David Margulis

Prahl: Let’s begin by having you tell us the very basics, your full name and where and when you were born.
MARGULIS: My name is David William Margulis. My middle name is from my grandfather’s first name, William. He went by the name Will. I was born July 3, 1951 in Portland, Oregon, at Emanuel Hospital.

Prahl: What was your family doing in Portland at the time? Why were they here?
MARGULIS: My family came to Portland because my grandfather William Margulis came for the Lewis and Clark Exposition. He had been in the business of expositions, having food concessions at world’s fairs.

Prahl: In Europe?
MARGULIS: In the United States. My grandfather William was originally born in Odessa, but he was quite a traveler. I don’t know when he immigrated to the United States. He had restaurants in Peking, China, during the Boxer Rebellion. He had European-style restaurants for workers who were Europeans in those countries. He had restaurants in the late-19th century in Peking, in Manila in the Philippines, and I believe Perth or Melbourne, Australia. Then he came back to the United States and they were having hundred-year centennials in different cities, and they had a special centennial for the departure of Lewis and Clark in St. Louis around 1903. Then two years later, in 1905, they had the Lewis and Clark Exposition, which brought them to Portland. My grandfather at that point had two sons — Louis, the elder son, and Milton — and his wife Ida Greenstein Margulis. Ida Greenstein Margulis was from South Carolina. She was from Lithuanian background.

Prahl: This is William’s wife?
MARGULIS: Yes, William’s wife. She was born in the United States, probably not too long after the Civil War. I believe my grandfather was born shortly after the Civil War in Odessa, Russia. So he brought his family out, his two sons and his wife. Then they had another world’s fair in Iowa in 1907. That was the year my father was born. They were in Iowa when my father, Jerome Marvin Margulis, was born. He was born June 7, 1907 in Iowa.

Then my grandfather had liked Portland so well that he moved back to Portland and brought his family, his three sons. My father was the youngest son, ten years younger than his brother Milton. His father came back to set up a large restaurant on Burnside Street. I believe it was between Third and Fourth, or Fourth and Fifth, on Burnside. It was a restaurant geared toward the lumbermen who used to come into Portland and stay down in that area. I don’t know if they called that area Stumptown at that time or Burnside. It had some funny name, that area of Old Town. They would oftentimes come in on the train, and they would walk over from the train station. His restaurant was based on having inexpensive meals. I believe a meal was five cents. But the big pitcher of beer was ten cents. They may have broken even on the meal but made their money on the alcohol. All of these workers from the lumber forests and the lumber mills loved to come into town and drink. He was very successful with that. 

My grandfather branched out, and I believe in a while they had the Prohibition. It might not have been because of the Prohibition, but he started an apple orchard in Odell, Oregon, which is up the mountainside from Hood River. It’s near Hood River. He had an apple orchard, and he organized and marketed Hood River apples. He was the first person to have the idea of taking Hood River apples from Oregon to the state of New York by train, all the way across the country — they had some way of keeping them cool — and marketing Hood River apples there. He also had a cider mill. The cider was called Marg’s [spells out] Apple Cider. 

Then later, when my father was in high school — my father was born in 1907, so high school was about 1920 or ’21 — his father and his mother got divorced. In the 1920s that was a huge embarrassment. It was a big family sadness. My grandfather, not to embarrass my grandmother so much, moved away from Portland, and my father was still living with his mother. His two brothers were ten years and 13 years older than him. They had already moved out of the house, and I believe they may have already been married.

Prahl: Just a couple of points: do you know the name of the restaurant on Burnside?
MARGULIS: I wish I did. No, I don’t remember the name. He also tried an experiment with an upscale restaurant. He always made lots of money with popular, blue-collar, working-class people’s restaurants, and then he aspired to having an upscale restaurant. My father told me it was in the basement of the old Multnomah Hotel. It was a fancy restaurant, and he didn’t make any money. He lost lots of money with the fancy restaurant but continued to make money with the regular, mass-market restaurant. 

I also learned this story about him. He was a very clever businessman. My father used to help him with reading and writing. He spoke English, but his first language was Russian, coming from Odessa. He learned to speak English quite well, but he could not read and write, so my father used to help him by writing letters and reading things to him. However, he was still very entrepreneurial and very successful with his different businesses. When he moved from Portland, he went to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, he was the first person to set up a group of restaurants where they had a central kitchen in downtown Los Angeles and sent trucks with the food in hot warming plates to restaurants around the city. He was the first one to cook in a central kitchen, and he had a very popular restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. I don’t know the name of it.

Prahl: Did you ever meet this grandfather?
MARGULIS: No. That grandfather died, I believe, in the late 1930s. He was almost 50 years old when my father was born, and my father was about 45 — 1907 to 1951 — that’s about 44 years old when I was born. So I had a very elderly grandfather who was born about 1860, a father who was born in 1907, then I was born in 1951. There was a such a great distance.

Prahl: You didn’t know that grandmother either then.
MARGULIS: I didn’t know my grandmother or my grandfather on that side of my family.

Prahl: How about your mother’s side of the family?
MARGULIS: On my mother’s side of the family, her . . .

Prahl: Let’s get her name.
MARGULIS: My mother’s name was Betty Lou Weissmandel. The name Weissmandel is German, and her family were German. I and my wife guess that her family were probably Jewish, but when they moved to America they didn’t say they were Jewish. My wife, who is European, said that most people with a name like “white coat,” weiss mantel, would have been Jewish. Names that were connected with clothing oftentimes were Jewish names. They came here among the first 500 Europeans to come to Oregon City in the early 1840s. I have old records — they gave me copies and I can’t find them now — from the funeral home that still exists in Oregon City that had the records on these family members who originally came here in the early ’40s. The family that came were [the family of] Phillip Weissmandel. Then he had a son named Casper Weissmandel, and I believe Casper was my mother’s grandfather. Either both of them were born in Germany or Phillip was born in Germany and Casper was born here. They came in 1842 or 1843.

Prahl: And they didn’t come here as Jews. They didn’t live as Jews in Oregon City.
MARGULIS: No.

Prahl: Was your father’s family living a Jewish life?
MARGULIS: My father’s family lived a Jewish life. I know his mother belonged to Temple Beth Israel. I have a suspicion that his father wasn’t very religious. From what I know, his father’s family came from in the city of Odessa. They were actually bankers in Odessa, and they didn’t live “beyond the Pale.” But I don’t know much about the Odessa part. I believe he went from Odessa to America before he went to Asia.

Prahl: What part of Portland did he settle in when he had these businesses here at the beginning of the century?
MARGULIS: Their home was in South Portland, in the old South Portland/Lincoln school district. My father went to Shattuck grade school and then went on to the old Lincoln high school, where Portland State University is today. I know they had to have lived in South Portland, where the Jewish people congregated.

