Jim Meyer

Marcus: This is Susan Marcus talking, and we’re going to talk about a variety of things. We’ll follow up the next time if something occurs to either Jim or to me that we want to pursue. Let’s start out talking about you, Jim. What do you want to talk about in terms of who you are, bio?
MEYER: Why don’t we start by talking about how I got to Oregon?

Marcus: Good.
MEYER: I wasn’t born here. Briefly, I was born in Boston, lived in New Hampshire until I was about 12, moved to Boston, went to Brookline High School, where my wife Lora went. I went to Harvard College, met Lora there [added later: when I was a freshman and she was a junior in high school]. We dated for a few years. After I graduated, I spent six months in the Army. Ten days before I started Harvard Business School, Lora and I were married. She was about to start her senior year at Wheaton College. She commuted for an hour three times a week, each way. I went to business school for two years, she worked for Polaroid the second year, and we decided that we wanted to spend a year or so in the west. At that time everybody who went to Harvard Business School wanted to work for big companies, but I wanted to work for a small company and have my own company someday.

Marcus: Was it the Hewlett-Packard model? Was that the business school model at that time?
MEYER: Hewlett-Packard wasn’t a huge company then. The people wanted to work for Dow Chemical or Ford Motor Company. They didn’t want to work for General Motors, which didn’t have a good relationship with the school. They were at Procter & Gamble. You could work for these big companies, get management training. I wanted to work in a small company.

Marcus: Why did you decide that?
MEYER: I just wanted to. I didn’t want to be in a family business, at least not in my family. I wanted to have my own company. I thought, “If I can get to a small company either now or later, I’ll do that.” I just thought it would be worth a try. So I got a job offer from a home-builder in Portland. His name was Dwight Haugen, at Wedgwood Homes. He invited us to come out. We wanted to be in San Francisco. Everybody wanted to be in San Francisco. Portland, as you can see on the map, is very close to San Francisco — from Boston [laughs]. So we just came out. They didn’t pay our way; we just came out. We started working. Lora was pregnant with Mark when we drove cross-country. I worked for Wedgwood Homes for a few months, and then I got a freaky opportunity to buy a company. I was 24 years old. Buy a company, an old-line industrial supply business specializing in industrial rubber products. Buy it essentially without any money and pay for it out of profits. We thought we should do this; we had nothing to lose. All we had was a car and a baby and $1,500. So we took advantage of the opportunity and it worked, and we’ve been here 45 years this coming July.

Marcus: It’s really an amazing story when you tell it, is it not? Did you do a Jewish checkup on Portland when you knew — did Lora’s family do a Jewish checkup?
MEYER: No, we didn’t. It was hard enough to do a checkup on Portland. I could only find two articles about Portland. One of them had to do with some testimony — Bobby Kennedy’s labor racketeering committee — that the Teamsters were dominating Portland, Oregon. And then there was an article about the Rose Festival. That was all we could find out about Portland, Oregon. So we came out [laughs]. But we kept kosher. The people I worked for were not Jewish, but one of them knew someone who was Jewish [laughs], and so he was going to connect Lora with this woman who would tell her all about everything Jewish. Of course, she knew very well. I remember we came on Fourth of July weekend. We actually came the weekend that Arden and Lois [Shenker] were married. I don’t know if you knew that.

Marcus: No, I didn’t realize that.
MEYER: Of course, we weren’t invited.

Marcus: I’m sorry [laughs].
MEYER: I think they were married on the third, and we arrived on the second. So we came on a Friday or a Saturday, and Sunday morning we went down to old South Portland, before urban renewal, 1960. We kept kosher, so we needed to find a kosher butcher, and we went in to, I guess it was Korsun’s. It was the grocery store there. There were some people sitting around the pickle barrel, literally, and talking about the butchers. There were two Jewish butchers, and they told us — Rabbi Kleinman was one of the people there. We met him . . .

Marcus: At Korsun’s?
MEYER: At Korsun’s. It was Rabbi Kleinman; it was not Matty Kleinman. I remember they said there were two Jewish butchers, but there was really only one. And why is there only one? Well, there’s Mr. Schnitzer, he’s the Jewish butcher. The other guy, “Let’s put it this way,” they said, “there was one cow and four livers” [laughs]. So we started buying meat from Mr. Schnitzer. We met a few Jewish people. We went to the synagogue. Rabbi Stampfer was on sabbatical. We knew we might need a bris because Mark was going to be born in October and it was July. So we started going to Ahavai Sholom, which was the Conservative synagogue. The first night there, of course, we met someone we had gone to Brookline High School with who was in the military here. His name was David Margolis. He was in the Air Force and he was stationed here. So we met him and we got to know people, and people were very nice to us. We had belonged to a very large synagogue in Boston, Lora’s parents had — my parents lived outside of Boston — where the rabbi was very cold and formal. And it was a large organization.

Marcus: This was in Brookline?
MEYER: In Brookline. It was actually the synagogue that Rich and Erika later went to.
We never had a close relationship with the rabbi. So we went to a couple of synagogues, but basically we were waiting for the Conservative rabbi to come back so we could get a feel for how this was going to be. And one day Lora called me up at my office and she said, “I got a call from the Conservative rabbi, Rabbi Stampfer. He’s back from sabbatical, and they invited us to their home tonight.” So we were stunned and shocked and delighted. And that began a long relationship with the Stampfers, who had three little boys. I don’t think Nehama had been born yet, maybe she was five years old or something, but Elana was not. So that’s how we got started with the Jewish community.

Marcus: Who was the woman to whom you were referred?
MEYER: Her name was Ann Gerstenfeld. Do you know her?

Marcus: No.
MEYER: I think she belonged to Temple. She gave Lora some background, but she seemed to be somebody who was not heavily involved, but a participant. So she knew what she knew and she was helpful, but after a while — among the first people we met, we met people like Vic and Toinette Menashe who were very nice and went to our synagogue. We met Vic Levy. We met people like Herb and Ella Ostroff and Phil and Felicia Albert. We met a lot of newcomers as well; newcomers meet newcomers a lot. And so we got involved in the synagogue. They had what were called “circle groups” that were groups of ten or 12 couples who’d meet once a month with Rabbi Stampfer at someone’s home. It created many social groups. We got to know people that way.

Marcus: So Rabbi Stampfer was kind of the spoke of the wheel that provided your . . .
MEYER: He was. He made us feel very welcome and the congregation made us feel welcome, so we went fairly often. He did Mark’s bris. We knew hardly anybody at the time that Mark was born.

Marcus: To invite?
MEYER: To invite. We assumed you needed a minyan for a bris. He explained to us that you don’t. I don’t remember who the doctor was. I think it was the urologist.

Marcus: Arnold Rustin?
MEYER: Arnold Rustin.

Marcus: He did Hank’s bris as well.
MEYER: Did he? And I think he did Tom’s. Phil Albert did Richard’s. He was a friend of ours by then. We saw his son Michael this week, who is a doctor still living in Portland, a very nice young man.

Marcus: So the synagogue formed the basis for . . .
MEYER: The basis for our getting to meet people. And then, the other way we met a lot of Jewish people was within a couple years Lora was invited to join the book club. And you were in the book club, and Audrey was in the book club, and Renee was in the book club, and Naomi was in the book club. Was Lorraine Rose in the book club? There was a group of women who were that age, and Lora got to know them. And Lois. Well, Lois was not back in town yet. They were at Yale Law School.

Marcus: How did you meet Arden and Lois? When they came back?
MEYER: When they came back. Everybody said, “Oh, Arden and Lois, these wonderful people, are coming back.” Sylvia was in the book club. So then, Audrey and Mort, one day — by then we lived on Woodside Drive, which was right behind Jesuit High School. Toinette and Vic lived on Arrow Wood, and they moved. Toinette and Vic moved to 88th off Jamieson, just a couple of blocks away, and Audrey and Mort Zalutsky bought Vic and Toinette’s home. They had cherry trees in the backyard. Some kind of fruit trees, I think they were cherry trees. And Lora said, “This woman I met at the book club and her husband live near us, and they have this cherry tree and they invited us over to pick cherries Sunday.” So we went over to pick cherries and that’s when I met Mort, and we’ve been best friends ever since that day.

Marcus: That’s terrific.
MEYER: So a successful lawyer, and I was his first client.

Marcus: I love it [laughs]. It’s a fact he’s successful. So now how old are you? You were 24 years old when you . . .
MEYER: I was 24. I’ll be 69 next week.

Marcus: So when this was occurring, you’re 26 maybe?
MEYER: 26, 27.

Marcus: Okay. And what’s the next step?
MEYER: The company that I bought, by the way, I kept. It worked out. So I got it paid for, and we really liked Portland, and it was a great place to raise children. We had three sons, still have three sons. I kept that business for 22 years. So then . . .

Marcus: The fire destroyed it?
MEYER: Well, no. The fire destroyed it — let’s see, it was 1961 when I first became involved, ’63 I exercised my option. It was at Northwest Fifth and Davis. In 1970, we had the fire.

Marcus: Becky was born that day, on the Fourth of July.
MEYER: Becky was born on the Fourth of July in 1970. The fire was on Memorial Day, 1970.

