Sara Mae and Isaac J. Ewing
Following the death of his wife, the former May Moore, John Williams Ewing admitted their two children, Sara Mae (12) and Isaac J. (10), to the Home from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
While in the Home, Sara Mae participated in the Girl Scout troop, including its 1926 track and field contest in which she took first place for the fifty-yard dash. She also attended the city Girl Scout summer camp at Camp Pruden on the Bogue Falaya River. After her graduation from Isidore Newman Manual Training School in 1929, she remained at the Home for several years working as a Girls’ Supervisor.
By 1940, Sara Mae returned to Pine Bluff where she worked as a cashier in retail clothing store before marrying Reuben Pollock. Whether that marriage ended due to divorce or Pollock’s death is uncertain; by 1950 she married Harry Irwin Mark, a retail jeweler, with whom she lived in Hazlehurst, Mississippi where she volunteered for the hospital auxiliary.
Sara Mae died in 1975 while traveling in Madrid, Spain. She was buried in Laurel, Mississippi.
Sara Mae Ewing, undated photo from the scrapbook of Bessie Mashinka Rothstein, courtesy of Debbie Rothstein Wizig.
Isaac, who was known in his youth as “I.J.,” also demonstrated athletic prowess in track, making headlines for “starring” in the 1929 synagogue games on behalf of Touro Synagogue, winning three events and being part of the winning relay team. When Superintendent Ed Lashman died suddenly that year, I.J. was selected along with two other Home boys, Louis Berman and Ralph Beerman, to join Assistant Superintendent Harry Ginsburg and alumni Barney Segal and Jack Margolin as active pallbearers.
In 1932, he earned his diploma from Delgado Central Trades School, specializing in printing, a career to which may have been introduced during a 1927 Isidore Newman School field trip to the Item-Tribune newspaper plant. In 1933, when he was discharge from the Home, I.J. put his printing interest and skills to work with a job at the New Orleans Item Tribune Publishing Company, where he remained for the next several decades.
In 1936, I.J. married Nora Aisene, who died in 1940. The next year, I.J. married Hazel Poirson. I.J. died in 1999 and was buried in Mandeville, Louisiana.
