Michael “Izzy” Eisenberg
Michael Eisenberg was born in Dallas on December 26, 1948, named for his maternal grandfather Morris, who passed away before his birth. His parents, Marion (Masonoff) Eisenberg and Leo Eisenberg, were born in Kansas City, Missouri, and moved to Dallas in 1948 after Leo's brothers, who had entered the scrap business, told them Dallas was a place of opportunity. The family arrived knowing almost no one but a brother-in-law. Michael had two sisters, Marcia, who lives in Dallas, and Wendy, who lives in Austin. He remembered his maternal grandmother Alice Weinstein warmly, along with his paternal grandmother, whom he called Boobie, who moved to Dallas with her children.
Michael attended Walnut Hill Elementary, Kerry Junior High, and later Hillcrest High School after his family moved into a more Jewish section of the city. Through AZA and the Kaplan chapter, he formed close, competitive, and comedic friendships with families such as the Meyers, Gutos, Gallants, and Shores, and helped start a Christmas Day football game that reached its 55th year. Raised in a Conservative home connected to Shearith Israel, he was bar mitzvahed and confirmed, though he later described losing his religious faith while keeping a strong cultural Jewish identity. He witnessed President Kennedy arrive at the airport the day of the assassination and was in Sunday school when Jack Ruby, a Shearith Israel member, killed Oswald.
After a year at Washington University in St. Louis pursuing dreams of becoming an astronaut, Michael transferred to the University of Texas at Austin in 1968, where he became more politically active during the Vietnam era, took part in protests, and earned a degree in sociology in December 1971. He built a career working in an after-school child care program for low-income families, serving as a camp director for an integration program and later as a supervisor and HR director, before moving on to work for the state parole board and a criminal justice policy agency. He met his wife, Laura Landy, while supervising her internship, and they married in 1977 and raised two daughters, Anna and Emily. He volunteered with big buddy mentoring and umpired at the J, and remains connected to Jewish life through family celebrations and holidays.
Full Transcript
well good morning today is thursday december 26 2019 my name is mitchell myers and i have the honor and privilege of interviewing michael eisenberg for the dallas jewish historical society taking oral history for michael uh thank you for being here it's a pleasure being here so uh when were you born december 26 1948. so happy birthday thank you thank you it's fantastic you get to do this on your birthday fantastic i'm still alive and uh tell us where you were born i was born in the old country dallas texas very nice and uh were your parents born here as well my parents were born in kansas city missouri moved here in 1948.
tell me their names marion heisenberg marion lee mason off eisenberg and my dad was leo eisenberg they weren't able to afford a middle name because they weren't that wealthy so it was just leo eisenberg so why did your parents select your name michael uh it was from my grandfather father on my mother's side morris who passed away before i was born and tell me a little bit about how your family came to live in dallas texas from kansas city so my dad had three brothers who uh was told that dallas was the golden city to go to and that they started in the scrap business
about 46 47 and my parents got married in 48 and they said come on down we got a good job for you and they moved down hardly knew anybody down here but uh they were here for a long time so they had family down here before no they had no family no friendly just a friend they had a brother-in-law who's down here yeah okay do you have any brothers or sisters i have two sisters uh marcia is the middle she lives here in dallas and my sister wendy is in austin okay so um where did you go to elementary school it was just recently destroyed
walnut hill elementary and then i went to kerry junior high also destroyed and then we moved from that area into the more jewish section and i ended up going to hillcrest high school okay and why was it destroyed the tornado that just uh hit a little bit of the j here so it was it was hit pretty hard and they're they're not talking about they're not going to rebuild that i don't think so so um grandparents can you tell a little bit about your grandparents so i had a wonderful grandmother on my mother's side alice weinstein um she's a little missing steve out there she
uh she was a wonderful person and uh didn't really uh my grandfather was about was uh i was six when he died so i didn't get to know him on my father's side but my boobie on my dad's side she uh now grew up in kansas city but that uh when all her kids moved down to here um they moved down here i had her for a good 20 30 years and she's a wonderful person that's nice and tell me this is your mom's mom my mom my mom's mom was uh grandma atlas and my dad's mom was uh boogie and so eva what was
about grandma alex that you loved something very sweet always took my side she just was a wonderful woman so tell me a little bit about your childhood growing up i mean you know the fun that you had or the you know going to school what did you like to do yeah so as you well know mitch uh we had a great group of friends from junior high on and uh our our big passion was playing sports and we evolved into uh having a regular after school we go play basketball here i'm sure i'm repeating a lot of stuff that we've all had the other interviews
