David's Eulogy (May 2021)

Thank you all so much for being here today, and thanks too for those of you watching the livestream from across the country and around the world.

My dad, Michael Wulf Friedlander, was born in Cape Town, South Africa in November 1928, first child of Hirsch and Rose, into a large and loving extended family of Friedlanders and Lewins. After doing bachelor’s and master’s degrees, with honors, at the University of Cape Town, he left South Africa in 1952 by ship for England to do his PhD at the University of Bristol. There he joined the lab of Cecil Powell, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics just two years before. He spent four years at Bristol, two for his PhD and two more as a junior faculty member, forging lifelong friendships and collaboration partners.

He came to Washington University in October of 1956 to replicate the Cosmic Ray Laboratory that he had known in Bristol. He worked with nuclear emulsions and later led research groups doing experiments with high altitude balloons in remote places such as Palestine, Texas, investigating cosmic rays and gamma rays.

My dad was very active with university affairs, serving as Chair of the Faculty Senate during the unrest on campus during the Vietnam War, and president of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors and vice-president of the national AAUP. For many years he was an ombudsman and trusted intermediary for many people on the Danforth and Medical School campuses, when they encountered disputes with their departments. He initiated a series of lectures for lay people, the Saturday Science lectures, which have continued to be enjoyed and well-attended.

My dad befriended and mentored people over many decades, including nearly 60 years as a professor and active emeritus at Wash. U.

He had tremendous academic breadth, far beyond his core astrophysics fields: He was especially interested in science and society issues, from advocating for the ban of above ground nuclear tests with the St. Louis Citizen’s Committee for Nuclear Information and the Baby Tooth Survey; [also: article] to writing books about science and society and about pseudoscience; to archaeoastronomy (the study of ancient astronomy, such as Stonehenge, or the woodhenge at the World Heritage Site of Cahokia Mounds across the river in Illinois. (He wrote a freshman astronomy text with a focus on astronomical history (“Astronomy: From Stonehenge to Quasars”).

He was even chairman of the Washington U. Music Department for two years in the 1980s (during my junior and senior years there). He developed interdisciplinary courses, sometimes teaching with his good friend Peter Riesenberg of the Wash U History Department.

He was also the intergenerational glue of the Friedlander family, despite the fact that he had moved thousands of miles away from his family in Cape Town, South Africa, beginning with leaving for Bristol, England in 1952 and then on to America in 1956.

My dad wrote letters to his parents and many aunts and cousins at least weekly for decades, a dedication that he inculcated in Rachel and me (even if we were more uneven about it). We grew up knowing family history and genealogy, and savored connections from our trips to Cape Town and many letters. In an era before email and video chats, when transatlantic phone calls were phenomenally expensive and rare, this was extraordinary.

With no local family for him or my mom (a native New Yorker) in St. Louis, they developed a wide circle of friends who were essentially family for us while growing up. Dinner parties of friends and university visitors were an ongoing feature of my childhood. Their friends ranged plus or minus 30 years of their age, which meant they continued to have wide connections at an age that many other people experience the diminution of their social circles.

Many of the interests that have guided and enriched my life came via my dad, certainly starting with physics and astronomy, as I have spent 32 years at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. But beyond that, my love of baseball (now transmitted to the next generation with Noah and Rafael) came from my dad, who had been an official scorer for baseball games in South Africa, long before arriving in the USA. I have happy memories (and still have the score cards to prove it!) of so many Cardinals games we attended at Busch Stadium II. And he is responsible for my love of photography, starting when I was 15 when he lent me his Kodak Retina camera (for which he taught me to guesstimate the distance to the subject in meters) and a handheld light meter, for which he showed me how to choose the correct exposure settings. Within a year or so, he and I designed & built a darkroom for our basement, in which I spent untold warmly remembered hours in high school and college.

My dad’s gracious manner and love of family expanded yet again as Rachel and I grew up, met, and married Neil and Sheryl, respectively, and welcomed Noah, Rafael, and Jonathan into the Friedlander clan. We have so many photos of Noah and Rafael snuggling in to read books with Grandpa Michael when they were little, and as they grew older, discussing their activities and interests with him. Even within the past ten days, he expressed proud interest as Rafael was making preparations to start college next fall as an architecture major at Temple University in Philadelphia and Noah was wrapping up his studies at the University of Chicago.

I don’t know any other way to sum up a life like his: He and my mom were devoted to each other for more than 62 years of marriage, and he led a long and rewarding life, enriching so many people with whom he crossed paths. We will all miss him so very much. I love you, Padre.