Sternberg, Shmuel
STERNBERG, Shmuel "Mookie"
Dr. Shmuel "Mookie" Sternberg, world class chemical engineer, Israeli military veteran, and former semi-professional soccer player, passed away on February 19, 2022 at the age of 83, of heart failure, in Wellington, Florida.
Mookie was born in Haifa in 1938, to Jewish pioneers from Europe. He always credited his experience at The Hebrew Reali School of Haifa for his later academic and intellectual success. As a young teen, Mookie received a soccer ball as a Bar Mitzvah gift ("it's my ball, I play") and quickly excelled at the game. In 1955, Mookie and his team won the Israeli youth national championship, and then he became a star player for Maccabi Haifa. Shortly after his service in the ferocious Golani Brigade during the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Mookie captained an IDF soccer team that won the Northern Command championship, for which then-commanding-officer Yitzhak Rabin personally handed him the medal.
Following his military service, Mookie began his engineering studies at the Technion in Haifa. Two years later, in 1960, cousins from the Patz family in Elberton, Georgia, invited him to finish his degree at Georgia Tech. He did question this decision initially, upon hearing a southern accent for the first time and thinking it must be a foreign language, but he always looked back fondly on his days in Atlanta. After graduating from Georgia Tech – where he played club soccer – Mookie received his master's degree from Carnegie Tech and his PhD from Case Western Reserve.
Mookie first saw American football at a 1960 game between Georgia Tech and Georgia and afterward mentioned to classmate -- and football captain -- Gerald Burch that he easily could have made all of the short range field goals that Tech's place kicker kept missing with toe kicks. Burch went to get a football and said "show me." Mookie did not miss a kick, and shortly thereafter found himself in front of legendary coach Bobby Dodd, who made Mookie a kicker for the team -- but only in practices, because kicking soccer style, or "sidewinder," was far too unconventional at that time . . . until Pete Gogolak did it for Cornell the following year.
Mookie's long career as a chemical engineer resulted in more than 40 patents under his name. For his work in the 1970s, Millipore has called him "the father of Durapore." Mookie lived in Lexington, Massachusetts from about 1970 until 1990, while also playing a lot of tennis and continuing with recreational soccer into his 50s, and then moved to Chicago to work for Baxter Healthcare. In 1994, he became the second-ever Baxter Distinguished Scientist. His scientific leadership over 22 years there included work on countless life-saving medical technologies. Mookie set the foundations of this accomplished career while also raising two children on his own, after his first wife, Frani, passed away in 1985.
After retiring from Baxter in 2012, Mookie moved to Florida with his wife Susan, to whom he was married for almost 24 years. He greatly enjoyed retirement in the Bellagio community, playing bridge and tennis, bicycling and tricycling, cooking sophisticated meals, studying biochemistry for fun, and honing his digital photography skills. He also loved visiting with his grandchildren, and tutoring granddaughter Foster in science and grandson Zevi in soccer. When asked "how are you?" Mookie's answer was always the same: "So far, so good."
Mookie was a fabulous storyteller, always finding the perfect tale from his incredible memory and life experience to fit any subject or situation and telling it with precisely the right detail and lesson. He was fond of noting that "life is a sequence of random events." His sequence of random events certainly was remarkable.
In addition to his wife Susan, Mookie is survived by his daughter Jordana Sternberg, her husband Brett Berlin, and their children, Foster and Zevi, of Atlanta; by his son Jacob Sternberg, of Oakland CA; by his stepchildren Ryan Dorko, Michael Orson (Sonia), and Melissa Dorko; by step-grandchildren Kyle, Katelyn, Alissa, Emily, Dylan, Briella, Sofia, and Beckett; by his beloved brother Aharon ("Ronnie") Sternberg; and by many cousins in Israel, Baltimore, and elsewhere.
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