There are so many wonderful memories to share about Bernie and it is difficult to choose what to say.   He was funny, intelligent, patient, loyal and very observant.  But when I think of shared times from my childhood to the last few years, the common thread is kindness.  He was always kind.  In the late 1960s, the Leitners and the Larsons met in Wyoming for a camping trip. All the kids decided we wanted to build a raft to go across this stream.  It was a silly scheme but Bernie supported our little dream and we made it across the stream.  Many years later when our Mom died in1991, Bernie, Jane and Patty came to Minneapolis and stayed with our Dad for two weeks.  The loving support offered by the Leitners was one of the kindest acts I have ever witness. For the next 23 years, Bernie and Jane were steadfast friends to our Dad.  They planned and took trips together, exchanged letters and called on a regular basis.  I will always remember Bernie for these quiet constant acts of kindness.

Bernie and my Dad (marv) shared a friendship that lasted 60 + years.  To me that says a lot about the kind of men they both were.   What is amazing to me is that they really did keep in touch - being that Leitners were in CA and my parents were in MN.

They shared Travel - Camping trips, Europe and Hawaii, along with trips to CA and MN!   

They shared Letter - OH the letters!   Its amazing the notes they shares back and forth!

They shared Books - Read a great book Bernie?  Bernie would mail it to Marv!  


More importantly - they shared 60 YEARS (think about that) of friendship!   That to me is most special - and I miss them both so very very much.  

And of course, there was the time he volunteered to bring me a car I had inherited, driving it from California to New York.  I was a little humbled by his generosity, but I couldn’t refuse.  When he arrived with the car, he wouldn’t let me pay for dinner.  He did sleep over in my tiny Greenwich Village studio, so I offered him the bed while I slept on the kitchen floor.  He insisted on the uncomfortable spot. 

Ultimately however, I paid, because for years after he would tell people how he drove my car all the way across the country and then I “made him” sleep under the kitchen table.

My best memory of Bernie is the simplest.  He and Jane always made their home open and welcoming to us.

My second memory is this:  Although I could see that Bernie was very intelligent, for comic effect he would put on a faux ignorant manner.  “I don’t understand,” he would say, slowly and wonderingly.  I didn’t really get the joke as a teen, but I seem to have learned his trick over the years.

Reading about the 'Hangabers' I was reminded of one of my favorites, waffles
'a la Bernie'. In my youth I spent many weekend nights on sleep-overs at Bernie and Jane's, Patty being my closest, best friend during those years. On Sunday mornings something special took place, as two sleep deprived girls were roused out of their beds by the unmistakeable aroma of Bernie's cheese waffles cookin'. They were original and tasty but my favorite had to be his sourdough pancakes. Perhaps it started as an experiment in fermentation. In any case, Bernie faithfully watched over his sourdough starter, never failing to feed it in anticipation of Sunday's breakfast. The music of Vivaldi's Four Seasons filled the house as we happliy devoured our pancakes. Could there be a more civilized way to start the day! 

For many years, the Leitner family (of which I was a member for several) travelled each summer to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.  We all piled into the VW bus (first the '65, then the newer one) and headed north.  We always stayed at the KOA near Emigrant Lake, home to the many yellowjackets who loved the hangabers (see related story) and chicken prepared for dinner each night before heading into town to marvel at the Bard's entertaining wisdom.  Bernie often decided to wash the windshield and ALL windows before we left Palo Alto (with all of us sitting inside the car, anxious to depart).


The Elizabethan Theatre was in those days uncovered, and minus the multi-tiered section at the back.   Sometimes it rained during the performances, and one night the storm was bad enough the play was cancelled because many of the lights blew out.  The evening's feature?  Why, The Tempest, of course (yes, really)!  I still remember these trips and Ashland remains one of my favorite towns.

One of my favorite stories that my Dad told me was of his work on the Sidewinder Missile development project at China Lake early in his career. He was on the team initially developing this air-to-air missile fired from a fighter jet: but there was a dilemma on how to mount the missile. They wanted to mount the missile under the wing, but the question was, when firing the missile, would the missile accelerate so quickly that the vertical stabilizer would cut through the wing. There were great arguments between the two camps (Camp One: the missile will easily miss the wing Camp Two: the missile will clearly cut through the wing) – when it occurred to someone, they could just build a test wing and missile and find out. In order to not risk a test pilot and a whole plane, a wing segment was mounted on a rocket sled (since they needed the wing and missile travelling at speed for the test to be valid), with the Sidewinder Missile hanging under the wing segment. Because the rocket sled was fairly close to the ground, they decided to build the missile with just the vertical stabilizer, and not all 3 stabilizing fins (since the lower fins wouldn’t fit between the wing segment and the ground). They all gathered in the bunker next to the rocket sled tracks, both those that felt the vertical fin would rip through the wing, and those like my Dad, who were sure that the missile would drop fast enough to miss the wing as it accelerated. The rocket sled fired its main engines and took off along the test track. The test speed was achieved, the Sidewinder Missile was fired, and just as my Dad had predicted, the missile dropped under the wing and sped off in front of the rocket sled. It was at that point that someone asked, “Did anyone do an aerodynamic analysis of a Sidewinder Missile with only one stabilizing fin?” – they all looked at each other and then back out through the bunker window, only to see the Sidewinder Missile arch up and then back, straight towards their bunker. Everyone panicked, started running back and forth like chickens with their heads cut off, completely at a loss as to what to do. Luckily, the missile remained unstable, and crashed into the ground just yards away from the bunker. That’s how engineers have fun in the desert!

For many years, Bernie cooked hangabers (hamburgers, a la Bernie) over charcoal in a grill on the patio.  Perhaps the pronunciation was because Kam and Patty had a hard time pronouncing "hamburger", perhaps it was just a Bernie-ism.  Either way, they were delicious.

One year, the radiant heating pipes under the original floor of the Louis Road house stopped working.  Several of us (Charlie and Debbie Daly, Kevin Kelly, Kam and Patty Leitner, among others) spent many long days that summer prepping and replacing the system.  My job was usually to scrub the dust off the backs of hundreds of Mexican paver tiles and stack them in a pile so the others could set them in place after the new copper pipes had been heated and bent into shape.  It was a hot, dusty job.  The last time I visited the house, the tiles were still in place; some were chipped and worn, and some still retained a vestige of their original sheen.

One of my favorite memories of Bernie (I have so many) was the time he put on the original Bad Company album, turned up the volume, and came out of the bedroom wearing Jane's long brunette wig while pretending to strum a broom like a guitar.  When I reminded him of it years later, he got embarrassed and denied the performance.