Michael (Mickey) Folb worked as a bartender at the International Hotel in Vryburg for many years. Keith Brodovcky recalls that he was already at the hotel when his parents and the Allen family purchased it. Mickey Folb paid his synagogue dues in 1939 and might have arrived in town well before that. Mervyn Lieberthal described the long-serving bartender who enjoyed drinking 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 migrated 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 at age 27. He was listed as an assistant storekeeper living in Dover, near Heilbron. He was buried in Vereeniging. Mickey had a sister, Jane (1898-1973), who married Abe Kenneth Steinberg in Pietermaritzburg (1920), and a brother, Samuel (1900-1976), who 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 deceased, and Janie was recorded as residing in Cyferbult (near Rustenburg) in the Transvaal. At the time of their eldest brother Charles’s death, the two younger brothers were living in Johannesburg—Sam in Fordsburg and Mickey in Braamfontein. Charles's estate was drawn up in Koppies in the Free State.