Marcus: Right.
MEYER: Becky was born when we were painting our tree house in the backyard. And Lora called down, “Susie had her baby!” [laughter]. So we moved [added later: the business after the fire]. I had gotten into a wholesale hardware business. We had bought May Hardware and Honeyman Hardware, two old-line hardware businesses. The idea was that we would take two companies that were not doing well and put them together and have something that would work well. Of course, what we had on our hands was an enormous disaster, so we had liquidated that. We had paid all the debts. We had sort of folded it into the corporation, the healthy company, so we could continue to pay off the creditors.

We had part of an empty building on Northwest Yeon, and after the fire we just moved into the partially empty building we had. We had a tenant for most of that building, which was Frito-Lay, and they had spent a lot of money fixing up their part of it. Our insurance company ultimately bought out their lease so could move in and we wouldn’t be homeless, so we could get our business going again. It was a 50,000 square foot building, so we didn’t need all that space, but we kept that building and eventually bought it. That was the first real estate we bought.

Marcus: So now we’re in 197- . . .?
MEYER: 1970. And by then, I was the president of the Jewish Federation. It was either ’70 or ’71.

Marcus: How did that happen? You walked in one day and they said, “Would you like to be president?”
MEYER: No, I think it took a little longer than that, but not much [laughs]. First of all, I wasn’t ambitious to do things. I had a business and I had . . .

Marcus: Family.
MEYER: I had three young children, and I had a wife who wasn’t working, who was doing some volunteer work. We went to the Vermont Hills Playschool, and Lora was the president of that, and she was involved in urban tours. I had been on a couple of synagogue committees, and I had been on the board of the synagogue. I wasn’t much involved in Federation. I was solicited by Federation. I was a small giver. Stanley Marcus used to get me to take some cards and used to solicit me. He still reminds me that one year I said to him, “I used to have a lot of time but no money, and in the future I expect to have a lot of money but no time. Right now I have no time and no money” [laughs]. But he got me to take some cards, and I did some of that. And you used to have some people at your home. So I got a little involved in Federation, Young Leadership things and their events. I remember we went to Palm Springs once for an event, for a UJA weekend, and . . .

Marcus: We went to San Francisco once.
MEYER: We went to San Francisco. Was it at the Fairmont?

Marcus: Yes. It was a pro bono arrangement; it was paid for, and so we didn’t pay for the Fairmount. Do you remember that dinner we had in San Francisco? It cost $80 for eight of us, and we couldn’t figure out where to get the money. It was the most . . .
MEYER: Who paid for it?

Marcus: All of us.
MEYER: We dug out about ten bucks each.

Marcus: Yes [laughs].
MEYER: Per couple, not per person. I had forgotten that, but I remember it was at the Fairmont. You had Leonard Bell. Let’s see, Stanley and Arden were in the Young Leadership Cabinet, and Leonard Bell was the national chairman of the Young Leadership Cabinet. He traveled around the country. He was a small businessman from Lewiston, Maine. He and his brother had a family business. I had always thought that the people that do these things were from some other planet and not like me. Leonard Bell was the first sort of national figure who came to town and talked to us in your mother’s living room. And I thought, “This guy’s like me, and he thinks this is important.” I remember he talked about how we had to buy Jews out of Romania, and I was very moved by that. I thought, “Maybe this is something that I need to pay attention to.” That was really the first time that anything like that registered.

I think that night I also met Hal Saltzman. I don’t remember whether he was the president or the campaign chair. Hershal was president and Hal was campaign chair, and then when the Six-Day War came along, Hershal and Hal and a couple of other people had just stepped forward and had worked night and day and . . .

Marcus: Now we’re talking 1973.
MEYER: 1967. The Six-Day War. Did I say Yom Kippur War?

Marcus: No, you said Six Day War.
MEYER: 1967. That was before Moe Stein came to town. I think he came right after the Six-Day War. I may be wrong.

Marcus: No, that’s right. Because Hershal was managing this huge, crucial time period without . . .
MEYER: Without an executive director. Cliff Josephson had left. So anyway, I met these people, and I knew them from the synagogue. I knew Hershal and Shirley, and I liked Hershal, of course. And I met Hal that night at your home. I was very taken with Hal. He encouraged me — Hal reached out a lot to people. So he saw me, and I was young and I was interested. He said, “We have to get together.” And we had lunch or something, he sort of dragged me in. So that was going on.

But I guess before that was the JEA. Somebody had asked me to be on the board of the Jewish Education Association, which was the afternoon Hebrew school. And that had been in Portland for 75 years, I guess. It was a real community Hebrew school; it was not an inter-congregational school. It was really a community school just like the community center was a community center. There were Sunday schools at the synagogues, but there were not Hebrew schools, so everyone went there. I was on the board, and I think I missed the first few meetings. And then there was the crucial meeting that I came to where there was the emergency meeting that Asher Ettinger, the executive, called, so I went to the meeting. Arden was on the board, Jack Schwartz was on the board, Stan Loeb was on the board, Susie was on the board, I think Mort was on the board, a number of people I knew but had never really worked with. I knew them socially. I don’t remember who else. I remember Bill Galen was — I think Harold Schnitzer might have been president then. Maybe Bill was president afterwards.

I remember the meeting was called because school was about to start and we had dropped from 155 students to 110 students, and it was clear whose fault that was. It was the rabbis. The rabbis were not requiring boys to go to Hebrew school to have a bar mitzvah. They allowed them to learn these things by rote and perform like monkeys, we were told [laughs]. All of us were members of synagogues, and it was our responsibility to tell the rabbis that they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. I was listening to this, and I thought, “What’s wrong with this picture? And why are these kids not coming? The rabbis can’t be discouraging them from coming. They must not like it.” So then I asked, “Why are people not coming? Why should they be coming?” One rabbi who was on the board said, “If you don’t know the answer to that . . .”

Marcus: It was impertinent of you.
MEYER: “. . . you shouldn’t be on this board.” I wasn’t sure I should be on the board anyway [laughs]. But then other people said, “Let’s talk about that.” So as we talked about it, it became clear that maybe there were some issues, maybe it wasn’t the place that people liked to go and loved to send their children to. Maybe there was a question about whether it was up-to-date and doing everything right. So that led to some involvement in JEA, and of course, around that time Jonathan Newman — Jonathan Newman was a good lawyer in town. He was later on the school board, but he wasn’t yet. He was very well respected. He was a vice president of the Federation at that time. He was very active in Temple and in civil liberties issues. I didn’t know Jonathan.

Jonathan called me one day and said that he was the chair of the education committee of the Jewish Federation, and that there was a small group that had been grappling with the question of admitting Hillel. They had started with the question of whether Hillel Academy, as the new day school, should be admitted as a constituent agency. They’d been meeting for about a year and a half and had not gotten anywhere. Someone had told him that I might be a good member of that committee. I didn’t know Jonathan and he didn’t know me, but we met and I said, “I’d be glad to do that.”

So then I became involved with Susie Marcus and Jack Schwartz and Stan Loeb and Arden Shenker and — who else was on that? That was a small committee. That was a subcommittee of the education committee. We did a lot of analysis. It seemed to me that what had happened was that it was the typical situation where the question had come up about whether the school should be admitted. And the committee decided they couldn’t look at that question in a vacuum, they had to look at it in context of Jewish education in Portland, and so that’s why it became such a huge project. Hershal was the president. He was becoming impatient that nothing was happening, and he wanted something to happen. We met for quite a while.

Marcus: Hershal was the president of the Federation.
MEYER: Hershal was the president of the Federation at that time. So we met for a while, and our subcommittee decided that Hillel Academy was not quite ready to be admitted as a constituent agency. They weren’t really a community agency yet. There were some people who were committed to that idea, who were fanatics of one kind or another in our view, who had started this, and they had no interest beyond that school.

Marcus: That was the Torah Umesorah connection.
MEYER: The Torah Umesorah connection. That’s all they were interested in. And what we didn’t realize at that time was that all progress depends on fanatical people who are committed to something. We thought it was reasonable people who made things happen [both laugh]. So we reported back to the whole education committee, and that was about 20 people. I remember that Eve Rosenfeld was on that, and I remember that Rabbi Geller was on that and Rabbi Stampfer was on that.

But Rabbi Geller was outraged that we thought what we thought. He called us the Harvard, Yale, Stanford bunch of elitists who didn’t understand the importance of Jewish education for children in Portland, Oregon. He persuaded the committee to vote against us, and so the whole committee, which knew nothing about this stuff in our view, overruled us. Then it was my job as the chair of the education — oh, during this process, Jonathan Newman had run for the school board and had been elected to the school board. As a result, he had decided to resign from his office with the Federation.

Marcus: He was going to be the incoming president.
MEYER: Yes. He was the vice president, and he was going to be the president. He resigned because he didn’t have time. I don’t think he thought it was a conflict of interest; it was just too much. So he resigned from the board, and I became the chair of the education committee. When we were overruled, I then had the job of going to the Federation board. It was my job to persuade them to do what we had voted to do, which was to admit Hillel Academy, and we were successful in doing that. By then Moe Stein was the executive director, and he was a great executive director.

