Dear Folks,

Let me take you back to those earlier days of childhood and young adulthood to share some memories of my brother.

Maybe you knew Bernie from student days, maybe from his years as math teacher and high-school computer programmer, maybe as folk singer and folk musician, maybe as loving dad, grandfather, cousin, uncle, maybe a bit of much or some of the above, and surely as a good friend or just a real nice guy — but he was also a terrific athlete, and here is my first memory of that.

Picture Bernie, age four, holding a tiny football and grinning as he ran through our cousin David (two years older) and me (three years older).  Now fast forward to junior high school where he was captain of the school’s softball team, and by age 15 could easily hold his own playing sports with the older kids in our Bronx neighborhood. 

Then at Taft High School was on its handball team and was co-captain on its first football team, playing center on offense and linebacker on defense, which for those in the know is equivalent to quarterback on offense. I remember coming back at age 19 from a summer as a counselor at a kids’ camp and finding that Bernie had grown into 190 pounds of muscle, so gone were the days when I could mock wrestle him to a draw. 

Also at Taft HS, Bernie creating cartoons for its school paper.

Then at City College (CCNY), he joined its wrestling team, competing at the 167-pound level.  Didn’t lose a match his senior year, and if memory holds correct never did lose a match his entire time.  Oh yes, his teammates voted him its co-captain, sharing honors with a blind wrestler.

I saw him at some of those matches. The most graceful athlete, and quick. One second he could be seen upright, maneuvering, and the next second suddenly dipping down, his opponent upended.

So here’s a wrestling story told by Bernie to me: The college’s wrestling coach — a former champ himself and having developed a wrestler who went on to become a two-time Olympics heavyweight wrestling champ — told Bernie that he was going to take him to the nationals.  “Just come down in weight to 157,” said the coach, because that’s how virtually all of them competed at the higher level.

I watched Bernie losing that weight, ounce by torturous slice of lettuce, and off he and the coach went to the nationals where Bernie won his first match but lost the second on points. “I just couldn't move the guy around,” Bernie mused to me afterward.

Fast forward again to about three years ago.  Bernie and I were talking wistfully about how great it was to be able to have fond memories, and the story of that wrestling match at the nationals came up.  We were hanging out a week later when Bernie said to me, “Jerry, you’re not going to believe this.  Remember that thing about the nationals when the coach said I should come down to 157 pounds?  I looked up that match, and I couldn’t find myself.  Then I happened to glance at the 167-pound category, and there I was.  Guess what!  The coach forgot that he had told me to come down in weight and instead entered me in the 167 class!”  I (Jerry) tell this tale because many of us may think of him as contending with health issues as he grew older, but he was a great athlete, too, and tried to be a leader in the things he did.

Of Bernie’s earliest years right through the teenage years: Though times were tough financially for our parents because of the Great Depression, food was always on the table and a roof over our heads. Probably because at different times in our childhood and adolescence, we lived with and shared expenses with our maternal grandparents and even a young cousin of ours and an uncle or two, so with all those people living under one roof, something lively was always going on.

Things such as being surrounded by the reflections of several generations, hearing live music played almost daily at home by a maternal grandfather who had been a classical violinist in Ukraine and had became a tailor in America.

Then there was our father, who could play every instrument — you name it:  the violin, piano, piano accordion, harmonica, practically every stringed instrument, including the guitar, which started Bernie on his way, and whose father (our paternal grandfather) had owned a music shop that sold pianos and other instruments.  Add the thrill listening to the adventures of radio’s “The Lone Ranger,” “The Green Hornet” and “The Shadow,” and the fairytales brought to life on “Let’s Pretend” to stir the imagination and shape the soul. 

As to Bernie’s later prowess in math and computers, I remember our mom teaching us how to count by using spoons and forks, and if I was beginning to grasp such concepts at age five, Bernie was beginning at age two.  And she would take us to the library, and if I was reading picture books at age six, Bernie was doing the same at age three.

A word, too, about Bernie the humanist as he liked to think of himself in later years. Started early on.  I remember Bernie joining a social club at college but quitting it cold because of mean joking about other races.  Got that from our father, who held all people worthy of respect and who often saw the worth of a smile before a frown. I think that somehow rubbed off on Bernie, who made that his own, so to speak.   

Add as a teenager, Bernie getting to proudly walk our black-and-white mixed-spitz dog — the nemesis of a turtle named Jelly Beans that had the run of our apartment along with Bernie caring for goldfish and a parakeet, sojourns to the Museum of Natural History and the Bronx Zoo. And all that music all the time and living across a park and playgrounds near the Yankee Stadium and being a folk-music counselor at Camp Arcady where he met Myrna, though Bernie said that being the folk-music counselor wasn't always that glamorous because “while I sat playing, the rest of the counselors were making out.”

Also, hootenannies and being in a folk-music trio called The City Folk that appeared at The Village Gate, which in those days might have been dubbed the Carnegie Hall of folk music. Theodore Bikel was the headliner as The City Folk was introduced as just coming in from a tour in Europe, which let’s say was really their subway ride in from the Bronx and Queens, and the trio appeared twice on folk singer Oscar Brand’s radio show.  And Bernie and some friends making an unannounced pilgrimage to Pete Seeger’s log-cabin home and remembering Pete serving them tea and standing in his doorway playing the banjo as his figure faded from view. 

And Bernie and a couple of guys taking a rowboat from upstate down the Hudson River and them feeling like a toothpick alongside huge barges and me getting a call from midway down the Hudson to come rescue them by car ‘cause their boat had foundered. And camping out with Bernie and a few friends a couple of seasons canoeing to an island on Lake George in the days before motor boats and water skies when you could dip your glass into the lake to drink the purest unadulterated water. And Bernie and Myrna’s later enjoyment of camping trips with their children, and his love of hiking and the outdoors that he instilled in them.

And being on leave from teaching math in a high school as well as being in charge of its programming office in order to lead the NYC Board of Education’s original setup on programming via computer in high schools.  

And telling me that how as a father he would delegate responsibilities to Eric and Amy and it didn’t matter if they messed up, just that they would learn that he trusted them, and all those whimsical things that made Bernie the great brother and guy that he was, though in my head it often feels like was still is is, and that wry sense of humor and the puzzles and word games he did for his children and their children and the music he created and recorded on the five-string banjo and hammered dulcimer and played with so many of you and the dancing and the way he had of making you feel special and that includes everyone and I guess you can fill in the rest.

With love from his brother,

— Jerry