THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: Family HemisFair
INTERVIEW WITH: Robert A.(Bob) Polunsky (Tape 1 of 1)
DATE: 28 October 1998
PLACE: ITC
INTERVIEWER: Laurie Gudzikowski
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
G: ...and I'm going to be interviewing Bob Polunsky, and he's going to be talking about his family and their life in Texas. Bob, would you like to start out by telling us...by stating your name and telling us where you were born and when you were born.
P: Officially my name is Robert Allen Polunsky. I only go by Bob Polunsky. I was born right here in San Antonio on December 3rd 1931. I have...this is the fourth in the generation of Polunsky's living in San Antonio. And on my mother's side I am the second. And thanks to my daughter, Julie, Julie Ann Polunsky, she investigated a lot of our family I didn't even know about. And now I know where we came from.
G: Now can you tell us - start with your father's family that's been here for four generations and talk about the first Polunsky's that came to Texas?
P: All right. The very first Polunsky's that came to Texas. My great-grandfather was Zellig Polunsky, who was Robert (Bob) Polunsky 2
buried in San Antonio. And he organized the very first
P: pasteurized dairy in the southwest, it was called The Mistletoe Dairy, it was here in San Antonio on Austin Street. He had seven boys and two girls. One of those boys was my grandfather, Dan. They actually immigrated from St. Louis, Missouri, where most of the children were born. And originally they came from, well, a portion of Europe that has been called Lithuania, Poland, and Russia at one time or another. Basically we always called ourselves Polish. And they came to...by way of New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis. And then they came to Texas for health reasons, because my uncle and my grandfather had asthma and they wanted to go to a drier climate. When they were in San Antonio, they had the first, very first pasteurized dairy. And they eventually sold it to Borden's. And Borden's has the facility here in San Antonio now. But while they were here they were very well known. The family name was very well known. It was called P-o-l-u-n-s-k-y here in Texas. But when they lived in St. Louis the family's name was Polinsky - P-o-l-i-n. And when my great-grandfather sold the dairy his sons all went to different parts of the country and each one of them changed the spelling of the name by one vowel, just to start their own little hierarchy, I guess. And those here...and the Polunsky's had stayed pretty much in the food business - staple is what they specialized in. My Robert (Bob) Polunsky 3
grandfather, Dan Polunsky, stayed here in San Antonio and he had a grocery store. His wife, my grandmother, who's Anna
P: Bertha - I'm named for her, Robert Allen, Bob Allen, is the initials - the same. She was very ill. She had cancer and she died very young. My grandfather who had been a photographer's model in St. Louis - he was a very good looking man - married another woman and he had four kids, one of whom was my father, Morris. And they didn't like the idea of someone taking their mother's place so she ran off and left her husband. And my grandfather was a very temperamental man, very moody man, and he said he was going to get married again. He married another woman and if their kids didn't like it, they could leave. And they did. He actually disinherited them. I would have been rich, maybe, if they had stayed together. But he had a grocery store; it was on Dakota Street in San Antonio. At that time the southside of San Antonio was the major residential area. But he also developed an illness. He had heart condition, and he didn't keep the store, and the kids all went their separate ways. My father looked...he dropped out of high school and he started looking for a job. And he found a job with a merchant named Max Mazur - M-a-z-u-r. And Max Mazur had a department store at one time, and then he had a wholesale jobbers company. And my father went to work. And the reason he offered, told me he went to work, is that he Robert (Bob) Polunsky 4
saw my - his potential employer's daughter - working there and she caught his eye. Her name was Ethel, Ethel Mazur, and she was fifteen and she used to type for my grandfather.
