The Columbus Jewish Historical Society

Interviewer:  Hello.  This is Bill Cohen from the Columbus Jewish Historical Society and this is an interview with Marty Robins.  We’re here inside Mr. Robins’ house on Eastmoor Boulevard in Columbus, Ohio, and the date is June 9th, 2021.  Mr. Robins, let’s, why don’t we start…

Marty:  Call me Marty.

Interviewer:  Marty. Yes. Marty.  Tell us, how far back can you trace your ancestors?  What can you tell us about…?

Marty:  Just my grandfather, both sides.

Interviewer: Okay, tell us about them. Who were they?

Marty:  Well, one was Samuel Robins for Rabinowitz or Pataschnikov.  I’m not sure the name.  They came up with Rabinowitz and then it became Robins.  I don’t know it that was because there was a half-brother in this country or not.  My dad wasn’t sure.

Interviewer:  So, your father’s father…

Marty:  …father’s father, Samuel.

Interviewer:  And what country?

Marty:   He had come from the Ukraine, Tolchin.  Tolchin in the Ukraine.

Interviewer:  That’s the name of the city, Tolchin.

Marty:  Well, not a city, a shtetl you might say.

Interviewer:  A little village.

Marty:  …a little village and it’s in the history books, if you look up Tolchin in Russia, but it’s actually in Ukraine and he came here, I don’t know when he came here, before 1900 and, he was married, left his wife over there, came here with his brother and while he was here there was a epidemic, I don’t know when around 1900 or something like that, and his brother died, and then, my dad’s mother died over in Russia in 2003, 1903.  That’s all I know and my dad’s aunt or wait a minute, my dad’s father remarried. He found a woman in South Bloomfield or Circleville working in a bar, Jewish woman.  Never heard, I never heard the history of her.  I don’t even know if he talked much about her, how she got here or anything else.  She was Jewish, so, my dad came over here with his sis…older sister. Eva and my dad were the two children from my grandfather and then once they got over here, they melded families because my grandfather had remarried and they had a lot more children.  My aunts, I had two, three aunts, three uncles, oh, there was about seven of them, and my dad, two of them, made nine, and so, they lived on, all over the place and then they ended up on Fulton Street right at Lehman which was between Washington and Parsons.

Interviewer:  And you’re talking about your father?

Marty:  Yes.

Interviewer:  Your father.  So, your father was born where?

Marty:  Tolchin.

Interviewer:  He was born in Tolchin.

 Marty:  Right.

Interviewer:  And, not just your grandfather, but your father.

Marty:  Well, I’m fi… I’m guessing he was, same place, where they lived, and his sister, older sister.  She was a few years older than him, and then to get here, the brother of my grandfather who had passed away here, his wife and her children plus my dad’s grandmother all came over together in 1906, and landed at Baltimore.  My dad was four years old.  They all landed at Baltimore around the time of Passover and then came to Columbus, and the reason they came to Columbus because, and my grandfather had come to Columbus, because there was a relative already here, a Wolf Carlstein, lived on Mound Street.

Interviewer:  Do you know how he was related?

Marty:  Well, it’s crazy.  We were related both sides of the family, it seems like, but my dad and mother were not related at all, but they were related to the same people.  Carlstein was a cousin.   I’m not sure how but they have all died off.  In fact, the last one just died off, a cousin within the last year or year and a half which is Toody or Miriam Goodman who lived in Gahanna and it was her siblings and her father and her grandfather, so, that’s how they all got here.  I never knew the history as much.  My daughter might know more because she said she and my…she lived with my father during the Nineties and they talked a lot.

Interviewer:  Now, you’ve talked about your father’s side of the family.

Marty:  Yup.

Interviewer: Now how ’bout your mother?

Marty:   My mother came here when she was around twenty-one or twenty-two.  They couldn’t, in 1921 or ‘22, no, wait a minute.  She was twenty-one, so, it’d be about 1904, 1903, no, ’23.  She came here.  She was already almost an adult, so, it’d been around 1921 or so.  She came here.  She would have been the first foreign student at Ohio State University.  She was going to take medicine.  Stradley, at Ohio State, who had been the dean then, she went up there.  She couldn’t speak English.  He said, “You can’t come to Ohio state because you don’t speak English.  You’ll have to learn English,” so, then, she went to South High School to learn English so she could go to Ohio State, but she never went.

Interviewer:  She was from what country?

Marty:  Odessa, Russia, Odessa, Ukraine.  She was born in Odessa.

Interviewer:  And her name was, her maiden name was?

Marty:  Dechter, D-e, d as- in dog, e-c-h-t-e-r.

Interviewer:  Dechter.

Marty:  Right.

Interviewer:  That was her last name. Dechter.

Marty:  Right.

Interviewer:  And her first name was?

Marty:  Sophia.  They called her Sonia.  My grandmother called her Sonia.  That was a nickname. It was Sophie or Sophia. S-o-p-h-i-a, formally, but most people called her Sophie, and my parents met here when she came and lived with a cousin, A. W. Robins. The brother that had passed away, his children – we’re all like one big family, very, very close – and his family, my dad’s family was the two, and then there was, let’s see, Barney, Esther, Edith, Dorothy, let’s see, I said Barney, Mickey, and then another one that passed away.  He happened to be in the state hospital and the reason he had been in the state hospital, I think it came from, he got hit in the head one time with a pool cue at the old Schonthal Center on Rich Street.

Interviewer:  This was a brother of your father?

Marty:  Yes, step-brother, but they didn’t consider each other step-sisters, step-brothers.  They were a family.   They were, ‘This is my brother.  This is my sister.’  Nobody looked at it as “step” or “half” or anything like that back then, and you looked after each other.  He was the oldest.  He started working at eight years old with newspapers to help the family.

Interviewer:   So, this was a brother of your father who was playing pool at the Schonthal Center…

Marty:  …yeah or one of those places.

Interviewer:  One of the Jewish recreational places.

Marty: Yeah.  A guy hit him in the head with a pool cue and they think it affected something in his mind or brain.

Interviewer:  So, he had to live at the state mental hospital.

Marty:  He was at the state hospital later on because I remember going there every Sunday afternoon a lot of times when I was a little kid.  My dad would just leave me on the grounds and  go in the hospital.  Can you believe a six-or-seven-year-old kid on the grounds of the state hospital on West Broad Street?

 Interviewer:  And you wandered around…

Marty:  And I wandered around, talked to the people and you know, there was nothing thought about it bad at that time, ‘cause you wouldn’t have been able to come outside if you were violent or something like that.

Interviewer:   Now, let’s go back to your parents.  Your parents were married in approximately what year?

Marty:  1926, September 2^nd Labor Day weekend.   My dad took a shine to her when she came to this country and lived with my cousin A.W. Robins and then she actually worked in his fruit store.  He gave her a job. She couldn’t even really speak that much English but she had guts.  She took it on to go work and she would work and he’d give her money so she’d have spending money.

Interviewer:  Now whose fruit store was this?

Marty:  My father’s.

Interviewer:  Your father had a fruit store.

Marty:   Southern Market around 1876 Parsons Avenue near Schottenstein’s.  He was down there 48 years.  He started when he was 20years old which would have been in 1922 right out of high school.  He graduated in ’19 and then he was there 48 years.  In 1970, well, back right after the war, Schottenstein’s kicked everybody out of the building.  There was four tenants, so, more stores could come in there across from Schottenstein’s, at Reeb and Parsons, so, he ended up, talked somebody into selling him one of the doubles in that block and Eph Schottenstein had a jewelry store.  He bought one double.  My dad bought the other and what they did, they carved out a living room and a dining room and then went to the street, no porch and everything and got rid of the grass and yard and everything, put a building in there with apartments, made those two apartments upstairs where the second floor was all new all the way back to what you would say the kitchen in the houses, ‘cause they left the kitchens downstairs with stairways to go upstairs, really, had the same amount of space but, they were apartments now instead of doubles and he left the people in there that had been living there and that’s where his store was 1862 Parsons Avenue.

Interviewer:  And this was a fruit store.

Marty:  Fruit, vegetables, wine and beer.

Interviewer:  And uh, did he buy his fruit and vegetables at Central Market or one of those markets?

 Marty:   Up at market, there was a market district.  You had Town Street.  You had all the way to Third and between Rich and Fourth and then even on Town Street even past Fourth, there was a few across the street before you went to Gilbert’s Shoes and on the left was Ame and Thall, and there was about two or three wholesalers right there. The rest of them were on Town street and back in the alley, all the way back in.  I remember one there from time I was five, six years old.  There was a lot of them.

Interviewer:  And so, your father would buy the fruits and vegetables wholesale…

Marty:  Every morning, five o’clock.

Interviewer:  …and then take them down South Parsons and sell them retail.

Marty:  Right and besides that, we had a lot of restaurants and small groceries that came to him to buy their fruits and vegetables.  The restaurants like Federal Glass and also Owens Illinois, they had cafeterias so, they bought their products there from us, fruits and vegetables for their cafeterias.  Then there was some restaurants, Gall’s Hungarian Restaurant at Hinman and Parsons.  They bought product from us and they bought bushels of all kinds of stuff – cabbage, green peppers, hot peepers, just, head lettuce, anything you’d use in a restaurant that we sold and the same things.  There was a Louis Gores on the corner of, uh, see, Reeb, not Reeb, Innis and Parsons.  He was right there and next to him a guy opened up Block’s hotdog joint.  There was already a hotdog joint down the next block.  He opened up, thought he’d make a fortune.  Then there was a Russell Theater there.  Trying to think who owned it.  It was a young guy, had just passed away in last couple years.  I’ll think of it.

