube. If not, they have it, you can find it online somewhere and I wish I had that information, but I think if you called anybody involved higher up in the League, like there’s a fellow named Jeff Rycus and maybe Ken Kerstein and a couple other guys. It’s a, it’s kind of a history of the League, discussed by people that were bowling in 2015, and it talks about, goes all the way back to the 1930s when the League was established in Columbus.
Interviewer: So, this is, this film is, or this video is just about the Columbus Jewish bowlers.
Schwartz: Absolutely and it’s, it’s, it’s really good. They talked to guys who were old then. I’ll give you some examples – Shelley Sinai who bowled in the League for 60 years. He passed away three years ago.
Interviewer: Shelly…
Schwartz: Sinai.
Interviewer: Sinai, like the Sinai Desert? Okay.
Schwartz: Yes.
Interviewer: Spelled…
Schwartz: I think it’s spelled the same. Great guy and he had a million stories. And then A.C. Strip who’s still bowling. He’s an attorney in town and he’s in his late 80s but this was ten years ago. Jerry Friedman, who bowled in the League forever, is a retired pharmacist and some of the, who I would call younger guys, who were in their 50s at the time, but had been bowling for thirty-some years. I mentioned Ken Kerstein, Ira Nutis, Jeff Wasserstrom, Marc Gutter. These guys and their relatives bowled in the League. Some of them had parents that bowled in the League, and older siblings, and just bowled from the beginning of the League all the way through and were all interviewed and talk about it, but going back to that, so, they were filming it when I bowled my 300 and they got my last two strikes at the very end of this movie, so I hate to brag but, actually, I like to brag about that.
Interviewer: So, there must have been great tension and great drama as, as they videoed and recorded your last two bowls.
Schwartz: Well, I’ll, let’s just say I was shaking. Yeah, there’s only been about five 300’s ever bowled in that League, and, or five bowlers that have bowled 300. Jeff Rycus, Ira Nutis, Ken Kerstein. A guy named Dave Epstein bowled the first one, only a couple years before I bowled mine, so the League went 80 years without having any 300’s and now they’ve got five or six.
Interviewer: Now this video captures everybody cheering when you did, when you finished?
Schwartz: Yeah, except for the guys that didn’t like me. They booed. [laughter] Yes it does and you can see me so excited that I gave a high-five to one of my teammates and almost broke his arm, and but, yeah, I mean that was, that was so weird, coincidental that it happened while they were filming, you know? But it’s great.
Interviewer: Now, your, your mother helped teach you to bowl or she brought you to the Jewish Center.
Schwartz: Right. Yes. So…
Interviewer: Was she still alive when you…
Schwartz: No. She had passed away a few years before, but I thought about her when I did that, because, like I said, my dad was a decent athlete but didn’t bowl at all, and so that was something my mom had taught me and my two younger sisters, who didn’t continue on with bowling, but I thought about her, absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for asking that question. So, anyway, that, that, that was bowling. Like I said, that League survives, and I hope it does continue. It’s tough to get younger people. They’re just not interested. They’re just not interested in bowling. Bowling is actually, you know I mentioned there’s a lot of 300’s. Bowling’s actually easier than it used to be. Back when I told you that in the ’70s and early ’80s, a 180 was a good average? There are probably four or five guys now that average over 200 a year because the bowling alleys or whatever association governs the bowling in the country realized they were losing business in the ’90s and early 2000s, and they changed how the lanes are maintained and how they’re built. They used to be all wood. Now, they’re built out of a composite-plastic, and they make balls to match, and so, you’ll see around the country there used to be less than a hundred 300-sanctioned games a year back in the 1970’s and there were probably five times as many bowlers back then as there are now. Now, there are over ten thousand 300-games in a year in the leagues with many less, you know, much less bowlers, because what happened was, they decided that in order to maintain, to gain business, they’d have to make it easier, so people would come back. ‘Oh, I bowled a 200. I could’a’ had a 300. I’m coming back.’ And that’s how bowling has changed significantly, so if you had a 180 average back then, you’d probably have a 205 or a 210 now.
Interviewer: But it’s hard to understand. How could they make the lanes easier for people to bowl high scores? Obviously, you have the children’s lanes where you have structures on the side, so the ball never goes into the gutter but that’s not what we’re talking about here. How is it that the lanes themselves or the balls can help you?
Schwartz: Okay, so, back when they had rubber bowling balls basically, and wood lanes, you threw a ball and you might be able to make it curve a little bit, and if you go watch an old pro, like there was a guy named Dick Weber in the ’50s and ’60s. If you watch him bowl, he stands slightly to the right. He’s a right-handed guy and he throws the ball down over, oh, maybe the second arrow, which is about 40% into the headpin, the ball would curve a little bit into the headpin and that was how everybody bowled. Well. Now, if you watch these guys, they stand all the way to the left, almost in the left gutter, throw the ball out to the right, spinning like crazy and it curves in violently and shatters the pins, and there are so many more strikes, and even I can bowl a little bit like that now, not, not to the extent those guys do, but I know, I was a 160-170 average bowler in 1987 and was the best guy on my team and now, when I quit, I was 205-210 and the best guy on my team.
