Dad

Dad had the most amazing book collection. One bedroom of the house I grew up in was Dad’s office and study, and it had bookshelves from floor to ceiling. 

And the variety was astounding. Not just the usual English teacher stuff, classics of western literature and all the major contemporary authors – although it had all of them. 

It also had books that reflected pretty much any subject Dad had had even the most passing interest in. 

For example: I learned at least the basics of how to navigate on the open sea using a sextant, compass and chronometer, from a book on celestial navigation he had amid a collection of books about boats, seafaring and the great ocean explorers, which I pretty much completely vacucmed up by the time I was 12. 

From that same section, when I was nine or ten he gave me a copy of “Endurance”, the story of the Shackelton expedition – a group of of British Antarctic explorers whose ship had gotten crushed in the ice on the Ross Ice Shelf in 1916, and had to survive for two years on an ice floe before sailing lifeboats across the stormy South Atlantic (why, yes, life lessons were involved), but one of many books about people who conquered mountains, oceans, space, the unknown, the human condition, and every manner of art. 

He was fascinated by stories of people stretching far beyond themselves and conquering the impossible – and passed that fascination on to me. 

Dad also *hated* traveling, detested the cold, and was terrified of water. He taught me, and three generations of students, the infinite sprawl of the human mind – but was so terrified of “big city traffic” that he let my mom do all the “city driving”…

…when we went to Fargo or Bismark. 

It was one of many conundrums about my dad.

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I’ve always chalked his hatred of cold up to the fact that he was born in the hottest summer in North Dakota history – July 5, 1936, deep in the heart of the dust bowl. It was 120 the day he was born; my grandmother once told me it was 108 degrees in the house when they brought Dad home. I used to marvel that he could play three sets of tennis on a 90 degree day, have a cup of iced tea and go shoot 18 holes of golf without breaking a sweat, while if the morning temperature was below 40 he started like a Fiat Spyder. 

His parents, Oscar and Beatrice Berg, ran a little photography studio in Jamestown. They were an older couple – Grandpa was 47 and Grandma 32 when Dad was born – so dad wound up being an only child. 

Grandpa Oscar had a cardiac arrest and died suddenly while shoveling snow at the studio when Dad was five, in March of 1942 – the darkest days of World War Two, when people genuinely worried about the country getting invaded. I can’t imagine what it was like, being five and having to absorb all that – but my siblings and I never had to imagine the after-effects. Grandma had to keep the studio afloat, sometimes working sixteen hour days; my Mom once said Dad had a lot in common with orphans, including a lot of anxiety; for his mother, and for things that were unknown and out of his control. With the exception of five years starting his teaching career in Rugby, North Dakota, and this past seven months in Billings, he never lived more than a mile from where he was born. 

He graduated from Jamestown High School, then went to college in Jamestown, got a BA in English, and started his teaching career. 

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And Dad was a *great* teacher. .One of the two best teachers I ever had. If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty decent chance you were a student of Dad’s – most everyone in Jamestown had Dad in school, or had kids, or parents, or in at least one case both, who took Dad’s classes – Writing, Literature, and his marquee class, Speech. I took all three classes from him – and they may have been the hardest “A”s I earned in high school. Dad was always worried (!) about being perceived as giving a kid of his favorable treatment, and I think he may have tried just a *tad* too hard, sometimes. 

But he was the most amazing teacher. Even as a snotty adolescent, I was agog at how good he was at getting a room full of kids like me to pay attention, to learn, and to love it. 

Dad had an amazing talent for saying preposterous things, and convincing people they were legitimate. I may have inherited the talent [1] but Dad was the master. He used that talent to play elaborate pranks on his classes. My favorite: one day when we walked into class, he gave each of us a piece of fanfold paper (kids, ask your parents) with a bunch of official looking mumbo-jumbo on it, and a number, circled in red ink. Mine was “68”. 

As we took our seats, Dad explained that the government was starting a new program; since there weren’t enough resources for everyone to go to college, the government had been tracking our test scores, aptitude and IQ scores since kindergarten to gauge our suitability for different careers. And it all boiled down to a score, a number between 1 and 100. 

If your score was over 90? You were going to university, going into management, becoming lawyers and engineers and doctors and officers in the military. 

70-90? Trade school. Foreman on the job site; sergeants in the Army, produce manager at the grocery store. 

Below 70? Well, society needed farm labor, hot tar roofers, shelf-stockers and Army privates, too. 

Naturally, nearly everyone’s score was below 70 – I don’t think anyone had more than a 75. And kids took it seriously – kids who thought they were en route to law school or engineering or education suddenly were thinking they were going to be stocking shelves at Red Owl for the rest of their lives. 

The goal, of course, wasn’t *just* to prank the kids (although he loved a well-crafted ruse, and played many on my siblings and I just for the pure love of the game). It was to teach kids about discrimination – having your life sandbagged because of something arbitrary that you djdn’t control. And it was effective. 

Another thing he mastered that still boggles me; the first day of every class, every semester, he spent learning the name of every kid in every seat. He had some elaborate internal mnemonic that I still don’t understand, that allowed him to get the combination of period (he usually taught 4-5 classes a day), seat and name hammered into his long-term memory. It was a long, slow first day – but he he considered it a base level of respect, to actually know all the students name. 

And at reunions well into the 2000s, he would meeting former students, even from the early 1960s, and remember where they sat. He taught for about forty years – five or so in Rugby, and the rest in Jamestown – and he remembered every kid and their seat. 

I still can’t imagine. 

