Page 82 - Cityview_July_Aug_2015

VETERAN SPOTLIGHT
In his spare time, Bernard volunteers with his grandson at Sevierville’s aviation museum rebuilding planes and restoring them to flying condition.
“My darkroom was at the back of her office, down a little narrow hallway,” he says. “She had the only telephone down there, and for a while I would borrow her phone to call other girls. Then I quit borrowing it and focused my attention on her. I didn’t know it, but after the second time I took her for a Coke at the field house, the girls in the dorm started planning our wedding.”
The couple exchanged vows in Janu- ary 1947 and enjoyed “66 happy years” until Dorothy’s passing in February 2013, says Bernard. “She was a delight to live with.” Together they would have one son, Lance, who works at Alcoa, and a grandson who teaches history.
Bernard reserves his most pleasant memories for Dot—as he often called her—and the adventures they shared.
In the summer of 1948, they traveled
to Idaho in a 1939 Ford that Jules had bought for $400 and “patched up.” There, Dot cooked for the fire-tower staff. “She was spunky,” he says. “She shot a bear with birdshot one day.”
On the way out and back, the couple fell in love with Yellowstone National Park, and made some 15 return trips over the years—so enamored that they gave Lance the middle name Hayden, after the park’s picturesque Hayden Valley.
After graduation from LSU in 1949, the Bernards opened a photography studio in Homer, Louisiana, near Jules’ home- town, where the specialty images they shot and processed included Gulf Coast photos. Yet in talking about his work, Bernard cannot help veer back to more heartfelt subjects.
“In 1951, business was great, and I bought a new Studebaker coupe; that thing would fly,” he says. Dorothy had just earned $300 from a big wedding.
“I didn’t know anybody who had that much money,” says Bernard. “She said, ‘Let’s go to Yellowstone!’ We put a sign
on the door, ‘Gone Fishin’ in Yellow-
stone.’ Back then you’d let people know when you were gone.”
The two-week vacation cost them just under $200. “We both came up during the Depression, and her hobby was saving money,” says Bernard. They slept in the car en route—and paid 18 cents a gallon for gas, ate Vienna Sau- sages and crackers for lunch, lodged for $1.50 a night at Fishing Bridge camp- ground in Yellowstone, and forked out 35 cents for suppers of spaghetti, bread, and tea. “My wife had more expensive tastes,” says Bernard, “so she would order the sirloin tips for 45 cents.”
As his photography skills burgeoned, the couple moved to Mississippi. Bernard eventually caught the eye of Boeing and, in the 1960s, became a lead photographer on the moon-rocket pro- gram in Huntsville, shooting high-qual- ity, color reproductions of the drawings Boeing had created.
“After that, they asked me to work on the moon buggy,” he says. “I used high- speed photography to find out why the first model of the buggy would land on a heap in the floor instead of on its wheels.”
In keeping with aviation, Bernard’s next career phase was a 15-year stint with the UT Space Institute in Tul- lahoma, as head of public relations and continuing education. Among many highlights, he interacted with some of the world’s leading aeronautics experts who visited to teach. “When they were building the Concorde, we had the en- gineers and designers come and lecture about it,” he says. “When bomber design- ers from the Air Force came in, I had a secret clearance to run their films and slides during lectures.”
Along the way, he also earned his own pilot’s license while continuing
to work on airplanes on weekends at
a small airfield and as a hobby. After a three-year return to Boeing to inspect radar systems on B-52s, he retired “and just played with airplanes.”
In 1998, the Bernards moved to Knoxville, mostly to be closer to their son’s family and grandson, then a stu- dent at Christian Academy of Knox- ville. “We went into the grandpa and grandma business full time.”
A devout Christian, Bernard—who attends Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church—also began volunteering with Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS), part of Wycliffe Bible Trans- lators. “They’d bring planes back from missionaries around the world. I would go for a week or two several times a year, rebuild the wings, install new engines, and so forth.”
As a volunteer at Sevierville’s avia- tion museum, Bernard and his grand- son are rebuilding the Bird Dog plane.
“We’re gonna get it back in flying condi- tion, for sure,” he says. Otherwise, “I’m just takin’ it easy.”
His twilight years are bittersweet, to be sure, in light of his late wife’s absence. On a recent afternoon, his son walked in the kitchen to find Jules eating a can of Vienna sausages, his bygone, budget-friendly staple.
“Dad, what are you doing with those?” Lance asked.
A wistful smile crept across his father’s face. “I’m just having lunch with Dorothy on the Yellowstone River.”
Phil Newman is a senior writer for Cityview.
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