P: My dad saw her, he was seventeen, and they started going out together and they never dated anyone else. It is their wedding picture that you have here. And my grandfather and grandmother, Max and Rebekah Mazur...well, my grandfather was from Odessa, Russia, and my grandmother was from Lithuania. She came over and worked in the sweatshops of New York when she was thirteen. She was the daughter of dairy farmers, and when she had enough money she came down to Texas where her sister had already immigrated. Her sister, who's name was Rachel, was living in Brenham, Texas, and my grandmother came to visit her. And, going on the assumption that two can live cheaper than one, my great-aunt Rachel introduced her to Max Mazur. And from what I've been told, they got married the day they met. And they were married in Brenham and then they came to San Antonio where he developed his own business. And it was a department store on the corner of Main Avenue and Houston Street, which has since been torn down many, many years ago. And then his wholesale store was at...on Military Plaza and eventually at 301 West Market. My father wanted to marry my mother but my grandparents wouldn't let them because he was the hired help. And they had a tradition in Europe that the oldest Robert (Bob) Polunsky 5
got married first, then the second, and then the third. My mother was the youngest - she was the third of three daughters. Her oldest sister, Esther, did get married. But the second daughter, her name was Jennie, was something of a
P: ...well, she was very unattractive. She was very heavy, and she was wild as a March hare, they tell me, and she didn't have any prospects of getting married. And my grandfather figured that she wouldn't, and my mother and my father would never get married 'cause he was the hired help and that was fine. However, my aunt felt sorry for my mother. She got herself engaged to a man from Houston, Texas, and got my grandfather to compromise his edict, as long as my aunt was engaged, my mother could get married. My parents got married. They got married on October 19, 1930. They had gone together for about six years. And as soon as they got married, my aunt broke her engagement. She didn't get married until eight years later. She got married in 1938. And because my parents had established their marriage and had a very, very good union, never seemed to have any problems, never dated anyone else. My aunt said she wanted that same anniversary date for her wedding, and she had it, October 19, 1938. Incidentally, she eloped. And she eloped with a shoe sales-man from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, named Joe Sigman [?]. And she had lost an enormous amount of weight and she looked a lot better when Robert (Bob) Polunsky 6
she got married. And when she eloped and she...they went on a honeymoon, it just so happens that my grandparents, her mother and father, were among those who tuned in to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds late and the cities that they were talking about being destroyed by the Martians were among the
P: cities that my aunt and uncle were at and my grandparents were those, were in that controversy - they thought that the end of the world was here and my aunt was already gone. At any rate my aunts, both of my aunts, settled here in San Antonio. So did my parents, of course. And on my Dad's side he had a brother who was a drummer for the Shrine Band and he had two sisters, one of whom won a beauty contest when she was sixteen and got a movie contract, who was just going to be a starlet. In those days they trained them, you know. But she met a guy, ran off and got married, and so much for show-biz. That was the story of her life. She always remained vitally interested in the movies, and I used to talk to her for hours on end. She's gone now. My other aunt, my Dad's other sister, was a model who modeled extensively here in San Antonio on the stage of the Empire Theater. She married a man who had a...he had a ...[Name? Sounds like Kelford] Tire Company here in San Antonio and they had two sons. My Aunt Nettie, who was the movie actress, had one daughter named Annette. My Uncle Abner who was the drummer did not have children. He was Robert (Bob) Polunsky 7