I remember that one of the surprises I had was that Harold Schnitzer, who had been the president of the JEA and felt very strongly about Jewish education, was not as supportive of Hillel Academy at that time. And I was very concerned because a lot of people looked to Harold as a very strong and knowledgeable person. In that discussion, Harold said, “It’s obvious that this is a coming thing, and it’s obvious that people have looked at this and think it should it happen, and therefore it’s appropriate to do it.” I was very surprised and very impressed that he took that view. So by then . . .

Marcus: You’re now the chair of the education committee of the Federation.
MEYER: As the chair of the education committee, I was on the allocations committee, of which Henry Blauer was the chairman, and it was much smaller than it is today, a very small group.

Marcus: Let’s just review the time again. This was in . . .?
MEYER: This was about 1969 by then, ’68. There were a lot of people. There was a big gap in leadership, I think in all communities. That’s one of the reasons that the National Young Leadership Cabinet had started. The people who were Henry Blauer’s age, who were 15 years older than we were, who had come out of World War II, whose parents had been very active in their communities and very active in supporting Jews in Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel, when their children came out of the war, they didn’t want to do this stuff. They wanted to build their lives; they had lost years and wanted to get going. So in Jewish communities all over the country, there were a small number of people who were active leaders. Milt Carl was one of them and still is, and Henry Blauer was, still is, and there were some others. But there weren’t enough.

When I got on the Federation board with others of my cohort, who had been involved in education and been on the education committee, we were younger. I was the treasurer and Mel Peters was the vice president. Mel Peters was going to be the president after Hal Saltzman. Mel was a very dynamic, aggressive, bright guy and very generous, a lot of fun. Mel ran into business difficulties. I was having business difficulties too, but Mel had major reverses. He left town shortly after that. He moved to Los Angeles. But for a while he was a car dealer and did some other things. So he dropped out and all of a sudden I was in line.

I remember that Jack Olds was the chairman of the nominating committee and I was on the nominating committee. And I was 35 years old. Jack was a former president of the Federation and he had spent a lot of years in leadership in the community and was very well respected by lots of people, including me. When Moe pointed out that Mel wasn’t going to be president, so Jim was going to be the president, Jack said, “Can’t we get somebody else?” [laughs]. He thought we should have somebody with a little more experience and a little more maturity than a kid who was the same age as his kid, who in his view was — Michael was the treasurer of the Jewish Education Association for a lot of years, and Michael was still single and Jack was still single in those days, Jack Schwartz.

So I did become the president and had a great partnership with Moe. I loved working with Moe. One of the vice presidents was Gilbert Schnitzer, and one of the vice presidents was Vic Menashe, and they were very cooperative and supportive. I remember Stuart Durkheimer was on the board. You were on the board then, and Arden was on. A lot of the same people who had been on the education committee were on the board then. I don’t think we did anything earth shaking, but we had pretty good stewardship, and the campaign kept growing and we had a lot of young people involved. Then I just sort of hung around the Federation for the next 35 years in various capacities. Usually people are campaign chairs before they’re president, and I wasn’t a campaign chair before I was president. I was campaign chair about 15 years after I was president.

Marcus: Let’s take a brief break and see where we are at this point. [Recording is paused and then resumes.] Okay, we’re back.
MEYER: So when I first got involved with the Federation, the Federation used to meet primarily at the old Jewish Community Center, which was on Southwest 13th near what is now the freeway near Portland State. During my presidency, we started the new Jewish Community Center, now the old Jewish Community Center, in Hillsdale, and Southwest Capitol Highway was built. And Harold Schnitzer . . .

Marcus: Do you remember the date on that?
MEYER: I think it was dedicated in ’71.

Marcus: That’s what I think.
MEYER: Harold Schnitzer was the campaign chair, and Milt Carl was very active. They had a major campaign, and they sold the old Center and they still didn’t raise enough, so ultimately that’s why it became the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, because several years later when Stan Geffen was the president of the Center, he was instrumental in persuading Harry Mittleman to pay off the mortgage for them. But at the time they were building the Center, Hillel Academy was in a stew.

Initially, the school revolved between synagogues, between Neveh Shalom and Shaarie Torah. It had spent most of its years at Shaarie Torah, but they wanted to be in a community place, and they wanted to be in the Jewish Community Center. And the Jewish Community Center was going to build what they called club rooms, and the Federation people wanted them to be known as classrooms because we more interested in the educational value than in the social value. Both were important. So we asked Hillel Academy to let us know if what was going to be built would be adequate for their needs. They said that it would take four more classrooms than what was in the plan for that to be built. We determined that four more classrooms would cost $60,000 total, $15,000 each.

So my job as Federation president was to go to the Center board and ask them what it would take for them to be willing to build the additional four classrooms so that it would be possible for Hillel Academy to move in. We knew that it was going to be an issue because they hadn’t raised enough money to begin with. We assumed they would probably say that what it would take would be for Federation to raise the money or put in the extra $60,000. But when I got to the meeting with Moe Stein, we said, “What would it take for you to be willing to do that?” Basically, the board came back and said, “No how, no way are we going to have this as a school. This a community facility; it is not a school. They can have their own school. And besides that, we don’t have the $60,000.” After the building was built, a year later they added tennis courts, which cost $60,000. Of course, years later Hillel Academy became the Portland Jewish Academy and merged with the Jewish Education Association, moved into the Center, built a major new wing. It is still there and is the major tenant in the building.

One thing I wanted to mention, when Gilbert Schnitzer was the vice president, we were driving to a meeting one day. We used to come over the hill because we both worked on Yeon Avenue, and we had an executive committee meeting and I was driving him there. We came up Vista Avenue, and we went by the home below the Rose Garden where the Schnitzer family had lived, where he had grown up. He told me that his family had lived in old South Portland, and that his father, Sam Schnitzer, had come home one day and told his wife that he had bought a new house up on Vista Avenue, and that his mother had said, “I am not going to live way out there. I want to live in the city” [laughs]. Of course, now Vista Avenue is in the heart of the city. But Gilbert always remembered that his mother had not wanted to live way out there.

Marcus: It’s a great story. So there we are. That’s a really lovely place, actually, to stop.

Second Interview: May 2, 2005

Marcus: We’re going to start with adding a little information, and then we’ll continue. Would it be all right if we start here with asking you to think about going back to your childhood?
MEYER: Okay. I was born in Boston, but we lived in Newmarket, New Hampshire. Newmarket, New Hampshire, was a very small town and still is. It was so small that our telephone number was four. We lived there because my father was the youngest of five children. There were three sons and two daughters. He was the youngest and the only one who didn’t go to college. The others all went to Harvard and Wellesley. He wanted to go to Princeton and his mother thought that was not a good place for a Jewish boy, so they settled on he’d do other things instead of going to college. He was a fascinating guy. He was an actor and he was a gold miner and he did some other things.

But his father was sort of entrepreneurial. During the Depression in New England, they had all these factories that shut down and they were empty. So my father’s father bought a building in Newmarket, New Hampshire, that was the old mill, and then there were a bunch of houses that went along with the mill. The idea was if you could find a tenant for the mill, then you could rent the houses to the workers in the mill. And that was most of the housing, I think, that was in Newmarket, New Hampshire. So my grandfather hired my dad to go find a tenant. He looked around, and one of the people he negotiated with was a man named Max Goldstein, who had a textile mill, a silk mill, in Willimantic, Connecticut, which had previously had been in Paterson, New Jersey.

He tried to get him to move that to Newmarket, New Hampshire, and in the process Max Goldstein said, “I have a daughter” — he actually had three daughters — “you should come and meet my daughter.” He said, “Come for dinner some night.” So he came for dinner, and that’s why we’re here today talking [laughs]. My father met my mother, and Max Goldstein moved into the factory, and we all lived in Newmarket, New Hampshire. And then because my dad did so well, that process of getting the tenant in the mill, he did a little more of that, and then the governor of New Hampshire asked him to be the industrial agent for the state and to do that for the state to help them out of the Depression, which he did. Ultimately, we moved to Hopkinton, which was a suburb of Concord, and then into Concord when I was about five, and we lived there until I was about 12. After the war, my dad got into real estate development, and there was a recession and things didn’t work out well . . .

Marcus: What year are we?
MEYER: That was in 1946. My brother Les was born. ’46 and ’47. Then in 1948, my dad went broke. Over the summer I went away to camp, and instead of going back to Concord after camp, the people at camp told me I was going to take the train to Boston with the kids who were going to Boston, and my parents were going to meet me there. That’s when I learned that we were moving to Brookline, which is a suburb of Boston, because things had not worked out, and my dad was going to work as a product manager for Independent Lock Company, which was owned by members of his family, by his uncle. My father’s brother was the vice president, and he became a product manager and spent the next 15 years working for that company. They were in Fitchburg, Mass.

Marcus: So you were 12 years old and you get off the train in your new location.
MEYER: In Concord, New Hampshire, there were 70 Jewish families. My parents were very active in the community. My mother was the president of the sisterhood and my dad was the vice president of the congregation, and we were expected to be model children and show up at services and do well in Sunday school and all that, which we did. Except for the fact that I could not read Hebrew well, and the rabbi considered that my Hebrew reading was one of the crosses he had to bear [laughs] in his job.

