"Rabbi Sidney Wolf: Harmonizing in Texas"
By Hollace Ava Weiner

[From Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis, Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s, University of Alabama Press, 1997]

Depression-era Corpus Christi was three towns, not one.

On the wrong side of the tracks sat Colortown where blacks, then five percent of the cityıs 30,000 residents, subsisted in dilapidated rental housing.

There was the barrio—poor-to-modest dwellings throughout the West Side, a sector that was home to Hispanics, the 45 percent of the populace who labored in the fields, on the docks and in the trenches digging ditches.

The most visible stretches of the city were white, from the sun bleached beaches hugging the horseshoe bay to the Victorian homes on the bluff overlooking a harbor where oil tankers arrived to gorge their holds with newly discovered crude oil.

Cut off from the rest of Texas by 150 arid miles that ended at the Gulf of Mexico, Corpus Christi seemed the center of a universe, the largest city in a vast farm and ranching region that reached to the Mexican border. It was a county seat where "colored" signs directed blacks to the balcony at the movie theater and custom steered Hispanics there. Although the populace was divided racially, segregation and isolation fostered self-sufficient, tight knit communities. The League of United Latin American Citizens, which grew into a nationwide organization, began here in 1929. The NAACP chapter that started in the late 1930s produced statewide leaders. Among the white population that governed the town, both Jews and Gentiles, natives and foreign born, mingled on a first-name basis in the shops, on the docks, at the country club and the Rotary.

Into this tripartite world in the summer of 1932 arrived Rabbi Sidney Abraham Wolf, a recent graduate of Hebrew Union College, the Reform Jewish seminary in Cincinnati. Texas had not been first choice for the Cleveland-born Wolf, a musically inclined fellow who had hoped for a Midwest pulpit with a first class organ. Rather, South Texas was his only alternative. Three months past his ordination and still without a congregation, he jumped at the offer from 70 Jews in Corpus Christ for a three-month trial at $31.25 a week. This rabbi remained the next 50 years.

The 25-year-old rabbi was no stranger to auditions. A musician by feel and theologian by training, he had paid his way through the seminary as a piano man performing everything from boogie woogie to Bach in barrooms and ballrooms. Harmony was his forte. Improvisation his gift.

Still, he was caught off guard by the south Texas environment. His three-day trip by steam train to Corpus Christi ended in cultural shock. To this sun-baked coastal city, a casual summer resort, the rabbi wore striped woolen trousers, a high collared white shirt, a thigh-length frock jacket, and he carried an umbrella. "This is a rainless town," the rabbi wrote years later in his memoirs. "I must have presented quite a figure."

While Jews were no rarity in Corpus Christi—the first had settled there in 1858, six years after the city was chartered—a rabbi was an oddity in the region. No rabbi had ever stayed any longer than the Ten Days of Repentance. Yet here was Sidney Wolf—blue eyed, brown haired, with a slight build, a warm smile and a theatrically resonant voice—ready to settle in and ride the circuit. Since the closest full time rabbis were hours away in San Antonio, Houston and Galveston, Wolf availed himself for weddings and funerals to the handful of Jewish families living in outlying towns such as Sinton, San Diego, Falfurrias and Alice. He was likewise on call for the Christian community, if need be for counseling. When he was invited to speak one night in the neighboring farm community of Bishop, he grew alarmed as he drove into town and was met with a blanket of darkness. Only one light was on in the town­inside the Methodist church where the rabbi was scheduled to speak and where the entire populace had gathered for his standing-room-only address. The whole town had turned out to see what in the world a rabbi was.

Local Jews surprised Wolf as well, although in other ways. His congregation of 70 souls was relatively well-to-do. Congregantsı stores lined bustling Leopard Street. Some had homes dotting the prestigious bluff and ranches extending for miles into the Rio Grande Valley. Yet the synagogue they escorted him to on an inconspicuous corner at 11th and Craig Streets was, in his words, only a "simple shack" built in 1930.


To heat the structure there was a potbellied stove and for cooling, a few well-placed electric fans....On Sunday mornings when the children met for classes, we managed somehow to divide the one room into classrooms with burlap curtains for walls. There were no screens on the windows and the pews consisted of hard folding chairs. A pump organ that wheezed more than it gave any semblance of musical sound was played to accompany a choir....There I stood then on Sabbath Eves attired in a frock coat and striped trousers which I had purchased at a chain store in Cleveland for the great sum of $22.50. With a pince nez on my nose.


