Michael Grossfeld
Michael Howard Grossfeld was born on April 29, 1948, in the Bronx, New York, and given the name Michael to share the initial of his grandfather Max, whose Hebrew name, Menashe, he also carries. His father, Joseph, was a traveling salesman who sold men's suits and sport coats throughout Texas and Louisiana, while his mother was Helen. His paternal grandparents were Joseph and Jenny Grossfeld, and his maternal grandparents were Harry and Rose Eisenmann. Michael's mother died in 1959, a loss that shaped his life, but he credits his father with lovingly raising him and his older brother Don, to whom he was very close. When his father's New York-based company asked salespeople to live in their territories, the family moved to Dallas in January 1962.
In Dallas, Michael attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High and then Hillcrest High School, making friends quickly, including his first friend, Ira Toblowski. He was bar mitzvahed at the Fresh Meadows Jewish Center in Queens and confirmed in 1963 at Temple Emanu-El. Active in BBYO, he moved from Brandeis AZA to Kaplan AZA. During his senior year, after his father temporarily relocated to New York, Michael lived with the Myers family, welcomed warmly by Estelle Myers. He attended North Texas State before transferring to the University of Texas, where he earned a degree in accounting. He married Bonnie Hess of Houston in January 1972, and the couple raised three children, Mark, Meredith, and Emily, and have five grandchildren.
Michael began his career in public accounting at the Dallas firm Lane Gorman Trubitt, then worked for a family business selling industrial cleaning compounds. With his lifelong friend Ronald Meyers, he co-founded a property management company and, after buying out his partner, remained in real estate for the rest of his career. In 1993 he partnered with Mike to build a successful management firm, later starting Sunwest Real Estate Group with his son Mark, focused on commercial properties. A helper of the Jewish community from his late twenties, he served with the Federation while Bonnie worked with the National Council of Jewish Women. He is also a devoted participant in the Christmas Day Classic, a football gathering begun in 1965 that now includes children and grandchildren. He urges future generations to live life fully, give back, and support Jewish causes.
Full Transcript
so good afternoon it is december 20th 2019 and it's my honor and privilege to interview mike grossfeld mike i appreciate you being here my name is mitchell myers and i will do the interview this afternoon can you tell me your full name michael howard grossville and do you know why your parents selected that name well i'm actually my first name is i'm named after my father's father his name was max and they gave me the name michael to start with the letter m but my hebrew name is the same as his hebrew name which is menasha very nice i like that i didn't know that
that's great information uh so tell me when were you born and where were you born it's born april 29 1948 in the bronx new york uh i'm told at doctors hospital which was about a block away from yankee stadium interesting and how did your family come to live in dallas texas or was there a route that got you to dallas texas well there was uh my dad was a traveling salesman and uh sold men's suits and sport coats and texas and louisiana was always his territory and in about the early 60s a lot of the new york companies they were new york based companies wanted
their sales people to live in the part of the country that they traveled so that they could call on their customers more frequently so we ended up moving here in january of 1962. and tell me about your childhood from when you moved here i guess you wouldn't did you have a nice childhood in new york and the bronx did you yeah i guess you know i look i had a wonderful childhood i had a had a tragedy in my life that still live with today and that is unfortunate my mother died in 1959 but you know i had a fantastic father who took over the child rearing of both myself and my brother but obviously i that's a very sad part of my life to lost my mother but in general my childhood in new york i had nothing
but great feelings about it and and what were your what's your mom and dad's name my father's name was joseph roosevelt and my mother was helen right and what about your grandparents again so my grandparents uh both sets of grandparents uh also lived in new york when we lived there however my grandfather had was had died before i was born my father's father but my grandparents on my father's side were joseph and jenny grossfeld and on my mother's side they were harry and rose eisenmann very nice so when you got to dallas where did you go to elementary school so i doubt so when i
came to dallas in 1962 i actually was in the ninth grade it was the and i went to benjamin franklin junior high and then on the hillcrest okay and was your family religious when you moved here or not not really we joined uh my dad we we grew i grew up in new york conservative but for whatever reason i never questioned my dad we joined temple emmanuel and uh i was confirmed uh i was bar mitzvahed new york but i was confirmed in 1963 at temple emanuel and tell us where you were bar mitzvah do you remember that bar mitzvah at the fresh meadows jewish