In the seventh grade in Concord, there was one seventh grade for the whole city. It was part of the junior high school. There was one building with eight classes of seventh graders, so there were 200-and-some, of whom two of us were Jewish, Bobby Treisman and I. Bobby Treisman was later in my class at Harvard. When we moved to Brookline, more than half the kids were Jewish, and that was a major culture shock for me and for my parents too. Because Brookline was kind of upscale and my family didn’t have any money, they were just restarting, that was an experience for all of us, to live in a rich town and be poor. Financially poor. We weren’t poor in other senses. But we all lived through that.

Because my parents were so active, one of things my father used to do [added later: in Concord] was that when there was a bar mitzvah in town, the bar mitzvah boy — we didn’t have bat mitzvahs then — had to give a speech. My dad would help the bar mitzvah boys create their speeches. The routine was they would come to our house two or three times, and up in my bedroom I could hear my father talking with the kid about what was important to him and what were his interests and how did he want to express them and what did he want to talk about. So that by the time the kid gave his bar mitzvah speech, he was really expressing himself in ways that I thought was amazing, and my dad was very good at it. I always looked forward to the time when I could go through that experience.

Well, the year after we moved to Brookline was the year of my bar mitzvah. We moved in the summer, and the following May was my bar mitzvah. And it was a much larger congregation, a Conservative congregation. There was a rabbi who taught bar mitzvah, and we had double bar mitzvahs and we each did half the Haftorah, which is all we did. And we gave a speech. And my speech was not created by me with my dad, it was handed to me mimeographed by the rabbi who taught us. They said, “This is your speech,” and it was obviously the same speech a whole lot of other people had given. I read it pretty well [laughs]. And so that was my bar mitzvah, but I always thought I missed something in the transition.

Marcus: At that time you wouldn’t have thought of complaining. You just went with the mimeographed speech.
MEYER: And although I was an excellent student in public school, when we moved to Brookline, I was so far behind the curve because of the quality of my Jewish education in Concord that I was in the eighth grade and I was with kids who were fifth and sixth graders in Hebrew school, one of whom was Bob Kraft. Bob Kraft is now the owner of the New England Patriots, who’ve won three Super Bowls [laughs]. He was in my Hebrew school class.

Marcus: And was he in the fifth or sixth grade?
MEYER: He was in the fifth or sixth grade. His dad was one of the leaders of the congregation, one of the most active people in the congregation.

Marcus: Before we move on, how do you spell Bobby Treisman’s last name? Our person who does this will want to know.
MEYER: I can’t remember if it was T-r-i-e-s or T-r-e-i-s. But he had a brother and a cousin. We weren’t close friends, we lived in different parts of town, but we still connect periodically, at class reunions and so on.

Marcus: It was a high percentage to get to Harvard?
MEYER: Actually, there were three of us. Sidney Whiting, who was in the seventh grade with us, also was in my class at Harvard.

Marcus: Also from Concord?
MEYER: Yes. And also, I think, went to Harvard Business School in my class.

Marcus: That’s amazing.
MEYER: And he and I were friendly.

Marcus: It wouldn’t happen today, right?
MEYER: Three kids from Concord, New Hampshire? Maybe.

Marcus: So there you are in Brookline, and your parents continue to be active in the Jewish community.
MEYER: Well, they weren’t really, and that was another big difference, because my dad was getting himself going in this new job and he was commuting 40 miles several days a week. He went on trips around the country for five and six weeks at a time. And that was a time that he was really trying to rebuild his career, so I spent a lot of time with my mother. My sister was three years younger, still is, and my brother was ten years younger, still is. The classic note that my mother never — we never keep these most important notes. My mother had a note from my sister, Honey. She left my parents a note, who were out. It said, “Mom and Dad, Les has the chicken pox and Jim got into Harvard [laughs].

Marcus: That is a great one [laughs]. So your dad was traveling and therefore didn’t participate at the level he had participated . . .
MEYER: In the community, because he really didn’t do much in Brookline. He was sort of commuting. I think they put us in Brookline because the schools were better, and my grandparents lived there and we lived around the corner from them. After I graduated from high school, they moved to Leominster [spells out]. Leominster is about 40 miles from Boston, right next to Fitchburg [spells out], where the company was headquartered.

Marcus: So it was pretty much your mom and you, the older brother, and your sister and your younger brother . . .
MEYER: Right.

Marcus: While your dad was traveling about.
MEYER: So we stayed there until I graduated from high school, and then Honey finished high school in Leominster and Les went to public school in Leominster, and then he went to private schools, one of which was a boarding school where he was a day student. He lived at home. Ultimately, my dad started his own business, but by then I was out here.

Marcus: So it was, in a sense, like raising two different families because Les is ten years younger.
MEYER: After Honey and I moved out, Les was almost like an only child for a while.

Marcus: Yes. So the role models were there. It’s just that there was a different acting out in Massachusetts than there had been earlier.
MEYER: The community role was different. They’d been generally active, and they missed that too. But when they moved to Leominster they were active again in the community, both of them very active. And again, it was a small Jewish community there.

Marcus: So you think it had to do something with the entrée in a smaller Jewish community?
MEYER: I was never sure. I think it was mostly that it was the period in my dad’s life when he just had to focus on his job and couldn’t be going to meetings and doing things like that.

Marcus: So can we switch and talk a little about Moe Stein?
MEYER: Yes.

Marcus: When we talked last time, you mentioned what a pleasure it was for you to work with Moe. Moe Stein was the executive director of the Federation, and the years he was the executive director of Federation would have been l9– . . .
MEYER: ’67. He was hired around the time of the Six-Day War. He came that fall. The Six-Day War was in June, and he must have come in August or September of that year.

Marcus: And he was here until 1980?
MEYER: No, he was here until 1977. We had the farewell party for him after one of the Trailblazer playoff games the year they won the championship.

Marcus: [laughs] You can remember that because it happened once, right. So talk a little bit about what that relationship with Moe was like. What made him a person with whom you liked to work?
MEYER: First of all, Moe was a very warm, engaging personality, and he was very, very professional. He was very objective about what needed to go on, even though he had real feelings about people and about right and wrong and about priorities. But he always maintained his professional bearing and sort of hoped that other people would too, so he gave us a standard to measure up to. He was a great partner. In any organization, I always think that there are two people at the top, not one. In any really good organization — business, professional, whatever. In the Federation, in any federation, the president and the executive are partners, and Moe was just a great partner. He always went out of his way to make his partner look good; he never embarrassed his partner, he never embarrassed anybody. He was always very gracious.

I remember when he first came, with great good humor he would always start out — you may remember this — at any meeting, he would always say, “I’m the new guy so I can ask dumb questions because I don’t know anything about anything.” But he asked a lot of good questions and he really challenged a lot of what was going on in a very gracious way, and he could get away with that. He basically would let you know, “I hope I can get away with that because I’m new.” But I think he built good relationships. The relationships between the agencies and the Federation had been somewhat tenuous. There’s always a certain amount of tension that has to be there. But Moe went to great lengths to build trust and confidence and to be supportive of the agencies and to build relationships with the directors of the agencies. I think they always felt that even though their agency was not his first priority, they could rely on him to do the right thing.

And he had a very limited staff. He was the only professional, and he had two or three office people, it seems to me, when we started. He had a bookkeeper, Eileen Zugman, and he had Mary, who was the secretary, and somebody else. But if you worked with the Federation, you never felt he was dumping all the work in your lap. There was always pretty good staff work, and he never used the fact that he was understaffed as an excuse for making it hard — because it’s hard to get volunteers. And I think Moe was very effective at that. He made it very appealing to people, and he went out of his way also to find roles for people that they’d feel comfortable with. So it was great. I really liked working with him. The fact that we’ve all maintained a relationship with him for almost 40 years says a lot.

Marcus: Absolutely, it does.
MEYER: And he got his PhD when he was 74 years old. It’s extraordinary.

Marcus: Yes. So you quote his, “I’m new here so I can ask dumb questions.” Did that influence the way you operated, Jim, when asking questions? Because you’ve identified that as one of the things . . .
MEYER: Yes, I always thought that was a pretty good operating style, that in fact there is a sort of a honeymoon for new people that they can get away with — if you’re reasonably gracious and you don’t act like a know-it-all, and Moe didn’t. He acted like somebody who wanted to learn. That’s very effective.

Marcus: So sometimes the equations have different components than you think, when you start, and in order to find those out, you might have to ask some questions about how that equation is put together.
MEYER: Yes.

Marcus: Okay. That’s very nice, and I’m glad we got a chance to talk to Moe about that. It would be interesting for you to see that on the very short interview that I had with him — I’m hoping to do more — he talks about you and remembers the pleasure he had in working with a group of what he called “young leaders,” who cared about their community and so forth.
MEYER: He ran a young leadership program for about eight of us. I was in, Stan Loeb was in, Stanley Marcus was in, Arden was in, Jack Schwartz was in. I think it was all men. Were you in that? There were hardly any women.

Marcus: Yes. That was different period.
MEYER: It was very conventional. Meet with agencies, learn about the agencies, go see them. But it was very warm and made people feel comfortable. “This is a group I can work with. This is a professional I can work with.” And he helped us meet the professionals. The other thing, when I was president, Moe and I used to meet at least once a month. I think Moe might have been teaching at Portland State. But I was teaching at Portland State one afternoon a week, for a period, and we used to meet and have lunch and talk about the agenda for the board meeting and hash things out. We did a lot in terms of trying to get the board to be active. That was the other thing. Moe put a high premium on getting the board engaged, not being a professional who would use a board as window dressing.

