Bernie’s Truck Being Pulled from the Lake Ron AI

No, not that Bernie Madoff! Bernie Schwartz, my cousin. And Bernie wasn't Jewish. He was German Protestant. He was named after a beloved St. Bernard. I know that because his great-grandfather came from Germany sometime before the Civil War and established a homestead in northern Michigan. I'm writing this because Bernie is dead, I think.  But before he went, he made off with a lot of money, I think?  Anyway, it's an interesting story that I thought I would tell you anyway. Like it or not. Money or not

Bernie's grandfather, George Schwartz, grew up hunting and fishing in the remains of the great rape of Michigan forests at the turn-of-the-20th century. When that and his lumberjacking played out, he tried his hand at many businesses, including clam fishing for mother-of-pearl for buttons, cooking in a lumber camp, more lumberjacking, running a resort, managing a hotel, dairy farming, and truck farming. Even went to Alaska once to find gold or work, but that played out like most of his other schemes. 

When the Great Depression got hold of him, he and his strict Mennonite wife had to work hard just to survive. He didn't. He died young of cancer. She died a bit older, but still too young, of cancer. I could blame it on the canned food that they ate or some of the work they did, but I won't. They just died a bit too young of cancer.

Bernie's father, Arnold, or Arnie as they called him, grew up in those Northwoods with his father and caught the hunting and fishing bug. After high school, there wasn't any work in the middle of the Great Depression. So, Arnie rode the rails for a while to California and back but didn't find much but angry railroad detectives who put him in jail for trespassing a few times. After he saw guys getting shot on the trains, Arnie hightailed it home. 

He ended up joining the Civilian Conservation Corps, CCCs, and helped replant part of the trees that were clear-cut for losing farms and creating some of Michigan's state parks and scenic areas. That work lasted about five years and then Arnie began working as a farm hand, bus driver, truck driver, and any other work he could find. 

Arnie got married to a farm girl named Amy and had three kids in rapid succession just before World War II. The second child died in infancy, and, when the war broke out, Arnie headed to Lansing to work in the munitions business. Amy stayed home and took care of the kids. 

With whatever time Arnie had after his long shifts, he hit the bars. At the Iron Wheel, he ran into Rosy the riveter. Not the “Rosy the Riveter,” of World War II fame, but a woman who riveted Jeep bodies, nonetheless. Arnie fell head over heels in love with Rosy but didn't know how to tell his wife Amy about it. Fact is, he didn't. Instead, he enlisted.

Arnie went off to war – WW II. In basic training, the Army learned of his ability to hunt and shoot. Like Sargeant York before him, Arnie had 20-10 eyesight and was a crack shot. The Army immediately sent him to the sniper corps. 

From the time he joined the Army in 1943 until he was discharged in 1945, Arnie was often dropped behind enemy lines by parachute to assassinate key Nazi officials with the help of the underground. Two or three times, he nearly escaped with his life after being tracked and caught by the Gestapo. Each time, the underground intervened and saved him certain death. 

All the killing and stress of his assignments played on his mind, and he came out of the service with a taste for alcohol that was an attempt to drown all the pain he had caused and seen. He had sworn never to tell any of it. So, he drank it away and took its memory to his death. My story here is based on what I found out through secret Army records that were declassified in 1999.

So, it was Arnie's problem that Bernie never knew about that shaped both their lives. In those days we knew nothing of post-traumatic stress syndrome, PTSD. The Army just let those poor, shellshocked warriors back into society to fend for themselves. 

Postwar America was booming, and many veterans made their way very well. However, there were those, like Uncle George, who also divorced his first wife, had seven kids with his Japanese wife, became a New York cab driver, and died of emphysema and alcoholism, alone, in El Paso. 

Or my Uncle Fred who was a medic in World War I. He wasn't even overseas but suffered from having to take care of soldiers returning from Europe and then getting the famous 1918 flu that killed over half of them. Fred made a killing on the stock market until 1929 when it practically killed him. So, he collected coins until his abuse of my aunt and his kids had her put him in a Veterans Home. We are just now learning how so many of those guys suffered without help.

Arnie took another tack. Divorcing his first wife as soon as he mustered out, Arnie married Rosy and moved to Elkhart, Indiana, where he took a few odd jobs until Arnie determined that going into business was the only way he could get ahead. Right after Arnie got back from the war, Bernie was born. 

