#184 – Dick Bernard: April 1, Census Day 2010, "Coming to America"

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Today is Census Day. A week ago today I had the privilege of listening to the Second and Fourth Graders at South St. Paul’s Lincoln Center Elementary present their music programs to their fellow students and people like me. These kinds of events are always highlights for me. On stage were two of my grandkids, but the effect would have been the same if they were “just kids” up there front and center. One feels the enthusiasm and pride of the students; and sees the skill and respect of the adults involved in such productions.
In the morning session, the Fourth Graders did a wonderful program, “Let Music Surround You”, which closed with their rendition of Neil Diamond’s “America” (presented here by Neil Diamond himself). One of the fourth graders played the Statue of Liberty; fourth grader Teddy was one of those who carried in a banner. I choked up. After seven playful songs, the music teacher told us that the last number would be serious, and it was, in a wonderfully positive way.

I present this vignette on Census Day, 2010, since for almost the last year I’ve been completing my French-Canadian family history which goes back nearly 400 years in North America, and almost 160 years in the United States. Were it not for our immigrant forbears we would not be here.
A goodly part of the research base for ordinary family history is assorted census records. While my family came to the U.S. long before Ellis Island, and to North America long before there was a United States, the feelings and the dynamics were largely the same then, as they are now. “America” is a nation of immigrants, perhaps the most heterogeneous society ever existing on earth, still bringing together all of the rich variety of human beings.
I’ve sent in my census forum, and it was a simple, painless form to complete.
It was not always so simple, as I’ve found from attempting to decipher handwritten census documents generated from 1857 on in the United States, and earlier in Canada.
One can envision a census taker in 1857, walking from home to home, taking the census. The U.S. census taker could write (legibility often in question), and speak English. But frequently the people enumerated were not conversant with English (In my case, they spoke French, or German) and they were often illiterate. So the assorted census documents require a certain amount of interpretation a century or more later.
In eight censuses from 1857 to 1895, for instance, one of my great-great-grandmothers was recorded under four different first names (Ida, Adeline, Lydia, Hattie). The ages of the residents were recorded in each census, and it was obvious that a precise age was not a priority to the resident; it was more likely an approximate age.
In the days before Immigration, a question was asked in which country the children were born, and the adults, if born in another country, were asked if they were naturalized citizen. It was simply a question.
Censuses also recorded other important information about buildings and livestock and crops. One would guess that the only significant difference between then and now is the sophistication of record keeping, but census records have always been kept, and they are important.
Back at the concerts, the last number sung by the second graders, including granddaughter Kelly, was Joy to the World by Hoyt Axton. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, here’s a rendition of that song, actually sung by Hoyt Axton, (which was modified, slightly, to fit Second Grade and the theme of their program, “McElligot’s Pool, by Dr. Seuss”.
“Coming to America”, and “Joy to the World”, indeed. Happy Census Day!

#174 – Dick Bernard: Revisiting a column on a teacher's career

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UPDATE Sat. March 20, 2010: At the end of this post I mention a long-ago note from a student to my Dad. Yesterday afternoon I located him. He lives in Oregon, and has severe MS. He’s probably about 65 now. His sister, who lives in California and gave me his address, thinks he’ll really appreciate hearing from me. So it goes.
A week ago, March 11, 2010, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published my op ed on my Dad’s teaching career. The column finally resulted in at least 50 comments, 37 of which are on the Star Tribune website, the rest to me, personally. [content of the column is included at the end of this post.]