married but they did not have any children. I have two sisters. I...all of us were born and raised here in San Antonio. One sister still lives here. Her name is Dottie Fry; she's a Social Security expert, has written for the paper and has a consultation office to resolve social security problems and has developed quite a reputation and a P: name for herself. My youngest sister lives in New Orleans, she's married to a doctor and she's a housewife and has three kids of her own. My wife, whose maiden name was Paulina Norman, she came from, or she was raised in Austin, she was born in Cotulla, raised in Beeville and then Austin. We met on a blind date on a Friday night on Thanksgiving holidays when I was living in Houston as a travelling salesman and I had come in. And I met her on a blind date; we decided to get married that Sunday. I'm not exaggerating. My wife shoots me, though, when I mention that to people. But it is what happened. And she called her parents who were living in Austin and her father had retired and she told them she was going to get married, and they asked what I did. She said a travelling salesman, those are the worst kind - I sold yellow page advertising and traveled from town to town. My in-laws-to-be packed everything up and they were here within a week and they stopped us from getting married. They said, "No, please wait until we get there." They got here, "You have to wait at least a year." Well, weRobert (Bob) Polunsky 8
ended up waiting six months and I was travelling that whole time and I think we had our most, our bitterest, frankly, our only fights during that period of time. But I promised Paulina, her name was Paulina Norman and now it's Paulina Polunsky, that I would quit travelling so that we would have a home and raise a family. And I went to work at a TV station to sell advertising. I've always had an interest in
P: the movies and I did movie reviewing on the side. I was the very first critic to be on radio and television. And when I did it for the newspaper it was because nobody else wanted the job. And I did it on the side because I still sold, and I did write for the San Antonio Light for sixteen years. Then I moved to the Express. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I was there another sixteen years. And then when Hearst sold the Light and...rather, they closed it and bought the Express. And they changed the very ...the whole set-up, very, very much; I didn't like it and I left. And I write for the Prime Time Newspaper Syndicate now. And still do things on television - no one else did any reviewing or interviewing locally on TV or radio until I came there, and I have been doing that consistently since then. I've been married - well I got married in, on June 18, 1960. And we had three children. We don't have any kids anymore. Our daughter Julie, our oldest, light of our lives, passed away this year. And she studied our family Robert (Bob) Polunsky 9
roots. She couldn't have children; she had cancer and had a hysterectomy, so she didn't have kids, but she did have ancestors. She toured all over the country, and she found as many of our relatives as she could, collected as many pictures and notations, read books, interviewed people. Even got in messages and information from Europe and tracked down our family trees. And she did that very extensive work. I'm so proud of her for that. She donated it all to
P: the University of Texas Family Archive Center in Austin. They were happy to have it. It's very extensive. She tracked the Polunsky Clan down to about 1700, she had the Mazur Clan, my mother's family, down to the early 1800s, she had my wife's family down to the year 1049. She tracked them all the way down. They immigrated from Normandy to Scotland. Actually it was 1044; they immigrated in 1044. And she has a lot of documentation to proved everything. Very, very extensive. And she was very neat about everything. It's very well organized. They told me when I took the material up there, after we lost her, that they had never gotten material that is that well put together and organized. And because of her and her diligence and her love, we wanted to be able to do something in her memory. She had the Kewpie dolls, I call them, but they were little porcelain dolls that came off my parents' wedding cake, and wedding pictures and my mother's wedding veil that she had Robert (Bob) Polunsky 10
kept, and they are now at the Institute of Texan Cultures in her memory. And all of my movie memorabilia, and I've been doing revues now for close to forty years; I have a very extensive collection, that's all being donated to the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries in my daughter Julie Ann's memory. It's just my wife and I now, that's all. And the rest, I'd... Rather than just let it end up in a garage sale, I wanted Julie's name to be perpetuated with it.
G: Well, you've established a wonderful legacy for Julie. Bob, your family is Jewish, as well as being Polish. Can you tell me a little bit about...do you know if there was a synagogue here when your grand...great-grandfather first came here? How did they continue their religious practices?
