Melrose, Ezra_1975/10/8, Oral History, 1975 - 1975

I have been deeply honored by having been asked to interview Ezra Melrose. I am supposed to begin the interview by saying by stating clearly that my name is Murry Shapiro and I am about to interview our very dear friend Ezra , who is known as Zeke to most people, Melrose. On Wednesday evening October 8, 1975 in the Adult Lounge of the Hartford Jewish Community Center. Now we all know a great deal about my good friend Ezra Melrose. My friend an yours. He is best known perhaps as an educator. We also that he is a Hartford native, born here, attended Hartford Public High School, got his Bachelors Degree at Trinity College, his Masters Degree at NYU, and the University of Connecticut, started a career as a teacher, counselor, vice principal at Weaver High School, subsequently principal of that school, and then principal at Bulkeley High School as well prior to retirement. There are a lot of other things you should know about Zeke before I start asking him some questions and that is that he is a past president of this Jewish Community Center. As a mater of fact the second president during my time here as director. He is also an active member of Temple Beth Israel, he served on the Boards of Directors of the Temple as a member of its Religious School Committee and Social Action Committee. He is currently a board member of Midrasha, the Hebrew high school as well as this Jewish Historical Society. Zeke has also been honored by several outstanding awards, among them the Alumni Medal of Excellence, by his college, by Trinity. The Service to Youth Award by the YMCA and a number of years ago the Outstanding Hartford Jewish Community Center Leadership Award. Murry: Now Zeke I started giving this great biography on you a few minutes ago by saying that you were born in Hartford and I would be very much interest for the archives of the Historical Society to hear about your childhood in this fair city of ours. Zeke: I was born in 1910 in what is now the South Arsenal district on Kennedy Street in North Hartford. I have looked at the map out there trying to find the house I lived in but couldn’t because the map of that part of the city up in the lobby, the names I don’t remember, actually the owners of the property. I lived in a house that was owned by a family from Colchester. The farm was in Colchester. Right now I am searching desperately for the name, Mintz, a family named Mintz that owned the house the six family house that we lived in. It was a typical tenement. It’s now all Puerto Rican or it’s knocked down now, but just before they knocked it down for the South Arsenal Development I drove through there one day and it was almost all Spanish speaking so a tremendous change in that north area from the time that I spent my childhood there to the present. I went to the Arsenal School which was just north of Kennedy Street and for those who were in the Gallery tonight there is a picture of a man named Marcus F__________ who owned a delicatessen store at the corner of Canton and what was then Windsor Avenue. There is a drug store, the Galvin Drugstore, the lawyer’s father named the drug store and the delicatessen was right next to that, just north of that. And I noticed his name down there. That was a long, long time ago, of course. From the Arsenal School I went to Hartford Public High School. Those were the days of mid-years and I graduated there in 1928A which meant January of 1928. And one of the thrills tonight was to see one of my classmates here. Right there. She was Hilda Mcinstry, she now if Hilda Talcott almost 50 years later she’s come back to listen. Murry: Tell me Zeke, you know I can see the sparkling eyes out there as people recall some of the things that you recall, what did your father do and how did he earn his living, what was family life like and tell us a little about your family? Zeke: My father’s name was Henry Melrose. He was born in Austin, Texas. Now remember how a Jew got to Austin, Texas. Well they came from London and simply took a boat and they landed in Texas and came back to New York because of the lack of anything Jewish and he was born in 1883 and so they ended up back in New York. + Murry: How did make it from New York up to Hartford? How did that come about? Zeke: Well my mother’s family, some of them were already here. The Ginsberg family and they, her sister was the wife of Morris Sherry that ran Sherry’s clothing store in Hartford. In the old days it was down on Main Street, near Sheldon Street, then they moved to Asylum Avenue in the Asylum Street in the 20s in fact I worked there all during my senior year of high school. They had a little combination store, a clothing store and then right next to it was what was then a little discount shirt shop and I worked in there at night. Murry: And what did that Texan do for a living? Zeke: Mostly he was a, most of his life he never made a lot of money, he was a clothing salesman for Kennedy’s and for Horsefalls, and then they later moved to New York when the depression started. He lost his job here and he thought