For his first wedding service four months later at Temple Beth El, the diminutive rabbi mounted a platform to appear as tall as the bride and groom. For his own wedding, he returned to Cincinnati and married Sara Phillips in June, 1933. Sara—slender, stately, blond—shared the rabbiıs love of music. The couple had met two years before when he and other students at Hebrew Union College visited her home to hear her fatherıs recording of Tschaikowskyıs Fourth Symphony.

For Sara and Sidney, the music faded in January, 1936. Pregnant with their first child, she traveled from Texas back to Ohio and into the bitter cold for the final weeks of her pregnancy. Six days after the birth of a son nicknamed "Pinney," short for Phineas, she died of double pneumonia.

The rabbi, who stood sentry at her deathbed, was devastated yet could not linger to mourn. He had two weddings scheduled the next weekend in Texas. He left the infant in the care of his mother-in-law, missed his sonıs bris, and dispiritedly made the slow train ride back home.

"It seemed that my own little private world had come to an end," he wrote three decades later. "Disconsolate, I returned to Corpus Christi a crushed and devastatingly lonely man." During that bleak winter, the rabbi was comforted by his Episcopal colleague and neighbor the Rev. William Capers Munds, rector of The Church of the Good Shepherd. Like the rabbi, Munds was from Cleveland; like the rabbi, he had an extensive collection of classical recordings; and like the rabbi, his Sunday afternoons were free.

"We used to meet on Sunday afternoons to play records," says church member Arthur Elliott, an oil company accountant at the time. "The rector had a good phonograph, a Victor. It was a big box. Sidney would explain what the record was, the circumstances under which that symphony was composed. Then we would play the music."

Wolf, a child prodigy at the piano, could have chosen a musical career. The eldest of three children, born on Dec. 8, 1906, he was the offspring of a Polish father and Lithuanian mother, immigrants to America who spoke Yiddish at home and made a living as wholesale grocers. They started his piano lessons at age 7, and preferred that he stick with music. But while a senior at the Cleveland Jewish Center in 1923 and 1924, his high marks won him several books on Jewish law and lore, which he devoured. He also participated in a series of debates on the question "Was the European Ghetto Beneficial or Harmful to the Jewish Spirit?" The discourse introduced Wolf to the possibilities in Judaism beyond his introspective, Orthodox upbringing, a heritage in which the emphasis was on religious rituals and dietary laws. He was drawn to the notion of a more secular life and a wide open career as a community oriented rabbi.

During his senior year of soul searching, two classmates, Rudolph Rosenthal and Albert Goldstein, gradually convinced Sidney Wolf to join them in applying to Hebrew Union College and a career in the Reform rabbinate. Part of the application process required a recommendation from a local reform rabbi. The first rabbi whom Wolf visited berated him for forsaking his traditional Orthodox Jewish upbringing. His second try at a mentor led him to Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who extended the warmest of receptions.

Wolf matriculated at Hebrew Union College with the expectation of blending religion with music. He worked part time playing organ at a small town synagogue in Hamilton, Ohio, and had a scholarship at the collegeıs conservatory of music. He supplemented his income with stints in roadside honky tonks and organized impromptu concerts in the dorm. His serious attention focused on synagogue music. His thesis delved into the compositions of 19th century German Judaic composer Louis Lewandowski.

Few in Corpus Christi cared. His congregants were part Orthodox, part Reform, and most kept their shops open on Saturday­the Jewish Sabbath and the busiest trade day of the week. Wolf had left an environment rich with rabbis and remnants of Old World culture and been transplanted into a relative frontier where revivals and itinerant Bible Belt evangelists were the norm. To Texans accustomed to twangs and harangues from the pulpit, the young clergyman with the Midwest accent seemed a moral mix of mainstream America and ancient tradition. He was in a prime position to become an arbiter between groups.

In 1934 the rabbi and the Episcopal Rev. Munds held the cityıs first annual interfaith Thanksgiving Service—a gathering so remarkable in its day, it was subsequently written up in Time magazine. In the 30 November 1936 edition of the news weekly, an issue that featured Marlene Dietrich on the cover, the religion page pictured Rabbi Wolf and the Rev. Munds. Side by side they stood—the rector in a robe, the rabbi in his frock coat. The accompanying article spotlighted their joint Thanksgiving worship experiment, a service so embedded in Corpus Christi it continues to the present.

Down an Episcopal church aisle in Corpus Christi, Tex. this week was to march a Jewish rabbi bearing a Menorah or seven-branched candelabrum. An Episcopal rector was to read from the Reformed Jewish prayer book. the rabbi in turn was to pronounce the solemn syllables of the King James version of the New Testament. Cheek by jowl in the church pews would sit Episcopalians and Jews.... Decorated by its womenıs Guild and the Jewish Sisterhood of the Temple, Episcopalians and Jews acting as ushers, the dayıs offering to go to the needy of both congregations, and the sermon to be preached by the rabbi. His subject this week: ŒTrue Brotherly Love.ı Corpus Christiıs inter-faith venture, probably unique in the U.S., owes much to the calibre of its brotherly shepherds. Rector Munds, 44, is president of the cityıs Community Chest, its Planning Commission and chairman of the Boy Scouts. Rabbi Wolf, 30 next month, is a Rotarian, member of the Civic Music Association, chairman of the county Red Cross.

Praying together was one thing. Socializing on the golf course or at the Rotary was fine too. However, the liberated rabbi drew the line at intermarriage: "Marriage is in itself such a complex relationship that different religions merely contribute to the problems of adjustment.... A couple who has a mixed marriage is welcome to participate in the affairs of the temple, however."

In 1937, as he concluded his year of mourning, Sidney Wolf looked around and noticed no less than 42 bachelors in his congregation. The rabbi, young and single a second time around, realized that eligible women were few, and less so among the minuscule Jewish community. To ease his loneliness and theirs, he launched a so-called "bachelors club" for the purpose of "pooling our problems, hopefully to attract the attention of eligible young ladies." He spread the word through the Jewish grapevine. The result: Jewish girls came by train on weekends from San Antonio, decked out in wide-brimmed hats, cloth gloves and tailored Kelly-girl suits. They picnicked. They danced. And they paired off into couples.

The matchmaking worked for so many that by the summer of 1937, the bachelor club was disbanding, with the rabbi still a lone Wolf—until his high school friend Rudolph Rosenthal, by then a Cleveland rabbi, interceded with the address of an unattached Jewish girl from a musical family in Louisiana. After an initial exchange of letters, the lonely rabbi took a night train 450 miles to Lafayette, La., to meet his blind date. It was love at first sight. A five-month courtship and a 46-year marriage followed. The woman the rabbi met in Lafayette was a spunky native of Chantilly, France, 20 miles outside Paris. She was the youngest of five sisters, born in 1912 and named Bertha Rosenthal but called "Bebe" because she was the baby of the bunch. Bebe had grown up in a house filled with music and intellect. Her paternal grandfather was a champion chess player. Her mother taught piano in France, then America. Two of her sisters moved to Louisiana as young adults to live with relatives; and when Bebeıs father died in 1933, the rest of the family migrated to the bayou region.

Unlike the rabbiıs first wife, Bebe was dark haired and dark eyed, with a foreignerıs flair for turning a phrase. To her tongue, the local Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen was "fishers and loafers." She joined the board of Planned Parenthood, and when her husband delivered an unpopular sermon­promoting birth control in 1947 or opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s­ she bluntly assessed the reaction: "Not everybody loved it." When she was invited to teach sex education to the most unruly class of teenagers at the temple, the Rabbiıs spouse let parents and religious educators know she would teach on her own terms:

"There is nothing going to be hidden," she said. "We are going to talk about homosexualsŠ. IUDs Š pulling out Š We are going to be embarrassed. We are going to get used to it. Children love frankness and honesty."

Bebe hailed from a community-oriented background. Outwardly her family was more French than Jewish, and more musical than anything else. Once Bebe met Sidney, they played duets at the keyboard and worked in concert, their own, for as long as they both lived.

As newlyweds, they had planned an extended six-month honeymoon in Texas without Sidneyıs two-year-old son. But when Bebe realized the totıs caretaker-grandmother in Cincinnati was disabled by arthritis, and that Sidney carried a weight of guilt over the separation from his child, the new bride said, enough. Three months after their marriage in June 1938, the rabbi retrieved his child. Bebe said it was her decision­she had "cleaned up his life and put everything back together."

