Myra Enkelis

Prahl:  Today is December 5th, 2013 and this is an interview with Myra Enkelis being conducted by Anne Levant Prahl at the Oregon Jewish Museum. We are sitting here with Myra and her first cousin, Lois Shenker and two photo albums.
ENKELIS:  We’re not first cousins. We descended from the opposite twin. We shared grandmothers who were siblings. So, I always called it a third cousin. My brother calls it a second cousin. [conversation about relationship]

Prahl:  Is it second cousin once removed? You are the same generation? Then, you’re not removed. You’re second cousins. If your grandparents were siblings, you are second cousins.
ENKELIS:  That’s what we are.

Prahl:  We are going to ask Myra some questions about her family here and we are going to look at photographs and get a feeling for the descendants of Rose and Celia Himmelfarb, who are twin sisters who married Joseph Enkelis and Shia Sussman. [conversation about the photo albums]
ENKELIS:  Why don’t I tell you about Rose’s children? My father’s the oldest child. His name was Jacob.

Prahl:  Where did she have her children?
ENKELIS:  He was born in New York City.

Prahl:  What year?
ENKELIS:  1899. October 22, 1899.

Prahl:  So, Rose and Celia were born in New York?
ENKELIS:  I guess we have to back up and tell you how they came here. Do you know what town? [Asking Lois]

SHENKER:  Outside Kiev, somewhere outside Kiev.
ENKELIS:  My grandfather, Joseph, had some sort of peddler’s license that let him leave the ghetto every day to go, wherever. He was relatively newly married to my grandmother. It was her custom, the story that came down to us, to go down to the gate of the ghetto and kiss him goodbye.

Prahl:  Do you know what he peddled?
ENKELIS:  No. 
SHENKER: Probably whatever he could.

ENKELIS:  At the time they were threatening to draft him into the Russian army and it was a period of twenty years. He was really leaving, but they felt that if my grandmother went to the gate, she would cry. So her grandmother went instead to kiss him goodbye. Then, she didn’t cry.
SHENKER: I always heard he was on leave, home from the army and he did it to escape the army. Which is really the same sort of thing. 
ENKELIS: I think he did it to escape the draft. 

Prahl:  So he left as if he were going to peddle and he went on a ship.
ENKELIS:  But I don’t know anymore than that about how he got here. He came to New York. Somehow, he legally he brought my grandmother and later, brought her [Lois’s] grandmother, because my grandmother was so lonely without her twin. 

Prahl:  Was Celia married at the time?
ENKELIS:  No. There was another story about that. But we don’t want to put it on tape. He did bring her [Lois’], grandmother at a later date than mine. In 1899, when my father was born, they were living in New York. They were still living in New York when [Netti Olman] was born. Probably the dates are on that. I think that they were the only two born in New York. I think Uncle Ben, might have been born out here. There’s a Ben Enkelis who was the third child. The fourth child was Daisy. She was definitely born here. I am not sure whether Ben was born in New York or out here. 

Prahl:  What prompted them to come west?
ENKELIS: I think they had a relative out here. [Conversation between the two women, inaudible]
SHENKER: Your uncle had a relative.

Prahl:  Do you know who the relative was?
ENKELIS:  I don’t know whether Lipman. Somehow part of the Enkelis’ got renamed Lipman. Somewhere along the way. I don’t know if there was a Lipman out here.

Prahl: Is that the Lipman with one p or two p’s?
ENKELIS:  One, I believe. But, somebody was out here.

Prahl:  Tell me what you know about when they first got here and how they settled here.
ENKELIS:  I really don’t know what brought them here. I do know, that my grandfather, over his whole lifetime, was sort of a jack-of-all-trades. He was in different businesses at different times. Somewhere there’s a picture in here. I did not know that there was ever an Enkelis at [Suttons’] Grocery and Delivery, but there’s a picture of my father at the age of 13 in front of the horse drawn cart. It is one of the ones I marked to keep. There’s a picture for that.

Prahl:  Did you know this grandfather?
ENKELIS:  Yes. He died at my house when I was 10 years old.

Prahl:  What business was he in at the end of his life?
ENKELIS:  I don’t know. He always sold something. I don’t know what the somethings were. I have some antiques [inaudible], not real good stuff, that supposedly was stuff from his store. There was clothing involved, sometimes there were “knick knacky” things about. Apparently there were groceries.

Prahl:  So, when Joseph and Rose moved out here with their, some number of children. Did Celia come at the time too?
ENKELIS:  I don’t know how soon after they came, though.

Prahl:  So, she stayed in New York and we have that story on your recording.
SHENKER:  Right. But what you don’t know is my, and it wasn’t on the recording, my uncle, I mean, my grandfather came to New York by himself at the age of 17. They don’t know how old he was at this particular time, but they had already brought my grandmother. Uncle had a store near a trolley stop. He used to come to the trolley stop and wait. He and Uncle became friends because it was raining, he would come inside and wait inside for the trolley or the bus or whatever. 

Prahl:  You’re talking about Shiah and Joseph?
SHENKER:  Apparently, whatever kind of a store he had played music and my grandfather was an aficionado. He apparently came down to hear the music and he came in out of the rain and they became friends. One day, Auntie, was in the store. He said to Uncle, “You have a beautiful wife.” And he said, “You like her?” [laughter] Isn’t that too funny?

