VC HISTORY, EPISODE 5 With Sybil Mervis

DACC Executive Director of Public Relations and VC History host, Lara Conkin sits down and talks with Sybil Mervis.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Welcome to VC History, where we discuss fascinating and lesser known 200-year history of Vermilion County, Illinois. I'm your host, Lara Conklin, and my guest today is Sybil Mervis. Mrs. Mervis needs a little introduction. She's a well-known community service activist, especially in the area of education. She and her late husband Lou Mervis were instrumental in the founding of the DAC Foundation and in the process to move the college to its current campus. But we are talking about education today. We're going to talk about the history of the Jewish community in Vermilion County. So welcome, Mrs. Mervis, and tell me what is your connection to the Jewish community in Vermilion County.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

My connection is that when I married Lou in 1958, I became part of the conservative congregation in Danville.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

So the conservative congregation, for folks who don't know what that is, give us a little rundown.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

There are three basic branches of Judaism. There's reform, which is not as committed. There's uh there's conservative, which is more committed and and has more uh liturgy, and then there's the Orthodox. Uh you might recognize that by the black hats, the people on the street.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

The black hats and like the curl on their face. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Okay, so when you married Lou in 1958, were you a native to Vermilion County?

SPEAKER_00 1:47

No, I grew up in Bloomington, Illinois. Okay, so all my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

So how did you meet Lou Mervis?

SPEAKER_00 1:55

We were back in the 1940s, there was a big push because there was so much anti-Semitism around that you um married a Jewish person. And my father literally knocked me on the head every morning and said, Marry a Jewish boy. Oh. And that came from his mother who had grown up in Russia, where the the uh Russians were so nasty, so cruel to the Jews, and she didn't want to have anything to do with non-Jewish people, which is understandable. My father wasn't even allowed as a teenager or an adult to talk on the telephone to a non-Jewish girl if his mother knew about it. And there weren't any there weren't any Jewish girls in Bloomington when he was growing up.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Um when I was growing up in Bloomington high school, there were probably uh maybe eight or ten Jewish teenagers. Uh we were depression-era babies. So um there was a strong move for to have a Jewish youth group that encompassed Danville and Quincy and all the towns in between. And we met every six to eight weeks to get together to have fun. And I met Lou in that group, If J Illinois Federation of Jewish Youth. And um I ended up being president of the whole thing the year after he was. But I had a crush on him. When I first when I first met him, I was impressed with him when I was fifteen and a half, and certainly not looking for a husband.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Right, no, not that age.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

But uh he was impressive because he was so mature compared to the other 15-year-old boys. Yeah, I mean, you know what they're like.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Right. Yeah. So you and he are are of an age.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Yeah, we're six yes, we're six months apart in age.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Okay. So then Lou lived here in Vermilion County.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Yes, he lived in Danville all his life.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

And his family, how long had they been here in Vermilion County?

SPEAKER_00 3:56

I think they moved here in 1934 when life got really tough in Vetersburg. Okay, so they were in Vetersburg, Indiana. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Um well now I grew up outside of Cayuga, Indiana. Oh. And went to North Vermilion High School. Um I graduated in 1985, and I um if there were any Jewish people in my community, I was unaware of it.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

No, by then most of them had moved to a larger town.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Okay. And that's I think that's what we see uh kind of in this country right now. It seems like um well, you were telling me the other day there aren't very many Jewish people left in this community.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