greener pastures would be in New York so they moved to New York and he worked for the Crawford Chain in New York City. Murry: Right. I know you well enough to know that you had a lot of odd and interesting jobs because obviously since there wasn’t a lot of money at home and in the family you had to work a lot, as you worked your way through your various degrees and so forth, but on the way to it, tell us about some of these odd jobs that you did around Hartford? Zeke: Well I worked as a clothing salesman, I suppose a shirt salesman, at the Sherry Company, I worked at Steigers and Fox’s on weekends, Saturdays and during sale times. This was already after I had gotten to Trinity. I worked at the Tumblebrook Country Club as a caddy. Judge Bernstein brought me there one day. That’s when we got 25 or 50 cents, I can’t remember. It was 25 cents or 50 cents for 9 holes. It was then a nine hole golf course. So I met people like Mel Title and the Cohens and the Weinermans and that group when I was at Trinity caddying weekends. Murry: I understand you also worked in a theater around town do you have any memories of that? Zeke: Yup. Because after my freshman year at Trinity I couldn’t go back so I tried to get a job at the Aetna. They told me to come to work on the Monday and there’s an afterthought, they said, by the way what nationality are you, the name Melrose certainly wouldn’t indicate this so I said I am Jewish what difference does that make? Well we have found that Jewish people don’t fit into out organization. Why don’t you try selling insurance? Well they never called me and I went to work for Warner Brothers in the Strand Theater as an usher and became the youngest theater manager in the country at Regal. I don’t know if you remember the Regal on State Street? Well I managed that. I probably was all of 19 or 20. Murry: We are now back to the time of trying to find out hoe you became interested specifically in the Jewish community because we do know that you have a major hand in shaping some of our Jewish institutions and tell us about the Talmud Torah and your early days in religious training? Zeke: Well I was bar mitzvahed in the old Talmud Torah on Pleasant Street. We went Monday through Thursday and Sunday morning and I went there for about a year, a year and a half after I was bar mitzvahed and by that time I had had it and I quit against my mother’s protest. She wanted me to stay there but I got into some terrific arguments with Jacob Stein who later became the head teacher at the Emanuel. He was my teacher in the old Talmud Torah. He and I didn’t agree when I was 14 or 15 years old. Murry: Zeke, we know you essentially, well we know you in many ways but being an educator I’m sure that we would be interested in finding out how it was you became an educator. How did you gravitate into this profession? Zeke: Strictly by chance. I was a chem major in Trinity and by the time I was a senior I knew that I wasn’t equipped emotionally to stand at a chem lab desk and work at it and I was tutoring young people who were in trouble there and so that I simply applied to the Hartford school system. I graduated, let’s see in 1935, although I am carrying the class of ’33 because I went to Trinity on an every other year basis to earn some money. Murry: You mean it took you 8 years instead of the tradition 4? Zeke: Well I went to school, I got out of school in February of ’28 and didn’t go that far because I didn’t have any money so I entered in the class the following fall, that would have been September of 1929. The end of that year my dad lost his job and so I had to, that’s when I went to the Aetna trying to get a job at the end of my freshman year because I had had a year of calculus and I thought perhaps they might be able to use me. They gave me an intelligence test and everything else and I was Jewish and that was the end of it. Things have changed both at Trinity and in the community. Minna, who was the Salutatorium of her class at Bulkeley in the early 30s was sent by Bulkeley High School to take an exam for a typist at Connecticut General. When they found out she was Jewish they never let her take the exam even. Not only didn’t they hire her, but they wouldn’t sit down to take the competitive exam as a typist of secretary, whatever it was. Years later there was irony, when they moved to Bloomfield you know they sent letters out to matrons in the community asking if they were interested in part-time work. My comment to Minna was that if we were starving she wouldn’t go to work for Connecticut General. Murry: Okay. Now as your career developed, Zeke, you wound up at Weaver High School and when I met you, you were vice principal at Weaver. Zeke: I started teaching at Hartford Public High School in 1936 at $108 a month. That was my first salary. I was married, $108 a month. Minna was working at Rossows in those days and I think she was earning more money than I was. Murry: Okay, so you started teaching Zeke: 1936, it was January Murry: Now when you got to be vice principal at Weaver I know Weaver now in retrospect, from speaking to so