Interviewer:  There was a theater?

Marty:  Yeah. There was a theater in that block.  That was a busy section on Saturday nights.  Everybody came from, people worked all week, six days a week in the factories around the South End.  That was the Steelton District.  You had Bonnie Floyd.   You had Buckeye Steel Casting.  You had Hercules Box Company.  You had the Federal Glass there.  You had Brown Steel out there.  You had Dee Lasalle’s Cylinders for oxygen and everything.  They’re still in business down there on Parsons Avenue, or on Marion Road.

Interviewer:  Now, so, there were a lot of Jewish businesses along Parsons.

Marty:  There were quite a few Jewish people, but not all. There was Catholics and others.

Interviewer:  Now was that, there were Jewish businesses there. Did the Jews actually live down there that far south on Parsons?

MaRty:  Couple of ‘em did.  There was a barber shop three doors from my dad and the Swissmans had a wine store right next to Fountain Drug on the corner.

Interviewer:  Fountain Drug.  That was at Whittier and Parsons?

Marty:  No.  Fountain Drug was at Innis and Parsons back then.  There was another, Crystal across the street.  Those were not Jewish people but Swissman had a wine store right next door. Then there was a barber shop there for years and a house and then down there was another drug store past Marion Road and it was a Rosenberg or somebody who had that drug store.  She never married.

Interviewer:  So…so

 [Marty: I’ll turn that off]

Interviewer:   So, you’re telling me about the area that’s very far south on Parsons where Schottenstein’s Department Store was.

Marty:  Well, past Schottenstein.

Interviewer:  Even farther south.

Marty: You had the viaduct…

Interviewer:  Yes.

Marty:   …and you had the Benders that owned this auto-parts place up at Hozak.

Interviewer:  Benders?

Marty:  Bender was the name.

Interviewer:  That’s another Jewish family and they owned that.

Marty:  Yes, and in back of them were the Furmans that had a coal yard there.  Back off Parsons was Furman Coal.  Furman was…

Interviewer:  Another Jewish family.

 Marty: …another Jewish family [simultaneously] here in town.  Well, Lou Levine that owned Midwest Roofing, he was married to a Furman girl and she lived on Lilley Avenue with Levine’s parents while he was in the Army.

Interviewer:  Now you told me about a lot of these Jewish businesses that were far south on parsons but you and your father and your mother, you lived further north.  Where did you live when you were small?

MarTy:  Well, when I was small, we lived on Carpenter.  I got pictures of when I was just maybe two years old, three years old, with my sister standing out in front of the porch, my mother looking down on us.  We lived on Carpenter.  I would say it’s about two blocks north of Whittier on Carpenter, and then after that, when I was about, I don’t know what, five, four years old, we moved to 22^nd and Siebert and lived next to Lee and, Skilken and Stanley Skilken in a double that was owned by her father, Horkin.  We lived in their double.

Interviewer:  What was her father’s name?

Marty:  Horkin.

Interviewer:  Horkin.  That was the first name or the last name?

Marty:  Last name.

Interviewer: Horkin.

Marty:  Yeah.  There was a Horkin that belonged to our synagogue, relatives of theirs.  They’re related to the Skilkens.

Interviewer:  So, this area that you grew up in, uh, there were a lot of Jews in that neighborhood?

Marty:  Yeah. There were Jews all over.  If you went down 22^nd Street or Gilbert, all the way the other side of Livingston, all the way to Parsons, you had Jewish people mixed in those areas all the way to Whittier and past Whittier on all those streets which was South East, ‘cause we moved, we moved to Lilley Avenue in 1941.  My dad bought a house in Driving Park, five houses from the circle.  We lived between Forrest and Whittier, five blocks from Forrest, so, we were right there in the middle of it, everything.

Interviewer:  Were, so, there were a lot of Jews in that area, but, …

Marty:  Right.

Interviewer:  …but explain this.  Were Jews ever the majority?

Marty:  No.  I didn’t think it was a majority.  There were a lot of us there but, uh, I don’t think we were a majority of people.  Irving Roth lived on the corner down the street.  Sandy Lipson and Reva Lipson lived in that block.  There was a Silverstein two doors across the street.  There was Uretzky were three doors south of us and there was a Berkowitz that lived next to Roth down in there.  There were just a lot of Jewish families in that block, uh…

Interviewer:  Now, where did you go to elementary school?

Marty:  Fairwood Avenue School.

Interviewer:  Fairwood Avenue School, and do you remember, were most of your friends Jewish when you were a child or was there a mix of people?

Marty:  There was a mix of people at school, but my real association was with Jews, all the way, growing up.  That’s who I ran around with.  Those were my close friends, but in school, I mixed with all the kids and were friendly with.  When we went home, my best friend from the time I was six years old was Nate Katz.  His father, Philip Katz, and mother Mary, his father owned a rag place, wholesale rags, on North 18^th Street at the railroad tracks, all the way north at the railroad.

Interviewer:  Tell us about this business of rags.  How did somebody make a business in rags?

Marty:  Well, they gather ‘em up and put ‘em in bales and ship ‘em out to others, like my cousin A.W. Robins.  He had a wiper business where he bought rags that could be washed and used as wiper rags.  He had a place on Wager and Livingston right next door to a Gulf Station which was Jewish, uh, Max, let’s see, the name, the girl that owned the Katzinger’s originally, with the last name…I can’t think of the last name right now.  It’ll come to me.  It always does.

Interviewer:  So, the rags were used at, in this business as wipers to wipe…

Marty:  Wipers, used to wipe equipment, machinery, stuff like that.  My cousin would buy rags from different guys.  They used a wiper.  He’d wash ‘em and then he had dryers, big commercial stuff there.  It was big business and he did that.  He was right next to, there was Plotkin there.  There was Leonard’s Drug Store.  There was the 606 [Six O Six] Social Club where all the guys gambled, the Jewish guys.

Interviewer:  What street was that on?

Marty:   On Livingston and Parsons.

 Interviewer:  606 Social Club.

Marty:  Well, I called it Social Club.  They always had corned beef sandwiches.  There was a couple guys, one guy that ran it named Shine.  That’s all I know about it.  I never was in there, but a lot of Jewish guys hung out there.  You either hung out there or you maybe went to the Excelsior Club, if you had enough money to be members.

 Interviewer:  What era would this have been?  In the 1940’s?

Marty:  Thirties, Forties, Fifties.

Interviewer:  The 606 Social Club.

Marty:  Well, I just called it the 606. I nicknamed it Social Club.   There was gambling, played cards, hang out.  That’s all. It was right there, next door to Leonard’s Drug Store on the corner and my cousin was down the block and there was a Plotkin that was a tailor shop lived in a house that had a storefront right there on Livingston right in the same block between Wager and Parsons.

Interviewer:  You said that you had non-Jewish and Jewish friends in school.  How did people get along, the Jews and non-Jews?

Marty:  And there was also the Negroes that were from Hanford Village at Fairwood.  They’d bus them over in an old dilapidated bus a guy had from Hanford Village.  Instead of them crossing the railroad tracks and walking, they would drive ‘em in this old bus and bring them to Fairwood, and we never had problems.  I was, this was back in 1940…in the Forties, but I didn’t even know what segregation was back then, ‘cause these kids came to school and we were friendly.  In fact, one of them, a Johnny Steel went to elementary school and then when we were going to start the seventh grade at Roosevelt, he walked to my house on Lilley Avenue so, we all walked together to school and he was in Roosevelt Junior High School with us until the end of ninth grade.  Then he went to East and we went to South.

Interviewer:  But Blacks and Whites, Jews and Non-Jews were friendly.

Marty:  And there was a few Appalachians there.  One of them, of course there were a few of them that were smart, I won’t use the word, but bullies from that area and they didn’t even like the Negroes, but, I would say, on the majority, we never had a single problem in the school.  I didn’t, I never noticed it.  You went to the same bathrooms. You went to the same classes. Nobody had problems. Roosevelt never had a problem in Junior High School.  There were Jewish people there, non-Jews and the Blacks.

Interviewer:  What about anti-Semitism?  Did you ever have any problem with that?

Marty:  Well, when I was young, I got called…this guy from Appalachia called me a kike. I said “Well, I guess I could call you a hillbilly.  Same difference.  You’re calling me a kike,” but there wasn’t a lot of it, a ton of it.  I’m sure there was some in the homes, you know, because your, where your environment was.  I was taught – because my dad’s business was down on Parsons Avenue, and I worked there from the time I was six, seven years old, and then at 13 he gave me the choice.  If you’re not going to continue Hebrew school after the bar mitzvah you come to the store every day, so, I took a streetcar from Whittier and Lockbourne to Parsons Avenue and then another streetcar, the Parsons line down to the store.  We worked ‘til seven, eight o clock, seven, seven thirty at night and then come home.  And I worked in that store all through high school, even when I started at Ohio State.  He bought me a car when I was 19.  I was starting my sophomore year and he bought me a car so I could come to work.  My cousin was in, Goodman who had been a, who was married to a Carlstein, he was the first guy in this town to have cars – buy here, sell here and buy here and pay here, you know, on a weekly basis and all that. Kent Goodman, sharpest credit man in the city of Columbus back in the Fifties until he died.

Interviewer:  So, you went to Roosevelt Junior High and…

Marty:  …then South, South High.

Interviewer:  …and South, and a lot of Jews?

Marty:  Yes, back in that day.

Interviewer:  So, you lived in the neighborhoods that had a high concentration of Jews although they weren’t a majority…

Marty:  Right.

 Interviewer:  … before World War II.