No, uh at this point Jews have left small towns for the big city because they uh well it goes back to educating your children up and out. Um Jews moved to small towns, villages, even where they could make a living, uh having a general store or having a a women's shop or a men's shop or being in the scrap business. There were lots of Jewish scrap dealers. This was back in the teens, the twenties, and the thirties. And uh the one thing we all knew, well, the one goal was that we had to get an education. Neither of my parents went to college, but we three children knew that we had to get a college degree. They didn't care in w what it was in, but we had to get a college degree in something before we started our lives. That was just a given. And uh once we were all educated, we didn't want to live in small towns anymore. Right. And so you have this max mass exodus of the children of the people who settled here, and then they died out, or Walmart came in and took their business essentially, and so they either left for warmer climes or uh died, and so there aren't any Jewish people in Vermilion County. There are probably four people who identify as being Jewish. There are a handful more, but they don't identify necessarily as being Jewish.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Okay. So when in in all of your research, and I know that you have done a lot of research and you've written articles for the Heritage Magazine for the for the Vermillion County Museum, do you know when um Jews first settled in Vermilion County?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Yes, we uh I haven't done a lot of research way back in the 1800s, but we did come across the names of two Jewish men who were peddlers uh or traveling salesmen back in the 1850s, and then in the 1870s there were a handful of Jewish businessmen who had moved here from uh big cities from Cincinnati and other places to start businesses, the goldsmiths and several others, and uh their businesses grew, and then other Jewish people came. Um the Platts came, he ended up being the mayor of Danville in 1909, his son ended up being a federal judge, but of course they had three daughters and they all moved away. Uh which is not unusual. Anyhow, um the business community really grew in the first uh three decades of the 20th century in uh downtown Danville. There were numerous Jewish businessmen then. Very all your almost all your men's stores, often your women's stores, uh were owned by Jewish businessmen.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

You may not know the answer to this, but why is that?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Why is what?

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Why why um why do we um associate um people in the Jewish community as being store owners?

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Well, because you you couldn't get a job in the outer community if you were Jewish. I grew up with State Farm growing in Bloomington, that's where it was founded. And we knew Jews couldn't get jobs at State Farm and they couldn't get jobs at GE when that plant came to town. Um and so they had to be independent businessmen to make a living for their families. Uh the scrap business, the junk business, was an inexpensive business to get into if you were an immigrant. Fifty cents in a wagon, you could go around and collect what other people didn't want and find someone to sell it to. And so most of the scrap dealers across central Illinois were Jewish immigrants who it's amazing. They would come down from the city uh after they immigrated to a town that they knew very little about. They might be the only Jewish businessman in that town, but they could live there and make a living and educate their children. Okay. That was the goal.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Well, that sounds like a really good goal and a great way to to make it happen. Now, my um my neighbor now where I live in Oakwood is one of the four remaining people who identify as Jewish in the community. Okay, Peggy. Fleecer, Campbell, yes. And they had they had three sons, and yes, their three sons educated and and made their families elsewhere. Um but I know that her father came here as a doctor at Hubston Hospital.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Dr. Fleeser came here from Germany to escape the Nazis.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Okay. And her mother did too, but at a different time. Her mother because her mother had come, as I recall the story, um she uh sh they were in Poland, and um I her mother said one day, you know, people who had been her friends since childhood, she was 16 years old and they weren't her friends anymore. And so uh they left Poland, uh, she and her mother, and um they came to Chicago where an uncle had already uh immigrated and had started a business. And then eventually she met Dr. Fleecer. Did I say that correctly? Fleecer. Um I only know Peggy as Krimble. And then they moved down here to start their family and settled in Hubston.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Yes. You went as a doctor, and Dr. Koenig did the same thing. You went to a small town that needed a doctor.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Uh Fritz Koenig did the same thing. He and his wife escaped from the Nazis and they came down here and uh practiced in uh a town, a small town around uh Danville rather than in Danville.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

Now is that Ruth Koenig's No relation. No relation. Okay, different person.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Different Koenig family.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

This one was Jewish.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

And then, of course, you had a great many, a number of Jewish doctors who were immigrants from Austria and Germany who had escaped, who came through the VA system. Uh, one of them was Otto Schaefer, who was head of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Danville, who was instrumental in creating this campus.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Right. So Otto Schaefer is the one who worked with the government to give this campus.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Yeah, the front seven buildings. They were giving up the front seven buildings. And one night in synagogue, Otto was sitting behind Lou and he tapped Lou on the shoulder and he because I think Lou was head of the local school board then, and he said, Lou, I understand you're looking for a place to move the college to, because he had to get out of the high school uh at that point because the high school student population was growing. And he said, uh, I don't know if you realize it, but the VA's gonna give up the front seven buildings of the hospital, and that'd make a nice campus for the college. Woohoo.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Yeah. And and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

