Bernie’s Truck Being Pulled from the Lake Ron AI

Arnie then found it easy to get a Social Security card and driver’s license in Barry Hopkins's name. Arnie encouraged Victoria to do the same and stored all this information away in a safe deposit box he established in a local bank where he also opened a savings account in Hopkins's name.

At the same time, Grandpa Schwartz began showing the signs of a hard-working life. He had a stroke at 68. While recovering from the stroke, George Schwartz learned that he had diabetes. I went fishing with him one time and he seemed to lack energy, saying, “I'm just waiting for the good Lord to take me.” Well, he didn't have to wait long. Three years later, George Schwartz had another stroke that put him at death's door.

I was in my first year of college at Purdue when I heard the news that Grandpa had died. I had planned to go home that weekend anyway. drove my old rusted out wreck to Elkhart on my way home that Friday night. When I got to Uncle Arnie's place to stay the night, Aunt Rosy was beside herself with grief. She broke down while she was making supper for me and her kids. Bernie hadn't said anything, so I didn't know what was coming.

“I don't know what to tell you, but Grandpa Schwartz had been asking for Arnie all week before he died. I had to keep telling him that Arnie was on a business trip and would be back soon. But he never came back.” 

Rosy was bawling by then, but she continued. “He took $10,000 from our business account, nearly all we had, and said he had to go to Kansas City to buy some machinery. 

That was two weeks ago. When he didn't come back that weekend, I called the police, and they found his car at the rest stop just this side of the Illinois line on Interstate 80. It had been snowing and there was one set of tracks going to the trunk of the car and then leaving. Otherwise, the car contained nothing that could lead us to finding him. I called the FBI, but they said that they could do nothing because his car hadn't crossed the state line into Illinois. The guys at work couldn't tell me anything about where he was going and what machinery he was buying. We called everybody we knew in Kansas City but came up with nothing for the police.” Rosy kept wiping her eyes as she fried us up some supper.

We ate in silence and went to bed early, never saying another word about Arnie's disappearance. The next day, at Grandpa, Schwartz's viewing before the funeral, when Bernie went to view his grandfather, he broke down crying. Even at 14, Bernie was a tough kid; but not tough enough to deal with losing both his father and grandfather in the span of two weeks.

By the time he was 16, Bernie rewarded himself for his hard work and sense of loss by buying a 650 cc Triumph Bonneville motorcycle. That bike was lean and fast, and the only time I rode on it with him, he carved the curves of Highway 59 at 90 mph like sliced bread, with only his right hand on the handlebar while talking to me over his shoulder. I felt a false sense of security despite his reckless bravado. 

We were playing cards at the house. Every time a hand closed, and Aunt Rosy was shuffling the cards, Bernie would jump up, run outside, start up the Bonneville, and rip around the house in the yard. And then he would shut the machine off, run inside, and resume the game. After doing this several times, his mother got irritated and told him to stop. 

This was an example of the sort of reckless compulsion that would haunt Bernie for the rest of his life. Bernie smoked cigarettes like a machine, bit his nails to the quick, and had the worst case of psoriasis I've ever see.

The grocery store was a short walk away on highway 59. When his mother asked him to go get some groceries, Bernie took his bike. By the time he reached the intersection of 59 and County Q, Bernie was doing about 60 miles an hour.  When a car coming from the south on Q ran the stop sign in front of him, Bernie had to lay the bike down as he flew over the hood of the car, did a flip, and landed on his feet on the other side. As the car sped off to the east on 59, Bernie collected himself, got back on the bike and started it, and then took off down the highway in pursuit. With hardly a scratch, Bernie missed death for a fourth time.

The next summer, Bernie spent some time with his favorite Uncle Rock who had a bait shop on the Brule River. Bernie went out trout fishing one day on the Bonneville and headed into a curve too fast. He woke up five hours later with a broken collarbone and a headache. For the fifth time, death had passed Bernie by. It seemed like nothing could stop this kid, no matter how reckless he behaved. 