Just as Bebe was no strait-laced clericıs wife, so was Sidney no Bible-thumping clergyman. Clearly, they were an intellectual couple with their feet on the ground, a renaissance pair who found richness in a rural county seat. With Bebe and two-year-old Pinneyıs arrival in Corpus Christi, the Wolf home became a veritable synagogue annex and cosmopolitan community center. In their home, Catholic sisters broke matzah with Jewish families at Passover seders. Here, ministers gathered informally for discussions, philosophic and pragmatic. Here, in the 1950s and early 1960s, late at night the phone might ring: a black physician, fear in his voice, would ask the rabbiıs help in admitting a sick patient to a hospital that allowed no African-Americans on staff. With a few phone calls, the rabbi could quietly oblige.

The Wolfsı busy white wooden, neo-colonial home on tree shaded Leming Street also afforded privacy. A hallway bisected the house, separating the bedrooms from the living room, dining room, parlor and study. The hallway could be shut off from the communal areas, allowing Bebe, Pinney and later Joanne, born in 1940, to retreat into their own space no matter who had come to call. The rabbi found ultimate privacy in his backyard, where he built a greenhouse and cultivated orchids.

As Bebe and Sidney settled into the rhythm of married life, the winds of war were blowing across Europe disrupting others. Beginning in 1934, the first of 35 refugee families fleeing the Nazi terror came to Corpus Christi. The reality of impending war hit home for the rest of Corpus Christi in March 1941 when Congress created the Naval Air Station, the worldıs largest such facility, at the southern entrance to Corpus Christi Bay. As men in uniform from all races and all parts of the nation streamed into town, the population doubled and the communityıs sophistication broadened. Rabbi Wolf volunteered his services as auxiliary chaplain, welcoming servicemen to his home for weekend open houses and Jewish weddings in the parlor.

The baseıs military chaplains were invited into the Corpus Christi Ministerial Alliance, which Wolf had helped launch in the late 1930s. These clergy met monthly to share a meal, a topic of interest and to monitor the pulse of the community. In 1944, this cross section of ministers felt racial resentments stir when black and Hispanic soldiers were refused service at Anglo restaurants and stores. To "prevent and alleviate friction," the ministers created an 11-member Corpus Christi Inter-Racial Commission to "get quickly to the bottom of many minor misunderstandings."

War united Corpus Christi Š and divided it. During one of the Rotaryıs Thursday meetings at the old Plaza Hotel, Rabbi Wolf bristled when a fellow Rotarian declared that "the Jews should buy more war bonds. If they did not, then Hitler would come over here and give Sidney Wolf a pick axe and order him to dig." As Wolf rose to counter the speaker, a minister restrained him. Instead of the rabbi taking issue, a prominent business man stood to brand the remarks out of order and in conflict with the spirit of Rotary International.

Although Jews represented less than one half of one percent of the cityıs population, 10 percent of the local boys in uniform were Jewish. When the war took the life of Mayor Robert T. Wilsonıs son, the rabbi mourned with the Protestant mayor. And in postwar 1946 when the rabbi convened a banquet at the Driscoll Hotel to raise money for Europeıs displaced Jews, he invited the mayor to offer the customary greetings to the Jewish community. Rabbi Wolf wrote that instead of platitudes, the mayor "in a subdued but deeply moving voice, pledged $5,000 in memory of his beloved son who had lost his life on the battlefields of EuropeŠ whereupon it seemed as if the whole crowd rose en masse to its feet to follow the Mayorıs example, raising its pledges to meet an astronomic sum"­$126,611.

By then, the rabbiıs reputation extended beyond the regionıs pulpits and reverberated deeply within the secular community. Ever certain that music nourishes a communityıs soul, the rabbi had been instrumental in founding the Corpus Christi Symphony in 1945. The orchestra made its debut in the seaportıs largest hall, a 600-seat auditorium at Corpus Christi High School. The symphonyıs founding president was the rabbi. Its program annotator was the rabbi. Its radio promoter was the rabbi. "This is Sidney Wolf, your musical companion," he would say over the local airwaves. When the symphony performed Prokofievıs Peter and the Wolf, the rabbi delivered the narration in his recognizable bass voice that the local music critic deemed "as good as any movie starıs."