Prahl:  So how long after the Enkelis’ move out to Portland did the Sussmans follow them?
ENKELIS:  I don’t know, but I know why they moved. My father was two and half years old. My grandmother had lost, she’d had a couple of miscarriages and she had a stillborn child. She had one stillborn child and she had one child who died shortly after birth and my father became ill. She was convinced the air in New York was not good. She told him if they wanted to save her child’s life, she had to leave. And, of course, she had to be with her sister. That is how they came to Portland. They were not separated for very long. For the most part, they lived in the same part of the city across the street from one another. Different places. They lived in Laurelhurst at some point, I think. 
SHENKER:  Your grandmother stayed on the Westside [in the old] South Portland area. My grandparents moved to Fourth and Clinton for about a year. When daddy was in the fourth grade and every Friday before sundown they would move into Auntie’s house and stay for Shabbat on the weekend.

Prahl:  What was the synagogue? Where did they go to synagogue?
SHENKER:  The Mead Street Shul. Kesser Israel.
ENKELIS:  Our lifetimes, my grandmother lived on 0110 on Southwest Gibbs. Her grandmother lived catty-cornered.
SHENKER:  Catty-cornered in one house. They lived our whole lives.

Prahl:  How nice to get to visit all the relatives at once.
SHENKER:  Oh, yeah. And we would have Seder and after dinner everybody would switch houses.

Prahl:  The two of you grew up as one family.
SHENKER:  Our fathers’ generation were like siblings, not cousins. After Seder, all the children at the Enkelis home would come over, and the Sussman home, the two grandparents would stay. All the families would go back and forth so that everybody else could see Aunt and Uncle.

ENKELIS:  But the best story of that, one year at Passover. Each twin had one grandson and the rest granddaughters. The boys were important. [Howard] was an older child. Richard, my younger brother, was the youngest. The baby of the whole clan. At Passover, my grandfather was at the head of the table and Richard was in the highchair next to him. Seat of honor next to my grandfather. The front doors, over here, there’s a glass in the door. The front door opens. Everybody comes in. My grandmother is at the foot of the table. Everybody comes marching in, lead by her [Lois’] grandmother. My brother had big eyes to begin with. They got huge. He said, “Two grandmas.” Up to that point, he never realized that there were two of them. They handed him back and forth.

Prahl:  That’s great!
ENKELIS:  I love that story. So, two grandmothers. As far as I know, my grandmother had only the four children.

Prahl:  Let’s name them.
ENKELIS:  Jacob, then Nettie, who became Nettie Olman. Then, Ben and then, Daisy, who became Daisy Biskind. 

Prahl:  So, tell me a little bit about their growing up. They grew up in South Portland, mostly.
ENKELIS:  They grew up in South Portland. They went to Fieldman Elementary school, went to high school.

Prahl:  Do you know of any stories that they passed on to you about their lives?
ENKELIS:  Well, my father was active on baseball teams and football teams, whether they were Lincoln or not, I don’t know. There’s some pictures of him in uniform. 
SHENKER:  I do know that my father used him as a threat to anybody that bullied him. “My cousin, Jake, will take care of you.” 

Prahl:  Did they go to Neighborhood House? Did they go to Hebrew school there?
ENKELIS:  I suppose. They must have had.
SHENKER:  My father, there was somebody that came to their house. They did not go to Hebrew school. There was a roving teacher who came to their house. I would not be surprised, I don’t know this for fact, I would not be surprised it they, you know, had the cousins together.
ENKELIS:  Probably so. I don’t know. I never heard any discussion about a bar mitzvah for my father. There must have been one.

Prahl:  Did that make them, were they a little more well off than the kids that went to the Hebrew school? That they could afford to have a teacher to come in?
ENKELIS: I don’t think “well off” is a term they would use. No, no, I don’t think so. They weren’t poverty stricken, but certainly not what you would call “well off”. I would think in today’s terms, maybe, lower middle class. Working class.

Prahl:  Was Jake a newsboy? Did he sell the newspapers on the street corners?
ENKELIS:  I don’t think so.
SHENKER:  I don’t think so and neither were my dad or uncles. My grandfather had a shoe store and they worked at the shoe store.

Prahl:  Let’s do a little about your mother.
ENKELIS:  My mother’s name was Jennie Yudkin. She didn’t have a middle name. She was born in New Haven, CT. She was working as a secretary in the X-ray Department at the Yale New Haven Hospital. My father graduated from medical school at the University of Oregon and then went to the Yale New Haven Hospital to do his internship. He later went to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City to do two residencies. So he was back east for three years.

Prahl:  What kind of a doctor was he?
ENKELIS:  What he did was general practice, but he had, he was fully trained for the training of the day. It was a one-year residency in surgery and a one-year residency in obstetrics. Both of those. He met her while he was at Yale New Haven. But, in those days, there’s no salary if you were an intern or resident. You lived in. So there was certainly no possibility of marriage until after he finished all that. They married right after he finished, I imagine, on June 30.

Prahl:  Did they go to New York to Mt. Sinai together?
ENKELIS:   No, no.

Prahl:  He had to wait till after that. As soon as they married did they come back West?
ENKELIS:  Yes they did. Their honeymoon was to drive back across the county.

Prahl:  Do you know what year they married?
ENKELIS:  They married on July 14, 1929. They took much of their wedding gifts in the form of money. That’s how they crossed the country.

