Bernard Kleinman
Walk, run, exercise your brain. Bernie Kleinman was doing all the right things to live a healthy life decades before the experts began telling us what to do.
“I skied in Vermont and Aspen and I played tennis well into my 70s,” he says. “And I still play bridge with friends every Friday, but it’s now on Zoom. I love classical music and reading literature, although because of limited eyesight now I have to listen to audio books.”
Who else do you know that’s read Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, ‘Remembrances of Things Past,’ three times and listens to Beethoven at bedtime? The reward? Bernie will celebrate his 100th birthday in June.
Bernie started life in Flushing, Queens but when he was seven his father was killed in a car accident and the family moved to Manhattan. Little did he know that his later life would be spent in Brooklyn. “If you lived in Manhattan in the 1960s,” he said, “you didn’t think much of Brooklyn. Real human beings didn’t live there. Brooklyn was just a place that hung onto the Brooklyn Bridge.” But he got to know Brooklyn when his mother enrolled him in Brooklyn Technical High School!
“Pearl Harbor was attacked during my senior year, but I wasn’t drafted because of my eyesight. Then, after working as a junior draftsman, I decided to go to City College to get a degree in engineering. Later in the war, when the shooting was over, I was drafted into the Air Force. There, in Florida, I taught a course in radar fundamentals.”
After he was discharged from the Air Force, he went back to college and to graduate school. Following graduation, he held a couple of jobs working on the design of military equipment. Then he began working for New York Telephone, now Verizon. He said he was glad to help people talk instead of killing one another. He stayed there until he retired at age 66.
At New York Telephone, it was Bernie’s job was to keep the phones working. When the central office switch broke down, he was called on to get it fixed. “There was a lot of pressure. Imagine 10,000 customers losing dial tone. I was not one of the guys climbing up poles, you know. I came out with my jacket and tie, and with some knowledge of how things worked.“
“I remember one time I was sent to the Bronx because staff there couldn’t fix a problem. It took me hours to find what was wrong. One little contact in one little relay was dirty. I kept notes on all the problems I worked on. Months later I was called to another location with the same complaint. Their system had been out of service for many hours. I quietly listened, I climbed a ladder, poked around for a few seconds and said, ‘Try it now.’ The switch worked. Jaws dropped. Everyone looked at me as though I was God.”
Bernie didn’t get married until he was in his early 40s, late for that era. “I lived in a little apartment in Greenwich Village. One day I came home from work and there was a young woman relaxing on a bench, waiting for her brother who lived in the same building. I invited her to wait in my apartment ….and that was the beginning of my romance with Sondra.”
“After many months, I happened to mention to Sondra that I had taken a female friend to a movie. She immediately broke off the relationship, saying she was not planning to become one of my ‘girlfriends’. Five months later, I received a call from her: ‘How are you?’ I was overjoyed and we restarted our lives together.” Bernie and Sondra have two daughters and one grandson. Both daughters live nearby in Brooklyn.
Bernie loves playing bridge and at one point he decided to offer beginner lessons to members of Good Neighbors. He told new players, “You have to remember many small things, a lot of technical points, to become good. But once you’ve learned this, you’ll have years of pleasure from it.” People who have taken lessons with Bernie are among his most ardent admirers.
We all wish him a very happy birthday and look forward to his 101st.