Marty:  Well, my best friend was Nate Katz and he lived a block away and then you had the Garricks [sp?] down there, the Ringers down there and there was another Ringer across from me, and Sussman, a friend of mine.  He was three, four years older.  He lived right there on the corner of the alley.  He became a pharmacist and he’s the one that talked me of going to Ohio Northern and taking pharmacy.  See, what happened was, I quit at Ohio State after about four or five quarters, disgusted.  I didn’t know what I wanted.  Of course, I played around.  Probably, I would have flunked out if I didn’t quit.  So, I went an helped my dad for six months and a friend of mine, Floyd Bender, lived on Oakwood near Whittier, south of Whittier, one block.  There was a lot of Jews down in there, too. There were Jews all over the area back in that time.  I would say more Jews were on the East Side, Near East Side or Bexley, ‘cause we didn’t move to Eastmoor until 1952.  I was in my senior year.   We moved in here on Valentine’s Day, ’52.  So, we moved from Lilley Avenue then and there were Jewish kids and I was friendly, I was close with all my guys who were Jewish. We were all about the same age – Joe White, Floyd Bender, Marv Zuravsky who moved to Bexley.  I said Nate and there was a couple others, and then Ted Raphael who lived on Wager off of Livingston at that time. We all ran around together AND went to Schonthal Center a lot which was on Rich Street across from the Jewish, Columbus Jewish Hebrew School, was on Rich between Parsons and Washington.

Interviewer:  What do you remember about the Schonthal Center? What activities did you do there?

Marty:  Oh, you played pool in the basement.  You belonged to organizations.  There was a youth organization, Young Judea, belonged to that.  It was up on the third floor.  They had what they called a corral.  They fenced in the whole third floor, like a big room, fenced in, looked like a Western style, and that’s where we hung out, the Jewish Center, er, not the Jewish Center but the Schonthal Center and in ’49 they built the Jewish Center and we transferred over there.

Interviewer:  On College Avenue.

Marty:  Yeah, and I also belonged to AZA.  I joined Boy Scouts but I didn’t last too long, with,  I joined the Jewish Troop 126 and I was in it a couple years with Jess Forman and his kids and a bunch of other Jewish kids.  We used to walk from Rich Street to Parsons and Livingston to catch the streetcar to go home at night. We’d be out ‘til nine o’clock at night, and walking in that area, Parsons Avenue, back then, nobody was scared of anything, ‘cause there was a mixture of, lot of Jews were in that area and Blacks in that area, but nobody was scared to be out at night. You’d walk with your group of friends or you’d walk with the Boy Scout leader and we’d go home.  Then I joined AZA and there was two troops, two groups at AZA.  Schafer, Larry Schafer was, started one group at Tifereth Israel of AZA and that actually folded and went back to the original AZA group which we had at Schonthal and then when they opened the Jewish Center, we moved over there.  Those two trophies, I got to give to the Historical Society.  Those are from AZA back then when we moved and there was no place to put ‘em, I brought ‘em home and I guess they sat upstairs, and there’s also a war bond certificate thing right there that I have to give to the Historical Society.  It was made out to AZA by the Government for selling war bonds or stamps during World War II.  It’s a big certificate. So, those are the three things I have that I never turned over but I didn’t, they didn’t have any cases to put them in.  At Schonthal they did but not at the Jewish Center where we had the bowling alley and we, we actually hung out at the Jewish Center almost like every day and from the time I was fourteen, I’d be at the Jewish Center all the time.

Interviewer:  Now let’s put this in perspective.  You were born what year?

Marty:  1934.

Interviewer:  1934.

Marty:  April 11th.

Interviewer:  So, when you were in your mid-teens, fifteen or sixteen, that’s when the new Jewish Center…

Marty:  …fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, the original, number one Center…

Interviewer:  … came into being.

Marty:  …not the one that’s built now.

Interviewer:  Right.

Marty:   In fact, I remember hauling Leslie Wexner to AZA.  He wouldn’t know me today, but after high school, I never had contact with him, but, I remember picking him up in my dad’s truck and driving him to the Jewish Center when he was about fifteen, and I was, no, he was about fourteen and I was a little older and he was in our AZA group back then, but you know, you never had contact, I never had contact with him afterwards.  He would never know me as an adult.

Interviewer:  You didn’t have any inkling at the time that he would become…

Marty:  No.

Interviewer:  …a very successful businessman.

Marty:  No, I did not, but, you know, good for him. And I worked in my dad’s store, then I, ‘til I was in college.  Then I quit and worked for six months and the store, didn’t know what I wanted, but, also my dad took a vacation when I was fourteen.  I had a special permit to drive by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles at fourteen years old. So, I actually ran the store when I was fourteen, when they went away for three days to visit my sister in Wisconsin.  She went to summer school there.

Interviewer:  You were the boss at the fruit store…

Marty:  I ran the fruit store.

Interviewer:  …at age fourteen.

Marty:  Yep. I remember buying a hundred watermelons and going up to the track and loading ‘em in the truck and taking them to the store, ‘cause I went to all the wholesalers in the morning and they knew my dad and they knew me.  There was one, Pappy Caito [sp?] on Town Street and he called – I was there and he saw me walking around with a pencil on my ear and he called me over “Boy, let me have that list you got.”  So, I had a whole list of stuff I was buying in the alley and all over and he says, “Khaki,” one of the guys that had been a veteran.  He says, “Get him this, this and that and that.”  He says, “That item there,” certain item, he said, “go get it at such a place but don’t pay ‘em over so much.  This item go over to such a place and don’t pay ‘em over so much.”  And I’d say, “You treat me like my dad?  The stuff you’re giving me, maybe a quarter off here, a quarter off there?”

Interviewer:  So, he helped you get the right things at the right price.

Marty:  Right.  And the thing was my dad would buy stuff just like what Kroger’s and Big Bear would buy and they bought in big quantities, my dad bought just as cheap as they did. He’d only buy a couple boxes.  Say, bananas came in forty-pound boxes.  They came in stalks.  They had banana rooms where they gassed them to ripen them.  Then they’d cut the bunches and put ‘em in box, forty pounds, long like this, that wide, and with handles on both ends, carton boards and you’d buy ‘em by the box back then.  Oranges came in crates.  The Sunkist oranges from California came in two sections.  You had a big divider in the middle, but they were good wood solid crates you carried ‘em in, and the Florida oranges came in crates that were more, had wire around them, and those slats to hold ‘em and they were big crates.  You just open ‘em from the front.  You had pears came in crates.  Head lettuce came in great big things or crates they made.  They were heavy.

Interviewer:  So, Jews were, in Columbus Jews were big in the marketing and food industry?

Marty:  Jews and Italians.  Jews were in fruit and vegetables, peddling with trucks. The Benders, a couple Benders and a Rosenthal peddle I know of, that’s the way they started out and Val Rosenfeld.  I think he had bought merchandise up there and he was in business, in the fruit business, and there was a lot of them in the business up there.  You had to be up there five, six o’clock in the morning.   It was like a club.  Every morning you’d see the same people and go eat at the same restaurants around there and it was just a, it was, it was fun for me, but it was my dad’s lifestyle, get up five, six o’clock, get home seven o’clock at night and I can remember Christmas time stores were so busy on Parsons Avenue on Saturday nights during World War II, because you had all the soldiers, airmen coming from the base which was then called Lockbourne Air Force Base and they’d come to go to the theater or anything else down in there and, oh, now I remember!  The theater there, and he was only twenty-one years old when he had that theater, Jerry Knight.  Can you believe I’d known Jerry since he had that Russell Theater back in the Forties?

Interviewer:  And it was on Parsons?

Marty:  It was on Parsons just past Innis within a block of my dad’s store, right where Innis Avenue coming from High Street heading east ran right into that part of Parsons.  He was right there.  He had a theater.

Interviewer:  And around what years would this be?

Marty:  In the Forties, Fifties.  That was his theater.  Then he ended up with the Drexel later on and then he had Swenson’s out on Hamilton Road, that restaurant, and I’d see him in shul.  In the Nineties I went to shul when my dad passed away in ’98 and Jerry was in shul every single morning.

 Interviewer:  Let’s talk about shul a little bit especially when you were a child.  What synagogue did you go to?

Marty:  When I was in the fourth grade, we joined Tifereth where I went to Sunday School and was bar mitzvahed, confirmed, and my sister go married there and we were members there, but also, before that, we always went to Agudas.  My dad always went to Agudas for yahrzeit.

Interviewer:  Agudas Achim.

Marty:  Yes, because way back then it was on Washington and Donaldson.  Donaldson is not there now.  Beth Jacob is right down the street where Greenwald was the rabbi and that was Hirschprung was the rabbi at Agudas, and Harry Maybruck who was in the prophylactic business ran the children’s services on Saturdays at the old Agudas Achim, the big shul in this town, and down in the basement we had services every Saturday and they would give us theater tickets and a bar of candy after shul was over and the tickets were to the Champion Theater where we always went on Saturday afternoon to see a cowboy movie, shorts of the news, and world news and everything and then a serial.  Besides the cowboy movie there might be another movie.

Interviewer:  And this was because you went to services, you were rewarded?

Marty:  Yes, and we all went there, all of us. Someone who ran services at a young age and could daven like crazy – Buzzy Kantor.  When Buzzy was young, he’d go so fast through that service standing at the front.  It was all put on by the kids.  We went to services every Saturday morning.

 Interviewer:  You did your own services.

 Marty:  Yeah, but Harry Maybruck overseeing it but, it was youth services, kids’ services down in the basement in the social hall of the old Agudas Achim.  We’d go in through the side entrance on Donaldson Street.  The main entrance was on the corner which faced Washington and it was a big shul.  You had high steps you went up.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of the big shul, big brick shul and then they had a balcony where the women sat.