I remember going to see baby Bernie in the hospital, but Grandma drove the 35 Ford into the ditch, and we never got there. We rolled over once, and I got a big goose egg on my head. Grandma was unhurt but never drove on ice again. Arnie and Rosy named Bernie after Arnie's favorite childhood dog, a St. Bernard that George had called, Jack, but Arnie wanted to call him, Bernie, and the name stuck. Anyway, Bernie Jack Schwartz was just a baby when we would go to Arnie and Rosy's upstairs apartment and Dad would play cards with Arnie while I watched, breathing in the cigarette smoke and taking swigs of their beers. What a good way to get addicted to nicotine and become an alcoholic.

Uncle Arnie always greeted me with a great big smile and a pinch where my neck joined my shoulder between his index finger and thumb. The pain was excruciating and unwelcome. I soon learned how to wiggle out of his grasp and into the room before he could get his pincers on me. That move served me well when bullies moved in for the kill in grade school. One time, while my dad and Uncle Arnie were cussing and trying to beat each other at gin rummy, Uncle Arnie, with the dead serious look in his eye, asked me, "Have you ever seen stars?"

I replied, "Yes, I see them all the time at night."

"No, I don't think you have. Close your eyes and I'll show you what I mean." Uncle Arnie gave me that leering grin I hated.

Like a fool, I closed my eyes and waited to see stars. Uncle Arnie waited a minute and then burned my hand with his cigarette. I jumped up from my chair, shaking my burned hand and yelling, "Hey, you burned my hand! You burned my hand!"

Uncle Arnie only smiled wryly and replied, "I told you that you'd see stars."

Arnie started a pickup camper business that took off like a rocket. In the beginning, he asked my father to join him in the business when he needed capital to get started. Dad told him, "No," because dad had a good job as a game warden for the State of Michigan with good benefits and Uncle Arnie couldn't promise dad anything if he invested his savings and quit his job. 

So, Arnie became the big shot around Elkhart, sponsoring all kinds of the events like the Fourth of July Flotilla and pitching softball at a level that was semi-professional. Arnie started the local fishing and game club and regularly went to Upper Michigan trout fishing and hunting deer in the Madeleine Islands with a bow. The munitions plant Uncle Arnie worked for during the war had a huge fenced in compound around it that was rarely hunted. Somehow, Arnie got permission to hunt with a bow, and the club was regularly getting Boone and Crockett bucks from the place.

A big elm had died from Dutch Elm disease in Arnie's yard. The tree had been cut down and hauled off, but a large stump remained. A hired hand, Buck, was dispatched to remove the stump. Buck came with a double-bladed ax and began chopping away at the stump. 

It took a long time and Bernie, about seven at the time, was watching from the house. He likened Buck's ax to his father's hatchet that Arnie used when they went camping. Bernie told his mom, "I'm going to watch Buck hatch," and bounded happily out the door. Rosy thought nothing of it. Meanwhile, Bernie was watching Buck "hatching" a bit too close. On a backswing, Buck's ax sliced off Bernie's nose.

Rosy heard the screen door slam and Bernie came running into the house yelling, "Buck hatched me! Buck hatched me!" Bernie's nose was lying on his right cheek with blood pouring out everywhere. 

Rosy grabbed a towel in the bathroom, put Bernie's nose back in place and asked him to hold his nose there with the towel while she got in the car and drove him to the doctor. The doctor stitched Bernie's nose back on, but it was always a bit pinched on the left side and a little crooked. 

As handsome as his father was – very attractive to women – Bernie was not, and his crooked nose didn't help. It could've been a lot worse. Bernie could've lost an eye, had brain damage, or lost his life. This was the first of, what Bernie liked to call, "My nine lives," as though he were a cat or something.

Uncle Arnie regularly invited our family to a resort in Northern Michigan for weeks at a time where we would stay on him. It was just another business expense. Arnie bragged that he, "... spent $100 a week on minnows... to catch those big northerns."

Bernie joined me fishing on the lake in a rowboat. Fishing wasn't going well for us kids, but when we came to a channel to another lake, we saw a lot of mud turtles in the lily pads. Bernie knew that Grandpa George liked turtle, except for the part, "where they kept jumping around in the frying pan."

"Hey, let's catch a buncha' turtles that I can take back to Elkhart, sell to my friends, and give some to Grandpa to cook!"

I poled the boat backward through lily pads in the shallow water toward the nostrils of turtles sticking out of the water. As soon as we got close, a turtle would dive to the bottom, thinking it was safe. However, the bottom was only about 18 inches and Bernie could easily reach down and grab it. Within a half-hour we had a boat full of crawling mud turtles. 