Marcus: Rubber stamp.
MEYER: He really wanted the board to be engaged in the decision-making process. He wanted the board to develop a vision, and he did very well at it.

Marcus: That’s important when you think about what’s going on now, still attempts to engage.
MEYER: And besides the company that I had “inherited,” that was really the first thing that I’d ever been in charge of that was substantial, so having Moe there to help me made it possible for me, at a very young age, to do that job. Otherwise, it never would have happened.

Marcus: Moe wasn’t such an old man himself.
MEYER: No, he wasn’t. He’s ten years older than I am, so when I was 35, he was 45.

Marcus: It puts a little different setting on his wisdom, right? He was a 45-year-old wise man, right?
MEYER: About the age of my son Mark now.

Marcus: Exactly [laughs]. Well, what I’d like to do if you’re comfortable, for a little while here, is to just move ahead. I don’t care that it follows a specific chronological line, but just talk about the Portland Jewish community. We’ve had an anchor point of the education committee, the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, and the whole issue of the constituency of the Hillel Academy. Since that time, we’ve had a variety of other issues in which you’ve been involved. Can you think of some that you recall specifically since that point? They don’t have to be life threatening.
MEYER: Did we talk about the planning process that involved the Council of Jewish Women?

Marcus: We said that we wanted to talk about that, so let’s talk about that whole plan.
MEYER: Okay, let’s cover it very briefly. I think a year or two after I was president, the National Council of Jewish Women was left a lot of money, the chapter here. They wanted to use it for the community, and their idea was to build a building. The Federation had bought the land next to the Center. Have we talked about that?

Marcus: We haven’t, and we probably should talk about that.
MEYER: Briefly, the Jewish Community Center had an opportunity to buy, I think it’s five acres of land that are on the west end of their property. They had just built the building, they really didn’t have enough to complete the building, and they had the opportunity to buy the land — I think Milt Carl was the president of the Center. Again, I think this is partly because of Moe. Moe could figure out how to make these things happen, and Henry too, I think.

They came to the Federation and said, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We really need to buy this land for the future, but we don’t have the money.” And I think the Center suggested, and we agreed, that the Federation would buy the land. I think it was $95,000 that we paid for it. The Federation would own the land, and we made an agreement with the Center. I don’t remember whether they had right of first refusal or something like that, but maybe that we wouldn’t sell it without conferring with them. It was very carefully worded. So it was a fair deal, it was a good real estate deal. We still own the land.

Marcus: Meaning the Federation.
MEYER: The Federation still owns the land, and the Center uses the land for soccer fields and other things. That was a good example of cooperation. That was almost our whole endowment fund, that $95,000. We didn’t have much more than that. So the Council of Jewish Women wanted to use that land to build housing for well residents. The Robison Home thought that if they were going to do that, it should be next to the Robison Home. For some reason, they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to build it next to the Center. I think it had to do with the vitality of the people of that age.

So as usual, we formed a committee to look at everything in the Jewish community to see where this all fit in, and I chaired it. We met for a long time. That’s how I met Bing Sheldon, the architect, who’s still a good friend of mine. We met for about 18 months, and there were representatives of all the agencies involved. We went through all kinds of process, and what I remember is that at the end of the 18 months, when push came to shove, everybody voted about the same way they would have on the first day.

They voted not to allow the Council to use the land for that. And they did build the May Apartments next to the Robison Home, and that worked out very well. It turned out to be a good decision. But I was very discouraged as a leader that the vote had turned out the way it did, not so much that I wanted to push for that decision, but I was upset that we had put so much time into the process and nobody had changed their mind about anything. I didn’t do anything in the Jewish community for a year or two after that.

Marcus: Did you think they didn’t change their mind because of previously-held convictions, that they weren’t able to listen to new ideas? Or did you think their original idea proved to be correct?
MEYER: I didn’t know. Well, people were on various sides, and whatever anybody thought the day we walked in, when they heard all the experts, did all the analysis, listened to all the arguments from all the other sides, nobody changed their position at all. And it seemed to me that there should have been some movement. I didn’t know where it should have been, but I thought this process didn’t work well. But that was part of my education too. So I was involved in that.

Marcus: You took a so-called sabbatical then for a while?
MEYER: I took a sabbatical. I just felt that I wasn’t going to do another project and get burned again.

Marcus: How long did that last? How long was the sabbatical?
MEYER: Until the next thing came up [laughter]. And another significant thing was starting. When Harold Pollin was president of the Federation, he asked me to be the campaign chair. Actually, he asked Carolyn Weinstein and me to be co-chairs of the campaign. This campaign had flattened out and sort of grown stale, and we needed a different approach, and we needed to sort of upgrade the whole process. So Carolyn and I with — who was the Federation director? Was it Murray or was it David Roberts? I don’t remember. But anyway, we did get a significant increase, and we built a new organization and we sort of started moving people through the chairs again. Because part of what had happened is that we hadn’t been bringing people along in the campaign, and so a few people were repeating over and over in the same campaign cabinet. The whole thing was going stale, and the community was reacting to the Federation campaign as a bunch of elite people who were always in charge, and they were trying to get out of it and they couldn’t find anybody else to do it. So finally, Harold Pollin has had a lot of foresight in a lot of things, and Harold recognized that that had to change. So we got that moved off the dime.

And then in 1988 and ’89 — the Federation endowment fund had never grown very much. We actually formalized the endowment process when I was the president, and I remember we had Lew Fox come out from Baltimore, and he talked about how they had $10 million in Baltimore and that we could do that too, and we thought that was preposterous. But he told us how we could do it, and we hired an assistant director of the Federation to be half-time endowment director and half-time just help out Moe. And that’s when I learned that when you have a long-term project and an urgent part of a job, the part that’s urgent always get done and the part that’s long-term never gets done. Splitting a job that way was a good way to get the assistant federation director’s job done, but the endowment director’s job always waited until things got caught up, which was never. So we tried various approaches to that, and . . .

Marcus: Who was hired to be that assistant federation director?
MEYER: Was it Bob Tropp?

Marcus: Bob Tropp, I think.
MEYER: I think it was Bob Tropp, who was a very competent and capable guy and later became director of another federation. But he just didn’t have the time to focus on that. It’s a lot of preparation and a lot of cultivation, there’s no immediate payoff, and meanwhile a lot of urgent things going on in day-to-day operations that need tending to, so the long-term work doesn’t get done. Since then, I’ve always thought that on long-term projects we’re better off to have a quarter-time person, a half-time person, who has only one job. In anything I’ve been involved with, I’ve thought where it’s long-term development there shouldn’t be other jobs.

Marcus: So you were talking about 1988 and ’89.
MEYER: Okay. So the endowment fund never developed very much, and Harold Pollin developed the idea that we really needed to build endowment in the community, and the way to do this would not be the way that it would be done in other communities, which was to have a Federation endowment and — what we had here. Federation endowment is the agencies participate to a greater or lesser extent. There had to be a real community foundation, and the Federation would be a member of it but not in charge of it. I agreed with him. I thought that was very good insight on his part and good leadership. I think Charlie was the director by then. Charlie was not sold on that, and other significant community leaders were not sold on that, but Harold was, and I and some others supported him.

We were able to put together the Foundation in 1989. Everybody put in their building funds and we had lots of protections for the agencies. The agencies were full members and they had representation on the board and they had the same representation as Federation had. Our goal in 1989 was to have $10,000,000. I think we started off with about 4,000,000 collected from the Federation and all the agencies, to have a total of about $10,000,000 by the year 2000. And the way it worked out, partly because we hired Rick Zurow to be the Foundation director after a few years. At first the Federation staffed for us and didn’t charge us for it, which was very gracious of them. They obviously recognized the importance of it.

But by the year 2000 we had $30,000,000. Part of that was the economic bubble, but part of it was just that it was an idea whose time had come, and the idea of having all the agencies be equal partners was a great idea. Although now the turf has shifted again because so many family and individual-advised funds have come in that those agency dollars are now the minority of dollars in the Foundation, so the governance is probably going to change to reflecting that. But I think that was a very important thing and . . .

Marcus: Let’s trace for a minute the directorship of the Federation. Since Charlie Shiffman arrived in Portland now will be 18 years.
MEYER: Let’s see. After Moe we had David Roberts.

Marcus: Right. And wasn’t Murray Schneier after David Roberts?
MEYER: So Bob Tropp was not the first guy. No, the first assistant was named. He had worked at the symphony. I think it was Robert Eisenberg or something very close to that [added later: actually Richard Eisenstein]. And he was Moe’s assistant. Then when he left we hired David Roberts, who came from Boston, and he was Moe’s assistant. When Moe left, we did a search. We had three finalists. Remember Jay Yoskowitz?