I wrote the column “from the heart”, as I admitted in a comment to a blog which picked up and published the op ed. I began to question myself: “did I overstate my case”. After all, Dad’s leaving all of those jobs was never dramatic. There was no Donald Trumps “you’re fired”; no being run out of town on a rail. The separation was quiet, the contract simply not renewed with no indication it was coming. There were no reasons, there didn’t have to be. As my youngest brother commented during the days following the column, Dad never bad-mouthed anyone. We just moved on.
Dad did leave behind a summary he wrote of each teaching experience he and Mom had together. I pulled it out of the file, and read it. He never said he was fired, in any instance.
But as I pieced together the reality of the 26 years when one or another of we kids was alive and living at home, he indeed was “fired” at least three times, and probably two or three others as well. The others they left under their own power. Often those voluntary quits from the next towns were because those positions were very inadequate, for sundry reasons.
I can say with a lot of confidence that poor performance, morals, ethics were never an issue. In point of fact, Dad was more likely to have gotten in trouble because his standards were higher than for some specific power actor(s) who controlled whether he stayed in or left the community. Properly disciplining the wrong kid was a job security issue for my Dad.
In his last assignment, when my youngest brother graduated from high school, the high school baseball team won the State High School Baseball Championship. The baseball coach became the new Superintendent, replacing Dad. That’s how it went.
A week after the op ed, I am very, very comfortable that I did not overstate the case.
The words I used in the op ed that I choose to highlight now are Public Servant, and Due Process. Public School employees were and in many ways are still considered to be like a Hired Man or Housekeeper; to keep some stability in the relationships, the due process rights enshrined in teacher contracts need to be kept in force.
My parents were great teachers, and they deserved better than they got.
As it goes in the profession of teaching, there were small victories on occasion.
In Dad’s files I came across a high school graduation announcement including a male students photo and name. The card was dated for a specific year, so I knew in what town they had been living. “These Keepsakes are presented with My Deepest Appreciation and Gratitude for the Educational Opportunities that you have given me” said the printed text, and below was a handwritten note to “Mr. Bernard, I would like to express to you my deepest appreciation for the help you have given me the past two years. I know we have had our disagreements, but I guess everyone has them. Anyway, I can see now that everything was for my own good. Thank you. Sincerely, _____”
I didn’t know the student or the surname, so I asked my siblings who had lived in this particular town, if they knew this boy. One wrote back, noting, to be polite, that the kid was not a prize.
I noted back that teachers tend to keep these kinds of notes – they’re validation for the impossible task they try to perform under sometimes very difficult circumstances.
That student from almost 50 years ago will get his announcement back, if I can locate him. I wonder how he turned out. Stay tuned.
*
Addenda: In the Star Tribune comments noted above, I filed three of my own. Here they are:
Here’s a comment I made to “the cuckingstool” blog: it sort of sums it up for me. In addition I am including two comments I posted on the STrib website on the issue.
To Cuckingstood: I didn’t realize I’d become famous (or infamous) when I submitted this op ed earlier this week. I was writing from the heart. I was primarily reacting to the Newsweek cover story on getting rid of “bad teachers”, in conjunction with an earlier, accidental, discovery in December ’09 that there was some kind of organized covert attempted assault on teacher seniority in Minneapolis. I had read an earlier opinion in the STrib in December, along the lines of and probably closely related to the Samuels column, but can’t honestly say I’ve read the most recent Samuels et al post in its entirety.
Again, I wasn’t responding to Samuels.
Last I looked, there are nearly 40 comments on my STrib op ed, two of the final ones written by me. I make a couple of recommendations there, particularly about the need for true dialogue on the issues (which will be extremely difficult due to the obvious and quite certainly orchestrated attack mode against basic teacher protections like seniority and due process, and the unions which work to protect their members.) Nonetheless, true DIALOGUE amongst the warring parties is needed.
I have absolutely no beef against innovations like Teach for America, but there has to be a process in place to not have it end-around (and destroy) the basic rights of those already in the system.
*
Personal additions by myself to the submissions at the Minneapolis Star Tribune
After a day on-line
I wrote the commentary and have read all of the over 30 comments thus far, plus a dozen more received at home from persons who knew my parents and/or myself. Both Dad and Mom were professionals in every sense of the word and had high expectations for their children and their students. They were pretty typical of teachers in those small towns then, and now. At times Dad’s high expectations collided with some lower individual or community expectation, Power intervened, and lesser standards prevailed and Dad was gone. I can give examples. Being teacher or chief administrator in even a small district had its risks. Unions enhance public education and quality of society generally, but they represent a threat to some for assorted reasons, none truly related to quality. Are unions perfect? Or all school employees? By no means. They are human, like every other profession or institution. But they very significantly help rather than hinder the progress of society. Dad and Mom are long gone, but by no means forgotten. It would be my hope that this column leads to some true community dialogue on the topic at issue. I’m glad I had an opportunity to represent teachers. I hope I contributed a little. I think I did. Dick Bernard Woodbury
