Henry L. Levinger

Tanzer: Do you remember your grandparents?
LEVINGER: I do on my mother’s side. I never met my father’s parents.

Tanzer: Where did your father come from in Europe?
LEVINGER: Let’s see. He was born in 1864 and he came here [when he] was 13, so that would make it about 1877.

Tanzer: Where did he come from?
LEVINGER: He came from Augsburg. He lived in Kriegs Arbor, which was a suburb of Augsburg, Germany.

Tanzer: Did he ever talk about his parents?
LEVINGER: Very, very little. He told me that his father, Heinrich, for whom I was named, was some dignitary in the synagogue there. He wasn’t a rabbi but he had something to do with the services and things of that kind. I think my grandmother on my paternal side, her name was Mendel before she was married, but I don’t even know her first name. My dad wasn’t very talkative about his family.

Tanzer: Did you ever find out anything about the Mendel family?
LEVINGER: I haven’t. We’ve attempted. I have a distant cousin, a Dr. Hirshberger, who lived in Maine and I have written to her. She has traced the family back better than anybody that I know of. And I think when Hitler came in most of them went to South Africa. I think they are living in Johannesburg and places like that. She has been down visiting with them but she couldn’t carry the chain on, the genealogical chain that I was looking for. We were trying to do it for the benefit of our children so they would now who their grandparents were on my father’s side. On my mother’s side I know way back.

Tanzer: Tell me more about the Levingers. How many children were there?
LEVINGER: Let’s see. There were 13. My father was the youngest of 13 children. There were just two boys and the rest were all girls. I think out of the 13, four or five of the girls came to the United States and the rest of them remained in Germany and probably their progeny are now in South Africa – what’s left of them are in South Africa.

Tanzer: So you really lost track of the Levinger side?
LEVINGER: That’s right, lost track of the Levinger side. There’s lots of gaps.

Tanzer: Why did your father come to the United States?
LEVINGER: Well, he told me that he wasn’t doing well in school. I think he got in trouble writing something on the school wall. In Germany they are pretty strict and his brother had already established a little grocery store in Rohnerville, California, which is just out of Eureka. I think they were glad to get rid of him; at least that is what he told me. They shipped him over here as a boy of 13. He did help his brother out in the store in the day and at night he was an apprentice to a druggist who was in the same block and he studied pharmacy. Finally he was able to pass the State Board and he got naturalized. My dad was a great believer in speaking the language. He took special courses in English. He didn’t have any sign of a brogue. He didn’t like the Germans who did because he said if they just had enough time to spend on it they could learn to speak like the Americans. That was one of his phobias.

Tanzer: Where is Rohnerville?
LEVINGER: I think about five or six miles out of Eureka up in Northern California. It’s a little bit of a town, maybe 200 people at the most.

Tanzer: Is there still a town?
LEVINGER: There is a town there. We stopped through there last year and I did find the grocery store and the proprietor had some old pictures there and she thinks that is the same store that Morris Levinger, his brother, owned. But she couldn’t trace it back that far.

Tanzer: What happened to Morris Levinger?
LEVINGER: He died many years ago. I would say 30 or 40 years ago.

Tanzer: Do you remember him?
LEVINGER: I just met him once. We weren’t very close. I think he visited up here. I’ve never been in Rohnerville before last year.

Tanzer: Did this Morris Levinger remain in Rohnerville all his life?
LEVINGER: I think so, yes.

Tanzer: When did your father leave Rohnerville?
LEVINGER: He left evidently about 1880 or 1885, in that area as near as I can figure out. He went to Oregon City and opened up a drug store. He either worked in it or owned it. I think he owned it. And he practiced pharmacy there for five or six years and then he opened up a drug store in Portland on Sixth and Harrison, which I understand was part of the Jewish district.

Tanzer: What would it have been called?
LEVINGER: I think probably it was Levinger Drug Store.

Tanzer: And do you think the store in Oregon City had the same name?
LEVINGER: I doubt that. I’m not sure. That part is pretty vague.

Tanzer: We can check this out in the census.
LEVINGER: Good.

Tanzer: So we will find that out.
LEVINGER: Then in 1898 a salesman convinced him that Baker was the place where gold was flowing freely and all the mines were operating. He took a trip up here and that is where I imagine he met Sanford Heilner. He did a survey of the town and he decided that it was a good place to open up a drug store so he opened up a drug store here. Half of the drug store was a bakery and a candy store and the other side was his drug store. He was here from that time until his death, except for a four-year period. On account of my mother’s health the doctors advised him to move to Los Angeles, where he managed a big store for Sam Hellman in Los Angeles. He hated it down there.

Tanzer: What year was that?
LEVINGER: That was about… well I was about in the second grade. It must have been about 1915 or 1916.

Tanzer: At that time did he sell the store?
LEVINGER: He sold the store in Baker and when he moved back to Baker he bought a competing store in Baker, Grace and Bodinson Drug Company. For years there was quite a little confusion. There was the Levinger Drug Store, the one that he had sold before and when he bought the second store he had to call it Louis Levinger, the Rexall Store in order to differentiate the two. We used to get our mail mixed up. It was terrific for a while and finally the other store changed its name to Rodamer Drug, which was the man he had sold out to. But I would say that at least for eight or ten years they had the same name of the Levinger Drug and the Louis Levinger, both in this little town.

Tanzer: When your father came here was he married?
LEVINGER: No, he was single and my mother had just graduated from Oregon State and came up here. I think she taught first or second grade and after she taught two years, that’s when they were married. I think it was 1901.

Tanzer: Now, did she teach in Baker?
LEVINGER: Yes she taught in Baker.

Tanzer: So he met her here?
LEVINGER: He met her here, yes.