Marcus: Yes, of course. That’s “Jay and I’m on my way up.”
MEYER: “This is Jay Yoskowitz and I’m on my way up.” That was at a General Assembly and he came up for the interview. And he was on his way up. We didn’t hire him, but he became a major figure in the Federation movement, the Council of Jewish Federations, nationally. But we didn’t hire him. I always thought the reason we didn’t hire him was that my partner Joe and I had become very good at hiring people, and one of the things we had become very good at was checking references. We could find out everything negative about anybody much better than most people could. So I found out the few negatives that Jay had, which really had to do with that he doesn’t do everything perfectly. And nobody else found that out about any of the other candidates, and I always felt badly.

Marcus: You had been a better detective.
MEYER: I was just a better detective. But the effect — David was here, and people liked him and he worked well with people, and so there was a comfort level knowing that David was already here and that he knew the operation and people liked working with him. So he did the job for a while.

Marcus: And Bob Tropp was his assistant, right?
MEYER: That’s right. And did Bob leave then, or did Bob Tropp take over for a little while?

Marcus: Bob took over in an interim situation and also had applied for the job, by the way, which he didn’t get.

MEYER: Which he didn’t get because we hired — is that when we hired Murray Schneier?
And Murray lasted a few years and it didn’t work out well. It was just not good judgment in his last job, but he had learned his lesson. But he actually made the same mistake on this job. It was an administrative error. That’s not what caused him to leave.

Marcus: He got a job elsewhere.
MEYER: Yes, I think he got another job. So after Murray we did an intensive search, and that’s when we hired Charlie. Do you know anything about hiring Charlie?

Marcus: Nothing.
MEYER: When we hired — would you like to hear this?

Marcus: I’d love to.
MEYER: It’s a lulu of a story. I chaired the search committee when we hired Murray Schneier. Stan Geffen, who may have been the president, I think chaired the search committee when we hired the next person. We went through an elaborate search; we did a great job. In search committees, the results do not always correlate with the quality of the job that’s done. So we narrowed down to three final candidates.

There was a candidate who was an assistant director in West Palm Beach. He was young and very capable, and he was sort of charismatic. He was from Tacoma, Washington, and he and his wife had met at Camp Solomon Schechter, and it seemed like a perfect match. So we offered him the job, and somehow in the process of the negotiations it came apart. He didn’t like what we offered and he wanted more, and the way he conducted himself during the negotiations, our leadership decided — I wasn’t involved in the negotiations — but decided that we didn’t want him after all.

So then you always get the question, “Should we go to number two? Should we go to number three?” And by then we had decided we wanted to get somebody really good, not somebody who would be merely adequate or somebody who would eliminate the need for somebody temporary. So we decided we’ll just muddle through, and I forget how we were muddling through and what kind of an interim arrangement, but that we would just do the search again because it’s a seasonal search and you have to do it based on the annual cycle. [Added later: Laurie Rogoway was the interim executive director.]

Marcus: Campaign, right.
MEYER: You don’t expect somebody just to pop into your lap, but somebody popped into our lap. Stan got a call that there was a man named Charlie Shiffman who had been the director of the Federation in Columbus and in Springfield, Massachusetts, who was highly regarded, and who had moved to Israel and had worked for the Joint Distribution Committee and had gone off with a partner who was consulting in Israel. It was a very tough economic time in Israel, and it just had not worked out financially, I think, for Charlie and his wife. They had decided to come back here, and they were coming back at a time it wasn’t good in the cycle because people weren’t doing searches.

I don’t know if there were other communities in our boat, but we were looking for a director and we didn’t have one. We interviewed Charlie, and it was love at first sight. And he’s been great. We were very lucky. It demonstrates again that no matter how well prepared you are and how well you think you plan, serendipity always plays a major role in things that work well.
Marcus: Absolutely. It seems to me I remember the argument was, “Are we looking for a young person on their way up, or are we looking for someone who has had enough experience to move us to the next level where we need to be?” Charlie certainly fits the second category.
MEYER: He was both, actually, because he was still young.
Marcus: We’re loosely defining young in this tape.
MEYER: Well, he had young children. He was not a guy who was 62, who came here to live with his children. He was a guy who had a lot of accomplishment but a lot of years ahead of him, obviously.

Marcus: Is this a good place to stop for today?
MEYER: Sure.

Marcus: Okay. Great.

Third Interview: May 25, 2005

Marcus: Final interview of three tapes to discuss the Portland Jewish community and other challenges. This tape is done in Jim Meyer’s office. Jim and I are chatting here about what we’re going to speak about today, and we’re referencing especially Moe Stein’s leadership style and the challenges he had as the Federation executive. We talked about the care and feeding of volunteers, about encouraging and teaching those volunteers, and about the professional person’s role as supporter—not know-it-all, but in fact partner — and the goal for community leaders to be engaged in decision making and to think to the future. So shall we do a little description of the Jewish community as it is? Whatever you like. What do you think it looks like today, May 2005?
MEYER: I am less involved on a day-to-day basis. My perspective on the Jewish community today, besides the people I know who are active, is framed by the three things I’ve been involved with in the last year, which I will just list. One is that I’ve been on the board of the new Jewish Community Center, or I’ve been on the new board of the Jewish Community Center. There is not a new Jewish Community Center, at least yet. That’s been a major involvement, and it’s caused all 13 of us to think a lot about what is this Jewish community about, where is it going, and who’s in charge and who cares about what. So that’s been interesting.

The second thing is that the Federation had done the Over the Horizon Task Force, which was very ably chaired by Eric Rosenfeld, and which spent two years or more dealing with the question of what the Federation’s role should be like in the 21st century and got a lot of people involved. There must have been well over a 100 people involved in that process on task forces and in the discussions and debates. It was very well done. Eric is highly organized and really is a great leader. I think he’s going to be a great future leader here too, along with some other people who’ve come along, some of them from old Portland families and some of them new in town, and that’s been a revelation.

But the final chapter of that was the question, “Now that we know what we think the role should be and the relationships with the agencies and so on and so forth, what should be the role of the Federation? Should it just be a steward, just a fund-raiser? Should it be involved in providing direct services, or what?” Once all those things were hashed out, then the question gets to be, “How should the Federation governance be structured?”

And it became clear that people felt that the structure we had, the board structure particularly, was not appropriate even for now, let alone for the coming period. So Eric asked me to co-chair with him a task force, which took almost another two years. And in that process we changed the structure of the board, which is going to happen July 1st. And Susie, you’re going to be on the new board, which I think is going to be a major restructuring. Some people seem to think that the intention was to have different people, which it was not. It was really just to provide a basis on which the right kinds of people could function more effectively for the community.

Then the third thing is that I got back on the board of the Jewish Community Foundation, of which I was one of the founders and the second president. But I hadn’t been on that board for more than 10 years, and I was invited back on the board and the executive committee this year. I had been on the investment committee for most of that time, so I stayed in touch a little. But that’s a different involvement, and again provides a different set of challenges for the future. So those are my Jewish community involvements. What does this community look like?

Marcus: Yes. All three of these particular involvements, the new board of the MJCC, the Over the Horizon Task Force and then the specific governance task force, and the Jewish Community Foundation, I think reflect some directions for the community. So maybe from that point of view. Or maybe we don’t know, and that’s all right too. What’s happening and what do we think may happen?
MEYER: In terms of leadership, it’s kind of interesting as I look at it because some of the leaders we’ve had in all these areas are people from families that have been here a long time, even though those individuals may not have been in leadership positions in the past. So Gayle Romain from the Schnitzer family played a major role in the previous campus campaign, which failed not because of Gayle’s leadership by any means, but because of the economy, because of 9/11, and probably because the program was too ambitious in terms of its size for the community at that time. But also, I think, maybe not enough directive. Maybe there wasn’t enough recognition of what needed to be happening in that campus to get people excited. Somehow people didn’t get excited.

Marcus: So you think they didn’t have enough information, or . . .?
MEYER: I think that the leadership was thinking more in terms of the logistics of a place to have what’s going on now, and there wasn’t enough of a vision that people were interested in. And I don’t know what it should have been, but basically people didn’t get very excited. So there was more than just financial stress in the world going on, and there were some lessons there too.

Marcus: And those lessons are lessons that you’re using as a member of the board . . .
MEYER: The Center board. They were hoping to use because we’re looking at what do people really want. And one of the problems is always that people don’t always know what they want, so it gets — my own style is one that the Center is using now — there’s some trial and error. Instead of asking people what they want, which is of some value, but you can try some things out and see what happens, and then you find out what people really care about or don’t care about. And you also find out who understands, who doesn’t understand, and how the message has been delivered, and get some inkling as to how the messages need to be delivered. Once we have a message [laughs].

So here’s Jordan Schnitzer chairing this board from a longtime family leadership — Jordan’s father was a leader of the effort to build the Jewish Community Center 35 years ago. People like Tom Stern, whose dad Jerry has been a community leader for a long time on that board, people like Jay Zidell, same thing, playing significant roles. And people who are newer in town, newer compared to them, like Priscilla Kostiner and like Rob Shlachter, Jeff Nudelman.