*
Probably my final comment, at the Star Tribune website:
To: “Thanks for the article and comment, Dick” (and others as well)
At the end of my second comment (above, “After a day on-line”) I say I “hope that this column leads to some true community dialogue on the topic at issue.” This will be difficult, as “dialogue” does not presume a conclusion before or even following the conversation, but perhaps some understanding might flow from the conversation. Dialogue is not some comment like, “get rid of seniority”, or “fire bad teachers”. My understanding, after a lifetime (literally) in and around public education is that, for example, pay scales were unilateral creations of school boards to deal with a problem: they were initially attempts to differentiate and reward people in their employ who had more training and experience, probably more responsibilities, and thus of greater value to the system. Teacher Unions were late into the process of developing salary schedules. As one octogenarian friend wrote to me, yesterday, when he began teaching in southern Ohio, teachers were regularly let go because younger, less expensive teachers were available and saving money (not quality) entered in. I don’t think pay was a factor in my Dad’s case, at least during the years that he was called Superintendent, and I was alive. He and I talked often about his experiences. My plea is, to all parties, dialogue, to at least attempt to understand. For a moment, leave Power at the door (very, very hard to do, especially for those with the Power.) I appreciate the Star Tribune’s printing my column. Due to editorial limits on number of words, I could not write at as great a length as I would have liked. Dick Bernard, Woodbury MN
*
On dialogue, taken from a column I wrote on “Truth” December 25, 2008. accessible here.
I have long been taken with a quotation I saw in Joseph Jaworsky’s book, “Synchronicity, the Inner Path of Leadership” (1996). Preceding the chapter on “Dialogue: The Power of Collective Thinking”, Jaworsky included the following quote from David Bohms “On Dialogue”. It speaks to this business of talking with, rather than talking to or at others:
“From time to time, (the) tribe (gathered) in a circle.
They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader. And everybody could participate.
There may have been wise men or wise women who were listened to a bit more – the older ones – but everybody could talk. The meeting went on, until it finally seemed to stop for no reason at all and the group dispersed. Yet after that, everybody seemed to know what to do, because they understood each other so well. Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.”
*
Minneapolis Star Tribune March 11, 2011:
Dick Bernard: Don’t forget those good old days for educators
DICK BERNARD
It seems, from a flurry of commentaries and letters in recent months, that it is again open season on public school teachers, and particularly their unions.
The mantra is always the same: the union is protecting bad teachers and it’s against doing good things, like getting rid of supposedly lifetime no-cut contracts.
Hardly ever is there real evidence of these failings. To make the charge is sufficient evidence.
I plead guilty to having worked full time for 27 years as a teachers union representative (MEA/Education Minnesota). I am further guilty of having taught public school for nine years before that. Long retired, I now have seven grandkids in public schools and a daughter who’s a principal of a large middle school.
I guess I know a bit about the subject at hand.
There is another credential I possess as well. I grew up (born in 1940) in the good old days when teachers had virtually no rights. Both of my parents were career public school teachers from 1929 through 1971. (Mom stayed at home raising her preschool kids for 13 of those years.)
We lived in small towns in a neighboring state. During my growing-up years (I’m the eldest sibling), we moved to eight communities. In each, Dad was called superintendent, but actually was a teaching principal, the administrator who was accountable to the local school board. Later, younger siblings followed my parents to two more towns, until the youngest graduated from high school in 1966.
My parents were outstanding teachers and outstanding citizens of their communities. I know. One or the other was my teacher for my last five years of public school. All five of their kids achieved at least a bachelor’s degree and all have had long productive careers.
But we moved often, and very often that move was necessitated by Dad being fired, in one or another odd and sometimes innovative way.
These were the good old days of “at will” contracts. All it took was some disgruntled citizen who knew the right people to dispatch these outsiders at the annual contract renewal time. (In my files I have nearly every one of those single sheet “contracts” signed by my parents in their careers.)
Dad always took a philosophical view of the firings, but down deep, I think they hurt him deeply. Recently I came across an essay he wrote about the various ways he was fired during his long career. It was funny, in a very sad way.
Protections that are revolting to some — things like due process, seniority, continuing contract — came about because of abundant abuses in those good old days when the teacher was, literally, a “public servant.”
It’s much nicer to just label some generic teacher as “bad,” and then to blame the evil union for protecting his or her right to due process.
I’d suggest that those who wish to eliminate teacher rights and defang teacher unions had best be very careful lest they get what they pray for. They would not like the results.
Are there “bad teachers”? Of course. Just as there are bad parents, bad executives, bad politicians, bad journalists. We know them when we see them.
Or do we?
Those seeking to get rid of seniority and the like can find more constructive ways to help public education.
Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.
Dick Bernard, Woodbury, is a retired teacher and union representative.