center uh in queens new york i was born in the bronx and when we were two we moved to queens okay and so you went to benjamin heist benjamin franklin high school and were you part of any jewish organizations well i was you know i was in bbyo just like everybody else at the time initially i was in brandeis aza and then actually became friends with your brother and several other people mark shore and they were all members of kaplan and you know i was still kind of the new guy in the block and i they allowed me to switch chapters so i went from
brandeis to kaplan excellent so there's this thing called the christmas day classic that you were part of i guess it started with the kaplan aza bunch it did so can you talk a little bit about that you know it's it's uh it's probably one of my greatest memories in life uh not only from when the christmas day class it began but just over the years of all the camaraderie and all the friendships that we've been able to keep up with over the years so literally it was a football game that in 1965 a bunch of jewish boys were always looking for something to do on
christmas day and we started gathering we decided let's go over to the jcc and we'll play some tackle football and i did say tackle football because that's the way the game started out uh but you know we we had an original court group which over the years just grew and grew and grew and some of our french siblings you're one of them were able to begin playing the game we ended up having our children playing the game and now we have some of our grandchildren playing the game so here it is christmas coming up next week we're going to have the 55th i believe 55th
or 56th classic coming up so that's great and could you talk a little bit about your high school years like you know where did you go to high school again so went to hillcrest and uh you know all i have is good memories of high school um really it was it was easy for me to make friends once i got here um my first friend here we need to record this in history unfortunately he's no longer with us my first friend was ira tabalovsky and what i'll say about ira is i had been at franklin junior high for three days and at that time i
had not known a soul yet and i'm sitting in the lunchroom by myself probably the third day and someone taps me on the shoulder and turns around and goes hi are you new here well it was back in the day when people weren't wise guys the way we are probably today and i turned around i said yeah i said we just moved here and he said well i'm ira toblowski he said let's be friends and that became my first friend and you know was a friend of mine all these years until he unfortunately tragically died several years ago in high school can you talk about
your influences at the time such as music culture politics anything you can recall yeah you know right a very tumultuous time but i'd say more the more i got involved in politics was probably in my college years but the big event in my high school years was in 10th grade in november 1963 when president kennedy was assassinated and you know up until that point in my life you're a young kid you really don't think about that that type of stuff so that that had a pretty big impact on my life and i think most people in my generation that we were kind of in an
age of innocence and then this president that was so highly thought of his life was taken and uh you know it just it was a wake-up call and especially in dallas no doubt about it no doubt about it so that's one of the events that impacted your life yes i'd say that uh and before you went to college was there anything uh i understand that your father left to go back to yes so so what's interesting is is that when i was in my senior year at hillcrest um the part of my history that i hadn't discussed with you yet is after my mother passed
away but before we moved to dallas my father remarried and then his company in january 62 said joe we want you to move to texas my father's current wife at the time did not want to move yet she was a teacher in new york and she said she still had a couple years to retirement so my father basically took my brother and i you know straight down to dallas by my senior year things are not going real well with my father and his job and he still was married to my second mother in new york and he made the decision to take a job up
in new york and to move back to new york and of course you know i said dad i'm going to be a senior at hillcrest i have all these friends you know i just i don't want to go back so my dad met uh knew your mother for my friendship with ronnie myers of new estelle myers and estelle offered for me to live at the myers house so basically my sink most of my senior year in high school i lived with uh ronnie and seth in one room jody was in another room and mitchell myers was in the other room and and you know estelle
myers this amazing human being took care of all of us and treated me like i was one of her kids so you know it's it's it's an uncommon story but it worked out great i i graduated high school and uh i got accepted to the university of connecticut because my dad wanted me to rejoin him move back up to new york and uh i did that summer and uh was all set to go to university my father became ill that summer had some serious heart problems and i guess to make a long story short he met a woman doctor in the hospital a jewish woman
doctor who basically convinced my father that he had a bad heart because he had a broken heart and that the woman that he was with was really not good for him and he she thought that he ought to move back down to texas find a job down there get his son back to texas because his son had a great life there and in september of that year that i was supposed to start college we moved back to dallas so all my friends thought boy this is the last we've seen of mike grooseville and i show back up but but for me it was a very