That deep voice resonated across the city into its segregated pockets. To the black community, Rabbi Wolf was a rare friend, a prominent white man who dialogued with their ministers, spoke at youth group functions and purchased uniforms for youngsters in the African-American Boy Scout troop. "I remember the first Boy Scout shirt and tie I ever owned. Rabbi Wolf went and bought it," says James "Jimmy" Wagner, a Corpus Christi native and NAACP leader born in 1925. "My mother was a domestic. She couldnıt afford it....The Jewish community was always a friend of the blacks here in Corpus Christi. It was a tradition, and the forerunner of that was Rabbi Wolf. He would make the first move. He wouldnıt wait Œtil somebody asked him."

Hispanics likewise felt the rabbiıs presence. "Although he kept a low profile, he was well-known in town and respected as a humanitarian," recalls Dr. Hector P. Garcia, a physician and the founder of the American G.I. Forum, a national Hispanic civil rights organization begun in Corpus Christi 1948.

I know a lot of people he helped. Any time the poor people needed help with money or jobs or food, we would send them to the rabbi. He was always responding. He was one of those people who served everybody, not just the people he was representing....He accomplished perhaps more than we did because of his position as a religious man.

Hispanics had long felt themselves at the bottom of the heap. Despite their numbers, they had no clout. In roadside cafes, waiters ignored them. At harvest time, regardless of age or experience, they earned 10-cents an hour picking onions, cotton and spinach. In maternity wards, Hispanics mothers were relegated to beds on a screened-in porch rather than share a room with an Anglo patient. Even in death, South Texans with Mexican surnames were buried in segregated sections of cemeteries and often barred from funeral parlor chapels. "They didnıt think much of us," says retired county court at law Judge Hector De Pena, who was born in the Rio Grande Valley in 1914.

We were considered inferior. They used to be called "greasers" because their jobs made them sweat. Then we were "Mexicans." We were humble. We didnıt speak out. World War II changed things. We found out we were just as good and maybe even better.

During the post-war era, Hispanic and African-American soldiers who had fought for their country returned home to Corpus Christi less complacent than before. They now felt they merited some degree of equal treatment. Jimmy Wagner remembers being discharged from the Marines, returning to his hometown and walking into the Christian-owned Perkins Brothers department store to buy a pair of shoes.

They were not friendly. They said, "Boy. What you doinı here?" I walked out, went to Lichtensteinıs and was treated courteously. I remember that just as plain as day.

Lichtensteinıs was the Jewish-owned department store, the prestige place to shop and the first Corpus Christi retailer to promote blacks from positions as janitors into jobs as mail clerks and salesclerks in the ladiesı clothing department. Competing retailers slowly followed suit.

The rabbi perceived other ways to mix. In 1948, he began taking his teenage students on annual tours of St. John Baptist Church, an African American institution. Architect Jack Solka, then a Jewish confirmation student at Temple Beth El, remembers vividly the impression these visits made in an era when waiting rooms, water fountains, beaches and lunch counters remained segregated. "Rather than the typical blond angel, the angels on the wall at the church were black," Solka recalls. "It made me wonder and think. It was a real amazement on my part."

The rabbi sought to stir similar interracial thinking among adults in his congregation. So one Friday night in 1950, during the oneg shabbat reception following worship services, Rabbi Wolf tossed out the idea of featuring a black minister on his pulpit in observance of Brotherhood Week.

Bebe Wolf remembers: "Some people said ŒWhy be the first one, rabbi?ı Others said it was not the right time. Afterward I asked him, ŒSidney. What you are going to do?ı And he said, ŒIıve already done it!ı"

The following Friday evening, a black minister, the Rev. Sidney R. Smith of the First Congregational Church, preached from the pulpit at Temple Beth El. With the minister were his wife, Beulah Smith, and the choir she directed at the segregated Solomon M. Coles High School. The Rev. Smith was a northern bred, mainstream minister, the most middle-of-the road choice the rabbi could have selected for the interracial debut. Still, some congregants boycotted the temple that Friday night. Others refused to sit in the same pew with the Negro guests, as they were called. L.A. Train, then a teenager, remembers some people giggling at the gospel mannerisms of the choir and the repeated rounds of "Hallelujahs."

The rabbi carried on. The student gospel choir returned year after year for subsequent Inter-Racial Relations Sabbaths, but with different speakers, among them local NAACP president Dr. H.J. Williams, a physician denied membership in the Nueces County Medical Society from 1956 until 1963. (It was Williams whom the rabbi quietly helped with hospital admissions.) Another year the headliner on the pulpit was dentist H. Boyd Hall, the stateıs NAACP president and an outspoken activist who integrated Corpus Christiıs prestigious Ocean Drive in 1954, but not without a lawsuit against a home builder.