Prahl: Do you know what synagogue they went to? You said your grandmother belonged to Beth Israel. Most of the people who belonged to Beth Israel didn’t live in South Portland.
MARGULIS: Interesting. I don’t know. What is interesting is that I had some knowledge of her being at Beth Israel, but she may have earlier been at Neveh Shalom because she happens to be buried at the cemetery at Neveh Shalom. Maybe she went to both. Does that sound more likely?

Prahl: It does.
MARGULIS: OK. That helps me [laughs]. So my mother, her great-grandfather and grandfather lived in Oregon City. Her father’s name was Louis Weissmandel. He was born in Oregon City and then moved to Portland. I know that he had some kind of small general store. Her mother was definitely not Jewish. She came from a family named Eppers. My grandmother’s mother lived in Donald, Oregon, and came from Alsace Lorraine. Her name was Caroline Viox [spells out]. She was German/French. I don’t know what kind of name Eppers is.

Prahl: How did your parents meet each other?
MARGULIS: That’s a good question.

Prahl: Was it a problem for your father’s family that your mother came from a non-Jewish family?
MARGULIS: I don’t believe it was a problem because my father met my mother  — my father had started his jewelry store in 1932 with a partner named Alfred Stone. My father’s hobby was that he loved horses. When he was young, he rode horses and loved riding. When he went to World War II, he was older, he was in his 30s, and he was drafted, I believe, or maybe he signed up. But anyway, when he went to World War II, on the exercise area that was cement, he fell on his tailbone and broke it. So after he broke his tailbone, he could never ride a horse again because it never really healed properly. When he couldn’t ride a horse any longer, then he decided to have race horses. I think part of the way he met my mother was that his horses would race in Los Angeles, and at that time my mother was single and living in Los Angeles. Somebody must have introduced my father to my mother through a Portland connection. Someone told him that Betty Lou Weissmandel is living in Los Angeles. 

So I think they got together in Los Angeles, and then she came back to be married to my father in Portland, and she converted to being Jewish. She had no problem with that because my mother had grown up going to Caitlin Hillside. In those days it was called Miss Caitlin’s School for Girls. She had several good friends in her class who were Jewish, and she rode to school each day being driven by Ruth Edelson and Ruth Edelson’s older sister. Their chauffeur used to drive the Edelson sisters and give my mother a ride to Caitlin each day. She had friends and was familiar with people who were Jewish, so . . .

Prahl: Did she convert at Beth Israel? And they married at Beth Israel?
MARGULIS: Yes. I don’t know. I know they were married by — was it Rabbi Nodel at that time? Would he have been there in the late ’40s?

Prahl: Yes, I think so. And they might not have been married at the synagogue. They may have been married through Beth Israel.
MARGULIS: Yes. They were married through Beth Israel, and I know it was by Rabbi Nodel. Then my mother also put on all the traditional dinners that you do when you’re Jewish, but she never quite got the culture. She didn’t know any Yiddish. She didn’t know Hebrew. But I remember growing up that we always celebrated the holidays, and she’d have the other family members, who were all Jewish, to her home and do Passover or different Jewish holidays when I was a small child.

Prahl: Did you ever feel that they treated her differently or there was any animosity?
MARGULIS: There wasn’t animosity from the family, but we did notice that — you know, it isn’t that easy to be accepted by other Jewish people when you convert. It isn’t like you’re automatically welcomed in. You’re still always a little bit suspect. We’d have talks about that. But she had plenty of Jewish friends, and she helped do fundraising for the Jewish Community Center. My mother was a big organizer. There were lots of Jewish friends who I met over the years who would say, “Oh, I knew your mother in high school.” And a lot of her friends who went to Grant and Lincoln, who were Jewish, would always say, “Oh, your mother would organize parties.” There was a lot of free flow of those people interacting. There wasn’t a big divide or anything like that.

Prahl: Where did they live when they first got married?
MARGULIS: They first lived on 25th and Marshall. It was a new apartment. Then they bought their first home, which they thought was far out in the country, on Cedar Hills Boulevard at the corner of Walker Road. They moved out there because my father, loving horses, had a dream of having horses at his home on Cedar Hills Boulevard. In those days, there was an old country airport across the street from their house.

Prahl: And did he have horses?
MARGULIS: He did have horses, but they never had them at that house.

Prahl: Is that the house that they raised you in?
MARGULIS: They lived at that house when I was born, and then they moved into Portland on NW Cornell, where I was raised all my life. They moved there when I was about two years old.

Prahl: Let’s move on to your childhood. Do you have siblings?
MARGULIS: Yes. I have one older half-brother named Mike, Michael Cusick [spells out]. His father was Irish Catholic, and my mother was married to George Cusick before she married my father. My half-brother was exactly ten years older than I was. 

Prahl: So the two of you lived . . .
MARGULIS: In the same household on Cornell. And then after me, three years younger, is my brother Kent Ian Margulis.

Prahl: Was there anyone else in the house besides your parents and your brothers?
MARGULIS: Yes, we were raised in our house with a German-American housekeeper. Her name was Gerta Rhine. She used to speak with my father in Yiddish because my father had learned some Yiddish from his father and she knew German. So between the two of them, they were always saying things in Yiddish and a kind of funny, broken German.

Prahl: Did she have responsibilities for taking care of you as well?
MARGULIS: Yes. She took care of my younger brother and I, and she lived with our family for probably 35 years.

Prahl: So give me a feeling of what life was like in your house. What kind of house was it, and what did you do as a child in it?
MARGULIS: Well, I recall — my mother, because she did a lot of fundraising and partying  — they gave parties a lot when I was a child, and so the house was oriented around entertaining. My mother was a very active person who liked to be active outside the house. She loved cooking; however, she wasn’t someone who wanted to — she wanted to get out and do things a lot. She was a very outgoing, flamboyant, big personality. My father loved that. And they were not really parents who parented the way that people do nowadays. They were older, and it was almost like having grandparents for parents. My father was 44 or 45 when I was born, which was much older than all of my friends’ parents, and my mother was about 35 when I was born, so I always had older parents. They left a lot of parenting and the day-to-day regular duties to Gerta, who raised Kent and I. 

We went to Caitlin Hillside School, which was just up the hill from where we grew up. We walked to school every day. When we were little children, Gerta would walk us up the hill to school every morning and come meet us every day after school. Later, as we were older, we would walk on our own. Our home was on the edge of Macleay Park. We had a very fun neighborhood with other children our age. We spent a lot of time — our parents had no idea where we were. We’d be gone for four or five hours. As little children, we’d go to the top of the hill, of Cumberland, with our wagons and ride all the way down the hill [laughter]. We would do all sorts of things, build forts in the parks where nowadays parents would never let their children go unattended. We would play with neighbors. We always had to be home when it was dark, but summer nights I can remember being out until twilight, late at night, playing with our friends. It was a very pleasant, fun neighborhood to grow up in.