Prahl:  On the train?
ENKELIS:  No, they had a car. They drove across country.

Prahl:  Wow. Wonder how long a trip that was in 1929?
ENKELIS:  Then, of course he set up his medical practice and then the market crashed in October and nobody had any money to pay the doctor. So, they got paid in groceries and whatever. My mother was his secretary, but he couldn’t admit to having the wife working, so she was Miss [Yudkin] in the office until he got to a point where he could afford to have hired help in his office.

Prahl:  Do you know where they lived when they first came?
ENKELIS:  I’m not sure. There was an apartment on Ankeny Street, but I don’t know if that is where they first lived.

Prahl:  Did they also go to Kesser? Did they join the same synagogue?
ENKELIS:  I don’t know that they joined anything when they first came out here.
SHENKER:  I don’t think it was the custom, necessarily. I know my folks didn’t either until such time we were ready for Sunday school.
ENKELIS:  By then, Beth Israel already existed.
SHENKER:  It existed before. It’s the oldest in the city.
ENKELIS:  My parents, I don’t think, joined anything until Beth Israel. But, when we were children we were taken to see our grandparents on the high holidays at Meade St. or wherever the heck they were. But we went to our own synagogue.

Prahl:  Which was Beth Israel? Was Jenny raised Reform? 
ENKELIS:  I guess, maybe, it could have been Conservative.

Prahl:  What kind of household were you born into? Did they keep kosher? Were they particularly observant?
ENKELIS:  No, we did not keep kosher. We did a pretty Reform version of the holidays. 

Prahl:  Did you light candles on Friday night?
ENKELIS:  No. Not on any kind of regular basis. My grandparents did. My parents did not.

Prahl:  Was there any kind of Yiddish spoken around you at all or was everybody an English speaker?
ENKELIS:  When they didn’t want the children to understand. 

Prahl:  Who spoke Yiddish? Did your parents both speak Yiddish?
ENKELIS:  My parents spoke a little Yiddish when they didn’t want us to understand.

Prahl:  And your grandparents?
ENKELIS:  They spoke Yiddish. 

Prahl:  Did your grandparents have accents?
ENKELIS:  Yeah. Mildly so.

Prahl:  Did you know the [Yudkin] grandparents?
ENKELIS:  Yes. I was very lucky. I had four living grandparents living until I was 10 years old.

Prahl:  Did they move out here as well?
ENKELIS:  No

Prahl:  You went back and visited them.
ENKELIS:  We went back and forth. Given the times and how difficult that was, my family is equally close, my East Coast family is equally close. And, there is closeness between our two families, because somebody from the East came, at least, every other year and everybody here entertained them and the same.

Prahl:  Tell me, your memories of being a little child and traveling that distance. How did you get there?
ENKELIS:  Well, you have to understand it was before Dramamine and my mother and I both were subject to motion sickness. Four nights and three days on the train. Can you imagine taking a child? I don’t remember it. I just think, I remember distinctly that mother took me several times. I can’t imagine how she coped with that.

Prahl:  Did she bring food for you on the trains?
ENKELIS:  No, I think we ate on the trains, but we had to change trains in Chicago.
SHENKER:  I remember doing the same to Detroit where my mother came from. It was during the war and we had breakfast and dinner, but she took food on the train for lunch. I can see the suitcase and the Wonder bread, peanut butter and jelly. (Random Talking)

Prahl: Was it the kind of train trip you see in the movies where everybody is dressed up and it’s a fancy kind of a thing?
ENKELIS:  No. So there was this conscious effort to stay in touch, even when there was no money. There was an egg timer that once a week we called my grandparents and we had the egg timer because you could only talk for three minutes because long distance phone calls were very expensive. But, we talked to my grandparents every week. There was a conscious effort to keep the family connected. We got the benefit it as we got older. Because, I went east for various reasons and I was already close to my East Coast family.

Prahl:  Did you mother have siblings that were still back there?
ENKELIS:  Yes. My mother had two sisters and a brother. And they were all alive until I was a young adult.

Prahl:  It must have been hard to leave them. Come to the Wild West. We’ve got a little picture of your father’s family growing up in South Portland. And what that was like. He married and led a pretty different life raising his kids in Beth Israel. But you stayed West side or did you leave?
ENKELIS:  When I was first born, I don’t know. I think we rented the house. 

Prahl:  When were you born?
ENKELIS:  August 5th of 1937. I believe we were in a rental house on Siskiyou about 28th or 27th, somewhere in there. Then, when I was maybe four, four and a half, four, four and a half ½, we bought the house that I grew up in and that’s on NE 37th Avenue. 37th and Klickitat. I went to Beaumont Grade School and [inaudible] Grant High School.

Prahl:  Let’s talk a little bit about both of those things. Tell me about a typical day at Beaumont School.
ENKELIS:  I’m not sure I remember much about typical day at Beaumont School. I remember that I walked to school with my good friend who was my same grade who lived across the street and whose father owned the Jewell Ice Cream Company. The other good friend was Jeanne Weiner, whose father owned Nob Hill Pharmacy.
SHENKER:  That’s Alisha Rosenthal’s mother.

Prahl:  Were your friends in the neighborhood mostly Jewish kids?
ENKELIS:  No. Portland did not have any “Jewish neighborhood” other than the old part of South Portland. 