P: My grandfather did attend. He was the very first president of the Orthodox Synagogue, Rodfei Sholom, in San Antonio. When he came to San Antonio there was an Orthodox Synagogue on the Southside of town. My grandparents lived on Elmira, which is a little bit north of downtown, very close to downtown. And they attended Congregation Agudas Achim, which was the Orthodox Synagogue at that time. However they changed to Conservative, which is the middle-of-the-roaders. And the Rodfei Sholom Orthodox Synagogue - It was developed after that, and my grandfather, Max Mazur, was their very first president. There are pages in the Robert (Bob) Polunsky 11
newspapers that still exist; I've seen them in the libraries, in the newspaper library, that has his picture in the paper and his cohorts. His contemporaries were Mr. Joske of the Joske's of Texas, and Oppenheim of the Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer from the bank system, and Nat Washer who...well, there's a Masonic Lodge named for him. The Karotkin family were his contemporaries, and he knew the Frost family who had Frost Brothers, and the people who had Wolff and Marx. They were all...at that time we didn't have outside chains that owned the companies. And the religious
P: community was very well respected and very active. They also organized the Hebrew Free Loan here, which was a means of loaning money to people - they don't have to be Jewish - but they loan money to people, interest-free, immigrants, just to get them started. And on my father's side his family was Orthodox. However, Orthodoxy was the... well, people that were in Europe, most of them were, but they came over here and many of them changed to the Conservative, or Reformed, philosophy. Now, my father's side of the family were Orthodox and they all attended the Orthodox Congregation. But, as I said, my father's parents died young and the children all went their separate ways. My father was the only one of the four children who maintained the ties with Judaism. My aunts and uncle had converted over the years to other...to Protestant Robert (Bob) Polunsky 12
denominations of one form or another. Although we still kept our family ties, we just didn't talk about religion.
G: You said that your great-grandfather had a dairy here in San Antonio. Where was that dairy located?
P: All I can tell you is that it was on Austin Street. And it was a little bit east of the downtown area. It was called the Mistletoe Dairy. I've seen pictures of the milk wagons - trucks that were horse drawn - and it was a pasteurized dairy which was not common at the turn of the century. They sold it. When they sold it he - my great uncle who stayed here - his name was Barney; he and his
P: wife, Bertha Polunsky, founded the Polunsky - well, it was live chickens and turkeys; it was a poultry place. And it eventually became the fish market - it doesn't exist anymore, it's been sold. But it was here for a number of years and my...as far as the Polunsky relatives have moved all over the country. There's a nest of Polunskys in New York and Chicago and Florida, California, San Angelo, Texas, for that matter. Many of the Polunsky's, they changed the name, the spelling of the name, but in time many of them did inter-marry - distant cousins did. And some of my relatives became quite distinguished. Not on the Polunsky's, but on the Polunsky's side of the family...it was on my grandmother's - her nephew was the violinist Mischa Elman; his real name was Elmendorf and that was her maiden name. Robert (Bob) Polunsky 13
Well, her married name was Bereman, but her mother's maiden name was Elmendorf. And Mischa Elman, the violinist, was a relation. There is quite a few Polinskys in St. Louis. We never kept in touch with them. My Dad didn't ever know them, but my daughter Julie did and she found them and she corresponded with them and she visited with them. Their name is spelled P-o-l-i-n-s-k-y. She went to the cemeteries and took notes from all the gravestones, did the same in New York where their name was P-o-l-a-n-s-k-y. And she was very thorough in keeping track of all this. She met one Polunsky whose father had changed their name to Pollaine - P-o-l-l-a-i-n-e. I don't know why. But she worked with him to find
P: traces of the Polunsky family. He had moved to the San Francisco Bay area where she was living.
G: It seems that there were dairies on both sides of the family since your great-grandfather had a dairy and your mother came from that background also. When they came to Texas, did your grandparents and great-grandparents, were they...did they speak English or were they... Did they learn the language when they came here or do you have any idea about that?
P: They learned the language when they came to America. My grandmother came; she worked in New York. She learned the language. She never learned to read and write. She would sign her name with an X. And I remember that. My Robert (Bob) Polunsky 14
grandfather, who had a very thick accent, he lived in London for a while, from between...he migrated from Russia to London to the United States by the way of Galveston, and he ...as a matter of fact, he was a victim of one of the pogroms - some of the anti-Semetic things in Russia. He disguised himself as a woman and stowed away aboard a ship to get out of there. And he did. And when he came to the United States he learned English - hands-on, on-the-job training, let's say. My grandparents, on the Polunsky side, they were well-versed in English and Polish and Russian. My grandmother on my Dad's side, her name was Bereman, as I said. She came from Alsace-Lorraine; she knew French and German. She had relatives who were in Chile. Word is they
P: caught the wrong boat. I don't know why they were in Chile, but anyway they were in Chile. And my grandmother was actually educated there and she spoke Spanish fluently, I was told. She died way before I was born. But they... most of them learned - in the Polunsky side - learned English. Well, it goes back even further - they may have learned it here in America but they were all very fluent. The Polunsky's that I knew did not have accents. On my mother's side, they did because they had come over more recently. But they did, and they were also friendly in San Antonio - the Polunsky family, the Mazur family knew each other. And socialized together. They...even though my Robert (Bob) Polunsky 15
grandfather was upset because my Dad was the hired help, he knew his family and he knew that he wasn't anything - there were no skeletons in the closet for that matter. It was just the social status of the time, I guess.