Interviewer:  Separate.

Marty:  Yeah, and the men were all downstairs on the main level.

Interviewer:  Now five minutes ago you said something and I’m going to take a chance here and let you delve into it a little more.  I’m taking a chance.  You said Harry Maybruck who helped to lead the services, the youth services…

Marty:  His son was Stanley Maybruck.

 Interviewer:  His son was Stanley but, the elder Mr. Maybruck, you said, was a manufacturer of prophylactics?

Marty:  No, he bought them and in his basement they rolled them into packages and sold them.

Interviewer:  He bought them wholesale and…

Marty:  Yeah, well, no, he must have gotten them from the manufacturer.  He was the wholesaler.  He sold to drug stores and all that.

Interviewer:  Oh.

Marty:  That was his big business, but it was a lot…

Interviewer:  Jewish family.

Marty:  Yeah.  They lived on eighteenth Street, South Eighteenth between like Columbus and the next street down.

Interviewer:  So, the Maybruck family, a Jewish family was one of the main wholesalers of prophylactics.

Marty:  Well, of that brand.  He had that brand.

Interviewer:  Yes.  Oh, I see.  Of the mi…he was kind of the middleman between the manufacturer and the…

 Interviewer:  …pharmacies and the retailers.

Marty:   Retail pharmacies where they sold them.

Interviewer:  Wow.

 Marty:  Let’s see if I got this right. Take one second.  Well, I’ve got it somewhere but I don’t know where.  I’ve got one of those, I have one of those things that you squeeze and you put papers and notes and all that and you hang up on a wall?  I had one that was made out, “Peacock Prophylactics.”  I had one of those.  I still have it.

Interviewer:  It’s an advertisement?

Marty:  It was an advertisement. It was one of those things that you squeeze where you hold all your papers that closes in on them and you just hang it up.

Interviewer:  Like a clip.

Marty:  A clip. It was a special clip made with his advertisement on it.

 Interviewer:  Do you think Peacock Prophylactic was the name of the prophylactic…

Marty:  It was.

Interviewer:  …that Mr. Maybruck…

Marty:  It was.

 Interviewer:  …was the distributor for?

 Marty:  Yes.

Interviewer:  That’s a great piece of information.

Marty:  Well, there’s a lot of stories I have.  I worked, so, I worked for my dad, went in the Army, got out of the Army, worked six months.

Interviewer:  Now wait.  Let’s make sure we have the timeline right.  You went into the Army?

Marty:  …in 1954, November.

 Interviewer:  The Korean War was over.

Marty:  No.  It wasn’t over.

 Interviewer:  Oh.

Marty:  It was still ninety days ‘til they called the Declaration on it and so, I got the GI Bill ‘cause I was in ninety days, but afterward they opened the GI Bill to anybody who was in the service.

Interviewer:  Where did you serve?

Marty:  Germany, Gelnhausen, Germany, and then Ludwigsburg, which is outside Stuttgart.  I was a supply clerk with a basic infantry line unit in Gelnhausen.  I took company clerk training ‘cause I could type from high school and college.  I had typing all along and typed just like this, so, I knew how to type so they sent me, and plus a year of college or a year and a half, they sent me to clerk typist school after Basic at Fort Knox.  Then I went to Europe, thought, oh, I’m going to end up in the Fourth Infantry Division, so, they shipped me from Fourth Infantry Division down to a Regiment.   I say, oh, I’m going to be in Regiment, a clerk. Nope. Then they sent me to Battalion.  Am I going to be in Battalion Infantry Line Company or units, fighting company? Then they sent me to a Basic B Company of the Twelfth Infantry Division, 1^st Battalion.   I thought, what am I going to do here?  They didn’t have an opening for a company clerk. I thought, I’m going to be carrying a rifle, or a One Five Five or a mortar or something and all this stuff.  So, then they said, “Well, we don’t have an opening there but they’re not happy with the clerk in the Supply.”  They said “Would you accept clerk in the supply room?”  I said, “Yeah.” I ended up running that place most of the time ‘cause the Sergeant, he was always fooling around and taking off.  The guy that was the head of it left me in charge.

Interviewer:  And this was in Germany.

Marty:  Yeah, but after having been in the fruit store and business my whole life, this was nothing just to go to work something like that and end up being in charge of Supply Room.

Interviewer:  The same kind of skills that you had at the fruit company worked in the Army.

 Marty:  Skills you had in fruit…it worked in the Army.  I had a desk and I had to keep records of everything and load up and we had all kinds of, well, we’d go on alerts, practice alerts, ‘cause we were, we always ran to the Czech border.  Back then it was the time with, still with Russia and Czechoslovakia and Hungary and all that, ‘cause I was in ‘til 56, ‘til October ’56, which I ended up, my company left Germany and came back to Fort Knox, my, that whole Division. They were done there.  They came back, and the 3rd Armored came over.  Well, I wasn’t going to be with the 3^rd Armored and I only had about eight months left to serve, so, they sent me to the 529^th Transportation Company in Ludwigsburg, which was a trucking outfit and they weren’t happy with the clerk they had.  He liked to mess around and not work that hard, so they brought me in to be Company Clerk to work with him, so, I learned the job real quick, so I was Company Clerk and with him working with me all the time I was there until I left.

Interviewer:  So, you were in the Army for about two years?

Marty:  Yes, in active duty.  I even bought a car in Germany, a 19…see 56 MGA, the first new model from the TC’s.  I’ve had a 1952, ‘56, I had a 1956 MGA sports car.

Interviewer:  That was a brand-new car.

Marty:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  You bought in Germany.

Marty:  Yeah. Nineteen hundred dollars.

Interviewer:  And how did you get it back to the U.S.?

Marty:  Uncle Sam’s compliments.  They shipped it back a month before I left, and I only had it for about six or eight, about eight or nine months before I left.  I bought it.  I kept wanting to buy it.  My dad sent me two American Express checks for a thousand each.  I thought there was one there. I didn’t know it.  All of a sudden, I’m playing with this paper, cardboard and it was a check and it comes apart and there’s two of them.  That was enough money to pay for the car.

Interviewer:  Wow.  So, in 1956 you end your Army career.  You come back to Columbus and what happens then?

Marty:  I worked in the store.  I didn’t know what I wanted and I was sitting on the steps outside the bowling alley at the Jewish Center by the parking lot and just kibbitzing with Sussman, Dave Sussman who was a friend of mine.  When I got married, he was in my wedding. We were friends.  He said, “Go to Ohio Northern,” which was up in Aida, Ohio, which is up, you go to Marysville and then you go to Kenton, Ohio, then up Route 30 towards Lima and you cut off for Aida. We’re in the middle of a triangle between Finley, Lima, and Kenton, Ohio, and I drove that every weekend ‘cause there was nothing for a good Jewish boy to do in Aida, Ohio, on weekends, and I worked for Gray Drug which became Rite-Aid later, so I worked every weekend and I dated girls at Ohio State University.

Interviewer:  So, during the week, you would be in Aida at college…

Marty:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  …and you were working on what kind of a degree?

Marty:  Pharmacy.

Interviewer:  And then on weekends you would come back to Columbus…

Marty:  …work for Gray Drug like a Friday night, a Saturday, and go back to school on Sunday night and a few times, on Monday morning I’d take off real early, and I had two cars because my dad had kept the car that I had originally had when I went into the Service.  It sat in the garage.  He drove it and kept it running and I had the MGA and sometimes it’s better to leave the MGA in the garage in the middle of winter and not drive it back and forth because the windows would flap open and I dressed with, you dressed like you were in the middle of Artic Circle when you drove back and forth to school.

Interviewer:  So, this would be the late 1950’s…

Marty:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  …and you’re in college and where did you live? Did you still live with your parents?

Marty:  Well, yeah when I was home, but when I was in school, I joined AEPi Fraternity.

Interviewer:  A E Phi.

Marty:  AEPi.

Interviewer:  AEPi.

Marty:  Alpha Epsilon Pi. which is a Jewish fraternity.  It’s up at Ohio State, too. Well, I joined because it was cheaper to belong to a fraternity and as I was a veteran also.  Now, here’s the thing.  I joined.  My first summer there, it cost me 79 dollars for school.  I lived in the fraternity house free ‘cause the guys were gone for the summer so, the guys that were there, we just took rooms there and everything.  Then I joined after I, afterwards, I either had to live there or rent an apartment with another guy a block away and to get active, you know, they talk about all the hazing they had with guys drinking and all that.  You know what our job was, is where they called us pledges and we had to do something to be active?  Well, hell, we’re older.  We’re 23 years old.  I was 23.  You’re not going to treat me like a 17-or-18-year-old, so, even the kid that was going through with me, or a couple of them, what they did to make it really Hell Week, they called it Hell Week to go through to rush, so, you’re active as a member, they gave us raw liver in a jock strap to wear, to wear all week and then what you did at night as a pledge going through Hell Week, we painted the fraternity house.  We didn’t have alcohol and all that crap, that kind of stuff. They did stuff that was really constructive outside of that one thing, you painted.  You stayed up all night painting the fraternity house.   One guy had, he was older like me, had kids or two of them were, but the one guy, he had one son who was deaf and a daughter.  He was older and he had had a chemistry degree so, he sent me to his house, he said, basically, to babysit the kids in the evening ‘cause he and his wife wanted to go somewhere.  Basically, it was so I could sit there and sleep while the kids were upstairs asleep.  That was all.

Interviewer:  So, the one prankish thing that they made you do as a fraternity pledge was to wear a jock strap all week with liver inside it?

