A picture of drum majorette Doris Lew, right, adorns the cover of Jews of Weequahic. She co-led a World War II war bonds parade in 1945 with her Weequahic High School classmate Eunice Sender.
Photo courtesy Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest
July 3, 2008
Some 62 years after she graduated from high school, Doris Beck picked up a book about Newark and felt “quite a shock” when she spotted a photograph of herself on its cover.
There she was, in sepia tone, dressed as a drum majorette, leading a parade supporting a World War II bond drive.
The book is called Jews of Weequahic, and its author is Linda Forgosh, curator and outreach director at the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest. Forgosh wrote the book in connection with a JHS exhibition “Weequahic Memoirs,” which will run at the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, West Orange, until Aug. 27 and at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany from Sept. 9 to Oct. 11.
Beck — then Doris Lew — was in her senior year at Weequahic High School when the cover photo was taken in the fall of 1945.
“We were too young for the war, but we were all very involved in the war effort,” she recalled in a telephone interview from her current home in West Orange.
Her involvement in the war effort was an extension of her talents at entertaining the crowds that came to watch the high school’s “terrible football team and good basketball team. I started as a baton twirler, but when I became head of the whole squad, I was a majorette,” she said.
Her partner on the book cover, on the left side of the picture, was fellow majorette Eunice Sender.
“Eunice married a doctor and moved to Philadelphia. That’s all I know,” said Beck. Attempts by NJ Jewish News to locate Sender proved unsuccessful.
Growing up in the Weequahic section of Newark during the war years left Beck with memories of “a wonderful neighborhood to grow up in. You knew everybody. It was 90 percent Jewish.”
But Beck’s earlier days — especially those she spent in her birthplace — were not always pleasant ones.
She was born in Chehanovietzer, Poland, and can still recall watching several Jews being tortured by some of the town’s local anti-Semites in the mid-1930s.
Former drum majorette Doris Lew Beck holds a copy of the book in 2008 while visiting “Weequahic Memoirs,” a Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest exhibition at the Cooperman JCC in West Orange.
Photo by Linda Forgosh
She met and married Felix Beck, moved to Livingston, and raised three sons. One of them is Bruce Beck, the WNBC-TV sportscaster inducted into the MetroWest Jewish Sports Hall of Fame on June 25.
Through the years, she has been an active supporter of State of Israel Bonds and a member of Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston.
Her life of civic activity extended beyond the Jewish community.
Beck was president of her local chapter of the League of Women Voters, a board member of Orange Savings Bank and Saint Barnabas Hospital, and an arbitrator at the New York Stock Exchange.
Involvement with the LWV gave her the urge to run for office. In 1974, she was elected mayor of Livingston. The town had been a GOP stronghold, but Beck was part of a Democratic landslide after the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon and many other Republicans from office.
“My three sons campaigned for me, and there were many Weequahic people in Livingston who encouraged me to run,” she said.
Beck remained in office for eight years, alternating between the mayor’s office and a seat on the city council.
“I was the first woman mayor in all of Essex County. Men’s groups and businesses began taking notice of women, saying, ‘Gee, they can do something.’”
Doris Beck is a person who has done many things, but as she became older, she noticed one limitation.
“A few years ago I tried to twirl again,” she said. “But arthritis has set in, and since I graduated in 1946, I can’t lie about my age.”
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