My mother would have loved to be here for this beautiful celebration of her upcoming centennial birthday. You all know how central Temple Beth-El has been in her life! Her roots go back to the very floor under your feet. The grates here were vents for cold air from the ice blocks below that her father gave to the Temple to cool the sanctuary during the High Holidays.

Rather than present you with a list of her many accomplishments, I would like to give you a brief history of her development, both because it is more personal-inside information if you will-and because she would want you to learn from her amazing life that her ability to do what she did happened in small steps, steps that you can follow if you are so inclined. Or, you can just enjoy a good story about a beloved and very real woman.

My mother would be the first to describe her life as charmed, and most especially her childhood. She was the firstborn of 4 dearly loved children all spaced 2 years. Her early childhood was spent in upper middle-class King William where the neighborhood children played together and their parents visited back and forth. The same social equality that reigned within the small neighborhood of King William also reigned in some measure at the San Antonio Country Club where there were Jewish members, including my mother's family. She has no recollection of any anti-Semitism directed toward her in her childhood. A great beginning for someone who would later need to feel at home in the larger San Antonio community!

The Gugenheim home was always full of people. Besides her 3 siblings and parents, her great grandfather lived with the family in his last few years. Her maternal grandmother also was a permanent resident and it was she who made sure that the kids did their homework, who sewed on buttons-after all, she was a retired dress designer-and helped run the household. My mother often said there was nothing her grandmother didn't know how to do. There was also during the winter her father's sister, who wrote magazine articles and listened to opera. Family from Louisiana and from Palestine, Texas, might come visiting. A cousin of my mother's maternal grandfather came from France to try his luck in the US and stayed awhile with the Gugenheim household. When the Gugenheims moved out into the country to a house on Woodlawn Ave.-just a few blocks from here on the other side of Blanco-their house continued to be a gathering place for the family. Solitude was not the normal state of any of the Gugenheims-good training for the very public life that was to follow for little Helen!

Her sister once told me that my mother always enjoyed being on center stage, and my mother had opportunities as a good pianist and an honor student. Graduating at 16, she went off to college in faraway Virginia, to Hollins College. There she majored in English and minored in music. She has indicated that there she did feel less than fully accepted because she was one of the very few Jewish students. Nevertheless, her 4 years there must have been so fulfilling that she returned in the fall after graduation in a paid position to breathe life into their weak alumnae outreach program. Needless to say, her efforts paid off!

Before entering the world of work, upon graduation in 1928, my grandparents took the family on the Grand Tour of Europe. My mother returned to Paris in 1929, with another San Antonio friend, Rae Oppenheimer. It never occurred to me until very recently to ask my mother if she worked in Paris, hung out at clubs at night, or had any contact with the avant-garde like Sartre and Simone Beauvoir who were also denizens of the Left Bank where she lived. The answer? Negative to all three questions but she was aware of the writers developing existential philosophy contemporaneously with her year abroad. She recalls playing a lot of bridge, learning some French at L'Alliance Française, and one incident in which she and her gang almost landed in jail over an inflated café bill they refused to pay!

There are a few letters from her parents that my mother saved, beautiful examples of the love, praise and support they gave her during her young adult years. To have been brought up in the sunlight of their love was to have been nurtured and warmed for life. While certainly not everyone has such a beginning -- being so beloved by such positive parents--, we all know people who decide to gather up rays of such sunshine from other sources in order to draw on that infinite reservoir of inner energy for a lifetime. To do so is the lesson to be learned from the first 2 decades of my mother's remarkable life.

Back from Europe, my mother took off for graduate school at Columbia University, with the intention of getting a Masters in History and then teaching. But when she arrived in New York at the required residence for unmarried female graduate students, she was shocked to learn that she would have to abide by a curfew. Well! She'd been on her own in France! She was not going to be treated like a child! She removed herself from the rolls of incoming grad students and landed a job as a writing coach for a man who was attempting to write a book. It didn't take her long to realize that the man was nuts and his book was going to be a failure; she resigned. Undaunted and armed with a letter of recommendation from the radio station back home in San Antonio, my mother walked into NBC national radio at Radio City to seek employment and got a job as a script writer, first for women's household and social tips and later for such news greats as Lowell Thomas. She lived in an apartment near the Museum of Natural History and roomed with her brother-in-law's sister who, fortunately for them both, knew how to cook, a skill my mother was able to avoid learning throughout her life. The work was exciting and her circle of friends fun. Her life remained charmed despite the faltering economy and the ominous war clouds gathering over Europe. Although she had a serious boyfriend in New York, she was more engaged in her life as a career woman than in becoming engaged to marry. On vacation in San Antonio, she met the new young rabbi at a party given by Richard Goldsmith's parents; fell madly in love as did he. Several days into her holiday, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and she was summoned back to NBC. My dad sent her a telegram that read “aren't we willfully wasting precious time?” She quit her amazing job and went home to marry a man she barely knew. The year was 1938.