Marty:  Raw liver.

Interviewer:  Raw liver, so you smelled bad.

Marty:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  That was the worst thing you had to do.

Marty:  That was the worst and then we painted and then we were active duty and I was, I became head of the kitchen.  Overall, in the end, I was head of the kitchen for a couple years, so I got my meals free.  I just, you spent 200 dollars as a member if you wanted to live there.  If you didn’t live there, you didn’t pay that much. I had an apartment down the street one block away with one of the other guys that was in AEPi and we had an apartment there.  That’s all.

Interviewer:  So, after you got your pharmacy, pharmacist’s degree, then what happened job-wise.  What did you do?

Marty:  I worked for Grays and then, right before the Boards, the manager or district manager wanted me to work –  downtown right next to Lazarus was my manager I originally worked for and they were making me assistant manager there and they had a 90 year old man working as a back-up ‘cause I wasn’t licensed, so, I worked and did all the work as assistant manager but the district manager wanted me to work on  a Sunday without anybody licensed being there and if the State would come in catch me working and I wasn’t licensed yet, and no licensed pharmacist on the, I would have been, they would have cancelled me from taking the Board for a year or something like that.

Interviewer:  So, you refused?

Marty:  I refused and I got into it with him and I threw his damn key, I threw him his keys and said where he could stick ‘em, I said, “Here, keep your keys.”   Then I was hanging around a buddy of mine, Alan Katz who worked at the Sloan’s, on Allegheny, a new store.  Ted came in hanging around.

Interviewer:  Sloan’s Drugs.

 Marty:  Yeah.  Ted Shlonsky came in and he saw me hanging around a bunch of times.  He went downtown to sign up the girl at the Post Office and then went to a new facility.   Oar, Brown and Price had a discount operation where you paid cash and you bought stuff much cheaper, drugs, not drugs, proprietary…

Interviewer:  Medicines.

Marty:  …proprietary stuff like toothpaste…

Interviewer:  Aspirin…

Marty:  …Aspirin, mouthwash, all that was discounted in certain packs.  So, he took the girl to get her license for the post office they had in that store.  He said, “Why don’t you come along?” You had me get licensed too.  I said “Why? I don’t know.”  Then he hired me to work at Whittier and Parsons.  I didn’t have a license yet and I messed up on one part of the Board, had to take it over, so, of course I wasn’t registered right away, ‘til March, so I worked for him.  He said, “I’ll just pay you so much now” which was lower than I was probably making at Gray’s but, I wasn’t registered.  He said, “As soon as you get registered, I will add a hundred dollars a week to that salary,” which was 25 dollars a week more than Gray’s were paying back then.

Interviewer:  So, you got your pharmacist’s license.

 Marty:   License.

Interviewer:  What year would that have been, approximately?

Marty:  ’62, no, yeah, ’62.

Interviewer:  And so, you worked at the pharmacy…

 Marty:  Well, I got the license actually in March of ’63.

Interviewer:  And so, you worked at the corner of Parsons and Whittier.

Marty:  Right.

Interviewer:  Sloan’s Pharmacy.

 Marty:  Yeah.  I worked there, not all the time.  I worked there for them ‘til, ‘til September ’64 and in that time, I worked for them a couple years, I was running to Waverly, Ohio.  They had a store in Waverly and also, they had one in Fairborn, Ohio, Fairborn.

[Marty:  Did I turn it off?

Interviewer:  I don’t know.  Well, we’ll keep going.]

 Marty:  They had a store in Waverly, Ohio, and Fairborn, Ohio, and I was the go-to, the guy that had to run all the time.  In fact, Al Blank didn’t go to Waverly for six months bringing supplies and going down to the store because I was going.   Two, three times a week, I was going down there back and forth and driving home at night, fifty-mile round trip, fifty mile each way.  I would take gas money out of the re…cash register.

Interviewer:  So, this was a chain of pharmacies owned by…

 Marty:  Well, it was four, four…

 Interviewer:  … four that were owned by Mr. Shlonsky?

Marty:  and Mr. …

Interviewer: Blank.

Marty:  Al Blank.

Interviewer:  Al Blank.

Marty:  And so, I worked for them and it was a good association.  Anything they asked me to do, I would do it.  I never refused to work or do this or go to this town or that town.  I just never did, and Ted decided, he was getting tired being the, he was the registered pharmacist and Mr. Blank was the businessman, and the thing was, Ted was getting tired when they didn’t have anybody he had to go, ‘cause if I was in one store and something happened to another one out of town, he would have to run and work.  He was getting tired of it.

Interviewer:  So, this is a good example of Jewish business people from Columbus also having some stores and businesses in the outlying smaller towns.

Marty:  Well, out of, outside of Dayton and outside of Chillicothe, closer to Lucasville, down in that area there…

Interviewer:  Mm- hm., yep.

Marty:  …and I worked there and I got along fine with everybody.  In fact, both years I worked for them back and forth in different stores, even Fairborn, and then sometimes I worked on Parsons, I would stay in Waverly in a little ho’…motel there for a month, work three days, take one day off, come home, and go back the next day and work three more days, and Ted would fill in for me that one day I didn’t work, so, I don’t even know how many hours I put in.  I never got extra pay for it.   I just, my salary at the time.  Didn’t think about that ‘til just lately.

Interviewer:  Let me, let me switch gears and ask you, because you know…

 Marty:  …and I worked in Fairborn also back and forth on vacations, when somebody went on vacation.  I’d stay in a motel there.  I’d just take money for gas out of the cash register, leave a receipt, money for the hotel or motel, take the money to pay for it, leave the receipt.  It was all done, honest’ you know, on the basis of your integrity and honesty.

Interviewer:  Let me switch gears and ask you about delicatessens.  I’ve heard that you knew that there were a lot of either delicatessens in Columbus or Jewish food stores.

Marty:  Okay.  Okay.

Interviewer:  What was there, besides Martin’s Kosher Foods?

Marty:  Well, Martin’s was on Ellsworth and Livingston.  On Fulton Street you had two bakeries, not on Fulton, but across the street from Fulton Street School was Ruben’s Pharmacy.  In fact, my competitor in Fairborn, was Lou Ruben, the son of the owner of the bakery here.  He worked for Sloan’s originally, then opened his own store catty-corner and he was my competitor, but friendly competitor, and a friend, ‘cause we used to trade drugs.  You’re out of something, you give the guy what he needed and keep a list.  At end of the month, you’d settle up cash-wise.  I did it with two stores, them and Gallaghers across the street, but I carried the biggest inventory.

Interviewer:  So, your point is that the Jews, Jewish business people cooperated sometimes.

 Marty:  Well, even my friend in college, lived above me, he was in Dayton and he worked for Gallaghers and we were close friends all during school, non-Jewish, we traded drugs.  You know, you worked together with people.  There was no such thing you’re-a-competitor-I’m not-gonna’-do-anything-for-you.  It didn’t operate that way, at least, in Fairborn where I was, because you’re in a small town.  You want to help the customer and you did the best for the customer, that’s all.

Interviewer:  Now you were starting to talk about these two bakeries.

 Marty:  The two bakeries were Ruben’s and Schwartz. Schwartz Bakery was on Mound and Washington and next door, he was on the, there was a double – stores on the corner, like in a one building.  Schwartz Bakery was in one and there…they had a house two doors down where the baking was actually done.  They had the store where everything was but then they had the bakery itself where you went in late at night if you were picking up stuff or go in to buy something.  You’d go in that old, it had the ovens and everything and the bakery itself in there, in the middle of the night if you wanted to go, and then beside the two bakeries, you had Levine’s Fish Market on Washington between Fulton and Mound, and next door to Levine’s Fish Market, Levine also had live chickens, and two doors from Levine’s Fish Market was the shochet where they killed chickens.  My mother would go on Thursday morning and pick up fresh fish that Louie brought in and then buy a chicken.  They had a woman in the back room just flicking chickens after he had them killed, ‘cause you took them ritually over to the shochet two doors over.  He killed them ritually.  Then you brought them back to Levine’s and they plucked ‘em, all the stuff out of ‘em and then you took ‘em home and there was your chicken for the weekend.

Interviewer:  So, let me, let me understand exactly how this would work. If a woman, usually the woman in the household, would come in and say, “I want a chicken…”

Marty:  My mother and grandmother would go every Thursday.

Interviewer:  And would they pick out a live chicken?

Marty:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  Would they then pick up the chicken and walk over to the butcher who would kill it?

 Marty:  No, no, Levine’s would take it over.

 Interviewer:  But they would, the women would pick out a chicken…

 

Marty:  You’d just pick it out.  They would take it over there, kill the chicken, er, the ritual way of doing it, kosher way…

Interviewer:  Yes.

Marty:  …and then bring it back so, it was kosher, flick the chicken and all that.  Then when you’d bring it home, and cook it, you put kosher salt on it and everything and cook the chicken, and then we had fish on Thursday night.  It could be pike.  We even got all the different fish we needed for gefilte fish on the Holiday where I’ve got the grinder downstairs what I put on the chair to make the gefilte fish, you know, to grind it up, and then besides that, there was Center.  Larry Izeman’s father was a butcher in there.  Center Meat Market.

Interviewer:  It was called Center Meat Market?

Marty:  C-e-n-t-e-r.   I forget the guy’s first name. There was no name, all I remember was Center.  That was his name.  He had the market there.  There was a market and he had meat.

Interviewer:  What street was that on?

Marty:  Fulton Street, two doors this way from Washington. It was to the east of Washington, two doors on the south side of the street and just before him, next door was Restaurant Food Supply owned by the Bornsteins. Willy Bornstein’s father and his uncle owned that Restaurant Food Supply there in the building.