very happy time because even though i was happy to rejoin my dad after i graduated high school i wasn't necessarily happy being that up in the northeast i missed all my friends in dallas and i forgot to ask you about your brother so my brother's name is don and don don has passed away about 24 years ago but don was five years older than me and you know the the best thing to say about my brother is he was a great big brother um he was he went to smu but my dad being a traveling salesman when my dad would go out on the road
for two three weeks at the time my brother would take my brother and i would take care of each other basically he would take care of me so we became very close we became very very close so where did you end up going to college i ended up going to my my first year we get back to dallas uh it's late in september by the time my dad decides okay we're gonna move back he found a job and uh i couldn't get the university of texas was my dream school it was too late to get in and the draft was going on so i knew
i had to get into college so my dad said why don't we go to denton and i was able to register late register like a week and a half late as a student so my freshman year i went to north texas state in denton which is now university of north texas and then i transferred my sophomore year to the university of texas and that's where i graduated from and what did you study i studied accounting so i have a business degree in accounting is it useful for you now in your business you know mitch it's a good question i guess i was a kid that
didn't really i just was a happy-go-lucky kid and when i went off to college i went off to college to have fun and you know make more friends and meet new girls and that type of stuff and my dad said you know mike you ought to be an accounting major that's what your brother's going to be i just think it's a great background to have you'll never have trouble getting a job so i majored in accounting not thinking anything of it but now that i look back at it all these years later it really is a great skill set to have not preparing a tax
return but just understanding numbers so throughout my business life first couple years out of college i've worked for an accounting firm but then after that i ultimately got in the real estate business and i always felt like still to this day that having that knowledge of numbers and having some common business sense with numbers has has always helped me out in life and in my career so excellent so during your college years you know talk a little bit about that what was going on politically you know there's a war going on the hippie generation yeah yeah so yeah so the vietnam war was and and
uh you know it was a very controversial time and students at that time were extremely active against the war all over the country especially in austin austin seemed to have a little bit more of a active uh student life against the war what's interesting is i was a year ahead of a lot of my close friends mark shore ronnie myers and the guys that i was with there almost was like a year separation so even though i was against the war my activism against the war wasn't as great as people that were maybe a year or two or three years younger than me so even
though i was against the war i never really was involved in that many anti-war protests the way some of my friends were i didn't attend any marches um i was still i guess a good just kind clean cut straight lace kid never really i grew my hair a little bit but never really became much of a hippie so yeah can you talk a little bit about how you change from you know high school you here you are you've got a lot going on uh mother and parents father yeah but now you're in college this is a really weird time of growth uh because you see
it coming like when you're getting out of college soon like what am i gonna do yeah you know yeah you know it just kind of evenly flowed uh my dad was a pretty disciplined guy he basically said okay i'm gonna send you to college i don't have much money you got four years you need to finish in four years because if you don't finish in four years that's it so i was driven to finish but i was i probably mitch was a little on the immature side and once again was not really thinking about my future as much as maybe what some of my other
friends were at the time i pretty much thought you know what i'm going to get out of college i'm going to go to work for a cpa firm and that's what i did my senior year at texas i interviewed with a number of cpa firms on campus almost thought about moving to houston we didn't and i went to work for a cpa firm in dallas lane gorman trubit was the name of the firm and uh and how i met them was they were my dad's account so so did you meet anybody in college that uh well i yeah i dated uh i dated a girl
uh really from second semester my sophomore year which really was my first year at texas i dated uh the same girl all the way through the time that i graduated and uh her name was marsh later she has since passed away in the last couple years of cancer you know have great memories as one of the first loves of my life but i guess as the couple of years went by in college and our relationship continued to grow we kind of got to a point where we were either gonna get married or break up and look for you know another another person and i just