Prahl:  So you were friends with everyone you went to school with. Did you notice that there was any difference? With being Jewish at all?
ENKELIS:  Not particularly. Maybe in grade school. No, I don’t think it mattered.

Prahl:  How about in high school?
ENKELIS:  Maybe it was a little more noticeable in high school because we had Jewish clubs.
SHENKER:  Jewish people, Jewish girls, guys were not accepted in the high school clubs. Prior to our times, they started to be, when we came in high school.

Prahl:  So, you went to the clubs that were at the Jewish Community Center?
ENKELIS:  No. They weren’t at the Center.
SHENKER:  We met at homes. I think they were affiliated in some way.

Prahl:  Which club did you belong to?
Enkelis: K’maia club and Sub-Debs were the two. 

Prahl:  They met in girls’ homes each week. Then, that was paired with the boys club too, for dances.
SHENKER:  There was only one boys club. 

Prahl:  What was the boys club called?
SHENKER:  Eta Phi
ENKELIS:  So, thinking back, about whether we were a Jewish group or not a Jewish group, which we weren’t, because it wasn’t that way. I had exposure that not everybody had to African American professionals, because my father would host other doctors in our home and especially later on, like when, he became chief of staff of Good Samaritan Hospital. He had the responsibilities for the interns and residents. We would have a party, and so forth. I grew up with a fair amount of exposure to minorities, given that Portland didn’t have many to begin with.

Prahl:  Were these professional people who lived in Portland?
ENKELIS:  No, they lived in Portland.

Prahl:  Did they live in your neighborhood?
ENKELIS: No Probably not.
SHENKER:  Tell her about your time in the Navy, when you were traveling and when you lived away. Because I think that’s important.

Prahl:  Wait, wait. We’re not done. We are going to the War Years, but we have to do high school first.
SHENKER:  Okay. She was already in high school and the war years were before that. That’s why I mentioned it. 
ENKELIS:  So, Beaumont Grade School and Grant High. My parents had a child before me. Her name was Barbara Lee Enkelis. She was three and a half ½ when she died. My mother was pregnant with me. Hard to believe. Anyway.
SHENKER:  My mother said she was the most beautiful child she had ever seen.

Prahl:  What did she die of?
ENKELIS:  Wilm’s tumor. Which in today’s world is curable, but wasn’t then.

Prahl:  Say it again.
SHENKER:  Wilm’s tumor. [spelled it out] It’s either kidney or liver. I’ve forgotten. Kidney. Kidney tumor.

Prahl:  And, after you, were there more children?
ENKELIS:  I think there could have possible been some miscarriages. I think it is more likely that my father wasn’t home. I was born in 1937; my brother was born in 1943. My father enlisted in the Navy in 1940. Long before Pearl Harbor. He was a reserve officer.

Prahl:  Do you know why he did it?
ENKELIS:  I did not know this, but Howard Sussman, a cousin, told me, there was a general thought that they were going to draft doctors prior to there being a declaration of war. They were trying to start to build the military.

Prahl:  It was better to have enlisted than to be drafted.
ENKELIS:  Probably so. That may have been the reason that he enlisted. But, I never heard that part. I do know that he was already in the Navy for a period of about a year before Pearl Harbor. He and my mother were in the car on their way to somewhere for a weekend. They had the radio on and heard Pearl Harbor. They turned around and came home because he knew he would be activated.

Prahl:  Was he a political person? Do you remember political conversations?
ENKELIS:  No. He was at the time a Republican. As long as Wayne Morse was Senator, who was Republican, my father was a Republican. When Wayne Morse switched, so did my father, soon thereafter. They were personal friends. So, during the war, he was already in the Navy before Pearl Harbor, he was not deactivated until after the conclusion of WWII, but he remained in the Naval Reserve for the rest of his life. He was the ranking physician at Swan Island, the ranking reserve physician for the rest of his life. So, he was away, except for my second grade year. I was trying to get some of this together for myself. [Looking through photo albums.] I have somewhere the. I was trying to find out more about his military service. I haven’t been very successful, but I have at least one of the ships he was on, the Wharton. I only photocopied the pages that mattered to me, where I knew the people. Here’s the roster of people. My father’s name is on there and Jack McElroy’s name is on there as the executive officer.

Prahl:  I will make copies. So what do you know about what did you mother did? How did she manage as a single mother with a three year old at home? 
ENKELIS:  I really don’t know how she managed.

Prahl:  Was she an active mother in your school?
ENKELIS:  She did all the PTA stuff. She did all the Hadassah stuff and Sisterhood.

Prahl:  Did she have friends in the neighborhood too?
ENKELIS:  Not so much in the neighborhood. Her friendships were, again, the family. Her mother and some other very close friends, Susie Marcus’ mother. Well, the couples were, because her father was alive at that time. The couples who were friendly were the Woolachs, the Tobias’ and the Rogaways and what’s his name, Levitt, Anne Levitt’s husband, I can’t remember. Sam Levitt.

Prahl:  Were those Beth Israel’s people? Was there a synagogue affiliation?
ENKELIS:  For the most part. I’m not sure that’s how they did. 