Prahl: Were your playmates and your schoolmates Jewish kids, non-Jewish kids, or a mixture?
MARGULIS: I went to Caitlin, and I happened to start there when I was two-and-a-half. Caitlin was sort of the non-parochial private school. Our other friends, if they were Catholic, they went to Cathedral, and if they were Episcopalian, they went to St. Helen’s Hall or Bishop Dagwell. The Jewish kids who went to private school in those days went to Caitlin, so I grew up thinking that all schools had about 25% Jewish kids in them because Caitlin did. When I went there particularly, quite a few Jewish students were there because a lot of professional people would send their children there as the private school that they felt comfortable sending Jewish kids to. That was the same situation when my mother grew up and she went there.

Prahl: Have you maintained any friendships with kids you went through school with?
MARGULIS: Yes. I went through school with Richard Singer, Dick Singer, who did a lot of the developing on 23rd and 21st Avenue in the Northwest. We went to school together for preschool, then he went away for first grade, and I believe he came back in second grade. He went away to Chapman one year; we both lived in the Chapman district. So he went to school with me. I’m still friends with Dick Singer. Delores Director went to Caitlin. Julie Durkheimer lived across the street from Caitlin, but I don’t think she ever went to school there. I went through Caitlin with Charlie Buchwalter, who was Jewish, Marian Buchwalter’s son. Jordan Schnitzer was in my class later. Who else? Different years different students would cycle in and out. There were quite a few Jewish kids in my high school classes there. I went to Caitlin from the time I was two-and-a-half until I graduated from high school.

Prahl: It must have been hard to leave.
MARGULIS: Yes.

Prahl: Tell me a little bit about your Jewish education. Did you go to Sunday school?
MARGULIS: Yes, my parents sent me to Temple Beth Israel Sunday school, and I was always very obedient. So I was there always, every Sunday. I don’t think I missed a Sunday unless it was spring vacation.

Prahl: Do you remember anything about it?
MARGULIS: I remember Rabbi Rose came when I was very young. I believe the first funeral he did was the funeral of my aunt. He was very good at funerals. He did my aunt Sylvia’s funeral, the first wife of my uncle Milton. I grew up with my uncle Milty living across the street from us. My parents lived across the street from my father’s brother and his first wife, Sylvia. I remember as a small child first meeting Rabbi Rose for her funeral. Receiving people, or the minyan afterwards, was in my parents’ house.

Prahl: Did the family celebrate Jewish holidays together?
MARGULIS: Yes, my mother always invited Uncle Milton and his daughter, Sue Friedman, and her family. Then later, when my Uncle Milton married a second time, some of the holidays started shifting to his second wife, Nettie [spells out] Margulis.

Prahl: How about Shabbat? Was there any Shabbat activity at your house?
MARGULIS: We didn’t do Shabbat things really, but we always did the big holidays. In those days, Temple Beth Israel was — not the same number of people would show up for Friday night services. It was a different time, the kind of congregation and when people attended there. As I recall growing up, if I was ever there on a Friday night there was barely a corporal’s guard [laughter].

Prahl: You said that your parents were not hands-on parents, but what were their expectations for you, both academically and religiously? Did they let you know what they expected you to amount to?
MARGULIS: Yes. My father loved writing; he was very good at writing and kind of creative. My mother was more the artistic one. They wanted us to do well in school. Caitlin was a pretty competitive school. There were quite a few very good students, and I had total ADD. I was probably spending 10 to 20% of my time at the principal’s office because I was always the comic in the class who was disrupting things and making jokes and doing something that was not the protocol that they wanted. I was a bit of a handful in an odd way. I wasn’t acting out, but I was sort of clever and I’d make jokes or say something that was not what the teacher wanted to hear.

Prahl: Did they expect that you would go on to college after high school?
MARGULIS: Yes, without a doubt. That was very important. Since my father’s parents had gotten divorced, he felt obliged to work to help support my grandmother and be productive. He started college, but then he wasn’t able to finish and that made him very sad. He really threw himself into his work. He first worked at Meier & Frank in the early 1920s, and then when Zell Brothers opened their first “better” store that was on Washington Street, at the corner of Park and Washington Street . . .

Prahl: What do you mean by better store?
MARGULIS: Zell brothers started out with a more, what would I call it? A lower-end store down near the railroad station, before they moved to having a higher-end store. That might have been one of the things they didn’t talk about so much [laughs]. My father used to tell me the story. When they wanted to open the new, more upscale store, they chose my father, who had grown up in Portland and knew a lot of kids from — there was interchange between the Portland Heights kids and the South Portland kids because they both attended Lincoln High School. There was a lot of interfacing, and my father knew the old Portland families. When he grew up, the family that owned Hirsch Weis, the Hirsch family, were quite nice to him. He used to ride horses with Harold Hirsch in Washington Park. They had horses on the hillside there, and they used to invite my father to come ride horses. One of the Hirsches was an ambassador to Turkey. 

My father loved English; he liked reading and writing. He had very good verbal skills, and the Zells saw that in him when he worked for them. So they hired my father and a man named Alfred Stone. Then one of the younger Zell brothers, Harry Zell, went with these two to open the new, better store. In those days, there was the historic old jewelry family from the 19th century, the Feldenheimers. It was the family of Louise Feldenheimer. That was the old prestigious Jewish jewelers in Portland. The Zell family opened a store a block away from the old Feldenheimers in the more upscale area to try to attract the old carriage trade of Portland. My father and Alfred Stone worked for the Zell family from 1925 to 1931 or ’32, and then they left to open their own store.

Prahl: Do you know if that was acrimonious?
MARGULIS: Yes, because my father always told the story to me of Harry Zell running after him telling my father, “What do you want? What do I need to pay you? What can I do to keep you?” And that sort of thing. He always had funny stories. In olden days, the Zell family would also buy jewelry when somebody came in to sell something. Later on they didn’t buy jewelry off the street. One time Harry Zell, when a lady came in with a red ruby ring and wanted to sell it, he didn’t want it to look so good. In those days people used to slick their hair back with some sort of thing like Brill Cream or some sort of oil. He took the ruby ring and he ran it through his hair to make it sort of oily so it didn’t look so great, but by accident the ring fell down his collar and into his shirt. He had to get the ring out, and this person is standing in front of him going, “Where is my ruby ring?” And he said, “Just a moment.” Then he kind of turned around and shook his shirt and it fell out the front. He turned back around and said it had just fallen down, or whatever. My father always thought that story was so funny.

Then my father went. It was a crazy time to open a new jewelry store.