#152 – Dick Bernard: Who deserves medical care? A personal experience.

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Recently I attended a greatly informative information meeting on the realities about, and need for, Universal Health Care. The meeting was facilitated by the Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition.
The experience led me to recall my own personal history, which was published as a column in today’s edition of the Woodbury (MN) Bulletin. The column follows:
Forty-five years ago this month my wife, not yet 22, was actively engaged in the very difficult work of dying. Our first child was not yet one year old. We lived in a tiny apartment in the small town in western North Dakota where I was teaching school.
Barbara, who had kidney disease, was too weak to take care of her son; she was in the hospital about as much as she was at home. I took our son to the babysitter each morning.
At the end of May, 1965, I came home to pick up some materials I had forgotten, and found Barbara unconscious on the floor. I carried her down the stairs to the car, drove her to the local hospital, where she was transferred immediately to the hospital in Bismarck.
She had no alternative, they said, but to have a kidney transplant.
We had no insurance.
Finally University Hospital admitted her; she was there for almost two months, and she died July 24, 1965, leaving me with a year old son and medical debts equal to almost four times my to-be teacher salary.
I was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, but was saved by North Dakota Public Welfare which agreed to pay the University Hospital portion of the bill; and by one hospital which forgave my bill with them. When it was all over, I owed about a year’s salary worth of bills, which then became manageable.
Six days after she died, two days after she was buried, Medicare was signed into Law, July 30, 1965.
To me, that government action was totally irrelevant, then.
Years and years have passed, and now I’m well into my Medicare years, and, if anything, over-insured with things like Long Term Care insurance, hoping that I have the right coverage. Unlike most, I can afford this luxury.
Back then in 1963, two weeks out of the Army and in a new job and in a new marriage, I passed on signing up for Blue Cross coverage so, somebody can say, it was my fault we were uninsured. Truth be told, even then, knowing what I know now, my wife would have been excluded due to an unknown (to us) pre-existing condition. The kidney disease did not manifest until shortly after I declined to sign up for the insurance.
I look at the current health care debate, the information and the abundant misinformation, through the lens of my own past. It is, I guess, a luxury that I have.
Now there’s group insurance – for the fortunate; and because of government foresight in the same year my wife died, Medicare for we fortunate elders.
There is absolutely no excuse for us to quibble and squabble over who deserves to be insured in this still wealthy country of ours. It is – or it should be – a basic and equal human right for every one of us, no questions asked.
At minimum, our kids and grandkids, faced with greater future uncertainties than we had to face, deserve our foresight more than our selfishness.
I urge you to learn more, and truly dialogue more, about this most critical issue. An excellent source of information is www.muhcc.org, a group dedicated to moving us from a patchwork and unfair system of health care, to more universal care. Doubtless there are other sources of information, but this is a place to start.

#148 – Dick Bernard: Harry Reid and me.

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So, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid is being drawn and quartered for remarks made about candidate Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election. “There but for the grace of God go I”, and probably most everyone else, of any ethnicity, anywhere.
As a good friend of mine is wont to say “give me a break!”
Let’s take two days ago, just for instance.
It was Sunday, and I was at Church, this particular day taking care of a social justice table about my particular passion, Haiti.
A few of us were visiting at the neighboring table, including a man of, shall we say, very dark complexion, and an interesting accent to his English. “Where’re you from?”, I asked, since I was curious.
“Minnesotan”, he said…and it took awhile for his puckish grin to appear. He’d heard this one before.
It was awkward for a bit. He was Ethiopian, he finally said, had been here for quite a long while. There are plenty of Christians in Ethiopia, and also, as I began to insert foot in mouth once again, Jews as well – I’d seen a group of these black Ethiopian Jews in Israel in 1996….
Upstairs in church my long-time and great friend John was ushering. We said ‘hello’ as usual, and I got to thinking back two or three years ago when he and another friend of mine in another state were helping me set up an earlier rendition of this blog. I sent a brief e-mail to the other guy about my African-American friend, John, but by mistake I copied John on the e-mail.
I immediately apologized to John for the stupidity – his ethnicity had absolutely nothing to do with anything I was talking about with the other guy – and the matter was over in an instant. My guess is that John is used to gaffes like mine on the race issue. But it has stuck in my mind. And perhaps in his, too.
The one who says that they’ve never thought, or talked, negatively or apprehensively about someone who looks different than they do is not being truthful. I’ve been to homogeneous countries where most everybody looked alike (except for we tourists) and we were all white.
We grow up with said and unsaid messages that are imprinted.
I do family history, and I was taken aback when Aunt Mary on my German side, born in 1913 and lifelong North Dakotan, wrote in the early 1990s about the horses she remembered on the North Dakota farm. King, Queen, Kernal, Sally, Nelly, Sylvia, then “I think Old George and Nigger were part bronco”, Prince, Lady…. Horses were truly a part of the family in those old days, and, I suppose, “Nigger” was a black horse, but….
(I picked these words out of the family history I wrote. Initially I was going to edit out that word, but I’m glad I didn’t…some years later we found a batch of letters from 1905-06 from the farm kin in Wisconsin where on occasion “nigger” and “Jew” popped in as well.)
It’s a problem, and Harry Reid will survive it – since, after all, it’s rank hypocrisy for anyone to cast judgement on the man for such a statement in our still race-sensitive society. Similarly, it is unfair to “judge the book by its cover”…being white, or black (or blue or green or whatever) is no criteria for goodness, or badness.
This goes all ways, and it’s no fun to experience it first hand.
I remember my first trip to Haiti in 2003. I’d been there all of two days, and we were being briefed by victims of heinous crimes in the slums of Port au Prince during the 1991-94 coup time. It was very, very powerful. At the end, we went around to shake hands with the participants, men and women. One of the men refused my hand. I hadn’t said a word in the presentation, and I knew nothing about Haiti. I reminded him of someone, I’d guess. I wonder who.
Best we all learn by bits and pieces. It’s all we can do.

