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well off, and well thought of, a civic-minded, progressive commercial banker following in the path of his father, Emil Ganz, one of the first mayors of Phoenix. Sylvan attended college, but shortly before graduation, his mother died and he failed to complete his finals and earn a degree. But as the son of a city father, Ganz was still considered one of the town’s more prominent bachelors when he met dark-haired, dark-eyed Pauline. He was thirty-five; she twenty-two. Pauline had moved as a teen from Jackson, Michigan, to Arizona along with her sister and mother. Her father had been killed in a train wreck when she was two, and her mother had to take in sewing to make ends meet. After graduating from secretarial school, Pauline headed west with her family, “for the warmer weather and, I suspect, the adventure,” Cooney said.
    After a five-year courtship, Pauline and Sylvan finally made it to the altar, but not easily. She wanted to be married in the church, but to do so, Sylvan had to promise their children would be raised Roman Catholic. Though Ganz was agnostic, he feared taking vows from a priest would be seen as a denial of his Jewish roots. Despite his indifference to the religious tenets and obligations of Judaism, Ganz remained culturally identified with his heritage. But ultimately he relented, “because [marriage to Pauline] just wasn’t going to happen without it,” Cooney said. “He was by then forty, or close to it, and he desperately wanted to get married and have children, and he’d been in love with this woman for five years.”
    To be sure, there were Jews among the earliest settlers of Phoenix, not the least of whom was papa Emil, an immigrant tailor from Walldorf, Germany. Emil Ganz, a nonpracticing Jew and avowed atheist, came to the United States in 1858 or 1859. After stops in New York and Philadelphia, he established his trade in the unlikely locale of Cedartown, Georgia. Family speculation has it that Georgia reminded him—and a smattering of other German-Jewish settlers—of the “bucolic scenes from which they had come in Germany,” Cooney said.
    Convinced the South would prevail in the Civil War, Emil joined the Confederate army, served with distinction, and was wounded twice. His company participated in the battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and the defense of Richmond. He was held for seven months at a notorious federal prison in Elmira, New York, but when the war ended, he signed a loyalty oath to the United States and was released. Emil headed west, with stops in Quincy, Illinois; Kansas City, Missouri; and Las Animas, Colorado, before settling in Arizona in the mid-1870s. After operating hotels in Prescott and Phoenix, he became bank president at the National Bank of Arizona (which later became First National) and served three mayoral terms.
    Emil was a charter member of the Phoenix Country Club and enjoyed privileges there that were denied succeeding generations of Jews. It was almost as if the gates of the club briefly swung open for certain old-line families with German-Jewish bloodlines, only to close rapidly thereafter. Also making it through the country-club portal were the wealthy owners of a family-owned Phoenix department store, M. Goldwater & Sons—one of those sons being Barry Goldwater, the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Raised in the Episcopalian tradition of his mother, Goldwater inherited the family business, attained wealth and stature, and went on to serve five terms in the United States Senate.
    “The pioneering Jews of Phoenix were English and German, and they were treated as a separate class by the non-Jews,” Cooney said. “My father hated that country club. It made him uncomfortable on almost every level. It let the Goldwaters and Ganzes in, but Eastern European Jews who had accents from the old country? I don’t know if they even applied to get in, but if they had, they would not have been admitted. And these were my father’s