Prahl: It was during the Depression.
MARGULIS: Yes, the height of the Depression, 1932. Everything had crashed in 1929. My father always told me the story about how he came to the US National Bank, the main branch, when the banks were all being — they called it “closed for a holiday,” but they didn’t have enough money in the banks to give people their money when there was a run on the bank. He can remember seeing the entire bank packed with every notable family and every person in Portland from Portland Heights and all over, jammed shoulder to shoulder there in an absolute panic, thousands of people in the bank wanting to get their money. And they couldn’t get their money. They had shut everything because there were not the reserves to pay them when people wanted to take their money out because they were so afraid of losing it all. He said it was the most interesting human scene of all, these people panicked in that lobby.

Prahl: It must have been. So how did your father and Alfred Stone have the wherewithal to go into business for themselves in the middle of that?
MARGULIS: It was interesting. My father’s father bought real estate in South Portland when my father was a small child. When he got divorced from my grandmother, he left her a hotel near the Veritable Quandary restaurant. It was on Jefferson Street — now there’s the public garage there — between Second Avenue and Third, or maybe between First and Second. There was a hotel, and my father, with my grandmother jointly, sold that hotel property to invest in opening the jewelry store. I don’t know whether that was a good idea.

Prahl: Did they open it right here where we are now?
MARGULIS: No, they opened the store on the corner of Broadway at Morrison. That’s where present-day Nordstrom’s is. It was a small, corner store; however, it had two stories. It was two floors. They had one big bay window on each side of the corner, and it was one of the first examples of Art Deco architecture designed by Harry Herzog. It was a beautiful little jewel box.

Prahl: Did they mean to be direct competition for Zells?
MARGULIS: Yes, they were right across the street from Zells’ location then.

Prahl: Were they immediately successful at competing with Zells?
MARGULIS: I think it was a very hard time, and it took time because few people had cash or had money. Everybody had lost money; the customer base just shrunk incredibly. But their new store faced Zells’ old location. Zells was directly across the street. He said he could always remember, when they were going to take down the scaffolding showing the new store, the Zells were all in the window looking — but they had the lights turned off in their store — looking across the street to see what Jerry Margulis was opening and what are Alfred and Jerry going to do now?

Prahl: Was there a permanent rift between the two families?
MARGULIS: Would I call it a rift? Socially, when they were out, they would be very cordial to each other and people were all polite. The Zells made it difficult because if there were certain old vendors that my father might ask for, the Zells would say, “If you sell to Jerry Margulis then we won’t buy from you.” Then the other person that was competition, next door to Zells, was Carl Greve’s family, and Carl Greve and that operation were Scandinavian. They were — I’m going to say it, they were pretty antisemitic.

Prahl: How did that manifest?
MARGULIS: It manifested itself years later. They were our competition across the street. We were in the Royal Building; we had a lease. The developer from Corona del Mar bought the building and was buying all the buildings on the block. They wanted to tear them down to build a new Nordstrom store there, and we had a lease there, so we had to take them to court because they wanted to tear the building down with us in it. When we went to court, the building owner, his attorney got Greves to come and testify against us that they were an unbiased, expert witness. However, they happened to be our direct competition across the street. They came to the court case and said in the courtroom that it would not harm our business if they tore the building down with us in it [laughter], which was a very interesting thing.

Prahl: What ended up happening? Did they tear the building down?
MARGULIS: They did start tearing it down with us in it. There were barricades over the top of the — there was a wood structure on the sidewalk that you walk through . . .

Prahl: Scaffolding?
MARGULIS: Scaffolding, sort of, was put over. There is a name for that kind of walkway. They built scaffolding and cantilevered something over the sidewalk as they were tearing the building down with us in it. Also, many of the Jewish sales reps who came to see us would tell us that the Greves were quite rude to them. Some people who were Jewish salesmen on the road from New York or Chicago or wherever, who represented manufacturers, often told us they didn’t want to do business with Greves.

Prahl: Did most of your employees tend to be Jewish? Did your dad hire . . .?
MARGULIS: No. We had some Jewish employees. My father had some very loyal employees who were Japanese-Americans. One of them, named Roy Maida, was a devoted employee who worked for my father for 63 years. My father, I remember him telling this story, during World War II always had Roy go home before dark — particularly in the winter because he didn’t want him to be harmed — before his family was taken away to the American concentration camps.

Prahl: So he left to be interned and then came back again?
MARGULIS: Yes, he left to be interned, and then he went on to be part of the famous Japanese-American division that fought through Italy. I think it was the 441st. He was honored and awarded because it was a very dangerous movement. Then there was another wonderful employee, named Fred Fuji, who was Japanese-American. Fred was born in Japan but came here as a young man. There were always different Jewish men, but most of the women who worked for my father were not Jewish.

Prahl: Were there women working as salespeople?
MARGULIS: Yes, he hired women salespeople. He thought women salespeople were oftentimes better than men. He hired them and had quite a good team starting in the ’30s and through World War II.

Prahl: What do you know about your dad’s military service?
MARGULIS: My father had a friend who was on the draft board. His name was Maryfield. He told his friend he was going to be coming in for an interview. My father was older; he was at the top of the age range. He was maybe 35-ish, and a lot of the other people were 18. So he said to his friend, “Where do you think you’ll send me? I am going to have to be running this business from the Army while being away.” His partner would be there but he would be away, because his partner Alfred Stone was beyond the draft age. 

My father was very conservative and cautious. They asked him a question about how much business do you do a year, and my father wrote down something like $100,000. Mr. Maryfield added a zero to it, which made it a million dollars. Because of that, they asked about his expertise, and he had a lot of expertise in sourcing and buying things, so they put him in the office in Ohio as a purchasing agent for the Army. My father’s big thing was that he was terribly against graft or corruption or people getting deals from the cause of World War II, so he was a very tough buyer for the Army buying supplies. He would have to go to these people and get them to produce the things very quickly, and he wanted it at the right price and not overcharging the government.

Prahl: That’s great. And he served his whole time in Ohio?
MARGULIS: Yes, at Wright-Patterson Field. He bought all of the aluminum. They dropped aluminum to block the radar when the bombers were going over Europe. So that the bombers wouldn’t be detected, they dropped big sheets of aluminum foil that interfered with the radar.

Prahl: Were your parents married already when he went into the Army?
MARGULIS: No, my parents were not married. They didn’t get married until the late ’40s. My grandmother died during the war. My father had kind of remained a bachelor to take care of his mother until after she died.

Prahl: Do you know what your mother did during the war years? Did she work for the war effort?
MARGULIS: I know that my grandmother on my mother’s side was a big volunteer in the Red Cross, and she also worked. I feel I got a lot of my hard work ethic from my maternal grandmother. Also my father worked very hard. My grandmother worked in retail through the Depression all the way until the 1960s. She worked until she was probably 80 years old in women’s apparel. She was a buyer for H. Levis. The reason I mention that is that she had a lot of strength and she was full of love. You would never know that she worked probably six days a week. She always made time to have you over on Sunday for dinner. She was a very loving, fun grandmother. She was my only grandmother.

