Bernie–the–Bear

Bernie-the-Bear

            I first heard of Bernard John Darré during September of 1954. His father died in the stands when his Fortier High School football team was playing my high school in the initial game of that season. Bernie was a sophomore and I was a senior. I preceded him at Tulane by two years and was formally introduced to him in September 1957, when as a 165 pound interior lineman, he was granted an athletic scholarship after the importuning by his high school coach persuaded the head coach at Tulane to add him to the roster. Rumor has it was more a leveraging of the Tulane coach than importuning, since the Fortier coach had previously persuaded several larger and infinitely more talented athletes to complete in the university’s football program. Tulane’s coach was forced to accept this token player as a down payment on future fledgling stars. After the death of Bernard’s dockworker father, the family, never very wealthy before, now fell on even harder times and without a scholarship, he certainly would never have been financially able to attended Tulane, and I would have been deprived of one of the great joys of my life; having known Bernie-the-Bear.

            One thing I failed to mention above, he was a straight “A” high school student, something that surely escaped the clutches of your humble narrator, plus he had just celebrated his seventeenth birthday at the time of his freshman matriculation. Once he began eating regularly, exercising, and growing, Bernard’s body matured. This skinny boy, whose family lived on a street in New Orleans opposite the docks and next to a raucous barroom, morphed into to this two hundred forty pound athlete good enough to be selected to play in the College All Star Game, the Shriners’ East-West Game, and subsequently became a high draft choice of the Washington Redskins Professional Football Team, where he labored for two years.

            Once again, I forgot to mention, he graduated as an ‘A’ student from college, with a major in chemistry; an unbelievable feat, given the fact football took up so much of his time. He was able to save enough money from professional football to quit that avocation, and pursue his doctorate in chemistry from Ohio State University, which he received in the mid-sixties.

            Returning to Louisiana, along with a fresh Ohio bride, he took up residence in Baton Rouge, with a job in the Ethyl Refinery as a research chemist. Several years later, and obviously bored with a mundane laboratory existence, he left for the more intellectual confines of Stanford University, where he obtained his Masters of Business Administration degree.

            Welding together those academic pursuits, he was hired by the Shepherd Chemical Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he rose to lead them as their president and CEO until his tragic death on April 26, 2006.

            When I think back over the last fifty years of our friendship, I cannot remember one harsh word spoken between us, and that from one who has harsh words with almost everyone. I never heard him utter one negative comment about any human, animal, or flower; but do not mistake that for weakness. For while he was never a syrupy gusher of complements, and he took the people surrounding him in stride, he exuded an unmistakable aura of strength, which brought reason to discussions and comprehension to opposing views. He was totally secure in who he was, and who he was dealing with, and had no time or understanding of those who would not play the game by the strictest moral code. Everyone got the benefit of the doubt; often to his detriment, but he never wavered from his unalterable moral position and never compromised his gentle behavior.

            But that was the mature Bernard. There was another side to this gentle giant.

            In undergraduate school, Bernie was infatuated with this young lady, Cathy Bishop. For some unknown reason, she and he were discussing the effects of underarm deodorants on the human body and she apparently was complaining to him about the cost of purchasing the designer products and how they negatively reacted with her super-sensitive skin. Bernie, in an attempt to impress her, told her what a magnificent chemist he was and he could brew up a batch of sweet smelling stuff that would make the Dior’s of the world ashamed to market their inferior product, and at the same time would treat her skin like talcum powder.

            “Oh, Bernie. Could you make some for me?” she asked, batting her eyes seductively.

            Well it’s all Bernie needed. His weakness for eye batting placed him at a distinct disadvantage and he repaired to the laboratory to brew up the promised elixir. In actuality, what he did was borrow a bottle of his mother’s deodorant and began replicating the ingredients listed on the bottle. Several days later he extracted the final product from his lab caldron and presented Cathy with the resulting brew.

            “Oh, Bernie. Thank you so much,” she said, still batting her eyes at this poor schmuck, causing his knees to buckle like a piece of overcooked spaghetti.