didn't feel that she was the right person for me so i broke up with her and uh look it it turned out to be it turned out to be a right move excellent tell me about you so yeah about two years later i lived in dallas i was already out of college about two years later i met my wife uh her maiden name was bonnie hess from born and raised in houston texas so i married a real texan and uh we got married in january of 1972 and uh we've you know lived in dallas uh we actually the first year and a half we lived
in houston she wanted to live in houston and i took a job down there in the accounting world and decided after i was down there i wanted to get back to dallas as quickly as possible and a year and a half later i convinced bonnie to move back to dallas we came back it's still pretty easy to get a job and uh so you know she she was the love of she is still the love of my life we've been married 48 years be 49 this next year had three children and uh tell me their names what's that tell me your children's name children's name
is mark who's 43 meredith is and emily is 32. and we have five grandchildren mark is married to ashley eltis who's got dallas background but she was originally from tyler they have three beautiful grandchildren from them jacob who's 15 jonathan who's 12 and sarah who is eight and then uh meredith my beautiful daughter meredith is not married but she is in a very serious relationship so we have very high hopes and then emily my youngest daughter is married to a guy named brett luskey who is one of my favorite people too and brett and emily have brought us uh caleb and sydney caleb is four and sydney is two so we're we're and they all
everyone lives here in dallas so we're all we're very very fortunate families today seem to be spread out and we're just we're very lucky right yeah so tell us about some of your jobs that you've had over the years and then what are you doing now sure i i had a bunch until i finally figured it all out but you know i worked in the accounting world and uh then i had the opportunity to still stay in accounting but it wasn't in public accounting i went to work for a for a dallas family um i guess the best way to explain this is so when
my dad and i and my brother moved back down to texas this is before i went to college he divorced his wife in new york three years later when i was a junior in college he married a woman here her name was estelle epstell excuse me i can't believe i can't remember her first name i've been doing great eleanor green and she is related to a bunch of davidoffs in town and her daughter was married to a gentleman who's still around still a good friend of mine charles david often charles had a company at the time and i got to know charles through my dad's
marriage to eleanor and charles had a growing company they sold industrial cleaning compounds and he needed a financial guy in there and he hired me so i i did that for a couple until i was approached by a guy named ronald francis meyers who is probably my oldest and longest lifetime friend besides mark shore here in the dallas area and ron was young and he said look i have the opportunity he said i think we can start a property management company have the opportunity to manage all these apartments someone came to us or through ronnie's relationship with sonny schwiff someone came to us and needed
thought we did a good job running the apartments we owned needed someone else to run it mike i don't have time to do it because i'm building apartments with sunny i think you'd be perfect you and i will start a property management company i said ron what do i know about property management he said you got a lot of common sense you got number sense that's property management it's a people business and ron and i started this company a land management company uh you know we built a successful company until 1976 when ron decided that he was going to move to houston and go into
his wife's family business so long story short i bought ron out and i've been in the in the real estate business ever since then um moved around a few places in the real estate business my my company eventually sort of dried out on its own so i had to go back to work for people and uh worked for various companies until 1993 when i fell into the opportunity to manage about 1500 apartment units and i formed a company with a guy here in town named mike cotwoods and we've been partners ever since we still are although i'm not an active partner anymore and mike and
i built a great company and really it's been a great great career for both of us fantastic one of your sons yeah so that that's the last part of the story is that in uh let's figure this out my grandson is 15. so 15 years ago in uh say about 2000 and would that be about 2013 say or 2014. mark and ashley were living in austin at the time he he was working for dell computers but in the financial side of their business jacob our oldest grandson who was just about a year old and mark called me one night he said dad ashley and i want to move back to dallas we want to now that we've had jacob you know we've had our we had our nice five or six years in austin but we want to be back around family and he said i want to go in the real estate business with you and i said oh my god i said i've been waiting