Thelma Spencer Caesar, who sang the "Hallelujah Chorus" with the black choir and who graduated from Coles High School in 1953, looked forward to the annual engagement:

The synagogue had the handsomest men and the people were so friendly. People would introduce themselves­Mr. Grossman, Mr. Kane, the Wolfsons . . . It sort of gave you a good feeling that these people knew something about what you were going through. I started doing reading to find out why they didnıt celebrate Christmas.

Thelma Caesar, now an administrative assistant at St. John Baptist Church Day Care Center, appreciated the rabbiıs year-round presence in the black community. "You saw him in different places, he and his wife." When Caesar and other black students sought to integrate the Y-teens social organization, she remembers that Bebe Wolf was a YMCA board member endorsing the change.

When African-Americans sought to integrate the cityıs municipal golf course in the early 1950s, Sidney Wolf pushed the measure through while sitting on the Park and Recreation Department Board. In 1953, when Wolfıs friend Dr. H.J. Williams, then president of the local NAACP, complained to the park board that blacks were still barred from golf course concessions, locker rooms and showers, Wolf was irate:

It is my opinion that everybody should be allowed free use of the golf course, regardless of whether he is white, brown or black. We donıt hesitate to collect taxes from everybody....These men are only asking for elementary rights. They want to be able to buy a Coke or use a locker.... It is not for us to feel that we can grant or withhold these rights at our own discretion.

Wolfıs motion to integrate golf course amenities passed unanimously.

That same year, local Del Mar Community College quietly integrated when a black student applied to the freshman class. The rabbi, aware of the tension the application sparked, waited in the wings to ease the transition. No difficulties developed and other African-American freshmen successfully applied. The following year when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools must desegregate, Corpus Christiıs citizenry was not as compliant. Token integration and quiet resistance ensued for the next 14 years­until Hispanics and blacks filed a federal class action suit financed by the United Steel Workers Union.

Sensing the emerging civil rights movement and the need to enlighten the community, Wolf and four other ministers created the Association of Congregations in 1956. The new groupıs agenda was to put Corpus Christi on the national lecture circuit and host prominent civil libertarians who might broaden the communityıs soul. Among the charter members of the lecture association was the Rev. Dr. Alfred Swearingen, who had recently moved from a congregation outside Princeton, N.J., to Corpus Christiıs Parkway Presbyterian Church. Swearingen recalls that he was skeptical about accepting a South Texas pulpit:

When I was interviewed for the church, I contacted Wolf and the others (Rev. Oliver Harrison at First Christian Church, Rev. Harold T. Branch at St. John Baptist, and Rev. Joseph Brown at The Church of the Good Shepherd) to get a bearing on the sociology and the theological disposition of the community....Itıs Bible Belt basically and still is....I did find pretty rigid evangelical fundamentalism somewhat rampant in that era. Before I made the jump I wanted to be sure I could survive in that atmosphere....They said, ŒHey, we need ya.ı I got stirred up. It was kind of a missionary enterprise in my perspective.

Swearingen, now retired and teaching Elderhostels in Santa Fe, N.M., declared the speaker series a popular success­800 to 1,000 people attended each lecture in the Ray High School cafeteria, and 21 ministers eventually joined the association. "It was an era when the church could be influential," Swearingen says. "When I look back to this era in Corpus Christi, there was a vision and a theological and spiritual sensitivity to effect what was best for the larger society of Corpus Christi."

Not all was upbeat. "We were getting negative feedback from a number of our communicants," Swearingen says, recalling his one-on-one conversations with the rabbi. "We had to continually sit down and educate and persevere and talk about where we were coming from ethically and theologically." There were no threats on the clergy, he says. Rather, those who disagreed with the move toward racial equality greeted the religious leaders coldly. Sometimes children were more persuasive than men of the cloth. When the adult speaker series led to ecumenical spinoffs among youth groups, "we had some young people converting their parents to a better viewpoint," Swearingen says.