many Hartford natives, it was a kind of a thriving, throbbing educational community. Zeke: One of my students, right there, Janet Stein. Murry: One of your students sitting out there? Zeke: Right there. Murry: Okay. We won’t ask here anything about what kind of a vice principal of principal you were. But I think it would be well, Zeke, if you could dwell a little but about your experiences as vice principal and they principal of Weaver High School and perhaps for the record the kind of changes you lived through in the Weaver population in the life style of the North End of Hartford and your contribution to the life of the people you were serving in that community. And don’t be modest Zeke, tell it like it is. Zeke: I originally starting teaching at Weaving in 1936 and then I went from Weaver back to Hartford Public High School. I actually starting my teaching career at Public High School and then went to Weaver that fall. I started at mid-years. And we came in then by the back door. We were called permanent substitutes. I had applied for a job when I graduated from Trinity through the regular channels and was turned down. Then the principals had a free choice of picking three people a year. They called them full-time substitutes, and they rotated. I went to Hartford High, Weaver and Bulkeley. In fact I think I am the only person perhaps in the city that’s a member of all three retired teachers associations. A member of the Hartford High, Weaver and Bulkeley retired teachers group. If fact I’m going to luncheons twice this week. We pay our own way. And then I went to Northeast Junior High School and that would have been about ’38. They Dr. Feingold who was mentioned earlier, he used to observe teachers that he was interested in so he came to Northeast one day and watched me teach a math class and then asked me if I was interested in coming back to high school and I was training for secondary school teacher and wasn’t particularly happy with the adolescent age group that I was working with but basically I wanted to teach chemistry and so I came back to Bulkeley and was almost was a full-time math teacher who taught one class of chemistry so that I got my foot in the door. I went to World War II from Bulkeley. I was working at Colts. That’s when they asked high school teachers to do some volunteer work in the factory and I was a time keeper at Colts and also a security guard. I had a gun on my hip and I had never fired a gun in my life. Actually I got the job because my uncle, who is sitting here, Dan Melrose, was working at Colts and was able to get in there. I went from Colts, I got a call in the middle of the night and Minna was crying, and she says you have to report to Miami for officers training, so off I went to Miami, it was late August or early September. Then was sent from Miami to Santa Anna, California from navigation training with the army air force and was sent from there to Roswell, New Mexico where Ruth was born, my oldest daughter was born. And though Germans _________________ keeping _____ over in Roswell, New Mexico. And we who had been born in the East and watched nurses with their sterile masks these sisters that ran the hospital, the baby was only a couple of weeks old and they were kissing him on the mouth that we were taught not to do. In fact she came from that hospital with a very, very bad case of impetigo. Whether that was due to the unsterile conditions or whatever it was but it was a horrible experience to us who had at least had been taught how a young infant should be treated. Evidently it didn’t hurt because she is a good girl and works as a psychologist with the State of Massachusetts in the Department of Mental Health. Murry: Well, Zeke, I am going to ask you about your own family, by your own family I am talking about your wife and children in a few minutes. I want to get you back to Weaver High School if I may. We are interested in hearing a little bit more about what it was like when you came there, what your day-to-day work was like, some of the trauma in being a vice principal and then principal of Weaver High school because Weaver has had such an impact on the life of this Jewish community because it was essential, when I came here twenty years ago, there was still a very large Jewish population in that Weaver High School area. Tell us what it was like when you came and some of the changes an how you dealt with them, and how you tried to help the community that moved into that area? Zeke: When I came back from the war I went back to Bulkeley High School. I had gone from Bulkeley to war, came back to Bulkeley and in 1948 I was asked to go to Weaver as a teacher and a counselor. Now I was the only Jew on the staff in a high school that was almost predominantly Jewish. In 1948 I was the only Jew on the staff and I liked the kids and the kids liked me and I got along. I was made vice principal after one year at Weaver as a guidance counselor and stayed at Weaver until, let’s see Gil Akin left in ’62, I became principal in ’62 and stayed til after the King riots in ’68 when we had that very, very bad