Prahl: Do you know how her relationship was with her daughter after she converted? Was it a problem in that family that she converted?
MARGULIS: No. She always had difficulty pronouncing “bar mitzvah,” though [laughs]. She kind of liked it, and also she looked at it from a slightly different angle. She was in retail, and I think, over the years she met a lot of successful people who were Jewish, who might have been her customers. She might have been somewhat ignorant about Jewish things because she grew up in a small town, in Donald, Oregon. But I don’t think she carried prejudices or bigotry. She was also quite good friends with an African-American woman named Johnny B. who did cleaning work and backroom work at the Town Shoppe where my grandmother worked. So I think she was pretty open-minded. She was more interested that my mother was marrying a successful businessman than what religion it was. I never heard her say anything I thought was inappropriate or antisemitic or anything like that.

Prahl: We had been talking about your experience and we left for a minute. Let’s go back now to your own teenage years. Did you have anything to do with the Jewish Community Center?
MARGULIS: I did belong to some Jewish youth organization that used to meet at the Jewish Community Center. When I grew up, many of my friends belonged to the Multnomah Club, but it was before the time that my parents could join or did join. My father belonged to the Arrow Club. I think that my mother, even though she had a lot of friends in the Junior League, because she was married to somebody Jewish she was not invited to belong to the Junior League. They were kind of straddling two worlds at that point. My father was not a golfer, so they didn’t belong to Tualatin.

Prahl: I don’t know about the Arrow Club. What was that?
MARGULIS: Arrow Club was a club in downtown Portland. The clubs were all established because people couldn’t drink hard liquor outside of their homes, or any kind of liquor, until 1952 in Oregon. You had to belong to a club. So they had to have a lot more clubs, private clubs where you could go out in the evening. And then they had drinking clubs where you could go in the same day and become a member by paying a fee. You paid your $15 and you were a member, and then you could order a drink. Until 1952, you couldn’t get a drink over the counter. There were no bars, and restaurants couldn’t serve drinks; only private clubs could serve drinks. That’s why there were so many private clubs in the past. They might have dwindled now. 

I had many friends who belonged to the Multnomah Club, but I did not belong, so I learned to swim at the Jewish Community Center. I did things at the Jewish Community Center. One time I can remember, my father was driving me to the Jewish Community Center, probably around 1961 or ’62. We were driving south on 13th Avenue and had a horrible car accident. We were hit broadside at about 50 miles an hour by somebody who ran a red light. All I could remember was that, after the car stopped spinning around, the old-fashioned seatbelt had totally unraveled and my father was lying out in the street. I didn’t know what had happened, but he survived that accident pretty well. 

Since I had some Jewish friends in school and I kept going to Temple Beth Israel, I really didn’t do that much at the Jewish Community Center other than learn to swim there. I thought it was kind of a dreary place. I didn’t think it was that pleasant a building or hangout.

Prahl: So let’s do college and beyond.
MARGULIS: OK. I graduated from Caitlin, and I had gone to a small school all of my life and wanted to get to go to a big school. I went to Menlo College in the Bay Area. It’s in Menlo Park, California. I wanted to go there in order to become in-state. If I was in-state, it would be easier to get into the University of California system, so I went there for two years, to Menlo College, then I transferred to University of California at Berkeley. I loved my experience at Menlo, but it was another small school and I was looking forward to going to Berkeley. 

When I went to see Berkeley and first go there, I was not really the fraternity type. I happened to see there was a building at the top of Bancroft named the International House. I went in and asked, “Do Americans live here also?” They said, “Yes, there are 540 students from around the world and 60 Americans.” So I applied to live there, and it was the greatest experience. It was so interesting. It was very informative and formative. It was a wonderful residence hall that was built by the Rockefeller Foundation at Berkeley, at University of Chicago, and Columbia, to foster Americans and international students getting to know each other. It was an amazing place because the students who came there were the top students from their countries, from all around the world. Many of them had gotten the top scholarship from their country to be able to go to Cal Berkeley, and at that time, Berkeley was considered one of the best universities in America.

Prahl: What were you studying?
MARGULIS: When I went to Menlo College, I just took general liberal arts classes, and my roommate was from Saudi Arabia. His name was Talal Idris. He also transferred to Berkeley. Berkeley had the oldest Near-East Studies department west of the Mississippi. I was liking political science and sociology, but I decided to do an area studies, so I had an individual major in Near-East Studies and Modern Political Science. They had this wonderful department of Near-East Studies. I chose for my advisor a man named Harry Edwards. Harry Edwards was a full professor, and he was African-American. He wrote books on sociology of sports. He took me as an advisee because he was a very imposing and scary kind of professor, and I don’t think many people asked him to be their advisor. He was a very interesting fellow, a great big fellow, an athlete. He must have been six foot four. A wonderful lecturer, great classes. I did my thesis on the radicalization of the Palestinian National Movement.

Prahl: Did you go abroad at all to study?
MARGULIS: Yes. I did that in 1973. This was before the ’73 war. I took every kind of class you could on Arabs and the Middle East and history. I had professors that liked me and professors that invited us to their homes. I had a really incredible experience at Cal Berkeley. Sidebar: through my Saudi Arabian friend, who had also transferred there, we had another Saudi Arabian friend who was a prince. I had a few good friends there. One of my friends at the International House was a girl who was from Denver. She was half Jewish. We were good friends there. I introduced her to this Saudi prince, and she dated him for a while. Later on, we both visited this Saudi prince in Beirut, Lebanon, just before the ’73 war. 

I’ll skip ahead: years later, when we weren’t with this prince, he allegedly was the prince who assassinated the king of Saudi Arabia, King Faisal. We had known this fellow, and he was a friend of ours! We had known him pretty well. What was her name? Her last name was Davis. I can picture her . . .

Prahl: You can tell us later.
MARGULIS: OK. She and I talked about it afterwards. We couldn’t believe it. He didn’t have that in his personality; he was a quiet, gentle person. We could not figure it out for the life of us. We both felt that somehow he had been blamed, put up to it, or something. There was something very odd because it didn’t ring right. We had another friend who’d dated him very seriously, and she couldn’t believe it, either.

Prahl: You never talked to him again?
MARGULIS: We never talked to him again after we saw him in Beirut in late August of 1973.