#142 – Madeline Simon: A New Years Day Reflection

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It’s New Year’s Day 2010, often a time for reflection, and I guess I am feeling a little “bloggy.” That’s not foggy or hung over, and no, I am not going to start a blog.
A couple of things I pondered today:
First, I thought of a couple of wonderful large black raspberries I ate last night which had been brought by someone at the party and included in a fruit mix. Normally, we are looking at or considering a lot of issues, which I don’t need to explain, about where food comes from and how, etc. I thought today about those raspberries and pictured the sunshine, the plant, its environment, and other things necessary for the raspberries to have grown. Throughout most of human history, including our country’s, and as an important part of my own personal history, people have always known where their food came from and most often they saw and raised and picked the product themselves.
As a child I picked berries on my grandfather’s North Dakota farm, and those berries we kids didn’t eat while picking were put in pint/quart containers and loaded into the transport box lift on the back of my grandfather’s small tractor and hauled to the small grocery store in the small town some few miles away.
I also recalled my experiences sitting on a fruit crate with my babushka riding on that lift behind the tractor into town.
New Years Eve, 2009, I didn’t know where those berries came from.
We do indeed live in a “Global Village.”
Second, I was talking recently with the gardener who does tree trimming in the winter about having seen a couple of young deer in my yard with antlers engaged in practice for the first time. He told me of two deer during rutting season who were found drowned with their antlers still stuck together.
I guess nature can also tell us that you might win the battle and still lose your life.
Happy, Healthy and Peaceful New Year!!!

#140 – Dick Bernard: 500 years

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Happy New Year, and new Decade!
2009 ends today. Much of this past year my personal endeavors have been around family history projects.
Since late summer, I’ve been tackling an immense task: trying to summarize 400 years of the recorded history of my average and ordinary French-Canadian families experience in North America. (My father was French-Canadian, his ancestry going back to the early 1600s in what is now known as Quebec.) I’m nearing completion of the project, which I’m entitling “The First 300 Years”, summarizing the most difficult to access part: the 300 years preceding my Dad’s birth December 22, 1907. (Quebec was established in July, 1608.)
Of course, those 400 years are just a moment in the existence of humanity; 400 years in France is modern history. But in North American and American history, 400 years is a long, long time.
Normally a family history project about an ordinary family is plagued by a lack of data. For me, I was plagued by so much data it was difficult to know where to start, and what to include or leave out. I finally broke that psychological log-jam, and I think the end result (which ultimately will be on the web, perhaps in February of 2010), will probably be about 150 pages of work.
I thought I had completed the project of summarizing those 300 years in mid-November, 2009, and, in fact, I printed the first copy in mid-November, and sent out the draft to 35 people during that same week.
During that very week in November, it happened that the television was carrying a series of commercials produced by a natural gas producing association, and a couple of times their ad featured a young Mom and her little girl invited, by her Mom, to blow out 100 candles, each symbolizing a year of natural gas left for we consumers. Of course, blowing out those 100 candles would be quite a chore for a little girl, and that was noted by the Mom.
The point of that commercial, and the other companion ads, was that there is at least 100 years worth of natural gas left in this country; suggesting this to be a long, long time. “Not to worry.” I watched the screen, which is next to our natural gas fireplace, and I thought of this little girl and her Mom in context with the 400 years I’d been reviewing for the prior few months, and the hundreds and thousands of years of earlier human history.
What a distinction.
My Dad was born 102 years ago…when he came on the scene there was scarcely any use of that resource, natural gas. In fact, his ancestors (and mine) in North America likely didn’t know there was such a resource until late in the 19th century, 250 years into their arrival in the New World.
Now the ad was saying that we had about 100 years left of that single resource, and directly implying that 100 years is a very long time.
I wanted to see that ad again, so that I could write exactly what the screen “Mom” was saying to her “daughter”, but it didn’t air again. Perhaps someone thought better of the idea of using that little girl as a prop for a resource that was rapidly disappearing. I don’t know.
Having looked at my family history from 1608-1907 – I’m 12th generation in North America; and knowing my family history from 1907 to the present; and knowing how we have become a society that lives for the moment, and really relies on fantasy views of the present and future reality, I wonder what’s ahead for us as a society in the next, very short, century.
That little girl in the commercial, and most likely her stage Mom, will own the results of our helter-skelter squandering of our earth.
Meanwhile, that natural gas fireplace by the television continues to bring warmth….
We can live in the past; we can pretend that today and tomorrow are all that matters; I hope we all look far more to the future consequences of present actions.
We can start by demanding that our lawmakers take a long-term and global view as they make policy that will affect the generations that follow us.
Then, we might have a Happy New Year.
And give those who follow some chance for many Happy New Years to come.