Tanzer: Tell me about your mother.
LEVINGER: There were just two daughters in her family. They had lived in Corvallis and my grandfather on my mother’s side had moved to Portland. He was a carpenter and he built four or five little houses that he rented out. They lived over in Ladd’s Addition on the east side and my grandmother took in sewing and raised a garden and sold garden produce. She put both girls through Oregon State College. My grandfather had developed a bad back. He wasn’t really able to do heavy work anymore. I knew my grandparents very well. I spent most of my summers down there, either there or at my aunt’s in Oregon City, my mother’s sister, who married a druggist in Oregon City. I used to really enjoy going down there because they spoiled me rotten. I was the only boy in the family, my grandmother’s family.

Tanzer: Now, when your father married your mother, was your father an observant Jew?
LEVINGER: No, and it was surprising that he wasn’t because I don’t know whether [his father] was Orthodox, but I know that he was quite devout. I know that. My father had just gotten completely away from it although my mother and my father were married I think, by Rabbi Wise in Portland. My mother had to go two or three weeks beforehand to take some course of study before he would marry them.

Tanzer: So your mother did convert?
LEVINGER: Well, I don’t think she was really Jewish but she did agree to go through this training program so he would marry them.

Tanzer: I think that training program was probably what he set up as a conversion program.
LEVINGER: Well, it could be.

Tanzer: For all practical purposes then, they were married by a rabbi.
LEVINGER: That makes me full Jewish then.

Tanzer: Yes, if she was converted.
LEVINGER: Well, that’s what happened. I know.

Tanzer: Then it is. What was the reaction of your father’s friends and relatives to this?
LEVINGER: It was bad on both sides. My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side opposed it violently. They liked my father but [for] the fact that he was a Jew; they didn’t think that was the right thing to do. And then in Baker my father had been entertained both ways by the Jewish community here, which was quite small. But there was quite a clique. That he married outside of the faith, so he was dropped socially. We were raised without much religion in our family. We did go to church occasionally but were not officially members of any church. I have never been in a synagogue in my life.

Tanzer: Did your father say he was opposed by he parents or his family in his marriage?
LEVINGER: I don’t think so. I don’t think he had much correspondence, except with the sisters who were living in this country. Now he had a sister whose husband ran a bookstore in Eugene, Schwartzchild, and then the Harts and Sweets, who lived in Portland who entertained him quite a little when he lived in Portland before he was married.

Tanzer: Mrs. Hart is a sister?
LEVINGER: I think Mrs. Hart was. I’m not sure.

Tanzer: And Mrs. Sweet?
LEVINGER: I think Mrs. Sweet was one of his sisters. The only one that I new very well was the Schwartzchilds. Elsa Durkheimer was the daughter of the Schwartzchild family. She was Elsa Schwartzchild, who married a Hootstein and Ed Hootstein is now working for Emrich Furniture here. That’s the only branch of the family I have been able to trace down. When I went to Stanford, Elsa had me out for dinner quite a bit. Elsa Durkheimer. She was a great cook. She is long gone now but she was a fine person.

Tanzer: Was she related to the Durkheimers here [in Portland]?
LEVINGER: Yes. They are related.

Tanzer: That’s interesting. That might be a very good…
LEVINGER: …Good thread.

Tanzer: Did it ever strike you as being strange that your father did not have contact with his family?
LEVINGER: Well it did in a way. Dad was strictly of the hard-nosed German stock and he and I clashed in a lot of ways. He believed in working hard, not like the father that I was with my boys. He didn’t spend much time with me. He didn’t hunt of fish or anything. He just worked in the drug store trying to make a living for us, and so we didn’t have that companionship that a lot of fathers and sons do have.

Tanzer: Did your mother ever work?
LEVINGER: Just for the two years she taught. The rest of it was all homemaker. She was quite a… well she studied elocution in school and she was head of the Shakespearian Society here. She could recite everything that Shakespeare ever wrote, backwards or forwards. She taught classes in Shakespeare and then she gave readings. She was quite active in all the clubs in town.

Tanzer: Did she ever work in the store with your dad?
LEVINGER: No. Never did.

Tanzer: Were you close to your mother?
LEVINGER: Closer to my mother than my dad, by far.

Tanzer: What kinds of things did you do with your mother?
LEVINGER: Well, she was about the best cook I have ever seen and that is why I learned to love to cook. I never had a chance to do it until I retired. Now I do a lot of it but I used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. She was especially good in mathematics. She could do algebra like nobody’s business. That’s one thing I think they taught in those days. She was great in mathematics. She was very helpful. Of course she knew English very well. She was very helpful in all my high school days.

Tanzer: How many children were there in your family?
LEVINGER: Just two. 

Tanzer: Your immediate family.
LEVINGER: My immediate family. Well my sister and I. My sister was four years older. She died three years ago. She and I were the only offspring from my father and mother.

Tanzer: Do you remember your early activities in Baker? The types of things that you did?
LEVINGER: Oh yes. I had a real good life in Baker. I was never athletically inclined but I learned to play the saxophone. I used to play about five nights a week in the Happy Five orchestra around here and I saved all my money and was able to buy a car when I went to college. I did pretty well in school.

Tanzer: What school did you go to?
LEVINGER: Let’s see. I graduated from Stanford magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in economics. When I went to college my dad said, “You can take any subjects you want except pharmacy.” He said, “I don’t want a son of mine spending his time getting to work at 7:30 in the morning and working until 10:00 at night for the meager returns you get.” So I studied economics and then I worked for the National Cash Register for about four years. I graduated from college in 1928, which was just when the Depression hit. I was making a living all right but it didn’t look very good for me – the future with the National Cash Register. So about that time my dad said, “If you have any idea of coming back and running the drug store you had better come on home.” So I went back to Oregon State and took a two-year cram course in pharmacy because I had all the other college requirements. I got registered and came back. That was about 1933. I have been here ever since running the drug store.

