This is one of an occasional series intended to paint a cumulative portrait of our Jewish community. Individuals are selected at random from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation database. The Chronicle does not have access to donor information, nor does it contact members of the community with regard to their giving habits.
Today, we focus on Marilyn Teper.
“I don’t like to do just one thing,” said Marilyn Teper during an interview in her Fox Point home. “I don’t have tunnel vision.”
Indeed she doesn’t. In her more than 60 years of life, this Milwaukee native has done so many different things that one becomes fatigued just listening to her — and amazed at the energy she has for all of them.
Teper has made ceramics and porcelain jewelry; has made and painted furniture; has done calligraphy for invitations and faux painting for her bathrooms’ walls. She has been a volunteer for a variety of social service agencies, from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and Congregation Shalom to the (now defunct) Women’s Welfare Board and the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Showhouse. She plays tennis at least twice a week, likes to travel (she has been to Israel twice) and cooks and bakes as well.
She apparently has always had that kind of energy, according to her husband of 46 years, local attorney Robert Teper, who met her when they were children. In fact, “With the passage of time, she’s even gotten more energy,” he said.
And whenever she tackles a project, “she is not flexible,” according to Sherye Weinbach, who has been a friend and tennis partner of Marilyn’s for more than 30 years. “If she makes a plan, she does not vary that plan,” said Weinbach. “She carries through every project no matter what.”
But underneath all the variety of her interests and activities is one that takes top priority: her family. Whatever else she is doing, “I like to be available if a family member needs me,” Teper said.
Though she is “a kind, thoughtful, compassionate person” in general, “She is extremely devoted to her family,” said Weinbach. And her husband added, “I think she instilled that [trait] in me and in our children, and is working on instilling it into the grandchildren.” (They have four grandchildren with one more on the way.)
This trait may not seem so unusual, but the way it came to her is striking. Teper said she received it from her own father, who “was a much more interesting person than I am.”
Teper was the third child of Jeannette and Harry Galst. Her father had come to Milwaukee from Russia when he was 13. He started a grocery store, which still exists as Galst Food Market on 16th St. and North Ave. — but not for himself; rather for his own father. He himself worked for a dairy that sent him to study in Madison. But his father became ill, and Galst had to return to manage the store. He ended up following that trade permanently.
Galst married a Milwaukee native, but she died when Marilyn was 9. From then on, said Teper, Galst focused on raising the three children. He did not remarry until Marilyn herself was married and had a child. Even then, he chose someone who did not have her own children, because “he wanted his children to be number one,” Teper said.
Marilyn spent her early childhood on Milwaukee’s north side, her teen years on the west side. She was Jewishly active, attending the Jewish Community Center day camp and Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue’s “junior congregation,” and she belonged to B’nai B’rith Girls and a Jewish sorority, TOG, in high school.
She particularly remembers attending Sunday night dances once a month for teens from Beth El and Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, held alternately as these respective west side and east side synagogues. “It was an opportunity to meet and date kids from both ends of town. It was very interesting,” she said.
However, she did not meet her husband there. They are distant relations, having grandparents who were first cousins; but they became truly aware of each other when he, at age 13, worked as a stock boy in her father’s store.
As they both tell the story, he promised to take her out when they were older; and when she was 15 and he 17 that promise was fulfilled. However, they did not marry until 1957, after he had graduated from Marquette University and she had attended but not graduated from the Wisconsin State College, a predecessor to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
He went to law school at MU and established himself as an attorney. They eventually moved to the north shore suburbs, joined Congregation Shalom and raised three sons — the oldest of whom, Marilyn proudly said, is the fourth generation of the family to operate the Galst Food Market.
The other two sons live in Chicago suburbs, and she tries to visit them every other week. That is one important reason that Teper said she has “no intention of leaving Milwaukee,” or of becoming a “snowbird” even though she and her husband own a condominium in Scottsdale, Ariz. “I could not move away for six months and not see the family,” she said.
But in addition, “I feel it is important for me to remain part of Milwaukee. I feel strong roots here and Milwaukee has been good to me and my family,” she said. “This is my home.”
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