Prahl:  Did she join? Was she in the Sisterhood?
ENKELIS:  Mother? My mother was very active in the Sisterhood. My mother, oh Sadie Hellman, that was another. Those were close friends. My mother could best be described as being a lady at all times. Conduct of a lady. She was also very discreet. Number one, the wife of a doctor. You had to maintain confidentiality from that standpoint. She, by nature, was conservative and maintained confidence and private. At the time that Beth Israel was undergoing a terrible shake up because Rabbi Nodel and whatever the woman’s name was had to leave.

Prahl:  Was there a scandal?
ENKELIS:  There was a scandal. She was the Executive Secretary and he was married. 
SHENKER:  This is not nice. She was an immigrant and she was not particularly attractive. She wasn’t particularly bright. It’s not Nuremburg.
ENKELIS:  She wasn’t a very nice person at all.

Prahl:  And he ran off with her?
SHENKER:  It’s not Nuremburg, but something like that.
ENKELIS:  Something like that. The rabbi had to leave Portland because of this scandal. So here we have Beth Israel without a rabbi and without an executive secretary. My mother, at that time, had already past president in the Sisterhood, or whatever. They wanted to do a search committee, to start over. They ask my mother, would she please as a temporary thing, become the executive secretary for the synagogue? My brother was about a junior in high school, maybe a sophomore in high school, at the time. I graduated high school in ’55 and he came six years behind me. Maybe around ’53 or so, but he’s in high school and she takes this job, temporarily, from which she retired at age 72. When she took the job, let’s say it’s in 1955 for ease, she would have been 50 years old. Before that, she was a stay at home mom, doing all the volunteer activities.

Prahl:  Who was the rabbi who they found after?
ENKELIS:  Rabbi Rose. There was a temporary one.
SHENKER:  Where did Applebaum come in there?
ENKELIS:  Oh, Applebaum came next. You’re right. Applebaum came for a couple of years. And then Rose.

Prahl:  Oh, that’s wonderful. Did your mother ever talk to you about what it was like to be from someplace else and fit in being Jewish in Portland?
ENKELIS:  Except she was into family. There was a large family and she was just automatically.
SHENKER:  One of the things that we should say about the twins and there was true for both twins. She didn’t become the daughter in law, she became the daughter.
ENKELIS:  Absolutely true. Absolutely true. It was true of both of them. And it’s true of some of their children and grandchildren. Very close. Very warm and close-knit family. You asked, it at the beginning if the twins had siblings; they did. They had a brother named, Meyer, who died at sometime before I was born apparently, because there’s a Myra Himmelfarb named for him and there’s me, named for him. I think there was another sister, who lived around the corner.
SHENKER:  Frieda?
ENKELIS:  Auntie Frieda. 

Prahl:  Were all of those siblings born in Europe?
ENKELIS:  Yes.

SHENKER:  Then, there was a brother Himmelfarb.
ENKELIS:  Max.
SHENKER:  Max’s father.
ENKELIS:  Meyer Himmelfarb. That’s who I’m named for.

Prahl:  So, Meyer Himmelfarb is Dr. Max Himmelfarb’s father? So, we’re going back to your life.
SHENKER:  Tell her about the time in the navy when you were travelling and when lived away, because that was really important. It was important for me.
ENKELIS:  I didn’t finish about World War II. Number one, my father was away, for most of the time. From the time I was age of five and a half ½, about, until the end of World War II, when I was about eight. I was eight that summer. He was on a ship and periodically his ship would come to port, somewhere. He became very friendly with the executive officer of the ship. So they became friendly as couples. My mother and father and Jack and his wife, who were devout Catholics. Which is relevant in another part of the story. Jack used to be able to have some sort of private code signal with his wife when they were going to come into port, in the Port of San Diego. Once or twice mother would come to school and get me out of kindergarten or first grade and we would to directly to the train station and we would go to San Diego and we’d have a couple of days with my father and then come home again. But my second grade year, my father had shore duty in Astoria. We couldn’t get housing in Astoria. I started the school year at Beaumont, then we got housing at Seaside. So I went to school in Seaside. Then, we got housing in Astoria, so I went to school in Astoria. 

Prahl:  When you say housing are you talking about military housing?
ENKELIS:  Probably. It was probably military housing. At the very end of that second grade year, which VE day had already happened, but he was still in the Navy. We moved to San Francisco because he had overseas duty again. He was on the ship that was going in and out of San Francisco. I haven’t been able to find out what that was. All I could find out was the Wharton. I have not been able to find out whether they were relocated the Wharton or what. [I have since learned that he also served on the Matsonia.]

Prahl:  What was he doing on this ship?
ENKELIS:  He was a military doctor. 

Prahl:  He was being the doctor for the seamen who were on that ship.
ENKELIS:  According to what I found about the Wharton online, sometimes the Wharton served as evacuation. There would be civilians.
SHENKER: Part of the story that I remember is, he used to come in about once a month for a weekend. We were in the second grade and she would come to Sunday School and we sat in the same desk. We were good friends.
ENKELIS:  I wasn’t ordinarily in Sunday School in Portland. Probably wasn’t in Sunday School anywhere at that point. Sally Vidgoff was our teacher that second grade year.
SHENKER:  We’d sit together in that desk. We were always cramped.

Prahl:  Must have been hard to be apart for the year.
ENKELIS:  And growing up, you had more freedom than the kids have today in terms of get on public transportation and go somewhere. Maybe from the age of ten on, we’d pretty much every Saturday.

