The elderly elite of Kansas City share their life journeys, what motivated them along the way, the lucky breaks and tough times, and advice for staying active and relevant in their later years
Written by David Hodes
Interviewed by David M. Block, David Hodes and Pete Mundo
Debbie Granoff
Birth date: July 28, 1934, Age: 90
“I don’t know what advice I would give to someone except to look upon life positively and realize how fortunate you are.”
Debbie Bretton Granoff describes herself as a “professional volunteer,” doing that for various community organizations over much of her lifetime.
One of her earliest volunteer experiences was with the Jewish Federation of Great Kansas City with Executive Director Sol Koenigsberg in the early 1970s. She was the Federation’s photographer. Even now, in her 90s, Granoff continues her volunteer work with the Federation.
The Restaurateur
Granoff’s father, Rabbi Max Bretton, had effectively paved the way for her connection to the Federation. He was a graduate of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met Mary, an aspiring opera singer whom he went on to marry. He was a rabbi in Hammond, Indiana, who fought the Klan in the 1920s and preached racial harmony before moving to Kansas City in 1933. He was offered the position of director of the Kansas City Jewish Community Center. It was around that time that the local Jewish Federation was formed, and Bretton became the first executive director. He held that position until 1946.
So it seemed like destiny that Granoff, his only daughter, would be serving the Jewish community in some capacity. That destiny would come to fruition later in a sort of roundabout way.
In Kansas City, Granoff’s father eventually got into the hospitality business with his own place, Bretton’s Restaurant. Located at 12th Street and Baltimore Avenue, it was one of the classic landmark restaurants in the heart of the city, serving patrons from 1945 to 1976. His daughter would work there occasionally.
“It was considered the place to go,” Granoff says. “All of the celebrities, politicians, anybody who was anybody went there. And part of the reason they came was my father. We were the first restaurant to serve Black people. He had a customer that came up to him and said, ‘Max, if you continue to serve them, I won’t be back.’ And my father just put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
Photographer Specialist
Granoff married her husband, Loeb, in 1953, and they had two children together: Joel and Lauri (Loeb passed in 2015). Loeb was an attorney for a number of law firms, and he eventually started his own law firm, where he spent over 40 years as a trial and appellate lawyer specializing in complex business litigation. He was very active in the Jewish community.
It was during her husband’s years in his law firm that Granoff worked as a child photographer before moving into volunteer work with the Federation.
An article about her in The Jewish Chronicle described her photography of Jewish gatherings and campaign events as prolific. Much of her photography work was published in the Chronicle.
As she got more involved in the activities of the Federation, she became the Women’s Division campaign chair and president while doing other lay leadership functions.
In 1989, she decided to do more with the Federation. The then-executive director A. Robert Gast told her that the Federation needed a director of communications. She applied and was hired. That became her job for over 30 years.
Still Working—and Traveling
Along the way, Granoff was also named campaign director for a period of time. Even now, she keeps busy part-time with the Federation as the director of special campaign projects. “I’m very comfortable still working,” she says. “I go in three days a week and I don’t know right now what I would do without it. It keeps me going. It stimulates me.”
She also travels a lot, going to places such as Portugal, Spain, Africa, India, China and Cambodia.
Giving advice to younger people is something that Granoff finds hard to do. “I’ll start by saying age is just a number,” she says. “It’s difficult sometimes for me to realize what my age is because being in your 90s is not young. I think you have to grow with the times. You have to be able to change. You have to be able to adapt.
“In 90 years, there’s been a lot of changes, to say the least, and you just have to not be overcome by them—not be overwhelmed by them, which many of my friends have been,” she says. “I mean, they look upon age as not being pleasant.”
What made her feel different about her age was when her son, two weeks after her own 90th birthday, turned 65. “I thought to myself, ‘How can I have a 65 year old son?’”
She continues to work for the Federation today because she is “energized by what we do and the values that all of us have,” she says. “Just being there is a real positive for me.” She celebrated her 30th year with the organization in June 2019. The Federation thanked her for “being our resident historian, our steadfast cheerleader and a lifelong supporter of the Jewish Federation’s mission.”
The Most Important Thing
The most important thing to her today is to live life to the fullest. “It’s in knowing what you have and enjoying what you have and being able to give that, in some manner, to others,” she says. “I think there’s so much to learn and so much that is happening, and the world is a little upside down right now. There are a lot of disturbing things to me that are going on.”
Life, to her, is a marathon, but “it doesn’t feel long to me,” she says. “I really enjoy every day. Of course, there are times which are not pleasant and so forth. But I’m extraordinarily fortunate. I’m fortunate in my health. I’m fortunate with my family. I’m fortunate that I’m still working and able to do everything that I do.”
“He had a customer that came up to him and said, ‘Max, if you continue to serve them, I won’t be back.’ And my father just put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
“I think you have to grow with the times. You have to be able to change. You have to be able to adapt.”