we played basketball here football and baseball and uh we developed our tradition of playing football here on christmas day we just played our 55th game yesterday and we like we like to do that we weren't the suavest kids around so who are some of the friends that you uh you were growing up with that you're talking about now so of course the myers family i first met all the meyers and the gutos and the gallants and the shores um we were all pretty close we're all in kaplanizia together we're all very competitive athletically and comedically all that stuff we always tried to top each other
um and i first met mitch when he was selling lemonade on the corner of mason hills our famous our our favorite rapport is hey is he buy some lemonade so we'll get back to the class again in a second so was your family religious at this time were you um they were conservative we went to sheriff israel i was bar mitzvahed and confirmed and all that stuff and then i became very irreligious and have declined over the years as i've i've really lost my faith you want to talk about that or keep that i know for later you know my first disappointment was i get
in college and i realized that i can read hebrew and speak it but i don't know what it means i was only taught so i could get bar mitzvah and do the traditions and stuff like that and that was a little disheartening um and you know there's just there's just more and more stuff that makes me believe that uh there isn't a god uh uh the holocaust why were the jews freed from slavery and the african-americans weren't you know um i don't want to get off on this too much okay that's fine so you talked about being part of aza kaplan aza and you had
these great friends and you started this chris well it became a christmas day classic can you talk a little bit about the classic and how it evolved and to what it is now right so uh as i said before we we were all into athletics uh you know we were none of us were that great we thought we were except for mitch he was really good uh and aza brought you know we were offered the opportunity to play athletics in aza so we always did that and it was always fun competition and uh as i said earlier you know um you know jewish kids didn't
have anything to do on christmas so we always played football it just evolved into a great tradition that we've kept up over the years and it's a way to for us to keep our friends together and everything like so as i understand it it started as playing tackle football right tackle football um if i have one stage advice for the future generations don't play tackle football or you'll end up like me every part of my body is broken but it was great and uh we still enjoy it today even just standing out there so clearly it's more about it's not it's less about football than
it is about being friends and friendships and exactly well put it gives us a good opportunity to come and you know we're all over this country now and fewer fewer of us come each year but we still offer an opportunity to get together and uh and we have our pre a game party and a lot of good there or not that's good so let's go a little further let's go let's talk about high school so you said you moved from the tj area now you're going to go to hillcrest high school same friends or friends that you're with kaplan in most my friend you know
i grew up and went to wall hill and kerry had friends there but when we got to aza and we became i was more much more of a cultural jew and my friends gravitated to being jewish and so when we moved out of the tj area it was pretty much a lot of jewish friends the rest of my life so when you went to high school can you talk about some of the influences at the time whether it was music or culture or what you were getting into here you're getting older right it's moving away from just football games and watching stuff on tv more
social stuff trying to get a girlfriend had one she dumped me we just enjoyed a company that you know aca offered a lot of social opportunities and we'd have house parties and do that and we had a little social activism every now and then that was the just the beginnings of the vietnam war and integration and some of us were more active than others but we all pretty much were most of us we would probably be classified as liberals and progressive and growing in that direction from high school on so there were before i guess high school or i don't you tell me but uh
one of them several of the impacts that had impacted your life was president kennedy here in dallas getting shot i was i was at the airport i saw him come in get off the plane um we left from there we went to have we skipped school my my my mom took us out of school and we went to a hamburg place called dadios over by the hill and we heard on the radio that he'd been shot and killed and my mom who was a big liberal totally freaked out she just left us she ran out of the restaurant we didn't know where to go we
were just in there it was it was terrible and then i was i was in sunday school when jack ruby who was that sheriff a member of sheriff israel killed oswald so he was one of those our big debate was whether to have the uh kaplan charter dance that next week we did he wanted one of us to do that that's great so i'm glad that went on so now high school is wrapping up and you're getting ready to go to college where did you go to school so i was of the uh i was convinced i should get away and you know branch out
so i went to washington university in st louis um and i was going to be in i wanted to be an astronaut and uh i was there for a year and i miss my friends and i was not going to become an astronaut i couldn't do differential equations and uh so as we all gravitated by back to ut in austin and i went there in 68 and state have been there ever since you live in austin now live in austin yeah very nice so now austin 1968 this is even a more tumultuous time right you got the vietnam war you got martin luther king bobby
kennedy tell me about what you're what's going on there with you i i became more politically active i really wasn't that active but those circumstances sort of i brought that on and we had our protests we spent the night on the south mall at ut after kent state after the student killings in kent state and we marched on the capitol and i remember getting tear gassed everybody was getting tear gassed and running from the capitol and this woman who i knew dorothy pringler runs past me like i'm walking it was quite a memorable period of time when you say mark's on the capitol in austin
or washington in austin in austin okay yeah so what did you study in college so i got out of aerospace engineering and went to chemistry my mom was a chemist taught at the community college sharing a lab so i thought well maybe i could do that i couldn't do that so i switched to sociology got a degree in sociology and my funny story there is uh i graduated from ut in december of 1971 we went to play our christmas day football game i got knocked unconscious i wake up my roommate's standing over me and he goes uh she says are you all right i said
yeah i think i'm all right just do you know where you are i said no i don't know where i am it's just do you know what day it is i said no i don't know what a day it is do you know you just graduated from college and i go i did i said what are you gonna what did i get a degree in and he said you got a degree in sociology and i go sociology what am i gonna do with that like my first realization that that was one of the worthless degradation but i actually had a career uh doing program evaluations
and statistical analysis stuff like that so it really paid off it did help you yeah that's great so after your college years did you move back to dallas did you stay in austin i stayed in austin i stayed since 68 so it's what does that make it 51 years you've been there a while so you talked about your jewish identity but losing it a little bit and and now is it any change well my wife was a good jew good jewish woman i met my wife when i was working at this child care program and i was supervising social work students doing their internship and
uh she came driving up in what i thought was a real fancy sports car and she's all dressed up as opposed to the other interns and i go oh dammit this i got a jack coming in she was the poorest jewish girl out of dallas there but uh we got married we had two daughters and uh if it hadn't been for her they both got by mitzvah and went to hebrew school and now they've lost their jewish identity but but we still had passover and we had a hell of a hanukkah party together last week and uh so we do cultural jewish stuff well that's
good so let me digest just one second so no don't be sorry so in college i heard that you did a movie can you tell us about the movie we had a we had a friend of ours who wanted to be a comedy writer or performer and so he wrote a script uh developed to that he could show and we did a movie that he could show as part of his portfolio called kung zhu about a jewish mystic i i don't know if anybody will ever remember there was a kung fu which was asian version of kung zhu or a vice versa uh where the
he would go from town to town riding wrongs and i got to play the league character shame and we had the shame could do martial arts and uh he would defend the the innocent and of course there was the line where uh the gangsters were afraid of shame and the protagonist would say don't worry i'm not going to set shame on you which is a miserable line that's why it may have taken many years to become a successful writer who was the writer gary jacobs he went on to become a fan he became a great writer made a lot of money he's a worked with
a lot of famous people so but i don't think he ever showed it as we have used lines from kung ju for many years we're not ashamed of repeating everybody else's work their whole our whole lives so well that's great congratulations on the movie any other movies come out of it no that was about it i've been proposing shame to the return of kung fu to comes due to the return of but nobody's buying it yet we'll keep it going you never know so during this tumultuous time you're getting out of college um you're now knocked out you're in the hospital room you've actually graduated
without knowing that you graduated so how did all this shape you as an adult for your next steps all that very poorly i got a graduate now what am i going to do so once you get your undergraduate degree and you don't know what you're going to do graduate school so i went to graduate school but i was determined to try and support myself so i found a a job in this after-school child care program for low-income working parents i worked three summers at the temple emanuel bay camp which provided me enough enough experience that i could get this 200 a month job after school
and did it for seven years is one of the one thing that i was most proud of in my life it uh it helped poor working families and we actually actually in austin they integrated the schools in the sixth grade kids would come from fifth grade elementary schools and then they'd move them all into a sixth grade center and that would be their first experience with other races netness ethnic groups and my boss who was the same came up with this idea to uh have a camp for these kids for all the kids that were going into each of the feeder schools they would spend
one week in a day in a sleep away camp and have teachers be their account be the counselors so they get to know each other and you make real good friends in the dark when you're in sixth grade so it was a great vehicle to initiate integration and i was the camp director there for five years and it was a it was a lot of fun it was really really a great experience so how long did you have the job so i graduated ut in 71 i went to graduate school from 72 to 75 at the same time i was working the after school program
and then the the whole organization evolved from one school to 60 schools and i became the sort of the hr director and the supervisor of student uh social work students doing their experience there so there's one internship put you into touch with this job for for a number of right right that's fantastic right but i've never made any never mind well there's other things that are more important than money at that time right yeah yeah so what other work that you did or projects any civil or civic organizations that are memorable to you i was uh on the board of big brothers big sisters for
a couple years i was a big buddy there was a big brother program but this was a big buddy program with a mentally disabled kid and i was at his big buddy for longer than we should for about seven i was still i had roommates in college and my little buddy johnny brown would phone us up at six on six o'clock in the morning on saturday and my roommates weren't happy about that but we stayed together for a long time and i want to thank i did good for him i was a umpire here at the j for a couple of summers uh thankless job
softball baseball baseball um i was abused by kids of all ages rock throwing ignoring me did hank botner coach coach hank binder the the jay uh coach uh got me the job and then uh refused to pay me for half the games i murdered you go i just break your time crazy you didn't do all those games here's 50 for the summer so um when you're married you said tell me your wife's name uh laura laura landy eisenberg we met when i supervised her as an intern uh she she also went to work for our the organization i was working for that was the after
school child care was called extended care and she worked we both worked at a couple of schools for a couple years then we got married in 77 and we both left extended care in 79 and she went to nursing school and i got a job with the state parole board who is trying to figure out a better way to decide who should get paroled and who shouldn't and i had a little some of those skills to predict do a prediction instrument that was becoming popular across the country so i did that for uh for 10 years and then went to another state agency that just
did criminal justice policy evaluation and what we would look at things that the legislature had passed and try and determine if they were being effective or not or if they needed to be changed things like that so that was a pretty pretty good job that sounds like an interesting job and you said you had children two daughters two daughters anna and emily they're now 35 and 38. um and they live in austin they live in austin one lives real close to us they both look pretty close to us so it's nice they one has lived in san francisco and michigan and all over but she decided to come home and uh not married no grandchildren but they're happy well that's good how did you choose their names you know i don't know we went through a bunch of names and then we signed all the uh my first daughter anna maybe after a a great aunt and emily was after all the wild children i knew that were named emily so they've been great kids
and as you said your wife really got you back into judaism your daughters were about next foot in austin right right member of reform synagogue uh we're sort of like three day a year jews a lot of weddings and bar mitzvahs though over the years my mom had a very large family and uh they all stayed in kansas city so we've been to dozens of bar mitzvahs and weddings up there all they were they were much tighter knit family and st staying very jewish over the years than than we are and i don't know you know if it has to do with you know having
all the family there and being very observant and we're in dallas not so much family so i don't know that's a good point but they have their troubles so before we get on to winding down the interview um everybody calls you izzy can you tell us how that came about it's such a boring story you want to skip it well let's just say were a lot of michael's into my group and so we all started going by last name and eisenberg got to be too long and it got to be icy and i got to be izzy and that's it was everybody asleep yet well
i call you izzy thanks for letting me know what that's all about so just to wind it down a bit um what advice do you have for your kids you know that are going to see this video maybe for now or for the future i'm sure you've already told them but if you want to tell me well i mean i think they've learned from us just observing that friends and family are are very important for people my age i would advise them take better care of your body when you're younger because i'm a mess i'm still here also what legacy do you want to leave
for the next generation of young jewish boys and girls that you can talk about that you were if somebody would have given you advice when you were at kerry or walnut hill elementary school nobody gave me any advice and i'm not that stage to give other people advice just don't be afraid to get out there and do stuff well that's great um so izzy i really appreciate you sitting and having this oral history for the dallas jewish historical society and i thank you very much and it's been a pleasure to talk to you i love you mitch i love you too donut