Prahl:  How far apart did you live?
SHENKER:  We lived on 26th and Tillamook and she lived on 37th and Klickitat. It was three blocks to Knott, and another two, so five.
ENKELIS:  We would coordinate going to lunch and a movie downtown. So we would talk on the phone, “I’m getting on this bus.” This bus would go past her corner on Broadway and she would get on the same bus. Then we would come downtown and have lunch together. 

Prahl:  Without cell phones you still managed.
ENKELIS:  We did that for a lot of years.

Prahl:  Because of these clubs like K’maia club and the separation of the Jewish clubs, were your friends exclusively Jewish in high school or only during the club parts?
ENKELIS:  No, it was pretty much exclusively Jewish. I had other friends but they were mostly people that I already knew from grade school. Neighborhood friends, but my social activities weren’t with them particularly.

Prahl:  Were you involved in any sports in school?
ENKELIS:  No, I was never good at sports to begin with.

Prahl:  What were you good at in high school? What were the things you liked about high school?
ENKELIS:  I used to like to play piano, not very good.

Prahl:  Which subjects were your subjects?
ENKELIS:  I don’t think we had anything special to choose, did we? We had languages that we got to choose. I was in, what was that class that [Arden] and I were in together? Some sort of advanced English.
SHENKER:  They were in what they would call today the kind of [AP classes] and Myra was in an English with Arden and I think another one. You were in a couple.
ENKELIS:  I might have been in a math one. 

Prahl:  Did you date while you were in high school?
ENKELIS:  Yes, but not very much.

Prahl:  In groups, or in single dates? Like go out with a group of kids?
ENKELIS:  Both.

Prahl:  Did you drive?
ENKELIS:  Yes. As soon as I was eligible to get a driver’s license, I drove.

Prahl:  Did you do things at the JCC? Did you go downtown to JCC at all?
ENKELIS:  No. The JCC at that point was not a very attractive place.

Prahl:  Did you ever go?
SHENKER:  Physically it was not very attractive. I went sometimes, but not real often. We didn’t hang out there a lot. While there was AZA [Aleph Zedek Aleph] those years, they didn’t start BBG [B’nai B’rith Girls] until we were seniors in high school, late. If I may, I don’t mean to take over her interview. You know when you asked if she dated a lot? I don’t think our friendship group, Myra and I had a group of about six Jewish gals. None of us dated. It was more, the gals did things together, the guys did things together. There were sometimes parties, there was sometimes danced, but we didn’t do a lot of dating in between those occasions.
ENKELIS:  That’s right, we didn’t.
SHENKER:  I don’t think it was unique to me or unique to you. 

Prahl:  Were you a more intellectual group? Were you busy doing homework or were you just busy with your girlfriends?
ENKELIS:  Mostly girlfriends. I sailed through high school, never realizing that I was good, bad or indifferent. I just got the equivalent of A’s on everything without a lot of effort, so that when I got to college it was a very shocking, rude awakening.

Prahl:  Was your parents’ expectation that you would go on to college? Was there any question of that?
ENKELIS:  Absolutely. There was no question whatsoever. 

Prahl:  Did they have ideas what you do there? What you would study?
ENKELIS:  Not particularly. But, my freshman year, I went to Stanford, My freshman year, I came home. I went to freshman orientation. Soon after, it was Rosh Hashanah and I came home. I was never afraid of my father, never ever. But, I was a little reluctant to tell him what I learned at orientation. I said, “Daddy, they told us at orientation that at the end of four years we won’t be ready to do something specific. At the end of four years we’ll be ready to start preparing to do something else.” He responded, that that was what he expected, but it was to be clear to me that I had to keep going to school until I was ready to do something specific. 

Prahl:  Did you do that?
ENKELIS:  Yes.

Prahl:  What was it you got ready to do?
ENKELIS:  I was what used to be known as a Medical Record Administrator.
SHENKER:  She was the Administrator at the largest hospital in this country.

Prahl:  So, when you finished at Stanford you were not ready to be that? So what did you do after that?
ENKELIS:  Well, unfortunately, my senior year in college, was when my father died. I had already been accepted to where I went next. The medical record field was small. The number of places in the country where you could get training was limited in number, like 20, where you could get training that would qualify you for the national licensing exam. I think I applied to all of them and got accepted to all of them. One was at Berkeley and one was in Oakland. Several were back east. I had already decided to go to one of the only three in the country that required a college degree for admission. The others required two years of college.

Prahl:  Which one was that?
ENKELIS:  I went to the Graduate Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. But, the reason I am telling this tale, is, it is indicative of my mother. My father died after I already made the decision that I’m going to Philadelphia. It was already known I was going to Philadelphia. So, I said to my mother, “I’m going to change. I’m going to, whatever it was in Berkeley, or Oakland, Merritt Hospital.” She said, “No you’re not. You made the decision on a unemotional basis and you’re not changing it now on an emotional basis.” That is what typified her. So, I went east.

Prahl:  How long was the program?
ENKELIS:  The program was 12 months. At the end of which, I was eligible to able to sit for the national licensing exam, which I achieved. I went east, thinking I’ll go east for a year. I came back 20 something years later. Having lived in Philadelphia for the year, then Washington, D.C. area, and then Boston, then New York

Prahl:  Did you become closer with your east coast family during that time?
ENKELIS:  I did, but even growing up, I had a cousin who was 12 years older than I.

