The other week at the resthome, this one resident who's a retired professor started talking about back when she was living in Texas teaching Hebrew.
She was born and bred in upstate New York, and she had gotten some degrees and was a Hebrew teacher, and she had been looking for the best-paying Hebrew teaching job in the U.S. that she could find, it didn't matter where, since she was wanting to save up some money so she could go live in Israel.
And, she ended up at a synagogue in Texas that was more like a country club than a synagogue, she said.
She said that her first day on the job, she walked into her classroom, and there was this (big) (black) woman dressed in all white standing there inside, and the woman introduced herself and welcomed her and was like, "I'm your maid."
And, the retired professor said that she just kind of balked and made some excuse and scurried back to the principal's office, where she saw the principal, this guy named "Pinkus" who everyone called "Pinky."
"Pinky!", she was like, "There's a woman in my classroom, and she says she's made maid!".
"Welcome to Texas," he was like.
She also said that after she met her husband and they had kids and they ended up staying in Texas, she had a (black) babysitter and one day she suggested that she take the kids down to the local McDonald's, only she couldn't, she could only get food to-go through this window they had for black people.
"It felt like another country," she was like, and she said that she didn't like it at all.
She also said that Jack Ruby was a member of that synagogue that she worked at in Dallas, though she didn't really know him, just in passing.
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