G: So your grand...your, let's see, your mother married beneath her...is that her...in her father's eyes?
P: Well, not in her eyes and certainly not in our eyes. We adored our parents and, yes, they thought he was the hired help and you don't date the boss' daughter kind of thing.
G: Now your family - you talked about living on Elmira - is that right?
P: My grandparents. My mother's parents - my mother was raised on, at 657 West Elmira.
G: And where did your family...where were you raised when you were...?
P: Well, the earliest place I remember was at 211 Cornell. We moved away from there when I was about six, six or seven.
G: Where is Cornell?
P: Cornell is off of Fredericksburg Road, close to Five Points, close to the Cincinnati area. And...but the most of my...I remember most of my growing up years were at 1540 West Agarita, which is also off Fredericksburg Road but further up the street. It's right there close to...well, the old Knowleton's Dairy which is now Oak Farms. It's Robert (Bob) Polunsky 16
right close to there. And I lived there. When I went away to college my parents moved to Terrell Hills. They lived at 220 Newbury Terrace - I never lived in that house. As a matter of fact, the only place that I could stay when I came home for the week-end was a Murphy bed in the den; I didn't even have a room. But I've lived here in San Antonio all my life.
G: You...well you've not only lived here all your life but your family goes back a long ways here in San Antonio. But even...but through your life you've seen a lot of changes here in San Antonio. Would you like to comment a little bit about some of the changes that you've seen in San Antonio over the last about, you know, forty years?
P: Well, of course, when I was growing up we had a downtown section that was the center of all activities. And
P: I remember that going to town was an adventure. And I kind of traced my life, and the events of my life and my growing up years, by the movie theaters that existed. And I used to remember going to all the movie houses - the Majestic, the Aztec, the Texas. I ushered at the Palace, which was on the Alamo Plaza - it's torn down - until I got eye strain 'cause I watched the movie too much. And there was also the State, which was close to where my grandfather's store used to be on Main Avenue. And the Empire, which is re-opened. And then there were the Robert (Bob) Polunsky 17
suburban theaters - we lived by the Uptown Theater when we lived on Cornell and it was...then we lived by the Woodlawn Theater when we lived on Agarita. And I can remember the very first movie that played at the Woodlawn - it was National Velvet, 1944. When we lived by the Uptown I remember grocery night during the Depression Years, when they would try to stimulate audience activity and give away dishes and this, that and the other. They used...that's where all the big movies returned. And the best time for us kids was on Saturdays because they had a cowboy picture and a mystery of some kind and a serial. And if you were lucky you saw the last chapter of one serial plus the first chapter of the next serial. And my two sisters and I would go to the movies several times a week - as many times as we could con our parents into letting us go, because movies were about nine cents per person in those days. Now I can
P: remember the town growing out into the areas that it is now. I can remember before North Star Mall was built and that was just all country out there. And now I live out in that way, in that area. But when I was growing up, San Antonio...well, we lived on the Northside. We didn't really know much about the Southside, even though our ancestors had lived there. And the people that we knew and socialized with, went to school with, were all on the Northside. I went to Woodlawn Grade School, Horace Mann Junior High and Robert (Bob) Polunsky 18
Thomas Jefferson High School. I was a drum major of the band. My last year of high school I actually did twirl and strut and my parents when I tried, and said I was going to try out for it, they said, "Well, don't feel bad if you don't get it." But I got it. And I competed with twelve other people and most of them were girls. But I got it and I was very happy with it. And I had a mustache when I was in high school, because I had a hare-lip that grew...that the hair grew earlier, I guess, so I always thought maybe that's where I got it. They couldn't miss me; they knew I was coming. I also had a radio show when I was in high school on KMAC. I used to write a sit-com for school; I got credit for it. And I had that, and that's what helped me decide to do something in radio. I went to school to study radio broadcasting. And when I got out of school - I graduated on May 30, 1953 - when I graduated college and I started work at KABC Radio 680 on the dial on June 1st. And
P: that was...it is now KKYX, has the same place on the dial, but in those days that was network radio. And I've had my own show on radio and television. I did office work. I've done sales, for the most part. And when I was here I saw the town grow through its radio stations. I remember when FM came to town, and that was a big deal. The first one was on the top of the Express News Building.