Prahl:  That is Gloria?
ENKELIS:  Yes. With my mother. She’s 12 years older than I and I was a junior bridesmaid at her wedding and she was living back east. So that relationship solidified. I had wonderful family relationships with all my cousins back there, but especially with her and, later, with her children.

Prahl:  Tell me a little about Stanford and life there. Did you know of anyone else who was going there, as well?
ENKELIS:  Yes, Arden, number one.
SHENKER:  And I used to go and stay with her when I’d go. I met him at grade school and I was his date to his bar mitzvah party. I used to go stay with Myra.
ENKELIS:  Stanford was a shocking awakening.

Prahl:  In what way?
ENKELIS:  Well, I found out I was just average. I had to work hard to be really just average. The whole time I was convinced I was flunking. I was always convinced I was failing in this class or that. I don’t think I ever, ever in college had less than a C. Mostly I had As and Bs. But, I never had confidence that I was going to make it. I had three freshman roommates with whom I remained close. We’ve lost touch with one and one is now mentally slipping away. The one I was closest to just died this last year. 
SHENKER:  And Susie Marcus was there at the time.
ENKELIS:  Susie was a year ahead of me and Bill Rogoway was a year ahead of me.

Prahl:  Did you join a sorority?
ENKELIS:  No. There weren’t any actually in my day. But I wouldn’t have joined one if there had been. I loved Stanford, but I had, even though I had traveled many times, I had been sent by my parents to visit my grandparents on my own at age 12 on an airplane, 14 hours of travel, and a change of plane in Chicago. Even though I was an accomplished traveler and had been away to camp, and so forth, I still had real separation difficulties going off to college. Something about, it is never going to be the same again. I’m never going to go home and be mother’s little girl anymore. It’s very tough.

Prahl:  When you did go home, it was? When you finished school, your father had died. 
ENKELIS:  He died in my senior year.

Prahl:  And did you have this, at that time did you go back to Portland and…?
ENKELIS:  I never lived in Portland again. I went to Philadelphia because Mother said I couldn’t change my mind. And then when I was getting out of school in Philadelphia, there was a good job opportunity and I was, sort of, dating somebody and that’s where his younger sister was living, in DC, so I thought, I’d go down there for awhile. One job led to another. The field of Medical Records was small in terms of licensed credentialed people. There weren’t that many of us in the country at that time. Couple of thousand, probably in the whole country.

Prahl:  Were they all women?
ENKELIS:  In this country, mostly yes. In Europe, mostly no. I had the advantage that when I went to my first job, it was at a new hospital. It was a new physical plant and new medical staff, a new everything. It was created from nothing in the fastest growing county in the United States at the time –Fairfax County outside of Washington, DC. I was hired as were the other department heads because they could get us cheap. Straight out of school, no experience, low price, because there was no money. The county built the buildings and rented them to the hospital corporation for a dollar a year. The hospital corporation had, probably, the youngest hospital administrator they could find and the youngest assistant. We were all really young. It was 1960.

Prahl:  Did it turn out to be a good plan?
ENKELIS: It made my career. It turned out, it was 1960 and these new young people, the big boss and the next guy down, who was my boss. They said, “We know you never learned about this in school, but we have this thing called the computer that we’re going to rent time on, down the street. So even though, you learned how to do X, Y and Z on paper, we’re not doing it that way in this brand new facility. We’re not doing the payroll that way, we’re not doing hospital statistics that way, we’re not doing X, Y, Z that way.” We had a Data Processing Department, “DP,” as it was known, that consisted of one person and he had never been inside a hospital before. They hired him away from a university. So now, here we all are, and we’re supposed to open our doors February 9th, or 6th or whatever. It’s October we’ve been hired. They send us off to IBM schools. IBM used to run these little schools to try to teach people how to use the computer. So it was the making of my career because I became a big fish in a small pond. My role in my whole career really was, I was an interface person between the technical people and the medical staff. Sometimes I worked in hospitals, and sometimes I worked in industry selling something to hospitals. I was always in that middle ground.

Prahl:  So, in those 20 years that you were east, where did you live for the longest time?
ENKELIS:  In New York City. I stayed in the DC area, where we opened a brand new hospital. Then, five years later, I moved to Boston and worked for the General Electric Company for two years building something for hospitals and then, again, because I was a big fish in a small pond, I never went looking for a job. People would call and say, “Would you come talk to us about the possibility?”

Prahl:  So, being a woman, did that affect your job potential?
ENKELIS:  That was the norm for middle management in hospitals in the United States. There was no disadvantage to being a woman. My job in New York, a woman whom I greatly admired had been the one and only director of medical records at the [Columbia] Presbyterian Medical Center. I met her when I was 20-something and she was probably 59 or 60. Over the years at professional meetings we would get together. She called me one day when I was Washington DC and said, “Would you consider coming here to apply to be the Assistant Director to succeed me in two years when I retire?” I said, “I am extremely flattered. But, I am just packing right now to move to Boston because I accepted a job in Boston. So, no thank you.” Two years later she called again and said, “We never found the right person who would come to be my assistant, who would be in line to take over. So, we took a different tack. We hired, as my assistant, someone who definitely would not aspire to take over, but would bridge the gap between her retirement and the next person. So, would I come and let her boss interview me?” At that point, I was looking actively for a new job. I wasn’t looking actively to move cities, but I was actively looking for a new job. 