Prahl: Did you stay in the region during the war?
MARGULIS: After I graduated from college, I told my parents that I wanted to study in an Arab country. In 1973 my parents said, “Are you crazy? You’re Jewish. You can’t go to an Arab country and study there. You can’t do it, and we’re not paying for it.” So I said, “OK. You won’t pay for it.” I applied for a fellowship to study there, and I won the fellowship, and I paid all of my expenses to go and study in Cairo, Egypt. I went to study there for about six months in the spring and summer of 1973, just before the ’73 war.

Prahl: It must have been a very exciting time to be there.
MARGULIS: It was a very exciting time. University of Texas at Austin had a program where 37 graduate students got to go to Cairo and study at the American University there. We went to study the urban development of the city of Cairo. Well, when we went there I was the only one who said up front that I was Jewish. After we left, I found out that about 25 at least of the other students that went were also Jewish and hadn’t said. Maybe it was 20, but it was over half. They were smart not to. Many of the other students had already gotten jobs with military intelligence, naval intelligence, CIA, all these different places.

Prahl: Did you all speak Arabic already?
MARGULIS: No. Some of them did. There were different levels of students. Arabic is an incredibly difficult language. I was trying to get as much as I could from the different classes; it would have been such a distraction. I learned a little bit of spoken Arabic and a little bit of reading and writing, but it is so difficult. One has to really concentrate on it without anything else for at least a year to start to be knowledgeable. I took some spoken Arabic, but you didn’t need to have Arabic because American University was an English-language school there, and the program was all in English.

We left there two weeks or less before the start of the ’73 war. It was the Yom Kippur War. In that year, Yom Kippur might have been mid-September, and we left on the first of September. We traveled then without an Israeli stamp. I first went to Rome and then flew to Beirut, where I met the Saudi Arabian prince and this girl named Davis. Then we visited Beirut, Lebanon, and I visited some of my friends who had been students at Berkeley in Beirut. They were Middle-Eastern Armenians who had lived in Lebanon for years. They were in the jewelry business. We saw Beirut at a time, for a week or ten days, before there was all the fighting and the wars and the destruction, and before the conflict between Christian and Muslim Arabs there. It was a very interesting time.

Prahl: Did you go into Israel at all?
MARGULIS: After I visited Lebanon, I flew from Beirut to Cyprus and then from Cyprus into Israel. I visited Israel for about ten days. I was alone; it was a difficult trip. I wasn’t with any group, but I had one good friend who was a Professor Brenner from University of California Berkeley. He was a full professor at Berkeley, and he was also a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, so I got to visit him. He showed me around a bit. 

They had a program where students could stay with families, so I stayed with a Jewish family, but I was uncomfortable. Sometimes when you stay with a Jewish family they need to do it for economic reasons, and they didn’t necessarily really want all of these American visitors, but they had to do it. And I felt guilty for that. I was glad that I could be supportive and stay there, but it wasn’t a real welcoming experience. I felt a chip on a lot of Israelis’ shoulders in that they felt that you were an American Jewish person who’s had it easy all of your life, then you come here as a little tourist to see this experiment, and we are trapped here. We came here and didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t get in someplace else; we had to make a life here. So I felt badly. I enjoyed learning what I did, but it was not a 100% comfortable experience for me. I think there was definitely a resentment of all the places you saw where American people had donated to fund this or fund that. I don’t know. It was awkward.

Prahl: And then after Israel you came back to the States?
MARGULIS: Then I came back to Washington, DC. I applied and got a freelance job at the State Department being a diplomatic escort for English-speaking, Arab visitors.

Prahl: Were you draft-eligible at all during this time?
MARGULIS: I had the school deferment from 1962 to ’73, when I graduated, and then I think it just was at the tail end so I was able to miss the draft, just by one year or something. I can remember being with friends at Stanford when they were calling the draft numbers, and I was maybe number 129. I remember I was with a good friend, Steven Babbson. His uncle was the governor at the time, Tom McCall. He called his mother, who was Tom McCall’s twin sister, I think, and said, “You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to ask Uncle Tom to help me so I don’t get drafted.” But somehow we had that deferment while we were undergraduates.

Prahl: So tell us about this position in DC. 
MARGULIS: I got hired as an English-speaking diplomatic escort, and I was coming back to Portland to work at my father’s store while I applied to graduate school. I wanted to be in the Foreign Service. I was applying to Tufts, who had a good international studies program, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins, I believe. I think I even got accepted into all three, but I worked for my father for a year and liked it so much I chose not to go to graduate school and I stayed here.

Prahl: Tell me what it was about the job that you liked so much that it changed your career path.
MARGULIS: First of all, my father discouraged me. He said, “David, retail is so hard, so many hours, so long. I don’t want you doing that.” And my mother discouraged me. They both said, “You can’t do that. You’ve got to find something else. We don’t want you tied to that. It’s like a chain around your ankle.”

Prahl: Reverse psychology?
MARGULIS: They were always really supportive. I got in-state at University of California, but my parents always felt it was important. They had to make trade-offs in order to pay to send me to Caitlin and then to send me to Menlo and then to send me to Berkeley. And they did it all, paid for it. I didn’t get student loans, but I did get in-state, which was amazing. I got a Berkeley education paying something like $625 a quarter, which was $1,875 a year. That was amazing. I graduated from Berkeley with highest honors. I loved it so much that the work wasn’t difficult. You were surrounded by very hard-working people. I liked it more than Caitlin, and it was a different feeling so I did better. At Caitlin I was not that great a student. On the curve, I was in the lower third. In my small class at Caitlin that year, 44 students in my class, eight got into Stanford. That had never been done before and never happened again after that. I had a very smart class. But I was able to kind of shine with my colleagues and my fellow students in my departments at Berkeley. I did well because the professors liked me. You kind of felt like if they liked you, you were doing what they wanted. 

So I applied for that job, but when I found out what the State Department was — it sounds glamorous, but it is this giant factory building, just gigantic, filled with small cubicles. And they aren’t even attractive cubicles. It was like a sea of beige, steel file cabinets and little steel dividers and long, long corridors with tiny offices.

Prahl: So you chose retail because of the aesthetics.
MARGULIS: [Laughs] There you go. I always liked design, but I most of all liked my relationships with clients and making customers happy. It’s a really fun thing to do. Coming to work and working with the customers is like having the nicest social life you could ever have. It’s really pleasant. You work in pleasant surroundings. It’s all about a fun occasion; it’s all about making somebody happy. You can’t go very far wrong unless something goes wrong in what you do. 

Prahl: Had you worked at all during high school?
MARGULIS: Oh, my God. Yes. I knew what it was. I worked at Christmastime, and I worked in summertimes. Most of the kids at Caitlin when I went there were pretty wealthy, and I came from a merchant family. We were not that wealthy. The jewelry business is very capital intensive. You have to put everything into all of this merchandise and then make a living after that. I didn’t have a lot of money, and I always knew my parents made choices to make it so that I could go to Caitlin, so I felt it was my part to help in the store. I always worked at Christmas. I worked summertime . . .