G: What year was that? What year was that that they...?Robert (Bob) Polunsky 19
P: I was in high school, so it had to be in the very late 40s. I graduated high school in 1949, and I guess it was probably around 1947 - I'm guessing - maybe '48. I also remember when you had...television first came to San Antonio.
G: Can you remember that year?
P: Yeah, because I was in college. It was my first year in college. The very first program that I saw - I went to school at Northwestern my freshman year and I remember seeing a weather cast in a store window, that was in the fall of '49. I came home for Christmas and my parents said, "Guess what? We're getting a TV set." That was the very first time. That was in Christmas time of 1949.
G: I'm going to turn the tape over 'cause it's almost at the end of the tape, and then we'll talk again in just a minute when we get to the other side.
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 1
SIDE 2
G: This is Laurie Gudzikowski and this is the second - side 2 of the tape - and I'm interviewing Bob Polunsky and we're being interviewed here at the Institute of Texan Cultures. Bob, would you like to give us some - a little bit of your memories about HemisFair, and the changes that HemisFair made in San Antonio. It was a big watershed event in San Antonio's history. Robert (Bob) Polunsky 20
P: I remember the countdown as they started clearing away the land. And I remember where a friend of mine had Prompt Printers on South Street, South Street doesn't even exist any more, and I remember Frenchy's Black Cat Cafe was one of the first buildings to come down in the Alamo area. And that's where I used to go to lunch with my Dad when I worked there in the summertime. And I can remember a lot of the places that just paved the way for the buildings that we have now. And what existed then. As a matter of fact the Orthodox Synagogue was a little bit south of the HemisFair area, and they found the cupola that went on top of it when they were clearing the grounds. And I remember that too. And once they cleared the land, I remember the countdown until...as everything was being built. And I remember watching the Hilton Hotel being built, a room at a time. They brought in the prefabricated rooms and built it right there by the river. Everything was constructed before it came to San Antonio, then it was hoisted into place. And I can recall when HemisFair opened. It was a very upsetting
P: time for me because it opened April 6, 1968. My father died on March 30, 1968, so he never got to see any of it. And it was a very abrupt, sudden death, and it dampened our enthusiasm for things. But we did get back in the swing of things. I was selling advertising, but I was also doing my movie-going and movie critiquing and interviewing. And I Robert (Bob) Polunsky 21
interviewed a lot of the celebrities that came here to HemisFair. I wrote for a magazine that was called Fun Magazine, that existed during the HemisFair period only, and I used to go to all of the events, as many as I could, and interview celebrities. I remember talking to Bob Hope and Jack Benny. I remember talking to many of the people that came here - Andy Williams came here to sing, and I remember that. And I also went to work at the movie theaters. I was the City Manager for Santikos Theaters, before it was as big as it is today. John Santikos owned the Olmos Theater, which is leveled now, it's on San Pedro. He had the San Pedro Drive-In, and while I was there he made it a triple screen, and it's also leveled. The Embassy Theater is in its place now. And while I was there he broke ground for the very first multi-plex cinemas, it was the Century South on the Southside, it was the very first. Then he also built the Northwest, and he built the Galaxy while I was there. I was his general manager and booker. And I had to work every day. I couldn't go down to HemisFair a lot. When I did go, it was just to steal an hour or two, here and there, to see
P: as much as I could. My wife and I did get to go one Sunday - that was my day off, was Sunday. And we went down there one Sunday and spent the whole day there. And I remember how going from exhibit to exhibit - I was amazed that we had a World's Fair in San Antonio. And I heard all Robert (Bob) Polunsky 22
that flak that it's a bomb, it's a failure, and the big reason they said it is because mixed drinks weren't legal in Texas. That's what everybody said at the time. Well, I do know that they legalized - you could get...go to a bar not long after HemisFair closed, so maybe that had something to do with it. But while I was there at HemisFair in 1968, that was a pivotal year in our history and in our family times, I lost my father, we had a lot of...we moved...our house, built a home, that year and I had to take care of all of the activities at the Olmos and the San Pedro and the three Orange Julius Stands that John Santikos owned at the time, and squeeze in as much of HemisFair as I could. I had to go; it was part of my job to do some interviewing. I told him that, so he let me go.