Interviewer: So, the newer balls and the newer lanes let you do this newer strategy with a more of a hook.
Schwartz: Absolutely. That’s right. It’s violent hook and you get so many more strikes. They also, believe it or not, lightened the pins, about 20 years ago, by a couple of ounces, so little bit of a lighter pin means the pins fly around a lot more and hit each other and knock ‘em all down, so you see a lot more, a lot more 300’s and it’s saved bowling.
Interviewer: Now, you know, in general, Jews are not known for being superbly athletic. Obviously, we have Jewish stars in every sport, but we’re not known for that. Bowling, though, is something, I don’t know, is bowling different?
Schwartz: Oh, I don’t know if it’s different. I think there were a lot of great Jewish athletes in town when I grew up, I mean, a number of them. I used to go when I was real little, and I just have a slight memory of this, to the Sunday morning softball which was huge here in the ’50s and ’60s and there were some great baseball players, and I would say, there’s probably not as many great football players or basketball players among the Jewish community and that has nothing to do with the fact, other than the fact that we’re not that big of a people, generally, right? I mean, you know?
Interviewer: Physically.
Schwartz: Physically. Yeah. I mean, those sports you need, but gosh, baseball, I remember guys, when I was little, you probably just heard stories about Alex Clausen and Al Press, but I remember even as a kid, Al Kauffman, who most people knew, he or his son, Tim, the late Tim Kauffman, just great athletes and there were a lot of them. Ron Golden, who has been a coach around here forever…
Interviewer: You’re talking about the guys whose photographs are up at the Jewish Center…
Schwartz: That’s right.
Interviewer: …as their, I think they call it The Jewish Athletes Hall of Fame.
Schwartz: Right. Right. If you go down, if you go down by the Men’s Health Club, you’ll see all those guys, but they’re a lot of great Jewish athletes and I think probably a little bit before my time, down in the South End. That’s where they all lived, and most of them went to South High School, and they, South High School, I think, gosh, they had in the ’40s, they won a couple baseball, I know they won one state baseball championship and had other, other really good sports teams and there were a lot of Jewish guys on those teams.
Interviewer: This was in the ’40s before a lot of the Jews moved from the inner city to Bexley, Berwick and Eastmoor…
Schwartz: Correct.
Interviewer: …so they went to South High and East High.
Schwartz: That’s right. That’s right. And then I think later, you know, Bexley had some good teams, basketball teams and baseball teams with some Jewish guys, and, I know, Eastmoor had a lot of Jewish baseball players and had great baseball teams in the ’60s and ’70s, and the reason I know that is I went to Eastmoor in the ’70s and tried to play baseball and I wasn’t nearly as good as any of those guys, so I was done with that after, after tenth grade. They had a Little League and Pony League at the Jewish Center, fifth grade through, I think, eighth grade. When I was a kid, I played in those leagues and those were a lot of fun. They were all mostly Jewish kids but a lot of non-Jewish kids from the Berwick and Eastmoor and Bexley area participated because, contrary to what a lot of people thought, the Jewish Center wasn’t just for Jews. It was for everybody, a United Way organization and lots of non-Jewish kids, too, but there were a lot of really good Jewish ball players in those leagues.
Interviewer: I guess, you’ve reminded us here, that, you know when we think about the Jewish community and we think about various aspects of it, being charitable, the religious part, learning Hebrew, whatever, food and cooking and maybe sometimes we forget about athletics as a vital part of our community as it’s a part of all communities, obviously.
Schwartz: Right. Right. I mean, you know, the…
Interviewer: There’s camaraderie. There’s networking.
Schwartz: I played in basketball and baseball leagues at the Center, and I was, you know, an okay guy, you know. Nothing great and then bowled, and I still have friends from those days that might have gone to a different synagogue or a different school and you see each other and you say, ‘God, remember when we played with so-and-so in 1971’ and ‘I remember you hitting a home run’ and ‘I remember you throwing me out at second base’ or something like that, you know, and it’s so funny, these memories that you have and they are really a lot of fun, and gosh, I’ll bet you I have clients that I’ve had over the years in my law practice that I’ve known from being little kids at the Center. The Center was, was the place to be.
Interviewer: That sounds like a perfect way to end our Part 2 interview here with Joel Schwartz and I’m Bill Cohen, volunteer with the Columbus Jewish Historical Society. Thank you very much.
Schwartz: Thank you.
*Iz Harris B’nai B’rith League became I. M. Harris B’nai B’rith Bowling League.
** Joel said “Band of Brothers” but meant “Band of Bowlers” and we agreed to change. Band of Bowlers is the 2015 documentary by Ryan Vesler about the Columbus B’nai B’rith Bowling Association/The I. M. Harris B’nai B’rith Bowling Association/I.M. Harris B’nai B’rith Bowling League. The 70 minute film was shown at the Columbus Jewish Film Festival 2015.
Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein, April 2025