The rest is history.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

So who are these attractive gentlemen that you have pictures of in your magazines?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Uh that has that one has nothing to do.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Sorry. Uh this one is Louis Platt, who came here in the I think the 1870s, uh and developed some businesses, had several sons, one of whom became a um a federal judge.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

But his daughters all left town. His wife, I think, started the League of Women Voters. She was the first really educated Jewish woman to move to Danville, I suspect. And she started the League of Women Voters, and she founded the Girl Scouts in Danville. Uh, so they were both movers. Um, there were other people who came here. The gimbals were here, the of the Gimbal Department Store in New York City started in Indiana and at one point had a store on Vermilion Street in Danville before they moved on to Wisconsin and then ultimately to New York. Gimbal's was a big department store like Macy's in New York, but all that is history that's gone.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

I I think there's a I I think there's a holiday program. Um and it's uh there's a Santa Claus, and he's at Macy's, but he sends somebody to Gimbal's because they don't have a toy.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Oh and yeah, it's I didn't know anything about that, not being a television watcher. But there were um Ike Stern and the Bashes came from uh uh north of Bloomington and had a store here. And uh one of the Bashes' relatives wrote the Cherry Ames books, which were very popular during the Second World War for w girls who wanted to be nurses and escaped from the farm, maybe. And uh she was a very popular writer. She got her brother to do some writing also. And they were here? They were here where the days in, they had a yellow frame house on Gilbert Street in the first in the unit block where the Days Inn is now.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Uh and they uh brought Mrs. Bash's twin brothers who uh played in the band at the VA hospital, and uh had a store here for quite a while too.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Oh wow. Um I had a thought and it just went away. I don't know how that is. I find that happens to me more often these days. The only do you get the worst it is? Uh the Mies store.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Yes. They the Mises were from Alsace-Lorraine, um in between Germany and France, so to speak, and they came here in the late 1800s. Alphonse Mies came with a cousin, and they started a store on Main Street, and then I think a brother joined him, and they worked really hard, and it became the major department store for a long time in Danville, and uh was called the Great White Store because it was the building was painted white. Um but it was Danville's premier department store for many decades, uh, and that was true in all of the s medium-sized towns across central Illinois, between here and the Mississippi, that the major department store was created and owned by a Jewish person.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Oh wow. Well, I remember the Mies store. Uh I remember it being downtown before they built the town center. Yes. When the roads still went through, because my mom worked in the children's department when I was six or seven years old. Uh she didn't work there for very long, but um, but I do remember one holiday season she worked at the Mies store. But then that was, and so when they built the town center and that store was torn down, then they had the Mies store at the mall, correct?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Yes. And it was the same owners for a while until they moved on, or uh I'm not sure it was the same owners because I think the Mises and Terhot owned the store that was in in the mall.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Because it was El Mies, whoever whoever Elle was.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Lucian Mies. Okay. And then there was a uh Mies who owned the Parisian, which was on Vermilion Street, which was a women's ready to wear store also, and that was a relative. Uh Mises brought a lot of relatives to this area.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Okay. Okay. So what was the um what was the biggest the community got to be?