#135 – Dick Bernard: Dad's Shoes

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Today is my Dad’s 102nd birthday (he passed away in 1997, not quite reaching 90.) He’s more on my mind than usual this year because, for the last several months, I’ve been trying to summarize 400 years of his French-Canadian ancestry in North America. I’m in the home stretch, now, thanks to many people. I’m calling the document “The First 300 Years”. It ends with Dad’s birth, December 22, 1907, in Grafton ND. It has been a fascinating, difficult, project. I’ll be glad when I can say I’ve finished it (probably in January.)

Josephine and Henry Bernard in 1908, with youngster Henry, and his sister Josie.

Josephine and Henry Bernard in 1908, with youngster Henry, and his sister Josie.


Dad was a tall man: he reached his adult height of 6’3″ about 8th grade – very unusual for those early days. His height gave him no particular advantage. He was a gangly kid, and he had big, flat feet – size 12 if I recall rightly. His nickname of “Boy” (when he was born the doctor said “it’s a boy”) stuck with him his entire life.
Dad’s big feet helped caused me a broken leg in 7th grade. He had a hand-me-down pair of racing skates – the ones with the very long blades – which were size 13. This particular day, at the schoolyard pond across the street from our house, I put on those huge skates, ended up on the end of “crack the whip” with a bunch of kids, fell, and broke my leg. It was my first experience with Dad’s shoes.
I got to thinking about Dad and his shoes a few days ago, when I took down his insulated walking boots from the shelf. I like to walk outdoors year around, and sometime back around Dad’s death, I “inherited” the walking shoes he used in the winter at Our Lady of the Snows, the place at which he lived his last ten years, in Belleville IL. I’m size 10 1/2, so his boots are a little large, but with heavier socks they fit just fine, and they’ll do me all winter. Unlike Dad, they haven’t “kicked the bucket” yet, and my guess is that they have more years left in them.
Here they are, a couple of days ago…
Bernard, Henry Shoes001
A few years ago, one Christmas, I gave each of my kids and the then-grandkids one pair each of my beat-up old shoes (I don’t easily throw stuff in the garbage!) I’m a couple of grandkids behind (this year they’ll get theirs – I’ve got two pair in mind!) The gift of the old shoes was, I admit, a bit on the odd side, but it was a gift.
On this day, Dad’s 102nd birthday, Dad’s Big Shoes come to mind. Whatever his good points, or deficiencies (like us all, he certainly wasn’t perfect), he cobbled me together, and then sent me on my merry way to practice, imperfectly, life.
I’d guess that every one of us, in one way or another, male or female, had similar Dad or Mom stories…about their Big Shoes and how they helped us grow to what we have become.
Doubtless my own kids have Dad stories about me.
I hope most of the stories are at least a tiny bit positive!
Happy Birthday, Dad, and Merry Christmas.