Five weeks later, I joined him, with a borrowed boat at a friend's cabin on a small flowage. For much of the lake, the shoreline was dotted with submerged stumps and overhanging brush. I water skied first and made sure that I stayed clear of the stumps and brush. 

When it was Bernie's turn, he spent a lot of time straddling the stumps and rubbing up against the brush on the shoreline, as if courting disaster. I could just imagine the pain of catching one of those stumps hard with a ski and landing on one doing about 15 miles an hour. Fortunately, Bernie didn't have an accident. All he got out of the day was a sunburn and a sore collarbone from all the exertion.

I had nearly completed my engineering degree at Purdue when Bernie came along to college. I hadn't figured him for the studious type, but there he was in the freshman class, following in my footsteps. 

It was strange, because Bernie had become a master winemaker for a local Indiana winery. Winemaking made him enough money to start school but not enough money to buy a car. Instead, he brought the Bonneville. 

Bernie hadn't been on campus two weeks, when, with his roommate riding behind, a car ran a stop sign in front of him and Bernie had to put the bike down again. This time, Bernie's roommate slid off and got skinned up, while he hit the rear fender of the car and smashed his right hand and leg. Bernie's sixth brush with death in his short 18 years of life. When I saw Bernie in the hospital, he joked about it, “Well, you know I still got three more lives to go.”

That accident was enough incentive though for Bernie to sell the bike. I carted him around in my 57 Desoto until the spring of the year when he bought a 58 Austin Healey Mark I. By that time, I was on my way to graduate school at Caltech. 

With his gift for gab and entrepreneurial spirit, Bernie joined a geek fraternity, became its president, and joined a national. I don't know the particulars, because I wasn't there. But, knowing Bernie, he probably ran afoul of Purdue's policy for fraternity formation, not to mention, the Purdue Fraternity Council. In other words, his ass was grass. The only thing he could do after the Dean told him, “My way or the highway,” was get out of town. Bernie ended up at Virginia Tech where he kept his nose clean and got a degree in electrical engineering technology.

While he was home during the Christmas holiday in his senior year, Bernie attended the party at the Hancock building in Chicago and met the love of his life on the elevator. Patricia Hanrahan was redhaired, green eyed, and freckled like his mother. As Irish as could be, she turned out to be the daughter of a major, long dead, Outfit member. 

As a buyer for Marshall Field's, Pat fit Bernie's style to a T. Bernie wasn't Catholic, but it didn't matter to him. The only thing was – they couldn't be married in St. Bartholomew's Cathedral. They had to be married in Cicero instead, Pat's hometown. 

It was a good thing, because while the whole family was at the wedding in Cicero, downtown Chicago was trying to have a Democratic Convention with a lot of rioting going on. 

We paid no mind to all the commotion and were lavished on by the remains of the Capote crime syndicate, still with its talons in Mayor Daley. You wouldn't have known it for their generosity and good feeling. The whole affair was more Italian than Irish, although the Italian food was better than the Irish.

With his new job in a small electronics firm in California, Bernie settled in with his new bride in a trailer (all he could afford in domestic tranquility). That didn't last long. On a visit to see them, Bernie set me up with this Swedish chick from the office that he said, “Liked him.” Like father, like son. 

I put two and two together and concluded that he was having an affair with her. She was very sweet to me, but I only visited that one brief time, and I suspected that she liked him better than me but was only doing him a favor. 

It wasn't long before Bernie was transferred to Stockton where Pat and he settled down to a ranch-style three-bedroom with pool and the All-American dream. Noticing that Bay Area electrical and electronic firms use a lot of copper, Bernie took some of his savings and opened a little metal collection outlet on El Camino Real in Mountain View. Down and outers would bring him scrap aluminum, brass, copper, and sometimes, platinum and gold in the form of jewelry. The drug scene was heavy in the area at that time, so his business grew as he opened other outlets throughout the Bay Area. He got a little help from the Outfit because it was a rough business, especially dealing with the existing junk dealers left over from WW II.