Tanzer: Your father did make a success of the drug store.
LEVINGER: Oh, yes. When it came to what we needed, why we always had what we wanted and we lived very well compared with what the returns are now. It was pretty meager but we were, I would say, middle class. We weren’t top class financially but we had everything we needed. 

Tanzer: Did it bother your mother that she was not accepted by the Jewish community?
LEVINGER: Not at all. She had so many friends. She was a great bridge player, too. She was playing cards about four or five afternoons a week and running the house. It didn’t bother her at all. But I think in later years she was accepted. And as I said before, my dad was the first one to make the break. But several other Jewish people in town did marry out of the faith. I think things have mellowed so much during the years now. In the later years it didn’t make any difference. But none of our real close friends were Jewish when I grew up.

Tanzer: Did it bother your dad?
LEVINGER: No, I don’t think so. He was a funny man. There was so much difference in our ages, see. He was 37 when he married so he was about 42 or 43 when I was born and there was such a difference in our ages and I think that is one reason why we didn’t have the companionship, too. He knew that he had to keep his nose to the grindstone to keep providing for us and my mother took care of the rest of our lives.

Tanzer: Did he have a community civic interest?
LEVINGER: Oh, he was great. He was one of the charter members of the Kiwanis Club here and he was the one who instigated planting the trees between here and Haines on each side of the highway. He was one of the three or four fellows who started the natatorium here. He was too much that way and he was always a kind-hearted man. Every time we went to Portland, at the last minute he would say, “I’ve invited a couple of poor people here who wanted to get down to Portland to ride with us.” And he was always bringing someone home for dinner. Fifteen minutes before he would call my mother up and say, “I am bringing two more people home for dinner.” It used to drive my mother crazy. He was always giving stuff to the poor people. More people in Baker just loved him because he was always giving away our second best radio to somebody who didn’t have one and that type of thing. But he was a hard man to understand. You had to understand him to get along with him and he and I clashed about the way the drug store should be run and things of that kind. When my mother died that was the worst four years I have ever experienced in my life. She ran the whole household and when he would come home at night she would say, “Get dressed. We are going out to some kind of a party.” And he would go. When she died there was just nothing and he kept telling everybody all day long in the store that he wished he had died and there is nothing to live for and that type of thing. I had to put up with that. He and I lived in this big house and we hired a housekeeper to get our meals. It was terrible on me; I was working and trying to build the store and he was ready to go.

Tanzer: Where was your sister at this time?
LEVINGER: She was married to a rancher and lived about fifteen miles out of town, a cattle rancher.

Tanzer: She wasn’t around.
LEVINGER: No, she wasn’t around.

Tanzer: What year was this?
LEVINGER: My mother died in 1935.

Tanzer: You mentioned that your father had sold his store. I am interested in that, and you lived four years in Los Angeles. What life was like there, because you all moved down there.
LEVINGER: Yes. We all moved down there and I started school in Los Angeles. I think I was in about the second grade or the third when we moved back to Baker. This was a tremendously big store. It was catering to movie stars. I remember it having marble floors and it was a beautiful thing. It had five or six registered druggists filling prescriptions. I think they had had five or six managers. My dad did turn it around so it started making a little money and Sam Hellman hated to see him leave because he thought maybe he could make something out of it. Because he spent so much money on the fixtures and accouterments in the place. My dad didn’t like it down there at all.

Tanzer: Was this the kind of drug store that preceded the Milton F. Krees, which had all the sundries and the soda fountain?
LEVINGER: Yes. It had one of those big soda fountains. I would always go in there and order buttermilk (they thought I was crazy) instead of a banana split.

Tanzer: Did your mother’s health improve?
LEVINGER: Well, she was better. They thought she ought to get out of the altitude and that is why they sent her down there. But I think she must have had a bad heart. It never slowed her down, though. She just kept going at a steady pace. She had high blood pressure and she was overweight and in those days they didn’t know what to do about it. I still think her public speaking stuff that she did… well I don’t think that helped her blood pressure either because it was a nervous strain. She was selected to go down and give a talk at her class reunion. She was a good speaker.

Tanzer: So she was really quite young when she died.
LEVINGER: She was 54, I think.

Tanzer: That four years after your mother died, your father was still in the store?
LEVINGER: Yes.

Tanzer: Did he eventually accommodate himself to the fact that she was gone? What adjustment?
LEVINGER: No. He never really did. He just felt that his life was over when she was gone. You’ve never seen two people more devoted than they were. He just lived for my mother and vice versa. My mother could manipulate him. He was always screaming that she was spending too much money. When I wanted something I would tell my mother and she would say, “Well, I’ll get it out of your dad.” And that’s the way it worked. They were really happy. We were a happy family except that we didn’t go out and do a lot of things together, like we have done with our kids.

Tanzer: Why not?
LEVINGER: Because my dad worked all the time. He didn’t have time off. He worked six days a week and a half a day on Sunday, often times. He just didn’t have the chance to get out.

Tanzer: So your mother really worked to raise you?
LEVINGER: She was the head of the family as far as I was concerned.

Tanzer: And was this true for your sister also?
LEVINGER: I think so, yes. My sister had a nervous breakdown after my mother died because they were very close.

Tanzer: So your mother really was strong.
LEVINGER: She was strong. Character.