#133 – Dick Bernard: The Dust Bowl

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COMMENTS follow this post.
Last evening I watched most of a History Channel program on the horrors of the Dust Bowl of mid-America in the 1930s. Interspersed with film and commentary from the actual events, were recollections of survivors of the Dirty Thirties, as well as a fascinating effort by scientists to reenact in the present day what people living in farm houses back then would have actually experienced.
The present day experimenters could turn off the wind and dust making machines at will, and did. They could not tolerate what the residents in the 1930s either survived, or didn’t, when the horrible winds and dust storms and plagues of insects and rabbits and on and on destroyed much of the midwest, especially in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, but all throughout the northern plains as well.
My uncle, soon to be 85, remembered what he recalled as the worst year, 1934, in North Dakota. He was 9 years old. It was horrid. There was no escape.
To have gone through it was to be seared forever…or was it?
I was born in 1940, young enough to miss the worst years of the Depression, and to remember some things about the last years of World War II.
Memory or not, I was totally immersed in the attitudes generated by these life-altering times in American history.
The 30s and first half of the 1940s were times of self-sacrifice, and a need for working together. The nature of humans was no different then than now…the assorted attitudes that plague us now, plagued them then. The difference was that there was, for them, no real choice but to concentrate on survival. Prosperity for the masses was not an active dream. Surviving the dirty thirties, and then getting the war over with were the priorities. People had to pull together. Those who didn’t were noticed….
1945 brought the end of the war, and after almost 20 years of hardship, life began anew. The baby boom began. Today, one of my cousins is 63 – she was one of the first of millions of baby boom babies.
That boom was to last until the end of the 1960s.
An attitude began then that, I believe, has become our fatal flaw as a society.
Those who’d been through the Great Depression and World War II in sundry ways made a pledge to their kids and grandkids to protect them from all that was bad in those years. The boomers made a similar contract with their kids.
A consequence of this new contract, in my opinion, is to diminish the values that allowed America to survive the bad times: a collective will to sacrifice and to work together. Looking out for #1 became a primary value.
In the 1930s, it was not until a dust storm reached Washington D.C. in the later 1930s that the then-Congress began to enact crucial legislation for the dust bowl states. It was a classic “NIMBY” (“not in my backyard”) response to a huge problem. Until the problem was virtually unsolvable, the Congress was essentially an inert mass. The rains came almost before the actions of the People’s House in Washington. Even then, a sense of unity among the “united” states was tenuous.
In a lot of ways we are in a similar quandary today, only much, much worse in long-term implications.
We dodged a financial catastrophe by a whisker this year, and we’re now living as if there wasn’t – and won’t be – a problem later.
Many pretend that climate change is no longer an issue, because some pilfered e-mails allegedly prove it isn’t a huge future problem.
We dismiss a coming crisis as fossil fuels become ever more scarce…and expensive; we ignore water tables receding due to use for irrigation – water resources that cannot be replenished by putting a hose in the ground.
Too many of the same heroes who are extolled as part of the Greatest Generation are now saying that the benefits they have reaped, like Social Security and Medicare, are too expensive to provide for the generations following them. Ironically many of today’s generation seem to agree: it is every one for him or herself. The youngsters too young to decide – our children and grandchildren? Their problem.
We are back to the individualism that led to the ship sinking with the late 1920s financial catastrophe (my Dad’s parents experienced the bank closing at the same time as Grandpa’s employer shut its doors in 1927, two years before 1929.) Both my families were casualties of the Great Depression. It took a long while to recover, somewhat.
Only time will tell if I and people like me are “chicken littles” saying “the sky is falling”.
My guess is we have a pretty clear view of the future if societal attitudes do not dramatically change: not pleasant, indeed, grim. Indeed, even deep change now may be too late…but its worth a try.
Bob Barkley, Dec. 20, 09: In regard to your piece, “Dust Bowl,” it occurred to me today, as I was once again trying to make inroads with my right-leaning sister, that attitudes have context. They don’t occur in a vacuum. For example most Americans believe what they were taught about the nations history, but that version most of us were exposed to was seriously skewed. Consequently I sent my sister two books — both by Howard Zinn: The People’s History of the United States, and A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.
Your story regarding the dust bowl provides part of your context. I was raised well into my teens in Jersey City, NJ during the Boss Hague days. I was in a Republican household in a Democratic stronghold. And my Dad was a Lutheran minister in an overwhelmingly Catholic community. Those were two strong components of the context for my beliefs.
Until we know the context in which people think we will not understand their beliefs. Your rural upper Midwest context is foreign to me. This why we must listen deeply to really understand others. It’s hard but essential.
Dick’s response to Bob: Excellent. We’ve ‘talked’ a bit before about the Jersey City days. Don’t recall the exact context, but something I’d written or sent around jogged your memories of the tense years in Jersey City. I think the primary relevance of your comment is that we all need to ‘farm’ our own circles, since our group experiences are so unique…’city slickers’ out east have not a clue what farmers in the midwest are about, and vice versa.

#127 – Dick Bernard: Pearl Harbor. Once, we were young

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Comments at the end of this post. Here is the Minneapolis Star Tribune story of the event. My uncle is mentioned in the story. I happened to be next to the reporter who was covering the story, and luckily had an extra copy of the 9 pages of archival materials I had just given Mr. Wentzlaff.
Sunday, December 7, 1941, my Dad’s brother, my uncle Frank, went down with the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Most every Pearl Harbor Day I witness Frank’s death – the explosion of the Arizona is an iconic photograph. Flags can be and often are flown at half-staff this day.
Today, I took the time to go over to the Veteran’s Service Building to meet one of the Arizona survivors. Ed Wentzlaff of Milaca is now 92, two years younger than my Uncle Frank would have been, and a most engaging man. We visited very briefly – he was in demand – and I gave him a packet of information about my Uncle and his time on the Arizona, including the 1938 Thanksgiving dinner menu for the Arizona, a dinner Ed may have had. He recognized the name of the ship commander, Rear Admiral I. C. Kidd who, he said, saved his life. Kidd perished that day, later awarded the Medal of Honor. Ed was taken to safety in Admiral Kidd’s boat.

