Dedicated · Intelligent · Passionate · Involved

Family Bromberg

Traditionally modern.

Involved

Learning. Law. Commerce. Culture. Art.Improving the places we call home.

Where it began

The end of the line

As the family tells it, Isaac Gustave Bromberg left Europe with the money in his pocket, landed in New York and bought a train ticket west. The line ended in Mineola, a new railroad town in the East Texas pines, and so did his search for a home.

He opened a general store. The Wood County Historical Commission remembers him as a prominent entrepreneur and philanthropist; a state historical marker at Broad and Johnson Streets honors the Jewish families, his among them, who built Mineola. He gave the high school its library, with the funds and more than 1,500 books, and after his death in 1926 the students dedicated it as the Bromberg Memorial Library. Bromberg Street still runs through town.

The Bromberg general store in Mineola, with wagons and horses out front
The store, Mineola
Inside the store: long counters and shelves of goods
Inside the store

Dallas

South Boulevard

As Dallas grew, the family grew with it. I. G. Bromberg built one of the largest houses on South Boulevard, designed by H. A. Overbeck, in the neighborhood that rose around Temple Emanu-El after 1913 and became the city’s second Jewish enclave. The South Boulevard–Park Row district has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978.

The family kept giving where it lived. Edward S. Bromberg (1918–2007) was born in Dallas and studied at St. Mark’s, Rice and MIT, graduating in 1939. During the Second World War he engineered for a General Motors division in Baltimore on the Grumman Avenger. As director of engineering at Pollock Paper Company he earned patents for manufacturing equipment, and for decades he designed and built furniture in wood for family and friends. He supported Temple Emanu-El, and a shop at a South Dallas school bears his name and his tools and trains young people to work with their hands.

Mildred R. Bromberg gave her time and donations to Terrell State Hospital, where a wing was named for her.

Alfred Bromberg at his desk
Alfred Bromberg
Bromberg men and boys in a garden
Bromberg men

Henri L. Bromberg Sr.

A Dallas attorney

Henri L. Bromberg Sr. practiced law in Dallas. In 1935 his son Henri Jr. joined his firm, later Bromberg, Leftwich, Carrington and Gowan.

Henri L. Bromberg Sr. at his desk
Henri L. Bromberg Sr.Dallas attorney

Henri L. Bromberg Jr.

Building Dallas

Henri L. Bromberg Jr. (1911–1999) studied at the University of Texas and Northwestern, and in 1935 joined his father’s Dallas law firm, later Bromberg, Leftwich, Carrington and Gowan, where he practiced for more than sixty years. He represented builders such as Trammell Crow and Ray Nasher and helped finance the Dallas Trade Mart and NorthPark Center. He served as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Forces during the Second World War, led Temple Emanu-El as its president in 1969, received the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and sat on the boards of the Dallas Symphony and the Dallas Grand Opera.

Janice “Jan” Mayer Bromberg

Education first

Janice “Jan” Mayer Bromberg (1912–2005) came to Dallas from Chicago in 1936, when she married Henri. Education was her cause: the Dallas school board (1966–1972), the boards of Hockaday and Lamplighter, and SMU’s Board of Trustees (1976–1988), along with KERA, United Way, Dallas Services for the Blind and the Dallas Home for the Jewish Aged.

In 1997 Henri and Jan endowed a research chair at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Learning

Everyone at the table

The Brombergs have always believed in education: three Bromberg daughters were college graduates in the 1800s, when few women went to college. Education is also the oldest thread in the family’s giving. It began with the Mineola library and continues in the Isaac Gustave Bromberg Scholarship in Latin and the Humanities and the Belle Mayer Bromberg Scholarship in English at SMU, both since 1952, and the Bromberg Memorial Fund at the University of Texas, since 1957. Closer to home, the family’s ties run to St. Mark’s School of Texas and the Episcopal School of Dallas.

The Harkness side brings an idea the family holds close: the Harkness table. In 1930 Edward Harkness gave Phillips Exeter Academy a new way to teach, students around one oval table, each expected to speak, the teacher guiding rather than lecturing. It is a round-table way of thinking: every voice counts, and the best answer comes from the whole table.

A young man reading in an Adirondack chair by a lake

Law

Sixty years in the classroom

Alan R. Bromberg (1928–2014) taught at SMU’s Dedman School of Law for more than six decades and is University Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus. His writing on partnership, securities and corporate law has been cited in more than 500 judicial opinions, ten of them at the U.S. Supreme Court. Law and art met in his work too: in 1963 he worked on the agreement that merged the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts with the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the union that became today’s Dallas Museum of Art.

His chair, the Alan R. Bromberg Centennial Chair in corporate, partnership, business and securities law, carries the work forward, and since 1968 the Bromberg Endowed Book Fund has kept the Underwood Law Library growing. In practice, the name continues at Stutzman, Bromberg, Esserman & Plifka, a Dallas business law firm since 1984.

Family and friends gathered in a book-lined room

Culture and art

A house of 93,000 blocks

In 1939 the Brombergs asked Arch Swank and O’Neil Ford to design a home on Wendover Road, near White Rock Lake. It became a landmark of early Texas modernism, built from 93,000 concrete blocks made with oyster shell and beach sand, and the family lived there for sixty years. It filled with art: Juanita Bromberg’s collection included works by Rodin, and the drawings, including a Matisse, passed down through the family.

Dr. Anne Bromberg joined the Dallas Museum of Art in 1962, became its curator of ancient and Asian art and is now curator emerita, bringing Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs to Dallas. The Bromberg Family Wendover Fund, which shares its name with that road, has brought into the museum works spanning five thousand years: a Japanese terracotta from 3000 BCE, a Sue ware vessel, a Roman head of Herakles, The Tale of Genji screens, Matisse etchings and ancient Mezcala sculpture. At home, Anne and Alan’s books covered every wall, and the art was hung, as she put it, in “startling juxtapositions.” At SMU, the Anne and Alan Bromberg Chair supports the Meadows School of the Arts.

Four family members smiling outdoors
Family men gathered outdoors

Joined families

The names that join ours

Every name that joins the family brings its own story. On the Jenkins side, Walter Jenkins (1918–1985), from Wichita Falls, served as Lyndon B. Johnson’s top aide for most of twenty-five years. His daughter Beth was a close friend of Luci Baines Johnson. On the Johnsons’ first night in the White House, the two girls lit a fire in a bedroom fireplace whose chimney had gone uncleaned, and smoke filled the room. Luci spent the rest of that week scrubbing the stains from the walls and took to calling her new home “the Great White Zoo.” On the Ruggles side, William B. Ruggles, an editor at The Dallas Morning News, coined the phrase “right to work” in a 1941 Labor Day editorial. On the Harkness side, the Horwitz family traces its roots to Calcutta.

Commerce

Still keeping shop

The instinct that opened a general store at the end of the line is still at work. In London, Whitney Bromberg Hawkings founded FLOWERBX. Campbell Bromberg leads global events and exhibitions for Tiffany & Co., after years staging events for Cartier and Louis Vuitton. In Austin, the Osgood Bromberg Capps Group is a wealth management team at Morgan Stanley.

And more

Stories, songs and films

The family keeps making things for the next generation to find.

Sources

Wood County Historical Commission · Texas Historical Commission marker 15997 · Edward S. Bromberg obituary · Texas Monthly · Harkness table · Harkness method · SMU · Dallas Museum of Art oral history · South Blvd.–Park Row · Henri L. Bromberg Jr. · The Jews Who Built Dallas · Walter Jenkins · 3201 Wendover Road · D Magazine