Prahl: Did you work in sales? Where did they put you when you were in school?
MARGULIS: I started from cleaning, gift wrapping, doing stuff that little kids could do. Cleaning jewelry, cleaning the store. And I worked my way up to selling. But I don’t think I really sold much until I got done with college.

Prahl: Did your younger brother come up behind you working in the store?
MARGULIS: Yes, my younger brother did but he didn’t like that. He didn’t have the personality for it. He was a little more at loggerheads with my parents on more occasions. They were trying to please him a little more. I was more of a pleaser, and he was not a pleaser.

Prahl: What did he end up doing?
MARGULIS: My younger brother ended up going to Occidental College, graduating in fine arts as a sculptor and maybe painter, but mainly sculptor. Then he went to Berlin and worked in Berlin for about a year with an American artist building a huge statue at the Berlin Opera House in West Berlin, when the city was still divided. Then he came back and went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and got a master’s degree in industrial design. Then he went to work for Lockheed Martin in California. After that, he moved to Seattle and worked for some sort of industrial design and commercial interiors company.

Prahl: So there’s an artistic and design vein running through your family, isn’t there? You said your mother was artistic, and you did design work, too. Did you study design at all, or do you just do it naturally?
MARGULIS: I sort of learned it here. I always studied art history; that was my avocation when I was in college. I took whatever art history classes I could. Then I have studied the history of jewelry since I’ve been a jeweler. I belong to the American Society of Jewelry Historians. I love reading about the history of jewelry and style and design.

Prahl: I want to make sure that we cover everything that we need to cover, and we haven’t even talked about Dolorosa at all. So . . .
MARGULIS: Should I jump up to there?

Prahl: Well, we had gotten to your making the decision to work in the family business. Let’s take it from there and go into your family life.
MARGULIS: So in 1973, I started working in the family business. I’m here permanently from ’73 on. I work with my father, and remember, my father was older. We had quite a good relationship. I was probably pretty hard on my father because he really liked to please us. But he had a sense of humor. He was, I felt, very young for his age. He was always politically open-minded. I was active in the World Affairs Council, so I’d bring him to lectures, which he always enjoyed. Then I got him into the City Club of Portland, and he really loved that.

Prahl: What were his politics?
MARGULIS: His politics were pretty liberal. His brother was a staunch Democrat, Uncle Milton, and Uncle Milton had a big influence on him. Both of my parents encouraged that progressive, Jewish perspective on politics. It was before Jews were becoming Republicans so much. I can remember sometimes my mother arguing with her friends who were non-Jewish and staunch Republicans. She was usually taking the Democratic side and having discussions with them. But they also liked progressive Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller. Or we used to talk about Paul McCloskey, who was big on overpopulation. He was a congressman from the Bay Area.

Prahl: Did they support Wayne Morse when he was running?
MARGULIS: Yes, they would have supported Wayne Morse. However, they were friends with Hatfield. Was it Hatfield or Packwood that ended up beating Wayne Morse? They were friends with Hatfield and were always Hatfield supporters. And they liked Tom McCall. They went between. They weren’t staunch Democrats.

Prahl: Were there political conversations around your dinner table?
MARGULIS: Absolutely. We talked about the plight of Black people. We talked about Jews and World War II. We were always quite fixated on that. Then we talked a lot about the Vietnam War. Because of me, and not because of my age and being drafted, they understood why they should be against the Vietnam War. It took some convincing, but they came to that side. Our politics were usually pretty harmonious. They were very worried when I went to Berkeley that it was too radical and there were too many demonstrations, but I was at the tail end of that.

Prahl: I’m sorry to distract you, but were there other relatives of yours working here at the store, or was it just you and your dad?
MARGULIS: It was just me and my father for a short time when I came to work here. Because I thought it would be very difficult working with my father, I told my father that my mother was going to have to work in the business also. So she came to work here for a while, not that long. I was nervous about having an older, very strong father and spending all of your waking hours with this person. You always hear all of these nightmares about fathers and sons having a difficult time with each other. But we didn’t. He wanted to encourage me. He enjoyed my perspective and what I brought to it.

He was actually more daring than I was. I can remember when I first began he said, “Now David, all kinds of people have all kinds of taste. You can’t be so conservative and want everything to be a little three-stone ring.” So he was more daring. He was also a very interesting character. Through the horse world, he had a lot of clients on the East Coast who accepted him. He was their jeweler, and he knew them through the horse business. I used to travel with him to all of these old American, WASPy families. He was their jeweler, and they all liked him very well. They had built a relationship because they had horses in common. He was made the first Jewish member of this old club in Saratoga Springs where there used to be a separation of the Jewish horse owners from the WASPy horse owners. The WASPy ones had a club. Even in the old Belmont racetrack, they separated the Jews from the non-Jews, and that racetrack was built by a Jewish man. Belmont was Jewish. 

But even here in Portland I learned that the Multnomah Club had an old German-Jewish group who decided which Jews were OK to accept into the Multnomah Club. There was an unusual dichotomy, and it sounds terrible to say, but there were different classes of Jews. Because my father had grown up in the west and in Portland, he got accepted with these WASPy people, who said, “Well, you’re a good guy and you’re OK, so we’re going to let you be in the club.”

Prahl: Were you a horse person, too?
MARGULIS: No. I did learn to ride when I was young, but it wasn’t in my blood the way it was in his blood. But that brought about a lot of interesting experiences. And then my father and I were early Jewish members at the University Club. As crazy as it sounds, before probably 1970, the University Club was just non-Jewish members, as if Jewish people didn’t go to the university. Isn’t that crazy? We were the first Jewish people. I can remember one time being at an annual meeting, and one of the non-Jewish members asked my father if he was Jewish. You knew he was getting at, kind of like, “How did you get here?” [laughs]. That was a transition time.

Prahl: Did your father tell him?
MARGULIS: Yes. My father said, “I’m Jewish. I grew up here.” But now they welcome all of the Jews who join the club. So I lived through that transition of Jews being excluded from things. The first time I was ever aware of somebody excluding me because I was Jewish was when I went to Menlo College. There was a group of young men who were in my class. We all became friends, and they all had gone to some kind of boarding schools on the East Coast. It was Thanksgiving and they were going home or something. Somehow it came up. I had gone from mid-September until Thanksgiving, and they didn’t know I was Jewish. But they didn’t ask me. If they would have asked me, I would have said, “Yes, I’m Jewish.” But nobody asked me. So then it came up that I was Jewish, and they said, “You didn’t tell us you were Jewish. Why didn’t you tell us?” I said, “Well, it never came up. You didn’t ask me. I didn’t know it was a prerequisite to have a friendship.” We were friends later, but they were incredibly upset that I hadn’t let them know from day one that I was Jewish. Isn’t that kind of curious?

