Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents Who Died a Long Time Ago

“Bernice and John” is part memoir and part post-WWII Oklahoma history, and in a sense national history, through the eyes of two people who lived and worked in Oklahoma City. My father was a petroleum geologist; he illustrates the life of a young man who comes to maturity in the Great Depression and chooses to become a professional oil man, a choice heavily influenced by the Oklahoma oil boom, and who is just starting his career as WWII begins. My mother was an extremely intelligent person from a family with a religious fundamentalist father, yet she became, through her own efforts, a very well-educated, dignified, and liberal individual. Her final act, as she neared the end of a 14-year battle with cancer, was to go to college, a life-long dream. I believe that regardless of the memoir tone, this project is a valid contribution to regional history and sociology.

“Bernice and John” is a memoir, yes, but it’s not so much about the author as about the people, organisms, circumstances and machines encountered in the last seven decades, and how these factors serve to shape personal history in an ever-changing world. The book has one overriding theme, namely, the intimate but mostly invisible connections between individual lives and the major historical movements that bracket and enclose those lives. These connections are intimate because they run deeply through our daily conversations, our daily behaviors and choices, and the cultural milieu in which our children mature. “Bernice and John” asserts that these connections are strong and functional beyond the obvious cases such as combat veterans, Holocaust survivors, Presidents, and CEOs of multinational giants. Even the proverbial person on the street today lives with the results of a United Nations vote taken on November 29, 1947, a single bomb dropped August 6, 1945, and construction of Mark I by Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper in 1944, in other words, with the creation of Israel by division of Palestine, the age of mass destruction as ushered in by Hiroshima, and invention of the digital computer.