Interviewer:  Restaurant Food Supply.

Marty:  Right.  Say, had canned goods and all the stuff you sold to restaurants and all that and then Center Meats were right there and then you went over on Livingston Avenue and you had Mendlowitz [sp?] had a meat market between Parsons and Wager on the south side, on the, yeah, south side of the street.  He had meats there, Mendlowitz [sp?].

Interviewer:  Now these were kosher meat places.

Marty:  Kosher meat markets.

 Interviewer:  So, all their customers then were Jewish.

 Marty:  Well, yeah, nowadays you’d have, I guess, the Muslims go there ‘cause they want kosher type meat or they have their own stores now but back then those were all the Jewish markets. Then there was a Katz’s.  It became Katz’s at, between Ohio and Champion.  Right in the middle of the block was Katz’s Market.

Interviewer:  Between Champion and Ohio on what street?

 Marty:  On Livingston.

Interviewer:  On Livingston, Katz’s Market.

Marty:  And then that became, they sold out to Haas when they came here from Europe, a couple Haas, Haases.

Interviewer:  H-a-a-s?

Marty:  Yes.  They were eventually the family who got into the furniture business here and all that, same family, but there were two brothers that had Haas’s there and then you went down to Wilson.  At the corner there was Briar’s. [sp?] Mrs. Briar had a meat market.

Interviewer:  On Livingston.

 Marty:  Yes, Sir.  Her husband was deceased, but she kept the market going.  That was another market, kosher, right there at Wilson and Livingston, and then you went down to Ellsworth and there was Martin’s with his father working as the butcher in the back,’ cause my mother would walk.  During World War II, you didn’t take the car to go, from where we lived was two good long blocks and then two more blocks to go to market.  She would carry a bag or something, and she’d go to Martin’s every single day and even had a charge account there, and when Martin’s moved on Broad Street, my mother still had a charge account there, but we always had a charge because she always went in on Monday morning.  My dad left her money and she would pay her bill every Monday morning what she owed Martin’s, and then you had Brier’s, not Brier’s.  You already mentioned Briar.  Uh, Gold, uh, one more meat market, what’s his name?  He’s married to a Hirsch, a Dr. Gold…Gold…well, I’m trying to think.

Interviewer:  How ’bout a place called Hepps.

Marty:  Hepps was a delicatessen on Washing…well, no, I’ll think about what the Gold…their name started Gold… but they were German.  They came here, Manfred was a doctor.  His brother was a pharmacist and his father was the butcher and they were there on Wilson and Main.  They had a kosher market, so, that was the kosher markets.  That was all of them I can remember.

Interviewer:  And this would have all been in the Forties.

 Marty:  Forties, Fifties.

Interviewer:  But now Hepps was a delicatessen.

Marty:  Hepps, Hepps was a delicatessen and Hepps was on Washington and Main.  In fact, I remember running from the old Jewish Center for Hebrew School.  We’d run through the alley over to Main and the half a block to Hepps to buy a pickle.  It was a nickel and you reached in the barrel and got a pickle out and then ran back to Hebrew School or the Center, and that’s where Mrs. Hepps was.  Her husband was deceased.  She had two kids.  One of them was Barbara.  I was friends with her.  She was close to my age.  Then they moved out where, on Broad Street right here next to Panera. Next door to Panera was Hepps’s.

Interviewer:  Near in Bexley or close to Bexley?

 Marty:  Right outside the Bexley line and Gould was right there.  That center now where that Stan’s [Stav’s] restaurant…

Interviewer:  Gould and Broad and now…

Marty: Gould and Broad next to Panera was Hepps.

Interviewer:  Now there’s a place there called Stav’s.

Marty:  That’s what was in there now, and later on another one, but Hepps was right there and that’s all, that’s all I remember the delicatessens.  Hepps was kosher style, she didn’t consider herself, but it was the best corned beef in this town, pastrami.  It was even better than Martin’s or all the other.  I remember standing on Sunday morning in front of that delicatessen counter at Martin’s in both stores with a crowd of people.  You took a number so you’d know who’s next to be waited on.  Joe Metchnick was Martin’s brother-in-law and partner.  He was behind the delicatessen with a woman named Fanny who worked for him for years and they were at both places and you stood on Sunday morning to get everything, with a number, but Hepps was, their corned beef was the best and so was their pastrami, ‘cause somehow they cooked it.  Then they left it in a steamer, warm.  They’d take it out and slice it for you warm and you took it home.

Interviewer:   Now, you got your pharmacist degree in the early Sixties and you worked at Sloan Pharmacy at the corner of Parsons and Whittier…

Marty:  …but basically going to the other stores…

Interviewer:  … and going to their other stores…

Marty:  …when they needed somebody.

Interviewer:  Yeah, and then what happened in the, later in the Sixties?

Marty:  Well, ’64, I moved to Fairborn.  He asked me to go.  Ted and Al asked me to move there ‘cause Al’s nephew moved back to Cleveland with his wife. They had lived in Dayton.  They didn’t like living there. They wanted to be by family, so I moved there and went to work with the guy that was the manager.  For years, he worked for Ted all the way through World War II, and I worked with Ross Spinning there and they called him “Doc” ‘cause he was older.  I knew him as “Doc.”  Me, they just called Marty and I was a pharmacist there.  Actually, I cleaned up the store and did a lot.  In some ways I did a lot of stuff a manager should have done  but he didn’t do, and I just kept busy ‘cause my wife went to work at Wright State.  At that time, they only had one building and the dean, they had a secretary pool of four secretaries at Wright State and it was all in one building.  She worked there for all the professors and the deans.

Interviewer:  Well, now tell us about your wife. Where, what was, what’s your wife’s name and when did you meet her?

Marty:  Okay.  I met her in ’63, er’, ’62 I met her and then dated her on until the end of ’63 when we got married.  She was Roberta Lind from Zanesville, Ohio.

Interviewer:  Roberta Lind.

Marty:  L i n d.  Her grandfather knew that Ronnie Robins’ grandfather who was, I called him Moti Izeman. he was a brother-in-law of my mother’s side, my grandmother.  See, my grandfather on my mother’s side had two sisters.  He had Ronnie Robins’ grandmother, Ruchel, and then there was Eva, who was the Robins that came here, brought my dad here, and they were sisters of my mother’s father.

Interviewer:  So, the woman you married was a distant, distant, distant relation?

Marty:  No, she wasn’t related to me at all…

 Interviewer:  Okay. Okay.

 Marty:  …but I’m just saying that Izeman knew her grandfather…

Interviewer:  Ah.

Marty: …‘cause they worked on the railroad and he worked around Zanesville.  He got out of the railroad business, ended up, the grandfather, her grandfather, my wife’s grandfather married, got married.  He had a woman he was married to, Jewish, and they, he had two theaters, and ended up two theaters in Zanesville, plus a lot of commercial property including the Arcade where the people that have  –  the Cohens! Violet and her husband, Violet Cohen and her husband had a store, had the store on campus that had all the paraphernalia for Ohio State?  You know what I’m talking about?  The Cohens?

Interviewer:  Violet Cohen?  C-o-h-e-n?

Marty:  Yeah, and they had the jewelry store before they came to Columbus with their kids.

Interviewer:  I think their store was on Lane Avenue.

Marty:  It’s still there.  The son runs it. Anyhow, originally, they were in Zanesville in the Arcade Building that my wife’s grandfather owned.  That’s where the jewelry store was and my father-in-law was a dentist on the third floor in the Arcade.  The radio station was there and down in the basement was a pool room and that was at one building.  I know they also owned a furniture store building and they also owned a building where Omar Bread trucks, they had all the trucks for that area for Zanesville and everything.  They baked it here on Sheldon and Parsons but they brought it there and first floor is where the semis would drive in.  They had big elevator where they’d take the regular bread trucks that delivered to the neighborhood up on the second floor at night, park ‘em.  So, they owned that property.  So, there were a lot of property owned.

Interviewer:  So, there were, so, the fact that your wife was from Zanesville and her family was very active in business, is just further evidence that even though we think of small Ohio towns as not being very Jewish, a lot of it does have a big presence.

Marty:  There were Jews there.  I was married at Beth Abraham Synagogue on Blue Avenue in Zanesville, Ohio, December ’63, across from the high school.  In fact, just a few years ago, they closed it.  My daughter has a picture carrying, she was carrying the Torah and all that around for the closing ceremony of the synagogue.  They have since sold it, I think, but all the paraphernalia, I don’t know where the Torahs went and all that, but it was taken over by the Columbus Jewish Foundation, a lot of it, and so, maybe other shuls have gotten that Torahs and all the books and that kind of stuff, but my daughter was there with her mother.  I got divorced in ‘70 and ’80 to the same woman, married her twice.

Interviewer:  Wait. Wait.  Let me understand this.  You were married in the early Sixties.

 Marty: ’63.

Interviewer:  ’63.

Marty:  Got divorced in “70…

Interviewer:  Okay.

Marty:   …and then divorced her again in ’80.

Interviewer:  Wait.  Did you remarry?  You remarried her?

 Marty:  Yeah, yeah, mainly I think, because of the kids.  I don’t why but, I forgave her her sins.  Let’s put it that way.

Interviewer:  So, you remarried the wife that you divorced.

Marty:  I didn’t really re-marry her according to Rabbi Remer and Beth Abraham in Dayton.  That’s where I belonged when I left here.  He said, “You were still married ‘cause you never got a get, so, you just have to have a reaffirmation of your marriage.”  “Okay.”

Interviewer:  I see.