SPEAKER_00 17:03

There were two congregations here, two Jewish congregations. The Reformed Jews formed a congregation in about 1905, and in 1910 or 1914 built a building uh as a sanctuary of the Reformed Temple on the corner of Walnut and Fairchild, the southeast corner. It was dedicated in 1914, and it the congregation literally, literally died out in 1969.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

They refused to join with the conservative congregation that was one block north on Walnut Street, and uh so they just literally died out. Oh my goodness. Um it was sad to watch from my point of view because I had grown up in a reform congregation and I didn't understand why they didn't want to be a part of any Jewish congregation that was still viable. The uh conservative congregation, the more religious uh folks, started a congregation in the teens and bought a church on the corner of uh Harrison and Washington that had been a Catholic church, was the Northeast Corner, and they bought that in 1920, and then the president of the congregation died, or they tried to buy it. The president of the congregation died and willed them the church, I think, for a dollar.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

Oh my.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

The president of the congregation was murdered in front of Uncle Joe Cannon's house one evening. He and his sister were walking home from the movies, and a highwayman, as the newspaper called it, stepped out from behind a tree and shot him in the abdomen, and the matter ran out. That's what the newspapers said. Oh my! I found that fascinating. Oh my! Um my impression was that this particular man uh had been in the scrap, well, I know he'd been in the scrap business, the junk business it was called then, and he was a bachelor, and my imagination tells me that he was a bachelor who loaded up his truck occasionally with scrap, took it to Chicago to sell during the time of um who was the big gang gangster in New in Chicago then?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Oh, um Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

And he uh and Al Capone. Al Capone, and he probably went to gamble and he went to bars and this and that, possibly. And maybe he didn't pay his debts. Oh. And so the highwayman stepped out in front of a tree and shot him.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Oh my. And left his sister alone.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Left his sister, yes. I think there were a couple other siblings, but anyhow, um that was kind of a gory story. But um anyhow, the conservative congregation lasted until I closed the synagogue in 2012 at the direction of my husband because we were down to 16 people. We had a rabbi who came every two months from uh all the way from Columbus, Ohio to do services for us. All 16 would show up when he did. But uh it wasn't viable to keep a it was the former uh uh Ridgeview Baptist Church behind the Custard Cup, and it was a big building with five furnaces, and we had no Sunday school at that point, just 16 adults, and it wasn't viable to keep it uh m open any longer. So that was the end of uh formal Jewish life in Danville, Illinois.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

So what do you do now for synagogue?

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Um I think Jerry Feingold goes over to Champaign. I don't know where Peggy goes. Milt Bear can't go anyplace because he's in a wheelchair, I assume. Um but you can get services on the internet.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

I belong to a congregation in Carmel, Indiana, because that's where my sons belong.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Okay. So I I remember when when we first moved next door to Peggy, and that was at the time when your rabbi was coming from Ohio, because he would come and stay with someone in the congregation.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Yes. He would stay with us and we'd have to feed him kosher food, which was difficult because nobody in the congregation at that point kept kosher.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

So that made it a little difficult.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

That okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

But you do what you can to have a leader in leadership in religion. Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Well, and I've I've um it uh what what has always struck me is not the differences but the similarities. Um I have Been to funeral services for two members of Peggy's family. And when her mother passed, we were uh my daughter and I had attended, and the rabbi then was speaking, he said a Hebrew prayer, and then he said, you know, I'm I'm now going to say it in English for those who don't speak Hebrew. And um it was the Lord's Prayer. I knew that prayer. Um and so I've always been struck by by the similarities as opposed to the differences. And like I said, I grew up in a small town where there were no people of the Jewish faith. Um there were no people. I don't know that there were anyone who there was anyone who practiced the Catholic faith. I think we were all Protestants. Um we had very few minorities in our community at that time. Um well, we did have a few, a handful. Um we had a handful of children of soldiers who had been in the Vietnam War. And one of the things I I think you and I have talked before, you've you've talked about some of the different things that people would say to and about Jews that were very derogatory. And I was unfamiliar with them because we didn't have Jewish people in our community, so we didn't talk about that. Um you know, if you if and and I was surprised by some of the things that you had told me, yeah. Um, because I just well, first of all, it seems ridiculous, uh, but also I, you know, and I don't I don't understand it. Again, I see the similarities rather than the differences. So was there was there a problem with that for your community in Vermilion County? Or were, I mean, it sounds like it sounds like the folks who settled here were fairly prominent. Obviously, you and Mr. Mervis were uh business successful business owners. Um I mean in this day and age we celebrate successful business owners. So was that the case or was there uh conflict?