Marcus: Where do you put yourself?
MEYER: I’ve been here a long time, but none of my ancestors were here [laughs]. So it’s a mixture of people who have been involved in the community but didn’t inherit being involved in this community, and people who did inherit being involved in this community. And there’s no division between those groups, we’re all here as individuals trying to do the job. I’m sure I’ve left some people off, obviously. You have Steve Kahn who’s a leader, this year’s campaign chair, whose parents were active in the community. And Wendy Kahn, Steve’s wife, who came here from out of town and is playing a great role, played a great role in the Center and in the Federation. So we’re very fortunate that way, that we get people who understand what this is about. Michael Kapiloff has come from out of town, came from Baltimore, and he’s . . .

Marcus: A good place to get guys from because we already had Lew Fox [laughs].
MEYER: We already had Lew Fox, and his family was active in Baltimore. He came with an understanding of what it means to pay your dues in the community. And of course, in the Federation you still have people like Henry Blauer, who is permanent [laughs]. We hope he’ll be permanent as a leader. He’s always there and he brings a history and a perspective, even though he came from elsewhere too.

Marcus: He did. He was an out-of-towner for a while until he married Gerel, who was definitely an insider.
MEYER: Yes, that’s right. But Milt Carl is on the Center board, and Milt’s been active all the time for 40 years that I know about. He grew up in the Center. He’s been a leader of almost everything. Jim Winkler has been in town. His parents came to town. Jim has been a leader of the Robison Home and on the Center board. On the Foundation board, the leadership tends to be more — oh, Jerry Sadis, another new guy who came to town and has been very involved in the Federation and the Center.

Marcus: Did he come from Baltimore too?
MEYER: No. I don’t know where Jerry came from, but he’s done a lot here.

Marcus: You were starting to talk about the difference on the Foundation board.
MEYER: On the Foundation board, Stan Blauer’s the present president. Irwin Holzman was the president before him. Both of those people have been involved in the community for a long time. I think neither of them has had a major leadership role with an organization before, but they’ve done a good job. Roy Lambert was a president of the Foundation who was active in the Home and was president of the MJCC.

Marcus: Would you call Roy an out-of-towner?
MEYER: I don’t know where Roy comes from, but Roy plays a good role. I was just on a committee with him last week in which he did a brilliant job leading the committee. So there’s this constant mix of people who emerge and people who’ve been there for a while. Steve Gradow is a young guy who’s been active on the Foundation board. Stuart Weiss has been involved in the Foundation board and also in the PJA board. I think he has been a representative on the Federation board, if I’m not mistaken. There will not be any more representatives of agencies on the Federation board. The new Federation board is going to be all at-large.

Marcus: Do you want to talk about that for a minute? That was by design.
MEYER: What happened — there’s always a conflict between being inclusive and being efficient, and efficiency is less important than effectiveness. I think the Federation board was beginning to feel it was ineffective. One of the messages that came through a lot was that it was clear that — the board structure provided for up to 48 members, of whom some were at-large, some were agency representatives, and some were ex-officio members who were chairmen of the campaign or chairmen of this or that committee. So people came with portfolios which were their main interest.

And it’s important, I think, and a lot of people think, for everybody on the Federation board to take the responsibility very seriously and to have the whole community’s interest at heart, whatever one feels that is, not to be a debating society in which the factions in the community have a place to sit down. That’s a valid enterprise, but it’s not, I think, what the Federation is really about. There needs to be a cohesive group that’s planning and organizing what it’s responsible for.

Marcus: So by eliminating that representative nature of the board, do you think it freed up the smaller board to think through issues with no hats on at all, simply . . .?
MEYER: We hope so. One of the things that was happening was that the “real work” was being done by the executive committee, which was about 15 or 16 people who met more often than the board did. So the other people who came to board meetings were presented with: one, I’m not as engaged; two, I’m being told on whatever issue we have that the executive committee has studied this thoroughly and has come to this conclusion and therefore you should vote for this. That’s a slight exaggeration, but that’s how it came across to people. And the reaction is, “What do they need me for? I wasn’t here last time. Maybe I won’t be here next time.”

Another thing that was happening was there was such a large board, which was from 44 to 48 people, that there was a different cast of characters every time so that the chemistry of the group was different every time, and there wasn’t a cohesiveness and a cohesion. There certainly wasn’t an equality, or a good range of equality, about the extent to which people were knowledgeable and engaged. So those were the kinds of things that we hope to overcome with the new structure, and whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen. But in my experience, smaller boards — not too small, and this board’s going to be 15 to 20, which is a good size — smaller boards tend to be more effective, more efficient, and more engaged.

Also, we’ve seen, both in corporations and in universities and in other places, the ball being dropped by boards. I think a lot because there’s a feeling that on a board this big, “I don’t know too much, but I’m sure these other people are on top of this,” and it turns out not to be the case. Then when trouble arises the question gets to be, “Who’s responsible for this?” And we don’t want to be getting to that, who’s responsible for what went wrong. We want to have people who are responsible for making things go right, and I hope that’s what we’ll have. We certainly have enough capable people to fill those 15 to 20 slots.

Marcus: That, actually, is the model for both the new Mittleman Jewish Community Center board as well as the new Federation board, right?
MEYER: Right. But the Center board was really a task force with a project, and so that had to be small and efficient. And whether that group is a suitable group for governing in the long-term [laughs], hopefully not. Hopefully there’ll be people who are more concerned with program and less concerned with problem solving than we are. But there are a lot of people who have been good members of the Center board and boards like that in the past. The Center board really came in with a crisis mentality, and it was faced with a turnaround and a new vision, and we hope we’ve achieved some of that. Part of that’s been through integration.

We had people from in the community saying, “There’s no need for a Center anymore. I grew up in the Center, now I belong to the MAC.” Or, “Now I have other ways of getting what I need.” There are people who said this building should just be a school and a few other activities, and there are people who said, essentially, “I want this to be what it’s always been because I liked being there.” And essentially, as it turns out, none of those people could bring enough to the party to make it happen, and none of those approaches were viable. So there had to be some major synergy between the school and the Center. It turned out there are a lot of people who really want to have a place where Jewish people come and do things. And what we used to call Jewish basketball and laugh, it turns out that that’s real. People really do care about those things.

And when we looked at past surveys — we didn’t do a lot of surveys — one of the things we found — and Gary Goldstick, our turnaround expert, helped point this out to us — there have been lots of surveys over the years, and the results were always the same. Why don’t we just look at what those results are? The people were not saying, “The building is not grand enough; the vision is not imaginative enough.” It was really, “The place is not well enough managed, the place is not clean, the place is too beat up. When my kid comes for a swimming lesson and the instructor does not show up, I don’t like that” [laughs]. And we did determine that almost everything that goes on there could be done somewhere else as well or better, and that, in fact, people really wanted to have things going on in that building. And that there can be huge synergy between the school and the Center, and we’re hoping to build on that.

Marcus: It remains to be seen.
MEYER: It remains to be seen how successful it is. But we found that some of the programs that have been merged between the Center and the school have been merged very effectively. And some that have gone out. I talked to David Fuks at the Home and he says that the kosher meals program at the Home now is working very well.

Marcus: They call it Lunch and Learn.
MEYER: Although they had a lot of misgivings about it. The neighbors were very concerned about it, and there were a number of issues.

Marcus: The neighbors were concerned about the traffic.
MEYER: Right, the traffic. But by now the positives have outweighed the negatives and it’s working more the way everybody hoped. And it’s proving to be a good marketing tool, getting older people involved with the Robison Home and with people at Rose Schnitzer Manor, and out there to see what it’s like. So that’s good.

Marcus: It’s in the interest of the Cedar Sinai Park folks to continue this, as well as in the interests of the larger Jewish community to see it happen.
MEYER: Right. So there seem to be more people because of this crisis — on the one hand, we do have more people who have sort of opted out of heavy involvement in the Jewish community whose families had previously played a larger role, but that’s fortunately balanced by more people who are willing to be involved who hadn’t been as much involved or are who are just growing. And one of the things that is comforting to me is that more people are willing to look at the substantive issues and have less patience with the turf issues.

Marcus: You see that as a kind of theme for what’s going on?
MEYER: It’s a partial theme of what’s going on. Steve Rosenberg talked about — just this simple example. ECLC, the Early Childhood Learning Center, was at the Center and it was a good program. It’s always been a good program. It was about half Jewish, about half non-Jewish. It was to some extent a feeder for the PJA and to some extent not, and it was a way that Jews and non-Jews had a place to go. It met a lot of people’s criteria and it was good quality and highly respected. It was not doing well financially; it was not doing poorly financially, either. But it started at 9:00 AM, and PJA, which was right next door, started at 8:00 AM, and something like 15-20% of the ECLC parents had children at PJA. And that was a significant inconvenience for them.

When ECLC management was taken over by PJA, not only did we have some upgrades of the education and some upgrades of the financial management, but the times were brought close enough together that it was convenient for the families. Well, that could have happened a long time ago. We shouldn’t have needed to have one person in charge to make that happen. But people just don’t care enough about somebody else’s concerns; they are concerned with their own constituency’s concern. Fortunately, I think we’re seeing less of that.

Marcus: So that’s a good thing.
MEYER: Yes, it’s a very good thing. And it’s critical because we just don’t have the resources available to have that kind of waste and inefficiency and aggravation that goes on for people.

Marcus: So the motto may be that paying attention to other people’s concerns actually may make successful programming, may solve some financial problems, because people will come if they think their needs are being met.
MEYER: And of course, the by-product of that is that if people feel that their concerns are listened to, they’re more willing to be involved and they’re more willing to let you know what else they think, which is very helpful to the planners.