day the morning after the King death and I had, I was called in at the downtown office, I will never forget this, by Magil Bear, who is long departed for green pastures, and I think was a horrible superintendent if I might say so, he called me in on a Friday afternoon, I was in a pair of shorts, I remember, that be cause I was home in the middle of summer and he said you’re going to Bulkeley High School and I said Hell I am. I didn’t want to leave Weaver, by the way, despite that fact that we were in trouble. I wanted to stay there. I think I understood the kids. And the black kids liked me. I got along and never had any trouble with the black kids at Weaver. In fact, the riot was on a Friday as I remember, that Sunday night Minna can tell this, a whole bunch of black kids came to my house on Penn Drive, sat down with me an said what can we do Monday morning to help you open up the school? And I didn’t want to leave Weaver, in fact my staff at Weaver was given a, sent an open letter saying that Zeke will not go at his own request, that this was a request of the downtown office. I think, if it may pat myself on the back, it was a mistake. They’ve had eight principals since I left. Since 1968, nobody’s been able to manage the school. The school, when I got there, had a handful of black kids. It was primarily middle class Jewish kids who lived in what we call the Blue Avenue section of Hartford and when I got there an saw that my first class of counseling was a class that graduating in ’49 I think I had 285 kids that I was supposed to work with as a guidance counselor. And in all the years at Weaver and Bulkeley I wrote all of the college applications myself. In other words I took the material, I got to know the seniors very, very well and I wrote their applications in person. Not only signed them but actually wrote and rated them from there. But basically because I knew the kids and made it my business to get to know them. Murry: Zeke, those early years at Weaver must have been thrilling educational years for you I imagine that there were some pretty outstanding students among them. Do you happen to remember any of those Weaver Zeke: Ernie Greenberg was in my geometry class. I remember him best of all as somebody who. He was a student in my class. I tutored Johnny Egan in math so he could go to college. This is a history in itself. He was absolutely an inarticulate high school kid. He couldn’t talk. Johnny Eagan, who was the manager of the Houston basketball club. When I see him now on TV as a commentator and I’ve seen him a couple of times, I just wondered, but basically I remember him as a very tough student. He needed a math course to go to college and my office was off the main lobby and there was a little cubby hole off that that the kids called the torture chamber because when they got in trouble I sat them in there, we closed the door and they wouldn’t, they couldn’t see out in the corridor, they were just like isolated. It wasn’t a very pleasant form of punishment but it was effective. And I tutored him in math so that he got a second year of math under my tutoring and he went to Providence College and the priests there did a wonderful job on him. He had, most people don’t know, he quit school, came home to Hartford, I think Thanksgiving of his freshman year, and Charlie Horvath, who was his coach, and a couple of people got in to see John and convinced him to go back to school and history was made. In fact, probably the most thrilling experience of my life, sports wise, was a New England Championship of Weaver and Catholic of St. Lawrence, where Weaver by behind by two points, I think as I remember, he tied the score and was fouled in the process. No he tied the game by going up to the foul line putting two hoops through there and then in the overtime I think we outscored them 21 to 5 or some such thing. And then he became an actually All American Basketball Player at Providence College. Murry: Were there any members of the Jewish community coming through Weaver who have become prominent in one field or another that you can Zeke: Well, there was Dan Bloom who was a councilman in West Hartford. Jerry Roisman who is running for the Board. In fact he and I are going to the class of ’55 reunion this Saturday night. The Weaver ’55 And Jerry Roisman is the chairman of that committee and they called this way last spring. I had the Sheketoff girls in Sunday school, the Emanuel. I can’t remember if it was pre-War II or after the War, it’s mixed up. But I taught at the Emanuel and also taught at Temple Beth Israel in their religious school. Murry: Okay, apparently he denominational barrier didn’t trouble you too much. Zeke: Nope, I was actually a conservative Jew in those days. We belonged to Emanuel but we were eating ham at home and I couldn’t see leading a dual life and so we joined the temple. Murry: We will erase that line and move on. Zeke: You said to tell it as it was! That’s the way it was. Murry: Zeke, most people in this room who know you well know that you have two lovely daughters and you have a lovely wife, you’ve