My mother must have had mixed feelings about her next occupation, that of rebbetzin. She had grown up in a family that identified itself as Jewish but was not religious in the traditional sense. Her parents were very philanthropic but in a quiet way; you won't see any plaques with their names displayed. Temple Beth-El members for all their adult lives, they taught by word and deed essential Jewish values, and all 4 children lived lives variously but each daily governed by their Jewish principles. In her early years in King William a family's religious affiliation mattered less than their neighborliness. Although she had been confirmed at Temple Beth-El, my mother's Jewish education hadn't been as important to her as her school days at Main Avenue High School. She had been on her own in New York City for a decade, responsible to NBC yes, but personally responsible only for herself. Now she was in public view. And, her husband's contract throughout his 38 years as rabbi here came up for review every year. My mother took on her new role with the single-mindedness she would summon to all her endeavors. She was active in the Temple Sisterhood from the start and busy getting to know a community that was changing and would change even more as World War II brought people from all over the US to San Antonio and as military families joined the Temple. She set about making everyone feel welcome. And in 1942, she and my dad welcomed my older sister Liz! When my father joined the Navy and was sent to Virginia, it was my mother who comforted families whose loved ones were serving in the Armed Forces. I came along at the end of the war. With 2 small children and a shortage of housing for families, we moved in with my grandparents while my dad continued military service as a Navy chaplain.

The four of us settled into our own home. My mother began the civic leadership that became her life's work. Indeed, she has been quoted as saying that a volunteer should devote as much commitment and passion to a project as one would to one's career. She didn't start out with any grand plan. She was asked to be on the Girl Scouts Board. Board work was new to her and she was fortunate to begin with a group of women who had much experience as volunteers and the willingness to teach her. My sister's and my grandparents and great-aunt were willing and loving sitters along with wise and dependable Arementa Reethy Daniels, our live-in housekeeper, allowing my mother to make simultaneous, serious civic commitments. At the same time as her Board position with the Girl Scouts, Monte Harris, her mentor at the Express-News where she had worked summers while in college, urged her to go on the Board of the San Antonio Library. Her special interest was expanding out through the city by means of branch libraries, one of which was the Landa Library, bequeathed in 1946 at the suggestion of both my parents. On the grounds of the Landa Library was a little house, empty at the time, except for some cans of yellow paint. When my mother learned that the local school for deaf children needed a place to hold classes, she asked the Board if the school could use this outbuilding. That little building, repainted with the yellow paint, became known as Sunshine Cottage. And, not surprisingly, my mother served on that Board, too, raising money to build the school that has been the Sunshine Cottage campus since 1952.

My mother's tenure on the San Antonio Library Board provided an unexpected growth spurt. I was too young to understand the threat to freedom posed by Sen. Joe McCarthy. But I was old enough to understand that there were people who wanted to take books off the shelves that they didn't like and burn them. Until then, nothing my mother did sparked the least amount of controversy. She was at every service held at Temple Beth-El, she made hospital calls, condolence calls, went to brits and baby-namings, went to parties given by congregants and fellow board members of her boards and those of my father's increasing community involvement. She never gossiped-talking about people behind their backs was just not part of my mother's nature-and she wore the same simple black dress and hat and white gloves to services for years. I asked her recently if she had any hesitation about taking a very public stand against censorship. She didn't. It was the first time that she stepped out from the shadow of my father's position. To be mindful of their public presence had been a conscious and willing decision she had made in marrying him. Soon after the book-burning business, my father urged a few other local religious leaders to use their combined influence to convince restaurants, hotels, and movie theaters to integrate. At the same time, my mother urged the Public Library Board to open the libraries to blacks, hard as it is to imagine that public libraries were as segregated as public drinking fountains. My parents stood together and weathered the criticisms. Both my parents learned that they had great inner power to bring about positive change through these controversies. No books were burned and San Antonio integrated even before Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech in Washington.

Her service at Sunshine Cottage and with the Girl Scouts led her to the Board of the Community Guidance Center, where, again, she raised the money for a new building. This woman who had often said to my sister and me on the drive home from school that she was “nervous” and we needed to be quiet, which always meant to us that she had to give a speech somewhere in the next 24 hours, had become an ace fundraiser. Her activity in the area of children's needs led to her being asked to join the state board of Crime and Delinquency, then caught the attention of the local UNICEF chapter and she was recruited to serve on that board, then the state board and then the international UNICEF Board. In her characteristically positive way, my mother conquered the breast cancer she had in 1960 and used that experience to encourage others through her work for the Cancer Therapy and Treatment Center. The state and nationwide positions both she and my father took on conveniently were offered at about the same time as the nest emptied, with both daughters in college. UNICEF was particularly helpful in that the board meetings were held in Manhattan. From there, my mother routed herself through Chicago in order to visit me at Northwestern and later, when I was in grad school in New York. You can study her list of organizations and see that her statewide and national board involvement increased from the mid 1960's on. Another lesson-- how to balance public and private life.

When my father retired in 1977, my mother was perhaps at the height of her volunteer career. He was not as busy by a long shot as he had been, and gradually she decreased the breadth of her organization work and concentrated on depth. Providing a bit of a distraction from her civic duties, Sam, our 2 children-- Ethan and Stephanie-- and I moved back here and then we gave her one more grandbaby-Seth. My parents traveled together to Abilene where my dad served as rabbi, on cruises where he served as chaplain and UNICEF tours abroad. His Parkinson's may have been slowing his pace down long before his diagnosis, and my mother gradually slowed her pace to match his. Another lesson, the lesson of her 9th and 10th decades--it's OK to retire from volunteer work. During my father's last years, my mother did the activities that retired people do, enjoyed couple time, doted on her grandchildren, joined a book club, caught up on movies not yet seen, spent time with her girlfriends.

Her most recent decade has been one of losses, again change that she has met with grace and a positive attitude and again, giving us a lesson in life by her example. We all lost my wonderful father in 2001. Our family lost her beloved brother Joe just 2 weeks ago. She has gradually lost her robustness and has become pretty much homebound. She is content, comfortable, still mobile and sharp though she runs out of steam quickly now. She keeps up with the news-of family, of this congregation, of the city, state, country, and world. Let's pray that her life continues with happiness and good health for years to come!

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