Ed Wentzlaff, USS Arizona survivor, December 7, 2009

Ed Wentzlaff, USS Arizona survivor, December 7, 2009


Uncle Frank was 26 years old on that fateful December day in 1941. He had been on the Arizona since January of 1935, and in a letter to my Dad, dated November 7, 1941, he talked about a “little girl up in Washington”, probably Bremerton, who he apparently planned to marry.
Ed was to be discharged from the Navy the next day….
The Navy had been good for Frank. It was a job in the 1930s, and not a bad job at that. Three squares, a bunk, and opportunities to see exotic places, like Honolulu. I doubt that being killed in the line of duty was much on his mind on December 6 or before.
Frank Bernard, at right, and his cousin and buddy, Marvin Campbell, July 14, 1935. Soon thereafter Frank entered the U.S. Navy.

Frank Bernard, at right, and his cousin and buddy, Marvin Campbell, July 14, 1935. Soon thereafter Frank entered the U.S. Navy.


Frank and over a thousand others died December 7, and many, including on the USS Arizona, survived.
Marvin Campbell, who idolized his cousin, Frank, was already in the Army December 7, 1941, ending the war as a Colonel, at least for a short time, in charge of a prefecture of Japan. He came home and was a successful businessman and a respected community leader.
Ed has his own story, as do they all, those who died, and those who didn’t. Ed is the third Arizona survivor I’ve been privileged to meet over the years. They each had their stories.
There is no other moral to this story, only to remember and share the story…. You may interpret as you wish.
Comments:
Florence Hedeen: “…[We] were shopping downtown today [Dec. 7] when we entered a store where the TV showed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I told the manager that my Uncle Frank went down with the Arizona. He quickly offered to turn off the TV, but I said it’s history and we need to remember it. I never knew Uncle Frank, but I’m quite sure that he, like many others who didn’t face the draft, entered the military for the opportunities it offered, not to fight and die. War never ends because there are no winners, only opponents who want to even the score – now and forever, it seems!”
Mel and Lee Berning: “We seem to forget that day in the mist of time and only bring up the terrible events that ended that terrible war. As a first hand witness to several A-tests I hope that we can put a permanent lid on the use of such devices. I hope that the world will never see those sights again and that some misguided political minded nations do not resort to that force.”

#120 – Dick Bernard: Raining Apples

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Monday and Tuesday I took a trip out to ND to give my Uncle a little help at the farm near Berlin; the place where Mom grew up ‘way back when’. The hardest part of the work is the drive back and forth, though there was some heavy lifting that needs two people. This time the objective was to begin emptying a couple of grain bins.
Once the augur is in place, and hooked up to the power take off of the tractor, the project basically takes care of itself…until the end when some unlucky person has to shovel the last remnants. I was spared that task this trip. Some day I won’t be….
The augur augured, Uncle Vince supervised from the cab of the tractor, and I had some time to wander around the now people-less farmstead. One of the apple trees in the front yard showed evidence of some windfalls, and it was an invitation to a quick lunch. I knew from past experience that these are GOOD eating and pie apples, though the remnants I found this year were on the small side.
The apple trees are now large, and there were still a lot of apples up there in the ‘heavens’ of the top branches. Vince and Edith knew they were there, but too high to harvest by the usual means.
Then came Tuesday.
Tuesday was a windy day – not an unusual occurrence in ND: 15-30 mph they were saying.
There were sufficient windfalls so I decided to make myself useful and pick them up off the ground.
The wind blew, and one dropped to the ground here, another there, sometimes several at once. I’d clean up a piece of ground, and a half dozen apples would be there in no time.
I found the task changing from ordinary work to fun. For a time, there, I felt like a kid, hoping that one of those free-fall apples would ‘bop me on the noggin’, but none did. By the time I finished, I had nearly a bushel of those windfalls gathered in one place, and then in a tub.
While I didn’t grow up on the farm, I visited there a lot when a kid and adult. So it was possible to connect the dots between the very hard manual work of the old farm days, and the occasional simple fun that visited those scattered patches of humanity in the simpler times of America years ago.
Like raining apples.
Apples Nov 10 09003
Happy Thanksgiving.