I was in graduate school at the time at Berkeley and knew little of the business. From time to time, I would take a break and drive on over to Stockton to enjoy the suburban life and get away from constant studies. With money coming in, Bernie bought a plane and took flying lessons. Pat and he also took scuba diving lessons. With the plane, he didn't have to drive so much to his metal collection outlets. 

Shortly after he got his license I was there. Bernie immediately invited me to lunch in Napa. I stayed around the house until about 11 am. Bernie came by and drove me to the airport in his Bronco. We flew up to the Napa airport and had lunch there. While there, Bernie explained that he never liked his name and wanted to be called, "BJ" from here on out. He called his scrap metal business, "BJ Enterprises" because he wanted to "branch out" into other things. Told me that he had to hire a lawyer and an accountant to keep him out of the "hoosegow."

One Christmas holiday when I was at Bernie's house, Bernie took me out to scout a favorite hunting spot in the central mountains. We landed in a farmer's muddy field. Bernie had called the farmer before we came, and he was already driving up with a tractor when we got there. We rode on the tractor to the farmhouse where BJ and his buddy talked about hunting, fishing and other things over a hot cup of coffee. 

When it came time to return, the farmer dropped us off near the plane and drove away with his tractor. When Bernie saw that one wheel was mired in mud, he yelled for the farmer, but the farmer couldn't hear him over the sound of the tractor. We were stuck. 

Fortunately, near a fence line, Bernie found an old wooden plank. Bernie shoved that plank under the mired wheel and pried it up. He told me to stand by while he revved the engine and took off with one wheel on that plank. Bernie then taxied on around and picked me up on the plane was still moving about 3 mph. As soon as I got on board, we made a couple more circles, slowly, every time we got to those soft spots and finally got up enough speed to take off and clear some low telephone wires at the road. We took off a bit too close to the road and cleared those tripwires with a bit too little to spare.

Bernie felt the need to tell me about an earlier trip that he had taken with three other scuba divers to a nearby lake. 

"We were all a little bit tired and thirsty after scuba diving, so I thought we would stop here at the farm and have a little coffee before heading back to Stockton. When we went to leave, I noticed that we were heavy, and I couldn't get my speed up enough for takeoff. When I finally cleared the wires at the road, we only cleared by about 2 feet – almost bought the farm." Bernie was describing his seventh brush with death.

Every time I came to Bernie's place, he had something in mind for us to do. He showed me a pistol he kept in his Bronco's glove compartment that he said he kept, for his "protection." The gun was promptly stolen from the Bronco when it was parked out front of his suburban house. 

One night, Bernie took me to a friend's house for a friendly poker game. Bernie brought a half bottle of Southern Comfort for us to drink. The guy had recently divorced and the only furniture in the house was a dining room table and chairs we used to play the game on.  Loose from the stress of my studies, I drank about half of the booze, winning as I went, and got drunk. I started to lose and thought, "What the heck," and still came out ahead. On the way home, BJ told me that he didn't like, "The way you play" – losing like that was embarrassing in front of his friends.

Another time, Bernie invited his brother-in-law and me out for the evening. We went bar hopping for a few hours until around midnight when we stopped at an all-night restaurant on a local strip where prostitutes hung out. 

While we had coffee, BJ chatted with the prostitutes as if he did this regularly – and he probably did – they all seemed very friendly to his questions. After that, we went to a bar in the suburbs until it closed. 

BJ said, "See that girl across the bar? I bet I can pick her up." With that comment, he got up and went over to the other side of the bar and sat next to her. When the bar closed, BJ walked her to her car and then joined us. He had made his point. He also knew that while most guys are hitting on the best-looking girls in a bar, the ugly ones are just waiting to be picked up.

As a result of his philandering, BJ's fairytale marriage to Pat came to an end. The next time I saw him, he was living in Venice with his girlfriend, Riva, a barmaid, had purchased a warehouse, and had a productive little business going in gold and silver. It was late summer, so he said he wanted to "check out hunting prospects" at the farm. 

Find out what we found out, surprisingly, at the farm in Part 3

Copyright 2011 © Ronald W. Hull

4/2/11

Second Revision: 4/17/25