Tanzer: Did your father then eventually retire?
LEVINGER: No. There came a showdown when I got out of the pharmacy school in 1933 and worked for two or three years. I had a couple of offers. I had worked one summer in a store in Eugene for the Tiffany-Davis Drug and they offered me a pretty good salary. I think about $150 a month, which was a pretty good salary in those days. So I went back and told my dad. I said, “Either you sell the store to me or I am going to go to work elsewhere because there is no point in me spending the rest of my life here and having half if it belong to my sister.” Although my sister and I have always gotten along well. So I said, “I think for my own future I would be better off working in another place. And he said, “What do you want me to do? Give it to you?” I said, “No, I’ll pay it out whatever the book value is.” So I was still paying when he died. I had more than half of it paid out and a year or two after I did pay it out completely. But that was the only run-in we ever had about the business. I mean, there was no reason that he didn’t want to sell it to me.

Tanzer: What year did he die?
LEVINGER: He died in 1940, five years after my mother died.

Tanzer: After you agreed to buy him out, did he still continue to be involved with the store?
LEVINGER: Well, he criticized everything I did. He kept complaining. We had a small, little store. It was 25 ft. by 40 ft. and we kept moving the walls back and adding more things and that wasn’t the way he liked to run a drug store. He would tell me, “You are going to go broke and we’ll never make it.” But things worked out beautifully. We had seven drug stores here at one time. We ended up with three. I think we have about 85% of the business in town now.

Tanzer: Why do you think he was concerned about expanding?
LEVINGER: Well, of course, he was getting along in years and he thought I was taking chances. He knew it would work his way. I mean, having worked for the National Cash Register and in other stores, I knew that it was an old fashioned type of store and we had to do something to modernize it, which we did. We kept expanding and expanding and then we rented the building next door and knocked the walls out and doubled the size. Then we had a fire and tripled the size.

Tanzer: When was the fire?
LEVINGER: The fire was in 1958.

Tanzer: What happened in the fire?
LEVINGER: We were just ready for Christmas. We had all our displays out and I had just gone home for dinner. It was about 6:30 or 7:00 and the fire whistle blew and we never did know what started it. We had an incinerator in the basement. They thought that might have been it. But by the time I got up there twenty minutes later, the building was just gone. It was the biggest fire Baker ever had. You could see it for thirty miles away with all the alcoholic products and stuff we had and the inflammable material. I should say, it just blew the roof off.

Tanzer: Were there other buildings that also ignited?
LEVINGER: Yes. The first National Bank building on the corner was pretty badly damaged and the furniture store next door was damaged.

Tanzer: Was that when Leo’s…?
LEVINGER: Leo’s office was upstairs over the bank. That is when he had to move.

Tanzer: Yes. He told me about that. I wondered whether that was the fire.
LEVINGER: Yes. That was the fire.

Tanzer: Then what did you do?
LEVINGER: Well, there was a vacant building right across the street on First Street. It had been a furniture store. It had been sold and they were going to put a filling station there, tear it down. We immediately went over and asked them if they would consider renting it and they said, “If you can get out of here within sixty days.” So we opened up the next day, although we didn’t have any stock. I sent wires to Squibb, Lilly, and Parke-Davis and all the companies and told them to send us some open stock and then we called McKesson ad Robbins and Northwest Drug in Portland and told them to send us some opening stock. All our employees pitched in and we had saw horses and planks and inside of three days we were filling prescriptions. We did almost as much business that Christmas as we did the year before, which was remarkable. People all thought it was great that we reopened because I could have quit then. In fact, this financial advisor that I had from Boise said, “You are crazy. You’ve got insurance and everything. You might as well quit and retire.” But I said, “No. We can’t do that.” People depended on us. We had to keep going so we did.

Tanzer: What were your feelings when you came back there and saw the store that your father had built and you had worked so hard in and saw it just go up in flames
LEVINGER: It was just a terrible feeling. Fortunately though, we saved most of our prescription files. The biggest headache was the accounts receivable. In Baker, over half of your business in on credit and we thought we lost a pile of money on this. Fortunately the record weathered the fire all right and we could still make out the figures. Everybody in town pitched in and gave us fixtures and all the doctors gave us sample pills. So we started filling prescriptions. It was just remarkable. We immediately hired a contractor to rebuild the building and I bought another 25 ft. of space so we ended up with 75 ft. by 100 ft. and that is what we have now.

Tanzer: Is the present store the same store that you rebuilt?
LEVINGER: Yes. Only when we started out we had 25 x 40 and ended up with 75 x 100 ft. We bought the two buildings to the south end of town.

Tanzer: You mentioned that you had expanded and had other drug stores and other branch stores. Where were they?
LEVINGER: I never had any other stores.

Tanzer: Oh, I see. I misunderstood.
LEVINGER: I had chances. If it hadn’t been for my family and being close to my family. I did have chances. I was thinking about opening up in LaGrande and Pendleton but I never did it.

Tanzer: You decided not to do it because of your family.
LEVINGER: That’s right. Because I had about all I could handle here and I knew if I… Peyton Hawes, who owns Payless Drug here, is a real good friend of mine. In fact, he said as long as I was in Baker they wouldn’t open up here and they haven’t. Baker is the only sizable town in Oregon where Payless doesn’t have a store. His wife and I went to Stanford together ad I’ve known Peyton for years. That’s one reason why I thought I had better stay where I was, because I had all I could handle anyhow.

Tanzer: You seem to be very devoted to your family and I would like to find out about your family. When were you married?
LEVINGER: They all thought that I would never get married because if it hadn’t been for the war, I probably never would have. But when World War II broke out I knew that I was able and willing and would have to go, so I volunteered. Up until the war broke, if you had a college degree all you had to do was – and I had ROTC in college. All you had to do was apply for a commission and go in. But they got a little tough right after the war broke so I applied to the Army and got a letter back and told me to take a physical exam in Pendleton. I thought I was in like Flynn and then nothing happened for a couple of months and I got worried and tried to join the Navy. I went up to Seattle and took another physical and the sad part of the Armed Forces is that they don’t really have a set-up for druggists. There is no place. You can be a storekeeper in the Navy or you can be a medical administrative corps in the Army but there is nothing actually for pharmacists. So things got tight here. That was in early ’42 when I was trying to get the best job I could in the armed forces and finally the local draft board said, “Well, we’ll give you another couple of weeks, otherwise you will have to go in as an enlisted man.” And I said, “Well that’s fine. I’m no better than anybody else.” So I think about three days before the deadline I got a wire from San Francisco, “First Lieutenant Henry Levinger report to the San Francisco Port of Embarkation.” So I thought here I’m going over to the Pacific, which was great. Everybody was fired up and wanted to get into the action. So I went down to San Francisco to Fort Mason and an old crow of a doctor, a full colonel, said, “Do you know anything about running a warehouse?” And I said, “Not a thing in the world.” But he said, “We are going to open one up in the Presidio.” So I was the only one to start out with and we started receiving bandages and medical supplies of all kinds and I had a hand truck unloading boxcars. Gradually, in a few weeks time, we had probably 15 or 20 people working there. There were a couple of other druggists came in and they put them on and we just got the thing set up good when they moved it over to the Oakland Army Base, which was a great big warehouse area. We had 150 people working in the warehouse and about 200 civilians working in the office. What we did, we were in the overseas supply division and anybody in the Pacific that sent in a requisition for medical supplies, it cleared through our office and we had to check and see that everything was in order and then we fanned out the orders to the different medical depots. There were about nine of them in the United States and then we had to check the supplies as they came back in and be able to tell in which ship each one shipped on. It was more of a bookkeeping job than anything else. Of course in the warehouse we handled a lot of shipments ourselves. We handled all the vaccines and all the narcotics that went to the Pacific. I was fortunate enough to be the first officer under the Colonel and outranked them all. And I ended up with a majority. In fact, ultimately I was in charge of the medical overseas supply division. Finally they moved the doctor out and let me handle it but it was the most interesting time of my life. During this time we talked to the Surgeon General every morning on a direct line. I said, “Get me out of here. I want to get over and run a hospital and get out where the fighting is.” And they said, “Well, we’ll take care of that.” 

I met Marian at a cocktail party in San Francisco. She was secretary to Mr. Gallen Kamp of the Gallen Kamp Shoes. I thought, “Well, there is a pretty good-looking girl.” And we started dating and we were married in 1944. She had never been in Oregon.

Tanzer: Where was she from?
LEVINGER: She was from Arkansas originally. She had been in San Francisco for several years. We moved into Oregon in my old family home that we had rented out. The renters just about stripped it and when we arrived, Mary, she was about ready to go back to San Francisco when she saw the looks of our house.

Tanzer: Where was the family home?
LEVINGER: It’s down on Main Street, just about four blocks from the store. It was an old, old house. My dad built it and in fact he built the one next door and then when I came along it wasn’t big enough so he built this bigger house. Before I went into the army I had had the upstairs made into two apartments and we rented the lower part. The man did keep it rented but the renters had cleaned out anything of value in the house.

Tanzer: What did they take?
LEVINGER: All of the cooking utensils and stuff of that kind and some of the furniture. Anyhow, Mary was a good sport and we moved in. After about a couple of years here she wouldn’t go back to San Francisco for anything. She loved it here and has ever since. She’s a good mixer and she got to know everybody in town. It’s been a real good marriage. Before we left, our first son was born in San Francisco and we brought him up when he was about a year old. Then we had another son born eighteen months after the first one, so that’s our entire family. Two boys.

Tanzer: What are their names?
LEVINGER: The first one was Larry. His name is Laurence. He was named after my mother’s family name. And the second one was Roger. We named him after a good friend of mine, a doctor who did the delivery.

Tanzer: How old are they now?
LEVINGER: Let’s see. Larry is 31 and Roger is 30.

Tanzer: And where are they now?
LEVINGER: Larry is in South Korea. They have a deal in medical school. They did have during the Vietnam War, where if you agreed to sign up under the Berry Program you had to agree to serve two years in the Army when you got through your specialty. They agreed not to draft you until you had finished your specialty, which meant that he finished his medical school and had four years of internship in a hospital before they drafted him. Well, they discontinued this now. His was the last class where this was available, but it wasn’t too bad. It’s more or less of a moral obligation. I think we could have gotten him out of it if we wanted to but anyhow they sent him a deal and gave him five choices in the United States where he wanted to go and three choices overseas, which he filled out and instead of that they sent him to South Korea, which is the worst possible place you can go. In the meantime he had married a nurse. He didn’t like it over there at first because, well he is a board certified surgeon now and they sent him to a dispensary where all he does is treat colds and deliver babies. Once in a while he removes a mole from someone. He hasn’t had any surgical experience in South Korea but he has had a lot of fun. They are playing golf and taking bridge lessons and he has many friends among the other officers. He went in as a major, too, by the way, which is pretty good.