for this day for you to tell me that so i said i don't know what we're going to do mark but we'll figure it out and i wasn't able to figure out a way to bring mark into my existing partnership with mike hotwitz that company is named fairmont management company but it just seemed like the best avenue was to start a second company with mike's permission of which is mark and our principles in is called sunwest real estate group the difference between the two companies is fairmont was mainly at the time doing a lot of property management and some investing in multi-family properties sunwest was
going to concentrate on the commercial real estate market primarily office buildings and warehouses and since then we've also gotten involved in retail properties too so for all those years i actually had two since about 2000 and say 12 or 13 i had two businesses we operated them out of the same office i thought to myself well i don't know if this will work out i got two partners on either side it worked out we still office together to fast forward about three years ago i kind of stepped aside the everyday involvement in both companies and my son-in-law brett luskey took over my position in fairmont
and mark assumed all the ownership in sunwest and i'm still around i do a little i have some some things to keep me active but i'm basically not involved in the day-to-day management anymore that's a great story yeah appreciate you sure with everybody sure so we're gonna wind it down but i just wanted to ask you if you have any advice knowing that this is your oral history you want to share with your children first that you'd like to say to them you know i i think as i've gotten older i realize you need to you need to live life to its fullest this is
what i tell my kids there and i tell my grandkids this and if you have a dream in life you need to make every effort to try to to accomplish that dream or accomplish that goal and don't just sit back and and you know not be active you need to you need to get out there the other thing i try to the other two things that i really tried as a parent and still try as a parent and grandparent is i think we all need to give back to the community and uh i started doing and bonnie and i both started doing it at a
very early age i got involved with the federation when i was in my late 20s and bonnie got involved with national council of jewish women and it only grew as the years went on i'm not talking only doesn't only have to be monetary support what it has to be is just caring about finding your passion finding an organization that you care about and devoting your time and your efforts to that organization so that that organization you know does well and accomplishes what it's set out to accomplish uh and the last thing is just to you know judaism i mean it it's it's i'm not a
religious jew but it's a very important part of bonnie's in my life and fortunately it still remains an important part of my children's life all five of my grandkids are at levine academy until jacob graduated last year now he's at st mark so he went from a jewish day school to saint mark's but whatever uh no but uh you know i i think judaism to me the survival of jewish people is of utmost importance and we all as jews have to strive to continue that we we live in some very challenging times right now so appreciate that so any advice just for your grandchildren that
you want to share i mean it could be the same thing yeah it's similar you know i just as as when they're young i just tell them look just enjoy life have as much fun don't don't live within a box you know if you've got a passion go for it one of my grandsons just recently experienced you know one of his first major disappointments in life he got he was one of the final cuts from his 9th grade basketball team and it was pretty you know it was a pretty pretty tough moment for him and uh of course mark and ashley were great dealing with
it but i i was alone with him one day i said jacob you know you need to pick yourself back up first of all i know you've always been involved in a lot of recreation league so you need to continue to play if you i know you love basketball and you need to strive to get better and then when the 10th grade team tryouts come out next year you go out for the team again and hopefully you make it so it's really you know what i tell them is just to try to enjoy life and try not to uh you know try not to let
the little things bother you that's great yeah so last question uh any what legacy do you want to leave for the next generation of young jewish boys and girls i know you touched on it a brit but anything just specifically yeah no just how important it is to i i think how important it is to support not only charities but in my eyes the most important is support jewish charities my dad told me a long time ago if the jews if the jews don't take care of the jews i don't know how many other people will look after us so as a jew and as
someone who wants to see the survival of the jewish race or jewish religion i would you know hope that that they continue to be good jews they continue to do mitzvah projects they continue to live their life by jewish laws to follow the rules of seducka and and follow the rules of just living as a as a good honest you know hard-working person so that's great so mike i really appreciate you sitting with us and uh taking the oral history for the dallas jewish historical society i want to thank you very much and uh it's been it's been great talking to you and learning and
you've live living a blessed life so i'm very proud of you well thank you mitch it's been a pleasure