[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
United States News Title: He died penniless, but rich with friends It was just before sunrise when Bernie Kern wheeled himself to an outdoor plaza at Laguna Honda Hospital for his usual morning cigarette. He'd been living in the hospital for five years, but four decades of homelessness before that had left him with an enduring affection for the early morning chill and quiet.
The cigarette was done in a few minutes. It was his last.
Kern was found peacefully slumped in his wheelchair just outside the elevator, his heart given out from the long years on the streets.
That was Oct. 9. He was 90.
Having long outlived every relative he knew, there was no family to claim him. The normal city policy in such cases is to cremate him along with other unclaimed indigents, then scatter his ashes into the ocean with all the others on a routine run by a city-hired boat.
And if that were the end of it, he'd be forgotten like many of the 150 or so other homeless people who die in San Francisco every year.
But Kern isn't forgotten.
He left behind a Hayes Valley woman, her daughter and her grandchildren who met him on the street and had come to adore him, and a staff at the hospital that grieved so hard for Kern at a memorial service last week that many could not speak through their tears.
"I thought I'd kick it before he did," Maureen Roche, the 67-year-old woman whose family helped shepherd Kern through his final decade, said at the service through trembling lips. "He was a wonderful man.
"Oh, he had a hard, hard life. But such a wonderful man." Introverted at first
Kern went into Laguna Honda in 2007 so introverted he'd spend all day with his bedsheets pulled up to his nose. But by the time he died, the wiry man with the wispy white beard had become the life of his ward - telling tall tales, saving candy for kids and zipping through the hallways so quickly he made the nurses grin.
Studies have shown that most hard-core homeless people have difficulty surviving outside past late middle age. Lasting until age 85 made Kern a rare stone in the cruel current of street life - and one of the most resilient homeless people ever seen at Laguna Honda, the rehabilitative hospital of last resort for those with little or no income in San Francisco.
"When he first got here he was bed-bound and weak," said Laguna Honda social worker Paul Kelly. "He didn't trust anyone except for Maureen and her family. But then after he'd been here a while, he perked up.
"And oh, the stories he told."
Nobody could tell if his tales were true, but they were told often and with conviction, said Roche. One of his favorites was about how, as a young man working a salad counter in New York, singer Ella Fitzgerald dropped a $5 bill from her coat pocket.
"He always called her 'Miss Fitzgerald,' and he said when he picked up the bill to give it back to her she was so touched she gave it to him," said Roche. "And then there was the time he met Al Capone - 'He was an intense guy,' Bernie said. Or the time he met Willie McCovey and they talked about baseball, or Charles Bronson at a bar. It went on and on." Rough childhood
From the thin records available on Kern and the details he offered repeatedly at different times, Roche's family and the hospital staff assembled a picture of a rough start in life.
He was born in New York City, and when he was 8 his father abandoned his mother - who put Kern, his two brothers and one sister into an orphanage. The family reunited when the mother remarried, but the drunken stepfather beat the children.
As a young man Kern worked at Horn and Hardart, the first food service automat in New York and the place where he said he met Fitzgerald. Then came World War II, when he was injured as an Army private in Europe.
At the time of his death he still got a small monthly disability check from Veterans Affairs. He shrugged off inquiries about his injury.
Kern said his mother passed away in 1954 and his siblings died after that. He never gave names.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
|
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|