mentioned the name Minna a number of times on this tape and I think that some of the people in this room remember her as Minna Galinsky and the Galinsky clan is a rather interesting group of people. Why don’t you dwell on the family that you know best now, Minna, Ruth and Harriet and perhaps some of that clan of Minna’s. They’re an interesting bunch, aren’t they? Zeke: The oldest girl, as I said is living in Cambridge and she’s a psychologist with the State of Massachusetts and the Department of Mental Health. She has become enamored by the West Coast. She was just admitted, after being away from school for many years, to a doctorate program at BU but she has just returned from the West Coast where Minna’s brother is a pharmacist in Berkeley, loves the West Coast and she is thinking that if she goes to the West coast and establishes he residency there she can go to the University of California at Berkeley for her Ph.D is psychology. And I have enough faith in her brain power to think that she would be admitted to the program and will make it because she is an extremely bright girl. The younger one is married and living in Middletown and by the grace of G-d is there because in August she was hit head on on Route 66 by a woman who lost control of her car came across the center line and folded up Harriet’s car like an accordion. The State Police who took her out of it said they still don’t know how she’s alive. Murry: But she’s okay? Zeke: She okay, in fact was it today that the doctors said she could go outside. It’s the first time he said she could walk after she was in a neck brace and close to the hospital for ________. We are very grateful to G-d that she is around. Murry: Zeke, you’ve, I asked you about the Galinsky’s. Is there anything you want to say about your in-laws or your, or Minna’s family? Nothing at all? Should I quash that Minna? Zeke: Minna’s brother is Dr. David Galinsky who practices on Whitney Street. Some of you perhaps know him, but I am fondest of a memory of her father whom I called Skipper. We called him Skipper. And he became Skipper to his whole Jewish family because we named him Skipper as the head of the family. And I can remember as you came up the stairs in their house on New Britain Avenue there is a bookcase full of, he was a tailor, in fact, I was spoiled to death because I didn’t buy a store suit for years he made them by hand. There are books of Jewish content in that bookcase. Full of books. I often said to Bob he was the smartest of the whole group, if he had been given an education when he came to America he would have made things much more than being a skilled tailor because he had that kind of intelligence and secall, that’s the best word I can think of to describe him. Murry: I would get the feeling that there is a lot of warmth in the family size and that Minna’s family and your family and very close knit family is the feeling that I have always gotten in your home. Zeke: Well my father was extremely fond of Minna. And I think Minna reciprocated. They were extremely fond of each other. Murry: How did you find that lady? I mean how did it all come about? Zeke: I knew her brother. We were at Trinity together. Murry: He allowed the whole thing to happen? Zeke: That’s right. Murry: You know Zeke, one of the that you liked doing when you were doing your thing as principal at Weaver and at Bulkeley was your activity in the State Association of School Principals, do you want to tell us a little bit about those activities? Zeke: In fact I went to their all day concerts at the Cromwell Inn last week even though I am retired. I go back to see if there are any of the old timers around like myself. Just a whole bunch of new young people but the thing that amazes me is mobility. I meet them one year and they are in Avon then I meet them the following year and they’re in Tolland and the third year they are still in another community and that was so different in my career where I spent 37 years in Hartford. And the principals like Dr. Feingold and Mr. Hyde, Mr. Burke stayed on the same job for many, many years. These people, I don’t know whether they’re staying ahead of the guys who are going to fire them or whether they are just are getting better salary offers or whatever it is. The whole group of them simply go from school to school on a yearly basis. It isn’t even two years or three years it’s at the end of one year and they pick and go. Long before womens’ lib I was the chairman of what was called the Girls’ Athletic Committee, and the state organization. I fought for year to put the girls’ athletic on the par with boys athletics as in terms of budgets, getting equipment. In fact, I think it culminated last year. It was the year after I was ________ girls state basketball tournament. Well if you said that ten years ago in the State of Connecticut they would have said you were crazy but it happened. It happened because people like myself and a couple of women from Norwich Free Academy who were intensely interested in promoting girls sports and we’d meet once a month with a fixed agenda and then go back to the state organization, kept pressuring them to give the girls a break in athletics. It was very enjoyable because it enabled me to meet principals from all over the state who were members of the Board of Directors of CASS which is Connecticut Association Secondary School Principals. CIAC is the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, that’s a very lovely academic group. I enjoy going down and meeting some of the people that I actually was appeared with when we were principals. Murry: Zeke, I want to ask you to tell this group assembled here and for the record what it was like when you became active in the Community Center movement in this town. Then I came here 19 or 20 years ago, we had a converted mansion on Asylum Avenue, you were very much a part of the people who were helping to shape what the Center would eventually become. Could you tell us about some of the people you worked with and about some of the things we did in those days and your own role in it? Zeke: I came to Weaver in 1948 from a school that had perhaps half a dozen Jewish youngsters in it to Weaver which was predominantly Jewish and immediately became interested getting myself involved outside of the school with the kids that I was servicing in school so that I think the first job in the Center was as program chairman or the Teenage Committee it was one or the other. Asylum Avenue was an old converted mansion. What’s there now, National Cash Register building. It’s right there. We sold that piece of property, I think it was going to be an apartment house as I remember and then suddenly it became a building establishment I never knew why, how or what but this was it. And I think one of the things, I said this to Murry. One of the things I remember most about my early years in the Center is I looked at the bulletin board down there, the Ann Randall Committee, I was the Board member who got up and made the motion to have the Center subsidize the Ann Randall Committee to the tune of $1,000 that night. The directors were aghast that we should get involved with this. Well we made history theater if you want to call it that, but some of the early things when I saw the Inbal Dancers and Hal Holbrook and people of that caliber that the original Ann Randall Committee brought to Hartford so that the original motion in retrospect was very well founded and… I loved theater, some of you probably knew my uncle Max Ginsberg who did all the advertising at the old Parsons Theater and then later at the Bushnell. By the time I was so high I was sitting up in the peanut gallery at the Parsons watching the great people of America, the Cornells and the _________ Extreme dancing teams. All of that group and we went on a regular basis because it was free. I sat there and watched this stuff and had a great time. Murry: So Zeke, you moved from your interest in the senior high committee right on through the chairs of the Cejter, became its president in the early years and worked very closely with a lot of its top leaders in the Jewish community in shaping the future of this Jewish Community Center. Zeke: I was scared to death because I could remember the ___________ the last meeting that I be willing to serve as president of the Center was announced upstairs as I remember at the office Murry: You mean where the meeting was being held? Zeke: Where the meeting was being held. They brought me downstairs and said will you take on the Center presidency next year. I had some real fears about it because I knew we were in the process of going up for a building drive. The drive to build this was while I was president of the Center. And I had no experience in fund raising. I was a teacher in the North End. No connection with the big brass in town. I was frankly frightened but I said yes because I love the Center. It turned out the be successful actually two that I served. Murry: Zeke, I happened to know that you had a little job on the side even while you were doing all this educating and I think it’s a piece of Jewish history and particularly Hartford Jewish history because before I came here I never heard the world Oxie in my whole life I never heard such a word and suddenly my friend Ezra Melrose is involved with the Oxie. YIDDISH Okay so tell us about the Oxie and what you did there? Zeke: I can’t tell you what Oxie stands for except that it’s similar to a mutual loan association except it’s a closed membership. When I came back from World War II my salary as a teacher was much too low to support, Ruth was born in the army camp actually in Roswell so that I went to work on a Monday night as secretary to the Oxie and the secretary was to keep the books and arrange loans to people that you knew, that belonged or actually cajole people into becoming members. Because we were always looking for members. Like Puggy Roth, there. So that it was a very pleasant experience because it was a picture of the North End actually as the people came in most of them small business people. Originally we started with limits like $100, $200, $300 loans. Today the loans run in the thousands because I