 Marty:  The second time I divorced her I got a get, so that way, ‘cause she married somebody she was dating when we were still married, found somebody, same thing the first time.  There were some things, you know.  Everybody goes through problems in their life and I had a good life.  I’ve been single for forty years, over forty years, since 1980, but in that time, I’ve dated some great Jewish women and went with them for a period of time. Always were really wonderful Jewish women.  I never really dated non-Jews.  I had a couple friends who were non-Jews, women, in Fairborn, but friends only. You know, nothing went on, no hokey pokey, or went with them, like, you know, trying to get a woman in bed or something like that.  They were just friends.  We were real good friends.  In fact, the girl that was the hair-dresser, she got divorced.  She was a little bit younger than me.  She had a couple kids and she knew my daughter, knew my family and I used to take her to dinner and we even went to the Pine Club, a big steak place in Dayton one time.  She paid the bill.  Another time I’d go to King Cole, I’d pay the bill.  You know, we were friends, went out, had good times together as friendship.

Interviewer:  So, you and your wife, you had a daughter.

Marty:  A daughter and two sons.

Interviewer:  And what are, what are their names?

Marty:  Andrea and Jeff were born the first time we were married, the second time around, Benjamin. Benjamin, right now, I got a picture of him as a little boy there about five, six years old, five years old, before.  When we got divorced the second time, his mother took him and left, left me in “her” house, ‘cause, I, both times, to show faith, I put the house in her name. A lot of guys wouldn’t have done that, and plus, the second time I had a…so she couldn’t get my business, if something happened again, so, but it did happen, but, I had three good kids, and Benjamin was born in the second time we got married.  Benjamin graduated high school, went to the Air Force Academy for four years, distinguished graduate, 11^th in his class, in that whole class of nine hundred and some, and this month, the 25^th, he’s retiring from the Air Force, at MacDill Air Force Base where he’s Vice Commander and Vice Commander of the Wing, of the Aero-squadron, which is air refuelers.

Interviewer:  So, his entire career has been in the military.

Marty:  Yes, and one time, when he was a Major, he was, he was secre…he worked for the Secretary of the Air Force and Liaison with Congress.

Interviewer:  Wow.

Marty:  And he also worked for a Four Star who was head of everything that moved, mobility that wasn’t tactical, anything else that moved, the, not the bombers but, all the, everything, the C-130’s and the C-5’s, and all that.  He worked for that General.  In fact, that General’s going to be there at the ceremony.

Interviewer:  Now, tell us about your two other children.

Marty:  Andrea, is a nurse, hard-worker.  Wherever she worked, they loved her and she gets mad about some of the young ones.  So, she worked at, here in Columbus, she got a job, when she couldn’t get a job here when she first came back. She got married.  She moved to Georgia when she graduated high school.  That’s where her mother was, but then she ended up going to nursing school, because she worked as a clerk in the emergency room at their sub, not the hospital but Peach County, outside of, Warner Robins had an emergency room.  She worked there and got interested in nursing school in Georgia, came back here, got a job in Dayton.  She went and talked to the woman at the ER at Children’s in Dayton and talked her into “Give me a chance,” and she learned pediatrics like you can’t believe.  Then she’s at the point now where she even taught it. She taught pediatrics to firemen, new beginning doctors, externs, interns when they came to Children’s so, she was in that group that did all the teaching of even new nurses and she still does that up until just lately.

Interviewer:  And your other daughter, or, your…

Marty:   My son.

Interviewer:  …another son?

Marty:   He works for UPS as happy as can be. He built a big beautiful log home in a township outside of Springfield, gorgeous.  He did all the designing and everything but he didn’t want to go to college.  He said, “I’m gonna’ work for UPS,” and he did. He started out loading trucks in the middle of the night, four o’clock in the morning, and then worked on a car lot as a lot boy so he had two jobs all the time he was waiting to get to be a UPS driver.  Now he does two jobs.  He has a regular route in Mechanicsburg, which is the easiest route out of Springfield ‘cause it’s a country route and then this week he’s driving [feesers sp?] which is your two semi-trailers hooked together.  He goes to Lexington back and forth.  He learned to do that.  He’s a spare.  They have two guys that drive those to Lexington and Louisville.  They have others that go to Indianapolis and somewhere else.   So, the regular guy on vacation of two of them, he handles that.  He takes off from his job and then goes over to feesers, so, he’s doing both.

Interviewer:  And that son’s name is?

Marty:  Jeffrey.

Interviewer:  So, you’ve raised three kids who have become independent and…

Marty:  …and done very well.  Jeffrey makes good money and his wife makes good money and he’s got a daughter.  She graduated, vet tech at St. Clair, and she’s doing that now, and my daughter’s, grandchildren, my grandchildren in, I’ve got six grandchildren.  Ben in the Air Force has three, – fourteen, thirteen and nine, and they’re only one year apart exactly – November 1^st and November 3^rd, but a year apart, and that’s, we’re going to celebrate all that when we go down there, and I really didn’t get in to my mother’s family.  My grandfather came here and my grandmother came here and, from Russia.  They were from Odessa.  My grandfather on my mother’s side, Menasseh, I’m named after him.  Menasseh is my Hebrew name and his name was Menasseh, so, he was a cattle buyer, like a commission man in the middle.  He would buy from the farmers, cattle for the czar.

Interviewer:  This is the father of your mother.

Marty:  …mother.  He was a cattle buyer that would buy cattle for the czar so, of course, they had to get out of there.  They did get out and but they ended up…

Interviewer:  You mean when you say they had to get out, you mean when the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 kicked the czar out.

Marty:  …meaning Russia.  Yeah.  They left.  They ended up, all I know is they ended up in Turkey, which is Constantinople and I don’t know what they call it now, but anyhow, that’s where my mother and her two brothers were, and finally around 1922, ’23, my mother came here to go to school, med school.  She would have been the first foreign student.  Not they let anybody can’t even talk English teach the American students who, ‘cause my son-in-law got very upset and quit.  He went to Franklin all the way through and then got a master’s in hospital administration and he is head of all, he was here in Dayton, at that group owned Miami Valley and all the others. Then he went to there in Charleston, South Carolina, lived on John’s Island.  He was head of the Strategies and Development and during the, they went through three presidents, during the last year with all the epidemic and everything.  He was running the hospital with all the COVID and everything else.

Interviewer:  Now, back to your mother, I know you explained earlier, that she wanted to go to Ohio State but they said, “Well, you have to speak English,” …

Marty:  Right.

Interviewer:  …so then she went and got…

Marty:  …learned English,

Interviewer:  …learned English, and so, what did she do?  Did she…

Marty:  Ended up marrying my father.

Interviewer:  So, she was a housewife or did she…

Marty:  Housewife all those years and when my grandparents came over here, I’m not sure when they came, but I know my grandfather died in, my mother’s father died in ’33, ‘cause I remember he, there were stories where he used to take my sister downtown and loved it on Saturday afternoons, and my grandmother lived my whole life, my mother’s mother lived with us, so, she would do all the cooking.  She was the cook in the house, my grandmother, plus when I was little, she could watch us.  If my mother had to go down to the store to cover for my dad if he had to go somewhere, he had to leave the store.  She had to learn to drive at like 39 and he had a car and a truck, and let’s see, so, then, they lived with us and ‘course my dad, grandmother, dad married, grandfather married a second time.  Her name was Anna, got married over here, and  there was all the brothers and sisters, and so…

Interviewer:  So, this kind of symbolized how families of several generations would live together back then…

Marty:  Yeah,

Interviewer:  …grandparents would live…

Marty:  Well, they lived with my parents ‘til my grandfather got throat cancer.  My dad remembers going to Joe Alexander, used to own the Desert Inn, and it was really a bootlegger down ‘n the South End, had Club Alexander.  It was during those days of bootlegging.  He was a bootlegger.  Mt dad would go to him and buy pure alcohol, not bootlegged where it’s made, because my grandfather had throat cancer, my mother’s father.  He would actually drink that stuff or whatever it was, pure alcohol, or mixed a little bit with something else so he could eat. ‘Cause of the cancer, he couldn’t eat, so he would drink vodka or that alcohol just so he could eat.  A little sip, a little of that to numb it and he could eat, but he died in ’33.  He’s buried at the old Ahavas Sholem and his sister is buried there and my grandmother.  Oh my grandmother that lived with us is buried right next to my mother and her two bothers who came here in ’41, and that’s what all this stuff is.

Interviewer:  Now, let me ask you this.  You are living here at  Eastmoor Boulevard in Eastmoor and you’ve lived here for…

Marty:  Since ’97.  I moved back from Fairborn.  I was there from ’64.  In may of ’65, Ted came to my dad.

Interviewer:  Ted Shlonsky.

Marty:  Ted Shlonsky came to my dad and offered my dad the opportunity to buy the store.  It was their best store out of four, but Ted wanted out and they made me a deal.  He didn’t even tell his partner who really, they tell me he had apoplexy when he found out what Ted did, getting rid of the store without even consulting him.

Interviewer:  The store in Fairborn.

Marty:  Right. It was their best store.  We had a cosmetic counter, cosmetician, front counter where we served food and the pharmacy, twenty…twenty-four hundred square feet and it was in there from, I bought the store in May of ’65, paid them off.  They said, “We’ll carry you.”  My dad lent me, somehow raised the money and I paid him interest, the whole time, ten percent interest.  He said, “Interest should only be five.”  I said, “You’re a part of the business.  You get ten percent,” and he made me final…quit paying him one time.  He said,” I have to pay too much tax now.  I don’t want to pay that,” but basically…

Interviewer:  So, you lived and worked in Fairborn for many, many years.