G: I've heard that there were some interesting theater- type presentations at HemisFair. Do you remember any of them?
P: I went to all of them. I went to every one of the theater things at the HemisFair, which is now called the Lila Cockrell Auditorium. That's where Jack Benny was, as a matter of fact. That's where Bob Hope was. And I remember
P: seeing a lot of the touring companies that came to San Antonio. I believe "Man of La Mancha" came during that time. And, you know, a lot of that does run together because I continue to see all the plays that came down there even Robert (Bob) Polunsky 23
afterwards. And I did do the interviews, so I used to see everyone of the stage shows that came to San Antonio. At the HemisFair Theater, which was not a very good place to do it because you can't hear. And then at the Majestic Theater and sometimes at the Municipal Auditorium. The Municipal Auditorium is where I used to usher for the Symphony and the Ballet and the Opera because the band boys - and I was in the band in high school - and got to usher and got paid a dollar a night. And we couldn't wait to collect our dollar so we could run down to the Majestic or the Aztec or someplace and go to the movies and spend it all at one time. I do remember going to the theater - that introduced theater to us. There were some little theaters on, like, on Losoya - South Broadway they called it for a while. There was a little theater there, a community theater, locally active and everything else, but they had plays associated, really, with HemisFair. There was a place on Broadway that had local theaters. That kind of gave birth to an awful lot of little theater work. Not just the San Pedro Playhouse, or the San Antonio Little Theater, but other ones cropped up during HemisFair because, well, the tourists were here and, by golly, they were going to get an audience, and they did.
P: And many of them stayed around for a long time. That's when the dinner theaters came in. And we had a dinner theater there on the Hemisfair grounds, and I Robert (Bob) Polunsky 24
remember, they used to bring name talent there. They also would have a children's theater on the weekends, and I used to take my daughter to that. That dinner theater closed up not too long after HemisFair closed. It didn't last very long. But we had others. Dinner theater lasted here for a long time after HemisFair - at Fort Sam Houston, the Fiesta Playhouse off of 1604, around that area. But there was one at HemisFair, and I don't recall exactly what the name of it was, the name of the theater, but it was there on the HemisFair grounds. Right next door to it was a big restaurant that was...had two sections - one served Mexican food and the other side served Chinese food; I remember that too. And I still have a few artifacts. My mother-in-law worked at the gift shop at the Tower. I used to go there to see her and see what she had, so I could collect for my daughter, different souvenirs. And I can remember various movie companies coming to town - I was in touch with all the movie studios, scouting the area to see...to use it for a possible film site. To my knowledge and my memory I don't remember them ever using the HemisFair grounds, but I know they talked about it. You see, they used the Seattle World's Fairgrounds for an Elvis Presley movie. And they had a big Needle, and we were going to have one too. We did
P: have one, and we really wanted to get some movie activities done here. I don't think it ever came about, butRobert (Bob) Polunsky 25
they sure came in to look, and I enjoyed having lunch with them every time.
