#294 – Dick Bernard: Naming a mystery man in a photograph, 72 years later.

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Pearl Harbor Day I posted a piece about my Uncle Frank and his service and death on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
The day went on and late in the afternoon came an e-mail from a name I’d never heard before. The e-mail included two photos of my Uncle Frank in Long Beach CA on November 10, 1938. The writer of the e-mail identified himself as the son of the man, Max Calvert, who was posing with Uncle Frank in the photo. His Dad, Dave said, was then the secretary for Admiral Kimmel on-board the USS San Francisco. Kimmel was at that time commander of the Pacific fleet and professionally suffered in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.
I have my pictures fairly well organized, so I took out the package labeled “Frank Bernard” to see if there were any matches. You can see the results for yourself, below.
The first photo of each pair is from Dave Calvert; the second is from my family file.

Max Calvert and Frank Bernard Nov. 10, 1938 Long Beach CA


Same setting, date, place from the Bernard files

Max and Frank from the Calvert album Long Beach Nov. 10, 1938


Same setting, Frank with his Dad Henry Bernard, from the Bernard album


Again, the first photo is from the Calvert album, the second from the Bernard album, third, Calvert, fourth, Bernard.
Before December 7, 2010, Dave Calvert, a Californian, and I had never heard of each other.
How did Dave find me? He had the pictures, and he knew that Frank was a casualty on the Arizona, and on this particular Pearl Harbor Day he decided to see if he could find any evidence of family of this long ago sailor who was friends with his sailor Dad in 1938. He did a simple google search and several pages in found reference to my family history website. From there he managed to get ahold of my e-mail address and the rest is history.
The miracle of the internet.
Some days later, he says, he still has ‘goosebumps’ over this essentially chance meeting and our sharing of essentially identical photographs from 72 years ago. I share his sentiments exactly.
I couldn’t label that photograph with the unknown man though I knew that the picture had been taken in 1938 from a developers mark.
Now, thanks to someone who took the extra step another piece of the family tapestry has been identified.

#293 – Dick Bernard: Continuing the tax cuts

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For the record, some time ago, before the November elections, I wrote my U.S. Senators arguing in favor of letting the tax cuts expire for everyone at the end of 2010 – including my own.
My wife and I are small fish in the economic pond that is the U.S., but even for ourselves I demonstrated by actual numbers that the net effect of those ill-considered tax cuts earlier in this decade had quite a dramatic impact on our personal tax bill. I said that these were tax savings we neither needed nor could the country afford them. We were destroying our grandkids futures, I argued.
I think of this two page letter to my elected representatives in the wake of yesterday’s announcement of agreement in principal between President Obama and the Republicans and the resulting rhetorical tsunami particularly from the left (with whom I am most often in agreement).
The most well reasoned opinion I’ve seen about the compromise is this one from a west coast blogger I have come to like. It speaks for itself.
But Outside the Walls is my blog, and how is it that I think the President of the United States did what he had to do in dealing with a very tough reality?
I spent most of my working life as a teacher’s union representative, charged with making some sense out of the abundant nonsense that litters every one of our lives: trying to help resolve petty and profound disagreements between individuals and groups of individuals and labor and management.
In such a setting you learn rapidly – and then live within – the reality that nothing is ever as simple as it most often is portrayed by the advocates from one side or the other. Even the stark line between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ blurs.
As I read and listened yesterday I kept thinking of a specific situation that occurred in about 1996 in the very town in which I now live.
It was a bitterly cold January, and the local union here – actually two competing unions which were finally cooperating – was at death’s door heading to a Strike.
In fact, everything was in place for the strike: picket signs, captains, schedules, etc. The strike was to happen at 7 a.m. the next morning.
The State Mediator called the parties together for one more attempt to reach agreement, and anyone who’s ever negotiated knows the scenario: labor and management were in separate rooms in an unpleasant place, sitting with stale donuts and old coffee, considering a mutual reality. If we didn’t settle below our sacred rock bottom bottom line, one side would be out on the streets, and both sides would have to figure out how to save face later.
I said that there were two competing unions in this scenario. I was representative for the smaller of the two. My local President wanted a strike in the worst way.
The night wore on and nobody was budging. The mediator was going back and forth.
Finally came the moment of truth: somewhere around midnight or after the Mediator called out our chief negotiator, as well as managements, and let them know the lay of the land, which was pretty dismal. Essentially, he said ‘you folks figure it out, or its your problem’.
Time went on interminably, and then the chief negotiator, representing the majority union, came in the room and asked me to join him.
The reality struck home. This was what we were going to get. Period. Were we going to strike for the difference? No. I supported settling.
The bargaining team sitting in the room agreed; my local President did not. He was very angry. He’d had a large stake in having that long overdue strike.
It was a stormy, snowy night, and the telephone tree went into effect well after midnight: no pickets in the morning. The 20 miles solitary drive home was very lonely.
A short while later we held a meeting to ratify or reject the agreement. Several hundred teachers came and heard the presentation, and voted in secret ballot. In my recollection, the contract we thought was so deficient was overwhelmingly ratified.
My local President – the one who wanted the strike – held me responsible for selling out and had nothing to do with me for the remainder of his term of office.
Life went on. He retired, and a couple of years later he called and asked me a question about something or other.
It was his way of saying “it’s okay. Life goes on”. And it did.
President Obama did what he had to do. It’s not the best, but the best that is attainable.

#292 – Remember the Maine; USS Arizona; Never Forget; LPD 21 USS New York

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December 7, 1941, my Uncle Frank Bernard was minding his own business on the USS Arizona, berthed at Pearl Harbor, HI. Without doubt he was awake at the time a Japanese bomb destroyed his ship and snuffed out his life. 1176 shipmates also died that day. Frank was definitely at the wrong place at the wrong time. Every year on this date, no doubt today as well, I will see a photo or a film clip of the Arizona blowing up.
I am the only one of my siblings old enough to have ever actually met Uncle Frank; the last time at the end of June, 1941, in Long Beach, California.

Bernard Family Reunion at Long Beach CA late June, 1941. Frank is in the center, Dick, 1 1/2, is next to him.

Frank had served on the Arizona since 1936. Though he seems to have been engaged to someone in Bremerton WA, he likely intended to be a career man in the Navy.

Frank Bernard, Honolulu, some time before Dec. 7, 1941

Wars are never fought without reasons, or consequences. They are collections of stories, often mythology masquerading as fact. One war succeeds the last war. That’s just how wars are.
Frank’s Dad, my Grandpa Henry Bernard, 43 years earlier had enlisted to serve the United States in what he always called the Spanish-American War in the Philippines. He was very proud of this service, which lasted from the spring of 1898, to the summer of 1899. The pretext for this war was the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor. Whatever actually caused the explosion was blamed on the Spaniards, and led to an outpouring of patriotic fervor in the U.S. “Remember the Maine” was the battle cry.
Grandpa’s unit, one of the first to the Philippines, never actually fought any Spaniards – he and his comrades were hardly off the boat near Manila when the Spanish surrendered. His battles were with the Filipino “insurgents” who were glad to be rid of the Spaniards, and just wanted the Americans to go back where they came from. That war is now called the Philippine-American War – a term Grandpa wouldn’t know.
In Henry’ company was his future wife’s cousin, Alfred Collette. Some years after the war, Alfred returned to the Philippines, becoming successful, later marrying and living the rest of his life in the Philippines.
After Pearl Harbor, the first major conquest of American territory by the Japanese was the Philippines…. Alfred was imprisoned at the notorious Santo Tomas. During the final battle for the liberation of Manila in 1945 his second child, named for my grandmother Josephine, was killed by shrapnel from either the liberators or the Japanese. She was only four years old, in her mother’s arms. Her two siblings witnessed her death.
Seven of Uncle Frank’s cousins in Canada, all from the same family, went to WWII, three in the Canadian Army, four in the U.S. Army. One of the seven died in combat. Others from my families served as well, as did neighbors. Most survived; some didn’t.

Alfred Collette, 1898, Presidio San Franciso CA

Henry Bernard, middle soldier, in Yokahoma Japan, enroute home1899

Which brings to mind the USS New York LPD 21.
On Thanksgiving day came one of those power point forwards celebrating the launch of the Amphibious Transport Ship the USS New York, a ship partially manufactured out of the wreckage of the World Trade Centers September 11, 2001. The internet is awash with items about this ship, commissioned in November of 2009.
A key caption of the powerpoint said that the New York’s contingent was “360 sailors, 700 combat ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft”, apparently roaming the world at the ready to do battle with the bad guys wherever they were. The transport has “twin towers” smokestacks,
I could see the attempt at symbolism in the power point: “don’t mess with the U.S.”. The boat plays to the American fantasy that we are an exceptional society, more deserving than others.
But, somehow, I failed to see the positive significance of this lonely boat, roaming the world, looking for opportunities to do battle against our enemies.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of geographic knowledge to know how immense this world is, and how tiny and truly insignificant is a single ship with about 1000 U.S. servicemen, no matter how highly trained and well-equipped they might be.
It seems we have better ways to use our money.
Uncle Frank was technically a peace-time casualty – War wasn’t declared against Japan until after he was dead. He and his comrades at Pearl Harbor who also died were only the first of hundreds of thousands of Americans, who joined, ultimately, millions of others who became casualties of WWII. A few of Grandpa Henry’s comrades were killed on Luzon, and till the end of his life in 1957 in Grafton ND there was an annual remembrance at the monument in front of the Walsh County Court House.
The triumph of war is what we seem to remember.
The horror of war is what we best “never forget”.
Peace takes work, lots of it. Let’s work for Peace.

#291 – Dick Bernard: Looking at ourselves through "rose-colored glasses"

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My daily hangout for morning coffee is a very busy place, more or less the ‘crossroads’ for the commuting class in my community – a community which would be considered fairly prosperous and definitely middle class.
I am at my station during drive time every morning, next to the front door, so I can see the comings and goings for perhaps two hours every day. Often I’ll drop by in the afternoon for awhile as well. I’m just a creature of habit, I guess.
It occurs to me that, except for the panic days at the end of 2008, the normal clientele of the coffee shop has scarcely missed a beat. It is impossible to tell that there is major concern about unemployment or the like. Sure, a guy I used to see – a small builder who built higher-end homes one at a time – no longer shows up, and I heard he went bankrupt, but people still come through the doors, order their designer drinks, chat a bit, and are pleasantly on their way to wherever.
Life seems good, if viewed through the coffee shop “lens”.
In the same town, between the coffee shop and my house, is a homeowner I know well. He is, in fact, my son-in-law.
He was laid off last March from a corporate job, then was lucky enough to get a state job which, while was to last a year, at least provided some wages and benefits. Before Thanksgiving he was angling to refinance his house to get lower interest and thus lower payments, and things looked promising.
Tuesday before Thanksgiving he was laid off again – his work was not quite up to standards, and there’s plenty of people to replace him. Exactly what he didn’t do right, I don’t know, so I can’t judge. I don’t think he knows, either. His job was taking phone calls from unemployed people and redirecting them. Somebody who listened in (“this phone call may be monitored for quality assurance”) apparently was less than fully satisfied. He wasn’t fired, just let go.
There is no appeal process.
So, he’s back on layoff and unemployment again.
The refinance has now fallen through. He has no job, and thus is of no interest to the people who would have refinanced his house.
The homeowner is in the minority of us – they say roughly 10% are unemployed. The unemployed have no clout, but they are the soft underbelly of our economy and if the country goes down, their lack of work and thus lack of money to spend in this economy will be a big contributing factor.
There needs to be a better way.
***
After writing the previous words, we stopped at a newly opened Dollar store in our town (we are not a Dollar store kind of town – another story). While my wife shopped, I waited.
I overheard one lady ask a manager about jobs at the store – there was a Hiring sign posted outside.
The manager said, no openings. Corporate said no new hires. The woman walked away, sadly.
One of those little dramas repeated thousands and thousands of times each and every day.
Now, apparently, the rich will get the tax cuts they don’t need continued. Those same tax cuts didn’t help the economy earlier in this decade. Why should we expect differently now? But we, “the American people”, apparently don’t want to discriminate against the rich…. Best we clobber our own ‘kind’.

#290 – Dick Bernard: Vicarious Violence a Threat, Chapter 2

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December 3, I passed along a commentary of mine printed in the December 2 2010 Minneapolis Star Tribune. I was responding to an earlier column by Washington Post columnist George Will about regulation of video games. The blog post including the commentaries is here.
As of 5 a.m. December 4, there have been 14 comments posted at the Star Tribune in response to my commentary. They deserve to be read. Two of those 14 are from me, and very brief. The other 12 speak for themselves, mostly (but not all) challenging my reasoning, or worse. A couple of folks support me. It would appear that the on-line vote, leaving out my comments, is 10-2 against me.
Not visible are the 19 comments I have received via e-mails, in person, and even via a phone call. Eighteen support my reasoning in the column; one is ambivalent [update: now 24 Dec 7, 2010].
So it goes.
When it comes to violence we are, and probably always have been, a nonchalant society. If we aren’t in the bullseye ourselves, we don’t seem to care much about the daily exercise of violence around us. We have a history….
Responding to one on-line comment, when I was a little kid, a friend and I spent hours playing Lone Ranger and Tonto. Probably because the game was the other kids idea, I was always Tonto, the Lone Rangers loyal Indian sidekick. We’d slap ourselves in the butt and run all over town taking on the bad guys.
It wasn’t until Thanksgiving Day, this year, that a friend pointed out that the word “Tonto” means, essentially, “dumb”, “stupid”, “silly”. Of all the words that could have been chosen for that loyal Indian I dutifully played most every day for a whole summer, a derogatory word was chosen….
This little conversation about violence leads me back to one of the few newspaper articles I have actually kept over the years. It is dated October 8, 2001, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, from the Washington Post, and it speaks abundantly clearly for itself, here War Opinion 2001001. Particularly note the last half of the article, and ask what those 506 American citizens, probably casually answering a series of questions, have ultimately wrought in our name: a never-ending war we will never win, virtual financial bankruptcy of our economy, and on and on.
This poll, and other similar polls, ‘blessed’ the political decision to go to war…and stay at war until today.
To this very day we are reaping the bitter fruits of publicly sanctioned violence.
Back to the topic which led to this column, video games, personally, I don’t have anything against video games per se. But the combination of George Will’s column, those guys in the Salt Lake City airport, and the scorecard for those little kids playing a video game on Thanksgiving day (“kills”, “deaths”) has had an impact.
We are aiming a loaded and increasingly unstable gun directly at ourselves.

#289 – Dick Bernard: Vicarious Violence a Threat? Yes.

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The below commentary of mine appeared on the opinion page in the December 2, Minneapolis Star Tribune. You can also read it as printed in the STrib here. I was responding to a commentary by George Will of the Washington Post which appeared in the Nov. 28 newspaper.
I was gone most of the day and late into last evening so didn’t see the on-line comments on the column till late in the evening. Most interesting to me was that the always-anonymous on-line comments about the column in the newspaper were generally negative and most of the most negative ones seemed to unanimously agree with each other (which is very unusual, even on-line, almost like an orchestrated response); while the in-person comments I heard from many random people I saw at various events yesterday were 100% positive.
I apparently struck some kind of nerve. Bottom line: I like the kids I wrote about; I think this is a topic that needs a lot of civil and rational discussion; the vast majority of people don’t act out based on things like virtual violence, but we never have to be concerned about the vast majority…it’s the tiny minority that cause the huge problems.
The headline writer for George Will’s column on video games subheads the column “Today, it’s video games. In another era, it was comic books. So, pass a law? Pshaw.”
Oh, were it so easy to dismiss a very serious societal problem.
Will is exactly one year younger than I am, so he and I come from the same generation.
Here’s a counterpoint, doubtless replayed tens of millions of times every day across our nation.
A few days before Wills column appeared, Thanksgiving Day, we were at dinner at a relative’s home, and there was a certain amount of competition for the large screen TV. A video game ultimately won out over football, at least for a while.
Two of the kids, a girl, 7, and a boy, 11, were playing a realistic video game reenacting battles of World War I and II. Dutifully they worked to take out the enemy with their hand-held remote controls.
It was all so normal, including the scorecard at the end, where the one who had the most “kills” (planes shot down) and “deaths” (victims of war) was the winner. The kids were learning how to win, through death, but with no threat to themselves. Death was a casual act, meted out on somebody else, tallied on a score sheet on a television screen.
I thought back to the days in the 1940s when I was the age of those kids. Where I lived, those days were long before television, and yes, there were comic books, but not yet common for people in my station in life. What Will and I experienced as kids, he buttresses with selective anecdotes about then-experts. He then makes these people his fools: vintage Will.
I remember visiting my grandparents ‘back in the day’, and a favorite find was the very dog-eared copy of Flash Gordon – outer space futuristic fiction where, indeed, people were zapped by things like ray guns. But it was all in the deep dark distant future, and we had to read about it. We weren’t doing battle like those two little kids I was witnessing Thanksgiving Day.
A few days before Thanksgiving we were waiting for our plane home from Salt Lake City. The plane was delayed due to weather, and there was extra idle time in the boarding area.
Near the window were two older men, waiting with wheelchairs to assist disabled passengers who’d soon be deplaning.
They were conversing about war, these two, mostly through the lens of “Saving Private Ryan” and John Wayne movies.
One guy tended to dominate the conversation, the other nodding gravely, as the talk turned to things like War on Terror topics. “They don’t follow the rules of warfare like in the old days”, the one said, observing that the enemy now melts in among us, and can be anywhere.
“We just have to be able to go in there and take them out. If some civilians are killed, too bad.” Doubtless he was just a nice family man.
His civilians, of course, are a nebulous them who dress funny, or look a little different, or talk a different language. They aren’t persons, they’re things, like a bunch of animals in someone’s sights. “The ends justify the means.”
So it goes in our society where violence is a staple of our lives, nothing more than a casual act.
There may not be a place for another law, but for our society to survive as a civil place, we need to pay a whole lot of attention to sanctioned and impersonal violence against others.

#288 – Dick Bernard: 2010 Election Postmortem

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Yesterday, I checked the internet to fill in a blank in my November 4 post about the 2010 election. That blank is filled in the bold-faced section in the fourth paragraph under the photo.
Succinctly: about two-thirds as many voters went to the polls in 2010, as did in 2008; that turnout was slightly higher than the normal mid-term election turnout; only about 40% of people who could have voted actually went to the polls, whether or not they were informed about the issues or aware of the implications of their vote. (I count everybody, whether they actually vote or not, as VOTERS. Most simply don’t exercise their right and responsibility as a citizen.)
The oft quoted “American people” have spoken.
They are learning, already, what they said….
We – every one of us – is the Government we so often revile.

#287 – Dick Bernard: Getting RESULTS

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A number of years ago a new acquaintance, Paul Hoffinger, called to invite us to get to know an organization he was involved in. We enrolled, and became a small monthly contributor to to the group, called RESULTS.
Some years later we were part of a group traveling to observe the work of the micro-finance group Fonkoze in Haiti. Two staff people from RESULTS were part of the delegation, young and vibrant people.
Then, last week, Paul called again, to remind us of the RESULTS event which happened last night. Without his reminder, we would not have attended. We were both happy that we went.
RESULTS is one of those thousands of ‘under the radar’ organizations which are quietly about the business of doing good for those who are unable to lobby for themselves: “the least among us”.
There were perhaps 30 of us at the gathering, and we enjoyed a light meal and an impressively paced program which began and ended on time!
RESULTS emphasis is positively impacting on government policy for the poor in our country and elsewhere. It is a network of citizen lobbyists working in local communities with local lawmakers to, as former MN Congressman Arlen Erdahl said, “Help people help themselves“.
Erdahls career included time in the MN State Legislature and service as Minnesota’s Secretary of State. In addition, he served six years as part of the Peace Corps, in Jamaica and at Peace Corps Headquarters in Washington. Erdahl encouraged ordinary citizens to lobby their legislators. In his view, “lobbying” is not a dirty word, and well informed and respectful citizen lobbyists can and do have impact on lawmakers. In fact, he said, a few individually written letters on a particular topic will catch a lawmakers attention: “what is going on?”
Yolande Saboutey, a native of Togo, learned about RESULTS through a class project, and chose to become involving as a volunteer, helping sponsor children’s education in her country.

Yolande Saboutey, RESULTS Volunteer


Several others, including Jim Koppel, Regional Director of the Children’s Defense Fund, encouraged us to reach beyond ourselves.
We could have found other things to occupy ourselves last night other than driving across town to another meeting.
Paul Hoffinger’s willingness to send an e-mail, make a call, and continue to follow through made the difference, and his is a good example worth emulating.
Thanks, Paul.

Katy Windschill, RESULTS Volunteer


Jos Linn, RESULTS Domestic Outreach Coordinator