Tanzer: But he is becoming acquainted with Southeast Asia.
LEVINGER: Yes, and he has been able to see a lot of Southeast Asia. He’ll be through the first of September of this year and then he has another year at Fort Ord, which I think has a big hospital. I hope he’ll get back into doing some surgery again so that he doesn’t get too rusty. Then he doesn’t know where he is going to practice. He might come back here. He has had several good offers in Chicago. His internship was at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago and the chief of staff there has offered him a partnership. He hates Chicago because it is so flat and he doesn’t like the climate there, so I don’t know. He thinks he would rather practice here where he would make less money but he would be happier. He is kind of an outdoorsman, too. He loves to hunt, fish and ski and things of that kind so we don’t know what he is going to do. The other boy – he graduated from Vanderbilt in mathematics and now he is at Temple University. He has finished his masters and is working on his doctorate. [He is] working on his dissertation on methodology. It’s a mixture of sociology and mathematics and it’s way over my head. I don’t know what he is doing but I think he will end up teaching on a college level. That’s what we hope.

Tanzer: A kind of statistical.
LEVINGER: Statistical, yes.

Tanzer: Human science.
LEVINGER: That’s right and most of the sociologists don’t know anything about math so I think he has a pretty good opportunity in this field.

Tanzer: It’s a tremendous refinement and improvement in the social science, which has not been scientific enough.
LEVINGER: Yes, that’s right.

Tanzer: I think it’s a great new field.
LEVINGER: That’s what he thinks and he has taught classes in statistics and several mathematic courses while he was at Temple, so he has had some teaching experience and he likes it.

Tanzer: Is he interested in coming back to Oregon?
LEVINGER: He married a nurse, too, and she has her master’s degree in psychiatric nursing. She is working in the Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia now but they both would like to get out west. If they do come it will have to be in University of Oregon or in Seattle at the University of Washington or someplace where there is a big hospital. That’s the only place they would need a nurse with her background and where Roger can teach. So they are kind of up in the air now, too. But I think within the next two or three years they will come west. 

Tanzer: You mentioned spending a lot of time with the boys, with your children. How do you feel the quality of time was spent with them?
LEVINGER: I think it was great. Our kids, we never had any trouble with them, even as teenagers. They would rather be with us than go out with their peers. We taught them both to hunt and they both like to shoot birds and Larry has done some deer hunting and we started them both out rock hunting. We had a jeep station wagon. We went over the hills and packed a picnic lunch and go out for weekends. We have always taken the kids with us, when we would go out to restaurants and on trips. They knew how to handle themselves when they did get out. We’ve taken them down to the coast fishing and they just love the Oregon Coast. We did everything together to the point that they would rather be with us than anybody else. When they were home, instead of going into town and drinking beer, they stayed home.

Tanzer: Did they ever know their grandparents?
LEVINGER: No, they hadn’t, on either side. They did know Mary’s mother, who lived with us 27 years.

Tanzer: Did they ever ask about them?
LEVINGER: Oh yes. Mary has worked up a book for each of them with as much information as we have been able to get together, with all the pictures. Of course, their baby pictures on up through high school and all the background material on both sides of the family that we were able to put together. Right now it doesn’t interest them much but I know it will when they get older.

Tanzer: Have they asked or were they interested in the Jewish side of their family?
LEVINGER: Well, they had a little problem. Roger went to prep school in Massachusetts, Brooks School, and from his name they spotted right away that he was Jewish. When I went to his graduation they had “Jew” written on the mirror on his dresser, which I thought was a terrible thing to do. But kids are mean. He did develop a lot of friends there and I don’t think anybody held it against him at all. It was strictly an Episcopalian school and at one time, Roger was quite religious. In fact he joined the Episcopal Church here because he liked the Episcopal minister so well. But I think going to Brooks kind of cured him. It was compulsory chapel every day and they overdid it. So I don’t think he has gone to church regularly since he got out of there. But he did have communion there and he is officially an Episcopalian. Larry has never shown any interest in any church. He is the kind that brushes it off.

Of course they are only a quarter Jewish but their name definitely gives it away. Not that they are trying to hide anything. Larry is proud of it. He said, “I’m proud of the Jewish background that I have.”

Tanzer: I just wondered if they had ever asked any questions and how you would answer those questions.
LEVINGER: Well, we didn’t know enough about the Jewish faith actually to give them too many but I did tell them that I had run into a little bit of feeling in school. It used to be a lot worse than it is now. There were people, places, and clubs you couldn’t belong to and things of that kind. But I said, “I figure if people are that bigoted and narrow-minded, why that is probably not the kind of club you ought to join anyhow.” Both of the boys are real open about it. 

Tanzer: What kind of antisemitism did you find, Henry?
LEVINGER: I found it at Oregon State in the fraternities and also at Stanford. Not openly, but you could tell. I know that I was rushed in five or six houses at Oregon State and I know two of them, I was told later, that was the reason I wasn’t offered to pledge. I finally joined ATO house.

Tanzer: Did you ever discuss this with your parents?
LEVINGER: Oh yes.

Tanzer: What did your father suggest that you do in situations like this?
LEVINGER: Well, his idea was, it’s what you do yourself that counts. His only religion, I don’t know where he got it, he always believed that if you lived in sin or treated people badly in this life that you got your reward here in this life. He would see some mean old guy that he didn’t like and he would get sick and crippled up with arthritis. He would say, “He’s getting his now.” It was kind of a philosophy that he developed.

Tanzer: That’s a typical Jewish saying. Yes. That’s typical Jewish because in the Jewish religion we believe in this life and not particularly in punishment or reward in the later life.
LEVINGER: Well I didn’t know that but that was his philosophy all though life. You’ve got to live right and everything will come to you and it did. He was quite successful in his day, among the people in our town.

Tanzer: He believed in doing good.
LEVINGER: He believed in doing good and he didn’t do it for that reason either. He had a heart as big as a watermelon, but not for his family. He was very strict with my sister and I. I know that he meant well but we clashed. Not openly but he would just criticize what I did and he wasn’t doing it the right way. I had been out long enough in the business world to know that this system was old fashioned.