Marty:  Yeah, ‘til ’97.

Interviewer:  And you came back here.

 Marty:  …and came back here but the kids went to Sunday School at, we joined Beth Abraham immediately when we got to Fairborn, so, we lived in Fairborn but went to Dayton for services.  We had friends in Dayton, and non-Jewish friends in Fairborn, but always maintained Jewish friends, too.

Interviewer:   So, this house, though that you are now living in is the same house that your parents moved to with you as a child.

Marty:  In 1952, I was 18 years old, just finishing up at South High School.

Interviewer:  So, here you are, back in…

Marty:  In ’97.  I had to put my dad in ’96, we put him in Heritage House, hardest thing I ever did.  Nowadays, you would try to find somebody to take care of him, but my daughter was, lived here for a while and then, for two three years and they saved up.  They came here with nothing, thirty dollars.  Then when they got to Fairborn, driving here with a U-Haul and pulling a one jeep and driving the other, I gave them money so they’d have money for gas and everything else.  They stayed with me a day or two.  I think I gave them a couple hundred dollars back in ’90 so they’d have money when they got here.  They moved in with my dad so it’d be cheaper living.  He went to school and she got a job, couldn‘t find one here, came to Dayton, so she’d be in Dayton three days a week, off a day or two, whatever, come back here, then come back again,  stay in my house and worked a midnight shift eleven to seven at Children’s in Dayton until she finally found a job here at Children’s and she worked here and then also Fairfield Hospital for a while when they lived in Pickerington and then eventually moved to Dayton and she moved to Dayton Children’s and was there for years until she left.

Interviewer:  When you were a young child, you lived closer to Parsons Avenue where all the Jews, many of the Jews lived and…

Marty:  We weren’t that close.  We were on Carpenter and Whittier, near Whittier.

Interviewer:  Carpenter, yes, Okay.

Marty:  We went to Lilley Avenue…

Interviewer:  …and then in the 50’s, you moved to Eastmoor.

Marty:  ’52.

Interviewer:  Yeah, and still Eastmoor had a lot of Jews and Bexley, of course, had a lot of Jews…

Marty:  Well…

Interviewer:  I wonder, what I want to know is, you’ve seen the Jewish community disperse some because now we have Jews living in places they never lived in before: New Albany,  Arlington, Grandview, Clintonville…

Marty:  Right. Back then…

Interviewer:   …many places.  I wonder what your feelings are about that.

Marty:  Well, that’s good to be all over because now you have more shuls.  Look at all the shuls you’ve got now.  The ones that live up in Arlington and Grandview, and so forth, they probably belong to the shul on Olentangy.

Interviewer:  Beth Tikvah.

Marty:  Beth Tikvah and go there.  In fact, I know Mim, Mimi, she belongs there.

Interviewer:  Mim Chenfeld.

Marty:  Yes. She goes there.

Interviewer:  Yes.  So, you think this has been a good change.

Marty:  Well, it’s been good but even when I was, after I left here to go to college and then the Army, this was still my base of operation. Anybody looking for me, even up to ’97 or even now, they could come to the same address or same phone number from ’52 to find me.  I could always be found because of this address, so, my dad went in Heritage House.  We kept the house and I moved back here, and when my dad passed away, the house became mine and my sister got all the money, everything, and that was it.  I was happy with the house.

Interviewer:  So, tell me about your feeling…

Marty:  [?] here.

Interviewer:  …your feelings of Jewishness.

 Marty:  Okay.

Interviewer:  What I’d like to know is do you…

 Marty:  I’m not Orthodox.  I’m not ultra-Orthodox, but I’m Jewish.  I joined a shul immediately when I got here.  I always felt I’m in a generation, I’m eighty-seven years old. I’m in the generation that most of us joined a shul. Well, until I got married, I didn’t really join.  I just went with my parents to Tifereth.  Then afterwards, my parents got upset about something and they started going back to Agudas so they went to Agudas where they could still sit together and then my dad kept going to Agudas after my mother passed away in ’70.  He was retired when she, in ’70 he wanted to retire and they were going to spend and have a good life together.  This was February.  April, find out she had lung cancer.  She wasn’t really a smoker that much.  She smoked [puff sounds] Blow it out and didn’t really inhale.  I used to steal her cigarettes when I was thirteen, fourteen years old.  They were stale so, you know how much she smoked, but she had lung cancer and passed away and my dad retired.  In fact, he used to pick up, he went to shul every day, in the morning and evening, when he retired and have people there, and made friends there and all the people he knew, and then he even took, when Ted got cancer and couldn’t do for himself, Shlonsky, my dad would pick him up and bring him to shul.  He also picked up another man on Roosevelt, older man and bring him to shul, so, he did that while he was able to,

Interviewer:  So…

Marty:  …bring others to shul.

Interviewer:  So, are you a member of a synagogue right now?

 Marty:  Tifereth.

 Interviewer:  Tifereth Israel.

Marty:  I joined. I was a member in Dayton until the day I left to come back here.  I sent a letter in and I got a letter from the rabbi from Dayton at that time, Press, telling me how he, surprised he was that I’d left and he was really going to miss me and good luck to me in Columbus, and I immediately got back here and rejoined Tifereth again.  I joined here before I left.  I had to resign when I went to Fairborn, ‘cause when I got married, I joined Tifereth.  Then, when I got back here in ’97, I rejoined and I’ve been a member ever since.

Interviewer:  What are your feelings about being Jewish?

Marty:  I was born a Jew.  I’ll die a Jew.  I only dated Jewish women.  That is because my mother and grandmother so hollered and carried on, “Jewish, Jewish, Jewish.  Don’t go with shiksas, don’t go with shiksas, don’t do this, don’t do that.”  I always went with Jewish girls.  In fact, one girl came here one time from Ohio State, was a blond.  My grandmother saw her in the driveway and started carrying on.   I said, “Bauba, [pronounced Bauba].  I says, “Her name is Goldstein, from Cleveland.  She’s Jewish.”  But, they, they indoctrinated me so much.  My two uncles, my mother’s brothers married non-Jews.   A lot of my dad’s brothers married non-Jews.  We stayed completely Jewish and I would not consider it.  I would consider it an insult to my father and mother if I would have married a non-Jew.  And I felt Judaism, I brought my kids up in Jewish, Judaism.  My son-in-law, my daughter’s husband, he turned Jewish. Now, Jeffrey’s married to a non-Jew.  They don’t really have any religion but anybody ask him, he’s Jewish.  He comes in every year, or goes with his mother to Springfield shul or he’d come here to be with me on Rosh Hashana or Kol Nidre from Springfield.  My son is raising his kids Jewish.  His wife, I would say is half-Jewish, but she was Jewish, her mother was Jewish so that makes her Jewish and he raised his kids Jewish and she really, her, my grandson’s wife that’s in the Air Force, her mother’s grandfather was a rabbi in Galveston, Texas. She married a non-Jew and her father started an accounting firm and her husband went into the accounting firm and they sold the firm later on when he retired so, my daughter-in-law’s father sold his firm, but they raised the kids Jewish, and you know, they didn’t really have much religion in the house with her growing up, but when they were in Little Rock, Arkansas, they came back from Germany.  There was a Chabad rabbi there and they became very close with him and his family.

 Interviewer:  I don’t want to talk about politics but I want to just let you talk about this:  do you, do you have an optimistic feeling about the Jewish community, especially here in Columbus?  We hear a lot of talk about anti-Semitism being on the rise.  I just wonder.  What is your, are you hopeful that things are good for the Jewish people?

Marty:  I hope so.  I hope so.  I always had a decent life working with Black people or Negroes as I called them.  I never used the “N” word as you, people talk, not once in my life.  I was brought up, I used to eat in a Black restaurant on Hozak Street when I’d deliver his produce in the mornings working for my dad.  I’d be the only White person in there.  A guy came in drunk and said, “What’s that White boy doing in here?”  and Mr. Bruce came out in his chef’s outfit and his hat and everything else.  He had a big butcher’s knife in his hand, and says, “You don’t like it?  You get out of here. You’re drunk. You get out of my restaurant.  That boy can come and eat here any time he wants,” he says, and I knew everybody.  Everybody knew me. I was protected.  If I went and delivered an order, I was fifteen years old on Hozak, at eleven o’clock at Christmas time on Hozak Street, I met a kid that went to school with me on the outside talking to him.  People in the house would look out and say, “Little Abe, are you okay?”   I’d say, “This is a school friend of mine.  I’m fine.”  So, I got looked after very well in the South End.  I felt very safe down there.

Interviewer:  So, you have fond memories of growing up Jewish in Columbus.

Marty:  Yes, I do, ‘cause I went to the Jewish Center.  We were there all the time.  We bowled there.  We were there every night. By the time I was fourteen I had my driver’s permit.  All my gang got in my truck and we went to the Center.  I wasn’t supposed to be out driving at night, but I drove.  Never got a ticket or got picked up for anything, but we had transportation.  At night or evenings, we were always at the Jewish Center where there were Jewish girls.  Always we dated Jewish girls or went with Jewish girls.  I never got serious with a Jewish girl ‘til my wife or a couple, once, one before that when I was in college, but before that I was friends with all the girls, always considered a friend. “You want to go out?” Somebody would call me. “Marty, let’s go to a movie?”  A couple of the girls would go there or guys, they’d all get together as people, just groups getting together and we went.  That’s all.  My crowd.

 Interviewer:  Marty Robins, it’s been a pleasure talking with you.  This is Bill Cohen from the  Jewish Historical Society of Columbus, and we’ve been talking to Marty Robins here at his home on this June 9^th, 2021.

Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein