#255 – Dick Bernard: Au Revoir to Five Sisters

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The call came on Friday. It was unexpected only because I didn’t think I’d be in the communications loop.
Sister Victorine Long CSJ had passed away at Bethany Convent in St. Paul. She was 90. Her niece said she had a folder of assorted photos and letters for me – items which Sister Victorine had kept over the years.

I went to Sister’s funeral on Saturday, and her niece, Sister Lillian, gave me the folder which brought back many memories of not only Sister Victorine, but four of her colleagues at Bethany who had preceded her in death.
The six of us were occasional friends, sometime correspondents, infrequent lunch companions at Bethany, which is the home for elderly and disabled Nuns of the St. Paul Province of the Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondolet (CSJ). These are the Nuns who founded the College of St. Catherine and St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul and many others. They are a remarkable Order among many Orders.
For me, the relationship began in the early 1990s when a CSJ, Sr. Mary Henry Nachtsheim, CSJ, and I got to know each other in a French-Canadian Club, La Societe Canadienne-Francaise du Minnesota (LSCF). Sr. Mary Henry and I served on the Board of now-defunct LSCF. I doubt she had a lick of French blood, but she had a passion for things French, and her career was teaching French at the College of St. Catherine.
Before she died in 1995, Sr. Mary Henry introduced me to Sr. Ellen Murphy, CSJ, a remarkable poet, born and raised on a farm at Bachelors Grove ND. (See the poem at the end of this writing.) Hidden behind Sr. Ellen’s Irish name was her French-Canadian mother whose maiden name was Normand, and who grew up in the same community as my Grandmother, Oakwood ND. Sr. Ellen had a great interest in things French-Canadian. As she grew older, she took up residence at Bethany.
In turn, she introduced me to Sr. Ann Thomasine Sampson, CSJ, a resident of Bethany, and at the time I met her an historian completing a fascinating history of some of the powerful women who led the CSJ’s (“Seeds On Good Ground”, 2000).

Sr. Ellen Murphy and Sr. Ann Thomasine Sampson at Bethany Convent St. Paul MN July 1997


Ellen began to organize occasional and elegant formal luncheons for the three of us in the Bethany dining room. We had fascinating conversations about many things.
Ann Thomasine shared Ellen and my French-Canadian heritage, and while we never talked about it specifically, most certainly her family name, Sampson, while rooted for her in Minneapolis, also migrated to Oakwood, a community near Grafton ND.
Early on Wisconsin native Sr. Magdalen Schimanski, CSJ, joined the occasional table get-togethers. Like the others, Magdalene had been a CSJ for many years, and she, too, was a resident at Bethany. I knew her primarily in connection with the Art Department at the College of St. Catherine, which she had headed. Her art hangs in the reception parlor at Bethany and in our home as well. While she was not of the French-Canadian cloth, we all had a great deal to talk about in our every now and then lunches.

Sr. Magdalen's art at Bethany Convent, St. Paul MN


Sometime in 1999, Sr. Victorine Long joined the table. Word apparently had gotten around that a North Dakota native was lunching with the other Nuns. Not only was Victorine a North Dakotan, but she had grown up at the same time and same rural countryside (near Berlin ND) as my Aunt Edith. They were four months apart in age. Victorine, 79 when we met, had most recently been a medical professional in Jonestown, Mississippi during her “retirement”. Like the others, she had a quiet and very accomplished careerVictorine Long002.
Life went on, as did age, and my friends, all of whom had joined the CSJ order in the 1930s, slowly became more and more disabled. Sr. Victorine organized our last luncheons. Sr. Ellen was second to die in about 2004; then Sr. Ann Thomasine. The last time I visited Sr. Magdalene she was waiting for the release of death from her physical maladies. I walked down the hall that day and Sr. Victorine had no idea who I was – for her, her mind failed before her body. Sr. Magdalene passed away last year, and now Sr. Victorine is gone, and the luncheon table is empty for now.
When I viewed Victorine in the simple pine box at Bethany Chapel Saturday, I revisited and remembered some wonderful conversations with some wonderful ladies. I wonder how they’d comment on happenings today. They were far more than one-dimensional.
They are all at peace.
If I Am There
Sr. Magdelen Schimanski CSJ
in Sisters Today, March 2000, p. 90
Spring will go
and summer come.
Who will care
if I am there
when leaves fall
and then snow
softly covers all?
Saint Catherine’s Wood:
Reflections On An Autumn Scene
Sr. Ellen Murphy CSJ revised, 1994
We looked in wonder from southwestern slopes,
facing the wind, facing the guardian wood
where every shade and shape of leaf was moved
to catch our ears with murmurs, hold our gaze
with bronze, gold, crimson, russet leaves
the windswept boughs let fall
within our old and ravaged,
dear and criss-crossed wood. But then –
it’s true –
Progress brings need to dig and dump and plough
now here, now there – where ecosystems grew
fresh revelations of the Love we knew:
the bottle gentians, lupine, ferns and moss,
the owl and thrush, the moth and butterfly –
a myriad of those shy and gentle lives that must
thrive upon trust – all there on common ground
like you and me. Their lives a providence
of earth and sky and love and mystery.
Some trees are bent with burdens not their own.
Some stand tall and open as a prayer
that hasn’t yet received its sure response. Their
dignity, their strength will come to life
through temporal loss. Their life’s austerity in ways
like Monks whose spirits thrive through Lenten days.
What if today from every compass point
the Angels of the Earth called out, ‘Do not impair
the sole protection of the ozone layer. Do not unsheathe
the suns life-fostering rays; do not pollute
the vital air you breathe; your temporal light
that gives you such delight. Love meant all these to be,
with sheltering trees, the mainstays of your life.’
What if an Angel called to all of us in time
a louder, more peremptory ‘Wait! O, do not harm
the land, the sea, the trees! And then revealed
that God, our Love, will now make all things new:
our ravaged planet and polluted air, our ruined
ecosystems’ ecospheres. The stones
that tell our earths history, the song-birds’ bones.
All that we mourn for in our Guardian Wood.
All of creation that He looked upon
and found so good.

#249 – Dick Bernard: Beginning a family history

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Monday I mailed the family history of my Dad’s French-Canadian family.
It is a weighty tome. Its 500+ pages read 3 lb 9.4 oz on the post office scale. It represents my efforts to condense 400 years of several families French-Canadian history in North America. More info: here and here.
Whether the book turns out to be a ‘weighty tome’ in an intellectual or even family interest sense remains to be seen. Other ‘scales’ will measure that, and I have no control over them. I did my best, collecting information over the last 30 years, and during the last year attempting to organize and make some sense of it. Being a family in 2010 means, already, that I have sent books to California and New Jersey and Montreal and Winnipeg and Santa Fe and many other places. The family is hidden in plain sight, everywhere. Like a bunch of needles in a haystack.
Mine is an ordinary garden variety kind of family, like the vast majority of families who have built every nation and community in every era in history.
I built this history around the families of my Grandma and Grandpa’s root families: on one side, Bernard and Cote; on the other Collette and Blondeau. (I did a similar history of my mother’s ‘side’ some years ago.) My French-Canadians came from an era where French-Canadian married French-Canadian, and above that, lived in a French-Canadian culture in a French-Canadian community, speaking French. When my Dad was born in 1907, the fairly rigid ethnic boundaries were breaking down in northeastern North Dakota, but even so, when Grandpa died in 1957, a majority of the 116 names (usually the wife, it seems) who signed the book at his funeral in Grafton, North Dakota were French surnames, and some of the non-French surnames I know had French maiden names. That is how it was, then.
I like to think – again, the critics will be the judge – that this document I labored over for the last twelve months approaches the status of legitimate history.
Such histories are difficult for common people to do.
My roots families were farmers and grain millers and sometimes small merchants, and for the most part not very educated in the formal sense. There were no journals to quote from; no treasure trove of family letters found in somebodies attic; no scribes recording their daily activities.
Still, once one is identified as having an interest in the history of the family, information begins to accumulate, and it did, in my project. I gratefully acknowledge at least 37 people who had at one time or another over the 30 years provided information of one kind or another. And I was lucky in that this family had some sense that photographs might be useful in documenting its members.
Importantly, I could use stories about the French-Canadian experience gleaned from a newsletter I edited for over 15 years. There are about 50 of these in the book, presented as they were presented in the ‘cut and paste’ days of the 1980s, forward.
And now it’s done…at least for me. I shipped the several boxes that constitute the archives off to the University of North Dakota library, ready for some unknown researcher in the future.
I noted, in all of this, that people of my generation – I am 70 – are truly the final keepers of what can legitimately called ‘the old days’, before television, computers, rapid transportation and the like.
If memories are to be carried on, it is people like myself who are well advised to take on the task, now, before memory fails.

Dick Bernard and Family History Book September 28, 2010

#248 – Dick Bernard: Awaiting a new season

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One of the duties on a quick visit to the home farm near Berlin ND was to harvest the last of the land falls off the apple tree beside the house.
This was a good year for apples – at least for three of the four trees on the homestead – but very few of the apples were salvageable, mostly landfalls that either rotted or were partially eaten by one critter or another. Produce from nature doesn’t wait around to be attended to. My uncle and aunt couldn’t get to the task, much, this year.

Apples at the farm September 19, 2010


I picked what seemed to be usable apples and temporarily placed them in an old washtub – a relic of the days before washing machines – and mowed the grass.
My uncle and aunt knew that most of their apples would end up spoiled, and that was distressing. In some other year there was a lot of apple juice, etc., coming from these trees.
This year, almost nothing from the trees would actually be consumed.
While I mowed, my mind wandered back to a long ago visit to a relatives home in Mt. Angel OR, not far from Salem. It was 1971, and I was in a summer program at an area college. We went out for dinner at this families home. We’d never met before.
I remember nothing about the visit except for the huge Bing Cherry tree beside the house. This was an undisciplined tree, reaching so high that the fruit on the topmost branches was unreachable. In fact, most of the cherries were rotting on the ground. This astonished me, a kid from the midwest who grew up when perhaps once a summer a truck would come through with these same luscious cherries for sale, and my parents might buy a lug or two for canning purposes. And here I was seeing these riches of the earth rotting on the ground – no doubt a smelly nuisance to the homeowners.
As I completed my mowing, I put together a small pail of the best apples and went back to town, and then back home to the Twin Cities.
My thought process changed as time went on.
From the point of view of the apple tree, those apples aren’t wasted at all. They are simply the end point of the apple trees job: to provide seed for a potential new apple tree sometime in the future.
Those apples rotting on the ground were simply the fruit of its labor.
Next year is another season. Maybe lots of apples, maybe few, maybe none.
Hopefully I can give back at least as much as I took out as my own cycle of life continues.

Prairie fruit near Berlin ND September 19, 2010


Today Fall begins.
Make it a productive season.
**
Vince and Edith’s garden was as productive as ever. There were immense numbers of green tomatoes, and some great muskmelons still thriving. No killing frost yet, but this is the time of year when that is bound to happen on the North Dakota prairie. Everyone, the natural world included, begins to hunker down for Fall and then Winter.
Muskmelons at the farm September 18, 2010

Green tomatoes September 18, 2010


Uncle Vince checking out the garden September 18, 2010

#242 – Dick Bernard: A School for the Feeble-Minded

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When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, we would occasionally go to visit my Dad’s parents in Grafton ND.
While there, one of the certain trips was to the city park, Leistikow Park, on the bank of the Park River. It was an awesome place in the eyes of small town kids in the big city of Grafton (which probably was well on the short-side of 5,000 residents in those years).
Approaching the park we always passed what we knew as the State School for the Feeble Minded. There was one particularly large building that I remember, and on summer days the lawn was crowded with people we knew were very different from ourselves. Even in those years, when there was at least the beginnings of recognition of special needs, the perception was that these people were more-or-less warehoused, much as they would have been in an insane asylum. The financial resources and the political will were not yet there to help these persons who were very different from we supposedly normal folk.
We looked at those people behind the fence much like someone would look at animals in a zoo.

Undated photo of the main building at Grafton


By the 1950s enlightenment was beginning in states across the nation. Apparently, even though I remember the school only as the School for the Feeble Minded, its name had been changed even before I was born to the less descriptive “Grafton State School”.
By bits and pieces, everywhere, came new programs and attention and funding for “MAXIMIZING human potential for greater SELF-SUFFICIENCY*”
I’ve come to know about the importance and richness of the special needs community in the years since my youngest child was born Down Syndrome in November, 1975.
Heather is nearing 35 this year, and is a phenomenal human being.
This week I drew the pleasant duty of picking Heather up at her daytime work facility, Proact*, in Eagan MN. (It is Proact’s operating philosophy which I quote above.)
Off hours she lives in a pleasant suburban home with a couple of other special needs adults.
I’ve written before about her active engagement in after hours athletic activities most recently last month.
Last night, Heather watched the Vikings and the Saints at her sister’s home. She’s an avid sports fan.
It is easy to take for granted the safety-net we have constructed in this country for those less capable of competing on their own. It is easy to say they’re a waste of precious resources.
In a bygone day my Heather could have been one of those behind the walls of that School for the Feeble Minded. I sometimes wonder how it would have been had she been child, and I parent, 100 years ago. What forces would have worked on me, then.
Those were not the good old days.
And as for going back…when I picked up Heather yesterday, one of her workmates gave her a hug as she was leaving. Then this friend, named Mary, reached out her hand and said to me, “hi, I’m Mary”.
Can’t get any better than that.

Dick and Heather as photographed by the Smooch Project www.thesmoochproject.com

#240 – Dick Bernard: Rene Collette Celebrates a Birthday

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Today – September 8, 2010 – Rene Collette of Lemon Grove CA is 90.
These days, 90 is “just like a kid” in some contexts, another year hardly worthy of notice.
Rene is definitely worthy of notice, any year, any time.
The family invitation says “Rene [as in the French pronunciation wren-a] chose not to have a party, so we are planning a month long CARD PARTY!…Select any day in September and send a card or a note to Rene with any message you want to send. He will be so pleased to hear from you. That’s all there is: …No RSVP…No gifts…No traveling…No dressing up…No crowds…No rich foods…Just a nice quiet afternoon or evening of your own choosing to do whatever you want.”
Rene’s address: 2520 Bonita Street, Lemon Grove CA 91945. Go for it! (If you’d like to take a peak at where Lil and Rene have lived for many years, a few miles inland from San Diego, here it is.)

Lil and Rene Collette, Lemon Grove CA, January 20, 2008


I’ve been privileged to know Rene for years, but it’s only since the 1990s that I have really got to know he and his spouse of 63 years, Lillian (Sando).
He is especially in mind now as he helped me get my start on researching our shared Collette family history in 1981. His handprints, shoe leather, pen and ink, miles on the road and intellect are all over the 500 page history of the Collette and other French-Canadian families that I just completed, and which will be printed within a couple of weeks. For many years, Rene has had a passion about preserving the family roots, the family story he grew up in during the 1920s and 30s. The book is an unintended birthday gift for Rene and for Lil (part of whose Norwegian family story also appears in the book.)
Rene was born in Grafton ND, the son of Edmond Collette and Clara Rheaume, and grandson of Ovide Collette and Olivine Laberge. He grew up in the largely French-Canadian Oakwood community just east of Grafton.
I know only fragments of his most interesting history, but I do know it included military service in Asia during WWII. He and Lillian Sando of Grafton area married, May 17, 1947, and have five children. Rene had a long working career in the San Diego area, and a hugely productive time in retirement, with active interests in many things. His backyard orchard was a place to behold, and his colony of large turtles would surprise a new visitor to their backyard. He helped rebuild historically significant airplanes at a Balboa Park facility in San Diego, and he was proctor at southern California Bar exams for many years. Life has been interesting for Rene, and in turn he has made life interesting for many, including myself. I was privileged to visit with he and Lil a number of times at their home.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RENE!
An undated photo of Rene, his parents and three of his four siblings, is at upper left on page 41 of the Sacred Heart of Oakwood 1981 Centennial Book. A pdf copy of the entire Sacred Heart Centennial Book can be viewed in four parts, accessed here.

#238 – Dick Bernard: A close encounter with a Mosque

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Related post Nov. 14, 2010 here.
The abundant insanity (that’s what it is – insanity) around the proposed (and approved) Islamic Center in lower Manhattan caused me to revisit a significant time in my youth.
In the summer of 1953 I was about to enter 8th grade. We had moved to the tiny village of Ross, North Dakota, hardly even a wide spot in the road between Minot and Williston; on the main line of the extremely busy Great Northern Railroad.
This was the first oil boom in the Williston Basin and housing was at a premium. I was the oldest of five kids, and the only housing for our parents was next door to the school in which they both taught. The “teacherage”, as such buildings were called, had two rooms and a kitchen. As I recall, we showered in the basement of the school building, and that was where the telephone was. Our conditions were primitive.
But 1953-54 was a rich one for me. Among other happenings was meeting a farm kid whose name was Emmett. Emmett and I became friends as kids do, and while I don’t recall that we spent a lot of time together I have kept in contact with him to this day, 57 years later.
One time during that year I was invited out to Emmet’s home in the country. I rode my bike out there, met his parents and his sisters and brother, had supper, saw the barn and the horses, and went home. Driving down that dirt road seemed like a long trip then, but three years ago I revisited the town and the now deserted farm, and it was perhaps two or three miles at most from my home to his.
Emmett was a little darker complected than I with somewhat different facial features than most North Dakota country folks. I might have known then that he and many families around the town were of Syrian ancestry, but it really never registered with me – it wasn’t important.
Similarly, at some point somebody must have told me that these Syrian folks with unusual names were “Mohammedans”, but I don’t remember who, or when, that might have been.
We moved on after a single year in that tiny town and went somewhere else.
It was years later that I came to learn that along that country rode I’d biked sometime in 1953-54 was probably the first Mosque in the United States of America; and later still that someone – probably Emmett – told me that his Mom (both parents and the current Mosque are pictured at the referenced website) was one of the key persons in keeping the Moslem faith alive in outback North Dakota.
Dad was the Superintendent of the tiny school at Ross, and he tended to keep records for posterity. In his papers I came across the attendance records for the Ross school in the year I was there. Typewritten on the roster was the name of my friend, Emmett ____. Handwritten to the left of Emmett’s name was “Mohomed”, more like Emmet’s true given name. Even then, perhaps, there was no desire to raise any unnecessary “red flags”.
I visited the Ross Mosque and the Cemetery in the summer of 2007. I recognized many last names and it was an emotional experience for me.

The first Mosque near Ross ND from Plains Folk, North Dakota\’s Ethnic History , Playford Thorson, ND Institute for Regional Studies 1988, p. 360

Intolerance is one of our many inheritances in this country.
I hope that the powers that be do not cave in to intolerance in New York City or anywhere else.

Ross ND High School Graduates 1954

Update November 13, 2010:
This evening I have been invited to give a very brief presentation concerning this blogpost. The above blogpost itself will be in the groups program booklet.
Following are some brief notes in addition to what is already described above.
In addition to having a one year and very positive encounter with the Muslim community of Ross ND in 1953-54, I also have family experience of having lived in many small towns in North Dakota in my youth. Both my father and mother taught in the schools of these communities. In recent years I have had a great interest in family history so that has also given me more reason to pay attention to things most people might not notice.
In 1991, I inquired about the Ross school, and the then-County Superintendent provided me with my Dad’s year-end report for the high school which that year had 30 pupils in grades 9-12. In 1953-54, the report shows, there were at least six and possibly seven members of the Ross Syrian Community in the public school. Two were seniors, one from Emmett’s family.
We, on the other hand, were clearly religious outsiders: our family was Catholic, and I would doubt there were any other Catholics in the community. We attended church in the nearby trade center of Stanley.
A 1988 book, “North Dakota’s Ethnic History: Plains Folk” (ND Institute of Regional Studies, North Dakota State University, multiple authors), has been a frequent resource for me in my family history work. Pages 354-363 of this book discuss Syrians (Lebanese) and their presence in many parts of North Dakota. On page 360 is this quote, particularly relevant to this discussion: “In Mountrail County, near the village of Ross, other Syrians put down roots during the homestead rush at the turn of the [20th] century. Sam Omar, probably the first settler of Arabic background, in 1902 took land on section 26, Ross township. Later in that year, twenty-two other men came to Ross Township and nearby Alger Township. Within several years almost seventy Lebanese men had taken up land in Ross, James Hill, and Alger townships.
The Mountrail settlers were unique in that, with two exceptions, everyone was of Muslim background. Their descendants today remember two home towns “in Syria”: Bire (Berrie) and Rafid. These villages, in eastern Lebanon adjoin each other and lie only three miles from Ain-Arab. Beirut is twenty-eight air miles to the northwest.
Families in the early days came not only from Lebanon and eastern American seaports, but also from settlements in Nebraska as well….”
I saw these families through an eighth graders eyes in the single year of 1953-54.
I don’t recall so much as a thought or a mention that they were ‘different’. They were simply part of the community.
Lest I be accused of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, North Dakota was no less immune to prejudice than anywhere else. In my own Catholic case, for instance, in the late 1920s there was a Ku Klux Klan movement that was anti-Catholic in its focus, led by a Protestant minister, and was very damaging. In the late 1940s an anti-garb law was passed prohibiting Nuns in habits to teach in public schools. And, of course, there was the shameful matter of treatment of American Indians.
With the coming of the mid-1950s came two major Air Force bases, at Minot and Grand Forks, and large numbers of African-Americans. I am sure this was an occasional matter of concern.
But in my interlude in Ross, meeting a Muslim kid named Emmett, and experiencing the hospitality of Emmett’s farm family, I developed lifelong affection for these fine rural folks in northwestern North Dakota, and an appreciation for the religious tradition which they held.

#226 – Dick Bernard: Winning Last

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I arrived late for the Dakota County Softball League Championship Picnic on August 17, and as I got out of the car I heard the beginning of the singing of the Star Spangled Banner. I turned around and in front of me was the American flag, backlit by a brilliant sun, and as much instinctively as intentionally, I stopped in place, took off my baseball hat, and paid attention to the national anthem as beautifully sung by two young women somewhere in the park.
It was a perfect start to a perfect three hours on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon at Aronson Park in Lakeville MN.

During the Star Spangled Banner August 17, 2010


The event was, I guess one would say, the “World Series” for a bunch of truly exceptional adults, one of whom is my daughter, Heather (photo below). The program listed a dozen teams, roughly half in the “A” League, the other half in the “B”. Heather’s team was vying for 5th Place in their Division.

Heather Bernard August 17, 2010


After the national anthem, and before the games, came the picnic for about 400 of us: players, coaches, families and friends. Fried Chicken never tasted so good! Heather’s sisters and their families were there, as well as the family in whose home she lives with two other exceptional adults. We sometimes joke with Heather being “the Queen”. For sure, on Tuesday, she was! Her own cheering section was “in the stands”.
After the picnic came the game. Every player came to bat, and spent time as fielders. Can’t say I saw any double plays or ‘out of the park’ home runs, but I was truly at the World Series! Heather is a big sports fan. When she came up to bat, she did the routine, “knocking” the dirt off her sneakers; doing the stretching exercise with the bat before coming to the plate – the whole nine yards. She rapped a couple of near-hits. While in this particular game she didn’t actually reach base, it made no difference at all to anybody, including herself. She’d shown up and taken a cut!

The mighty Heather taking a cut at the Plate


Game over – each game lasts an hour – Heather’s team, Rave Red, was on the short end of an 8-4 final score. The way some people would see it, they came in last in the league.
But you wouldn’t know it from the players, the coaches, the fans in the ‘stands’. They were winners, as they congratulated the opposition, and ran the bases one last time for this season, and received their trophy for a truly winning season.

Heather receives her award


Before the game, I made a side comment to Jeff, who’s a good friend of mine, one of the volunteer coaches, and parent of one of the athletes.
“Without volunteers, this country of ours would collapse“, I said. He agreed. We are bombarded daily with all sorts of very bad news about us; it is good, sometimes, to take time to identify the good – and there’s lots of that, too.
So to all the unsung heroes, especially those folks who make things like the Dakota County Softball League happen, including the players on the field, I offer my heart-felt thanks and Congratulations!
You make my day.

Coach Jeff gives an Award to one of his players after the game.


Seen at a game in July, 2010


The sign on the car door says this: “Kate was born with a serious ability“.

#225 – Dick Bernard: Social Security celebrates a birthday

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Sunday, August 15, 2010, is the 75th birthday of the signing of the Social Security Act. Actually the day was a Wednesday, and there is more than ample history available at the Social Security website.
As a veteran recipient of the benefits of Social Security, and as a contributor to the program for many years as an employee, I have an obvious interest in the act.
As a person, I most often think of the Act in the context of my Grandfather Bernard, my Dad’s Dad. In his story is the story of both the history of and the need for a national system of income security.
Grandpa turned 65 on February 26, 1937. This happened to be virtually coincidental with the first actual payouts to Social Security recipients. Since this was a brand new program, he had likely contributed nothing to it. A heckuva deal. But life is a bit more complicated than that.
For many years, Grandpa was chief engineer in the flour mill in Grafton ND. He had a first-grade education, was a self-made and hard-working man, the “bread-winner” of the family, and proud of it. In context of the times, he was middle class. They owned a house, car, and were thrifty, saving money in the local bank. In 1925, he and Grandma took their only vacation that I know of: they spent a month back in the Quebec of his birth.
Life was going along well, that summer of 1925, when he was 53, and Grandma 44. These were the good old days, when heroic men fed their families and didn’t rely on the dole. Women stayed at home and raised the kids, and if you weren’t shiftless you worked for a living: no unemployment insurance or the like.
But then as now, unbeknownst to them, a curve ball was to deliver a strikeout to their best laid plans.
In the month of May, 1927, a couple of weeks before my Dad graduated from high school, two events happened within the same week in Grafton ND: the flour mill closed its doors forever; and the bank which held all of the family savings went under, leaving the family with no livelihood or savings. Dad had planned to go to college that fall, but those plans were delayed. Grandpa was 55, not the expected retirement age.
The Great Depression is usually marked as beginning in 1929. Theirs started two years earlier. Their youngest son, Frank, was still at home, 12 years old.
There is little historical record of how they survived the first half of the 1930s. Grandpa is said to have gotten some income from being a night watchman at the closed mill. He possibly received some income from a small pension resulting from service in the Spanish-American War in 1898-99 – a promise long-delayed by Congressional inertia. They probably got some assistance from relatives in the area, and they took in a couple of farm kids as boarders during some of the winter months. Some of the bank savings finally came back to them at about 10 cents on the dollar.
But when Grandpa qualified for Social Security in ’35, it was undoubtedly a god-send to the family, and it made possible a tiny house which they bought in Grafton, and lived in till they died in 1957 and 1963 respectively.
Today Grandpa’s generation is gone, and Dad’s is rapidly departing. Social Security has been a welcome reality in their lives.
I’m in the lucky generation to have the full benefits of Social Security.
The next generation – my kids – is much more vulnerable, and seems unaware of its vulnerability, and is courted to reject Social Security in favor of rugged individualism once again.
Ironically, the coalition to privatize social security seems to be some of the the youngers and the elders, for opposing reasons.
I hope they both wake up before the youngers experience the consequences of short-sightedness.
Grandpa thought he was secure, too.

#222 – A.J. goes to Teach

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In the next few days A.J., a young woman I’ve gotten to know at my local coffee shop, leaves town for a new assignment and career as a 5th grade teacher in a Montana town. Today there was a farewell party, a going away sendoff, for this young woman. The kids she’s been assigned will be lucky. She joins the millions of other young people over the years who have nervously taken their first full-time teaching assignment. (As I know, from having been a junior high school teacher myself, and knowing from conversations with many others, it is the rare teacher who is not nervous on that first day of the school year. After all, for the most part they have new students, and the certainty that this year will be different than last.)
So, A.J.’s heading west, and I went to the gathering today to wish her well.
My parents were both public school teachers, beginning their respective careers in North Dakota country schools in the 1920s. I was a teachers kid. I have some idea how the business works.
I’ve been thinking of a send-off message for A.J. and mostly I’m drawn back to a memory of my Dad, long after he retired from classroom work.
In the late 1970s Mom and Dad bought a small home in San Benito TX, a Rio Grande Valley town. Their home at 557 N. Dowling was directly across the street from Berta Cabaza Junior High School. They had retired from teaching in the very early 1970s.
Nothing is certain in life, and in 1981, about this time of year, my mother died of cancer, leaving Dad alone, far away and very lonely.
He had a life decision to make, literally, and at some early point he went across the street to the school and offered to volunteer.
San Benito is basically a border town, and many of the kids had a first language of Spanish. It was the language they spoke at home and with each other. The teaching was in English, and the kids just couldn’t keep up.
Dad’s volunteer job was to tutor some of these students in English. It was not a glamorous job, but it was an essential one. The below photo, taken when Dad was 77 years old, shows some of the students he worked with in one school year. Other photos from 1983-86 H Bernard & Stu 4-22-85002:

Henry Bernard with Berta Cabaza students he helped tutor April 22, 1985


Dad and Mom liked to travel, most often by bus, and in their trips they would usually bring home a few postcards, usually non-descript ones, like a free one of a little motel they had stayed in somewhere. Dad kept these “postals” as he called them. One would never know when they’d come in handy.
Dad hit on an idea: he decided to ask his kids if they wanted to hear from him when he went someplace, and a number of them were interested and gave him their home address.
So, out on the road somewhere, say Salt Lake City, Dad might take out a random postcard from his cache, say, California, and write a little note to his correspondent in San Benito.
As it was described at the time, these simple little postal messages were a hit. For many of the kids, it was the first time they had ever received a letter from anyone, much less someone traveling elsewhere in the United States.
A.J., what my Dad did was the essence of teaching. It doesn’t need to be grandiose, or expensive, or time consuming.
Knowing you, I’m sure you’ll ‘catch the wave’ and do a great job! Have a great year.
A.J. has set up a blog to chronicle her first year. Check in once in awhile.