Tanzer: Well, the Germanic parent also and if his parents were his model, the Germanic parent always had to supersede the child, no matter what.
LEVINGER: My grandmother on my mother’s side used to scream at him (she resented his methods of training my sister and I when we were young). His philosophy was if you can’t afford to go first class, don’t go at all. When we would go to Portland we would go to a place where they had men waiters and an eight-course dinner and that type of thing. We would go to the Portland Hotel and we were supposed to know how to behave as adults, to put your napkin in your lap and all that stuff.

Tanzer: He really sounds like a remarkable man.
LEVINGER: He was. You would have to know him. People still talk about him. What a great guy he was.

Tanzer: Then he was not alive during World War II?
LEVINGER: No. Fortunately he wasn’t. He was worried about this Hitler thing going on because it had started building up and he was worried about what was happening. Of course he lost track of most of his relatives but he knew that a lot of them were still living and he was awful worried about them.

Tanzer: He didn’t make any attempt or was he unable to make any attempt?
LEVINGER: I don’t think he ever corresponded with them. He just lost ties when he came to the United States except for those brothers and sisters who came here too.

Tanzer: Were you ever contacted by any of the family during World War II?
LEVINGER: No.

Tanzer: What were your feelings? Here was the Holocaust with its concerted efforts to destroy the Jews in Germany. I wonder how you felt about it.
LEVINGER: Well, I thought there should have been a lot more uprising of all the Christian nations as well as, especially, the Pope. There were a lot of those Catholic countries over there and he could have said, “Wait a minute now. Let’s do something about this.” But I just couldn’t believe that they would let one man do these horrible things. Of course, a lot of the details didn’t come out until later. But a lot of the word was leaking out, too.

Tanzer: Was there any [activity] in Baker by the Jewish families?
LEVINGER: I don’t think so. We had a strong Ku Klux Klan in Baker and they burned crosses. The fact that you were German wasn’t too good around here either. During World War I especially.

Tanzer: [unclear] So, you actually, with the strength of the Ku Klux Klan, because your name was German and you were Jewish both.
LEVINGER: We were on the outs and Baker is a strong Catholic town. In those days the Catholics hated the Jews like mad. Now it’s just the opposite. I’m on the Board of Trustees of the Catholic Hospital here and on the Board of Trustees of the nursing home, with all the nuns around, and they think it’s funny. Once one said, “This is impossible; here is a Jew helping us run this place.” And I said there is no reason why I shouldn’t.

Tanzer: Now you know that you are probably fully Jewish if your mother converted – if they were married by Rabbi Wise.
LEVINGER: Yes, that is probably right.

Tanzer: And your parents’ marriage record is quite available at Temple Beth Israel. Well, it may have been destroyed by the fire.
LEVINGER: I am not sure.

Tanzer: They had a fire.
LEVINGER: I am sure it was Rabbi Wise because my mother thought he was one of the smartest men she ever met.

Tanzer: And he was. Did your parents come to Baker after they were married?
LEVINGER: No, he met my mother here and they lived here ever since. But she had taught here for two years. My dad was 37 and she was 20 when they got married.

Tanzer: You spent most of your life in Baker. What do you look towards in the future? Both for yourself and for the area in which you live?
LEVINGER: Well, I don’t think Baker will ever grow too much. It has always been about 10,000 population. When I was a little kid it was and it still is now. Of course we’ve lost a lot of things. There used to be a lot of mining going on. The county actually has lost a lot of population. It used to be about 25,000. I think it is about 16,000 now and I don’t see any great future as far as business growth here, although business has been very good to me. But it’s an ideal place to live, I think. We’ve lived in California for four years, at Stanford for four years and during the war. I just love the climate here. We have hard winters but I like that – the change. We have our summers and then in the winter you kind of hole up and do your hobbies.

Tanzer: What hobbies do you have?
LEVINGER: I used to do a lot of hunting, bird hunting. But I haven’t done that for years. As a result of the rock hunting we did, where we polished agates, I got started in faceting. Mary bought me a faceting machine. It came from a man at Santa Cruz, which was a pretty primitive deal. That was about 35 years ago and when I got home from the store, I would go down and fool around with it for a while. I finally got to where I began to understand it a little and knocked out some pretty good stones, I mean semi-precious stones like tourmaline and aquamarine, amethysts, etc. About five or six years ago I bought a real good machine – a machine made up in Spokane. And through the winter I spend all my time out there grinding and polishing stones and giving them away. I’ve never sold one yet. I’ve fixed up about half the gals in town with stones. They have to buy their own mountings but I finish the stones for them.

Tanzer: And during the summer?
LEVINGER: During the summer I’ve got a big garden – a vegetable garden with raspberries, garlic, shallots, peas, corn, carrots, just about everything you can think of. We have about an acre and a half of lawn here I have to keep up. I mow that about every three or four days.

Tanzer: When did you retire?
LEVINGER: I am going on nine years now.

Tanzer: What was the procedure for your retiring?
LEVINGER: Well, our store had gotten so big. When I left the store we had about 25 employees and they have about 35 now. There was just no chance to sell it to someone for cash. We did incorporate, back in 1957 and two druggists I had at that time were interested in buying. They didn’t have any money but we set up a deal where we gave them a third interest and the income from that third interest paid the deal off so that when I was at age 60 I had to retire and the store had enough money in surplus that they paid me off in full. I still own the building but the two druggists own the business and they’ve done well too. Of course, what with inflation and all, business has been good. Baker is a good, stable town. It never goes wild but it’s a good business town.

Tanzer: Do you ever think in terms of Jewish philanthropy, in terms of your own Jewish background?
LEVINGER: I’ve always given to the United Jewish Appeal. For the last couple of years they haven’t sent a man around and I’ve always sent in something. They used to send a man around every year. I haven’t bought any bonds like Leo and I’ve never been approached on the subject. I feel that we should help them out.