"All of this was most unusual in Corpus Christi, as well as for the South as a matter of fact," recalls the Rev. Harold T. Branch, minister at St. John Baptist for a 32-year span. Branch, who in 1971 became the first black elected to the Corpus Christi City Council, credits the rabbi for many of the cityıs racial strides:

He was sort of a pioneer. He lived on the growing edge of his community. If he felt something was right, he would move ahead and do it believing it would win out over the opposition....He was a sharp thinker on his feet. He was good at repartee. He could come back. It was captivating when he would start speaking at meetings and public forums.... Our paths just crossed so many times in the course of our lives. He had tremendous compassion for people of all strata. He was at home with all people.

Wolf was there when the NAACP fought for urban renewal­demolition of dilapidated housing leased by blacks from absentee landowners. The controversial push to accept federal funds won City Council approval twice during the Œ50s and Œ60s, but went down to crushing defeat in voter referendums. "There was racism in the vote," Wagner insists.

The push for public accommodations in the mid-ı60s fared better. Tactics changed. Anglos, energized by church leadership, went with black friends to lunch counters and movie theaters. Rabbi Wolf, Rev. Swearingen, a handful of their colleagues and scores of their congregants joined blacks in a march around city hall. A public accommodations ordinance followed in December 1964. Still, as late as 1967, Hispanics who worked at the local post office could not get jobs at customer windows nor haircuts from Anglo barbers. "There were very clear lines and divisions in this community," recalls Corpus Christi attorney Tony Bonilla, a former national president of LULAC. "There was a lot of dialogue that took place. Rabbi Wolfıs work was subtle. He was not out to make a name for himself as some kind of a hero or community healer or compromiser. He just did it quietly. He was always available. He was always on call."

Hispanics and blacks counted on the rabbiıs moral suasion and city hall connections to secure Anglo backing for broader representation. Because Jewish merchants and ranchers had deep roots in the region and were part of the cityıs infrastructure, they mingled among the wealthy Protestants. Wolf saw to it that Jewish connections became a bridge for others. A relentless push continued for tri-ethnic representation on city boards and commissions. "Rabbi Wolf was a link between the Hispanic community and not only the Jewish community but, in a way, the establishment,ıı Bonilla says. Twice, when Bonilla was invited to Israel as part of a Hispanic delegation, the Jews of Corpus Christi helped underwrite his trips. "Sidney Wolf was a leader who could bring people together. He had a certain goodness about him. He was very bright, yet not considered egotistical or arrogant or self centered like many intellectuals are inclined to be. It was possible for him to open doors with the establishment. Rabbi Wolf, by his quiet, moral leadership did a lot to help Corpus Christi find its soul."

Twice Rabbi Wolf seriously pondered leaving Corpus Christi. Once after his first wife died, to be closer to his infant son; and later during the war years, when a Toronto synagogue courted him, offering a larger pulpit in a more culturally sophisticated region.

By then the rabbi was entrenched in South Texas and committed to the wartime effort at the Naval base. His oldest son, Pinney, seemed pure Texan. Daughter Joanne was starting school. Bebe "never heard any regrets" over the decision to stay.

When the rabbi retired from the pulpit in June, 1972 the Bishop of Corpus Christi presented him with a zucchetto­a pink skull cap that is the mark of a Catholic prelate. By then, Wolf was the regionıs senior clergyman, both in age and tenure. In his new found spare time, the retired rabbi turned his energy toward the Mexican-American community by teaching Latinos, age 17 to 65, to read and write at the public schoolıs Adult Learning Center. He indulged himself by creating a course he called "Perceiving Music" for the two local colleges. "I loved to teach rather than preach," he said.

Wolf had had his fill of obligatory pastoral duties. "Visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved ... are Mitzvos [commandments] incumbent upon every Jew," he wrote in his memoirs. "This is not, in my view and many others in the rabbinate, the prime function of the Rabbi. The Jewish ministry is not a priesthood or pastoral office. Rather it is one of educating, counseling and service to the community and congregation in many directions for the promotion of the well-being of both the Jewish people as a whole and the general community."

When Rabbi Wolf first moved to Texas from Ohio, he led a congregation that totalled less than four score. At first he was a curiosity but soon he was a key player, whether imitating a wolf at a childrenıs concert, bringing people together at Thanksgiving or marching for public accommodations.

Three months before the rabbiıs death from cancer in February, 1983, the Corpus Christi City Council, by then presiding over a town of 231,000, proclaimed a "Rabbi Sidney Wolf Day." The Cleveland-born rabbi who came to Corpus Christi for a three-month tryout had found his calling in a town named for the body of Christ.