Remembering Nelda Berndt

Nelda Berndt is a very important influence in my life during the time that I was a workhorse in the Azusa Unified School District. I was in my 20's, still naive enough to think that teaching is something important, that reaching students and impacting the young has value and worth.  Only the young really believe that since age teaches us otherwise.  In time, we eventually learn that our enthusiasm when young is simply youth's natural state and that age dims that light for all the right reasons...it is natural.

So while I had had a limited education, having had the environment of a small town country girl who did not have luxurious field trips, extracurricular activities to enhance my limited regurgitory education, I entered life with only the exposure of small town, and suitcase college experience.  I was still very inhibited, natural and outgoing, but lacking in many respects so that culture frankly was not a part of my lifestyle.  I was  a country hick, straight from the midwest where life is controlled and regulated by the seasons.

Nelda was of the same stock. She came from Minnesota and was proud to have been a farm girl also. But as a parent, she enrolled her children in little league games since their father was an avid fan of baseball so that his sons had to follow suit.  I ended up helping her at little league games in the concession stands, making taco strips, watching kids and parents alike compete for winning in the baseball games. 

She invited me to become a part of her family, a good husband, three sons, and a daughter. We met due to the fact that her oldest son was in my classroom.  I was very young then, and the talk of the school not for my appearance but for my exciting English classes.  A devoted and dedicated teacher I was then trying to prepare the college students to succeed when they finally left the high school classroom.

I had had several romances that never panned out for me, leaving me to be an early old maid in that day, at the tender age of 24. Again, I met up with men, but thanks to Nelda's wisdom about marriage and family, I listened to her advice about marriage.  She was frankly sour on it but due to religious beliefs, and family, she held on and loved her husband despite his neglect of her.

So it goes   Her obituary testitifies to the fact that if women hold on long enough they can finally win some of what they want for themselves.  Apparently, she did succeed in having all her children educated and able to fend for themselves.  She and her husband eventually moved away from their home in West Covina to Colton to enjoy a retired state of life.  Her husband survives her as do all her three children. I did contact one of them tonight. I do not know if she will respond.  I spent a lot of time taxiing these children around for the Berndts in those days. I enjoyed them.  As Nelda always said, What are friends for?