Marcus: So is this reminiscent for you of other activities in which you’re involved outside of the Jewish community, going through similar kinds of struggles, or are they different?
MEYER: To some extent. I was on the board of the Oregon Community Foundation for eight years. That board has 13 people from throughout the state. It’s not a lot of people to be the philanthropic leader for the state. But it’s an effective size group. It works well and people take it very seriously. And like the leadership of lots of organizations, they are, of course, the busiest people and the ones who have the most on their plates. And it is rare at a board meeting — and their board meetings are only quarterly, but there are a lot of committee meetings going on — but at the board meetings it’s rare to have more than one or two people absent.

Marcus: Because they know they matter.
MEYER: Right. With the Center board, with 12 or 13 people who met every week for six months and about every other week for the second six months, it’s rare to have more than two or three people absent from those meetings.

Marcus: So that experience on the Oregon Community Foundation influenced your views, it sounds like, of what you’d like to see in the Jewish Community.
MEYER: Yes. I’d like to see it everywhere. I’m in general much less willing to be on a big board, and there are some big boards. Some people’s philosophy is that on a big board, you need to have donors on, you need to get people interested. There are lots of reasons to put people on a board, but . . .

RECORDING IS PAUSED AND THEN RESUMES

Marcus: We were just discussing how boards work and are effective and how communities get things done. So the Oregon Community Foundation was a model for you in looking at the structure of effective boards.
MEYER: Right.

Marcus: Any other experiences outside of the community? What did you take from the struggles of public education organizations?
MEYER: Public education organizations.

Marcus: Sorry, but it had to come up.
MEYER: First of all, I consider most experiences in life to be — you take your experience and your education where you find it, and it can be in the Jewish community, it can be in business or profession, it can be in — some of it is what you observe, but to the extent that you learn from experience, all these experiences are interchangeable in that you can bring what you learned five years ago in a Jewish organization to a general organization or vice versa.

My first involvement in education was Jewish education, and a lot of that started with Jonathan Newman, and Jonathan one time had talked to me about going on the Portland School Board, where he was. Lora said I shouldn’t do that because I’d have to run for office and I can’t remember peoples’ names, which turned out to be right. But I got involved in education at the state level. Well, I actually was on the advisory committee. We had area advisory committees then and we had area superintendents, and we had much more infrastructure in the school district.

Marcus: You served on what was then the Area 1 Advisory Committee.
MEYER: The Area 1 Advisory Committee for, I think, four years. I chaired that for a while. And then I was on the State Educational Coordinating Commission, which was new. Actually, it was started before I was on it. I was on the Economic Development Commission when Bob Straub became governor.

Marcus: So tell me about the State Educational — what was it?
MEYER: The Educational Coordinating Commission. What happens in states — well, what happened in this state — we had this State Board of Education that was responsible for education, kindergarten through 12th grade and the community colleges. We had the State Board of Higher Education that was responsible for the four-year schools and the graduate schools, but only the public schools, I think. I think the Board of Education had some responsibility for private schools as well. But they went off in different directions and they overlapped, especially the community colleges, which were under one governing board, and the four-year schools competed during those first two years, and they were not coordinated. And the legislature and the governor were faced with how do we fund this and who’s in charge of what, and they were doing too much. And they had what was called an Educational Coordinating Council, which was a large organization of about 15 or 20 people who met periodically.

Marcus: Were they mostly presidents of . . .?
MEYER: They were lay people and professionals. As you might expect, the professionals came more often, so that at any given meeting, I gather, the professionals tended to dominate. And they had no authority; they were a discussion group. So finally somebody said, “This is no good.” And the legislature created a coordinating commission, which was not a super board as some people feared and others hoped, but it had more influence. It was seven people, and one of the rules was that none of those people could be an employee of an educational organization, none could be on the governing board.

So no school board members, nobody from the Board of Higher Education, nobody from any of these other organizations. They could have experience with that, but if they were still, they had to resign. And several of the original members did resign, one from the school board and one from the Board of Higher Education, that I remember. There were seven people from throughout the state, and they got started and immediately they somehow got off on the wrong foot. There was a lot of conflict with turf issues, amazingly. It wasn’t going well, and one of the original members became very ill and subsequently died. So they decided they wanted somebody more amiable [laughs] on that commission.

Marcus: Not a fighter?
MEYER: So one day I was in my office and the governor called.

Marcus: [laughs] You got the call.
MEYER: I got a call from the governor, and he said, “You’re doing fine on the Economic Development Commission. How’d you like to be on the Educational Coordinating Commission?” I wasn’t sure what it was, but I liked education.

Marcus: Governor Straub?
MEYER: Governor Straub. I was more interested in education than economic development at that time, so I said, “Sure.” I did that for almost eight years, and I was the chair for the last couple of years. One of the things that happens with those coordinating commissions is they start building enemies over time because they do infringe on people’s turf, and when they build enough enemies they get abolished. And that’s what happened, long after my time.

Marcus: Those enemies are about programs and who gets them?
MEYER: Programs, who gets them, priorities, personality issues. What really happened here was that when Neil Goldschmidt became governor, he said to himself and to other people, “Why do I need this whole commission?” We had a great staff. I was long gone from that commission by then. We did have a great staff, and Terry Olson was the executive. Basically, what Neil said was, “Why don’t I just hire Terry Olson as my advisor on education, and I could do away with this whole infrastructure?” And that’s what he did, and it worked for a while, but now we’re back in the soup.

Marcus: It sounds like it was because of what Terry Olson had done that made him effective as an advisor, but without the previous experience, maybe he would not have been so effective. So there was give and take there.
MEYER: There was. It’s always tempting to take over something that’s in place without — if you don’t take the dynamism and the organic structure that goes with it, you run the risk that what you’ve got is something that is good for today, but tomorrow doesn’t continue to grow and doesn’t continue to function. And in fact, when that advisor leaves, there’s no organization backing him up, and who’s going to be the advisor to the governor? He has to select somebody brand new who doesn’t bring the history and knowledge that the last guy had.

Marcus: So you mean that person has the whole history in their head, but if they are no longer there, there are not others to . . .
MEYER: Right, which doesn’t mean you need a whole infrastructure. But in this case, we’re back to a lot of the issues we had before: where should the priorities be, who decides, and how do we coordinate them?

Marcus: As a matter of fact, that sounds very similar to the discussion we were having about the Jewish Community, right?
MEYER: Right. The more things are different, the more they’re the same.

Marcus: They’re the same, right? So do you have any other thoughts about the future of the community? How do you see it? Are you optimistic about . . .?
MEYER: I’m optimistic. One of the things that has happened is that — and this started before I got here, before you got here — the general community is more accepting of Jews in leadership roles throughout the community. It’s always been true in culture . . .

Marcus: It goes way back, right, to Julius Meier?
MEYER: Yes. In the state, we have disproportionate — we just had a Jewish mayor. She was the second or third Jewish mayor. We’ve had two Jewish governors. We have a Jewish senator now. He’s not the first Jewish senator. And considering that about one percent of the population of the state is Jewish, that’s really amazing. But part of the fallout from that is that where people organizationally wanted to flap their wings, so to speak, it was much easier to do so in the Jewish community than outside the Jewish community. That’s no longer true, certainly much less true. So it’s harder for us to attract those people, and we have to offer them more.

Marcus: Within the Jewish community.
MEYER: Within the Jewish community. It’s harder to attract those people and to be relevant to them, and we have to get them earlier. It’s harder to get people later, although that sometimes happens. That’s one of the real challenges, is to get the best young Jewish people engaged. We have some now; we’ve always had some. We’ve always had some very capable Jewish people who have little or no interest in being involved in the Jewish community as such. But societal issues change too. Women used to be volunteers, and not as many women worked. Now many more women work, so those volunteers are not as readily available, but women still want to be involved in their communities. And so we still have many outstanding women as leaders. You, for example, even when you were working full time, you were a community leader.

Marcus: Well, this brings, I think, sort of the wrap-up question, which is — how important to you was having colleagues in your endeavors? In other words, not being a lone marcher in all of these enterprises, not doing things without feeling that people supported you, either by their presence or by validating what you’ve done. How important is that?
MEYER: For me personally, it’s everything because I’m not the inventor or the driver or the idea person. I don’t have a personal agenda beyond helping good people get where they want to go. And if there are good people around who have someplace to go and would like to have me along for the ride, that’s great for me. And if there aren’t, then I don’t have much to do, frankly, because I’m not the creative, imaginative person who says, “This is what we need, and I’m going to make it happen.” It’s not who I am.

Marcus: So you tend to work not alone. You don’t see yourself as . . .
MEYER: I tend to only work with other people.

Marcus: Collaborative.
MEYER: But I can work alone. It’s not that I get lonesome, it’s that I’m a collaborator.

Marcus: That’s a really neat message. Have I missed anything I should have asked you about the community in general?
MEYER: No, I think we’ve talked about . . .

Marcus: We did it.
MEYER: We talked about more than I imagined we had to talk about.

Marcus: I think we probably still have other things, but for now I think that’s really great. Thank you so much.