am still a member. I go over there ___________ in my own house. Does anybody here know what Oxie stands for? Explanation from audience. Mostly in Yiddish. It means shares Murry: Shares, is that what it means? From the German? And the word is Oxia? Hey Zeke, I don’t know, I think if we are dissecting Ezra Melrose here tonight and hearing all these fond memories of his past and his relationship to the Jewish community and to the general community through his education endeavors and his community endeavors I don’t know how many folks here realize that Zeke went through some very, very serious open heart surgery not terribly long ago. I don’t know whether it’s appropriate or pertinent. I think it is for us to ask Zeke to tell us about that ordeal and it was very recent. Do you mind that question Zeke. Zeke: No. I went to Dr. Murry: I mean I am not asking you really to tell about your operation in the traditional sense. Zeke: I am very lucky to be alive because I went to get a routine physical. I guess it was on a Monday. Minna tells me it was the day that Rabbi Silverman’s’ funeral was and I went from there back to school and then went on to my appointment. They had taken an electrocardiogram. The next thing I knew I heard Gilbie Shane calling the Hartford Hospital and says I have an emergency coming in. that was I think a Monday and I was operated on that Saturday and there was whole sequence of events there that simply G-d was with me because they wanted to send me home because the time they did it at the emergency room at the hospital the thing had actually gone back to normal then they did an arterial _______ and it showed three of the main, I had a triple bypass actually, took the vein out of my legs and shunted around the arteries to my heart. I had a stroke during the operation and the hearing is the only part that still bothers me. On a wet day it kicks up and today I said to Minna, it’s a beautiful day, why it is hurting? It’s a weather indicator whether the doctor says so or not because on a damp day it just drives me crazy and I’ve learned to live with it. At first I couldn’t even pick up anything with it. I think you get an idea. You know the pins on the cars that you lift up the lock to lock your car? In ’72 I could not lift up the pins of a car. That’s how little strength there was left in that hand. It’s come back and I’m busier now than I ever was actually. Murry: That’s great Zeke everybody is this room is delighted to hear that and delighted to have seen you come through that ordeal and that serious surgery. I can attest to the fact that Zeke lives a very, very active communal life in retirement. He’s all over the place and he’s still very much with it. Zeke, is there anything that I should have asked you about that I didn’t know? I mean are there any hidden corners in your life that you’d like to reveal, especially as it relates to the community? Zeke: Well I think the thing I remember most is the hard time that Trinity, contrary to what Mel said, I had a very hard time at Trinity just by being Jewish and there are only about six of us admitted a year and there was no place that really welcomed. None of the fraternities would let Jewish young people in so that we formed our own chapter of a fraternity called Phi Alpha. In fact there is a picture of the group out on the board. I had a biter experience with that. I played varsity football at Trinity and I think at the end of my junior year I had an “A” average and suddenly during the middle of the summer I realized that I had not received my letter renewing my scholarship and without the scholarship I could not go back to school so that I said to my father I think I better go into Hartford early and see Reverend Golding. He was an Episcopalian minister. The most prejudiced guy in the world in my book and I said I haven’t heard all summer. And he said I got some sad news for you Ezra. This is now early September. I had not gone to their compulsory chapel and so my scholarship was taken away. Any yet the catalog said very definitely that you could make up the chapel credits before you graduated so I skipped chapel in those says because I was working nights and I didn’t want to get up that early in the morning knowing that I would have to make them up in my senior year. But I didn’t make them up because I left school that year, went back to New York and work in a drug store and then back to Hartford and worked at Stoughton’s while going to Trinity and graduated in ’35. Murry: Zeke, it’s time to wrap up this interview and I’m going to say that it’s been my privilege of these years to have known you as a member of the board of directors of the Center and as a very good friend and I stress the latter. And for the records of this Jewish Historical Society I want to restate at the end as I am supposed according to my instructions here that we’ve been hearing about the life and times of Ezra “Zeke” Melrose. This interview conducted on October 8, 1975. Ezra Melrose, a fine educator, a devoted husband and father but essentially I think a mensch. And we’ll end with that, shall we?