- [Jeannie] My father was a writer, an editor, critic, teacher, actor, director, former folk musician, husband, father, grandfather, and one of the people who shaped Milwaukee's cultural life for more than half a century.

(gentle piano music) - Last year on his Substack, my dad wrote, "I was born during World War II.

Both my parents were noted escapees from Nazi Germany.

He, a writer whose books had been burned.

She, an emerging opera singer who happened to be Jewish.

One day in 1933, she sensed she was being followed from opera house to opera house, so she got on a train to Munich from Berlin, and just kept going into France, where her husband-to-be had fled months earlier."

- At the very end, he was so sharp, and we all just got really great time with him.

And for me personally, I felt like I had a chance to relive all my childhood in a few hours just being with him, and just the immense amount of tenderness, all that tenderness came back.

- He read constantly, and I remember we just had so many books in our house and it's just like I was so blessed to be growing up around all those books all the time.

He was intimidatingly smart.

The only decision that he ever made that kind of made me question his judgment was having eight more children after me.

(audience laughs) - Jeannie, who was your father and what was his passion in life?

- Well, my father was a theater, film critic, you know, for more than half a century in Milwaukee.

He treated Milwaukee's cultural life as something worthy of serious attention, and set the highest standards for it.

(subtle ambient tune) - Hi, I'm Jim Peck.

Welcome to "I Remember Milwaukee."

Joining me tonight is Dominique Paul Noth.

Now, he's a former critic and newspaper feature editor.

Now, how did you get interested in that?

I knew you, of course, in college, and you were an actor and you were interested in directing and that sort of thing.

- And I'd always been kind of a student of film.

And I went to New York and I started writing about movies and theater there.

And I came back out to Milwaukee for an interview with the Journal, and I think they realized they wanted to fill this area.

At the time that I started the Journal, the movie reviews were really two paragraphs.

- Mm-hmm.

- You know, I mean, they stemmed from the days when the movies were something you threw around the vaudeville shows at the Riverside, and 30 years later, they had really not changed that format.

And I hadn't realized it was gonna be quite such a battle to begin to get the movies to be paid attention to the way they were.

I was kind of like called into the office by the feature editor at the time, and he said, "Well, you know, we kinda like the work you're doing, and we think you've been doing an okay job on this area, and we kinda like wanna make you do it maybe, like, a full-time so you're kind of like our full-time person, but don't let it go to your head."

(Jim laughs) And that was my welcome to the elevation at the newspaper business type of a situation.

- So warm and enveloping.

- That's how I found out that I was gonna be covering movies and theater pretty much full-time.

- I feel like in everything that I've seen that he's written, that he wanted to raise that bar that he thought Milwaukee was worthy of great talent and great performances and greatness, period, so he was gonna demand it.

- Yeah, and it was his form of respect, really.

He was not, like, just a cheerleader.

He was a critic.

People deserve honesty, and it's a form of respect.

- And why did he love arts and culture, particularly theater and film so much?

- Well, his mother was an opera singer in Europe and she was Jewish.

And in the '30s, she started to notice that she was being followed from opera house to opera house and there was something going on, right?

So she was getting censored for her art.

So, I feel like my dad's kind of passion about how, you know, freedom and freedom of expression was just really an element to cherish and not take for granted.

- That's powerful to think about how that really did shape him, his appreciation for the arts, not just as a beautiful form of expression, but as a meaningful and titled form of expression.

- Yeah, I think that art and history and politics were all really entwined in who he was and how he interpreted everything and caused him to be really passionate about it.

- It was really interesting that when I began to start writing about movies, people began to start talking about it or writing letters about it or were doing shows about it and that the reviews then began to be able to expand because it was clearly an interest in people discussing this.

And there was, of course, a hotbed of time in the late '60s and '70s, the whole idea that movies could be important, a whole range of directors like Kubrick and others who really established- - Oh, we never thought of movies as an art form.

- Yeah, and I think it's clear that it's just like rock music at a certain time.

Media sources were kind of slow to pick up on the fact that people might wanna seriously discuss The Beatles, you know, something beyond their hair.

(Jim chuckles) I mean, it was a major revelation to all the media.

- Well, I would say something that you definitely did inherit from your father, is a real gift for writing.

And what was it that prompted you to write an essay all about your father?

- Well, I think that initially, the motivation for me to write the essay was out of grief.

(gentle piano music) I am the eldest (keyboard keys tapping) of Dominique Paul Noth's nine children, and I have spent the days since his death trying to explain who he was.

That sounds simple until I try to do it.

(gentle piano music continues) I didn't know how else to express the way that I felt, so it started where I was like, "Okay, let me write down things that I know about death, right?

Because it was something that I could keep, right?

So it wouldn't just go away.

I could just put it down on paper."

I hope that people remember his dedication to telling the truth, to expecting more.

All nine of us (keyboard keys tapping) carry pieces of him.

Some of us are artists.

Some of us write.

Some of us work in policy.

Some of us work in philanthropy.

Some of us serve communities directly, including in Milwaukee that carries his same belief that a city becomes better when dignity, excellence, and opportunity are treated as expectations, not luxuries.

(gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) We are all parts of him, (keyboard keys tapping) but none of us is all him.

No one else could be Dom.

(gentle piano music fading)