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If was while living in Rugby, but visiting his mother in Jamestown, on a double date (with his lifelong best friend, Daniel “Buddy” Buchanan, whose daughter is a Facebook friend) that he met my mother, Janice Hall – who was out with Bud. Dad and Jan wound up talking, and going out, and in fairl8y short order getting married in July of 1961. I came along a couple years later, not long before we moved back to Jamestown (born during a blizzard; it was -25 with a howling wind when they took me home from the hospital. There’s some foreshadowing for you). There, there were more kids – Susan (who died at about ten days old), Barb and Jim. 

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Another of Dad’s conundrums – for a guy who was so seriously enthralled by the adventures of others, he could never imagine living anyplace *but* Jamestown. But he also wanted to be a writer, a playwright, an impresario. 

Seems like a hard plane to land in a town of 15,000. But not for Dad. 

In the early ‘80s, with a couple of other teachers and staffers from the local college, he started “Jamestown Performing Arts”, a group dedicated to producing and promoting local theater. And then they set to work writing and producing plays – one-acts, full-length, whatever – and recruiting casts, and putting on the shows and, starting in about 1984, the “Last Annual Comedy Review”, a yearly comedy production featuring entire local talent, material and production. Dad produced and MCed it every year for something like 34 seasons – every one of them a different show. 

If you think that sounds ambitious for a town of 15,000 – you’re right, It is. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in towns that size. 

Dad’s attitude was, since I don’t wanna go to Broadway, I’m going to create my own. 

So when I walked into a radio station in 2004 to ask them to give a bunch of bloggers some airtime every week, it may not have seemed *quite* as crazy to me as it did to everyone else. It runs in the family. 

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Dad retired in 1995. The school bought out his contract so they could hire a cheaper teacher. And that was OK – he was ready to move on to the next chapter. He started writing books; his first, self-published in 1996, “Common Ground” was the story of Jamestown’s baseball stadium, which had been home to an amazing tradition of small town baseball that included many of the stars of the old Negro Leagues. 

He always sold enough of each book to pay for publishing his next book – which kept him chugging along until a couple of years ago. He was also wrote columns for the Jamestown Sun, and recorded editorials for the public radio station in Fargo for 25 years or so. I used to joke that Dad had had a longer radio career than I did. 

He stayed very active as long as he could; he played tennis into his sixties, and shot his first hole in one at 72. And he always loved having an audience. 

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My parents split up in 1990 (although he was abidingly grateful to be able to stay close to his inlaws, my grandparents, aunts and uncles). My Dad was more than happy exploring the world in his mind, and creating his own right where he was. Mom wanted to actually see it – and she did. That’s another whole story – but Dad’s anxiety about things “being different* was a problem. 

And it was for me, too. 

Many sons, especially oldest sons, wrestle hard with getting out of their father’s shadows to have their own identity. I certainly did. As long as I can remember, Dad was a pillar of the community, one of the most admired people *in* that little world. He was a big, universally venerated fish in a small pond – and I was Bruce Berg’s Son. I’m pretty sure he wanted me to follow in his footsteps and “take ove the family business” as a high school teacher, preferably in Jamestown. Teaching is stable, and the benefits are good, and there’s a pension. 

And I was simultaneously proud to *be* Bruce Betg’s son, and still couldn’t imagine spending my whole life in that shadow. I’ve told the story elsewhere – I left Jamestown and moved to Minneapolis; ostensibly to be a musician, but really just to get to someplace where I was Mitch Berg, full stop. 

My mom once told me that Dad admired me for doing it, but was also terrified that one of his kids had left the world he knew and jumped into the deep end of the social pool. I was well into my forties before he stopped reminding me I could still be high school teacher. 

Dad remarried a few years later, by the way, to Rowena “Roni” Bye – who also loved being nestled into Jamestown life; they shared a lot of long walks and movies and Roni’s amazing cooking. They were both very lucky to find each other. 

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Dad taught me a lot of things that are fundamental to my life – how to write, how to speak in public, how to debate fairly and logically but incisively. 

He did *not* teach me how to fish, hunt, fix cars, build additions onto my house, track game, pack a bearing or any of the things other dads taught their sons. Growing up, I used to wish my siblings and I *could* have learned more of that at home (my mom taught me how to field-strip a toilet) – but growing up with a widowed single mom who was always working, he never learned any of those things, not to mention how to swim. Had Grandpa Oscar lived, that likely would have been different; Oscar was an outdoorsman, hunter, and we’re told kind of a hard guy; Dad may well have turned out *much* different had Oscar lived, and so might his kids. 

I was thinking about that a few years ago; being a father myself was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But throughout my adventure of being a parent of two kids, I was able to ask myself “what would Dad have done?” It didn’t always help – what does? – but the example was out there when I needed it. 

And it occurred to me; Dad raised three kids, and did a pretty decent job, *figuring it out on his own as he did it*, With no father’s example to fall back on. 

And that? That amazes me. 

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Dad passed away last night. He was 89. He died, pretty much, of what people used to call “old age”. Things just started falling apart, first slowly, and then very quickly. But he died last night, in his sleep, with my sister nearby, after a few days of visits from grandkids and great-grandkids, not really communicating but seeming to enjoy all he little kids giggling at how weird Mom and the uncles looked in the photo albums. 

There are many worse endings to stories like this. 

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The culminating moment of Bruce Springsteen‘s Broadway show was when he said he’d realized, well into his 50s, that all of the music he had written had been basically telling the story of his father , without really knowing it.

In some ways, I could say the same – as different as we are, we have both followed many of the same dreams, in very different ways . 

And I guess we all can say the same thing, in our own way; we are all the most important stories any of our parents ever get to tell.

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[1] I’m afraid I may have convinced a few people that Nicole DID frame OJ. I don’t know my own strength.