Tanzer: Have you ever had the desire to go to Israel?
LEVINGER: Mary especially wants to go and the only reason I was worried about it was it is [unclear] country there and secondly my knowledge of biblical history was kind of meager. I have been reading the Bible the last four or five years. I never had time before. There are so many names and so many geographical areas mentioned and I know if I once saw it that would clear a lot of things up in my mind. I think we’ll probably do that. The next trip we take it will probably be to Israel.

Tanzer: Well, with your interest in the agriculture, with your interest in an area like this, which is a kind of growing community, I think you would very much enjoy Israel. As a matter of fact today as we were coming back from Sparta I commented that the topography, the many areas of sagebrush, the irrigation alongside the sagebrush, the low hills are very, very much like Israel. It reminds me, there are areas that remind me of Israel very much.
LEVINGER: Is that right? Well I think that’s probably what we will do next. We have taken three trips abroad. Mediterranean cruise doesn’t particularly appeal to me because it would be duplicating many things that we have already seen. But Israel would be all new to us.

Tanzer: I think you would find Israel to be a very western country. I would like to ask what expectations you have for your children.
LEVINGER: Oh, we have great hopes for them. Larry was voted the outstanding surgeon of his class of about 100 and his record at St. Luke’s indicated that he is willing to work. He did a lot of things beyond the call of duty and he loves to operate. I don’t know where he gets it on either side of our family. I think he is a great surgeon and he has a lot of compassion. He loves people. He follows up after his operations. It isn’t just surgery alone.

Tanzer: He sounds like his father. He has a big heart.
LEVINGER: Yes, that’s right. He claims he doesn’t have but I know he does from the way he operated in Chicago and we have great hopes for him. Roger is a deep thinker. I believe he’ll make a good teacher, too. He’s an entirely different personality. Larry is more outgoing and Roger is more of the introvert. They are both smart. Roger has always been a mathematical wizard. He could work problems in his head. Right now he could go to Reno and he could tell you what the odds are in an ordinary game and that type of thing. I was hoping that he would go into accounting or something like that. As far as making a living it might be better than teaching but he likes what he is doing. We hope that he will get famous some day too, as a great teacher.

Tanzer: That sounds like your mother with her mathematical mind.
LEVINGER: Yes.

Tanzer: What difficulties do you see for them?
LEVINGER: Well the only thing that I can foresee is the difficulties that the whole country is facing. I think we have over population and inflation is a terrific problem. I think we have too much government interference. Of course, I am of the old-school type. Maybe these boys will figure it out the way they are going. But it looks to me as if we are headed for trouble. I think both professions are going to be needed, especially in the medical profession, even if they reduce it down to a salary basis. It will still provide a good living. And they are always going to need teachers, too, especially if you can do mathematics or a lot of other fields. Roger has done a lot of computer work, too. I think he could go into the computer programming and there are a lot of other ways that he can go. I think both boys are pretty well prepared no matter what happens.

Tanzer: Well, do you think that things in this country are getting worse? What could be done to improve them?
LEVINGER: Well, my personal ideas are that we should balance the budget and stop spending so much money, especially for social services and locally, I know, we can see so many people that just won’t work anymore. They are making so much money on the dole and the welfare deal. There is no incentive for them to work. We had a good example here last week. The museum commission sent down three CETA workers. They were supposed to help out. They were to clean the inside of the building. They took one look and said, “No. We don’t do this type of work.” There are so many young kids that come along today. They know the world is going to take care of them. It used to be you tried to save for your old age and start planning things but now they figure the government will take care of them. So it means that the few people who are working are taking care of an awful lot that aren’t.

Tanzer: Now you mentioned the museum commission. What is your position there?
LEVINGER: I am chairman of the museum commission here and we are trying to get an old building. It used to be the old swimming pool that my dad helped start. The Baker Natatorium, [built in 1920, was the first Olympic sized pool in the Northwest]. During World War II they turned it into the Baker War Industries [manufacturing truck bodies for the Army]. Since then the city has owned it and just let it go to ruin. The roof leaked. We have it back in shape now and the building is stable. We hope to get enough Federal money and local money to make a regional museum of it which will be slanted towards forestry, mining and cattle raising and things that are indigenous to this part of the country.

Tanzer: Although it ought to be an art museum?
LEVINGER: We do have an art center here so we don’t want to overlap too much but we understand that there are traveling displays available from the Smithsonian and other sources. We could have such attractions for a month at a time and then send them on to another museum. We probably will have some art. Of course we will have Indian artifacts and things of that kind at all times.

Tanzer: Would this be a history museum then?
LEVINGER: That’s the basis of it. It will be an historical museum. Actually, Baker is one of the earliest cities in Oregon and the fact that gold was discovered here led to the development of Willamette Valley and the rest of Oregon. We had the second high school in the State of Oregon here and a lot of people don’t understand the history, the important part that Baker played in the early history of Oregon. That’s what we are trying to develop.

Tanzer: Are the possibilities pretty good?
LEVINGER: Pretty good, yes. We hired a museologist from the State of Washington. She has had a lot of museum experience. In fact, she worked for the Smithsonian Institution for two different hitches and she’s got two different doctorate degrees. I think in anthropology and archaeology and museology. I didn’t know there was such a thing as museology. She gave us the right start and told us how we should proceed in order to get some matching funds. We are in the process now of getting the old natatorium building established in the national register in Washington, DC. When we do that we will be eligible for matching funds and we hope over a period of five or six years we will be able to reconstruct the building as the “Oregon Trail Regional Museum.”