A good card, methinks, for a 5th grade teacher. The card is from Kate Harper Designs, Box 2112 Berkeley 94701. She solicits designs kateharp@aol.com.

#214 – Dick Bernard: Exploring a Cultural Heritage

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There was a particularly remarkable moment at the closing program of the Initiatives in French Annual Conference in Bismarck ND July 10.
We had been treated to an evening of wonderful music and dance with a French flavor. The performers were Metis, Native American, African, and Caucasian. They performed ancient and modern music from West Africa to the North Dakota Indian Reservations to the traditional music and dance of the French-Canadian settlers to the Midwest. In common, they celebrated elements of the French culture, which they either represented, or were part of by native language or ancestry. It was a very rich evening.
The final number brought all the groups back to the stage and they improvised together. It was absolutely delightful. Here’s a photo (others from the program are at the end of this piece):

Metis fiddler Eddie King Johnson leads the improv at Belle Mehus Auditorium, Bismarck ND, July 10, 2010.


The U.S. is without any question a multi-cultural nation, in a multi-cultural world. Every world culture is represented within our borders. Increasingly, this is true of other nations as well. This reality can complicate relationships and, worse, can be used to fuel division and dissension through fear. The IFMidwest aim is to celebrate this diversity, and build bridges across boundaries of geography, language, race, culture, tradition….
This bridge building is not easy. On that single stage on Saturday night were performers from Togo, Cameroun, Congo (Zaire), and Cote d’Ivoire – all African countries whose official language is French. (One of the performers – I believe from Cameroun – said that in her country alone there were 218 different tribal cultures, each with their own dialect.) Within my French-Canadian extended family, I have cousins whose first language in Canada is French, including some who have considerable difficulty communicating in English. Then there’s me, who was never exposed to French, even in a school elective course, and is thus language handicapped when someone chooses to speak French, as happened on occasion on Saturday night.
The organizers of the Bismarck conference sought to implement the idea of Heritage as defined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
As identified in the conference program “1. …Heritage consists of the worlds natural environment, its history and social institutions and its human spirit to imagine.
2. Examples…in the natural environment are the prairies, bodies of water, wetlands, mountains, oceans, buttes and bluffs, etc. In our social institutions and history, they are schools, families, businesses, farms, ranches, parishes, libraries, and museums, etc. The third heritage, that of the human spirit is found in paintings, stories, drama, the interpretation of history, politics, in moving speeches, music, sculpture, architecture, and daily customs we cultivate from cuisine to gardening.
3. Living heritage…consists of reflection on our past and the pursuit of relationships with the elements that constitute Heritage. Study in genealogy or other aspects of Heritage develop our curiosity, causing us to raise such questions as where our ancestors lived, how they fit into the society of their time, and what motivated them. Living heritage leads to new relationships among the three areas UNESCO defines as heritage.”
During the year preceding the conference, indeed for the previous 30 years, I had been delving into the “living heritage” component of my own family, culminating in a 500 page family history I brought to the gathering. So, the issue was very fresh on my mind.
At the end of the conference, I delivered to the Director of IF Midwest three large boxes full of material I had used for my book. They now reside in the IF Midwest archives at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.
As I picked up one of the boxes, in which my father’s papers had been stored for many years, I noticed on the end of the box something I had never seen before: whichever company had made the box included instructions about its contents. The instructions were in English, in French, and in Spanish. American business has, for some time, really, come to grips with a reality that we all need to face as Americans. We are not, and will never be, a place where one language and one language only will dominate. Best for us to learn how to make the best of the abundant riches that come with our diversity.

African Arts Arena of Fargo and Grand Forks joined by a member of the audience.


Members of the audience join the on-stage performance


Dance Revels of the Twin Cities performs traditional French-Canadian and Metis dances.


Additional photos here.