Prahl: It is.
MARGULIS: That was the first time in my life that I experienced — other than knowing, when we were children going to Saratoga Springs, we used to talk about the fact that the hotel we stayed at just a very few years before that did not permit Jews to stay there. My father used to tell me about these different places he would go. His friends he would be visiting would make a reservation for him, and it would be under the friend’s name. Then he would come to the hotel and they couldn’t turn him down. But if he would have made the reservation — and this is in the ’60s. Isn’t that interesting?

Prahl: It is interesting. And he was aware of it but still willing to patronize those places?
MARGULIS: He thought, “If I don’t start doing it and they don’t see that we haven’t crawled out from under a rock, it’s never going to change.” So we had those experiences. It’s also interesting to bridge both worlds when sometimes someone doesn’t know that you are Jewish and you hear what they say. That can be beneficial. But I didn’t have much of that. I even had a lovely client, a very nice person, not a bad person, but she grew up in Georgia where it’s quite separate, and she lived for a while in New Jersey, where it was quite separate. But few years ago, she said to me, “I can’t believe you’re Jewish.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “Well, you’re not what I’ve heard in all of the antisemitic remarks,” or backroom talk or whatever.

Prahl: So it was surprising to her that you were a good guy.
MARGULIS: Yes. Isn’t that interesting?

Prahl: It’s interesting that she chose to share it with you.
MARGULIS: I think she was being frank. Or maybe she thought she was giving me a compliment, unfortunately. But see, growing up going to Caitlin, you never had that. I never even had a family friend or the parents of one of my schoolmates say anything wrong to me. I never grew up with that.

Prahl: Then it comes as a surprise.
MARGULIS: It does when you’re an adult.

Prahl: And your Saudi friends in college didn’t have any problem with the fact that you were Jewish?
MARGULIS: No, we got to know each other. All of my Arab friends —  it’s gotten worse now, but they were brainwashed just about Israel. They would separate you, saying you were Jewish and you’re not Israeli, or you’re Jewish and it’s your government doing wrong things separate, supporting Israel. It’s not you. He was friends with my father. And even a Saudi Arabian prince who went here to school was very close with my father; he adored my father. He gave my father a car for a present one time. He flew here, I think from Saudi Arabia, when my father died. He came to his funeral. It was interesting. They had some misnotions, and we might have some discussions sometimes where I would try to straighten them out on some things where they had been brainwashed the totally wrong way, but it was not as bad as it is today. It’s much worse now, their level of getting antisemitic misinformation.

Prahl: Did your interest in political science and international relations continue even though you were not working in those fields?
MARGULIS: Yes.

Prahl: What have you done to continue those interests?
MARGULIS: I would go to speakers and read a lot. I was vice president of the World Affairs Council. The World Affairs Council is not very open-minded to Israel. The bulk of the people there are pretty anti-Israel. Anti-Israel is one level before you get the next level down; digging deeper is antisemitic, unfortunately. 

Then in March of 1979, I met my wife Dolorosa. She was a client in the store. Part of why we became close was that she had lived in the country of Jordan, and I had lived in Egypt. She came and bought something from me, and she had a checkbook from Bank of America in Jakarta, Indonesia. She had a California driver’s license, a Dutch accent, and a residence in Washington.

Prahl: [Laughs] And you said, “This is the woman for me.”
MARGULIS: Yes. And, “This is too interesting.” She was very attractive and had a charming accent. I started talking to her, and somehow we found out about our interests from around the world, and I invited her to come to the World Affairs Council for a lecture. Then she invited me to her house for a dinner party.

She had an interesting background. She was a direct descendant of the artist Peter Paul Rubens, and her mother was Roman Catholic and her father was Jewish. Her father was from a very prominent Jewish family that dated back in the Netherlands to 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, and her Rubens side of the family had started companies like the East India Company. They did all sorts of trade and had a big bank called Boas Bank. They were very important Dutch citizens in Amsterdam all the way up to World War II. Then her great-grandmother, who was still alive when the Germans came, said, “They aren’t going to take me. Our family has been important here for 500 years.” And they took her, and her great-grandmother was killed at Auschwitz as an old patrician woman. My wife couldn’t imagine what it was like taking her to that situation. My wife went into hiding as a small child. Here she is before World War II. She was born in ’37, and the Germans invaded in 1940. Have you gotten her book?

Prahl: Yes. We sell it at our museum shop.
MARGULIS: OK. Her father was Jewish, her mother was Roman Catholic, but she grew up — after the war, her mother said, “After we hid and everything else, I’m not raising the children Jewish after that.” But the father, just from all the cultural things, she was more in tune with, and she never caught on with the Catholic religion. There were just too many things that she questioned. Before she met me, she went to Temple Beth Israel and took lessons and converted there. And we hadn’t even met each other.

Prahl: Oh, my.
MARGULIS: Out of her respect for her father and wanting to learn more about her background, she had become Jewish. Then we got married in 1981, and this month is our 35th wedding anniversary.

Prahl: Congratulations! Hopefully she will talk more about that [at her own interview] next week.
MARGULIS: Yes, she has a much more interesting story than mine [laughter].

Prahl: And they connect, so that’s really good.
MARGULIS: Have I given you enough?

Prahl: I think you have given us so much. I think we have covered everything that we had intended to cover, unless you want to talk about Jewish life in Portland from your perspective. You could talk about changes that you have seen, or even just looking back on what it’s like to be Jewish in Oregon.
MARGULIS: I do have many thoughts on that. It’s difficult. I have Jewish values and respect for what I learned as Jewish morals, and I love going to services. I love Jewish music. I don’t have any deep understanding of Hebrew. I don’t like to read prayers where I don’t know exactly what I’m reading. I would just be reciting a Hebrew prayer. To me that’s meaningless. I like words in English that have meaning and depth for me. I grew up with Rabbi Rose, and I really liked him. He was kind of stern, and he wasn’t very warm and fuzzy and parochial, but he was intellectual. I liked some of the things he had to say, and I liked the old prayer book, and I don’t like things that get “dumbed down.” I’m afraid sometimes now the services are either dumbed down or they aren’t teaching me something if there is a sermon which is ridiculously elementary. I want more depth. So I have a hard time dragging myself to services because they don’t have enough meaning for me, and I feel really badly about that. I love the synagogue. I love the music, and I feel that I like Rabbi Michael Cahana very much and I also like Ida Rae. But sometimes it can be a little too casual and too folksy. But it must be appealing to a lot of other audiences.

Prahl: But you are missing the intellectual stimulation you had before.
MARGULIS: Yes.

Prahl: Well, we’re going to close this up. I want to thank you so much for being a part of this.
MARGULIS: Thank you for all the time you have taken.