            Cathy took the little box home and couldn’t wait to administer it to her waiting armpits. In all fairness, I did get a whiff of the mixture before he gave it to her and it smelled pretty good to me. By this time, Bernie was bragging to anyone who would listen, that he had created an aphrodisiac that would turn his new love into this compliant slave.

            To Cathy, the deodorant smelled wonderful, and the dulcet aromas sneaked out from under her arms and wafted beneath her nose. “Smell this,” she said to all of her friends, producing the newly minted bottle from her purse. “Bernie made it just for me.”

            When Cathy got home and took off her clothes, she noticed any area where she applied Bernard’s mixture, was covered in a bright red rash. Over night, the rash blossomed into these horrible looking sores and she itched like a fresh dose of the chicken pox had invaded her skin.

            It turns out Bernie had added or subtracted several ingredients from his mother’s bottle and that, plus the fact he was drinking beer with me in the lab during the brewing process, certainly detracted greatly from the final product. That was the end of Bernie’s love affair with Cathy; even though he told her he could correct his mistake and brew a perfectly acting liquid the next time. Cathy was too smart for his line.

            The second Bernie story which accurately illustrates another side to this complex man, happened one summer while I was attending summer school at Tulane. Bernie didn’t have to attend summer school because he was a straight ‘A’ student, while I was often grateful for the professor’s gift of a ‘gentleman’s C’ and had to attend one summer session in order to keep up with my aggressive classmates. Bernie was hired as a laboratory assistant by the chemistry department, so we were both living on campus without much to do.

            I called Bernie one day to get him out of the laboratory and accompany me to one of the nearby watering holes. He answered on the first ring.

            “What do you want?” he asked, knowing full well I wasn’t calling him asking for the atomic weight of helium.

            “How’s about a drink?”

            “Come over here and pick me up. I have to finish this experiment before I can leave.”

            When I arrived at the chemistry lab, Bernie was busy pouring some awful-colored mixture in with a clear liquid causing the reaction to bubble over like a Doctor Frankenstein experiment.

            “Brewing up a little something else for Cathy,” I asked, never letting him forget about his romantic blunder.

            “No. This is grain alcohol mixed with something else.” Bernard was smart enough to know I wouldn’t have any comprehension of the ‘something else’ liquid.

            All I heard was the word ‘alcohol,’ so I asked, “Can you drink that stuff?”

            Bernie looked at me like I was crazy. “Yeah, you can drink grain alcohol, but you have to mix it with jungle juice or something, because it’s one hundred and ninety proof. That stuff can make you blind if you’re not careful.”

            It was all I needed. Before we departed from the local watering hole, I convinced Bernie we were having a party at a friend’s house that night, and he and I would mix up this delectable potable to be served to all our friends and their dates. That afternoon, Bernie, our friend, Cameron Gamble, and I began mixing up this homebrew with the primary ingredient being the grain alcohol Bernie had purloined from the chemistry lab.

            In order to make sure the brew was tasty and the juice-grain alcohol mixture was correct, we needed to sample it throughout the afternoon. By the start of the party, Bernie, Cameron, and I were giggling like teenage school girls; the liquor having already taken its toll.

            All I can remember about the party was most of the girls were passed out on the floor, and their dates were so drunk, they just left them there and presumably staggered back to the dormitory.

            I woke up in a filthy ditch in front of Cameron’s house, trying to get up so I could also stagger back to my room in the dormitory before I drowned in all the gutter muck. I have no idea how long I was lying there.

            I looked over to my left and Bernie was face down in the same ditch. I thought he was dead. Fortunately, he wasn’t dead and I sat him up and shook him as hard as I could.

            “Get up Bernie. We’ve got to go home,” I mumbled, with the ditch’s refuse still stuck to various parts of our bodies.

            “Hell of a party, Pierre. Hell of a party” my great friend said, as he sneaked a smile past his drunken lips.