By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
My father, Ernest Rudolph Bergman, was born in 1917, and died in 1998, at age 81. I know very little about his life, something I should have learned about when he was alive.
To avoid regret, all readers who still have their father should learn about the details of his life from him … before it’s too late.
Ideally, do a memory book, as my wife did with her family, the Haldimans, where each member writes a few pages about their life. We made copies and each of our families got one.
My father was the third child of John and Mary Matilda (Maria) Bergman, both born in Finland. Their first two children were twins, and only one survived, Esther. John, a laborer, died around 1919 from pneumonia.
My grandmother, uneducated and English-illiterate, struggled financially her entire life after her husband died.
Unable to care for her two children, they were farmed out to various relatives. As a result, my father never had the security of two parents or a stable place to call home.
As a benefit, though, he was able to travel to, and live in, several states, including New York, Minnesota, Michigan, and California.
Soon after arriving in Detroit, my father married my mother in 1943. Dad was in the U.S. Navy then, where he served on an aircraft carrier from 1943 to 1944. My father, determined to improve himself after he married my mother, earned a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Wayne State University in Detroit.
As I was growing up, I remember he was always involved in schoolwork, a new invention, or starting a new business.
After he graduated from Wayne State, he was hired as an engineer at the Ford Motor Car Company. He learned he did not like working for someone else, so soon started several businesses.
He would rather work 12 hours a day in his own business than 8 hours a day for someone else. And it turned out that he often worked more than 12 hours a day.
His hard work ethos greatly influenced the careers of both my two brothers and me.
His love of science also strongly influenced me. Our basement was cluttered with science books, chemicals, machinery (such as a milling machine), and scientific paraphernalia. Dad would often show me the purpose of some instrument and explain the physics behind its use.
He designed a variety of science-teaching tools—several with his lifelong friend, Ralph Herring of Detroit.
Dad earned several patents for his inventions: one for a geothermal heating system and an innovative stove heat exchanger (U.S. patent 4,250,864; filed May 31, 1979).
In the early 1950s, Dad drew a 4-by-8 foot periodic table of the chemical elements by hand, using ink and drafting tools. He then silk-screened these charts and sold them to colleges and universities throughout North America. He also produced a smaller 3-by-5-foot, silk-screened, wall-size chart and an 8-1/2-by-11-inch, offset-printed, notebook-size version.
College bookstores throughout the U.S. sold many thousands of his charts to students until his copyright expired.
Imitators then rapidly sprang up, producing similar charts out of plastic-coated paper, at a much lower price, putting my father’s company out of business.
Every chemistry classroom in the country now has a 4-by-8-foot periodic table prominently displayed in the front of the room.
As a chemistry graduate student at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in the 1990s, I saw one of his large wall charts, tattered from decades of use, still hanging on the wall! I felt very proud of my father then.
Dad also bought me a chemistry set, and an atomic energy kit with a scintillator that picked up alpha particles which could be seen in the small scope when one’s eyes were adjusted to the dark.
When in junior high school, I wanted a microscope. Dad convinced me to buy a good used one instead of an new, inexpensive model for kids that I first had in mind.
He found a reconditioned medical Bausch & Lomb® microscope at Wayne State University. It cost me $125.00, and a half century later I still use it. I spent years examining everything I could find that fit on a glass slide.
It turned out I would spend years using microscopes in my graduate work at medical school and when teaching college.
Dad often took me to the Engineering Society of Detroit meetings to watch science films and lectures. We had long discussions about science, especially physics and chemistry, giving me a heads-up in this area that enabled me to do well in my science classes.
In short, he had a profound influence on me for which I am grateful even to this day. The bottom line: Learn as much as possible about your father while you still can.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries.