Michael (Mickey) Folb served as a barman in the International Hotel in Vryburg for many years. Keith Brodovcky recounts that he was already at the hotel when his parents and the Allen family bought the hotel. Mickey Folb paid shul dues in 1939 and may have reached the town well before. Mervyn Lieberthal described the long-serving barman, who liked to drink as follows: "he was like a ghost who lived behind the bar at the International hotel and would emerge from time to time."

 

Michael Folb was the youngest of four children born to Isaac Folb (1866-1914) and Rebecca Bernstein. Isaac was a greengrocer and died in Johannesburg. The Folb family were form from Seduva (Sadowa), Lithuania.

 

Mickey was born in 1902 and passed away in 1981, then residing at Sandringham Gardens. The eldest brother Charles died in 1919 aged 27. He was listed as an assistant store keeper living in Dover, near Heilbron. He was buried in Vereeneging. Mickey had a sister Jane (1898-1973) who married Abe Kenneth Steinberg in Pietermaritzburg and his brother Samuel (1900-1976) married a divorcee Fanny Gertrude Middledorf (nee Hack) in 1937. Sam was listed as a bookkeeper. At the time of Charles’s death, both parents were listed as dead and Janie was recorded as residing in Cyferbult (near Rustenburg) in the Transvaal. At the time of the death of their eldest brother Charles, the two younger brothers were residing in Johannesburg, Sam in Fordsburg and Michael in Braamfontein.