Prahl:  And you stayed in that job for a while.
ENKELIS:  I went to New York and I worked there for 15 years.
SHENKER:  Largest hospital in the country. Pretty responsible.
ENKELIS:  It was big. It was a big move.

Prahl:  Where do you live now?
ENKELIS:  I live in Mountain View, CA. When I moved to the west, I wanted to be near my brother and sister in law. I wanted to be back in the Bay area where I always had intended to settle, and I got sidetracked.

Prahl:  When you moved back were you retired or were you still working?
ENKELIS:  No, I was working. I was 45 years old when I came out. I took another job in a hospital, which I didn’t want to do. I wanted to work on the computer side of things. But, the county hospital in Alameda County was advertising in the national papers for a Director of Medical Records. So, I sent in a resume. When they talked to me on the phone, I was very honest and said, “I really don’t want to be a director of medical records anymore, but I haven’t found the kind of job I do want. I am going to be in CA visiting.” They said, “Would you come to the interview?” I said, “Yes.” When I was being interviewed, they said,” Would you please come, even if it’s just for six months. We’re desperate.” So, I figured, it’s a job, in the part of the country where I want to be. So, I said, “Yes.” I worked there for two years. At the end of that time, I had the kind of job I really wanted, which was working for a computer company. Doing things with Medical Record departments. So I did that for the last part of my career.

Prahl:  And you’ve been living in the same place all this time?
ENKELIS: Yes, I had a rental apartment in Sunnyvale when I first moved. Then, I bought a place in Mountain View. 

Prahl:  Did you have any family in CA?
ENKELIS:  My brother was in Palo Alto. Her sister [Shenker’s]. And Howard.
SHENKER:  We had a lot of holidays together.
ENKELIS:  That was my getting around the country.

Prahl:  How often do you make it up to Portland, now?
ENKELIS:  Well, it’s not very often, but we were saying before, I have to do more often more now, because she was coming south a lot because her sister was down there. Now, her sister is not living anymore, so I have to come north more often if we are going to be together. 
SHENKER:  And we need that.
ENKELIS:  We’ve decided that we were going to be in Seattle anyway. So I said, “What if I come to Portland? Fly in and out of Portland and then take the train with you guys to Seattle?” So that’s what we are doing. That way we get our visiting in. So what did I leave out?
SHENKER:  I think one thing that I would like to put in, which is relevant to me, particularly. But it was relevant to Barbara and, certainly, your cousins, like Phoebe, and so forth. Myra was sort of like the fairy Godmother. She didn’t belong to other children, so she was like an extra. All three of my children, independently, have said to her, “If you need care. If you need to be in a facility, whatever you call it.” All three of my children. She always came and she always sat on the floor and played games. She always talked to them and listened to their responses and gave really thoughtful, caring presents and has a real place and last Pesach Jordan said to me, “You know, Aunt Myra hasn’t come. She really needs to come for Pesach.” So, I told her and, guess what, she’s going to Pesach. She has never missed, well, I think there was one because she was doing something, like going to Israel, or something that was scheduled first. 
ENKELIS:  I missed Diana’s wedding. I was away for Diana’s wedding. 
SHENKER:  But she was there for all b’nai mitzvahs and weddings and everything. Not only of my children, but others, too. My kids were kind of special to her. She has always been very special to them. Because we were really very close growing up, and still are. It’s a known thing for the kids. “Aunt Myra’s coming?” 
ENKELIS:  I have a special relationship with her children. I guess with all of her grandchildren, but especially one of her grandchildren, who is now 14. Is he 14 now? When they were little and I would come home, one time I came and Diana was about three and Lois was doing laundry in the basement in the place wherever that place was. So we went down to the basement. The laundry machines were over here and over here was a little kitchen set for Diana. So, I’m sitting on a chair over here, but I’m carrying on a conversation with Lois. At the end of it, Diana said,” Could you come back and play tomorrow?” I do have a good relationship with the children. 
SHENKER:  It is very special, though, because I always wanted them to have a relationship with an adult, other than Arden and me, in case they needed to go to somebody. If she lived in town, she probably would have been that person. 
ENKELIS:  I guess I should have said that part of the story, which is, we were both raised by mothers who were fairly strict. Rules of behavior in the house, etc. In my case, I was supposed to ask mother for permission to do, XYZ. If mother was not available, I could ask her mother. If her mother said, yes, that was yes. If her mother said no, that was no. There was no discussion. “If I’m not available, then you ask Aunt Lil.” It was that kind of closeness among the families.
SHENKER:  You know, the sad reality about today’s society, it’s true of my family, but it’s true of most people I know, my children do not live in town. They don’t live in the same community with their aunts and uncles. They live really pretty independent lives. And that’s not necessarily a good or a bad, it’s a different.
ENKELIS:  It’s very different. Another thing that I thought was very interesting when I went away to college, was the first time I ever discovered that the rest of the world didn’t operate the way our family did. I just assumed that’s how everybody’s families behaved. It turned out, not to be true. My brother, unfortunately, died young. He was 59.

Prahl:  Did he have children?
ENKELIS:  No. He was in a happy marriage. She and I are still close. 

Prahl: Should we end here and look at the photographs?