G: What do you see as the big changes in San Antonio that happened as a result of HemisFair?
P: Well, one thing was the growth of live theater that we had. We still have don't have live theater like Dallas and Houston and other bigger cities might have; it's not as sophisticated. But we have got it, and we didn't have it before HemisFair. We had it very, very limited before HemisFair. Now we have got it, and it is available. It also brought in liquor-by-the-drink, you might say. And that was quite a social innovation. We also cleaned up the area and made it...I mean, there were a lot of things that were pretty run down in that area that HemisFair occupies now. I mentioned the places that were nice - the Frenchy's Black Cat Cafe, and the Prompt Printers, and the Four Brothers Steak House was down here too. But there were an awful lot of rundown places and it cleaned it up. And it also made a lot...it put San Antonio on the map. And we had an influx of tourism that was much more intense than it had been before. Before that, we could offer them the Alamo. After HemisFair, we could offer them the Riverwalk. We didn't have that before that. We still have the Alamo but now we also have the Riverwalk and we also have more hotels.
P: And that led to a lot of conventions which we enjoy Robert (Bob) Polunsky 26
right now. We have a lot of convention activity and we are still building hotels. And back in...when I was a kid you had the Gunter and the St. Anthony and the Plaza. The Menger had not been renovated since 1836, I don't think - and I'm exaggerating but it was really a dump. And the Crockett Hotel was a...not...it was a budget hotel. Well, today the Crockett and the Menger are revitalized and they're major hotels. And we still have the hotels that were called then the Gunter and the St. Anthony but they... and they're still known as that generally. The Plaza Hotel does not exist - it was off the beaten path, it is now; I believe it's an old folks home off of South St. Mary's. We also have the Hiltons and the...which was built for HemisFair. And we have so many major chains that have come in. It also moved the business away from downtown. We did have it downtown up till HemisFair. After that San Antonio went mall crazy. And the first mall - I think North Star Mall started in 1960 and it's still the biggest and probably the most traffic. But after HemisFair the other malls started cropping up and business moved away. So it redirected the center of business activity away from downtown. It took our movie theaters up to the suburbs. It took our lives away from the downtown area. It took such... it changed the complexion of San Antonio: where we would go for our leisure activities, where we would go to shop, even Robert (Bob) Polunsky 27
P: where we went to school.
G: That's about all the questions I can think of. Do you have anything that you would like to say?
P: Well, can I just mention, because I'm very, very...I'm so proud of my daughter Julie and some of her activities when she was here. She was a cheerleader...
G: Where did Julie go to school?
P: Well, she went to Harmony Hills Grade School, then Eisenhauer Middle School which is were she was a cheerleader and then to Churchill. She...the teachers sent home notes telling us what a wonderful student she was. She was probably the prettiest girl in the school. She came in second in a Farrah Fawcett look-a-like contest. She did. I still have the picture. And she was an A-student. She had a wealth of friends. She kept those friends until the very end. She maintained contact with her friends in San Antonio. She lived in California - she wanted to go there, she was a free-lance photographer, she traveled the world. She went all over Asia, Europe, Australia, India - all over the world - to take pictures and meant...much of her work is on display at restaurants in the Jack London Square area of San Francisco. All the proceeds that...those of her friends there operate it and they have her negatives and they reproduce prints and all the proceeds still go for cancer research. My daughter suffered with cancer for ten years. Robert (Bob) Polunsky 28
She really thought she could beat it. And if anybody could P: have beat it she could. She accomplished so much. She was only thirty-six and had just turned thirty-six a week before she left us. And I don't know of anyone who accomplished as much. Perpetuating her memory with the things she donated, and the things that I'm donating, just the idea that she gave so much to her family. She didn't have children but she did preserve our heritage. And we're very, very grateful.
G: She has left a wonderful legacy and you're a generous parent to share this legacy with all of us. Thank you very much, Bob.
P: Thank you.
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2.