When we got back to the dock, my mom and Aunt Rosy were waiting for us. Bernie cried out, "Look Mom, at all the turtles we got! I'm gonna sell some and give the rest to Grandpa to cook."

Aunt Rosy yelled. "Throw those dirty turtles back in the lake, wash your hands, and get on into dinner." So much for Bernie's first entrepreneurial idea at seven years old. It wouldn't be his last. He was soon organizing other kids to mow lawns for him and shovel sidewalks in the winter. Bernie was quite a salesman from the start. Bernie's idol was his father, and he wished to emulate him in every way.

I was five years older and usually beat Bernie at physical or mental games, although Bernie was a fierce competitor like his dad. At 16, I got a Mossberg 16-gauge shotgun for my birthday. It wasn't long before, when we were at Grandpa and Grandma's place, near the Elk River, that we went hunting. Three of us formed a line going down to the river. Bernie was far to my left with another guy between us. Soon, Bernie was out of sight. It also wasn't very long before a partridge took off from my right across in front of me, disappearing behind some brush. The bird reappeared and then glided down towards the river. I fired one shot at its disappearing tail.

Suddenly, we heard Bernie yelling loudly. “I've been shot. I've been shot. You shot me. You shot me!” We ran to his aid. We found Bernie on the path beside the river with his hat off, rubbing a red spot on his temple just above the right ear. “That partridge almost hit me in the head, and then, Bam! You shot me in the head!”

“I didn’t. I shot at a partridge. Why did you go out ahead like that where we couldn't see you?” To avoid a shouting match, we both stopped accusing, and took the trail to the right along the river. Bernie had just survived his second brush with death.

Before long, a female mallard took off from the riverbank. I instinctively raised my shotgun and caught the duck about 6 feet from the water. The mallard fell into the middle of the Elk River and begin floating downriver. Before long we came to a road bridge over the river and walked up onto it, watching the mallard float down toward us. Using our Grandfather George's 22 rifle, Bernie was doing a little plinking. Before I could stop him, he shot at the duck. “That's my duck,” Bernie proclaimed. “That's my duck, I shot it.”

Once again, I had to step in to make an 11-year-old understand. “That's my duck. You are shooting at a dead duck that I shot.”

I had already broken Bernie's wooden bow earlier that day to my father's dismay. Dad told me, “Don't you ever play with anyone's things again, you hear?” I heard loud and clear and didn't want any more trouble. It seemed like I was always getting into it.

“Okay, you can have the duck.” I groaned. We fished that duck from the river just downstream from the bridge. Bernie carried it all the way home.

When we got to Grandma and Grandpa's place, Bernie was swinging the mallard by the neck as we came through the door, singing, “I shot a duck!  I shot a duck!” At the top of his lungs. Uncle Arnie was very pleased at his son's accomplishment. I was pleased that he was unhurt. Bernie's second life was used. More would come.

A second venture of Bernie's was some wine that he made from dandelions and elderberries he picked with his best friend. Bernie showed it to me.  He had made quite a crock full that wasn't quite ready to drink when I was there. Didn't get to taste it. One day when the wine had finished fermenting, Bernie and his best friend drank it all and got drunk. Arnie beat him for that indiscretion. But Bernie still worshiped his father.

When Bernie was 14, a 13-year-old friend of his decided to take his father's pickup for a joy ride. Bernie was a willing conspirator and riding in the passenger seat when they drove off the road into a deep ditch where Bernie ended up under the truck with gasoline dripping down on him. Some neighbors came to the boys' rescue and lifted the truck off Bernie before anything caught fire. Hence, Bernie escaped death for the third time in his short life so far. He wasn't injured except for some scrapes and the taste of gasoline on his lips. 

As the 1950s came to an end, so did its prosperity. Recession put pressure on Arnie's business, and it was failing. Arnie had also engaged in several other business deals that fell through and gambled too much. He got tired of Rosy nagging him about the business and the needs of the kids. Thought about a divorce but knew that it would ruin him – tie him down until the kids were all 18.

He took solace in a local bar maid. Like Arnie, Victoria Hamilton had five children. They had a thing for each other. Something he had lost with Rosy. He searched for a way out and decided that the only thing that he could do would be to disappear. Arnie went to county court records and discovered that there was a Barry Hopkins that had died the year before who was his same age. Arnie went down to a local cemetery and found Barry's gravestone. 

Continue reading what Arnie did in Part 2

Copyright 2011 © Ronald W. Hull

4/2/11

Second Revision: 4/17/25