Michael: Hobbies and Interests

Beyond physics, Michael had wide-ranging interests. Some of these were inculcated from his time growing up in South Africa. He was a cadet during his teenage years during World War II. As a result of this, he was involved with rifle clubs both in Cape Town and in Bristol.

In a 19 February 2008 email when Michael sent me the East Bristol Rifle Club photo he described it:

In high school during WW II, all the boys were in the cadets and I learned to shoot. I won the school championship. Until I left CT, I was in a local club and in 1952 I won a place in the SA national team for an international contest. (We did not win!). In Bristol, I was in the university team but also in a local club. We won the Gloucester and Somerset county championships every year, and in 1954 we won the national championship - and this photo is from that year. The man second from the left was Will Hunt, an MD, and the others were all engineers working for Bristol Aircaft.

One can see and read more from a sampling of his rifle shooting scrapbook, including target match cards, club patches, and newspapers clippings of scores (teams and individuals).

He also became very good at table tennis, playing in South Africa and at Bristol.

Perhaps surprisingly, his love of baseball started when he was still in South Africa, where he served as an official scorer (the person in the press box who decides whether something is a hit or an error) for games there. [History of South African Baseball]

Arriving in St. Louis, he became a St. Louis Cardinals fan. My parents took me (David) to my first baseball game in 1972 (when I was eight), where the Cardinals hosted the New York Mets, including Willie Mays, who had returned to New York to conclude his career there. A scanned version of his scorecard (just shy of 50 years ago at this writing in 2022) is shown at left.

We continued to go to many games together over the years, although I don't believe he ever attended games in "Busch Stadium III" which opened in 2006.

He taught me to score games (marking each play in a scoresheet, totally different from the official scorer role), and we attended all sorts of highlights, such as Bob Gibson Day in 1975 and Lou Brock Day in 1979. We saw Gibson, Bob Forsch and Al "The Mad Hungarian" Hrabowsky pitch, Lou Brock steal bases, Ozzie Smith play acrobatically, while cheering on mediocre teams and championship teams. We also attended lots of the promotion games (Bat Day, Helmet Day, Poster Day, Batting Glove Day, etc.).

We often sat up high in the upper deck behind home plate (where you can call pitches, inside-outside at least) and have a commanding view of the field. And we always stayed until the last out of the game, an approach to the game that my sons Noah and Rafael take as well.

Michael's Pentax S2 35mm SLR

Photography was a decades-long avocation as well. Although he had acquired several other cameras during his time in Bristol, his primary camera for almost 50 years was his Pentax S2 single lens reflex camera, which he bought in Japan during the 1961 International Cosmic Ray Conference. Although it required a separate hand-held light meter, he opted not to replace it until he inherited a Canon Digital SLR around 2008. In addition, he shot 8mm movies on a Bolex movie camera. (I can remember the four hot (quartz?) lights on a single bar which would noticeably heat up a room while shooting during, say, birthday parties.

He taught me (David) an enormous amount about cameras, photography, not to mention darkroom skills.

Michael in the Climatron at
the Missouri Botanical Garden
St. Louis, April 2010.

Michael loved botanical gardens, very possibly cultivated (hah!) by his childhood (and returning) visits to the spectacular Kirstenbosch in Cape Town. My parents were (and are) decades-long members of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, and were always happy to visit there in almost any season. Similarly, they visited botanical gardens in many other cities. Michael loved photographing flowers at these places, and for years my parents used stationery cards made from his photographs.

My parents were also classical music fans, attending concerts of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, plus professional opera performances, and many chamber music performances (local and touring musicians). At home, classical music FM stations or music from their collection was regularly playing on the stereo or radios around the house. (Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts were a staple of my childhood.)

Michael reading London Sunday Observer
St. Louis, Fall 1980.

Music was often playing when my dad was sitting and reading. He read widely (but almost never fiction). Instead I remember him reading the London Sunday Observer when I was growing up. The Sunday New York Times was also ever-present. (In the days before out-of-town home delivery, it was printed in Chicago, and we bought it from the drive-up World News in Clayton (handed through the car window). Much later, they had a daily Times subscription.)

There were also many periodicals in the house, such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (I became familiar with the doomsday clock at a young age!), The Skeptical Inquirer, Physics Today, Science, Daedalus (the Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences), The Nation, and others.

In addition he built an extensive library, with books on many of the topics covered on this web site: physics, history of physics, philosophy of science, pseudoscience, Galileo, archaeoastronomy, plus other topics such as history, political science, and more. Books from the University City Library or Wash U Libraries were always around as well.

Michael interviewing cousin Rhoda Eisenberg
New Orleans, LA, May 1983.

Along with his cousin Hazel in South Africa, he was an archivist of family history for his generation of the family, collecting documents and many, many photographs from relatives all over the world. (The photo at right shows him interviewing cousin Rhoda Eisenberg with Jessica and Rachel, getting captions of photographs (and tape recording them), during a visit to her home in New Orleans, Louisiana in May 1983.)

My parents also liked to entertain, so there were frequent dinner parties at our house, with visiting scientists, visiting family members, plus many friends from the university community and far beyond, plus dear neighbor friends.