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Well, if you're speaking specifically of Danville, when I came here in 1958, I came back when lots of several of uh Lou's high school friends brought their wives back. And it was interesting to see uh how long it took for me to be invited to the junior service club or the junior auxiliary at the hospital. I remember uh um Alan Halpern, who's a doctor in Kalamazoo, telling me that his father was the first Jewish doctor to be admitted to practice at Lakeview Hospital, and that was during the war. I know there was a Jewish doctor here in the late 20s, but he left after his wife died in 1932, and there were no Jewish doctors that I can find between 1932 and when uh Sal Halpern came in the early 1940s. Um Dr. Halpern's wife was not invited to join the auxiliary at St. Elizabeth's Hospital because she was Jewish. Uh when we came, there were just a handful of Jews who were admitted to Danville Country Club, the uh uh more prominent Jews. Uh, the boat club didn't want any Jews. Uh there were places that you knew you just weren't going to be going. Uh not that it made a big difference to me because it didn't, because I grew up living on the 11th green of Bloomington Country Club and they didn't allow Jews, so it wasn't any big surprise to me. Um things eased, you did get comments from people, uh, but things eased as the Jewish population uh dissipated and people became more aware. Um our current president of the United States is teaching prejudice in every direction, and that's appalling uh to people who are the well.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

You know, I think that um I don't think people are necessarily taught to be liberal. I don't think people are taught to be more um accepting. I think that they when you expand your horizons and you get out of your silo and you start to know people who come from different backgrounds, who come from different religions and ethnicities, um different races, you you start to understand again the similarities as opposed to the differences. And I like to think that that's something that happens with education, with with greater experience.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Well, it's impossible for that to happen in Vermilion County since there are only four people who practice Judaism here.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

That is, yeah. Well, I go back to to my upbringing where there was there was no one practicing Judaism in my community, and I think Peggy was probably the first person from the Jewish faith that I had ever met.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Well, we made a big effort last October to provide books on the Holocaust to all of the schools in Vermilion County because we feel that that's part a major part of history that uh students in Vermilion County have no concept of. Uh, they have no concept of the Second World War for the most part. And so uh our family and another Jewish family from Taylorville uh provided a book trunk of books, age-appropriate books on the Holocaust to all the schools. I thought it had gone to the parochial schools, private schools, but it hasn't yet. Okay but all the public schools in because Holocaust education is mandated in fifth, eighth, and tenth grade, and we did uh eighth and tenth grade Murrays Family Foundation and the other foundation did fifth grade. But I just found out last week they did not give books to the pro-kill schools, but they're going to do that in the next few months, which is good, and provide uh teacher education if the teachers want it. So we hope that the kids will get some concept that there are people who aren't Christian who uh live in the world and are decent and uh help others.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

Well, Mrs. Mervis, thank you so much for talking to me today. Um I I enjoy history. Um I was aware of the Holocaust, even even in my small town, and the horrors that were happened during that time. Um But I do, like I said, I I see, I try to see the similarities rather than the differences, and having the conversations with you about um about the history of the community and where the community came from and where it's going or not. We would hope that it will maybe it will come back at some point. Um But I I again I think we can only we can only understand and grow if we talk about stuff.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

I I appreciate you coming and talking to me today. And um the Jewish community was definitely a strong and vibrant part of the history of Vermillion County.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

Oh, yes, and of the college also. And of the college also, uh, because of the gaining of the property. Right. And I remember that Leonard Jaffe, who was head of the Danville Jacket Company, was the first head of the uh the uh foundation for the college. He was the head of the foundation board.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

So there yes, I I mean I think that being business leaders also many times translates into being community service leaders. You've been a perfect example of that. Your husband was a was a perfect example of that. Mr. Jaffe, Dr. Schaefer. Um, all of these, all of these people contributed to the uh growth of Vermilion County. And we thank you. And I thank you for joining me today. And I hope you'll join me again for VC History. Thank you.